House of Tudor

Trace the House of Tudor — from Henry VII and Henry VIII to Mary I and Elizabeth I — the dynasty that ruled England for over a century, mapped across royal births, marriages and migrations on RootsLore.

People in this family tree

• Henry VII · 01/28/1457–04/21/1509 · Pembroke, Wales → Richmond, England — First Tudor king of England, who seized the crown by defeating Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485 and ending the Wars of the Roses. His marriage to Elizabeth of York united the rival houses of Lancaster and York; a shrewd, frugal ruler, he had secured the new dynasty by his death in 1509.
• Louis XII of France · 06/27/1462–01/01/1515 · Blois, France → Paris, France — King of France from 1498, hailed as the “Father of the People” for his reforms even as his armies fought in Italy. Aged 52, he took the young Mary Tudor as his third wife in a 1514 peace match with England — and died within three months, reputedly worn out by the marriage.
• Elizabeth of York · 02/11/1466–02/11/1503 · Westminster, England → London, England — Queen consort of Henry VII and daughter of the Yorkist king Edward IV, whose marriage in 1486 joined the warring houses of Lancaster and York into the Tudor rose. Mother of Henry VIII and grandmother of three English monarchs, she died after childbirth on her 37th birthday in 1503.
• James IV of Scotland · 03/17/1473–09/09/1513 · Stirling, Scotland → Branxton, England — King of Scots from 1488, a cultured Renaissance ruler who married Margaret Tudor in 1503 under the “Treaty of Perpetual Peace” with England. The peace did not hold: invading England in support of his French allies, he was killed amid the slaughter of the Scottish nobility at Flodden in 1513.
• Charles Brandon · 1484–08/24/1545 · Guildford, England — Duke of Suffolk and the close friend and jousting companion of Henry VIII. He risked the king’s fury by secretly marrying his sister Mary Tudor, the widowed Queen of France, in 1515; pardoned, he remained one of Henry’s most trusted servants until his death in 1545.
• Catherine of Aragon · 12/16/1485–01/07/1536 · Alcala de Henares, Spain → Kimbolton, England — A Spanish princess, daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, and first wife of Henry VIII — having first been briefly wed to his late brother Arthur. Mother of Mary I, she fought the annulment of her marriage for years; cast aside in 1533, she died in 1536 still insisting she was the true queen.
• Arthur Prince of Wales · 09/19/1486–04/02/1502 · Winchester, England → Ludlow, England — Eldest son and heir of Henry VII, named for the legendary King Arthur to herald a new golden age. Married to Catherine of Aragon in 1501, he died at Ludlow Castle just months later, aged fifteen — a death that passed the throne, and eventually his widow, to his younger brother Henry VIII.
• Margaret Tudor · 11/28/1489–10/18/1541 · Westminster, England → Methven, Scotland — Elder daughter of Henry VII, married to James IV of Scotland in 1503 to seal an Anglo-Scottish peace. Widowed at Flodden, she carried the Tudor line north: through her descended the Stuart kings who, a century later, would inherit the English throne and unite the two crowns.
• Henry VIII · 06/28/1491–01/28/1547 · Greenwich, England → London, England — King of England from 1509, the towering, tempestuous monarch whose six marriages and break with Rome reshaped the realm. Denied a male heir and a papal annulment, he severed England from the Catholic Church to wed Anne Boleyn, making himself supreme head of a new Church of England before his death in 1547.
• Mary Tudor · 03/18/1496–06/25/1533 · Richmond, England → Westhorpe, England — Younger sister of Henry VIII, wed to the ageing Louis XII of France in 1514; widowed within months, she defied her brother to marry his friend Charles Brandon for love. As Duchess of Suffolk she became grandmother of the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey, whose claim sprang from this line.
• Anne Boleyn · 1501–05/19/1536 · Blickling, England → London, England — Second wife of Henry VIII, whose refusal to be merely his mistress drove the king to break with Rome and remake the English church to marry her. Mother of the future Elizabeth I, she fell from favour after failing to bear a son and was beheaded at the Tower in 1536 on charges of treason and adultery.
• Jane Seymour · 1508–10/24/1537 · Wulfhall, England → Hampton Court, England — Third wife of Henry VIII and the only one to give him the male heir he craved — the future Edward VI. She died of childbed fever days after the birth in 1537 and was mourned by the king as his truest wife; at his own wish he was later buried beside her.
• Catherine Parr · 1512–09/05/1548 · London, England → Sudeley, England — Sixth and last wife of Henry VIII, a learned, twice-widowed woman who nursed the ailing king and helped reconcile him with his daughters Mary and Elizabeth. She outlived him, married Thomas Seymour soon after his death in 1547, and herself died in childbirth the following year.
• James V of Scotland · 04/10/1512–12/14/1542 · Linlithgow, Scotland → Falkland, Scotland — King of Scots from 1513, son of James IV and Margaret Tudor, who came to the throne as an infant. His French marriages bound Scotland to the Catholic cause; broken by the rout of his army at Solway Moss, he died days later in 1542, leaving the crown to his six-day-old daughter Mary.
• Anne of Cleves · 09/22/1515–07/16/1557 · Dusseldorf, Germany → Chelsea, England — Fourth wife of Henry VIII, a German princess chosen by portrait to seal a Protestant alliance. The king found the match displeasing and had it annulled within months; styled the King’s “beloved sister” and richly provided for, she outlived all his other wives, dying in 1557.
• Mary of Guise · 11/22/1515–06/11/1560 · Bar-le-Duc, France → Edinburgh, Scotland — A French noblewoman of the powerful House of Guise, second wife of James V of Scotland and mother of Mary, Queen of Scots. After her husband’s death she governed Scotland as regent for her infant daughter, upholding the “Auld Alliance” with France against the rising Protestant lords until her death in 1560.
• Mary I · 02/18/1516–11/17/1558 · Greenwich, England → London, England — Queen of England from 1553, daughter of Catherine of Aragon and the first woman to rule England in her own right. A devout Catholic, she reversed her father’s reformation and had some three hundred Protestants burned — earning the name “Bloody Mary” — before dying childless in 1558.
• Frances Brandon · 07/16/1517–11/20/1559 · Hatfield, England → London, England — Daughter of Mary Tudor and Charles Brandon and a niece of Henry VIII, which set her line close to the throne. As Duchess of Suffolk she was the mother of Lady Jane Grey, whose brief and doomed bid for the crown in 1553 ended on the scaffold.
• Henry Grey · 01/17/1517–02/23/1554 · Westminster, England → London, England — Duke of Suffolk and husband of Frances Brandon, who pushed the claim of their daughter Lady Jane Grey to the throne on Edward VI’s death. His part in that failed coup, and then in Wyatt’s rebellion against Mary I, brought him to the executioner’s block in 1554.
• Catherine Howard · 1523–02/13/1542 · Lambeth, England → London, England — Fifth wife of Henry VIII and a young cousin of Anne Boleyn, married to the ageing king in 1540. Accused of adultery barely a year later, she was beheaded at the Tower in 1542 — the second of Henry’s queens, after her own cousin, to die on the block.
• Elizabeth I · 09/07/1533–03/24/1603 · Greenwich, England → Richmond, England — Queen of England from 1558 and the last Tudor monarch, daughter of Anne Boleyn. Her 45-year reign — the age of Shakespeare and Drake and of the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 — saw England rise as a Protestant power; the “Virgin Queen” never married and died childless in 1603.
• Edward VI · 10/12/1537–07/06/1553 · Hampton Court, England → Greenwich, England — King of England from 1547, the only surviving legitimate son of Henry VIII, by Jane Seymour. Crowned at nine, he drove the Protestant Reformation forward through his regents but was always sickly; he died at fifteen in 1553, and his attempt to leave the crown to Lady Jane Grey collapsed within days.
• Jane Grey · 1537–02/12/1554 · Bradgate, England → London, England — The “Nine Days’ Queen”, a learned great-granddaughter of Henry VII proclaimed queen in 1553 in a bid to keep England Protestant. Deposed within days by Mary I’s supporters, the sixteen-year-old Jane was imprisoned and beheaded at the Tower in 1554 — a pawn of others’ ambition.
• Mary Queen of Scots · 12/08/1542–02/08/1587 · Linlithgow, Scotland → Fotheringhay, England — Queen of Scots from her sixth day of life and great-granddaughter of Henry VII. Her turbulent reign — marred by the murders of her husband Darnley and his killer — ended in forced abdication and flight to England; imprisoned by her cousin Elizabeth I for nineteen years, she was executed for treason in 1587.
• Henry Lord Darnley · 12/07/1545–02/10/1567 · Leeds, England → Edinburgh, Scotland — Second husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, and father of the future James VI and I, a union that fused two claims to the English throne. Jealous and dissolute, he joined in the murder of Mary’s secretary Rizzio; he was himself killed in a mysterious explosion at Kirk o’ Field in 1567.
• James VI & I · 06/19/1566–03/27/1625 · Edinburgh, Scotland → Cheshunt, England — King of Scots from 1567 and, on Elizabeth I’s childless death in 1603, the first Stuart king of England — uniting the crowns of both realms in his own person. Son of Mary, Queen of Scots, he sponsored the King James Bible and ruled the two kingdoms until his death in 1625.