[1] Born in 7th March 1541, Henry, Duke of York was born to 50 year old King Henry VIII, and 18 year old, Catherine Howard.
Upon his birth he was second in line, behind his half brother, Edward, Duke of Cornwall, but before his older sisters, Mary and Elizabeth.
Before his sixth birthday, his father at the age of 55, died on 28 January 1547.
His brother became Edward VI, however since Edward was still a child, rule passed to a regency council dominated by Protestants, who attempted to establish their faith throughout the country. Prince Henry, Duke of York, became heir presumptive.
On 6 July 1553, at the age of 15, Edward VI died from a lung infection, leaving 12 year old, Henry to succeed him.
Again a regency was needed and this came in the form of his maternal Great-uncle Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk (1473 – 25 August 1554) and then his cousin, Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk (10 March 1536 – 2 June 1572)
In 1555, 14 year old Henry IX was married by proxy to 10 year old Princess Anna of Sweden (19 June 1545 – 20 March 1610), his sister Princess Elizabeth stood in her place in London, while Prince Eric stood in his place in Stockholm. The official wedding took place five years later at Richmond Palace
The marriage was said to be a happy one resulting in the birth of 12 children, with 9 reaching adulthood.
Taking control of the throne fully in 1558, Henry’s first job was the smooth relations between foreign warring nations.
His sister Mary, at 42 was seen as to old to wed to a reasonable suitor, so instead was married off as the second wife to Thomas Howard (ca. 1520 – 1582) the youngest son of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk and Lady Elizabeth Stafford. Thomas and Mary was rewarded with the title Duke and Duchess of Richmond. Mary would become weak and ill in May 1558. In pain, possibly from ovarian cysts or uterine cancer, she died in 17 November, leaving her lands and money to Thomas and his children from his first marriage.
Elizabeth on the other hand was 25 and still suited, there were rumors of marrying Anne’s older brother Prince Eric of Sweden, but a double Swedish marriage was seen as beneficial, so instead she was wed off to Frederick II of Denmark & Norway (1 July 1534 – 4 April 1588), this marriage would help peaceful diplomacy in 1563 between Sweden and Denmark & Norway.
Henry IX’s reign was seen as a great alliance of Northern Protestant Nations, while keeping the peace with Spain, France and Rome.
Henry died just before his 57th birthday, following a short illness and was succeeded by King Edward VII Tudor, his grandson.
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[2] The eldest son of Prince Thomas of Wales, eldest son of Henry IX, Edward VII was born May 3rd of 1580. He would spend the majority of his childhood in Wales while his father governed as Prince of Wales. An active child, Edward rode extensively and was usually outdoors. Then in 1592 when Prince Thomas of Wales passed, Edward and his two younger siblings, Arthur and Catherine, would be placed in the care of their uncle, Prince Henry Tudor Duke of York.
After Edward's marriage to Princess Elisabeth of Denmark and Norway, the great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Tudor, Edward would return to Wales where he would take up his duties as Prince of Wales. Or in reality, Princess Elizabeth took up the duties, for Edward had returned to the hunting and riding of his youth. But as he was handsome and personable, and Princess Elizabeth handled things ably, no one really cared that the heir to the thrown was somewhat useless.
At age eighteen, Henry IX would die leaving Edward King Edward VII King of England, Ireland, and France (really only a small part of France). As King Edward continued the pattern set while he was Prince of Wales, most tasks were left to his wife or the Privy Council and he would hunt and ride pretty much all day everyday.
In 1614, France would attempt to retake much of the English lands in Normandy. King Edward would travel with the English forces and participate in battle. This endeared him to the common soldier. After almost seven years of war, the borders hadn't really changed all that much, but both sides would finally agree to a peace.
King Edward would return from war a changed man. Having spent a great deal of time with common soldier for seven years, he became concerned with the plight of the common man. He would spend the last 8 years of his life forcing reforms with Tudor bullheadedness.
While many agreed with the changes purposed, most of them wished he wasn't quite so pushy about it. As such, everyone breathed a sigh of relief when finally all that riding and hunting did him in. King Edward VII would die form a head injury that occurred while riding at age 49 leaving his young nephew, Henry as King of England, Ireland, and part of France. He looked to be a much more reasonable individual.
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[3] Prince Henry, the Duke of Cambridge, was born to
Prince Arthur, the younger brother of the King, in 1611 on April 1st. As the King had no children, that made the young Duke the third in line for the throne. His father was born in 1586 and had married a distant cousin,
Margaret Seymour, the daughter of Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp of Hatch, the son of Lady Catherine Grey, a granddaughter Mary Tudor, the sister of Henry VIII.
Prince Arthur was with his brother, the King, in 1614 on the ground with the common solider, as was his closest friend, Richard Cromwell, the Duke of Kent. It is said the King considered this a lark, while his younger brother saw it as a thing of duty. Perhaps the most important point in the King's life, beginning the changes in his attitudes, was when Arthur died in their first battle sacrificing his life to save the King and Cromwell. Instead of returning home, the King now remained with the soldiers until the end of the war.
The young Duke was not yet three years old when this happened and didn't meet his uncle until he was ten. His world was a world of women, his mother, Princess Margaret, his aunt-in-law, Queen Elisabeth, and his aunt, Princess Catherine. The Duke loved this world and grew up to love women. He disdained the crude world of men, of war and of the hunt and of sports. He preferred the games of the parlor, deep conversations tending to gossip, fashion, and, most of all, pomp and ceremony.
Like his aunt-in-law, the Duke was a pragmatist. He agreed with many of the reforms his Uncle desired after his change of attitude, but agreed he pushed too fast and too hard, alienating the conservative aristocracy who saw the rise of the Parliament and in particular the reformists desire to reform the Church of England along Presbyterian lines, as a threat to them. So they lauded him as the new young King, only 18, when he took the throne. They saw him as a much more reasonable individual.
But they confused his wiles and love of intrigue with actually agreeing with them. Henry deftly played off both sides against each other, seeming to change positions over the years. But slowly and surely the result was a move towards greater and greater power to Parliament and more and more reform in the Church. The Episcopal system was not replaced, just modified with a Presbyterian aspect where a Presbytery of all the clergy and lay elders would share power with the Bishop just as Parliament shared power with the King.
Finally the elite realized they were being played when in 1639 the King called a kingdom wide Church Council to write a confession of faith, a new common book of worship, and a catechism. They clearly saw that the Puritans in control of Parliament would dominate this council and move the Church to aspects they despised. A group of nobles declared that Henry was not the actual son of Prince Arthur, but that he was in truth the son of the Duke of Kent, Richard Cromwell, who'd been Prince Arthur's close friend and had married Princess Margaret in 1622, after returning from the war. Cromwell was the closest advisor of the King and the head of the Privy Council. They declared the legitimate King was Henry's cousin once removed, also named Henry Tudor, the son of the King's great uncle, Henry Tudor. The other Henry was now the 2nd Duke of York and became the champion of the elite.
The Rebellion was quickly put down. The King, who'd dressed like the elite with long hair and lace and frills, showed his loyalty by marching to the Puritan cause by cutting his hair, wearing simple black, and marching with the Army of the Parliament.
But being the pragmatist he was, the King promised the elite that the Council would not go too far. By the middle of the 1640s a 'middle way' in both Kingdom and Church had finally been agreed on in a new consensus.
The Kingdom was peaceful, stable, and prosperous the rest of Henry's reign.
The other big change in the kingdom during Henry's reign was the establishment and settlement of colonies in North America. The first colony of Chesapeake was established during his uncle's reign. By the end of Henry's reign there were 8 North American colonies including Upper Canada.
Henry married after the Yorkist rebellion and married his second cousin, Mary of York, the daughter of the pretender, in part to unite both sides. They had quite a few children and seemed to have a robust and happy marriage, partly because she fully accepted his love of other women. He had many mistresses and more illegitimate children than legitimate.
Henry died at the age of 60 after a long illness. It is now pretty accepted it was Syphilis.
[4]The eldest son and child of Henry X with Mary of York, born almost exactly nine months after their wedding night, Henry XI was raised by his father's first cousin (and one of his only female friends to not be also a mistress at some point) Lady Adelaide Seymour, an extremely pious and conservative woman who would raise the royal children in a similar manner (Henry's younger sister, Princess Elizabeth, would go as far as following the puritan trend of overly religious names, as her first son with the Duke of Richmond would be named "Charles If-Chirst-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Francis", and her oldest daughter was named "Prudentia", while her youngest son, who would become Duke of New Sarum, in the Colonies, was named "Hate-Evil" but nicknamed "Harry"), with the Prince of Wales becoming remarkably pious and somber, quite unlike his partying and womanizing father.
Much like his father in his dislike of war and fighting, Henry XI's reign would follow a similar vein in a focus for maintaining England and her territories out of the conflicts that marked continental Europe (although his dislike of catholics meant that the king would crack down hard on the remaining Irish Catholics, who held down in the west and south, and would, with the help of the now mostly protestant Gaelic Nobility of the east and north, crush two rebellions there), using England's great navy as a silent threat to anyone who might try and bring the kingdom out of its neutrality. He, instead, invested on colonization, focusing heavily on the settlement of the southern colonies in North America (mostly with indentured servants brought from Africa and Ireland, as the King preferred a more feudal approach to settlement instead of following the Portuguese and French in their slavering ways)
Living in Ludlow from his preteen to young adult years as Prince of Wales, Henry XI took a great liking to the culture, language and history of the Welsh, taking it (and later Cornish, when he visited Cornwall during a tour in the 1670s and saw the ruins of Tintagel, said to have been Camelot from Arthurain Legend and took a similar liking to it) as a second language and creating many Welsh peers during his reign, he also stayed in Wales many times, turning Canarvon castle into a royal residence comparable to Whitehall for that purpose, and later also built the Castle of Tintagel near the ruins that it is named after
Married to Princess Jadwiga of Prussia, herself a cousin from his father's side (her mother was his father's sister), Henry had many children, but most of them died in infancy, and when he died of what is now believed to have been a brain tumor, all the surviving ones had died, with him being succeded by his only grandchild by his eldest son, the Princess Grace, who would be the first female monarch of England.
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Grace I, Queen of England and Ireland (c.1728)
[5] The Princess Grace Maria Tudor, third born daughter of the
Prince of Wales Arthur Tudor and his second wife, Barbara Hamilton of Albany, daughter of the
Duke of Albany. Arthur's first wife, Juliana Gonzaga, had been unfertile and had died in 1703 at the age of 30 of accidental poisoning during a fertility treatment. In 1712, her mother and elder siblings Edward and Elizabeth Tudor all took ill of smallpox, dying at the hands of unexperienced nurses and leading to the rest of the royal family being innoculated to prevent further deaths the next year. Grace, now second in line to the throne, saw her father remarry a German Princess, Augusta of Brunswick, and with every stillborn son and sickly daughter, saw herself remain the heiress, with only her younger sister Catherine Tudor surviving infancy. Finally, in 1719, the third
Princess of Wales passed away of a kidney infection, and the Prince, distraught, died in a "hunting accident". Grace, now heiress, was rushed away from the Yorkshire estate where her father had secluded himself and his daughters and into the capable hands the Queen.
Jadwiga of Prussia,
Queen of England, had custody of her two granddaughters at the time of her husband's death, preventing her other grandchild, Henry Tudor,
Duke of St James, from overstepping the succession. Henry, still unmarried in his early 30's, arrived in London within hours of his father's death, seemingly having hovered at the city's edge for a week, since his grandfather's collapse, and rushing to the court to claim the throne. Declaring England could never have a female monarch, he 'kindly' offered to marry his fourteen year old cousin and, even, to betroth their eldest son to her sister to maintain the succession. Henry was nothing if not bold.
His grandmother was disgusted. The
Queen Dowager, a tall, broad woman with a deeply engrained sense of morality, lectured not only the Duke, but his cronies, for his arrogance and incestuous plans. Having thoroughly destroyed his hopes for the throne, she then offered his a ceremonial position on HER regency council, along with the suggestion that he finally marry, and offering the suggestion of Elena of Beja, a Portuguese spinster Princess of forty known for her extreme deformaties. Infuriated, Henry went to attack her and then, failing that, attempted to launch a "Catholic invasion", to which he got no support. Unimpressed by her son, Jadwiga had him arrested and imprisoned, visiting him regularly for a year before releasing him. Henry would later actually follow his mother's advice and marry Elena of Beja, when she herself became a potential heiress to the Portuguese Throne, and died in 1728, having managed to father a child on her a year earlier, before the war had been won and she took the throne. Elena, for the record, loved her awful husband deeply and named her son and heir after him.
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Elena I, Queen of Portugal, at her coronation (c.1729). Elena, a widow with a single son, won her throne after the death of the King in 1725 in a fire that took his pregnant bride with him. Elena, the daughter of his eldest aunt, beat out the Archduke Ferdinand of Upper Austria, her cousin by her youngest aunt, and the widowed (childless) Queen of Spain, who failed to take the throne based off her marriage contract and the lack of heir she brought with her. Elena, in 1726 the half-sister of the Duke of Beja, saw her chance to take the throne, marrying an Exiled British Prince and producing a healthy son at the age of 47. This portrait was considered extremely faltering, and Elena would later say she only recognised herself because of her shoes. Her reign was long and relatively peaceful.
Grace, unaware of her uncle's attempts to marry her, fell into a deep and sincere mourning for her father, stepmother, grandfather and, within a year, sister, leaning deeply on her grandmother during her remaining childhood. Taking to dressing in all white, the French style of mourning she found more appealing than the custom black, Grace Maria led no dances and played no games even on her birthday, and in 1724, aged 18, ordered the court into a full year of severe mourning she felt had failed to be followed during the Regency. When her grandmother objected, Grace riled against her and claimed "few know how deeply I feel this sadness inside". Thus began her reputation for madness.
Her first major project was the building of twenty new towns across England, designed by city planners with housing and factories planned to be practical yet appealing, she reasoned that since war had torn England apart many times over, and a population boom following the civil war had left many in her country homeless, it was her job to fix it. The Queen, often absent from more specific policy decisions, was set on this plan, and by 1731 all her envisioned towns were in construction across England. Ten were named Gracetown, seven Arthurtown, and the remaining three Jadwigatown.
The Queen initially refused to marry, turning away the
Duke of Guarda, the
Dauphin of France and the heir to the Danish Throne within a month of each other. At the needling of her grandmother, she did agree to meet with the
Duke of Ross, heir to the Scottish throne as grandson to the King, but even this match did not make it through, due to her distaste of his flippant jokes at the expense of her then recently deceased cousin in Portugal. When Jadwiga of Poland died in 1730, the 24 year old Grace was left a letter that ranked the noblemen of Europe in order of suitability for her. The top choice was Albert of Bavaria, second son to the
Duke of Bavaria. The bottom choice was Lord Francis de Lorraine, son of the formerly illegitimate
Duke of Lorraine and uncle to the now unseated Duke Nicholas of Lorraine, who's exploits in Sweden with the Princess Dorothea had become legendary. Not on the list was Grace's eventual husband, King Alexander V of Scotland.
Alexander V of Scotland was 72 years old when he agreed to meet with the
Queen of England, the pretty but supposedly mad Queen of England, with her wardrobe of white silk and her propensity for long sermons about the afterlife. The courts travelled to the border, and the King, recently a widower with his wife of fifty years dying of pneumonia, demanded his four grandsons practise their manners. He wanted a Scotsman to capture the heart of the Queen. But when Grace of England saw the Scottish royal party, her eyes travelled to the tall, thin old man still tall and graceful on white horseback. She had found the love of her life. He was swept away by her demand to marry him, but in that summer of 1732, agreed, abdicating his throne to his eldest son and travelling to England alongside the Queen, now
King of England himself. Their first son was born a year later.
The Queen's reign of England during this time was her most productive. Taking a strong stance on cleanliness and literacy, Grace travelled to the towns she had had built and, confronted with mud and general dirtiness, demanded they be cleaned regularly. Every town had a cleaning committee employed, payed by the state, to ensure walkways were clear and the air was "not poorly scented". She also began building schools in this towns, with two teachers each. Grace imagined a world where everyone was able to read, write do their numbers. She assumed that would solve the issues of poverty in England.
Grace had ten happy years with her husband. She even wore colour for a time. but by 1735, he was obviously ageing and not long for this world. Their final child was born in 1737, and in 1742, she was a widow. He would be buried next to his first wife, and Grace spent the rest of her life reiterating that she wished to join them when she passed.
Her wish would not be granted.
She did not remarry another European Prince, and instead took a lover in former slave Geoffrey Stafford, original name unrecorded, who father a child with her born in 1744, named Rosamund Tudor. A scandal, the Queen claimed a morganatic had taken place between the two, much like the current reigning
King of France had with a former mistress, and that while her husband held no rank, and her daughter would not be a Princess, they were part of the royal family and should be treated as such. Grace's actions were considered part of her insanity, but in actuality, should be taken into consideration with the historical reality of the times. In 1711, the slave trade in the Americas had begin to fall as those enslaved rose up and nation states had formed. Portugal's slave ports in Africa had failed within a year of this, leading to the unrest that ended up with Elena of Beja on the throne. England worried their own colonies would rise against them, had ended slavery in the colonies and given slave owners twenty years to end the practise and claim reparations, or else lose their right to compensation. This had not been enough, and in 1724 England began to lose their own colonies. Grace met Geoffrey around this time, when he was amongst an interracial group of 20 men brought to England to negotiate support for "The North Eastern American Kingdom" (OTL Maine, Vermond, Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connexticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and most of Ohio), which she agreed to if a tithe could be paid and an ambassador remain in England. Geoffrey was the result of this, and by 1735 he was considered an integral part of London society by those who had not shunned him. And now, to some, he was all but a King.
Geoffrey Stafford's life before arrive to England had been hard, both as the son of a slave (although he would write in his memoirs that he did no hard labour as by 1711 he was supposedly 9 years old), and a black politician in the early days the North Eastern American Kingdom, later renamed Freeland in 1761. Geoffrey, who took the name in 1720 upon becoming a lawyer, would write daily newsletters about slave liberation and the necessity of an English influence in their politics, which would be part of the reason why he was picked amongst the 20 men sent to London. His father, who died in 1762, was to be paid almost 1000 pounds in 1750 to "write" a tell all book about his son, published in articles across Europe and detailing, amongst other things, his supposed "real wife" Alice Kraft, a white German woman of whom no record exists outside of the book. Many took this as proof that the Queen had married a filthy man only interested in "diluting European whiteness". Regardless, she was considered unwell.
Grace Tudor's relationship with Geoffrey Stafford was perhaps the first issue of her reign the men and women of her court did not take in good faith. Her perpetual mourning was considered somewhat endearing, her hatred of dancing a personality quirk. Even her reluctance to do much fine policy, instead declaring broad concepts and having her ministers make them a reality was considered a smart choice. Women were not expected to know law. They had even accepted her strange choice in a first husband, and Alexander of Scotland had been a popular man towards the end. But a black second husband was considered too far. Grace was, in 1746, briefly imprisoned and Geoffrey run out of London. He was replaced by a white politican from the North Eastern American Kingdom within a year. Grace was allowed out of her imprisonment and given a choice. The throne or Geoffrey. She initially chose the throne.
Sending money to her husband to buy an estate in his homeland and prepare it for them, Grace set about righting England before leaving in 1752. Deeply furious her countrymen were not only so narrow minded, but so cruel, she first punished the
Duke of Norfolk and
Duke of Richmond for their parts in her imprisonment, then sent away the Portuguese ambassador who had egged them on, himself a former slave owner. Finally, in 1750, she had a portrait painted depicting herself, in one of the only depictions of the Queen in a non-white dress, with her daughter Rosamund, which was to travel with her to the Americas. Grace's final act was one of defiance, and in leaving she did not weep, but instead abdicated to her eldest son _____, demanding he not give into the prejudice of his court, and to not forget his youngest sister.
Grace's reign was remembered in the years following as a strange one. Many of the policies she followed were successful, and her time in the Americas would be fruitful, as she would represent the old world's acceptance of a burgeoning order (although she was not fully accepted their either, with many agreeing that some madness must exist in the woman always in white who walked through cemeteries with her daughter). Her legacy in England would be somewhat tarnished by her final decade on the throne, but children were still educated in the 200 schools she funded, living in houses she had had built in cities she demanded by kept clean. A rising literate class only were able to read the salacious reports of her married life to Geoffrey because of her work. It was all her.
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Grace I, Queen of England and Ireland, sits with her youngest daughter, Rosamund Tudor. (c.1750).