The House of Tudor was an influential royal dynasty in England and Wales that reigned from 1485 to 1603. The Tudors trace their lineage back to Ednyfed Fychan and the Tudors of Penmynydd, a distinguished Welsh noble family, as well as Catherine of Valois. Their ancestry also includes descent from the House of Lancaster. During their period of rule, the Tudors governed the Kingdom of England and the Lordship of Ireland (which later became the Kingdom of Ireland) for a total of 118 years, with five monarchs: Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. They succeeded the House of Plantagenet and were eventually succeeded by the Scottish House of Stuart.
Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch, was a descendant of Edward III through his mother, and the son of Edmund Tudor, who was a half-brother of King Henry VI. He established his claim to the throne by presenting himself as a candidate appealing to both Lancastrian supporters and those loyal to the rival House of York, ultimately securing power through military victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field in August 1485.
In 1486, he strengthened his legitimacy by fulfilling his 1483 promise to marry Elizabeth of York, daughter of King Edward IV and a Yorkist heiress, thereby symbolically uniting the two warring factions of Lancaster and York under the new Tudor dynasty, represented by the Tudor rose.
The Tudor monarchs expanded their influence beyond England, achieving the formal unification of England and Wales in 1542 through the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535 and 1542, and asserting their authority over Ireland, as proclaimed by the Crown of Ireland Act of 1542.
They also maintained a nominal claim to the Kingdom of France; although they did not pursue active territorial ambitions in France, Henry VIII engaged in warfare mainly to strengthen alliances and to assert the royal claim. After his reign, Queen Mary I lost all territorial claims in France, most notably with the fall of Calais in 1558.