Have we ever had a more successful yet somehow forgettable king than Henry VII? A century ago, the Dictionary of National Biography could still hail him as the ‘Solomon of England’. But if he is remembered now it is almost solely for the dynasty he founded, with the domestic and international achievements of his own long and prudent reign largely ignored in the country’s bizarre obsession with the later Tudors.   

There must have been an unusual mix of calculation and audacity to Henry’s character, because calculation alone could never have brought him to the throne. Over the first 30 years of his life, regime change had become the violent norm of English life; so when, in 1485, a minor Welsh earl with few supporters and no experience of either war or government returned from exile to seize Richard III’s crown, there can have been no reason to think that he would last any longer than his predecessor.

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It was not, either, as though his royal claims on either side of his lineage were anything but tenuous. He had been born at Pembroke Castle in 1457, the only child of the 13-year-old Margaret Beaufort, the recently widowed great-granddaughter of the Lancastrian John of Gaunt and his mistress Katherine Swynford.

If that all sounds a little ‘sketchy’, as Sean Cunningham puts it, the story on the paternal side was a good deal less reputable. In 1455,........

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