Skip to main content

The Tudors

1486 – 1551 AD

In 1485 Henry Tudor, the head of the house of Lancaster, landed at Milford Haven. He marched to Bosworth Field, and there defeated and killed Richard III. Richard’s Queen, Ann Neville, had died five months previously.

It was not expected that the vast Neville estates, by now merged in those of the Crown, should be allowed to revert to the Neville family, and Henry Tudor (now King Henry VII) gave the Lordship of Cardiff to his cousin Jasper Tudor in 1486.

Ann Beauchamp, widow of Warwick the Kingmaker, had been deprived of any claim to the Beauchamp estates by an act of Edward IV after her husband’s death in 1471, and had seen them through the hands of her sons-in-law. On Jasper’s death in 1495 the lordship reverted to the crown and the castle remained in royal hands through the reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. In 1551 Edward VI granted possession to William Herbert.