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|title=Tudor: The Family Story

|author=Leanda de Lisle

|publisher=Vintage

|date=June 2014

|website=http://www.leandadelisle.com/

|summary=A comprehensive account of the Tudor history, its monarchs and unsuccessful claimants to the throne, unusually taking the death and and funeral in 1437 of Catherine of Valois, mother of the dynasty, as a starting point.

}}

With so many recent books published on various aspects of Tudor history, it becomes harder to find a new angle or approach to the subject. Leanda de Lisle has thus pulled off the almost-impossible. Her starting point is not the battle of Bosworth and Henry Tudor’s claiming of the throne as King Henry VII in 1485, but an event nearly fifty years earlier, the death and funeral of Catherine de Valois. The widow of King Henry V, Catherine married secondly the Welsh squire Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur, known to posterity as Owen Tudor. Their elder son Edmund later married Margaret Beaufort, a descendant of John of Gaunt, one of King Edward III’s several sons, and it was the only child of this union, born when his mother was a mere girl thirteen years of age, who would become the victor on Bosworth Field.