it shall be so : Hamlet. madness in great ones must not unwatch'd go.When Henry Tudor won the battle of Bosworth in 1485, he put an end to the wars which had troubled England for more than one hundred and fifty years. A few months later he married Elizabeth of York, in this way uniting the rival dynasties of Lancaster and York. According to canon law they were too closely related to marry, but the Pope granted a dispensation a few days after the wedding had taken place. With the birth of two sons to the royal couple, the danger of the revival of the War of the Roses soon vanished, and England relaxed into a deeply needed state of internal peace.The first of the Tudor kings was shrewd and calculating. He was able to rule as an absolute monarch, since Parliament had not yet grown so powerful and so opposed to absolutism as under the future Stuart dynasty. Fines, taxes, and "voluntary gifts', made the frugal and avaricious king enormously rich.His eldest son, the fifteen-year-old Arthur, married the Spanish Princess Catharine of Aragon in 1501. She was rather untalented and no great beauty, but the young lady had a strong will and a violent temperament combined with proud self-esteem and stubbornness. It is doubtful whether the marriage was ever consummated ; Arthur was a weakly boy who died a few months 'after the wedding. The fifteen-year-old widow remained in England, and Henry VII, who was a widower now, wanted to marry
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