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This is an 18th century engraving of Henry VII , king of England and Wales from 1485 to 1509.

Although Wales would remain a separate constitutional entity from England down to the 1530s, in many ways Henry VII is a central figure connecting Wales with the royal houses of England.

This was because Welsh men and women accounted him as one of their own.

Henry was born in Pembroke Castle in 1457 and spent nine years of his youth in Raglan Castle, where he may have picked up a smattering of the Welsh language.

His status as one of the few credible Lancastrian claimants to the Crown of England, however, placed him in a perilous position.

In June 1471, as the Wars of the Roses raged, he made a daring escape from Tenby harbour to the safety of Brittany.

He returned in 1485, however, to face the Yorkist Richard III, and landed his invasion force at Milford Haven in Pembrokeshire. He did so because the Welsh had not forgotten their native son, and, as he marched across Wales, so his countrymen swelled his forces. As one man put it, “breathing of this his native country’s air, began his forces to increase”.

Henry played on his Welsh ancestry by incorporating the red dragon of the ancient Welsh king Cadwalladr into his heraldic arms; this can be seen in the lower left hand portion of the image.

Henry, of course, defeated Richard at Bosworth Field and inaugurated the reign of the Tudor dynasty. In Wales, however, this was seen as the rule of the Tudur family, a line hailing ultimately from Anglesey. As one foreign ambassador at Henry’s court wrote “the Welsh may be said to have recovered their former independence; the most wise and fortunate Henry VII is a Welshman”. This was, of course, propaganda not reality.

Henry operated like an English monarch and gave little particular regard to the country of his birth.

However, just as the embracing cupids in this engraving suggest the uniting of the houses of York and Lancaster through the marriage of Henry and his Yorkist wife, Elizabeth, so his reign was crucial in tying Wales to the English crown.

Dr Lloyd Bowen is a historian of 16th and 17th century Britain at Cardiff University. His interest in the relationship between Wales and the monarchy stems from his research into Welsh politics during the civil wars of the 1640s and 1650s. The Welsh were overwhelmingly royalist at this time, and provided King Charles I with many loyal soldiers. Dr Bowen is a native of Treorchy in the Rhondda Valleys and a republican, but want to understand how and why earlier generations of Welsh men and women supported the Crown, not to try and judge them for doing so.