The Middle Ages, too, as far as England was concerned, may be said to have passed away with Richard III." _J. Gairdner, History of the Life, and Reign of Richard The Third, introduction and chapter 6._ ENGLAND: A. D. 1485. Accession of King Henry VII. ENGLAND: A. D. 1485-1528. The Sweating Sickness. See SWEATING SICKNESS. ENGLAND: A. D. 1485-1603. The Tudors. The Tudor family, which occupied the English throne from the accession of Henry VII., 1485, until the death of Elizabeth, 1603, took its name, but not its royal lineage, from Sir Owen Tudor, a handsome Welsh chieftain, who won the heart and the hand of the young widow of Henry V., Catherine of France. The eldest son of that marriage, made Earl of Richmond, married in his turn Margaret Beaufort, great-granddaughter to John of Gaunt, or Ghent, who was one of the sons of Edward III. From this latter union came Henry of Richmond, as he was known, who disputed the crown with Richard III. and made his claim good on Bosworth Field, where the hated Richard was killed. Henry's pretensions were based on the royal descent of his mother--derived, however, through John of Gaunt's mistress-- and the dynasty which he founded was closely related in origin to the Lancastrian line. Henry of Richmond strengthened his hold upon the crown, though not his title to it, by marrying Elizabeth, daughter of Edward IV., thus joining the white rose to the red. He ascended the throne as Henry VII., A. D. 1485; was succeeded by his son, Henry VIII., in 1509, and the latter by his three children, in order as follows: Edward VI., 1547; Mary, 1553; Elizabeth, 1558. The Tudor family became extinct on the death of Queen Elizabeth, in 1603. "They [the Tudors] reigned in England, without a successful rising against them, for upwards of a hundred years; but not more by a studied avoidance of what might so provoke the country, than by the most resolute repression of every effort, on the part of what remained of the peerage and great families, to make head against the throne. They gave free indulgence to their tyranny only within the circle of the court, while they unceasingly watched and conciliated the temper of the people. The work they had to do, and which by more scrupulous means was not possible to be done, was one of paramount necessity; the dynasty uninterruptedly endured for only so long as was requisite to its thorough completion; and to each individual sovereign the particular task might seem to have been specially assigned. It was Henry's to spurn, renounce and utterly cast off, the Pope's authority, without too suddenly revolting the people's usages and habits; to arrive at blessed results by ways that a better man might have held to be accursed; during the momentous change in progress to keep in