Henry VII of England

Born three months after his father's death in 1457, Henry Tudor inherited a Lancastrian claim to the throne but spent his childhood shuttled between uncles as the civil wars raged. Edward IV's return in 1471 sent him into fourteen years of exile in Brittany. With French and Scottish backing, he invaded in 1485 and won the crown at Bosworth Field, the last monarch to do so on a battlefield. He married Elizabeth of York two years later, fusing the rival houses, and crushed a final challenge at Stoke Field in 1487. The rest of his twenty-four-year reign he devoted not to war but to ledgers: new taxes, trade policy favoring English wool, obsessive attention to revenue. By his death in 1509, the throne was solvent and stable enough to pass peacefully to his son - though a commission soon found his tax collectors had been ruthless.