The Battle of Bosworth Field (or Battle of Bosworth) was the last significant battle of the Wars of the Roses, the civil war between the Houses of Lancaster and York that raged across England in the latter half of the 15th century. Fought on August 22, 1485, the battle was won by the Lancastrians. Their leader Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, by his victory became the first English monarch of the Tudor dynasty. His opponent, Richard III, the last king of the House of York, was killed in the battle. Historians consider Bosworth Field to mark the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, making it a defining moment of English and Welsh history. The Tudor dynasty or House of Tudor was a royal house of Welsh and English origin, descended in the male line from the Tudors of Penmynydd, which ruled the Kingdom of England and its realms, including their ancestral Wales and the Lordship of Ireland, later the Kingdom of Ireland, from 1485 until 1603. Its first monarch was Henry VII, a descendant through his mother of a legitimized branch of the English royal House of Lancaster. The Tudor family rose to power in the wake of the Wars of the Roses, which left the House of Lancaster, to which the Tudors were aligned, extinct. Image taken from page 466 of "A History of England for the Young" by Henry Tyrrell, 1872.