10 Pounds - Elizabeth II Henry VII, Silver Piedfort

This piedfort was issued as part of the Royal Mint's "The Kings and Queens of England" bullion series, which launched in 2022 and works backward through the English monarchs. Henry VII opens the series — an appropriate choice, given that it was Henry who established the first permanent royal mint organization with meaningful centralized control over English coinage after decades of civil war had fractured production under the Yorkist and Lancastrian struggle. His 1489 gold sovereign, introduced partly as a propaganda instrument projecting restored royal authority, remains one of the most consequential coin designs in English minting history.

A piedfort of this specification — double the standard flan thickness — follows a tradition the Royal Mint revived in the 1980s for collector issues, itself borrowing from medieval French practice of striking presentation pieces for assay verification.