General Notes

Also Known As:<_AKA> /Edmund of Woodstock, Earl of Kent/
Cause of Death:<CAUS> Decapitation
Edmund Plantagenet, b. 5 August, 1301, surnamed of Woodstock, from the place of his birth, 2nd son of King Edward I, was summoned to parliament by writ directed "Edmundo de Wodestok," 5 August, 1320, about two years before he attained majority.  He had previously been in the wars of Scotland and had obtained considerable territorial grants from the crown. In the next year he was created Earl of Kent, and had a grant of the castle of Okham, in the co. Rutland, and shrievalty of the county.  About the same time he was constituted governor of the castle of Tunbridge, in Kent, and upon the breaking out of the insurrection under Thomas Plantagenet, Earl of Lancaster, he was commissioned by the king to pursue that rebellious prince and to lay siege to the castle of Pontefract.  The Earl of Lancaster was subsequently made prisoner at Boroughbridge and the Earl of Kent was one of those who condemned him to death.  From this period, during the reign of his brother, Edmund, of Woodstock, was constantly employed in the cabinet or the field.  He was frequently accredited on embassies to the Court of France, and was in all the wars in Gascony and Scotland.  After the accession of his nephew, King Edward III, he was arrested and sentenced to death for having conspired with other nobles to deliver his brother, the deposed Edward II, out of prison, whereupon, by the management of Queen Isabel and her paramour, Mortimer, he was beheaded at Winchester (1380), after he had remained upon the scaffold from noon until five o'clock in the evening waiting for an executioner, no one being willing to undertake the horrid office till a malefactor from the Marshalsea was procured to perform it.  The earl m. Margaret, dau. of John, Lord Wake, and sister and heiress of Thomas, Lord Wake, by whom (who d. 29 September, 1349) he had issue, Edmund and John, successively Earls of Kent; Margaret, m. to Amaneus, eldest son of Bernard, Lord de la Brette, and d. s. p.; and Joan, styled "the Fair Maid of Kent" for her extraordinary beauty.  [Sir Bernard Burke, Dormant, Abeyant, Forfeited, and Extinct Peerages, Burke's Peerage, Ltd., London, 1883, p. 433, Plantagenet, Barons of Woodstock, Earls of Kent]


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