Edmund Plantagenet, Earl of Kent, and his Descendants.
EDMUND PLANTAGENET, surnamed of Woodstock, Earl of Kent, second son of EDWARD I., by his second queen, was summoned to parliament, as “Edmundo de Wodestok,” on the 5th 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 county of 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 remainder of 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. But 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, daughter of John, Lord Wake, and sister and heiress of Thomas, Lord Wake, by whom he had issue,
EDMUND, & JOHN }successively Earls of Kent.
Margaret, m. to Amaneus, eldest son of Bernard, Lord de la Brette, and d.s.p. JOANE, from her extraordinary beauty, styled” the Fair Maid of Kent,” m. 1st, William Montacute, Earl of Salisbury, from whom she was divorced;
2ndly, Sir Thomas Holland, K.G., and 3rdly, the renowned hero, EDWARD the Black Prince, by whom she was mother of King RICHARD II.
The unfortunate earl’s eldest son,
EDMUND PLANTAGENET, was restored to blood and honours by parliament, the year in which his father suffered, and thus became Baron Woodstock, and Earl of Kent—but d. soon after in minority, unmarried, and was succeeded by his brother,
JOHN PLANTAGENET, third Earl of Kent, who m. Elizabeth, daughter of the Duke of Juliers, but d..s.p. in 1352, when the Earldom of Kent, and Baronies of Woodstock and Wake, devolved upon his only surviving sister,
Joane, the Fair Maid of Kent, who m. Sir Thomas Holland, Lord Holland, K.G.