Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond

Edmund Tudor, 1st Earl of Richmond, was the elder son of Owen Tudor and the widowed queen Catherine of Valois, making him a maternal half-brother of Henry VI. The king raised Edmund and his brother Jasper into the English nobility, and Edmund’s marriage to the young Lancastrian heiress Margaret Beaufort joined the Tudor and Beaufort lines.

During the opening phase of the Wars of the Roses, Edmund was sent to uphold royal authority in South Wales. Yorkist forces captured him at Carmarthen in 1456, and he died there during imprisonment, several months before Margaret gave birth to their only child, Henry Tudor. Through that posthumous son Edmund became the father of Henry VII and a crucial link in the formation of the Tudor dynasty.

Joanna Hickson’s First of the Tudors places Edmund Tudor beside his brother Jasper at the court of their half-brother Henry VI and follows the marriage to Margaret Beaufort that gives the future Tudor dynasty its crucial heir. Edmund’s death before Henry Tudor’s birth shifts the burden of protecting that inheritance onto Jasper. Nathen Amin’s Son of Prophecy traces the same family story from Owen Tudor and Catherine of Valois through the advancement of Edmund and Jasper and Edmund’s marriage to Margaret. Amin’s Tudor Wales then follows the dynasty geographically through the Welsh places, castles and family networks that formed the background to Edmund’s short life and his son’s eventual claim to the throne.