Edward Plantagenet ~ 17th Earl of Warwick

Edward, 17th Earl of Warwick was the last male member of the House of Plantagenet.
He was the son of George ~ Duke of Clarence and Isabel Neville.

Edward was born on 25th February 1475, at Warwick, the family home of his mother.

Edward’s father George, was the brother of Kings Edward IV and Richard III.

The young Edward experienced a turbulent childhood.
His mother died the year after his birth, of either consumption or childbed fever.

His father was ex3cuted for treason in the Tower of London two years later, by his brother King Edward IV in 1478.

Edward and his older sister Margaret were left as orphans.
During the short reign of his uncle Richard III, he was kept at Sheriff Hutton Castle in Yorkshire.

Following King Richard’s death at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, 10 year old Edward was brought to London and placed in the Tower by the new king, Henry VII.

His claim to the throne posed a potential threat to the new Tudor dynasty, particularly after the appearance of the pretender Lambert Simnel in 1487.

Simnel claimed he was Edward, the Earl of Warwick.
He joined forces with Edward’s cousin, John de la Pole whom Richard III had proclaimed his heir.

Simnel and de la Pole were defeated at Stoke, where de la Pole was killed on the battlefield.
Simmel was treated leniently, he was pardoned and given a job in the royal kitchen by Henry VII.

In order to prove Simmel was not the real Earl of Warwick, Henry VII had Edward paraded through the streets of London, and displayed at St. Paul’s.

Edward was then returned to the Tower, where he had no contact with the outside world.

In 1499, the pretender Perkin Warbeck, a handsome young man with a superficial resemblance to Edward IV, led a rebellion against Henry VII.

He claimed to be Edward’s cousin, Richard Duke of York, the younger of the Princes in the Tower.
He was captured and later sent to the tower.

An alleged plot between Edward and Warbeck aimed at their escape, was said to have been hatched.

On 21st November 1499, Edward attended a trial before his peers at Westminster, presided over by John de Vere, Earl of Oxford.
He pleaded guilty.

A week later, at the age of 24, Edward was b~headed for treason on Tower Hill.
Henry VII paid for his body and head to be taken to Bisham Abbey in Berkshire, for burial.

It was thought at the time, that Edward was ex3cuted in response to pressure from Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile.

Their daughter Katharine of Aragon, was to marry King Henry VII’s heir Arthur Tudor, and they wanted nobody in the way of Katharine’s journey to the throne.

Katharine was said to feel very guilty about Edward’s death, and believed that her trials in later life were punishment for what her parents did in her name.

It has been claimed that Edward was of a ‘simple mind’.
This surmise is based entirely on a statement by chronicler Edward Hall, that Edward had been kept imprisoned for so long~

“out of all company of men, and sight of beasts, in so much that he could not discern a Goose from a Capon”

It could be that Hall meant that the long imprisonment Edward had undergone from a young age, had made him intellectually limited by a lack of education, and deprivation of company and freedom.

Upon Warwick’s death, the House of Plantagenet became extinct in the legitimate male line.

His sister Margaret Pole ~ Countess of Salisbury, known as ‘the last of the Plantagenets’ survived until 1541, when she was ex3cuted for treason on the order of her cousin Henry VIII.