Edmund Mortimer

Sir Edmund Mortimer IV (10 December 1376 – January 1409) was an English nobleman and landowner who played a part in the rebellions of the Welsh leader Owain Glyndŵr and of the Percy family against King Henry IV, at the beginning of the 15th century. He died at the siege of Harlech as part of these conflicts. He was related to many members of the English royal family through his mother, Princess Philippa, Countess of Ulster, who was a granddaughter of King Edward III.

Family

Edmund IV was born on 10 December 1376 at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire as the second son of Edmund Mortimer, 3rd Earl of March, by his wife, princess Philippa Plantagenet. He was a grandson of prince Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence, thus a great-grandson of King Edward III. His grandfather Lionel was previously married to Violante Visconti, sister of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the Duke of Milan. Both were members of the House of Visconti and the Royal House of Savoy.

Edmund Mortimer had an elder brother, Roger Mortimer, 4th Earl of March, and two sisters, Elizabeth, who married Henry 'Hotspur' Percy, and Philippa, who married firstly John Hastings, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, secondly Richard Fitzalan, 11th Earl of Arundel, and thirdly, Sir Thomas Poynings.

Edmund was financially well provided for, both by his father, who died when Edmund was 5 years old, and by his elder brother Roger.

Edmund was a supporter of his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, later King Henry IV of England, in spite of the fact that his older brother Roger had a stronger genealogical claim to the throne by reason of the fact that he and his brother were grandsons of Lionel of Antwerp, King Edward III's second surviving son, whereas Bolingbroke's father, John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, was King Edward III's third surviving son.

When his elder brother Roger was slain in a skirmish at Kells in Ireland on 20 July 1398,

The alliance of Glyndŵr and Edmund Mortimer with the Percys survived the setback at Shrewsbury. In February 1405, Glyndŵr, Mortimer, and Northumberland entered into the Tripartite Indenture, which proposed a threefold division of the kingdom. Mortimer was to have most of the south of England. This agreement was apparently connected to the attempted abduction of Mortimer's nephew Edmund in the same month and Northumberland's second rising in May 1405.

However, after Shrewsbury, Glyndŵr's attacks on the king's forces were largely unsuccessful, and according to T. F. Tout, "Mortimer himself was reduced to great distress". He died in 1409, either during or shortly after the eight-month siege of Glyndŵr's stronghold of Harlech Castle by Henry IV's son, Henry, Prince of Wales, where he was "killed in the fighting".

Edmund Mortimer and his wife Catrin had one son, Lionel, and three daughters. After Mortimer's death, the king had Catrin and her daughters brought to London, where they were held in custody. In 1413, she and two of her daughters were buried at St Swithin, London Stone.

Shakespeare and Sir Edmund Mortimer

Events in the life of Sir Edmund Mortimer were dramatised by Shakespeare in Henry IV, Part 1 . In the play, Shakespeare accurately identifies him as Hotspur's brother-in-law, but simultaneously conflates him with his nephew by referring to him as "Earl of March". He was famously played by Junius Brutus Booth, who was John Wilkes Booth’s father.

Ancestry

Family connections