Royal: Edmund, Earl of Rutland, 1443-1460

Game of Thrones season has almost arrived, and with it another bunch of articles online about which character is based on what historical personage from the Wars of the Roses.  Whether Jon Snow or Daenerys Targaryen is Henry VII Tudor, the ultimate victor of the Wars of the Roses, is a subject for someone else's blog.  One thing GOT gets spot on was that that time period in English history was brutal, and it was dangerous to be a member of the wrong side of the royal family.  Edward of Winchester, the Joffrey-esque son of Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou wasn't the only teenager killed in battle.  The Yorkists also lost one of their own.

Edmund of York was born in 1443 in Normandy, where his father, Richard, 3rd Duke of York was in command of the English forces busily losing the Hundred Years War.  Edmund was the second of Richard's and Cecily Neville's four sons.  Edward, the future King Edward IV was older, George, later Duke of Clarence and Richard, later Richard III, were younger.  Boys began training as knights very young.  By 1454, Edmund was Earl of March, but that wasn't Edmund's first royal honor.  When the Duke of York became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he appointed 8-year old Edmund as Lord Chancellor of Ireland in 1451.  Of course, adults actually performed the duties of the office.  What the young Lord Chancellor probably didn't know was that his father was gathering support among Anglo-Irish barons for an invasion of England, to wrest the crown from the mentally incompetent Henry VI. 

In 1460, Richard of York made his move, with his now 17-year-old son at his side.  On December 30, 1460, his father's forces met those of the Duke of Somerset at Wakefield.  Richard of York was killed in the fighting and Edmund's attendants urged him to escape.  He was captured by John, 9th Baron Clifford, who had lost his own father at the Battle of St. Albans.  Whether Clifford killed Edmund himself or had it done, Edmund's head appeared with that of his father and of his uncle Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, on the gates of York shortly after the battle.  Their bodies were buried at Pontefract Priory, and later re-interred in the family vault at Fotheringhay.  Karma would catch up to Lord Clifford a few months later, at the Battle of Ferrybridge.