period, and occasionally upon great historical events.
[Calendar of Letters and Papers of Henry VIII; Dugdale's Baronage; Herbert's History; Kaulek's Correspondence de M. de Marillac, 1885.]
‘PLANTAGENET,’ EDWARD, more correctly Edward of Norwich, second Duke of York (1373?–1415), was the eldest child of Edmund de Langley, earl of Cambridge, and afterwards duke of York [see Langley]. His father was the fifth son of Edward III, and his mother was Isabella of Castille, second daughter of Pedro the Cruel. Edward of Norwich was probably born in 1373 (at Norwich?), the year after his parents' marriage, though his age at his father's death, as given by Dugdale from the Escheat Rolls, would place his birth two or three years later (Doyle; Beltz, p. 310; Dugdale, Baronage, ii. 155; Chron. du Religieux de St. Denys, ii. 356). He was knighted by Richard II at his coronation (Fœdera, vii. 157). Betrothed to Beatrice, daughter of Ferdinand, king of Portugal, by the treaty of Estremoz (1380), as a condition of assistance against Henry of Castille, he was taken to Portugal by his father in July 1381, and the marriage was performed shortly after their arrival in Lisbon (ib. vii. 264; Walsingham, i. 313). But Ferdinand making peace with Castille, Cambridge returned to England in 1382, taking with him his son, whom the king, it is said, wished to retain; Ferdinand refused to send his daughter with him, and shortly after remarried her to the infante John of Castille (ib. ii. 83).
Edward in May 1387 succeeded Sir Richard Burley as knight of the Garter. On 25 Feb. 1390 Richard II created him Earl of Rutland, with Oakham and the hereditary sheriffdom of the county for the support of the title. The grant, for which parliamentary confirmation was obtained, was, however, limited to his father's lifetime. Gloucester's reversionary rights in these old Bohun estates were ignored in the grant, but confirmed by the king a few months later, and again in 1394 (Dugdale, Baronage, ii. 156, 170; Rot. Parl. iii. 264; Associated Architectural Societies' Reports, xiv. 106, 112). A year later (22 March 1391) Rutland, despite his youth, was made admiral of the northern fleet, and in the following November sole admiral, an office which he retained until May 1398. In the spring of 1392 he was associated with his uncle, John of Gaunt, in the negotiations at Amiens for peace with France (Beltz, p. 310; Knighton, col. 2739). About the same time he succeeded (27 Jan. 1392) the king's step-brother, Thomas Holland, earl of Kent, as constable of the Tower of London. As Richard's relations with Gloucester and Arundel grew more and more strained, he showed increasing favour to Rutland, than whom, says Creton (p. 309), there was no man in the world whom he loved better. Accompanying the king on his first expedition to Ireland in 1394, he was rewarded (before 9 March 1396) with the earldom of Cork, and acted as Richard's principal plenipotentiary in the conclusion of his marriage with Isabella of France (St. Denys, ii. 333, 356, 359; Walsingham, ii. 215). A suggested marriage between Rutland himself and a sister of Isabella came to nothing, as Jeanne, the second daughter of Charles VI, was already betrothed to the heir of Brittany (Wallon, ii. 415; Fœdera, vii. 804). He figured prominently at the costly meeting between the two kings in October 1396 which preceded the marriage.
In the following spring he went abroad again on a mission to France and the princes of the Rhine. Offices were accumulated on him. In 1396 he was made warden of the Cinque ports, with the reversion of the governorship of the Channel Islands; in April 1397 warden and chief justice of the New Forest, and of all the forests south of Trent; and in June lord of the Isle of Wight, which had been in the hands of the crown for a century. It can hardly have been a mere coincidence that just before taking his revenge upon the lords appellant Richard entrusted so many strategical points along the Channel to the man who already commanded the fleet. When the crisis arrived, Rutland took a leading part in the arrest of Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick; was given Gloucester's office of constable of England on 12 July, and headed the eight who appealed the prisoners of treason at Nottingham in August, and in the fatal September parliament (Annales Ricardi, p. 203; Dugdale, ii. 156; Rot. Parl. iii. 374). In the next reign he was accused by the informer Halle of having sent his servants to assist in the murder of Gloucester (ib. iii. 452). Gloucester's lands in Holderness, and with them his title of duke of Aumarle or Albemarle, were granted (28–29 Sept.) to Rutland; and in December 1398 Oakham and the shrievalty of Rutland, in which Gloucester's reversionary rights had lapsed by his attainder, were regranted to Albemarle and his heirs male. His share of Arundel's possessions was Clun in the Welsh march and other estates, and of Warwick's the Hertfordshire manor of Flamsteed. In the next reign it was even asserted that Richard had contemplated abdi-
