The eldest son of Owen Tudor and Catherine of Valois, Edmund was born around 1430 and at first grew up away from court, probably entrusted to the Abbess of Barking after his mother’s death in 1437, in an ambiguous social position his modest Welsh ancestry and his parents’ irregular secret marriage made delicate. It was not until 1452 that his half-brother Henry VI formally acknowledged him and raised him, along with his younger brother Jasper, to the peerage, granting him the title Earl of Richmond.

The king granted him the hand, the following year, of Margaret Beaufort, heiress of a legitimised branch of the House of Lancaster barely twelve years old, a match that directly tied the Tudors to the royal Lancastrian kinship and let Henry VI hope for a strengthened camp through this family alliance. Sent to Wales to restore royal authority against local Yorkist claims, Edmund carried out a delicate task in a region where the crown’s authority remained fragile.

Captured by Yorkist rivals, probably supporters of the Vaughan family hostile to his authority, he was imprisoned at Carmarthen Castle, where he died in November 1456, probably of plague contracted in captivity, only months before the birth of his only son, the future Henry VII, whom Margaret Beaufort bore at just thirteen years old. His premature death left his brother Jasper the task of protecting this fatherless child, whose survival would, decades later, become the keystone of the entire Tudor house’s political fortune.