Burgh, Sir Edmund de

Burgh, Sir Edmund de (a. 1290–1338), magnate, third son of Richard de Burgh (qv), 2nd earl of Ulster, and his wife Margaret, rose to prominence after the death of his father in June 1326. The king entrusted the lordship to Sir Edmund, son of the old earl, and Walter de Burgh (qv), son of Sir William Liath de Burgh (qv), during the minority of the new earl. In 1327, the council of Countess Elizabeth (qv), mother of Earl William (qv), 3rd earl of Ulster, urged her to summon Edmund to England to receive his arms from the king and to marry him to an Englishwoman if possible. When Earl William came to Ireland (September 1328), his uncle became his firmest supporter and remained one of the foremost magnates of the lordship. Sir Edmund and the earl were among those who stood surety for Maurice fitz Thomas FitzGerald (qv), 1st earl of Desmond, in 1333. Earl William used his uncle to reassert his authority over the de Burgh lordship, and especially Sir Walter de Burgh in Connacht. Sir Walter's activities in 1329–31 showed an increasingly independent stance, and Sir Edmund was sent to control him. Sir Walter was captured (November 1331) and brought to Northburgh castle (February 1332), where he was starved to death, an event that led directly to the assassination of Earl William in June 1333. After the earl's death, the Dublin administration turned to Sir Edmund as the most suitable guardian of the rights and lands of the earl's daughter, Elizabeth (qv). The administration also tried to make peace between Sir Edmund, ‘the son of the earl’, and his cousin Sir Edmund Albanach (qv), Walter's brother, a peace that was symbolised by both Sir Edmunds being summoned to service in Scotland in 1335. This peace did not last long, as the two Edmunds found themselves on opposite sides of the conflicts in Connacht. The crown's efforts at mediation failed but the matter was settled in 1338 when Edmund Albanach captured his namesake and drowned him in Lough Mask. For this crime Albanach was driven out of Connacht by Toirrdelbach O'Connor (qv) (d. 1345), who married Sir Edmund's widow, Sláine O'Brien, and presumably took care of Sir Edmund's son, Richard. Richard's birth was apparently considered illegitimate by the Dublin administration, as he was not regarded as a potential heir to the earldom of Ulster in 1348, but his descendants settled in the de Burgh lands in Tipperary and Limerick and formed a minor lordship there.