Sir Richard Edgcumbe (alias Edgecombe, etc.) (c. 1443 – 8 September 1489) of Cotehele in the parish of Calstock in Cornwall, was an English courtier and Member of Parliament.
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Origins
He was the son and heir of Piers Edgcumbe of Cotehele by his wife Elizabeth Holland, daughter and heiress of Richard Holland. The family is earliest recorded in 1292 when Richard Edgcombe was seated at the manor of Edgcombe in the parish of Milton Abbot in Devon, from which his family took their surname. His grandson William Edgcombe (d.1380) married the heiress of Cothele, to which manor he moved his residence.
Career
He was a Member of Parliament for Tavistock in Devon, from 1467 to 1468. He was a Lancastrian and had his lands confiscated in 1471 by the Yorkist King Edward IV, although these were returned to him the next year.
Angered by Richard of Gloucester’s usurpation of the throne in 1483 and the rumours of the murder of Edward V and his brother in the Tower of London, Edgcumbe joined the rebellion led by Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham to dethrone the Yorkist Richard III and replace him with the Lancastrian Henry Tudor. When the rebellion collapsed and Henry's ships fled, Edgcumbe's arrest was ordered and a troop of soldiers commanded by the notoriously brutal Sir Henry Trenowth of Bodrugan were sent to arrest him. He hid on the wooded hillside of his Tamar-side home, Cotehele, and when his hiding place was discovered, threw his pursuers off the scent by filling his cap with stones and throwing it into the river, fooling his pursuers into thinking he had drowned and thus escaping certain death. After his escape, he fled to Brittany and joined Henry Tudor with whom he returned to England in 1485. He was knighted later that year after the Battle of Bosworth, where Henry Tudor and the Lancastrians were victorious.