Edward the Black Prince

Edward of Woodstock, eldest son of Edward III and Philippa of Hainault, was the most celebrated English soldier of his age yet never reigned, dying a year before his father. Born in June 1330, he was created duke of Cornwall in 1337, the first duke in English history, and Prince of Wales in 1343. The sobriquet "Black Prince" is not recorded in his lifetime, first appearing in the sixteenth century.

His military reputation was made early. At Crecy in 1346, aged sixteen, he commanded the vanguard of his father's army, and he was among the founding knights of the Order of the Garter. Leading devastating raids from Gascony in 1355-56, he won his greatest victory at Poitiers on 19 September 1356, where his outnumbered army defeated the French and captured King John II of France himself, a prize that shaped the Treaty of Bretigny of 1360 and its enormous ransom.

In 1361 he married his cousin Joan of Kent, a granddaughter of Edward I, in a love match unusual for a royal heir. The following year his father made him prince of Aquitaine, and he held a brilliant court at Bordeaux. In 1367 he intervened in the Castilian civil war, restoring Pedro I to his throne with victory at Najera, but the expedition ruined his finances and his health; the taxation he imposed to cover its costs drove Gascon lords to appeal to Charles V of France, reopening the war. During the renewed fighting his forces sacked the city of Limoges in 1370, an episode that darkened his reputation.

Chronically ill from the time of the Spanish campaign, the prince returned to England in 1371 and resigned the principality of Aquitaine in 1372. He died at Westminster on 8 June 1376, having on his deathbed sought the protection of his father and parliament for his nine-year-old son. He was buried in Canterbury Cathedral, where his tomb with its effigy in armour and funerary achievements survives. When Edward III died in 1377, the prince's son succeeded as Richard II.