The boy-king Edward III was crowned at Westminster on 1 February, in a ceremony arranged at unprecedented speed. Royal authority had collapsed to a baleful condition under his father; the immediate priority for the new king and his minders was to re-establish it. Fortunately, since most of England’s political community were in London at the end of January, it proved relatively simple to assemble them at Westminster at short notice to see Edward, along with three of Roger Mortimer’s sons, knighted by the 36-year-old Henry of Lancaster. Then, on the day of the coronation itself, Westminster Abbey filled with magnates and prelates to watch Archbishop Reynolds of Canterbury lower the large, heavy crown of the Confessor – fitted with extra padding to ensure it did not topple off at some critical, ill-omened moment – onto the head of the fourteen-year-old king.
Edward swore the same coronation oath that Edward II had taken in 1307, including the novel fourth vow that his father had so conspicuously failed to observe: that he would ‘hold and preserve the laws and righteous customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen’. The new reign was then celebrated with a feast in Westminster Hall of wilder extravagance and luxury than would be seen again for another half-century. The hall was transformed into a richly furnished paradise of kingship, glittering with priceless cloth and precious plate. The royal throne was hung on every side with cloth of gold. The celebratory atmosphere served as a much-needed counterpoint to the miserable, bloody events of the previous year, and there was no mistaking the political message: the old king might have fallen, but the Crown itself remained supreme and magnificent.
Yet kingship was palpably not recovered. At fourteen, Edward had reached the age of discretion, but he was not fit to rule in his own right. This presented an ambiguous state of affairs: a king too old to be a mere figurehead, but not yet old enough to take the reins of power in both hands. Although he took control of his own household from March 1327, the real business of government very quickly fell to Queen Isabella, who controlled influence and access to her son, and Roger Mortimer, who performed a similar role towards the queen. It would not be very long before they, too, had perverted the principles of the royal office they were supposed to protect.
The first task of the new regime was to rehabilitate the outcasts of the previous reign. A parliament assembled the day after the coronation reversed the sentences of treason that had been passed on Thomas earl of Lancaster and his allies in 1322, and allowed for the proper inheritance of the family estates and titles, which were largely awarded to Henry of Lancaster. Mortimer, too, was restored to his lands and titles, and began an aggressive pursuit of other Marcher territories, beginning with those belonging to his uncle, Roger Mortimer of Chirk, who had recently died. None of this was very unusual, for Mortimer, like Henry of Lancaster, was fully entitled to reclaim what had been unfairly taken from him by Edward II and the Despensers. Yet there were signs very early that Isabella and Mortimer had just as grasping a mindset as their forerunner partisans and favourites.
Before Edward’s coronation, during the chaotic bloodletting that preceded her husband’s abdication, Queen Isabella had resumed all the lands of her dowry, worth some £4,500. After her son was crowned, she was awarded further estates, taking her landed income to 20,000 marks – making her a greater landowner than any other magnate in England. This massive accumulation of wealth, combined with her access to the large stockpiles of treasure that had been amassed by her husband and the Despensers, rattled onlookers.
Of more immediate concern, however, was the queen’s involvement in foreign politics. Here, three urgent issues pressed the new government. Peace with Isabella’s brother Charles IV of France had to be formalized, to protect the disputed borders of the beleaguered Aquitanian territories. Scotland required a show of force to subdue its impertinent natives, some of whom had led a successful assault on the English-held castle at Norham on 1 February – the very day that Edward was crowned. Finally, Edward needed a bride, through whom to sire a new generation of Plantagenets.
Failure greeted almost every move. The terms of the Treaty of Paris, hastily agreed with the French Crown, reached the king in Lincolnshire in mid-April, and it was clear that they were designed not only to humiliate him, but also to cripple his realm financially. English possessions in south-west France were reduced to the Gascon coast between Bordeaux and Bayonne. Everything else would be controlled directly by the French king. The cost to Edward for retaining this tiny sliver of the former Plantagenet empire was a punitive bill of 50,000 marks. It seems that Isabella and Mortimer recognized just how high a price they were paying for peace, since the detailed terms of the treaty were suppressed on the English side of the Channel. This represented a helpless acquiescence – an acceptance that England was too mired in internal discord to contemplate reconquest in France.
Even when Charles died in 1328 without a Capetian heir, minimal effort was made to turn the situation to England’s advantage. Although Edward was one of the three surviving grandsons of Philip IV, and thus had a claim to the French Crown, only token protests were made when Charles’s cousin Philip of Valois was crowned Philip VI. Edward travelled to Amiens in 1329 to do homage to the new king for the rump of Aquitaine and the county of Ponthieu. This was hardly a sign that the English were prepared to use Edward’s dynastic claim as a bargaining lever for greater security in what remained of the Plantagenet continental lands.
In Scotland, things fared worse. Border raids continued from February to the summer, with bands of Scots crossing into northern England to burn and plunder as they pleased. At the same time as the terms of the Treaty of Paris were put before a disappointed Edward III in Lincolnshire, royal orders were heading north for an old-fashioned feudal muster of troops at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and York.
Edward and his mother travelled to York in late May, where they met with a band of 500 Flemish knights under Isabella’s continental ally John of Hainault. This elite fighting unit made itself immediately unpopular with the citizens of England’s second city by fighting with the English troops, rampaging in violent disorder through the streets of York. Despite this unpromising background, Edward left Isabella in York in early July and set out for the Scottish border, aiming to meet the enemy, who were amassed under the veteran commander Sir James Douglas, and bring them to battle. The mission was a disaster: Douglas spent several weeks dodging his English pursuers, before abruptly changing tack at the end of the month. He fell upon the royal camp near Stanhope Park near Durham, causing havoc, scattering the king’s attendants, and according to one chronicle, riding to the middle of the royal encampment, ‘always crying “Douglas!”, and stroke asunder two or three cords of the King’s tent’. Several days later Douglas took his rampant troops on a final retreat back into Scotland.
Edward was said by several chroniclers to have been so enraged at his own failure that he wept in fury. Well might he have done: the campaign ran through funds so quickly that the crown jewels had to be pawned to keep English government solvent. By the Treaty of Edinburgh–Northampton (so-called because it was sealed in Edinburgh by Robert the Bruce in early 1328 and subsequently ratified in an English parliament held in May at Northampton), Mortimer and Isabella accepted that they could not afford to wage a war in the north. They settled with the Scots, disgracefully giving up England’s claim to overlordship in Scotland for a paltry £20,000. Scotland was recognized as a sovereign kingdom, ruled over by Bruce and his heirs and constrained by the border as it had been in Alexander III’s time. Edward’s six-year-old sister Joanna was betrothed and swiftly married to Bruce’s infant son David. This did little to obscure the fact that everything the English had fought for since Edward I’s glorious war had begun in 1295 was forfeited in a stroke.
Edward’s wedding, at least, was more certain. The alliance made with the count of Hainault before Isabella and Mortimer’s invasion was honoured, and the young Philippa of Hainault – born some time between 1310 and 1315, so approximately Edward’s own age – was brought over to London in late 1327. The couple were married at York Minster on 26 January 1328 in an opulent, gold-trimmed ceremony designed to demonstrate as surely to Edward’s northern subjects as his coronation had shown his southern that royal power was not in decline. (That such magnificence could be afforded against a background of war-weary penury was thanks to the Plantagenets’ generous Italian bankers, the Bardi family. The Bardis would learn their lesson some years later when Edward’s repeated defaults on his loans ruined them – a financial catastrophe that began the rise of the Medici family in Italy.) Marriage was one area of foreign diplomacy in which Isabella and Mortimer succeeded – although Isabella’s wish to exercise the powers of queen consort meant that she would not allow the girl’s coronation for nearly two years. Yet Edward’s wedding came against the background of strange events closer to home.
During the night hours of 23 September 1327, the young king was woken in his chamber at Lincoln and told that his father was dead. Since April, Edward of Caernarfon had been imprisoned in a dungeon in Berkeley castle, Gloucestershire, and it was there that he had died two days previously, according to the messengers, from natural causes. Since the young king was pressingly engaged with parliamentary business related to the Scottish situation, plans to bury the old king were made for December.
At the time of Edward’s death, very few people questioned the cause. Edward III, certainly, seems to have accepted that his father had died in unexceptional circumstances, and organized a funeral for him. But as the years passed, a number of descriptions of Edward of Caernarfon’s death circulated, beginning to suggest that there had been foul play. At first the king was said to have died from grief or illness, or in some sort of pain. Soon, though, talk turned to the presumption of murder.
Three times during Edward of Caernarfon’s imprisonment plots had been uncovered to release him from captivity: once in April while he was imprisoned at Kenilworth and twice, in July and September, during his captivity at Berkeley. The first two plots involved Dominican friars, but the third involved men from Wales, the most prominent being Rhys ap Gruffudd, a long-time ally of Edward II, who had come to his assistance in 1321–2 and had been with him during his final flight in 1326. It began to be rumoured that these repeated escape attempts had exhausted the patience of the Isabella–Mortimer regime, and eventually Mortimer had ordered that the old king be slain in his cell. In October 1330 it was stated before parliament that Edward had been murdered. Two decades after Edward’s death, the well-informed chronicler Adam of Murimuth wrote that the king had been killed by a trick, and that Roger Mortimer had had him suffocated.
As news of Edward’s death spread, and suspicions of murder strengthened, the supposed cause of death grew more extreme. A tradition grew up that he had been strangled before suffering the agonizing fate of internal burning, with a red-hot poker inserted via a ‘trumpet’ device placed in his rectum. This has become the standard account of Edward’s death, since – as its originators probably intended – there is a ghastly poetic symbolism in the emasculated, decadent, possibly homosexual king being buggered to death. It is almost certainly quite untrue.
Nevertheless, it seems most likely that Edward was indeed murdered, and that it happened on the orders of Roger Mortimer. The murderers were probably Mortimer’s allies William Ogle and Sir Thomas Gurney, acting in alliance with the steward of the royal household, Sir John Maltravers, who was personally responsible for Edward’s custody.
In any case, Edward of Caernarfon was buried on 20 December 1327. He was not buried with his grandfather and father next to the Confessor’s tomb in the Plantagenet mausoleum at Westminster Abbey. Rather, he was interred at St Peter’s Abbey in Gloucester, where Henry III had been crowned as a nine-year-old boy during the civil war of 1217. Perhaps it was appropriate that the only other royal figure to have been buried there was Robert Curthose, son of William the Conqueror: a man who might have been a king of England, but who had instead been imprisoned for nearly thirty years at Devizes and Cardiff, by his brother Henry I. Edward was buried in the under-clothes he had worn at his ill-fated coronation in 1308 and he had the distinction of bearing on his tomb the first-ever royal effigy to be used in England – a tradition that continued for centuries after his death. If it was not quite a great royal farewell, it was still a surprisingly dignified end for a king who had besmirched the English royal line, and suffered the most damning verdict imaginable in the articles of accusation published by his enemies in January 1327. These had described the king as ‘incompetent to govern in person … controlled and governed by others who have given him evil counsel’, and unwilling ‘to listen to good counsel nor to adopt it nor give himself to the good government of his realm’. Eleven months on from his deposition, and even with his body lying still, all remained acutely aware that Edward II had ‘stripped his realm, and done all that he could to ruin his realm and his people, and what is worse, by his cruelty and lack of character he has shown himself incorrigible without hope of amendment, which things are so notorious that they cannot be denied’.
But was the regime that had succeeded him really any better? The answer, more and more, appeared to be no. For the concerns with Isabella and Mortimer’s control over the king went beyond their influence in foreign policy. At home, their behaviour increasingly seemed to mirror the acquisitive excess that had blighted the previous reign. By 1330, they had gone even further, and England plunged once more into the depths of murderous villainy.
As Mortimer grew confident in the queen’s support, he soon found that he was as unable as a Gaveston or a Despenser to resist using his proximity to royal prerogative to enrich himself. He steadily accumulated territories throughout Wales and the Marches, many of which had been confiscated from the traitors of 1326. At a series of tournaments held around England, Mortimer presided above Edward III in quasi-kingly fashion, holding round tables and parading himself as King Arthur – a nod to his Welsh ancestry. He revelled in his role as consort to the king’s mother, and in a parliament held at Salisbury in 1328 he succeeded in his final ascent to the upper ranks of the nobility, being awarded the extraordinary and novel title of earl of March.
So soon after the Despenser fiasco, this was wildly disruptive. On Mortimer’s watch England had suffered humiliation on two fronts of war and diplomacy; the king’s young wife was still uncrowned; judicial ‘commissions of trailbaston’ – brigandage courts – which had been sent out into the shires to deal with widespread violence and disorder had collapsed; and the Crown, despite the treasure that had been inherited from the old king and the vast loans taken from the Bardi bank, was perilously close to bankruptcy. Yet the new earl of March was enriching himself to the point where he resembled another king. As disillusion grew with the new regime, England began to split once more into warring factions. Henry earl of Lancaster led the opposition, which by January 1329 threatened to turn to outright warfare. Suggestions sped around that the king, through his failure to take good counsel and govern reasonably, was in breach both of Magna Carta and his coronation oath. War seemed so probable that a new set of armour was commissioned for Edward. Throughout almost the whole of 1329, the seventeen-year-old king was kept away from Westminster and London: prevented from taking command of government himself; coddled like a child by his rapacious parent and her lover.
Full civil war was, mercifully, avoided, but by the spring of 1330 Edward could be nannied no more. Philippa of Hainault was pregnant – a fact that demanded her coronation at Westminster Abbey in February. Simultaneously, very worrying rumours reached the ears of the court. It had begun to be said that Edward of Caernarfon – supposedly buried in Gloucester more than two years previously – was alive and at large.
Stories of Edward II’s supposed survival remain in currency to this day, active particularly in a tradition that has the former king escaping captivity and living out his days as a hermit in Italy. That they are unconvincing now is neither here nor there; in 1330 the notion that the old king might return was a frightening prospect which haunted everyone who had been complicit in his abdication and burial, and Edward III’s accession.
It is quite possible that one source of the rumours was the man responsible for the king’s death. By 1330 the earl of March was more unpopular than ever before. It seemed highly likely that the French were about to annex what remained of Aquitaine, and Mortimer had made himself gravely unpopular by attempting arbitrarily to seize funds for the defence of Gascony from local communities and individual lords. He had created many bitter enemies, not least Henry earl of Lancaster, but also the king’s half-uncles Thomas earl of Norfolk and Edmund earl of Kent. While both of them professed their loyalty to the Crown, Mortimer saw them as threatening to his own position as protector and governor of the king’s person.
At the end of a parliament held in Winchester in March 1330, at which funds for the defence of Gascony were under urgent discussion, Mortimer launched an attack on the earl of Kent. As parliament was breaking up, Kent was suddenly arrested for treason and accused of plotting to make contact with his (supposedly living) half-brother Edward II at Corfe castle. The earl was dragged before a court set up hastily under Mortimer’s presidency. He was charged with treason, incriminating letters were produced, and he was duly found guilty. He was summarily disinherited, his wife and children sentenced to imprisonment in Salisbury castle, and Kent himself sentenced to death outside the walls of Winchester castle. It was a mark of the savage, terrifying nature of Mortimer’s decision that for some time no one could be found to execute the sentence. Eventually another prisoner at Winchester, responsible for cleaning the latrines, was given his freedom in exchange for hacking off poor Kent’s head. Yet another earl had gone to his death – and this one of royal blood. Edmund was a son of Edward I, and an even greater casualty of the early fourteenth century’s killing time than Thomas of Lancaster had been.
As parliament broke up and Edward headed to Woodstock to join his wife for the birth of their first child – a boy named Edward, born on 15 June – the king was distraught. He had wished to pardon Kent, but had been overridden by Mortimer. Edward III was a husband, a father and a king; yet another man ruled his realm, slept with his mother and murdered his kin as he saw fit. The kingdom, beggared by his father, approached the point of total dissolution under Mortimer’s cruel and greedy tyranny. Three disastrous years of misgovernment had indeed brought as much calamity upon England as had been seen under the old king, ending with a judicial slaying enacted on the whim of a murderous tyrant who lorded it over England as though he himself were king. The time had come for action. Edward III – desperate, daring and no little courageous – began to plot the recapture of his Crown. A bright new age of kingship was about to dawn.