PART VI
Long live, therefore, the young Edward, and may he himself embody the
virtues that enriched each of his forefathers separately. May he follow the
industry of King Henry II, the well-known valour of King Richard, may he
reach the age of King Henry [III], revive the wisdom of King Edward [I] and
remind us of the physical strength and comeliness of his father.
– THE LIFE OF EDWARD II, ON THE BIRTH OF EDWARD III
The plotters moved as quietly as they could through a secret underground passage, deep in the bowels of Nottingham castle. There were at least sixteen, and perhaps more than twenty of them: heavily armed, mostly young men, loyal to their king and desperate for their own lives. Above them, the castle was settling down for the night, emptied of the day’s visitors, who had returned to their lodgings in the town outside. The only sounds in the tunnel would have been stifled breath, the dull clank of moving armour, and the crackle of torchlight.
They were acting on urgent royal orders. Earlier in the day, five of the conspirators in the tunnel and the seventeen-year-old king himself had been hauled before a suspicious panel of interrogation, headed by Roger Mortimer, earl of March, the queen’s lover, who had been controlling the government of England for three years, overruling the king and spreading his tentacles into every aspect of government business. Spies had informed Mortimer that a group of men around the young king were planning an attempt on his life. All had strenuously denied it. All had left their interrogation knowing that they had to act.
The leader of the men in the tunnel was William Montagu, twenty-nine years old, a knight-banneret in Edward III’s household and a friend of the king. He had accompanied Edward on recent business in France and had just returned from the papal curia at Avignon, where he had been sent to relay secret messages to Pope John XXII. Montagu was a soldier, a loyalist, a royal friend – just as his father had been to Edward II. He above all people feared that the king’s life was in jeopardy from Mortimer. He had told the king that day that immediate action was essential. ‘It is better to eat dog than to be eaten by the dog,’ he had told the king, and Edward had heeded his advice, giving his assent to a plan that was destined either to be a suicide mission or a moment that would rescue the Crown.
Alongside Montagu crept four more of Edward’s household companions. Edward Bohun, Robert Ufford and William Clinton were also bannerets. John Neville of Hornby was a household knight. These were brave men, ready to risk their lives for their lord on a violent, dangerous mission. But key to the mission was a sixth man: William Eland, speculator of Nottingham castle. The role of ‘speculator’ was probably that of a watchman, and Eland knew the corridors and passageways of the fortress better than any man alive.
The tunnel through which Montagu and his men now stole was the only route into a castle to which Mortimer held the keys – the earl left them under the queen’s pillow at night. The tunnel linked the riverbank outside with Queen Isabella’s apartment at the heart of the castle. Eland had flouted his duties on 19 October 1330 and left unlocked the postern gate in the tunnel. Now he used his inside knowledge to guide the other men through the darkness.
Somehow evading Mortimer’s suspicions, Nottingham castle was rotten with treachery. Within the castle, co-conspirators, including Edward’s personal physician Pancio de Controne, supplied alibis for the king to absent himself from his mother and Mortimer’s presence for the evening, and perhaps assisted with unlocking the door that joined the secret passage to the castle keep. Eland and Montagu must have prayed, as they led their men up the spiral staircase from deep underground to the heart of the royal quarters, that their plot would not have been foiled by the time they reached the final door. If Mortimer had subverted any of their allies, he might already have sent soldiers into the tunnel behind them. Death and ruin would await.
Their fears were not realized. In the queen’s hall, Isabella sat in conference with Mortimer, his two sons Geoffrey and Edmund, Simon Bereford, Sir Hugh Turpington and Henry Burghersh, bishop of Lincoln, discussing the best way to proceed against the men who, unbeknownst to them, had now left the tunnel, entered the castle keep and were advancing on the meeting room with deadly intent.
As Montagu and his men burst into the apartment complex they encountered Turpington, the steward of the household, who was ultimately responsible for the security that had now been breached. John Neville attacked and killed him. The noise drew the startled attention of those few household esquires posted as guards at the doorway of the hall. As the plotters burst in, they cut down two of the guards where they stood.
Mortimer ran, aiming for his chamber to collect his sword. But he and two of his advisers were captured and arrested and the earl of March was deliberately kept alive to be tried as a traitor. Both of Mortimer’s sons, as well as Simon Bereford, were also taken prisoner. According to the Brut chronicler, Bishop Burghersh forgot his ecclesiastical dignity completely. He made a bid to flee by running to the lavatory and trying to throw himself down the chute that evacuated human waste to the moat outside. As Montagu’s men gave chase, to haul the bishop from his squalid bolt-hole, Queen Isabella stood by the door of the hall, wailing into the darkness, calling for her son, who she believed was lurking behind the plotters.
By these dramatic means, the seventeen-year-old Edward III threw off the shackles of his mother and Roger Mortimer and took personal control of England’s government. The day after the coup a declaration made to the sheriffs of England informed them that Roger Mortimer, earl of March, had been arrested and that Edward would ‘henceforth govern his people according to right and reason, as befits his royal dignity, and that the affairs that concern him and the estate of the realm shall be directed by the common counsel of the magnates of the realm and in no other wise …’
After his arrest, Mortimer was imprisoned and prepared for a grand trial before a parliament that met in Westminster Hall in November 1330. He was brought before the assembled peers of the realm, bound, gagged and humiliated. And he was accused, according to the official parliamentary record, of having ‘usurped by himself royal power and the government of the realm concerning the estate of the king’, and of having used his servant John Wray ‘to spy on [Edward’s] actions and his words; so that, in such a way, our said lord the king was surrounded by his enemies so that he was unable to do as he wished, so that he was like a man living in custody’. The long list of charges (Mortimer was accused of fourteen separate crimes) also included alienating royal lands with the creation of his earldom of March, making war upon the earl of Lancaster and his allies, framing the earl of Kent for treason and siphoning off royal funds including the fee paid by the Scots for peace.
Most important, however, Mortimer was explicitly accused of Edward II’s murder. ‘The said Roger by the royal power usurped by him … ordained that [the old king] be sent to Berkeley Castle where he was traitorously, feloniously and falsely murdered and killed by him and his followers,’ reads the record. This was the first time that it had been officially stated that Edward II was murdered, and it was enough for Mortimer to be ‘drawn and hanged as a traitor and an enemy of the king and of the realm’.
Here then, was the chance of an end to the cycle of violence that had begun in 1312 and lasted for nearly two decades. In keeping with all the other noble killings that had taken place, Mortimer was not allowed to speak in his own defence. But with his traitor’s death at Tyburn, on 29 November 1330, a chapter was closed.
Isabella, for her part, was not ill-treated. As the king’s mother she was simply removed from power and pensioned off. Far from being isolated, she would live out the next twenty-seven years of her life in magnificence and luxury at Castle Rising in Norfolk, playing an important diplomatic role for the Crown and participating in her son’s increasingly lavish ceremonial feasts and family celebrations.
With his daring sponsorship of a dramatic coup, and a decisive seizure of power at the approach of his eighteenth birthday, Edward III gave promising signs that he had the character and capability to restore some sense of normality and order to a badly diminished realm. And indeed he did so. He showed early on a pattern of behaviour that would underpin everything his kingship stood for: he identified a problem and took radical – even reckless – action to solve it, aided by a close group of trusted supporters. This would prove to be an effective, intoxicating form of kingship. But it would take many years of difficulty before Edward was recognized for what he was: perhaps the greatest of all the Plantagenet kings.