The Plantagenets: The Warrior Kings and Queens Who Made England

by Dan Jones

  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.

  PART VI

  Age of Glory

  (1330–1360)

  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

  Royal Coup

  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.

  Glorious King of a Beggared Kingdom

  In the aftermath of the Nottingham coup, Edward was lauded throughout his land. He was eighteen years old in November 1330, and at last in sole command of his Crown and his destiny. His personal badge was the sunburst – rays of golden sunshine exploding from behind a thick cloud – and it was this impression that the young king wished his subjects to take as he stepped out from the cramping grasp of his parents and Mortimer, to rule the kingdom as his own man. The new king offered light, courage and hope.