by Jones, Nigel
Mortimer languished in the Tower for three months before the king’s thoughts returned to him. In the interim Edward had destroyed his enemies at the battle of Boroughbridge in Yorkshire. There was now no barrier to the despotic power of the Despensers, and Mortimer’s future looked short. In July, he was taken from the Tower to Westminster Hall, tried for his recent rebellion and condemned to death. Surprisingly, the king, perhaps mindful of their youthful companionship, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. For now, Hugh Despenser was deprived of his prey.
The reprieve was brief. In the twelve months that followed, Despenser spared no effort in adding to his already bulging portfolio of property and riches, mostly acquired illegally. The king was wax in his hot hands, granting every gift and title demanded. Finally, the vengeful tyrant demanded the best prize of all: Roger Mortimer’s head. But Despenser had made an enemy more dangerous than Roger, helpless in his Tower cell. He had reckoned without Edward’s long-neglected queen, Isabella, who would soon live up to her nickname ‘the She-wolf of France’.
The daughter of Philip IV of France – named ‘the Fair’ for his blond good looks, which she would inherit – Isabella had married Edward in 1308, when she was twelve. They wed in Boulogne-sur-Mer and the young queen immediately received a clear indication of her new husband’s sexual priorities when, arriving at Dover, she and the French nobles accompanying her witnessed a long and loving embrace between Edward and Piers Gaveston. Further shocks were in store at the wedding feast in Westminster Hall when Gaveston shamelessly appeared in the costly finery which Isabella’s father had bestowed on his new son-in-law as wedding gifts. Horrified by the insult, the French nobles stormed out. This pattern continued throughout the reign, and although the royal couple succeeded in producing four children, Edward’s sexual preferences became obvious to his comely young wife, and her resentment festered.
We do not know exactly when Isabella and Mortimer first met, but as a prominent nobleman Roger was a familiar figure to Isabella by the time he was confined in the Tower in 1322. Isabella gave birth to her youngest child, Joan of the Tower, there in 1321. While pregnant with Joan, Isabella had openly signalled her growing displeasure with her husband by adding her voice to the chorus demanding that the hated Hugh Despenser be banished. His return from exile turned her disillusion into outright disgust.
That revulsion was reinforced when, in 1322, Edward and Despenser fled from Robert the Bruce’s marauding Scottish army, leaving the queen marooned at Tynemouth Abbey. Only by luck did she escape by sea, losing two of her ladies-in-waiting in the process. Her hatred of her husband now hardened into a determination to exact revenge for the serial humiliations she had suffered at his hands. Mortimer’s presence in the Tower gave Isabella an ally – and, possibly, more. It is quite likely that her pity for Mortimer’s plight turned now into a physical passion. It seems certain that they met covertly in the Tower and plotted. The result was that Isabella intervened on Roger’s behalf against their common enemy. In February 1323 she protested to the king that Roger’s loyal wife Joan and his aged mother were being subjected to royal harassment. The liaision that would bring her and Mortimer to supreme power was first forged at the Tower that foggy February.
Mortimer was not a man to submit patiently to incarceration in the White Tower. Like Flambard, he had, even in his reduced state, the means to persuade his jailers to do his bidding. This included smuggling messages to the world outside, and bringing replies back to his cell. But royal spies intercepted some of Roger’s letters to a network of nobles and clerics across the country. An ally of Roger’s, Lord Berkeley, under torture supervised by Edward and Despenser, blurted out his knowledge of Mortimer’s scheming. Armed with this evidence, Despenser again insisted that Mortimer was too dangerous to be allowed to live. Edward was persuaded, and Mortimer’s death was set for early August 1323.
Warning of the king’s lethal intentions was brought to Mortimer in the Tower by Isabella. He knew that he had to act quickly. On 1 August under the cover of celebrations marking the feast day of St Peter ad Vincula, the Tower’s patron saint, Roger put his escape plan into effect. His jailers gathered in the main hall of the White Tower for a banquet to honour their saint. Wine flowed and caution and sobriety were thrown to the winds. But one high-placed guest at the long trestle tables watched the hilarity with a coldly sober eye. Gerard d’Alspaye, second-in-command to the Tower’s lieutenant, Stephen de Segrave, was the insider who had ferried Mortimer’s letters in and out of the fortress. Now he would be the key to unlock his prison. Given free run of the Tower’s cellars and kitchens, d’Alspaye had discreetly added sleeping draughts to the drinks and watched as de Segrave slumped unconscious, along with most of his men.
D’Alspaye slipped from the room, picked up a concealed crowbar and a couple of coiled rope ladders, and hurried to the cell which Mortimer shared with a confederate, Richard de Monmouth. D’Alspaye went to work with the crowbar on the old mortar until one of the great stones was prised out. On his side of the wall, Mortimer was also working with improvised tools to dig out a hole in the masonry which he had loosened in advance. Breathing a prayer to St Peter – along with a promise to build the saint a dedicated chapel at Ludlow in his native Marches if the prayer was granted – he and de Monmouth sweated desperately in the hot summer night to heave the stones free. Both knew that their lives depended on their speed.
At last a ragged hole was made big enough for the two men to squeeze through and they quickly crept downstairs, out of the White Tower, and into the kitchen of the adjoining royal palace to the south. The chief cook, also in on the plot, showed them their means of escape: up a wide chimney kept cold and empty for the purpose. They clambered up the sooty interior and found themselves on the kitchen roof under the wide, starry summer sky. D’Alspaye’s rope ladders now came into their own. Such ladders had been successfully used by Bruce’s Scots to capture castles and had been copied in England. Feverishly, they slung a ladder, with a grappling iron attached, over the high Inner Ward wall and heaved themselves over. A final barrier faced them – the Tower’s outer curtain wall. Using their second ladder, they flung it over the wall, scaled it, and found themselves splashing along the marshy north bank of the Thames.
A prearranged boat was waiting in the shadows, and the two escapees were rowed downriver to Greenwich, where, guarded by four of Mortimer’s liegemen, two horses were saddled and ready. Avoiding the Dover road, the most obvious route for a cross-Channel escape, the fugitives rode south-west to Portchester in Hampshire, where they took ship for France. As he sucked the sea air into his lungs, Mortimer now had one implacable purpose. God had freed him for a reason: to avenge himself on the tyrant king who had locked him in the Tower. Nothing would distract him from that goal.
When informed that Mortimer had escaped, Edward’s rage was murderous. The hapless Segrave was sacked and replaced as Tower lieutenant by Walter de Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter and one of Edward’s most slavish supporters. Mortimer was proclaimed a rebel, outlaw and traitor. A fresh wave of persecution swept the land which saw Roger’s friends and family deprived of their estates. Darkly suspecting the queen of involvement in the getaway, Despenser persuaded the king to strip Isabella of her property and slash her personal living expenses to the bone. With Roger living under the protection of Isabella’s brother, King Charles IV of France, the queen’s fellow countrymen fell under suspicion as a potential fifth column. All French citizens living in England were arrested, including thirty members of Isabella’s own household staff. The final cruel indignity to the slighted queen was to remove Isabella’s children from her care and to place them under the control of Hugh Despenser’s wife. Three of Roger Mortimer’s sons were locked in the Tower in place of their father. Mortimer’s daughters were immured in priories, while his wife Joan was imprisoned and given just one mark a day to feed herself and her five servants.
In March 1325, Edward made a fatal mistake. Increasingly isolated, fearful of a Frenc
h invasion, he sent Isabella to France to negotiate peace with her brother Charles. Once free from her husband’s control, Isabella was determined that she would only return to England to liberate it from Edward’s tyranny. She succeeded in her peace mission, and in May a treaty was agreed. A clause of the treaty stipulated that Edward should personally pay homage to Charles. Instead, Edward sent his own son and heir, Prince Edward, to pay homage in his place. This was his second fatal error.
With her son safely at her side, Isabella openly proclaimed contemptuous defiance of her husband. The man leading the delegation accompanying young Prince Edward to France was the new lieutenant of the Tower, Bishop Walter de Stapledon. The bishop humiliated the queen in front of the French court by demanding that she return home with him to her husband. The ‘She-wolf’ turned on the cleric in fury: ‘Someone has come between my husband and me, trying to break this [marriage] bond. I protest that I will not return until this intruder is removed, but, discarding my marriage garment, shall assume the weeds of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged on this Pharisee.’ There were no prizes for guessing that the ‘Pharisee’ was Despenser.
Once de Stapledon had been sent packing, Isabella united her fortunes with those of Roger Mortimer to overthrow the tyranny of Edward and the Despensers. By Christmas, the lovers were openly living together and plotting their return. It was no small matter in medieval Europe for a queen to spurn an anointed king and live in adultery with another man. It is a measure of the strength of Isabella’s character, her hatred for Edward, and her love for Mortimer that she was prepared to trample this taboo.
Roger went to the court of Count William I of Hainault (the modern Netherlands) to prepare their invasion of England, while Isabella stayed in France, raising men and money. Count William agreed to subsidise the enterprise, and provide the ships, in return for a pledge that his daughter Philippa would marry young Prince Edward. Meanwhile, a plot by Hugh Despenser to murder the lovers was foiled when a ship containing barrels of silver to bribe French courtiers to murder Mortimer was intercepted and the Despensers’ treasure diverted to Hainault to fund Mortimer’s overthrow of their despotism.
By September 1326 Mortimer had gathered an invasion armada of almost 100 ships with a small army of 1,500 mercenary soldiers off Rotterdam. On 21 September, Isabella and Mortimer embarked and a week later landed at the mouth of the River Orwell in Suffolk. Edward awaited their arrival at the Tower. At first, he was not unduly worried. Against the tiny invasion force, he had a notional army of 50,000. Thanks to the Despensers’ extortions, the Royal Exchequer was full of cash to pay the troops. But, as Edward and the Despensers discovered, no money could buy the loyalty they had wantonly squandered. The soldiers they summoned ignored the call. Instead of the king, their allegiance went to Isabella. As Isabella and Mortimer’s growing army moved towards Oxford, Edward and Despenser abandoned the Tower and fled west, making for Despenser’s lands in south Wales. The Tower’s lieutenant, the hated Bishop Walter de Stapledon, was caught seeking sanctuary in St Paul’s Cathedral, and had his head sawn off with a bread knife.
By the time Edward and Despenser arrived in Wales, royal authority had melted away. Riding with a handful of retainers, they were caught near Neath on 16 November, arrested and separated. Despenser was taken to Hereford where the triumphant queen was waiting. Knowing he could expect no mercy from the ‘She-wolf’ Despenser tried to starve himself to death, but Isabella was implacable. On 24 November, Hugh and two followers were paraded before an immense crowd who hooted and jeered the fallen tyrant. Crowned with mocking nettles, the doomed man was pulled from his horse, stripped naked and had biblical verses denouncing ambition and evil scrawled on his emaciated flesh. Led into the market square where a vengeful Mortimer and Isabella sat, Despenser listened while his many sins were listed. Judged a traitor and thief, he was condemned to the terrible punishment of being hanged, drawn and quartered.
Dragged by four horses to one of his own castles, Despenser was tied to an enormous fifty-foot ladder and hoisted high above his castle walls. The executioner clambered up a parallel ladder and set about his grisly task. First, the condemned man’s genitals were sliced off and flung into a bonfire at the foot of the ladder. Then the executioner plunged his knife into Hugh’s abdomen and cut out his guts, throwing the entrails into the fire. Finally, Despenser’s chest was ripped open and his heart followed the other organs into the flames. The despot was then quartered and his head sent to London for display, while his limbs and torso were dispatched to the four corners of the kingdon he had tyrannised. York, Newcastle, Dover and Bristol – the city where his own father had earlier been executed – all received a hunk of flesh. It was a horrible but fitting end for a monstrous tyrant. We can be sure that Isabella and Roger had enjoyed the show.
King Edward II’s fate, in contrast to his favourite’s very public end, was private and masked in mystery. The deposed monarch was shuttled from castle to castle between Kenilworth, Corfe and Berkeley near Gloucester. In January 1327, at Kenilworth, Edward had publicly agreed to abdicate. But with the Despensers dead, popular sympathy for the deposed monarch returned, and there were several serious attempts to rescue him from his cell. His frustrated jailers had tried without success to kill him by putting him in a dungeon filled with stagnant water and decaying animal cadavers, while shaving him with ditch water.
Mortimer apparently now decided that such methods were too slow, and gave orders to kill the stubborn king as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. According to legend, Edward was either suffocated in his cell or suffered the exquisite agony of having a red-hot copper rod inserted through a horn into his rectum and twisted in his bowels while he was pinioned under a table or mattress. It has been suggested that this fiendish, agonising means of dispatching the king was either to conceal the crime by leaving no exterior marks on the corpse, or as a symbolic punishment for Edward’s homosexuality, or both. It has also been plausibly proposed by medieval historian Ian Mortimer that Edward did not die in Berkeley, but survived his supposed death by some fourteen years as a wandering hermit after he had been successfully sprung from the castle. Whatever the truth, Edward’s reign effectively ended with his abdication in January 1327, even if his life did not.
Roger Mortimer’s life now entered its final act. Effectively dictator of the kingdom, he was, as lover of the queen regent, also guardian of the teenage monarch, Edward III. Mortimer’s position was not enviable, since many noblemen did not relish submitting to another tyrant. Young Edward’s feelings about the man who had probably murdered his father, usurping his place in his mother’s bed, are also unlikely to have been friendly. In addition, Mortimer treated the king with arrogant disrespect.
At a tournament held at his seat, Wigmore Castle, in the summer of 1329, Roger played the part of King Arthur in a pageant – having himself crowned before the young king. Power appears to have gone to Mortimer’s head, and he began to act in a way that, ironically, mirrored the tyrannical behaviour of the man he had deposed: Hugh Despenser. Mortimer styled himself Earl of March, overlord of his native region, and acquired large estates, oppressing those who opposed him. His most unforgivable deed was to implicate Edmund, Earl of Kent, younger brother of Edward II, in a plot to free the imprisoned monarch. Mortimer personally oversaw the earl’s trial and decapitation. In the words of his namesake biographer Ian Mortimer, ‘He had grown too mighty … Despenser’s brutal tyranny had been reborn.’ Or, as Roger’s own son Geoffrey told him, Mortimer had morphed from chivalrous knight into the ‘King of Folly’.
Nemesis swiftly followed. In October 1330, at Nottingham Castle, a band of nobles, led by their young king, now almost eighteen, stole into the castle at night via a tunnel in the sandstone rock on which the fortress stood. After a brief brawl, Mortimer was arrested. Edward ignored his mother’s plea to ‘spare the gentle Mortimer’ and Roger was returned to the familiar surroundings of the Tower. This time, there would be no escape.
Edward III ga
ve orders that Mortimer, his son Geoffrey, and his chief henchman Simon Bereford should be literally walled up in the Tower. Their cell’s door and windows were filled in with masonry and mortar, and the room was placed under the round-the-clock guard of six serjeants-at-arms supervised by two knights of the royal household. To make security doubly sure, Edward himself moved into the room next door. The Mortimers and Bereford, kept alive on bread and water, spent a miserable month incarcerated inside their dark and chilly prison.
Then, laden with heavy chains, Roger was taken to Westminster Hall to be tried for treason. He was gagged to prevent him from speaking, and rapidly condemned to death. Returned to the Tower, on 29 November he was placed on an ox hide and bumped painfully along the uneven roads between the Tower and the gallows at Tyburn. Battered but alive, he made a short speech to the crowd confessing the injustice of his execution the Earl of Kent. He was then hanged. The king was more merciful to his mother, who ended her days comfortably enough in 1358 – nearly three decades after the ignominious execution of her lover and partner in power.
Sir John Oldcastle is best known today as the model for Shakespeare’s uproarious Sir John Falstaff. Early versions of Henry IV Parts 1 and 2 featured a character called Sir John Oldcastle, though when the play was printed in 1598, the surname ‘Falstaff’ had been substituted. In truth, the real historical Oldcastle – lean, hard and courageous – bore no resemblance to Shakespeare’s cowardly, vainglorious ‘fat knight’, and there was little to laugh about in Oldcastle’s life and tragic death. He did, however, have one thing in common with his fictional counterpart: he was a bosom companion of young Prince Hal, later England’s quintessential hero monarch Henry V, forever associated with his famous victory at Agincourt in 1415.