The Plantagenets (59 page)

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.

He marked the beginning of his reign with a series of tournaments, mainly held around London and the south-east. Here he presented himself at once as a knightly king, his court a centre of revelry and fun, romance and martial competition. ‘This king led a gay life in jousts and tournaments and entertaining ladies,’ wrote Sir Thomas Gray. Tournaments would become a near-monthly feature of his reign, each one an occasion for the great men and women of the realm to dress up in splendid costumes, acting out roles as fierce animals, mythical beasts and heavenly beings, rehearsing great stories from history and legend, and cavorting about dressed mischievously as friars, merchants or priests. Large and keenly fought mock battles took place, which both bonded the aristocrats who fought in them and provided valuable training for a time that was to be dominated, once more, by real warfare.

The king at the centre of it all was a vigorous, athletic, enterprising young man. Most representations of him show a slightly delicate face, with a long, slender nose beneath wide, deep-set eyes and a flat brow.
He had a high forehead and in keeping with the times, wore a long beard – described as ‘berry-brown’ by a poem written in the mid-1350s – throughout his adult life. Thick, wavy hair hid his ears and stood out from beneath the fine hat or commander’s helmet that he almost invariably wore. He was an exceptional horseman and a redoubtable warrior – as well as a paragon of chivalric magnificence. He and Queen Philippa had a taste for the finest clothes, which they would have embroidered with slogans and quasi-cryptic royal sayings – some of Edward’s favourite mottoes later in his life included ‘It is as it is’, ‘Hay hay the wythe swan/By Godes soule I am thy man’, and ‘Syker as ye wodebynd’ (Strong as the woodbine). Queen Philippa’s slogans included ‘Ich wyndemuth’ (I wind myself [around you]) and ‘Myn biddeneye’ (My bidding). The coin struck to commemorate Edward’s coronation had featured a slogan that captured the king’s lifelong confidence and ease in his own office: ‘I did not take; I received’.

Outward show and pageantry was an essential skill for any king, but Edward had a better intuition for it than any of his predecessors – excepting only Henry III. He imported the finest gold cloth from the Far East, and his robes were decorated with exotic animals: leopards, tigers, pelicans and falcons. He loved music, and as his court travelled it rang with minstrels singing, drums and lutes filling the air with sound – the king at the heart of it all, laughing with joy at the spectacle he created. He kept a menagerie which included lions, leopards, a bear and various apes and monkeys. He was as avid a huntsman as any king before him – of his forebears only Henry II could have matched the thrill Edward got from thundering on horseback through his parks, forests and the English countryside, chasing down wild animals to shed their blood. The thousands of pounds he spent on sumptuous costumes and lavish entertainment for himself, his friends and his family combined to create a vision of royal power that was worthy of celebration. In tune with his personal knack for charming the ladies of the court and striking up close, brotherly friendships with the men, Edward began from the earliest days of his personal reign to bind the noblemen and knights of England – the political
class with whom all successful kings would cultivate a natural amity – to his rule.

But Edward III was more than a royal clothes-horse. He was a conventionally educated young aristocrat, versed in the spheres of knowledge and culture that fitted his position. He spoke both English and the courtly language of northern French. Brought up surrounded by scholars such as Richard Bury (who would become one of his closest advisers), he had absorbed what they had taught him. He was literate beyond the simple standard of being able to read in Latin and French: Edward is the first English king to leave us examples of his handwriting. He took his instruction on kingship from the variety of classic texts on governance known as the ‘mirrors for princes’ – books by European scholars analysing the great achievements and ignoble failures of rulers modern and ancient, which were designed to reveal sound principles of leadership to their readers. Edward had been fascinated from his youth by the great heroes of history and mythology, and he was especially taken with a popular fourteenth-century literary staple: the lives of the Nine Worthies. (These consisted of three ‘good pagans’ – Hector, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar; three great biblical kings – Joshua, David and Judas Maccabaeus; and three great Christian kings – Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon, the first king of Jerusalem.) He consciously studied the lives of kings and would try to imbue his own reign with their best qualities, while avoiding their failures. Edward was fascinated by the providential quality of history, with its ability both to foreshadow the events of his own life and to set the conditions for the lives of his descendants. His contemporaries, excited by the dash of his Nottingham coup, were eager to see him as fulfilling the prophecies of Merlin – and Edward did not discourage them, visiting Glastonbury in 1331 and inspecting the great tomb of Arthur and Guinevere, which Edward I had commissioned. Indeed, of his Plantagenet ancestors Edward III reserved special veneration for Edward I, sending gold cloth to Westminster to deck his grandfather’s tomb, sharing his tastes for Arthuriana and ensuring that the anniversary of the death of the Hammer of the Scots was never neglected. The leopard – Edward I’s
pejorative nickname during his youth – now became a symbol of Edward III’s kingship, in its heraldic form of the lion passant guardant.

Yet for all this finery, Edward was also aware that kingship was, more than at any time before, a sacred bond between king and realm. As well as parading before his kingdom as a prince in glorious array, Edward was also comfortable adopting the guise of poor knight. At some tournaments he liked to fight incognito – disguised as an ordinary warrior, and competing shoulder-to-shoulder with his contemporaries and companions. In his taste for the legends of Arthur, he was careful not to emulate Roger Mortimer’s arrogant assumption of the legendary king’s role. During the 1330s, Edward preferred to identify himself as one of the simple knights of the Round Table – most frequently Sir Lionel. Mortimer had been the first to assign him this role, when at a tournament held in 1329 at Mortimer’s home town of Wigmore the late tyrant had presented the king with a cup bearing Sir Lionel’s arms. That Edward persisted in playing Sir Lionel – wearing the same arms at the tournaments he held throughout the 1330s and christening his third son, born in Antwerp in 1338, by the fabled knight’s name – was a sign that he had not forgotten the values of enterprise and endeavour that had led him to overthrow Mortimer’s rule. It was also, perhaps, a wry joke.