The Earl Who Ruled England From the Queen's Bedchamber

On the evening of Friday, 19 October 1330, a small group of armed men entered Nottingham Castle through a secret tunnel that had been cut into the bedrock beneath the keep’s eastern wall. The tunnel was old — possibly built by the original Norman castellans two centuries earlier and forgotten — and had been discovered, only the week before, by the castle’s custodian William Eland. The men climbed up through the tunnel into the basement of the central keep, then up a series of internal staircases, until they reached the second-floor private apartments where the Dowager Queen Isabella of France was sleeping with her lover Roger Mortimer, Earl of March.

The men’s leader was William Montagu, a twenty-nine-year-old English knight in the immediate retinue of King Edward III, who was — at seventeen years old — also one of the men climbing through the tunnel that night. Edward III had been king for three and a half years, ever since his mother Isabella and her lover had deposed his father Edward II in early 1327. During those three and a half years, Edward III had been formally king and effectively a figurehead. Real power had been exercised by Mortimer and Isabella, who governed England from the Mortimer estates in the Welsh Marches and from whatever royal residence they happened to be using at any given time. Edward III had grown up watching this. He was, by October 1330, ready to govern himself.

Mortimer was in bed with Isabella when the door of the bedchamber was broken open by Montagu’s men. He reached for his sword. He was overpowered before he could draw it. Isabella, by Jean Le Bel’s near-contemporary account, called out — in French, her native language — “Beau fils, beau fils, ayez pitié de gentil Mortimer.” (Fair son, fair son, have pity on the gentle Mortimer.) Edward III, standing in the doorway, did not reply. Mortimer was taken away in chains. He would be tried in Parliament within five weeks and hanged at Tyburn forty-one days later.

The man whose escape from the Tower of London seven years earlier had set the entire crisis in motion died on a triple gallows in front of a London crowd estimated by chroniclers at several thousand. His estates were forfeited. His descendants would not see the earldom restored for two generations.

How Mortimer became regent in everything but name

Roger Mortimer had been born around 1287 into one of the oldest and most powerful baronial families on the English-Welsh border. The Mortimers held the lordship of Wigmore in modern-day Herefordshire and substantial additional estates in central and southern Wales. They were what English medieval historians call Marcher lords — a small group of feudal magnates whose holdings on the disputed Welsh frontier gave them legal privileges and military traditions distinct from the rest of the English aristocracy.

Mortimer had served Edward II loyally through the first half of the king’s reign. He fought in the Scottish wars; he held a series of senior administrative appointments; he was made Justiciar of Ireland in 1316. The break came in 1321-1322, when Mortimer joined a baronial rebellion against the king’s increasing reliance on the favourite Hugh Despenser the Younger. The rebellion was defeated. Mortimer was captured, sentenced to death, and then — at the last minute — had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment in the Tower of London.

He escaped from the Tower on the night of 1 August 1323. The escape itself, organized with the help of the Tower’s sub-lieutenant Gerard de Alspaye and possibly the connivance of the Bishop of Hereford, was one of the most spectacular jailbreaks of the medieval period. Mortimer was drugged with wine (the chronicles disagree on whether it was him or his guards who were drugged), lowered down the side of the keep on a rope, taken by boat down the Thames to a waiting horse, and rode through the night to the south coast where a ship was waiting to take him to France. He arrived in Paris within a week.

He spent the next three years at the French royal court. In 1325, the French king Charles IV invited Queen Isabella to Paris to negotiate a peace settlement with England over Gascony. Isabella arrived. She met Mortimer. They became, by the end of 1325, lovers. They planned, by the early months of 1326, an invasion of England to depose Edward II.

The invasion sailed from the Low Countries in September 1326 with approximately fifteen hundred soldiers. It landed in Suffolk almost unopposed. The English aristocracy, increasingly hostile to Edward II’s reliance on the Despensers, joined the invaders in waves over the following weeks. The Despensers were captured and executed. Edward II was captured in Wales in November 1326 and forced to abdicate at the January 1327 Parliament. The fourteen-year-old Edward III became king. Mortimer and Isabella, ostensibly as regents for the new king but effectively as the actual government, took control of England.

Three years of Mortimer’s England

The Mortimer-Isabella regency lasted from January 1327 until October 1330. It was, by most measures, not a successful government. Mortimer enriched himself spectacularly — he was created Earl of March in October 1328, accumulated estates across both England and Wales worth roughly £8,000 a year in income (an enormous sum for the period), and took control of substantial parts of the former Despenser holdings. His court protocol began to mirror the royal court. By 1329, foreign ambassadors arriving in England were being received by Mortimer personally rather than by the king. The Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton, which recognized Scottish independence under Robert the Bruce, was negotiated and signed primarily by Mortimer and was unpopular with the English aristocracy who had lost lands in southern Scotland.

The regency had two further problems that finally undid it. The first was the death of Edward II at Berkeley Castle in September 1327, the circumstances of which are still genuinely uncertain. Whether the deposed king was murdered, died of natural causes, or somehow survived and lived in continental exile, the regime’s responsibility for the death was widely assumed. The second was that Edward III turned eighteen in November 1330 and was, by every account, a serious and ambitious young man who had no intention of remaining a puppet.

By the summer of 1330, Edward III was secretly assembling a faction of supporters — including William Montagu, his closest personal friend; the Earl of Lancaster; and a series of lesser barons who had been excluded from the Mortimer patronage system. The faction needed a way to physically separate Mortimer from his military supporters. The opportunity came in October, when Mortimer and Isabella took up residence at Nottingham Castle ahead of a Parliament scheduled to meet there. Mortimer brought a substantial personal guard. The castle’s own custodian, William Eland, was sympathetic to Edward III. Eland revealed the existence of the secret tunnel to Montagu. The plan was made within a week.

The execution

Mortimer was brought to London in chains over the following two weeks. He was held at the Tower — the same Tower he had escaped from seven years earlier. Parliament convened in late November and tried him under a process that did not allow him to speak in his own defense (the same procedure that had been used against the Despensers four years before). The charges were extensive: usurpation of royal authority, embezzlement of the treasury, complicity in the death of Edward II, treachery in the Scottish settlement, dishonoring the queen.

He was found guilty on all counts on 26 November 1330. The sentence was the standard medieval English punishment for high treason: drawn through the streets on a hurdle, then hanged at Tyburn, the body left on the gallows for two days before burial.

The execution took place on 29 November 1330. Mortimer was the first major political prisoner to be executed at the Tyburn site — the field at the western edge of London where the modern Marble Arch now stands. The location had been used occasionally for executions before, but Mortimer’s execution established Tyburn as the standard site for the public hanging of traitors. It would remain in use for almost five hundred years, until the last public execution at Tyburn in 1783.

Mortimer’s body was buried at the church of the Friars Minor in Coventry, in a tomb that no longer exists. The Friary was dissolved during the Reformation and the church demolished in the late sixteenth century. The exact location of the burial is no longer known.

Isabella, the king’s mother, was not punished. She retired from public life, was given a substantial pension and the use of Castle Rising in Norfolk, and lived out the remaining twenty-eight years of her life in well-funded retirement. She died in 1358. She was buried at the Greyfriars church in London, also dissolved at the Reformation and demolished in the seventeenth century. The location of her burial is also lost.

Edward III, having seized power at seventeen, would rule England for the next forty-seven years — long enough to begin the Hundred Years’ War, found the Order of the Garter, and bury most of his own family. He never spoke publicly about Mortimer again. The Mortimer earldom of March was restored to Roger’s grandson in 1354, twenty-four years after the execution. The grandson was named, with notable insistence, Roger.