The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March (44 page)

Kent is supposed to have replied: ‘In truth, Sir, understand well that I never assented to the impairment of the state of our lord the king, nor of his crown, and that I put myself to be tried by my peers.’ But Roger paid no attention to the earl’s plea. Instead he produced the letter which Kent had sent to the deposed king by way of Bogo de Bayeux and John Deveril. He held it up, with its seal, for all to see. ‘Sir Edmund, know ye not the print of this letter that you took unto Sir John Deveril?’ The earl, not knowing which letter it might have been, as he had sent several, agreed on inspecting the seal that it was one of his, but he claimed it was of no consequence. Roger asked him again if the seal was his, and the earl said he would not deny it. And then, in the words of the chronicler, ‘with that word the wily and false Mortimer began to undo the letter and started to read it in the hearing of all the court’.

Worships and reverence, with a brother’s liegeance and subjection. Sir knight, worshipful and dear brother, if you please, I pray heartily that you are of good comfort, for I shall ordain for you that soon you shall come out of prison, and be delivered of that disease in which you find yourself. Your lordship should know that I have the assent of almost all the great lords of England, with all their apparel, that is to say, with armour, and with treasure without number, in order to maintain and help your quarrel so you shall be king again as you were before, and that they all – prelates, earls and barons – have sworn to me upon a book.
³⁷

The implications did not need to be spelled out to those in the court. This was proof that a number of lords were plotting against the government, and thus against the king. More importantly, Kent would be forced to name names, and to implicate these lords, great and small, including some lords present. If the king’s own uncle could be charged in this way, no one was safe.

It was Robert Howel who delivered the final judgement:

Sir Edmund, since you have admitted openly in this court that this is your letter ensealed with your seal, and the tenor of the letter is that you were on the point of delivering the body of that worshipful knight Sir Edward, sometime King of England, your brother, and to help him become king again, and to govern his people as he was wont to do beforehand, thus impairing the state of our liege lord the present king, whom God keep from all disease … the will of this court is that you shall lose both life and limb, and that your heirs shall be disinherited forevermore, save the grace of our lord the king.

The court was horrified. The Earl of Kent was to die for the crime of trying to rescue his own brother. And all his family were to be disinherited. It was incredible. Everyone presumed that this was an anomaly, that the earl would appeal to the king, and that the king would spare the earl’s life. Edward II had lost his crown because of such acts of tyranny; surely his son would not uphold the death sentence on his own uncle for a crime fabricated by Roger.

But this extraordinary charade was not yet over. On 16 March a fuller confession was extracted from the earl, and it was read aloud in Parliament. It was declared solemnly that the Earl of Kent had acknowledged that the Pope had charged him to deliver Edward II from prison, and had promised to fund the plot. Many lords and prelates were implicated, including the Archbishop of York, Sir Ingelram de Berengar and Sir William de la Zouche, who had all promised to help rescue Edward II from Corfe. It was confessed that the archbishop had pledged £5,000. Sir Fulk FitzWarin was accused, so too were Sir John Pecche, Sir Henry de Beaumont, Sir Thomas Roscelyn, the Scottish Earl of Mar, Lady Vesci and the Bishop of London. The earl implicated certain Dominican friars, claiming they had informed him his brother was at Corfe. He gave everything away; everything, that is, except the real source of his information. Instead he told the story about the friar who had summoned up the devil. This suited both Roger and the king: if Kent had admitted he had heard of Edward II’s existence from the present king his testimony would confirm to everyone that Edward II was alive.

Having confessed so much, and so wholeheartedly, the earl threw himself on Edward’s mercy. He admitted that he was guilty, and that he had borne himself badly towards the king, and wholly submitted himself to him. He promised, if it was the king’s will, to walk in his shirt through the streets of Winchester or even all the way to London, barefoot, with a rope around his neck, or wherever the king pleased, in atonement for his offence. The picture of the earl is that of a sincerely contrite, terrified human being, begging for forgiveness with all his heart, not fully able to grasp that he was to be executed for trying to free his brother.

He was right to be terrified. Roger was unmoved by his pleading. To the earl’s horror and the astonishment of all present, Roger boldly urged that the death sentence be upheld. Edward, seeing that Kent had betrayed him by trying to restore his father, thereby jeopardising his life, had no choice but reluctantly to assent to the earl’s death.
³⁸

It was the most profoundly shocking act of tyranny that anyone could remember. There was no evidence against Kent apart from his confession and his letter. Roger himself had been forgiven far worse in 1322 by Edward II. But Roger knew that his life and Isabella’s life were at risk, and he was ruthless. There could be no half-measures. He ordered the arrest of Kent’s pregnant wife and their children. Like Hugh Despenser before him, he was locking up whole families and confiscating their estates. That Kent and his wife had both once been in exile in France with Roger simply made matters worse: as with Roscelyn, Beaumont and Wake, he had trusted these people implicitly. To be betrayed by them was an act of personal enmity, and he could not bear such betrayal.

The day before Kent’s execution Roger ordered about forty men to be arrested. Every layman mentioned in the earl’s confession was proscribed, as well as many others. He used the moment to take action against everyone whom he wanted behind bars.

The Earl of Kent was led out of his cell to be beheaded on the morning of 19 March 1330. There he waited, in the midst of a crowd. The man appointed to wield the axe refused to do so. Men-at-arms were ordered to cut the earl’s head off, but none dared. Their captains sympathised. And so the earl stood there, for several hours. The crowd grew restless. Furious with the delay, Roger offered a pardon to anyone in the local prison who would cut off the earl’s head. At last a latrine cleaner, facing the death penalty himself, was found and he agreed to kill the earl in return for his life being spared. The axe came down, the blood spurted on to the ground, and the earl’s head was lifted to the traditional shout of ‘behold the head of a traitor’. But the crowd was silent. The earl had not been a popular man but he was undoubtedly a victim of Roger’s tyranny, ensnared in his misguided search for his brother. Roger had taken advantage of his fraternal honour. His judicial execution amounted to murder.

*

There could be no significant parliamentary business after the earl’s death. No one had the stomach for it. Roger had called for a parliament with the intention of impressing everyone with a demonstration of his power, which he had very effectively done. But while the lords were frightened,
as he intended, they were also appalled. They were more determined than ever to remove him from power. But as long as the king kept silent, as long as he tolerated Roger, they could do nothing.

For the forty men whose names were on the list which Roger issued the day before the execution, the king’s position was an irrelevance. They were preoccupied with trying to save their own lives. Most fled the country as quickly as they could, before Roger closed the ports. Those who managed to escape joined Roger’s other enemies on the Continent. Many others did not wait for the next list, which was issued at the end of the month, or for the list after that. Thomas Wake, for example, fled long before his arrest warrant was issued. Like most sane men, he realised that Roger was now acting without any limit on his power, and without any regard to the destruction he was causing. Throughout the country commissioners were appointed to arrest political opponents and agitators. Despenser’s brutal tyranny had been reborn.

The increased violence and fear following Kent’s arrest and death were accompanied by Roger’s increased demands for money. At Winchester Roger had asked Parliament to grant a tax to be levied on both the clergy and the ordinary folk of the country, to pay for the defence of Gascony. Not surprisingly, after the execution of Kent, he received assent. Having heard of the unrest in London and the boldness of the Londoners, he berated their representatives and demanded a special tax be levied on the city. At the same time the Pope was prevailed upon to allow an ecclesiastical grant. Huge amounts of cash were needed to prepare to defend England from the risk of invasion by the exiles. There was stiff resistance from the Church, especially when it emerged that the money granted at an earlier date for a Scottish campaign had been spent on other things. But refusal was not an option: Roger and Isabella had already spent the £20,000 that the Scots had paid for the recognition of sovereignty; and the reserve of £60,000 which Edward had left in his treasury at the time of the revolution had also long since gone.

In addition to this urgent drive for public cash, Roger now sought personal grants on an unprecedented scale. On 20 April he ordered that he be pardoned all his own and all his ancestors’ debts at the Exchequer.
³⁹
Two days later he arranged that a certain John Galeys, in return for his service to Roger, should be allowed to keep a manor which he held from Queen Philippa, even after her death.
⁴⁰
The royal purse was now publicly rewarding men for service to Roger. On his forty-third birthday, he celebrated with a whole string of grants. To himself he gave the lordship of the manor of Droitwich and custody of the castle of Athlone in Ireland. To himself and Joan he granted palatinate rights in Meath. To his son Sir
Geoffrey, who had obviously been forgiven for his earlier outburst, he granted the lordship of Donnington Castle, as well as other lands forfeited by the Earl of Kent in Leicestershire, Gloucestershire, Surrey, Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Rutland and Wiltshire.
⁴¹
In May he granted himself an extra 500 marks (£333) annually, in addition to his usual salary, for governing Wales. In June he granted himself an extra 500 marks in return for his continued attendance on the king as well as the lordship of the manor of Westhall and the town of Folebrook. At the same time his son Geoffrey received the manor of Miserden, another of the Earl of Kent’s properties. A few days later he extended his control of the Pembroke wardship which he still held. The list goes on and on … In August he received Clifford Castle, the manor of Glasbury, the custody of the manor of Gormanstown, and a grant of all the goods and chattels of the Earls of Arundel and Hugh Despenser in the Marches of Wales which had escheated to the king. This last grant especially was an example of Roger interpreting his earldom of March in the widest possible sense, claiming authority over a vast area, and appropriating the huge wealth of the Despensers, which had supposedly been surrendered to the government, rather than to him personally.

No one was safe from Roger’s rapacity, not even his relations. His judicial murder of his cousin’s husband (the Earl of Kent) and the imprisonment of his thirty-eight-weeks-pregnant cousin (the Countess of Kent) have already been mentioned. Similarly he claimed that John Mortimer, grandson and heir of Lord Mortimer of Chirk, was illegitimate, and therefore could not inherit the Chirk lordship. Roger took it for himself, and thereby disinherited another cousin. Thomas Wake was another cousin whom he disinherited. He let nothing, not even kinship, stand in his way.

There were those who benefited from Roger’s tyranny. The lands of the Earl of Kent did not just go to Sir Geoffrey; they were distributed among men such as Hugh de Turpington, John Maltravers, John Wyard, Thomas de Berkeley, Sir Simon Bereford, Edward de Bohun, Sir Bartholomew de Burghersh, the Earl of Surrey and Oliver Ingham. Many of them had to promise to perform military service in return, ostensibly to the king but in reality to Roger. Orders were issued for the protection of Roger’s favoured merchants. Others benefited from grants made at his request as before, and more of his supporters were appointed to key positions. Maltravers was made Steward of the Royal Household again, and was followed in that office by Sir Hugh de Turpington. But whereas once Roger would have made such appointments out of patronage, now he was acting in self-defence.

Edward had tolerated Roger for nearly five years now, during which
time their relationship had been borne with great frustration on the king’s part. The two men had not been enemies the whole time: like Roger, Edward enjoyed jousting and hawking, and was enthusiastic about the whole chivalric world. Nevertheless by 1330 the companionship had worn very thin, and Edward had built up a catalogue of grudges against Roger, such as the Scottish fiasco and the secret custody of his father. With the execution of Kent in March, Edward and Roger became outright enemies. Edward could see that Roger’s domination of the government had to be brought to an end, but he could not find a way to act. Roger had too much power over him. Someone else would have to act on his behalf. But Roger had so many spies about the court. Sir William de Montagu was one of the few men whom the king could trust. Accordingly, in the summer of 1330, Montagu began tactfully and cautiously to prepare a band of supporters who would help the king throw off the yoke of Roger and Isabella.

Taking action against Roger was, however, exceedingly dangerous. In early June Richard FitzAlan, the disinherited Earl of Arundel, plotted to end Roger’s rule through a rising of men in Shropshire and Staffordshire. He was found out and swiftly arrested.
⁴²
A larger and more elaborate plot was hatched by the band of exiles from the English court on the Continent. They were now of sufficient strength and financial leverage to attempt an invasion, following Roger’s own example. A contingent in Wales was prepared to strike at Roger’s estates there, and the exiles themselves and their forces planned to attack the English coast, forcing a war on two fronts. But Roger was alert to their plans. In July all the counties and towns were forced to array troops for the defence of the realm, and Roger and his son Edmund themselves inspected many of the men. The Londoners were required to swear loyalty to Edward. With England on the alert, Wales being purged of would-be rebels under Roger’s justiciarship, and the court taking up a defensive position at Gloucester, within striking distance of Roger’s estates, the invasion plans of the exiles were brought to a halt.
⁴³