Fourteen-year-old Edward III was crowned on 25 January 1327 but the kingdom was ruled by his mother Isabella and her lover Roger de Mortimer. Mortimer was created Earl of March, received estates and appointments, and was granted the Montgomery Marches. He was even allowed to choose spouses for his three sons and eight daughters, giving him a powerful position in the west.
As Mortimer’s dominance at court increased, so did the hatred against him. In the autumn of 1328 the king’s uncles, Thomas and Edmund of Woodstock, joined forces with Henry, 3rd Earl of Lancaster and Leicester, but their plot to overthrow Mortimer failed. The teenage king did nothing.
In 1329 William Montagu accompanied young Edward III to France to negotiate a marriage alliance with King Philip VI. Montagu took the opportunity to secretly contact Pope John XXII in Avignon to tell him that England was being ruled by Isabella and de Mortimer. They agreed that genuine letters from the king would contain the words Pater Sancta (Holy Father) in Edward’s own handwriting; everything else was a forgery.
To begin with, only Edward, Montagu and Richard Bury, Keeper of the Privy Seal, were party to the scheme. Mortimer soon discovered the conspiracy but neither Edward nor Montagu gave anything away when they were questioned. Montagu suggested it was time for Edward to remove Mortimer, telling him, ‘it was better they should eat the dog than the dog should eat them.’
In March 1330 Mortimer laid a trap for Edmund by making him think that his brother Thomas was still alive. Edmund was caught plotting again and while he offered to walk from Winchester to London with a rope around his neck as atonement, Edward III ignored his appeal. He sanctioned the death sentence but did not set a date. Meanwhile, Mortimer struggled to find anyone willing to execute a member of the royal family and he eventually had to pardon a convicted murderer so he would do the deed. Edward III was furious when he heard about the execution. Henry, 3rd Earl of Leicester and Lancaster, convinced the teenage Edward to assert his independence and he declared Mortimer a traitor in Nottingham in October.
Edward gave instructions to the constable of Nottingham Castle to let his men in through a secret tunnel. They arrested Mortimer, took him to the Tower, condemned him without trial, and hanged him like a common criminal at Tyburn. His estates were forfeited to the crown and Edmund’s name was cleared. Queen Isabella was left in control of the estates of Alice de Lacy, 4th Countess of Lincoln. Meanwhile, the king gave Montagu her Earldom of Salisbury as a reward for bringing down Mortimer.
John of Eltham was Edward III’s brother and he became heir to the throne when he was 11 years old. John was created Earl of Cornwall and he remained heir until 18-year-old Edward had a son in June 1330. John was then betrothed to Maria, illegitimate daughter of King Afonso IV, to strengthen England’s alliance with Portugal; he would die of fever before they married.
Edmund of Woodstock, 1st Earl of Kent, had joint command of the Scottish Border with Henry Crouchback, 3rd Earl of Lancaster and Leicester. But the two fell out and Henry was made Captain General of all the Scottish Marches. David of Scotland had been betrothed to Edward III’s sister Joan under the Treaty of Northampton. He came to the throne in 1329, when he was only 5, but the pretender Edward Balliol was crowned after Ralph de Stafford, 1st Earl of Stafford, defeated the Scots at the battle of Dupplin Moor on 11 August 1332.
David was forced to flee across the border and he returned with English troops the following year, only to be defeated at the battle of Halidon Hill on 19 July 1333. John of Eltham, 1st Earl of Cornwall, then defeated Edward Balliol in south-west Scotland.
Edward Balliol told William Montagu, 1st Earl of Salisbury, that he refused to pay homage to Edward III in 1334. So English troops crossed the border and the Scots were forced to cede the Lowlands. Henry of Grosmont was appointed the king’s lieutenant in Scotland in 1336 and was created Earl of Derby soon afterwards for his loyal service. Montagu’s second invasion in 1337 failed to capture Dunbar, so Edward III decided to turn his attention back to France.
Fifty-three-year-old Alice de Lacy, 4th Countess of Lincoln, took a vow of chastity when her husband Eubulus died in 1335. The king had already granted her estates and the Earldom of Salisbury to William Montagu because he had helped dispose of Roger de Mortimer, Earl of March. But Alice was kidnapped from Bolingbroke castle by Hugh de Freyne, then raped and forced to marry her assailant. But Freyne died soon afterwards and Alice renewed her vow of chastity as her relatives argued over her inheritance. Eubulus’s nephew Roger le Strange was the first to imprison her in Bolingbroke castle. Then her illegitimate half-brother Sir John de Lacy detained her. The unfortunate Alice died childless in 1348 and her Earldom of Lincoln became extinct.
After his first wife died, Ralph de Stafford, 1st Earl of Stafford, abducted Margaret de Audley because her estates were worth ten times his own. Although her parents filed a complaint, the king supported Stafford’s marriage in 1336 and he compensated Margaret’s father with the Earldom of Gloucester.
In 1331 the 19-year-old King Edward III and William Montagu, 1st Earl of Salisbury, travelled to France disguised as merchants to spy on the new King Philip VI’s regime. Six years later, Philip declared that Edward had forfeited Aquitaine due to his rebellious and disobedient behaviour. The announcement started the Hundred Years’ War. Edward III immediately created six new earls to increase the number of loyal nobles he could take on campaign. They included William Montagu, Earl of Salisbury, Henry of Grosmont, Earl of Derby, Robert de Ufford, Earl of Suffolk, and William de Bohun, Earl of Northampton. Some were even given annuities or estates to supplement their income.
Hugh de Courtenay, 9th Earl of Devon, stopped a French invasion of Cornwall in 1339, while Montagu and Ufford joined the expedition to besiege Cambrai, only to be captured the following year. John of Bohemia persuaded King Philip VI not to execute them, so they were freed in a prisoner exchange after agreeing they would never fight in France again.
In June 1340 the English fleet destroyed the French at the battle of Sluys but Philip then played a waiting game on the land. He knew Edward was short of money to pay his troops so he avoided challenges to hold single combats or staged fights between small groups of knights to decide the outcome of the war.
William Montagu, 1st Earl of Salisbury, was sent to Valenciennes on a diplomatic mission to meet the princes of Flanders and Germany. He voiced concerns about the king’s plans for costly alliances but he remained loyal and was appointed Marshal of England and Earl of Norfolk. Edward III’s treaty with the Low Countries would result in a huge debt, so Montagu and Henry of Grosmont, 1st Duke of Lancaster, had to stay behind with the king’s family as security, until it was paid off. Expeditions into Flanders in 1340 and 1345 achieved little.
Joan was the daughter of Edmund of Woodstock, 1st Earl of Kent, and the king’s cousin. Her father had been executed by Queen Isabella’s lover, Roger de Mortimer, when she was only 2 years old and she, her mother and siblings had been imprisoned in Arundel Castle ever since.
Thomas Holland secretly married 12-year-old Joan in 1340 but he was overseas when her family married her to William Montague, son and heir of the 1st Earl of Salisbury. Joan did not disclose her secret marriage, fearing Thomas would be executed, but he announced their union when he returned from the crusades a rich man.
Montagu kept Joan a prisoner until the second, bigamous, marriage had been annulled in 1349 and she was allowed to join her husband in the Low Countries after Pope Clement VI approved of their marriage. After all their difficulties, all five of Thomas and Joan’s children died young.
John the Good, Duke of Brittany and 5th Earl of Richmond, hated his stepmother Yolande. He did not want to leave Brittany to his half-brother John de Montfort, so he left it to the French King when he died in 1341. Philip VI in turn gave it to Charles of Blois, husband of his niece Jeanne of Penthièvre, and the Breton barons rebelled.
It was the start of the prolonged War of the Breton Succession which was also known as the War of two Jeannes after Jeanne de Penthièvre and John de Montfort’s wife Jeanne de Flanders. Philip summoned Montfort to court and arrested him, leaving his wife Joanna (or Jeanne) to fight for his inheritance. Pope Clement VI organised a truce in 1343 and while John de Montfort was freed he fought in vain to retake Brittany until he died, using English troops provided by Edward III.
Jeanne of Flanders wanted to continue the fight on behalf of their 6-year-old son, also John, but they were forced to flee to England. Jeanne la Flamme, or Fiery Joanna as she was known, was then declared insane and imprisoned while her son was raised in the king’s household.
John of Flanders would return to Brittany when he came of age in 1364, and he defeated and killed Charles de Blois at the battle of Auray. Charles’s widow Joanna gave up her rights to Brittany under the Treaty Guérande. Unfortunately, for Edward III, John declared he was a vassal to Charles V of France until the Breton barons forced him to flee to England in 1373. Charles V tried to capture the duchy so the Bretons invited John back and he was reinforced by an English army led by Edward’s son Thomas of Woodstock, 1st Duke of Gloucester. The new French king, Charles VI, decided to pay off Thomas to avoid a confrontation, and John ruled for over a decade until Brest was taken from English control using a mixture of diplomacy and bribes in 1397.
Edward III planned a three-pronged attack on France in 1345. The Earl of Northampton would advance west from Brittany, Henry of Grosmont, 1st Duke of Lancaster, 4th Earl of Leicester and Lancaster, would move north from Aquitaine, while the king attacked from Flanders. Many of England’s principal earls were present when they met the French army at Crécy on 26 August 1346. John de Vere, 7th Earl of Oxford, was fighting alongside Prince Edward, 1st Duke of Cornwall, when he asked reinforcements; Edward III replied, ‘let the boy win his spurs,’ and he did so, defeating the French army. The following morning Robert de Ufford, 1st Earl of Suffolk, and William de Bohun, 1st Earl of Northampton, located and defeated the rest of the French.
King David and his Queen spent eight years in France before they returned to Scotland. David got his revenge when Edward III was campaigning in France by invading England in 1346 in support of the Auld Alliance, but he was defeated and captured at the battle of Neville’s Cross and was then imprisoned for eleven years.
William de Bohun, 1st Earl of Northampton, negotiated his release in 1357 for an enormous ransom which had to be paid over ten years. David’s plans to bequeath Scotland to England or hand over a son to Edward III were rejected, leaving him unable to pay the ransom. So David had no choice but to make peace with England.
William Montagu, 1st Earl of Salisbury, had married Catherine Grandison in 1327. She is remembered as the countess who dropped her garter in front of the king, giving Edward III the idea for the name of the new Order of the Garter, a new honour he could give his barons. There was also a rumour that Edward III lusted after Catherine and that he arranged to be alone with her so he could rape her. The story did the rounds but it was probably just French propaganda.
Margaret Brotherton had been married to John Segrave in 1335 when she was 15 years old and she became the Countess of Norfolk and Earl Marshal (the only woman to hold the appointment) as soon as she came of age. But she wanted a divorce by the time she was 30 and argued she had never consented to be married so young. Her plan was to visit Rome to ask for a divorce but Edward III banned her from leaving England. She was caught trying to escape in disguise but her problem was resolved when her husband died. Margaret had not learnt her lesson because she remarried without the king’s permission in 1354.
The fighting rumbled on in France until the Black Death struck in 1348, killing one-third of Europe’s population. The English kept the upper hand in the war against the French when Henry of Grosmont, Earl of Leicester, Lancaster, Derby and Lincoln, and Robert de Ufford, 1st Earl of Suffolk, won the naval battle of Winchelsea on 29 August 1350.
Edward of Woodstock, 1st Duke of Cornwall, made a daring raid into Aquitaine and Languedoc in 1355, crippling the economy of southern France. Then came the battle of Poitiers on 19 September 1356. An attack by John de Vere, 7th Earl of Oxford, against the French cavalry, helped secure an English victory. Hugh de Courtenay, 10th Earl of Devon, was in charge of the English baggage train which blocked the bridge on the French escape route, allowing Thomas de Beauchamp, 11th Earl of Warwick, William Montagu, 2nd Earl of Salisbury, and Robert de Ufford, 1st Earl of Suffolk, to complete the victory. King John II of France and his son Louis were amongst the prisoners.
Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York, and Roger de Mortimer, 2nd Earl of March, invaded French territory again in 1359 but they failed to capture Reims and the campaign was indecisive. King Edward decided to renounce his claims to the French throne so King John granted him full sovereignty of his Continental possessions (about a third of modern France). Henry of Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, and William Montague, 2nd Earl of Salisbury, had helped negotiate the Treaty of Brétigny.
King John II of France was taken to England and ransomed for three million crowns while his son Louis was held in Calais as a guarantee. Enguerrand de Coucy was one of the forty French noble hostages handed over as a guarantee of the king’s release in 1359. He soon became a favourite at the English court and Edward III’s headstrong daughter Isabella fell in love with him after her official betrothals had failed.
Louis escaped in 1363 but John voluntarily returned to captivity in England to agree the Treaty of Brétigny which established territorial adjustments between England and France and set the payments for John’s release. King John died in 1364 and Coucy married Isabella a few months later. He was released without having to pay a ransom, created Earl of Bedford and given estates in England.
Edward of Woodstock, Duke of Cornwall, was the eldest son of Edward III and Philippa (he would be given the name the Black Prince 200 years after his death). Edward was raised with his cousin Joan, and while she was married off at a young age, Edward never forgot his cousin, the Fair Maid of Kent. They married in secret in 1360 and while Pope Innocent VI blessed the union, many opposed it because they thought the Prince of Wales should have been married to a foreign princess.
Edward’s brother Prince Lionel of Antwerp, 1st Duke of Clarence, was betrothed to Elizabeth, 4th Countess of Ulster, when he was aged 8. Lionel became the Earl of Ulster and was appointed governor of Ireland in 1361, but he failed to secure his Irish estates and returned to England five years later. Lionel was then betrothed to Violante, daughter of Galeazzo Visconti, lord of Pavia, with the promise of a huge dowry. They married in 1368 but Lionel died of illness during the festivities and some believed he had been poisoned by his unimpressed father-in-law.
Edward was invested as Prince of Aquitaine in 1362. After France had been defeated, he saw an opportunity in Castile, where King Peter had been exiled by his illegitimate brother Henry of Trastámara. Edward was promised huge estates in 1367 in return for offering help; he helped defeat the French and Castilian forces at the battle of Nájera. But Peter was murdered in 1369 and Edward did not receive anything. King Charles V took advantage of the resentment caused by the new taxes being raised in Aquitaine and besieged Limoges in 1370.
Edward was eventually forced to retire due to illness and his brother John of Gaunt preferred to fight in Castile rather than in France. Edward III and his eldest son would sail for France with 400 ships and thousands of troops, only for bad weather to drive them back to England. After years of campaigning against the French and Spanish, Prince Edward died one year before his father, aged 46. His 10-year-old son, Richard II, would be crowned when Edward III died in 1377.
John of Gaunt was the third surviving son of Edward III and Philippa. He was so called because he was born in Ghent (then called Gaunt) and rumours of him being the son of a butcher angered him every time he heard them. He married Blanche of Lancaster in 1361, becoming the Earl of Lancaster with huge estates in the north-west. He inherited the rest of the Lancaster estates and was elevated to the Duke of Lancaster when Blanche’s sister Maud, the Countess of Leicester, died the year later.
King Charles V wanted Edward of Woodstock to answer charges in 1369 in Paris but the sick king’s son refused to go. So the French renewed their war on England and John of Gaunt was sent to raid northern France with Thomas de Beauchamp, 11th Earl of Warwick, and Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, Essex and Northampton. They had a stand-off with Philip, Duke of Burgundy, and then failed to capture Harfleur, so they fell back to Calais, where Beauchamp died of plague.
Gaunt’s incursion forced Charles V to abandon his plans to invade England and John reinforced his brothers Edward and Edmund of Langley, Earl of Cambridge, in Aquitaine the following summer. He captured Limoges and then took charge of the area after Edward returned home. He then married Princess Constance to form an alliance with Castile but he was unhappy about his lack of troops and resigned his command in 1371, joining his father in a failed invasion of France.
John of Gaunt and William de Ufford, 2nd Earl of Suffolk, invaded southern France in 1373 and while they travelled huge distances during the raid, they achieved nothing. Their exhausted troops deserted when they reached a plague-ridden Bordeaux and John had no money to raise another one, so he sailed home to England.
The powerful Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, Essex and Northampton, died in 1373. His vast estates should have gone to his cousin Gilbert but the king split them between Humphrey’s daughters and then married them to his close relatives. Eleanor was married to Edward III’s son Thomas of Woodstock, 1st Duke of Gloucester, and Mary married Edward III’s grandson Henry Bolingbroke.
John of Gaunt became the effective head of the English government in 1374, running the kingdom on behalf of his ill father and elder brother. But his wealth, his arrogance and failed policies made him unpopular and Earl Marshal Edmund de Mortimer, 3rd Earl of March, supported Edward, Prince of Wales, as he opposed his rule.
The Good Parliament of 1376 stopped the crippling war taxes, prosecuted corrupt officials and exiled the king’s mistress Alice Perrers. But Gaunt took control of the country when Prince Edward died in 1376 and reversed the council’s decisions, impeached the reformers and recalled the king’s mistress. Mortimer was ordered to inspect the remotest of royal castles, to remove him from court, so he resigned. The Bad Parliament of 1377 annulled everything introduced by the Good Parliament and it started an unpopular poll tax to finance the war.