William Montagu (1301–1344) had been a senior household knight of Edward II and continued in the same role after Edward II’s deposition in 1326 — attached to the household of the young Edward III, who was 14 at the time of the change. Montagu was 25 when the regency of Roger Mortimer and Queen Isabella began running England in the new king’s name; he was Edward III’s closest personal friend by 1329; he became the principal organiser of the coup that ended the regency in October 1330.
The Nottingham coup
Edward III was 17 years old and substantively a prisoner of his mother’s lover by autumn 1330. The Mortimer-Isabella regency had been in power for four years; it had executed Hugh Despenser the Younger, had murdered (or at least permitted the death of) Edward II at Berkeley Castle, and was substantively unwilling to surrender power to the young king. Mortimer in particular had treated Edward III with semi-public contempt through 1329 and 1330 and had taken substantive measures to monitor and restrict the king’s contacts with English nobles outside the regency’s network.
Montagu organised the response. He had assembled approximately twenty trusted household knights at Nottingham Castle by mid-October 1330 — the queen-mother and Mortimer were holding court there for a parliamentary session. The castle’s defences had been strengthened against possible coup attempts; Mortimer slept each night in the queen’s apartments with Isabella; the gate keys were in Mortimer’s personal possession.
On the night of 19 October 1330 Montagu led the king and approximately fifteen of the conspiratorial knights through an underground passage from the castle’s outer ditch into the inner keep. The passage had been known to the castle’s older retainers and substantially forgotten in the regency’s security review; one of those older retainers, a man named William Eland, was the substantive guide. The party emerged inside the keep, climbed to the queen’s apartments, broke down the doors, and arrested Mortimer in his nightshirt. Two of Mortimer’s household knights were killed in the brief fight; Mortimer himself was overpowered and bound. Isabella reportedly cried out from her bed: Beau fils, beau fils, ayez pitié du gentil Mortimer (‘Fair son, fair son, have pity on gentle Mortimer’). The cry was ignored.
Mortimer was taken to London under guard, tried by parliament on charges including the murder of Edward II and the usurpation of royal authority, and hanged at Tyburn on 29 November 1330. Isabella was placed under comfortable house arrest at Castle Rising in Norfolk and lived another 28 years there.
What Montagu received
Edward III rewarded Montagu substantially. He was made warden of the Channel Islands (1331), governor of Guernsey (1333), and was created 1st Earl of Salisbury in March 1337. He fought in the early phases of the Hundred Years’ War; he commanded the English siege at Dunbar in 1338; he was captured by the French at Lille in 1340 and ransomed for about 1,000 marks. He was a founding member of the Order of the Garter when Edward III established it in 1348 — by which point Montagu himself had been dead four years, but his son inherited the membership.
How he died
The death was substantively absurd. Montagu organised the wedding of his eldest son William to Joan of Kent in spring 1341 (the same Joan of Kent who would later marry the Black Prince and become mother of Richard II). The wedding feast at Windsor Castle included a jousting tournament; Montagu participated in the celebratory mêlée; he was struck a lance blow to the chest during one of the formal courses; the injury caused internal bleeding that the medieval surgeons could not treat.
He lingered for nearly three years before dying at his manor of Bisham Priory in Berkshire on 30 January 1344. He was 43. His wife Catherine Grandison ran the estate for their underage son until the boy came of age in 1349.
Edward III attended the funeral and personally endowed the chantry chapel at Bisham. The chapel survives; the Montagu tomb does not.