The Loyal Friend Who Helped the Seventeen-Year-Old Edward III Arrest Roger Mortimer in His Mother's Bedchamber

William Montagu (1301–1344) had been Edward III’s substantial personal companion from approximately the age of 12. He was the son of Sir William Montagu the elder, who had been a substantial household knight in the entourage of Edward II; the younger William had served as a substantial squire in the household of the young Prince Edward through the late 1310s and 1320s; the two boys were of the same age and were close personal friends through their shared adolescence.

By autumn 1330 they were both 17. Edward had been the nominal king of England for four years, since the 1326 deposition of his father. The actual government of England had been run by his mother Isabella of France and her lover Roger Mortimer through the intervening years — a regency that had progressively grown extractive and personally humiliating to Edward as he had approached adulthood.

The plan

The coup against the Mortimer-Isabella regency was planned by Edward and a small group of young household intimates through the summer and autumn of 1330. Montagu was the principal organiser. The circle was small — perhaps two dozen trusted knights — and the operational security was absolute. Mortimer and Isabella had spies throughout the royal household; the coup had to be executed before they could organise a response.

The trigger was a Parliament summoned to Nottingham in mid-October 1330. Mortimer and Isabella occupied the royal apartments of Nottingham Castle through the parliamentary session; the castle was garrisoned by Mortimer’s personal retainers; the standard guarded approaches were closed every evening.

The coup party’s entry route was an underground tunnel. The Nottingham Castle constable William de Eland had defected to Edward in advance and had briefed Montagu on the existence of a little-known passage leading from the Trent-side rocks below the castle up to a junction with the royal apartment levels. The passage was sometimes called Mortimer’s Hole in subsequent local tradition (the name is, on reconstruction, anachronistic — the passage had existed long before Mortimer used Nottingham as a residence).

The night of 19 October 1330

Montagu led approximately two dozen armed men through the passage shortly after midnight on 19 October 1330. The party emerged into the castle interior, surprised the sleeping guards, and moved directly to Isabella’s apartments. The bedchamber door was broken open. Mortimer was in the chamber with Isabella. The Queen Mother appears to have called out — the chronicler Geoffrey le Baker records her appeal to her son, “Beau filz, eiez pitié de gentil Mortimer” (“Fair son, have pity on gentle Mortimer”) — but Edward was personally present with Montagu’s party and ordered the arrest.

Mortimer was taken to London under heavy guard and imprisoned at the Tower. He was tried by the assembled Parliament in late November on charges of usurpation, of regicide (the responsibility for Edward II’s death), of illegal taxation, and of sexual relations with the Queen Mother. He was condemned to death on 26 November 1330 and executed on 29 November 1330 — dragged through London streets behind four horses to the Tyburn gallows, hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Isabella was placed under comfortable house arrest at her dower castle of Castle Rising in Norfolk. She lived for another 28 years in civil but restricted retirement; she died in August 1358 and was buried in the Greyfriars church at Newgate beside her heart (which she had had embalmed and placed in the casket of her deceased husband Edward II at his Gloucester tomb — a gesture of late-life reconciliation that complicated the subsequent historiographical reading of her 1320s political position).

What Montagu got

Edward III rewarded Montagu over the following years with systematic accumulation of royal honours and estates. He was created Earl of Salisbury in 1337; granted lordship over Man in 1333; Founder Knight of the Order of the Garter at its 1348 foundation (posthumously — Montagu had died in 1344, four years before the Garter was formally constituted, but the founding Garter membership explicitly included him in retrospective acknowledgement).

He died at Windsor in January 1344 of injuries sustained in a tournament. He was 42.

The 1330 Nottingham coup defined the subsequent fifty-year personal reign of Edward III. The young king became one of the most accomplished medieval English monarchs; the Hundred Years’ War he initiated against the French throne in 1337 dominated the subsequent English political history through the next century and a half; the English political-constitutional development of the period was shaped by the particular king the 1330 coup had produced.

Montagu was the indispensable human instrument of the transition.