The Teenage Friend Who Helped Edward III Storm Nottingham Castle and Overthrow Roger Mortimer in 1330

William Montagu (1301–1344) was approximately twelve years older than Edward III and had been attached to Edward’s household from approximately Edward’s birth in 1312. The two men grew up substantively as personal friends despite the substantial age difference; Montagu was substantively the closest non-royal personal companion of the young Edward through the difficult years of his minority. The friendship substantially defined Edward’s subsequent reign.

Edward’s predicament

By 1330 Edward III was 17 years old and had been formally king of England for four years. He had been crowned in February 1327 immediately after his mother Isabella of France’s invasion had deposed his father Edward II, but real political power had remained throughout with the regency of Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer. The regency had become substantively unpopular through 1329 and 1330 — the substantial Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton (March 1328, recognising Scottish independence under Robert the Bruce) had been a humiliating concession; the Mortimer-Isabella financial mismanagement was draining the royal treasury; the Mortimer personal pretensions (he had taken the title ‘Earl of March’ in 1328) were substantively offensive to the established English baronage.

Edward had begun substantively planning his independence from the regency through the spring and summer of 1330. The conspiracy was small — approximately a dozen of Edward’s closest personal friends, with Montagu as the principal organiser. The coup target was Roger Mortimer himself; the regency would substantively collapse the moment Mortimer was removed.

The Nottingham raid

Mortimer and Isabella were substantively in residence at Nottingham Castle through October 1330 for a royal council meeting. The castle’s outer defences were substantively well-guarded by Mortimer’s personal armed retinue; a direct assault on the castle would substantively have failed and would substantively have produced the alarm that would have allowed Mortimer to substantively kill or detain Edward and the conspirators.

The Montagu solution was a secret tunnel. The castle constable, William de Eland, was substantively recruited into the conspiracy and substantively revealed the existence of a Norman-period underground passage that ran from the cliffs below the castle up into the keep itself — a tunnel that had been substantively forgotten by the main castle garrison but that still existed in usable form.

On the night of 19 October 1330, Montagu led approximately 24 armed knights through the tunnel into the Nottingham Castle keep. Edward III met them inside the castle (he had substantively entered through the main gate that afternoon for the royal council session and had substantively remained in his own quarters through the evening). The combined force substantively moved directly to the queen’s bedchamber, where Mortimer was substantively in residence with Isabella.

Mortimer was seized at sword-point. Isabella reportedly cried out from the bed “Bel fitz, eez pitee du gentil Mortimer” (‘Fair son, have pity on the gentle Mortimer’) — the line that survives in the chronicle account of the night and that has substantively defined the literary memory of the coup. Edward did not have pity. Mortimer was taken under armed guard to the Tower of London the same week, tried by Parliament at Westminster on 26 November 1330 on charges including the murder of Edward II, and hanged at Tyburn on 29 November 1330.

Edward III was now substantively sole king of England. He was 17. The reign that would substantively define the Hundred Years’ War, the Order of the Garter, the Black Death English experience, and substantively the foundational period of English late-medieval political development had begun.

Montagu’s reward

Edward rewarded Montagu. He was given the Lordship of Denbigh in north Wales (which had been Mortimer’s principal territorial base) and was created Earl of Salisbury in March 1337. He was one of the founding members of the Order of the Garter in 1348 — the knightly order that Edward established as the highest English military-chivalric honour, with membership initially restricted to Edward himself and a small group of the closest royal companions of the king’s personal generation.

Montagu served with Edward in the early Hundred Years’ War campaigns of the 1330s and early 1340s, including the naval victory at the Battle of Sluys in June 1340. He died at Windsor Castle on 30 January 1344 of injuries received in a tournament accident — substantively the standard medieval-knightly cause of death for a man of his class and generation. He was 43.

Edward III named his eldest son’s principal household tutor ‘William Montagu’ in honour of his friend; the Montagu family substantively retained the earldom of Salisbury through the subsequent two generations, until the line failed in the male line in 1428 and the title passed by marriage to the Neville family.

The 1330 coup substantively defined the rest of Edward III’s reign. Without Montagu’s personal organisation, the coup would substantively not have succeeded and the subsequent course of English political history would substantively have been substantively different.