10 stories mention Roger Mortimer on DeadlyCurious.
The Treaty of Edinburgh-Northampton of March 1328 ended the First War of Scottish Independence. The English regency under Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer recognised Robert the Bruce as legitimate king of Scotland. The treaty was substantively reversed by Edward III within five years of taking personal control.
Read the story →The Franciscan Greyfriars Church on Newgate Street was the burial site of four major English royal women — Isabella of France, Margaret of France, Eleanor of Provence's heart, and Joan of the Tower. The church was dissolved in 1538, destroyed in the 1666 Great Fire, and the modern street pattern was laid out over the unrecovered burials.
Read the story →William Montagu was Edward III's closest personal friend from boyhood. He was 29 in October 1330 when he led the small group of armed knights who climbed through the secret tunnel into Nottingham Castle, seized Roger Mortimer in the queen's bedchamber, and gave Edward III sole control of the English crown. Montagu was rewarded with the earldom of Salisbury.
Read the story →A letter discovered in the Montpellier archives in 1878 — addressed to Edward III from the papal notary Manuel Fieschi around 1336 — claimed that Edward II had escaped his Berkeley Castle imprisonment, walked across Europe in disguise, and was living as a hermit at the Lombard hermitage of Sant'Alberto di Butrio. Modern historians remain divided.
Read the story →Hugh Despenser the Younger was Edward II's principal favourite from about 1318 until the king's deposition in 1326. His public execution at Hereford was one of the most elaborately brutal of the English medieval period — and the man who had ruled England with him died in a Berkeley castle basement nine months later.
Read the story →When the French king Charles IV died in February 1328 without a male heir, the French throne passed to his cousin Philip of Valois under a specific reading of the medieval Frankish *Salic Law*. The reading excluded the rival English claim of Edward III through his French-princess mother Isabella. Edward eventually decided he disagreed.
Read the story →The Tyburn gallows at the western edge of medieval London were the main public execution site for the English crown from 1196 to 1783. About sixty thousand people died there. The site is now a traffic junction at Marble Arch, with a plaque almost nobody reads.
Read the story →Isabella of France crossed the Channel with fifteen hundred soldiers in 1326, deposed her husband, and ruled England with her lover. Her son removed her at seventeen.
Read the story →Roger Mortimer escaped the Tower, invaded England, deposed a king, and ran the country for three years. His own teenage king-by-grace overthrew him in a midnight coup.
Read the story →Edward II of England was forced to abdicate, locked in a Gloucestershire castle, and died there in September 1327. Or did he escape and live another fourteen years?
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