The Greatest Traitor: The Life of Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March (42 page)

Those who had dared oppose him had to pay the penalty, especially the less important men, the Londoners. Only a matter of days after Lancaster’s submission the new mayor of London and twenty-four leading citizens were summoned and ordered to hold an inquiry to root out all those who had supported Lancaster. They held a council at the end of the
month. Powerful figures within the city hierarchy tried to protect the Lancastrian sympathisers, but spies ensured that this information found its way to Roger. A few days later the city’s inquiry was replaced by a group favourable to Roger, namely Oliver Ingham, Sir John Maltravers, John de Stonor, Robert Mablethorpe and John de Grantham, the mayor.
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Trials continued throughout the first half of February. It tried even the most powerful merchants, including Hamo de Chigwell, the former mayor, who was sent to the Tower.
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Londoners could be stamped on hard. Peers were a different matter. Obviously all positions of authority were removed from lords who had joined Lancaster. There was an unstated but implied death sentence on those whom Roger felt had betrayed him most of all: Thomas Roscelyn, Henry de Beaumont and William Trussel. To these he added Thomas Wyther, for the murder of Robert de Holand. All four of these men fled to France and lost their lands. But otherwise Roger was lenient. The Earls of Norfolk and Kent were not punished. Thomas Wake, being Roger’s cousin, was bound over for £10,000. Hugh Audley, Roger’s nephew, was also not driven into exile but was allowed to keep his estates on penalty of £10,000. The Earl of Lancaster himself was treated similarly, being bound over for £30,000 and fined £11,000. Many more leaders were allowed to remain and keep their estates on recognition of an impending fine. Roger did not need to exact revenge; he merely consolidated his victory by financial punishments and by forcing all rebel lords to swear to protect the king, Isabella, and all the other members of the king’s council, including, of course, Roger himself.

There are several reasons why Roger showed such leniency to his opponents. The first is that he did not want to provoke the reaction which would surely follow a cold-blooded massacre of the nobility, like the one after the Battle of Boroughbridge. In addition, he had sworn an oath on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s crozier that he meant the Earl of Lancaster no harm. Thomas Wake and Hugh Audley were close relations, and he did not want to alienate them. Similarly he did not want to damage the Earls of Kent and Norfolk; rather he wanted to thank them for turning the tables on Lancaster. Besides, he wanted to draw closer to the royal family, not to distance himself from it. But probably the most important reason was that he was cautious of the weight of the opposition which had dared to face him. Even now, Henry of Lancaster was very popular, especially in the north, for having led the resistance to Roger’s peace treaty with Scotland. To punish him severely would be to incite a popular uprising. Lastly, news of the ex-king’s survival was now spreading among his opponents beyond his control, and becoming common rumour. In the words
of the longer
Brut
chronicle, ‘all the commons almost of England were in sorrow and dread’ whether the king was alive at Corfe or not.
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In addition to the rumours and and the whispers behind closed doors, there was the problem of France. When Philip de Valois ascended the throne, against the claim of Edward III, he dealt a diplomatic as well as a political blow to the English royal family. In the autumn of 1328 the new French king insisted that Edward should come in person to France to do homage for Gascony. Isabella retorted that the son of a king would never do homage to the son of a mere count.
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Philip de Valois responded by confiscating the revenues of Gascony and, in February 1329, sent an ultimatum. Roger and Isabella, still tidying up the legal loose ends of Lancaster’s rebellion, realised they were in no position to go to war with France. Instead they loaded the envoys with gifts for the French king and promised that Edward would perform homage in the near future. In April an apology for the delay was sent. Finally in May the court went into Kent to see the young king off to France. As they said goodbye to one another at Dover, Edward gave Roger a diamond amulet worth £20, a token perhaps of his confidence in him rather than Henry of Lancaster.
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The king was away for sixteen days. He performed homage to Philip at Amiens on 6 June. He did so in an unsatisfactory manner, so far as the French king was concerned, for Philip wanted Edward to swear to serve him in war, knowing there was a high risk of Edward (as a rival for the French throne) attacking him. But the English advisers with Edward, notably Roger’s close friend, Henry de Burghersh, had been instructed not to let this happen, and Edward himself had no wish to serve his mother’s cousin. As soon as the ceremony was over Isabella summoned her son to return to England as quickly as possible, and he obeyed, without even taking formal leave of the King of France.
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On 11 June he was back at Dover. Three days later he was with Roger and Isabella at Canterbury.

We cannot know for certain the reason why Isabella summoned him back so abruptly. Perhaps she did not want him to fall under Philip’s influence; perhaps she did not trust Philip not to detain her son. But there is another possibility, more plausible than her fear of Edward falling under Philip’s influence; and although it cannot be proved it needs to be considered seriously.

She was pregnant.

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The subject of Isabella’s pregnancy has to be approached with enormous caution. If she was at any time pregnant with Roger’s child, the fact was kept secret for two very good reasons. Firstly, the child was proof of an
enormous impropriety on the part of the queen mother, and a public insult to the king. Secondly, a male child would have had a claim to the throne of France, after King Edward and Prince John, and thus his very existence would have constituted an international scandal, very probably affecting Edward’s claim to the French throne. To Edward, who clearly found Roger’s hold on him irksome, the thought of having to acknowledge Roger’s son as his half-brother was unbearable. The irony was that Edward was the one person from whom Roger and Isabella could not hide the truth. Being so close to his mother, and seeing her every day, any protracted period apart would have made him suspicious. But with his help, a pregnancy might be kept secret, especially under the more voluminous dresses to be seen at court now that Philippa was queen.

In these circumstances it is surprising that there is any evidence at all regarding a pregnancy. But there are some details which, taken together, indicate that it may well have happened. Firstly there is the chronicle of Froissart, which states bluntly that Isabella was rumoured to be pregnant in 1330.
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Froissart is somewhat erratic in his chronology of the early years of the reign of Edward III, and regards dates as less important than deeds of valour, but it is unlikely he would have completely fabricated a story which brought no credit to the mother of his hero. He may have heard a rumour and supposed it related to Roger’s arrest in 1330, or he may have picked up on rumours concerning a second pregnancy.

Support for Froissart’s statement that Isabella was pregnant is to be found in less explicit but more official sources for the previous year. In September 1329 Isabella made a form of will: a settlement of some of her estates which in the event of her death were to go to Roger. This was unusual for a thirty-three-year-old woman; most people made bequests only in the last months of life, when they knew they were dying. But it was not the first time Isabella had made such a settlement: she had made a similar one when pregnant with her first child in 1312, facing the uncertainty of giving birth.
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The only credible alternatives to a pregnancy are that Isabella was ill, or feared an attempt on her life. There is no evidence for any illness, and no evidence that anyone was plotting to murder her at that time.

The next piece of evidence that Isabella was pregnant in the summer of 1329 relates directly to Roger. In the grant he had made to Leintwardine church the previous December he had specified nine chaplains to sing masses daily for the souls of King Edward III, Queen Isabella, Queen Philippa, Bishop Burghersh, himself, his countess Joan, and their children, their successors and their ancestors.
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There are nine constituencies here – six individuals and three groups – corresponding with the nine chaplains
endowed. On 10 February 1330 Roger added another chaplain and another individual, acknowledging that there was now a further member of his extended family for whose soul prayers had to be offered daily. Roger named him as the ‘Earl of Lincoln’.
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This choice of title is interesting because there was no Earl of Lincoln in 1330.
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The last man to bear this title had been Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, who had borne the title by right of his wife, Alice, the last surviving child of Henry, Earl of Lincoln. The Earl of Suffolk had seized the countess and taken her away from Lancaster, to her great delight, and so Henry of Lancaster was unable to inherit the Lincoln title after the overthrow of the Despensers. She was forty-eight years old, and knew she would not bear an heir herself, although she was married to Sir Ebulo Lestrange, a Shropshire baron. Thus the title was bound to become extinct on her death. Moreover, most of the Lincoln estates had already been granted to Isabella, and those which had not were soon to be granted to Roger and his son Geoffrey.
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Thus, although the Leintwardine grant evidence is not conclusive, it is clearly significant. It suggests that there was a son, gives him a highly plausible title which he could have expected to be granted on the death of the countess, and explains how Roger and Isabella might have managed to bring him into the front rank of the nobility, despite his illegitimacy.
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If there was a child born to Isabella at this period one would expect this to be indicated by a prolonged pause in her itinerary. When Queen Philippa was heavily pregnant with Edward’s son in 1330, the court stayed at Woodstock from 29 March until 20 June, a period of about twelve weeks, moving on a few days after the birth took place (on 16 June). Apart from this instance there are only four other periods of five weeks or more when the court stayed in one place in the years 1326–30. All but one of these can be linked to major political developments in 1327, as the government was being more firmly established.
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There are no such prolonged pauses in Isabella’s itinerary in 1328. The only other stay in the whole of Roger’s period of authority was at Kenilworth Castle from 29 October 1329 to 3 January 1330. This is without obvious explanation. Indeed it was the quietest period of Roger and Isabella’s time together. Thus, if Isabella was pregnant by Roger, the most likely time and place for the child to have been born was December 1329 at Kenilworth. This coincides with the evidence of the revised Leintwardine grant, which implies a date not long before 10 February 1330.

If an illegitimate son was born at Kenilworth in December 1329, it would help explain several other events in the summer of that year. For example, it would explain why Edward returned from France so quickly
in June. Isabella and Roger realised the necessity of informing Edward at an early opportunity and summoned him back without an explanation. This caused him to hasten, fearing the worst. It would also explain a gift-giving ceremony which took place at Windsor that summer.
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Edward gave Roger a number of valuable jewels and other gifts, including seven silver goblets, four of which were gilt, one patterned with shells, one enamelled, and one encrusted with jewels.
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Such gift-giving between the king and his most important vassal may be accepted as routine, but it is not so easy to explain Edward’s gift of a French goblet later that summer. This was a valuable silver-gilt enamelled goblet bearing the royal arms of France and Navarre.
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These were the arms of Isabella’s parents, and thus this cup had been a possession of the French royal family, and a gift to Edward. Giving it to Roger was perhaps a confirmation, prompted by Isabella, that Roger was now linked to the royal family.

Any part of this evidence by itself would permit only tentative suggestions regarding a pregnancy. Taken as a whole, however, it suggests that Isabella gave birth to Roger’s son in December 1329. Moreover it seems that Edward was told about it. This is highly significant, as it would explain the worsening of Roger’s and Edward’s relationship with one another which took place at this time. Up to late 1329 Roger dominated the king and the court, but he remained deferential to Edward. All the marks of disrespect to the king – remaining seated in his presence, walking by his side, and, eventually, commanding that his own word was to be obeyed, and not the king’s – date from after the late summer of 1329.
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This is the real importance of a pregnancy in 1329: the effect it would have had on Roger and Isabella, and on their relationship with Edward. How did they cope with the pressure of keeping the pregnancy hidden while being seen publicly to be in control of government? What happened to their relationship with each other? Since Isabella was already bound to Roger by her dependency on him to keep Edward II safely concealed, it probably only reinforced the knowledge that they could never leave each other, as this secret could have destroyed both of them. But what did it mean for Roger’s relationship with Edward? It meant that Roger was even more closely tied to the royal family. He not only had possession of the ex-king and the love of the queen, he was biologically linked to the king through a half-brother. Edward could no longer hope that one day Roger would withdraw from court. If Isabella was pregnant, Roger was bound into the royal family by blood. To unbind him, blood would need to be shed.