Shameful as the state of the realm had been under the rule of Edward of Carnarvon and his favourites, a yet more disgraceful depth was reached in the years of minority of his son. The young king was only fourteen, and the government fell into the hands of those who had set him on the throne, his mother and her paramour, Roger Mortimer. A council, headed by Henry Earl of Lancaster, was supposed to guide the king's steps, but as a matter of fact he was in Queen Isabella's power, while she was entirely ruled by Mortimer. They were surrounded by a guard of 180 knights, and acted as they pleased in all things. It was only gradually that the nation realized the state of affairs, for the murder of Edward II. was long kept concealed, and the relations of the queen and Mortimer were not at first generally known.
Second Scottish invasion.—"The Shameful Peace."
The first blow to the new government was the renewal of the Scottish war. In 1328, Robert Bruce broke the truce that he had made six years before. He was now growing advanced in age, and was stricken by leprosy, but he sent out, under James "the Black Douglas," a great host, 4000 knights and squires, and 20,000 moss-troopers, all horsed on shaggy Galloway ponies. They harried England as far as the Tees, and successfully eluded Mortimer, who went out against them, taking the young king with him. Outmarching the English day by day, Douglas retired before them across the Northumbrian fells, occasionally harassing his pursuers by night-attacks; he returned home with much plunder, leaving not a cow unlifted nor a house unburnt in all Tynedale. The English host came back foiled and half starved, and Mortimer, not daring to face another campaign, advised the queen to make terms with the Scots. Accordingly "the Shameful Peace" was signed at Northampton, by which England resigned all claims of suzerainty over the Scotch realm, sent back the crown and royal jewels, which Edward I. had carried off to London, and gave the king's sister Joanna to be wed to Bruce's eldest son (1328).
Risings against Mortimer.
Mortimer's failure led to insurrections against him; but they were mere baronial risings, not efforts of the whole people. Henry of Lancaster, who headed the first, was put down and heavily fined for his pains. Edmund, Earl of Kent, then took up the same plan, announcing that he would free his half-brother Edward II., who, as he was persuaded, still survived. But he fell into Mortimer's hands, and was beheaded.
The king asserts himself—Mortimer executed.
It was the young king himself who was destined to put an end to the misrule of his mother and her minion. When he reached the age of eighteen, and realized the shameful tutelage in which he was being held, he resolved to free himself from it by force. While the court lay at Nottingham Castle in October, 1330, he gathered a small band of trustworthy adherents, and at midnight entered the queen's lodgings by a secret stair and seized Mortimer, in spite of his mother's tears and curses. The favourite was sent before his peers, tried, and executed; Isabella was relegated to honourable confinement at Castle-Rising, where she lived for many years after.
Character of Edward III.
King Edward now himself assumed the reins of government; he was still very young, but in the middle ages men ripened quick if they died early, and Edward at nineteen was thought both by others and himself old enough to take charge of the policy of the realm. He was in his youth a very well-served and well-loved sovereign, for he had all the qualities that attract popularity—a handsome person, pleasant and affable manners, a fluent tongue, and an energy that contrasted most happily with the listless indolence of his miserable father. It was many years before the world discovered that he was selfish, thriftless, reckless of his country's needs, and set on gratifying his personal ambition and love of warlike feats to the sacrifice of every other consideration. He was a knight-errant of the type of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, not a statesman and warrior like his grandfather Edward I. In his later years his faculties showed a premature decay, and he fell into the hands of favourites, male and female, who were almost as offensive as the Gavestons and Despensers of the previous generation.
Edward's reign falls into three well-marked periods: the first, 1330-39, is that of his Scottish wars; the second, 1339-60, is that in which he began the famous and unhappy "Hundred Years' War" with France, and himself conducted it up to the brilliant but unwise Peace of Bretigny; the third, 1360-77, that of his declining years, is a time of trouble and misgovernment gradually increasing till Edward sank unregretted into his grave.