Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (51 page)

Doubtless gold had greased Flambard’s path to freedom, and the constable of the Tower, Geoffrey de Mandeville, may have been in on the plot. King Henry himself might even have covertly allowed the able administrator to get away. This theory is given weight by the haste with which the king made his peace with Flambard. Taking refuge with Duke Robert in Normandy, the errant bishop helped Robert invade England only six months after his dramatic escape. A temporary truce between the warring brothers was signed at Alton in Hampshire which Flambard probably helped arrange. Under its terms he was formally forgiven by Henry and restored to the See of Durham.

In 1105 warfare between the brothers resumed and in September 1106 Henry decisively defeated Robert at Tinchebray in Normandy. Flambard transferred his loyalty to the winner, retired from politics and settled in Durham where he completed work on the cathedral and Durham Castle. He died in September 1128 and was buried in the chapter house at Durham. His tomb was opened in 1874 by the ever-inquisitive Victorians. Flambard’s
skeleton revealed that he had been five foot nine tall. His bishop’s crozier and signet ring had been buried with him.

Like Flambard, the second state prisoner to escape the Tower was also de facto ruler of England during the reign of an incompetent, unpopular king. Unlike Flambard, however, Roger Mortimer’s time in the Tower marked the beginning, not the end, of his dictatorial power. Mortimer was a Marcher lord, with huge estates along the lawless borders of Wales. Born at his family’s Herefordshire seat, Wigmore Castle, on 25 April 1287, Roger’s evident ability won him the regard of the ageing Edward I. Young Mortimer became a boon companion of Edward, Prince of Wales, the man he was destined to supplant and – probably – murder. Superficially the two young men were similar: tall, handsome and lusty. Mortimer fathered a dozen children in as many years; Edward, despite his homosexual dalliances, sired two sons and two daughters legitimately and had one bastard son. Though bold and muscular like his father ‘Longshanks’, the first Prince of Wales lacked the steel which Mortimer was so soon to display. Young Edward was drawn to ‘effeminate’ pursuits such as music and the decorative arts, and offended conservative courtiers by such lowly behaviour as harnessing himself to a peasant’s plough, or plying the oars of a rowing boat.

But after succeeding his father in 1307, it was Prince Edward’s unconventional sexuality which hastened his downfall. In 1312 he lost his first gay favourite, Piers Gaveston, murdered by barons whom Gaveston had gone out of his way to mock. An outraged but powerless Edward bided his time and brooded on his revenge. Roger Mortimer remained loyal. But his once close companionship with the king withered in the face of the monarch’s ineptitude, until finally dissolving in total disillusion.

By 1318 Edward’s doting gaze had fallen on a new favourite, with all Gaveston’s ambition but none of his charm. Hugh Despenser was a man whose greed and guile knew no bounds. Roger Mortimer was an ancestral foe of the Despensers. His grandfather had killed Hugh’s grandfather at the battle of Evesham, and young Despenser had not forgotten the ancient feud, vowing to destroy Mortimer. After a long absence fighting Edward’s wars in Ireland, on returning to England Mortimer was horrified to find how far the king had fallen under Despenser’s thumb. The ruthless new favourite flouted law, custom and human decency in amassing goods, land and property. He specialised in intimidating women as he cheated, robbed
and bullied his way to become the richest magnate in the kingdom. Once again, the barons combined to curb an overreaching royal favourite. The Marcher lords – Mortimer among them – led the revolt. Again Edward backed down, agreeing to exile Despenser and his equally rapacious namesake father.

Once the Despensers were out of the way, however, the barons squabbled over the spoils that the fallen favourites had left behind. Edward exploited these divisions, and within two years had re-established his untrammelled power. He recalled the Despensers from banishment, defeating his enemies, and wreaked vengeance with a string of hangings and beheadings. More than a dozen peers and hundreds of their humbler followers perished in a terror marking the beginning of a true royal tyranny. Mortimer surrendered to the king at Shrewsbury in January 1322. In front of the gloating Despensers, he was humiliated, stripped of his land – including his beloved birthplace, Wigmore Castle – and left with only the clothes he stood up in. He was consigned to the Tower while Edward and the Despensers travelled north to extinguish the last embers of the barons’ revolt.

Mortimer languished in the Tower for three months before the king’s thoughts returned to him. In the interim Edward had destroyed his enemies at the battle of Boroughbridge in Yorkshire. There was now no barrier to the despotic power of the Despensers, and Mortimer’s future looked short. In July, he was taken from the Tower to Westminster Hall, tried for his recent rebellion and condemned to death. Surprisingly, the king, perhaps mindful of their youthful companionship, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. For now, Hugh Despenser was deprived of his prey.

The reprieve was brief. In the twelve months that followed, Despenser spared no effort in adding to his already bulging portfolio of property and riches, mostly acquired illegally. The king was wax in his hot hands, granting every gift and title demanded. Finally, the vengeful tyrant demanded the best prize of all: Roger Mortimer’s head. But Despenser had made an enemy more dangerous than Roger, helpless in his Tower cell. He had reckoned without Edward’s long-neglected queen, Isabella, who would soon live up to her nickname ‘the She-wolf of France’.

The daughter of Philip IV of France – named ‘the Fair’ for his blond good looks, which she would inherit – Isabella had married Edward in 1308, when she was twelve. They wed in Boulogne-sur-Mer and the young queen immediately received a clear indication of her new husband’s sexual
priorities when, arriving at Dover, she and the French nobles accompanying her witnessed a long and loving embrace between Edward and Piers Gaveston. Further shocks were in store at the wedding feast in Westminster Hall when Gaveston shamelessly appeared in the costly finery which Isabella’s father had bestowed on his new son-in-law as wedding gifts. Horrified by the insult, the French nobles stormed out. This pattern continued throughout the reign, and although the royal couple succeeded in producing four children, Edward’s sexual preferences became obvious to his comely young wife, and her resentment festered.

We do not know exactly when Isabella and Mortimer first met, but as a prominent nobleman Roger was a familiar figure to Isabella by the time he was confined in the Tower in 1322. Isabella gave birth to her youngest child, Joan of the Tower, there in 1321. While pregnant with Joan, Isabella had openly signalled her growing displeasure with her husband by adding her voice to the chorus demanding that the hated Hugh Despenser be banished. His return from exile turned her disillusion into outright disgust.

That revulsion was reinforced when, in 1322, Edward and Despenser fled from Robert the Bruce’s marauding Scottish army, leaving the queen marooned at Tynemouth Abbey. Only by luck did she escape by sea, losing two of her ladies-in-waiting in the process. Her hatred of her husband now hardened into a determination to exact revenge for the serial humiliations she had suffered at his hands. Mortimer’s presence in the Tower gave Isabella an ally – and, possibly, more. It is quite likely that her pity for Mortimer’s plight turned now into a physical passion. It seems certain that they met covertly in the Tower and plotted. The result was that Isabella intervened on Roger’s behalf against their common enemy. In February 1323 she protested to the king that Roger’s loyal wife Joan and his aged mother were being subjected to royal harassment. The liaision that would bring her and Mortimer to supreme power was first forged at the Tower that foggy February.

Mortimer was not a man to submit patiently to incarceration in the White Tower. Like Flambard, he had, even in his reduced state, the means to persuade his jailers to do his bidding. This included smuggling messages to the world outside, and bringing replies back to his cell. But royal spies intercepted some of Roger’s letters to a network of nobles and clerics across the country. An ally of Roger’s, Lord Berkeley, under torture
supervised by Edward and Despenser, blurted out his knowledge of Mortimer’s scheming. Armed with this evidence, Despenser again insisted that Mortimer was too dangerous to be allowed to live. Edward was persuaded, and Mortimer’s death was set for early August 1323.

Warning of the king’s lethal intentions was brought to Mortimer in the Tower by Isabella. He knew that he had to act quickly. On 1 August under the cover of celebrations marking the feast day of St Peter ad Vincula, the Tower’s patron saint, Roger put his escape plan into effect. His jailers gathered in the main hall of the White Tower for a banquet to honour their saint. Wine flowed and caution and sobriety were thrown to the winds. But one high-placed guest at the long trestle tables watched the hilarity with a coldly sober eye. Gerard d’Alspaye, second-in-command to the Tower’s lieutenant, Stephen de Segrave, was the insider who had ferried Mortimer’s letters in and out of the fortress. Now he would be the key to unlock his prison. Given free run of the Tower’s cellars and kitchens, d’Alspaye had discreetly added sleeping draughts to the drinks and watched as de Segrave slumped unconscious, along with most of his men.

D’Alspaye slipped from the room, picked up a concealed crowbar and a couple of coiled rope ladders, and hurried to the cell which Mortimer shared with a confederate, Richard de Monmouth. D’Alspaye went to work with the crowbar on the old mortar until one of the great stones was prised out. On his side of the wall, Mortimer was also working with improvised tools to dig out a hole in the masonry which he had loosened in advance. Breathing a prayer to St Peter – along with a promise to build the saint a dedicated chapel at Ludlow in his native Marches if the prayer was granted – he and de Monmouth sweated desperately in the hot summer night to heave the stones free. Both knew that their lives depended on their speed.

At last a ragged hole was made big enough for the two men to squeeze through and they quickly crept downstairs, out of the White Tower, and into the kitchen of the adjoining royal palace to the south. The chief cook, also in on the plot, showed them their means of escape: up a wide chimney kept cold and empty for the purpose. They clambered up the sooty interior and found themselves on the kitchen roof under the wide, starry summer sky. D’Alspaye’s rope ladders now came into their own. Such ladders had been successfully used by Bruce’s Scots to capture castles and had been copied in England. Feverishly, they slung a ladder, with a grappling iron attached, over the high Inner Ward wall and heaved themselves over. A
final barrier faced them – the Tower’s outer curtain wall. Using their second ladder, they flung it over the wall, scaled it, and found themselves splashing along the marshy north bank of the Thames.

A prearranged boat was waiting in the shadows, and the two escapees were rowed downriver to Greenwich, where, guarded by four of Mortimer’s liegemen, two horses were saddled and ready. Avoiding the Dover road, the most obvious route for a cross-Channel escape, the fugitives rode south-west to Portchester in Hampshire, where they took ship for France. As he sucked the sea air into his lungs, Mortimer now had one implacable purpose. God had freed him for a reason: to avenge himself on the tyrant king who had locked him in the Tower. Nothing would distract him from that goal.

When informed that Mortimer had escaped, Edward’s rage was murderous. The hapless Segrave was sacked and replaced as Tower lieutenant by Walter de Stapledon, Bishop of Exeter and one of Edward’s most slavish supporters. Mortimer was proclaimed a rebel, outlaw and traitor. A fresh wave of persecution swept the land which saw Roger’s friends and family deprived of their estates. Darkly suspecting the queen of involvement in the getaway, Despenser persuaded the king to strip Isabella of her property and slash her personal living expenses to the bone. With Roger living under the protection of Isabella’s brother, King Charles IV of France, the queen’s fellow countrymen fell under suspicion as a potential fifth column. All French citizens living in England were arrested, including thirty members of Isabella’s own household staff. The final cruel indignity to the slighted queen was to remove Isabella’s children from her care and to place them under the control of Hugh Despenser’s wife. Three of Roger Mortimer’s sons were locked in the Tower in place of their father. Mortimer’s daughters were immured in priories, while his wife Joan was imprisoned and given just one mark a day to feed herself and her five servants.

In March 1325, Edward made a fatal mistake. Increasingly isolated, fearful of a French invasion, he sent Isabella to France to negotiate peace with her brother Charles. Once free from her husband’s control, Isabella was determined that she would only return to England to liberate it from Edward’s tyranny. She succeeded in her peace mission, and in May a treaty was agreed. A clause of the treaty stipulated that Edward should personally pay homage to Charles. Instead, Edward sent his own son and heir, Prince Edward, to pay homage in his place. This was his second fatal error.

With her son safely at her side, Isabella openly proclaimed contemptuous defiance of her husband. The man leading the delegation accompanying young Prince Edward to France was the new lieutenant of the Tower, Bishop Walter de Stapledon. The bishop humiliated the queen in front of the French court by demanding that she return home with him to her husband. The ‘She-wolf’ turned on the cleric in fury: ‘Someone has come between my husband and me, trying to break this [marriage] bond. I protest that I will not return until this intruder is removed, but, discarding my marriage garment, shall assume the weeds of widowhood and mourning until I am avenged on this Pharisee.’ There were no prizes for guessing that the ‘Pharisee’ was Despenser.

Once de Stapledon had been sent packing, Isabella united her fortunes with those of Roger Mortimer to overthrow the tyranny of Edward and the Despensers. By Christmas, the lovers were openly living together and plotting their return. It was no small matter in medieval Europe for a queen to spurn an anointed king and live in adultery with another man. It is a measure of the strength of Isabella’s character, her hatred for Edward, and her love for Mortimer that she was prepared to trample this taboo.