The Erpyngham Sir William Montacute

William Montacute 1^st Earl of Salisbury

Montacute or Montagu, William de, third Baron Montacute and first Earl of Salisbury (1301-1344), was the second, but first surviving, son of William, second Lord Montacute and Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Piers de Montfort of Beaudesert, Warwickshire, and Maud, daughter and heiress of Matthew de la Mare.

He was born at Cassington, Oxfordshire. He was under age at his fathers’ death in 1319 and his lands were taken into the custody of the crown; he himself was made a ward of the king and was created a yeoman of the royal household in the same year. He was allowed seisin of part of his inheritance in May 1321, though still underage, and was granted full possession on 21^st February 1323, proof of age having been taken some time after 29^th June 1322.

As a member of the household, Montacute served abroad with Edward II in 1320 and 1325, and he received knighthood in 1326. Summoned to provide military service on the first Scottish campaign of Edward III’s reign in 1327, he was elevated to the rank of knight bannerette of the household by June. 1328 and was granted the manor of Wark-on-Tweed, Northumberland, in January 1329 in part payment for his agreement to serve the king in peace and war for life with a personal retinue of twenty men at arms. In October 1329 he was made keeper of the king’s stannary and the water of Dartmouth.

Montacute clearly established a close friendship with the young Edward III. He accompanied the king on a personal journey to Amiens in May-June 1329 and was sent to France in June of the same year to negotiate a marriage alliance with Phillip VI. More particularly, in September 1329 he was sent to discuss certain secret business with Pope John XXII at Avignon, as a result of which Edward III subsequently wrote to the Pope indicating that only those written instruments containing the words pater sancte, written in his own hand, should be considered to express the king’s personal wishes, and specifying that only Montacute and Richard Bury, the royal secretary, were apprised of this business. The inference was that the king’s mother, Queen Isabella, and her lover, Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, who controlled government, were preventing the king from taking charge of his own regime.

When Edward and his friends were interrogated by Mortimer before a great council at Nottingham in October 1330, Montacute is reported to have advised the king, “It is better that they should eat the dog than the dog should eat them” (Gray, Scalacronica, p. 157). Montacute clearly took a leading part in the subsequent coup of 19^th October, when the king and his closest associates entered Nottingham Castle via an underground passage, seizes the Earl of March and removed him to London for trial and execution. The same parliament that condemned Mortimer in January 1331 also gave formal recognition to the role played by Montacute, along with Edward Bohun, Robert Ufford and John Neville, in the palace revolution, and the grateful king distinguished William by making him an exceptionally generous grant of land to the value of £1000, including the valuable lordship of Denbigh lately confiscated from the Earl of March.

Throughout the 1330s Montacute was probably Edward III’s closest political ally and personal friend. He accompanied the king on a secret expedition to France in April 1331, when both men travelled incognito disguised as merchants. In September of the same year Montacute organised a magnificent tournament at Cheapside in which he, the king and their team appeared dressed as Tartars. Edward’s reliance on, and confidence in, Montacute is demonstrated by the use of the latter’s seal to validate royal letters; Montacute also claimed to act as spokesman for the royal council in communicating its decisions to the chancery, and occasionally intervened directly to authorize minor administrative matters such as the appointment of judicial commissions.

It was, however, as a soldier that he was doubtless most valued by his friend the king. From 1333 to 1338. Montacute served regularly in the Scottish wars. He distinguished himself at the siege of Berwick in 1333 and was rewarded with royal recognition of his right, inherited from his grandfather, to possession of the Isle of Man. It was in his capacity as Lord of Man that he was appointed to the commission sent to Edinburgh in February 1334 to demand the homage of Edward Balliol. He served on the Roxburgh campaign of 1334-5 and provided the largest single contingent - 180 men at arms and 136 mounted archers - for the summer campaign of 1335. It was during this campaign that he was granted the right to bear the king’s crest of an eagle (a privilege that Montacute later surrendered to his godson, Prince Lionel), and was awarded a series of manors to support this new dignity. Following the cessation of the Lowlands to Edward III, Montacute was granted the forest of Selkirk and Ettrick with the town and country of Peebles, including all royal rights save pleas to the crown. In November 1337 Montacute was appointed co-commander of another northern campaign. However, his siege of Dunbar proved a failure, the castle being vigorously defended by “Black Agnes”, the wife of the Scottish Earl of March, and he quickly negotiated a truce, not the least because the king now required his services in the impending war against France.

On 16^th march 1337, in parliament, Montacute was made Earl of Salisbury and promised additional lands to the value of 1000 marks per annum. This was one of six new comital creations deliberately designed by Edward III to re-stock the aristocracy in preparation for a major military engagement against the French. Despite his commitments in the north, Montacute became quickly and actively involved in this new project. He had already served as keeper of the Channel Islands between 1333 and 1337 and was admiral of the western fleet between January and August 1337; in April 1337 he was dispatched to Valenciennes with the bishop of Lincoln and the Earl of Huntingdon to treat with the French and to negotiate alliances with Flanders and with the princes of the Empire. In July 1338 he accompanied Edward and his household to the continent, once again providing the largest retinue in the accompanying army, representing at its maximum a force of some 123 men at arms and 50 mounted archers. In September he succeeded the king’s uncle, Thomas of Brotherton, as marshal of England. In September he took part in the attack on the Cambresis. In 1339 he undertook engagements near Liege and Laon and was one of the English commanders at the battle of Buirenfosse. At the end of the year, when the king prepared to return to England to negotiate with parliament, Montacute was left in the Low Countries to act as surety for the king’s debts to the Duke of Brabant and to take care of the queen and her young children, who remained in Ghent. For these responsibilities he was paid the remarkable rate of five marks a day over the period 17^th November 1339 to 11^th April 1340. During the king’s absence, however, Montacute was taken prisoner by the French at Lille in April 1340 and imprisoned in Paris. He was apparently released under terms of the truce of Esplechin of September 1340, though only on parole: in May 1342 Edward III allowed him to negotiate a final settlement with Phillip VI by swearing, if necessary, never to fight in France again, and in the following month Montacute was pardoned his formal obligations to the French king in return for the release from English custody of the earl of Moray and Herman, lord of Leon in Brittany.

Montacute apparently returned directly to England following his release from captivity in 1340, being summoned to attend a council on 6^th November 1340, and was not therefore part of the small group of royal friends and advisors who accompanied Edward III when the later arrived home unexpectedly on 30^th November 1340 and dismissed many of the leading members of the domestic administration. Montacute seems to have kept out of the conflict that erupted between the king and John Stratford, archbishop of Canterbury, before and during the parliament of April-May 1341, though he was appointed to the lords’ committee established in this assembly to examine the king’s charges against Stratford. He quickly resumed his military career, and fought in Brittany with Robert of Artois in 1342-3, being one of the sponsors of the truce of Malestroit. Tradition has it that it was shortly after this episode that Salisbury finally confirmed his lordship of Man by conquest and was crowned king there, thought there is no evidence that he used the latter title outside the island. Later in 1343 he was sent on an embassy to Castile with the Earl of Derby and took part in Alfonso XI’s siege of Algeciras. He is reputed to have fallen ill during this period (Froissart, Oeuvres, vol. 4, 460), but he was apparently present at the tournament held by Edward III at Windsor early in 1344, when the king founded his round table of 300 knights. The well-informed chronicler Adam Murimuth attributed Montacute’s death, which occurred on 30^th January 1344, to the wounds that the Earl received while fighting in this tournament (Murimuth Continuatio chronicalrum, p 232)

Montacute married, in or before 1327, Katherine, youngest daughter of William, first lord Grandison, and Sybil, daughter and co-heiress of Sir John Tregoz. The marriage brought Montacute into contact with Katherine’s brother, John Grandison, bishop of Exeter, who corresponded with him on both personal and political matters. William and Katherine had six children: William Montacute, second earl of Salisbury (1328-97); John 1330-90), who married his father’s ward, Margaret, heiress of Thomas de Mothermer; Elizabeth (d. 1359), who married successively Giles Badlesmere, Hugh le Despenser and Guy de Brian; Phillippa (d. 1381), who married Roger Mortimer, second Earl of March; Sybil, who married Edmond Fitzalan, the disinherited eldest son of the Earl of Arundel; and Agnes, who was contracted to marry John, eldest son of Roger, Lord Grey of Ruthin. The prestigious marriages of his children are a mark of Montacute’s political ascendancy. His brothers Simon, bishop of Worcester and Ely, and Edward, Lord Montacute, also rose to prominence through his good offices.

After William’s death, his widowed countess made a vow of chastity; she died on 23^rd April 1349. She has sometimes been identified with the elusive figure of Alice, countess of Salisbury, whom certain continental chroniclers allege to have been raped by Edward III during William Montacute’s captivity in France, and who appears in English historical writings from the time of Polydore Vergil as the lady whose garter became the emblem of Edward’s celebrated order of chivalry (Froissart, Oeuvres, vol. 4, 458-62). However, neither of these stories is attested in contemporary English sources and the rape allegations seem almost certainly to have originated in French attempts to defame the character of Edward III.

Both William Montacute and his wife were buried at the Augustinian priory of Bisham (Berkshire), which he founded in 1337. Montacute’s close friendship with Edward III is tangibly demonstrated in a surviving memorial inscription recording that the king himself laid the foundation stone of the priory. In spite of this relationship, Montacute’s fortunes were not unclouded: he never obtained possession of all the lands promised him by the king and had to invest heavily in the military enterprises undertaken on Edward’s behalf. At his death, Montacute was owed a total of £11,720 by the crown, of which his executors formally wrote off some £6,374 in 1346.

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