At seventeen, Edward III seized power from his mother's lover in a night raid
Crowned at fourteen after his mother and her lover Roger Mortimer forced his father off the throne, Edward III spent three years as a figurehead. In October 1330 he and a handful of friends surprised Mortimer at Nottingham Castle and took him prisoner, launching a fifty-year reign that began the Hundred Years' War.
Windsor Castle was his birthplace, on 13 November 1312, and a contemporary prophecy cast him as a boar emerging from that castle. He was made Earl of Chester at twelve days old. His father, Edward II, lost battles to the Scots, leaned on hated favourites such as Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser the Younger, and by 1325 had convinced the nobility that no landowner was safe. The prince's tutor, the bibliophile bishop Richard de Bury, taught him to read and write French and Latin.
In 1325 the boy went to France to do homage for Aquitaine in his father's place, accompanied by his mother, Isabella, sister of Charles IV. There she plotted with the exiled Mortimer, engaged her son to Philippa of Hainault, and returned with an invasion force. Edward II's troops deserted, and the son was proclaimed king on 25 January 1327 and crowned on 1 February. Mortimer effectively ruled, grabbing estates and titles, and his standing slumped after a humiliating defeat by the Scots at Stanhope Park and the 1328 peace that followed.
Tension grew after Edward married Philippa at York Minster in January 1328 and their son Edward of Woodstock was born in June 1330. With his friend William Montagu, the king captured Mortimer on 19 October 1330, and Mortimer was put to death. The historian Mark Ormrod judges that Edward had little training in kingship and ruled from experience. He reopened war in Scotland after English lords who had lost land there invaded, winning at Halidon Hill and taking Berwick.
Claiming the French crown, he began the Hundred Years' War in 1337. Victories at Crécy and Poitiers brought the favourable Treaty of Brétigny in 1360, in which he gave up that claim for land. His later years brought ill health and reverses, and by 1375 only Calais remained of his gains. He believed he could heal by royal touch, yet could show surprising mercy. Outliving his eldest son, the Black Prince, he died on 21 June 1377 and was succeeded by his grandson Richard II.
Source: Edward III
