Although heir presumptive to Richard II, Edmund Mortimer, 5th earl of March never took the throne after the Lancaster usurpation of Henry IV. Dr Simon Payling of our Commons 1461-1504 project investigates March’s claim to the throne and if his claim was something he even wanted to pursue…

Both historical and contemporary verdicts on Edmund Mortimer, earl of March, have, with one notable exception, been negative.  One of his principal servants, Sir Walter Lucy, is said to have considered him ‘a hog’ and his distant kinsman, Sir John Mortimer, as ‘a daw’. Modern commentators have been scarcely kinder.  For Gerald Harriss, he was ‘a vacillating and contemptible figure’; and to Brynmor Pugh, he was ‘the feeblest and most inept representative of his line’.  One wonders, however, if these unkind judgments do justice to the difficulties under which he laboured for his entire career.  With his claim to the throne through Edward III’s second son, Lionel of Clarence, came an onerous burden of expectation and distrust.  On one hand, from some of his servants and kin, notably Lucy and Mortimer, he attracted contempt for what they saw as his cowardly failure to claim the Crown.  On the other hand, the alternative course of loyal service to the house of Lancaster was complicated by a suspicion of his intentions that provoked some hostile treatment from a distrustful Henry V. 

The uncertainty introduced into the succession of the English throne by Richard II’s deposition provides the context for March’s troubled career.  Even before Richard’s deposition, as the probability grew that he would die childless, rival claims were in open agitation. The uncontested resolution of these claims in favour of Henry Bolingbroke in 1399 does not mean that no other resolution was within the bounds of political possibility. Had Richard died a couple of years earlier, the alternative claim of Edmund’s father, Roger, earl of March, the representative of the senior royal line, would have provided the house of Lancaster with a rival of violently assertive temperament.  As it transpired, however, Earl Roger, acting as the King’s lieutenant in Ireland, was killed in a skirmish with Irish chieftains at Kellistown (co. Carlow) on 20 July 1398. This paved the way for the accession of the house of Lancaster in two ways: the rival Mortimer claim was significantly weakened, as Roger’s heir was only a boy, and the resulting crisis in English rule in Ireland provoked Richard’s campaign of the following year with his absence providing Bolingbroke his opportunity to invade.

None the less, the ease with which the Mortimer claim was set aside did not deprive it of political potency. It gave menace to the defection in 1402 of Edmund’s paternal uncle, Sir Edmund (d.1409), to the Glyn Dwr rebels; and although the Percys rose in the following year for selfish reasons of their own, their justificatory use of that claim shows that it was seen as a plausible rallying cry for opposition to the house of Lancaster, as it was to be again in 1405 and 1408.  To all this Edmund, then in royal wardship, can have been no more than a passive observer, save on one occasion. In February 1405 his cousin, Constance, Lady Despenser, sister of Edward, duke of York, abducted him from Windsor Castle with the apparent intention, readily thwarted, of taking him to his uncle in Wales. 

In these circumstances, Edmund’s coming of age posed a quandary for the house of Lancaster.  How was he to be treated; as a potential fermenter of rebellion or as a potentially valuable member of the royal house? The initial answer was the latter.  He spent the last years of Henry IV’s reign in the household of the prince of Wales, the future Henry V, and the two men appear to have formed a personal relationship.  March was knighted on the eve of Henry V’s coronation and soon after had royal licence to enter his inheritance. Yet this apparently congenial relationship was underlain by distrust, at least on one side.  This was to become apparent when the young earl belatedly married. He found a bride in Anne, sister of Humphrey, earl of Stafford, a marital union between two great families of the Welsh March. The mystery is why he had not been contracted in marriage while a royal ward, and it may be that the Lancastrian regime was motivated here by the calculation that the longer he remained unmarried, the greater the probability he would die childless. It was perhaps the potential frustration of this hope that led Henry V, with questionable legality, to impose a massive fine of 10,000 marks on the unfortunate groom.

The great crisis of March’s career followed almost immediately. His loyalty, seemingly freely offered, had been weakened by the heavy fine, and he is said to have feared that the King intended to destroy him.  As the nation prepared for the invasion of France in the early summer of 1415, his cousin and brother-in-law, the earl of Cambridge, sought to take advantage of this fear and urged him to rebel. March found himself under pressure, not just for from Cambridge but also from some of his own servants and even his confessors.  If he was tempted to give into this pressure, he soon thought better of it and went to the King and told him what he knew.  Short of supporting Cambridge in a conspiracy that had no prospect of success, there is nothing else he could reasonably have done. The course of remaining silent, perhaps the most honourable one, would have led to his execution. 

Thereafter March served Henry V throughout the French campaigns, holding important military commands, most notably, lieutenant of the marches of Normandy under the King’s brother, the duke of Gloucester.  This military career, outwardly impressive, is hard to assess.  The commands he held were no more than commensurate with his high social rank and, in themselves, do not imply that he was viewed as a gifted soldier or military administrator.  Similarly, the length of his service can be seen either as an expression of his commitment to the Lancastrian cause or else as matter of compulsion, with Henry V reluctant to leave him unsupervised in England.  Whatever the case, it was service that went without notable reward.  March had good reason to resent this.  At a time when his finances were under the stress of providing his King with large military retinues, such as the 400 men-at-arms and archers he brought to the 1417 campaign, he was obliged to pay his marriage fine in a series of unstructured payments at royal command.  By June 1421, at least according to his own submission, he had laid out nearly 9,000 marks.

The death of Henry V and the succession of his baby son, Henry VI, in August 1422 opened new vistas for March.  As his rank merited, he was named to the minority council and, more significantly, on 9 May 1423 he was appointed as the King’s lieutenant in Ireland, an office that was almost hereditary in the Mortimers, who had extensive landed interests there.  Yet he appears to have remained an object of suspicion.  As Parliament convened at Westminster in the following October, he assembled a retinue larger than those customarily brought to Parliament by even the greatest lords, perhaps a reflection of his feelings of insecurity, and, in the following February, his kinsman, Sir John Mortimer, was condemned in Parliament and executed on spurious legal grounds. March, either to escape his difficulties or because he was ordered to do so, prepared to depart for Ireland.  Arriving in the autumn, he died of plague at his castle of Trim in the following January, at the age of only 33.

March’s career merits a much more sympathetic reading than it has generally received.  He inherited a claim to the throne that he was temperamentally disinclined to pursue, either through natural caution or because he believed that the Lancastrian claim was superior to his own.  Yet the very existence of that claim made him an object of suspicion to the ruling house, and, in the face of that suspicion, he steered the best course he could.  This sympathetic interpretation is supported by the one sustained contemporary judgment on his character.  The family chronicle describes him as ‘severe in his morals, composed in his acts, circumspect in his talk, and wise and cautious during the days of his adversity’.  He was, in short, neither ‘contemptible’ nor ‘inept’, but simply cursed by his inheritance.

SJP