Late Middle Ages · Europe · Politics

1330

Edward III seizes power from Mortimer

October 1330

The eighteen-year-old king and a small band of companions slipped through a secret tunnel into Nottingham Castle and arrested his mother's lover. Mortimer was hanged at Tyburn within a month, his body left dangling for two days as a public spectacle. Edward, freed from regency, would embark on a half-century of wars that would define the Hundred Years' conflict.