THE KING OF FOLLY

In 1323, Roger Mortimer pulled off an audacious escape from the Tower of London before ejecting Edward II from the English throne. But, writes Paul Dryburgh, the rebel baron's designs on power were undone by his own big head

- Paul Dryburgh

As the heat of the day subsided on 1 August 1323, a boozy evening started in the Tower of London. Members of the garrison, including the constable, Sir Stephen de Segrave, settled down to celebrate the feast of St Peter ad Vincula (in Chains), the patron saint of the Tower’s parish church. Unbeknown to them, though, one of their number had slipped something into their drink – a drug so strong that “all of them slept at least two days and two nights”. One of the most daring and ingenious escapes in the long history of the Tower was under way.

Alerted to the potion’s success, Roger Mortimer, formerly Lord of Wigmore in Herefordshire, crept out into the darkness through a breach in his cell “in a very high up and confined place… out of sight and hearing of the world” into the kitchen that adjoined the king’s palace. From there, by means of “ropes ingeniously arranged into a ladder” that had been secretly smuggled into his cell, Mortimer scaled the walls of the inner and outer baileys.

In the colourful retelling of the St Albans monk Henry de Blaneforde, “guided by an angel, [Mortimer] passed over both the first and the second walls, and with the greatest difficulty he came at last to the water of the Thames”. Then he dropped into a boat which conveyed him to a group of accomplices holding horses, which bore him to the south coast. From either Portchester or Portsmouth, Mortimer sailed to northern France before King Edward II, the man on whose orders he had been imprisoned in the Tower, had the merest clue what was going on.