Edward III of England

Edward III was king of England from 1327 to 1377, crowned at fourteen after his father Edward II's forced deposition. For four years Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer governed in his name; in October 1330 Edward had Mortimer seized at Nottingham Castle and executed, and began to rule in earnest. He revived the Scottish war his father had lost, then in 1337, following the French crown's confiscation of Gascony and his own revived claim to the French throne itself, a claim resting on his mother Isabella's blood as sister of the last direct Capetian king, he opened the conflict historians call the Hundred Years' War. His victories at Sluys (1340), Crecy (1346) and the capture of Calais (1347) were followed by his son Edward, the Black Prince's, victory and capture of the French king John II at Poitiers (1356), and the 1360 Treaty of Calais briefly secured full sovereignty over an enlarged Aquitaine in exchange for renouncing the French crown. During the 1340s Edward also rebuilt Windsor Castle and founded the Order of the Garter, and Parliament grew in strength through his repeated need to secure grants for the war, passing the Statutes of Provisors (1351) and Praemunire (1353) against papal encroachment on English benefices and the Statute of Labourers (1351) after the Black Death first struck England in 1348 and 1349. The war reopened in 1369 and went badly; after Queen Philippa's death that year Edward fell under the influence of his mistress Alice Perrers, and the Good Parliament of 1376 impeached several of his ministers and Perrers herself for corruption before the Black Prince's death that June and Edward's own failing health let John of Gaunt reverse its reforms. Older, chronicle-derived tradition remembers Edward's fifty-year reign as a golden age of chivalry and military triumph; historians who weigh the reign whole read its final two decades as a genuine decline rather than a coda to unbroken success (see the recorded dissent).