s
uncle, the sometime justice of Wales, who had died in Edward II.'s
prison; and he procured for himself a grant of his uncle's old office
for life, so that, while as justice of Wales he lorded it over the
principality, as head of the Mortimers he could dominate the whole
march. To complete his ascendency in the march became his great
ambition. He obtained the custody of Glamorgan, the stronghold of his
sometime rival, Hugh Despenser the younger. To this were added Oswestry
and Clun, the Fitzalan march in western Shropshire, forfeited to the
crown by the faithfulness with which Edmund Fitzalan, the late Earl of
Arundel, had laid down his life for Edward II. Minor grants of lands,
offices, wardships, and pensions were constantly lavished upon him by
the complacency of his mistress. In Ireland he received complete
palatine franchises over Trim, Meath, and Louth, along with the custody
of the estates of the infant Earl of Kildare, the chief of the Leinster
Geraldines. He extended his connexions by marrying his seven daughters
to the heads of great families, and where possible to men of marcher
houses. He soon numbered among his sons-in-law the representatives of
the Charltons of Powys, the Hastingses of Abergavenny, now the chief
heirs of Aymer of Pembroke, the Audleys of the Shropshire march, the
Beauchamps of Warwick, the Berkeleys, the Grandisons, and the Braoses.
Anxious to extend his dignity as well as his power, he procured his
nomination as Earl of the March of Wales, "a title," says a chronicler,
"hitherto unheard of in England". As earl of the march and justice of
the principality, he ruled the lands west of the Severn with little
less than regal sway. His banquets, his tournaments, his pious
foundations even, dazzled all men by their splendour.

Mortimer was created Earl of March in the parliament held in October,
1328, at Salisbury, where John of Eltham was made Earl of Cornwall and
James, Butler of Ireland, Earl of Ormonde. His assumption of this new
title at last roused the sluggish indignation of Earl Henry of
Lancaster, who felt that his own marcher interests were compromised,
and bitterly resented the vain use made of his name, while he was
carefully kept without any control of policy. He refused to attend the
Salisbury parliament, though he and his partisans mustered in arms in
the neighbourhood of that city. Civil war seemed imminent, and
Mortimer's Welshmen devastated Lancaster's earldom of Leicester, bu