The ill-will produced by the “shameful peace” spread far and wide the profound dislike for Mortimer which pity for the fate of Edward had first aroused in the breasts of Englishmen.  The greedy marcher was at no pains to make himself popular.  Holding no great office of state, he strove to rule through his creatures Orleton, the treasurer, and the hardly less subservient chancellor, Bishop Hotham of Ely, or through lay partisans such as Sir Oliver Ingham and Sir Simon Bereford.  But his best chance of remaining in power was through the besotted infatuation of the queen-mother, whose relations with him were not concealed from the public eye by any elaborate parade of secrecy.  He still posed as the inheritor of the tradition of the lords ordainers, and never failed to put as much of the responsibility of his rule as he could on Henry of Lancaster and the old baronial leaders.  But with all his force and energy, he was too narrowly selfish and grasping to take much trouble to frame an elaborate policy.  As an administrator he was as incompetent as either Thomas of Lancaster or the Despensers.

Mortimer’s chief care was to add office to office, and estate to estate, in order that he might establish his house as supreme over all Wales and its march.  Besides his own enormous inheritance, he ruled over Ludlow and Meath in the right of his wife, Joan of Joinville, the heiress of the Lacys.  He had inherited Chirk and the other lands of his 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.