Leicester dubbed him knight, and on January 20 he was crowned in
Westminster Abbey. A few days later the young king met his parliament.
A standing council was appointed to carry on the administration during
his nonage. Of this body the Earl of Leicester acted as chief, though
most of his colleagues were partisans of Mortimer and the queen.
Orleton, who was made treasurer, continued to pull the wires as the
confidential agent of Isabella and Mortimer. A show of devotion to the
good old cause was thought politic, and therefore the sentences of 1322
were revoked, so that Earl Henry, restored to all his brother's
estates, was henceforth styled Earl of Lancaster. The commons went
beyond this in petitioning for the canonisation of Earl Thomas and
Archbishop Winchelsea. The revolution was consummated by a new
confirmation of the charters.

Even in the first flush of victory, Isabella and Mortimer were too
insecure and too bitter to allow Edward of Carnarvon to remain quietly
in prison under the custody of the Earl of Lancaster. As long as he was
alive, he might always become the possible instrument of their
degradation. At Orleton's instigation the deposed king was transferred
in April from his cousin's care to that of two knights, Thomas Gurney
and John Maltravers. He was promptly removed from Kenilworth and
hurried by night from castle to castle until, after some sojourn at
Corfe, he was at last immured at Berkeley. Every indignity was put upon
him, and the systematic course of ill-treatment, to which he was
subjected, was clearly intended to bring about his speedy death. But
the robust constitution of the athlete rose superior to the
persecutions of his torturers, and to save further trouble he was
barbarously murdered in his bed on the night of September 21. Piercing
shrieks from the interior of the castle told the peasantry that some
dire deed was being perpetrated within its gloomy walls. Next day it