1200-1215 Giles de Braose. Conflict between Bishop and King John.
1208-1214 – the Pope excommunicates the whole country due to conflict with King John. The bishop is exiled on the continent but he returns in 1213 when ‘the bishop’s heart was ripe for rebellion’ not least because Giles' mother and elder brother were starved to death at Windsor Castle, in 1210 on John's orders.
The king had failed to restore land to Bishop Giles and the Palace became a centre of a military campaign against the king. King John visited hoping to make peace which failed but they were reconciled before de Braose’s death. The King visited to make a truce with the Welsh, but when they refused he made for Hay and Radnor burning the towns and castles along the way.
Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer against Edward II
It was here in 1326 that Queen Isabella, the estranged wife of Edward II, conspired with her paramour Roger Mortimer (Black Roger from Wigmore Castle) and with Bishop Orleton to depose her former husband in favour of their son who became Edward III. The Royal apartments in the castle may have been unusable at this time but the palace was convenient because Bishop Orleton was in on the act. He almost certainly came from Orleton, very much in Roger Mortimer’s home territory and he or his family may well have been beholden to the Marcher baron. Edward II subsequently came to a nasty end in Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire and one of his boyfriends, Hugh de Spencer, was castrated, hung, drawn and quartered here in High Town. In 1461 Edward IV received homage here after the Battle of Mortimer’s Cross, 15 miles north of Hereford beyond the village of Kingsland. Then in 1645 Charles I stayed on two occasions when he visited the loyal and royalist city of Hereford, first after his disastrous defeat at the Battle of Naseby and then again in September of 1645 when he gave the city its extended charter and new coat of arms.