to live in honourable retirement on her dower manors.
Scrupulously visited by her dutiful son, she wandered freely from house
to house, as she felt disposed. She died in 1358 at her castle of
Hertford, in the habit of the Poor Clares--a sister order of the
Franciscans. The later tradition that she was kept in confinement at
Castle Rising has only this slender foundation in fact that Castle
Rising was one of her favourite places of abode. With her withdrawal
from public life Edward III.'s real reign begins.

CHAPTER XV.

THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR.

Edward III. had just entered upon his nineteenth year when he became
king in fact as well as in name. In person he was not unworthy of his
father and grandfather. Less strikingly tall than they, he was nobly
built and finely proportioned. In full manhood, long hair, a thick
moustache and a flowing beard adorned his regular and handsome
countenance. His graciousness and affability were universally praised.
His face shone, we are told, like the face of a god, so that to see him
or to dream of him was certain to conjure up joyous images.[1] He
delighted in the pomp of his office, wore magnificent garments, and
played his kingly part with the same majesty and dignity as his
grandfather. Despite the troubles of his youth, he was well educated.
Richard of Bury is said to have been his tutor, and the early lessons of
the author or instigator of the _Philobiblon_ were never entirely lost
by the prince who took Chaucer and Froissart into his service. More
conspicuous was his love of art, his taste for sumptuous buildings and
their magnificent embellishment, which left memorials in the stately
castle of Windsor and its rich chapel of St. George, in St. Stephen's
chapel at Westminster, and the Eastminster for Cistercian nuns hard by
Tower hill. A fluent and eloquent speaker in French and English, Edward
was also conversant with Latin, and perhaps Low-Dutch. Yet no king was
less given to study or seclusion. Possessed, perhaps, of no exceptional
measure of intellectual capacity, and not even endowed to any large
extent with firmness of character, he won a great place in history by
the extraordinary activity of his temperament and the vigour and energy
with which he threw himself into whatever work he set his hand to do. He
was a consummate master of knightly exercises, delighting in
tournaments, and especially in those which were marked by some touch of
quaint