It was the young king himself who was destined to put an end to the misrule of his mother and her minion. When he reached the age of eighteen, and realized the shameful tutelage in which he was being held, he resolved to free himself from it by force. While the court lay at Nottingham Castle in October, 1330, he gathered a small band of trustworthy adherents, and at midnight entered the queen's lodgings by a secret stair and seized Mortimer, in spite of his mother's tears and curses. The favourite was sent before his peers, tried, and executed; Isabella was relegated to honourable confinement at Castle-Rising, where she lived for many years after. [Sidenote: =Character of Edward III.=] King Edward now himself assumed the reins of government; he was still very young, but in the middle ages men ripened quick if they died early, and Edward at nineteen was thought both by others and himself old enough to take charge of the policy of the realm. He was in his youth a very well-served and well-loved sovereign, for he had all the qualities that attract popularity--a handsome person, pleasant and affable manners, a fluent tongue, and an energy that contrasted most happily with the listless indolence of his miserable father. It was many years before the world discovered that he was selfish, thriftless, reckless of his country's needs, and set on gratifying his personal ambition and love of warlike feats to the sacrifice of every other consideration. He was a knight-errant of the type of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, not a statesman and warrior like his grandfather Edward I. In his later years his faculties showed a premature decay, and he fell into the hands of favourites, male and female, who were almost as offensive as the Gavestons and Despensers of the previous generation. Edward's reign falls into three well-marked periods: the first, 1330-39, is that of his Scottish wars; the second, 1339-60, is that in which he began the famous and unhappy "Hundred Years' War" with France, and himself conducted it up to the brilliant but unwise Peace of Bretigny; the third, 1360-77, that of his declining years, is a time of trouble and misgovernment gradually increasing till Edward sank unregretted into his grave. [Sidenote: =War with Scotland.--Battle of Halidon Hill.=]