When at last they were able to sail again, they were sixteen days and nights making a voyage that usually took twelve hours. After landing, they repaired to an abbey, where they were celebrating Easter when the dreadful news came of the death of Warwick and the recapture of King Henry.
For the first time in her life the poor queen was completely crushed, and wished she might die rather than live for the misery that was yet in store for her. Some of the Lancastrian nobles sought her out, and expressed their intention of continuing the fight against Edward IV., and at last so aroused her from the despondent state into which she had fallen that she consented to aid them. Placing herself at the head of an army that they had raised, she marched thirty-seven miles in one day, and met her enemy within a mile of Tewksbury.
When all arrangements were made for the battle, Margaret rode about the field from rank to rank, encouraging the soldiers with promises of large rewards if they won the victory. It proved a sorry day for the Lancaster cause, and when Queen Margaret saw her troops wofully defeated she fell down in a swoon. She was carried from the battlefield to a small convent near by, where her daughter-in-law and some of her ladies awaited her. She was thus spared witnessing the fall of her son, who was killed near the close of the battle; but when the dreadful truth was brought to her, she cursed King Edward and all his posterity in her agony of grief.
When this was repeated to the king, he thought of putting her to death, but with a refinement of cruelty that was even worse, he forced her and the unfortunate Princess of Wales to take part in his triumphal entry to London. Margaret was then shut up in the dismal prison where her husband had been for five years, but she beheld him never again, for he was murdered the very night of her arrival in the gloomy fortress of the Tower.
King René sacrificed his inheritance of Provence to Louis XI. for the liberation of his daughter Margaret. Then an agreement having been made between the Kings of France and England for her ransom, in August, 1475, she landed in France, with three ladies and seven gentlemen sent by her father to escort her. Thirty years before she had left the shores of her native land a monarch's bride in all the pride and flush of youthful beauty; she returned a broken-hearted, childless widow, for whose afflictions it was treason to shed a tear.
"Ambition, pride, the rival names
Of York and Lancaster,
With all their long-contested claims,
What were they then to her?"
A.D. 1479. She died in the fifty-first year of her age, and was buried in the Cathedral of Angers, in the same tomb with her royal parents.