Leaving Bruges with her son, Margaret was escorted to Barr with all the honor due to the royal rank. At Barr, the exiled queen was met and welcomed by her father, King René, who gave her an old castle in Verdun as a residence till better days should come. Thither Margaret went to establish her little court; and thither, to be educated in the accomplishments in fashion at the period, she carried the young prince around whom all her hopes now clustered.
Two hundred Lancastrians of name and reputation shared the exile of Margaret of Anjou. Among these were Lord Kendal, a Gascon; the Bishop of St. Asaph, the young Lord De Roos and his kinsman, Sir Henry; John Courtenay, younger brother of Devon's Earl; Edmund Beaufort, the new Duke of Somerset, and his brother John, whom the Lancastrians called Marquis of Dorset; Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter—always, notwithstanding his relationship to Edward, faithful to the Red Rose; Jasper Tudor, who clung to Lancaster as if with a prophetic notion that with the fortunes of the house were associated those of his own family; John Morton, Parson of Blokesworth, whose talents subsequently made him a cardinal and an archbishop; and Sir John Fortescue, Chief Justice of England, one of the most upright judges who ever wore the ermine. Such men, when the fortunes of the house of Lancaster were at their worst, were prepared to suffer poverty and want in Henry's cause.
The banished queen could ill brook the obscurity of Verdun. It soon appeared that, notwithstanding so many disheartening reverses, Margaret retained her courage unimpaired; and that want, disappointment, mortification, had been unable to break her spirit or conquer her ambition. Hardly had the court of the exiles been formed at Verdun, when the queen renewed her efforts to regain the crown which she had already found so thorny.
At that time Alphonso the Fifth reigned in Portugal; and Portugal was rich, owing to the quantity of gold yearly brought from Guinea. Moreover, King Alphonso was a remarkable man. In his fiery nature were blended all the elements of love, chivalry, and religion; and though living in the fifteenth century he resembled a paladin of the age of Roland and Oliver. Through his grandmother, Philippa of Lancaster, Alphonso inherited the blood of John of Gaunt; and it was supposed that he would naturally feel much of that sympathy for the house of Lancaster which had been ever expressed by the Count of Charolois.
Accordingly, Margaret turned her eyes toward Portugal for aid, and employed John Butler, Earl of Ormond, to enlist Alphonso in her cause. Ormond, who, upon the execution of his brother, the Earl of Wiltshire, after Towton, had become the chief of the Butlers, was one of the most accomplished gentlemen of his age, and a master of the various languages then spoken in Europe. No fitter embassador could have been found; but he was not successful. In fact, although Alphonso was all his life engaged in chimerical enterprises, he could hardly have indulged in the delusion of being able to wrest a crown from Edward Plantagenet and Richard Neville. Not even that knight-errant would risk reputation against such odds. At all events the negotiation appears to have come to naught; and Ormond, doubtless, convinced that the fortunes of Lancaster were hopeless, returned to England, and made his submission. Edward restored the accomplished nobleman to the honors and estates of the Butlers, with a complimentary remark. "If good-breeding and liberal qualities," said the king, "were lost in all the world, they would still be found in the Earl of Ormond."
About the time when Ormond's mission failed, Margaret received intelligence that her husband had fallen into the hands of her enemies. Finding, perhaps, that Scottish hospitality was hard to bear, Henry, about a year after Hexham, removed to the north of England, and in July, 1465, while sitting at dinner in Waddington Hall, he was seized by Sir John Harrington, and sent prisoner to London. At Islington the captive king was met by Warwick, who lodged him securely in the Tower; and Henry, treated with humanity, forgot, in the practice of a monkish devotion, the crown he had lost and the world he had left.
The captivity of their king was not the only misfortune which, at this period, befell the Lancastrians. In 1467, Harleck Castle, their last strong-hold, was under the necessity of yielding. Davydd ap Jefan ap Einion held out to the last; but when the garrison was on the point of starvation, the brave Welsh captain listened to the dictates of humanity, and surrendered with honor.
Even after the fall of Harleck, Margaret's high spirit sustained her hopes. In 1467, she is understood to have come to London, disguised as a priest, to rouse her partisans to action, and even to have had an interview with her husband in the Tower. Next year she sent Jasper Tudor to Wales; and he laid siege to Denbigh. King Edward himself was in the castle, and the utmost peril of being taken prisoner. He contrived to escape, however; and the fortress surrendered. But a Yorkist named William Herbert went with an army, and inflicted such a defeat on Jasper that he was fain to escape to the Continent. Nevertheless, in October, Margaret lay at Harfleur threatening an invasion. Edward, however, sent his brother-in-law, Anthony Woodville, who now, in right of his wife, figured as Lord Scales, to attack the fleet of his old patroness; and the exiled queen, seeing no chance of success, abandoned her expedition in despair.
But even in despair Margaret could show herself heroic and sublime. Thus, when some of her Continental kinsfolk were, in a vulgar spirit, lamenting her unfortunate marriage, and describing her union with the unhappy Henry as the cause of all her misfortune, she raised her head with regal pride, and contemptuously rebuked their foolish talk. "On the day of my betrothal," exclaimed she, with poetic eloquence, "when I accepted the Rose of England, I knew that I must wear the rose entire and with all its thorns."