of Yandemontc. Her father, King René, in reply to the epistle detailing her calamities and captivity, wrote, "May God help you, child ! and when you can for only a moment forget your own sufferings, I beseech you to think of mine—they are overwhelming ; and yet, dearest daughter, would I console you in your sore afflictions,1' From the Tower Margaret was removed to AVindsor, and, lastly, to YVallingford. Hero, through the kind influence of Elizabeth Woodville, Queen of Edward the Fourth, the rigour of her imprisonment was relaxed, and five marks a week was allowed for the maintenance of herself and her servants. King René, after straining every nerve, procured her liberation by ceding Provence for half its value to Louis the Eleventh, who, in August, agreed to pay fifty thousand crowns for her ransom. After a captivity of five years, the broken-hearted widow quitted Wallingford, and reached Dieppe in safety ; from Dieppe she was conducted to Rouen, resigned to the French ambassadors on the twenty-second of January, 1476, and five days afterwards she formally renounced all claim to the income and rights which, as Queen of England, ehe was entitled to. Henceforth the unfortunate Margaret lived in great retirement in one of her father's castles at Reculée. Joy was unknown to her ; she seldom smiled, and passed the greater part of her time in brooding over her misfortunes. At length, the agonies of mind wrought a fearful change in her person, and a scaly leprosy rendered the most beautiful of womankind a spectacle horrible to look upon. When her father died, in 1480, she sold any right which she possessed, or hereafter might possess, to any of his territories to the King of France, for an annual pension of six thousand livres. Shortly afterwards, she took up her abode at the Chateau of Damprierre, where, care-worn and heart-broken, she closed her career of trouble and misfortune in August, 1482. The place of her sepulchre was the grave of her parents in the Cathedral of Angers ; no tomb or tablet was erected to her memory, but her devotion and heroism can never be forgotten whilst the story of the bloody wars of the pale and the purple rose occupy a prominent place in the annals of England.