At Amboise Warwick met with a reception which must have been gratifying to his pride. Louis was profuse of compliments and lavish of promises. The French king, however, took occasion to suggest to Warwick the expediency of finding some more adequate instrument than Clarence wherewith to work out his projects; and the English earl, bent on avenging England's injuries and his own, listened with patience, even when Louis proposed an alliance with Lancaster. Ere this Margaret was on the alert. When, in the autumn of 1469, the exiled queen learned that the house of York was divided against itself, and that the king and the king-maker were mortal foes, she left her retreat at Verdun, and, with her son, repaired to the French king at Tours. Thither, to renew their adhesion to the Red Rose, came, among other Lancastrians, Jasper Tudor, Earl of Pembroke, who had been wandering over Europe like a vagabond, and Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, and Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, with his brother John, who, since the rout of Hexham, had been lurking in Flanders, concealing their names and quality, and suffering all those inconveniences that arise from the ill-assorted union of pride and poverty. A man bearing a nobler name, and gifted with a higher intellect than Tudors, Hollands, or Beauforts, now joined the Lancastrian exiles. It was John De Vere, Earl of Oxford. At the beginning of the contentions of York and Lancaster, the De Veres naturally took part against the misleaders of the monk-monarch, and as late, at least, as 1455, John, twelfth Earl of Oxford, was a friend of the duke. Oxford, however, was not prepared for a transfer of the crown; and when the dispute assumed the form of a dynastic war, he took the losing side, and in 1461 was beheaded on Tower Hill, with his eldest son, Aubrey. At the time of the old earl's execution, his second son, John, was twenty-three; and, being husband of Margaret Neville, the sister of Warwick, he was allowed to remain undisturbed in England, to bear the title of Oxford, and, without taking any part in politics, to maintain feudal state at Wyvenhoe and Castle Hedlingham. Oxford, however, was "linked in the closest friendship with Warwick;" and when the Yorkist king shook off the influence of "The Stout Earl," England was no longer a place of safety for the chief of the De Veres. In 1470 Oxford followed his great brother-in-law to France, hoping, perhaps, to mediate between Warwick and the Lancastrian queen who had ever hated the earl as her mightiest foe. At this period Margaret of Anjou had seen forty summers, and, doubtless, felt somewhat less strongly than in earlier days the ambition which had animated her before Wakefield and Hexham. But the Prince of Wales was now in his eighteenth year, and, inspired by maternal love, she was ready, in order to regain the crown for him, to brave new dangers and endure fresh hardships.