Cecily Neville, Duchess of York was born (or at least Christened) on 3 May 1415.
Her father was Ralph Neville, 1st Earl of Westmorland and her mother, Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland, was the granddaughter of John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster and Katherine Swynford. Thus Cecily was the great-granddaughter of King Edward III.
She was the youngest of Westmorland’s 22 children (8 by his first wife, and 14 by his second wife). All of Westmorland’s children made good marriages (or went into the church), and the earl was determined that his final child should do as well. When Cecily was not quite 10 years old she was precontracted to her father’s ward, Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York.
Cecily’s groom was a cousin; he was also the great-grandchild of King Edward III. However, he was related to that great king on both sides of his parentage in multiple ways. York’s mother, Anne de Mortimer, was the great-granddaughter of Edward III’s second surviving son, Lionel of Antwerp. On his father’s side the duke was the grandson of Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York the fourth surviving son of King Edward III.
The couple wouldn’t marry until 1429, and they must have been discouraged from consummating the union until Cecily was in her late teens because she didn’t have her first child until August 1439. She would eventually give the duke a dozen children, although five of them would die as infants. Of her surviving offspring, 4 were strong sons – Edward, Edmund, George, and Richard. Alas, she would live to see all of her boys perish when her husband decided to try to take the crown for himself and launched the Wars of the Roses.
Seriously, if you think Game of Thrones is rough you don’t even want to look at medieval history. Cecily Neville, Duchess of York, would lose even more of her loved ones than Catelyn Tully Stark. Cecily lost her husband and son Edmund to the forces of King Henry VI in 1460, her son Edward was crowned but would kill Cecily’s nephew Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, in 1471 as well as his own brother George in 1478 before dying of natural causes in 1483. Only her son Richard was left alive, and he probably killed her grandsons, King Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, to take the throne for himself. As King Richard III, his only son died of natural causes, as did his wife, Cecily’s grandniece, Lady Anne Neville, of whom Cecily seemed fond.
And it got worse from there.
First, King Richard III was killed by his cousin, Henry Tudor, in 1485. (Cecily Neville was 1st cousins with future King Henry VII’s maternal grandfather, John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset. The Wars of the Roses might as well be called the Wars of the Cousins.) Then her eldest daughter, Anne of York, died of natural causes in 1476.
The newly crowned King Henry VII married Cecily’s granddaughter, Elizabeth of York, but killed another of her grandchildren — John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, the eldest son of her daughter Elizabeth of York, Duchess of Suffolk, – in 1487 when Lincoln rebelled and sought the crown for himself.
By the time Cecily Neville passed away on 31 May 1495 only two of her children – her daughter the Duchess of Suffolk and her daughter Margaret of York, Duchess of Burgundy – were left alive. Furthermore, most of Cecily’s male grandchildren had been slaughtered by their own relatives. Death could have only come as a relief and a blessed cessation of sorrow.
The bloodshed among cousins wouldn’t stop after Cecily Neville’s death, though. In 1499 Henry VII killed Cecily’s grandson Edward Plantagenet, 17th Earl of Warwick, the very last of the Yorkist male heirs. Cecily’s great-grandson, King Henry VIII, would kill her grandson Edmund de la Pole in 1513, and her grandson Richard de la Pole would be killed on a French battlefield in 1525. Cecily’s final grandson — William de la Pole – would die a prisoner of Henry VIII in 1539. Henry VIII would also kill her granddaughter, Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, in 1541. The king had already killed Margaret’s son – fellow great-grandson’s of Cecily Neville – Henry Pole, 1st Baron Montague, in 1539 and another of Cecily’s great-grandsons, Henry Courtenay, 1st Marquess of Exeter, in 1538.
Ironically, because Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, was also a great-granddaughter of Cecily Neville, the Duchess of York’s descendants still sit on the throne today. Queen Elizabeth II is a direct descendant of Margaret Tudor – and thus of Cecily Neville.
