Cecily Neville
1415 – 1495 · Generation XIX
Cecily Neville (1415–1495). Married Richard of York in 1429. 2 of their children are recorded in this archive. Mother of Edward IV and Richard III, grandmother of the Tudor queen consort. Born at Raby Castle, the youngest of the twenty-two children of Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, and Joan Beaufort, she was betrothed at eight to her father’s ward Richard, Duke of York, and followed him to Rouen, where Edward IV was born in 1442; in all she bore twelve children. When parliament debated her husband’s fate in 1459 she went to London to plead his cause, then lost him, her son Edmund and her brother Salisbury at Wakefield in 1460, and sent her youngest boys, George and Richard, to safety in Burgundy. She tried repeatedly to reconcile Edward and George, outlived her husband and all her sons, and gave her last years to a piety that became her reputation. She was buried at Fotheringhay beside her husband. The name “Rose of Raby” later given her has no historical basis; it first appears in a late-eighteenth-century novel.
Place in the family
- Cecily Neville was a great-grandmother of King Henry VIII.
- The archive records 121 of her descendants, across 21 generations.
Line of descent: King William I The Conqueror → King Henry I → Matilda the Empress → King Henry II → King John → King Henry III → King Edward I Longshanks → King Edward II → King Edward III → John of Gaunt → Joan Beaufort → Cecily Neville.
Parents
- Ralph Neville (1364 – 1425)
- Joan Beaufort (1379 – 1440)
Partners
- Married Richard of York (1411 – 1460) in 1429 — 2 children together
Children
- King Edward IV (1442 – 1483)
- King Richard III (1452 – 1485)
Life
- 1415 — Born
- 1429 — Married Richard of York
- 1495 — Died