Cecily was the youngest of her father's twenty-two children and would give birth to twelve of her own. Thirty-three years after giving birth to her youngest son, she had outlived her husband, all her sons, and the dynasty they had built.
Less than a year earlier, Elizabeth Woodville had entered a great church as the pregnant wife of a deposed king seeking sanctuary. On 28 September 1471, the monks of Canterbury Cathedral came to the door to receive her as queen.
Parliament declared her dead in 1474. She was forty-seven years old, in good health, and had approximately eighteen more years to live. The act required no evidence of death because her death was not the point. Her estates were the point. She was simply in the way of them.
561 Years ago today.. On the twenty-sixth of May 1465, Elizabeth Woodville was crowned Queen of England at Westminster Abbey, precisely one year after a marriage the court had not been told about until four months after it happened.
He was a prince of the blood in a dynasty that had no use for princes of the blood who were not the king. His brother wore the crown. He carried the blood. He spent his entire life trying to close the distance between those two facts. He never came close.
In the summer of 1470 Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, knelt before Margaret of Anjou in a French court and asked for her help. She had been waiting nine years for someone with an army. He was the man who had made that wait necessary. They both understood what the meeting was. They did it anyway.
She gave birth on a ship off Calais in April 1470. The captain had refused to let them land. Her father was negotiating. The baby did not survive. The negotiations did.
Her father sold her to the enemy to settle a political debt. The enemy's son was dead within a year. The man she married next may have been in the room when it happened.
She fought for his crown harder than he ever did. He was buried in an unmarked grave. She was ransomed like cargo and sent back to France to die in poverty.