Cecily of York - Later Life

Later Life

Cecily lived out the balance of her life quietly, far from court. In the royal account books, there is a gap in the record of her final years. Existing details about her final years in this last marriage are scanty and conflicting. Two children, Richard and Margaret (or Margery) are mentioned in the enhanced copy, dated 1602, of the heraldic Visitation of Hampshire (1576) made by Smythe, Rouge Dragon pursuivant at the College of Arms, indicating that they lived, married, and had offspring. The children of the princess and her last husband were granted no royal titles or styles, nor did they enjoy any royal favours, lands, or positions at court, nor, indeed, any public recognition whatsoever. Over the centuries, any memory of them has been obscured, and thus the veracity their historical existence is now difficult to substantiate.

Princess Cecily died in 1507, at the age of 38, only a few years after contracting her last marriage. She lived at East Standen in the Isle of Wight, not in great wealth.

According to Edward Hall's Chronicle, she was buried in relative obscurity in Quarr Abbey, Isle of Wight. Horrox disputes this pointing to evidence from the Beaufort account books that states she died at Hatfield, Hertfordshire, after a three-week sojourn there, and was buried at a place that must have been local, known as "the friars" (perhaps the friary at Kings Langley, associated with the House of York and where Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York was buried). The writ of diem clausit extremum, which supplies her death date, styles her as "late wife of John, late Viscount Wells", omitting any reference to her last husband or their children. If she was indeed buried in the precincts of Quarr Abbey, near her last home, then Cecily's tomb and any record of its precise location was lost when Quarr Abbey was destroyed during the Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries. Quarr's building materials were reused.

A stained glass portrait of Cecily, originally from a larger "royal window" depicting Edward IV's family is in the north transept of Canterbury Cathedral, and another stained panel is now in Glasgow's Burrell Collection. These are, along with another window in the parish church of Little Malvern, Worcestershire, her only surviving memorials.