A royal birth, a royal death, and a well-deserved execution

March 20, 1469 was the date of birth of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville’s daughter Cecily. Here is what I wrote about Cecily for the new AN for the 30th anniversary edition of Sunne; it had to be edited out of the hardcover AN for Sunne because of space concerns, but the new e-book edition of Sunne in the UK and the US has the new AN in its entirety.
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We also know more about the life of Edward’s daughter Cecily, for since Sunne’s publication, it has been established that she wed Ralph Scrope in late 1484. He was the son of Thomas, Lord Scrope, but we know little about this brief marriage. Henry Tudor had it annulled upon becoming king so that he could marry her to his uncle, John, Viscount Welles. He was in his forties and Cecily only eighteen, but what little evidence there is suggests the marriage was a happy one. They had two daughters, both of whom died before the viscount’s death in 1499. Cecily had often been in attendance to her sister the queen, but in 1502, she made what had to be a love match with a man of much lesser status, a mere esquire, William Kyme. Tudor was furious, banishing her from court and confiscating her estates. But she had an unlikely champion in Tudor’s mother, Margaret Beaufort, who’d apparently become fond of Cecily, and she interceded with her son on Cecily’s behalf. After the death of her beloved sister, Elizabeth, in 1503, Cecily and her husband retired from the court and settled on the Isle of Wight. She and William had a son, Richard, born in 1505 and a daughter, Margaret, born in 1507. Since Cecily died on August 24, 1507, she may have died from the complications of childbirth. This marriage, too, appears to have been a happy one. I would like to think so, for this daughter of York, said by Sir Thomas More to have been “not so fortunate as fair,” had suffered more than her share of sorrow in her thirty-eight years.
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On March 20th, 1413, the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV, died. His health had deteriorated in the last years of his life and at one time, he apparently suffered from a disfiguring skin condition. Some claimed he’d been inflicted with leprosy as divine punishment for the execution of a prelate, the Archbishop of York, who’d taken part in a rebellion against Henry. But according to his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, his bones were examined in the 19th century and they concluded that he showed no signs of leprosy. I confess I wondered if 19th century science was advanced enough to draw such a conclusion, but I simply don’t know enough about Henry’s life to have a horse in that race. It had been predicted that he would die in Jerusalem, which must have discouraged him from taking part in any crusades, but he collapsed and died in the Jerusalem Chamber of the abbot of Westminster…..or so it is said. He is a major character in Brian Wainwright’s excellent novel Within the Fetterlock

Lastly, on March 20, 1549, Thomas Seymour was beheaded. Among his crimes was the suspicion that he’d seduced the young princess, Elizabeth. She was kept under close watch by hostile observers, and when they flung the news of his death at her, she responded with remarkable coolness, saying that “Today died a man of much wit, but little wisdom.” Of course by then she’d already learned one of life’s most painful lessons, that there was no one she dared trust.