Lancaster, lived for some time in exile, and was in such poverty, as to be obliged to beg his bread, and in 1473, his corpse was found stripped naked, on the seashore, near Dover; her two grandsons, King Edward V. and Richard Duke of York, are believed to have been murdered {195a} in the Tower of London, in 1483; her son-in-law, Sir Thomas St. Ledger, who married Anne, widow of Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter, was executed in 1483, at Exeter, and attainted for treason, in joining the unsuccessful rebellion of Henry Stafford, Duke of Buckingham; and the latter, who was her great-nephew, being the grandson of her sister, Anne Neville, being deserted by his forces, and betrayed, was, about the same time, taken prisoner and beheaded; her grandson, Edward Prince of Wales, son of King Richard III. and of her great niece, Queen Anne, through whom she naturally expected the honour of being the ancestress of a line of English Monarchs, died in 1484; and the childless Queen, his mother, a few months afterwards, followed him to the tomb; her youngest son, King Richard III., was slain at the battle of Bosworth, in 1485; and her grandson, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, perished in 1487, at the battle of Stoke. {196a} She died in 1495; {196b} after three princes descended from her, had succeeded to the crown of England, without taking into the account her grand-daughter, Elizabeth, Queen of Henry VII., and more than one had been murdered; and, by her death, was saved the additional affliction of the loss of her grandson, Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, the last male of the House of Plantagenet, who was tyrannically and wickedly put to death, in 1499, by Henry VII. On a reference to the following Pedigrees, although they only give some portions of the descents and alliances of the illustrious Houses of Plantagenet and Neville, the reader will observe the degree of consanguinity or connection in which each of the before-mentioned distinguished but unfortunate personages stood, with reference to Cecily Duchess of York. It would be foreign to the object of this work, and would be an undertaking of great labour and difficulty, to give on a more extensive scale, the pedigrees of either of those Houses. After perusing such a list of frightful calamities, occurring in the lifetime of a single individual, to the members of her own family, the reader may rejoice in living in a civilized age, under the mild and gentle sway of a Sovereign of the House of Brunswick, and may well exclaim of the Duchess of York, in the language of Voltaire, whilst narrating the misfortunes of the Royal House of Stuart:—“Il n’y a pas d’exemple sur la terre d’une suite de calamités, aussi singulières et aussi horribles, que celles qui avaient affligé toute sa maison.” “Que les hommes privés, qui se plaignent de leur petites infortunes, jettent les yeux sur ce prince, et sur ses ancêtres.” {197} [Picture: Pedigree No. 1: King Edward III.]