Ralph Neville, 4th Earl of Westmorland
English Earl

Ralph Neville, 4th Earl of Westmorland KG (21 February 1498 – 24 April 1549), was an English peer and soldier. He was the grandson of Ralph Neville, 3rd Earl of Westmorland, and the father of Henry Neville, 5th Earl of Westmorland.
Family
Ralph Neville, born 21 February 1498, was the son of Ralph Neville (d. 1498) and Edith Sandys (d. 22 August 1529), daughter of Sir William Sandys of the Vyne by Edith Cheyne, daughter of Sir John Cheyne. He was the grandson of Ralph Neville, 3rd Earl of Westmorland, and Isabel Booth.
Neville had a brother who died young, and a sister, Isabel, who married firstly, Sir Robert Plumpton, and secondly, Lawrence Kighley, Esq. Another sister, Cecilia, married John Weston and was the mother of Robert Weston.
After his father's death in 1498, Neville's mother, Edith, married Thomas Darcy, 1st Baron Darcy of Darcy, who was beheaded on Tower Hill 30 June 1537 for his part in the Pilgrimage of Grace. She died at Stepney on 22 August 1529, and was buried at the Friars Observant, Greenwich.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ralph Neville, 4th Earl of Westmorland” is english Earl. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Ralph, Neville and Earl, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7287908. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1498, 1549, 1529 and 1537.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ralph Neville, 4th Earl of Westmorland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.