There the later part of Lydgate's life seems to have been spent. On 22 April 1439 he was granted a pension of ten marks from the customs of Ipswich (Pat. Roll. 17 Henry VI, p. 1, m. 7), and a sum of 6l. 4s. 5¼d. was accordingly paid him by the collectors of customs at the Easter following. On 7 May 1440 the king substituted for this payment an annual pension of 7l. 13s. 4d., to be paid out of the proceeds of the farm of Waytefee, and Lydgate received half the amount at Michaelmas of the same year. Legal difficulties touching the letters patent arose in the next year, and Lydgate petitioned the king (14 Nov. 1441) to direct the issue of new letters patent in which the same pension should be conferred jointly on himself and John Baret (d. 1467), the treasurer of Bury monastery. The request was complied with a week later; extant accounts of the sheriffs of Norfolk show that the pension was duly paid until Michaelmas 1449. An extant receipt, in the Bodleian Library, by Baret alone for half the sum is dated 2 Oct. 1446 (cf. Secreta Secretorum, ed. Steele, Early English Text Soc., and Anglia, iii. 532, by Zupitza).
In 1439, at the request of John Whethamstede, abbot of St. Albans, Lydgate had translated into English metre a Latin ‘Life of St. Alban’ [No. 10 below], and he was paid 3l. 6s. 8d. for his work (Amundesham, Annales Monast. S. Albani, ii. 256, Rolls Ser.) The abbot paid a hundred shillings for translating, copying, and illuminating the manuscript, which was placed before the altar of the saint. Lydgate celebrated miracles wrought at St. Edmund's shrine in 1441 and 1444, and he was ‘charged in his oold dayes’ by Abbot Curteys to make an English metrical translation of the ‘De Profundis,’ to be hung on the walls of the abbey church (cf. Laud. Misc. MS. 682, f. 8, and Harl. MS. 2255, No. 11). He still continued writing court poems, and described in verse ‘the prospect of peace’ during the negotiations of 1443, and the truce of 1444 and the treaty of marriage between Henry VI and Margaret of Anjou. Both pieces are printed from Harleian MS. 2255 in Wright's ‘Political Poems,’ ii. 209, 215. Stowe, in his ‘Annals of England,’ 1615, p. 385, states that Lydgate made the verses for the pageants exhibited at Queen Margaret's entry into London in 1445. He wrote ‘A Ballad on presenting an Eagle to the King and Queen on the day of their Marriage’ (Halliwell, Minor Poems, p. 213; cf. Harl. MS. 2251). A poem on the ‘Nightingale,’ in Cotton. MS. Calig. A. II. ff. 59–64, is dedicated to Ann, wife of Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, whom he had already eulogised when Countess of Stafford. Lydgate there deplored the death (11 June 1445) of Henry de Beauchamp, duke of Warwick [q. v.], (cf. Hist. MSS. Comm. 2nd Rep. p. 80). The epitaph ascribed by Stowe to him on Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, proves that he was writing in 1447. Osbern Bokenam [q. v.], in his ‘Legend of St. Elizabeth,’ which was composed between 1443 and 1447, describes him as a living contemporary, in contrast with Gower and Chaucer, who were dead. He wrote his ‘Testament,’ declaring his readiness for death in his last years, and died while engaged in translating the ‘Secreta Secretorum,’ a treatise on the education of princes, into English verse. In Michaelmas 1449 he received the latest known payment of his pension. John Alcock [q. v.], bishop of Ely, asserts that Lydgate wrote a poem on the occasion of the final loss by the English of France and Gascony, which cannot be dated earlier than 1451. Alcock, who was born in 1430, speaks as though he knew Lydgate personally. Lydgate's death may therefore be conjecturally placed in 1451 (cf. Sermon on Luke viij., W. de Worde, 1496? unique copy in Peterborough Cathedral Library bound up with Alcock's ‘Mons Perfeccionis;’ Brydges, British Bibliographer, ii. 532).
Pits, while denying that he died in 1482, assigns the event to 1440, and many other dates have been suggested. The manuscripts of some of Lydgate's poems have been freely interpolated by later hands, and the additions at times deal with events subsequent to Henry VI's reign. On these unsafe grounds the poet's life has been extended into the reign of Edward IV, and even into that of Henry VII. Thus some versions of Lydgate's verses on English kings [No. 29 below] introduce Edward IV (Harl. MS. 2251. 3) and Henry VII (Brit. Mus. MS. Reg. 18, D. ii). The prologue of the ‘Life of St. Edmund’ is in one copy (Ashmol. MS. 46) accommodated to celebrate Henry VI's successor; and Edward IV's ‘Quene and Modir’ are commemorated in a poem assigned to Lydgate in Harleian MS. 2251. 9. f. 10.
Lydgate was doubtless buried in the Bury monastery. Two fragments of coarse, soft stone were found amid the ruins of the abbey in 1775, and one bore the name of Lydgate amid some undecipherable words (Archæologia, iv. 130). The following epitaph, written soon after his death, may have been the original inscription on his tomb (cf. Harl. MS. 116, f. 170):
Lidgate Cristolicon, Edmundum, Maro Britanus,
Boccasiousque viros psallit; et hic cinis est.
Hæc tria præcipua opera fecit:—vij libros de Christo; librum de vita Sancti Edmundi;
