THE DAILY BRITISH WHIG

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 1908

PAGE SEVEN.

 

SELLING TO TENANTS

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SOME OF HIS COUNTY LIMERICK PROPERTY

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What Lord Devon is Doing Owing to Straightened Circumstances — A History of the House.

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     Lord Devon is at the present moment engaged in taking advantage of the Irish Land Act to sell to his tenants some 35,000 acres of his property in County Limerick, which have belonged to his family since the days of Queen Elizabeth, when the Desmonds, to whom the property belonged, were despoiled thereof by the Courtenays, of whom the Earl of Devon is the chief. He is getting rid of everything in Limerick excepting the castle and park known as Newcastle West. This sale will have the effect of putting the Earldom of Devon once more upon its feet in a financial sense. For owing to straightened circumstances, due to the insane extravagance of the 12th Earl, who was twice bankrupted, both the 13th Earl and his grandson, the present peer, have been compelled to rent out their ancestral homes, which include Powderham Castle, near Exeter, and Walreddon Manor, near Tavistock, both in Devon. The late Earl, in fact, was dependent upon his stipend as a village rector, while his grandson, the present Lord Devon, after having served through the South African war, has been for a number of years past an inspector of the Government Board of Agriculture, an office which brings him in about $4,000 a year in salary. He is unmarried, 38 years of age, and very sensible. For when his father, the late Lord Courtenay, died during his grandfather’s lifetime, he declined to assume the courtesy title of “Lord,” and continued to style himself “Mr. Courtenay,” until the death of the old peer, and his own accession to the latter’s seat in the House of Lords left him no alternate but to assume the dignity of the Earl of Devon.

     His people, and especially his father, the late Lord Courtenay, were put to no end of trouble and annoyance some years ago by the friends of a swindler in this country, who passed himself off everywhere as Lord Courtenay, and who possessing well-bred manners and an aristocratic appearance, succeeded in borrowing large sums from people who entertained him here, which they subsequently endeavored to recover from poor, old Lord Devon, that is to say, the late Earl.

     The Courtenays are justly described as possessing the bluest blood in England. They carry back the history of their line to a time when even the Howards and Nevills were unknown, and have intermarried with many a royal house. From the reign of King Robert of France the Barons of Courtenay, a place about 60 miles south of Paris, were immediate vassals of the crown. The historian Gibbon, in the pages of whose works much will be found concerning them, describes them as having taken part in the earlier crusades, one of them actually conquering for himself a principality on the shores of the Euphrates, from which his son was disposed by the Turks. Reginald de Courtenay, the first to settle in England, had among other issue a daughter, Elizabeth, upon whom he bestowed all his French property, on her marrying Prince Peter of France, son of King Louis Le Gros. Prince Peter took the name of Courtenay upon his marriage, and their son marrying Yolande, daughter of that Baldwin, Count of Flanders, who was first of the Crusaders, or so called “Latin” emperors of Constantinople became a rule of the Byzantine empire in his turn, and was followed by three other Courtenay emperors before they were driven out of Constantinople by the Greeks, and the dynasty of the Palaeologus established on the Byzantine throne in their stead.

     The son of Reginald de Courtenay described above as having wedded his daughter to Prince Peter of France, the progenitor of the Latin Emperors of Constantinople, was married by King Henry II of England to a great Devon heiress, and was created Viscount of Devon, Governor of the Castle of Exeter, and Lord of Oakhampton. The Hugh de Courtenay and Lord of Oakhampton of the reign of King Edward III was created Earl of Devonshire by that monarch, and the second earl married a granddaughter of Edward I, greatly distinguished himself at the battle of Crecy, and was one of the founder Knights of the Order of the Garter. At the outbreak of the War of the Roses, the Courtenays sided with the Lancastrians. The sixth-earl of Devon was beheaded by Edward IV after the battle of Towton. The seventh earl was beheaded at Salisbury, and the eighth earl, as well as his cousin and heir, fell at the battle of Tewksbury. The ninth earl married Catherine Plantaganet, daughter of King Edward IV. His son was promoted to the Marquisate of Exeter, but incurred the ill will of Henry VIII, who sent him to the scaffold and attainted his honors. He left a son, Edward, who remained in prison throughout the reign of Edward VI, but who was restored to liberty and created Earl of Devon by Queen Mary. Falling in love with her sister, Princess Elizabeth, and discovered in a conspiracy to place her upon the throne in the place of her sister, with himself as King Consort, he was consigned to the Tower, and only escaped decapitation through the intervention of King Philip of Spain, through whose influence on the occasion of his marriage to Queen Mary he was likewise restored to liberty. Mary banished him to the continent, warning him of vengeance if ever again he associated with her enemies; Presumably he failed to comply with this injunction, for some years later this nobleman, whose character has been pretty well depicted by Tennyson in his “Queen Mary.”, was poisoned, at Padua, by agents of the English government. As he left no issue, the Earldom of Devon was supposed to have become extinct.

    But in 1831, that is to say, 275 years later, the earldom was claimed by William Courtenay, third Viscount Courtenay, of Powderham Castle, near Exeter, on the ground that in the patent creating the Earldom of Devon, in 1553 by Queen Mary, the words “de corpora suo” had been for some reason or other omitted; consequently that the inheritance of the peerage was not restricted to the heirs of the body of the nobleman upon whom the earldom had been bestowed, but extended to his collaterals. The recovery of a peerage in such a fashion, and by virtue of such an omission, is unique in the annals of the English aristocracy. For although the present Earl of Devon sits in the House of Lords by virtue of the earldom bestowed by Queen Mary upon Edward Courtenay, who died at Padua without issue, he is obliged to go back to early in the 14th century to establish his connection as a collateral to Queen Mary’s Earl of Devon, being descended from Sir Philip Courtenay of Powderham Castle, one of the youngest sons of the Earl of Devon of the reign of King Edward III, whom I mention above as having been one of the founder Knights of the Garter, but whose earldom was extinguished by attainder under Henry VIII. – Marquise De Fontenoy