Peter Vannes, the English resident at Venice, sent Queen Mary an interesting account of his death. At the time some discontented Englishmen in France were urging him to return and renew the struggle with Mary and Philip in England. His handsome face and figure were highly commended. Noailles, the French ambassador, styled him ‘le plus beau et plus agréable gentilhomme d'Angleterre,’ and Michel de Castelnau stated that ‘il estoit l'un des plus beaux entre les jeunes seigneurs de son age’ (Mémoires, p. 74). But his prison education had not endowed him with any marks of good breeding, and there can be no doubt that his release from his long confinement was followed by very dissolute conduct.
Courtenay employed some of his leisure in the Tower by translating into English from Italian a work entitled ‘Trattato utilissimo del Beneficio di Giesu Christo, crocifisso, verso i Christiani,’ written about 1543 by Antonio della Paglia, commonly called Aonio Paleario. It was deemed to be an apology for the reformed doctrines, and was proscribed in Italy. Courtenay translated it under the title of ‘The Benefit of Christ's Death’ in 1548, apparently with a view to conciliating Edward VI, and dedicated it to Anne Seymour, duchess of Somerset. The manuscript is now in the Cambridge University Library, to which it was presented in 1840, and contains two autographs of Edward VI. It was printed for the first time in 1856 by Mr. Churchill Babington in a volume which also contained reprints of the original Italian edition (1543) and of a French translation issued in 1551.
With Edward Courtenay the earldom of Devon or Devonshire in the family of Courtenay became dormant, but a collateral branch claimed the title in 1831, and the claim was allowed by the House of Lords. The title of Earl of Devon is now borne by William Reginald Courtenay of Powderham Castle, Exeter.
Dugdale's Baronage; Burke's Extinct and Dormant Peerage; Doyle's Official Baronage; Wriothesley's Chronicle (Camden Soc.); Chronicle of Queen Mary and Queen Jane (Camden Soc.); Machyn's Diary (Camden Soc.); Cal. State Papers (Dom.), 1547–80; Wood's Letters of Illustrious Ladies, vol. iii.; Froude's Hist.; Lingard's Hist.
COURTENAY, HENRY, Marquis of Exeter and Earl of Devonshire (1496?–1538), born about 1496, was son of Sir William Courtenay, by Princess Catharine, youngest daughter of Edward IV. His grandfather, Edward Courtenay, was on 26 Oct. 1485 created Earl of Devonshire by Henry VII; was granted at the same time very large estates in Devonshire; was made knight of the Garter in 1490; resisted Perkin Warbeck's attack on Exeter in 1497; and dying 1 March 1509, was buried at Tiverton. The earl was grandnephew of another Edward Courtenay, earl of Devonshire (1357–1419), earl marshal in 1385, but this earldom had been forfeited by Edward IV, in the person of Thomas Courtenay (great-grandson of the elder Edward Courtenay), who fought with the Lancastrians at Towton, and was slain at Tewkesbury (1461).
Henry Courtenay's father, Sir William Courtenay, was in high favour at the court of Henry VII in the lifetime of his wife's sister, Queen Elizabeth, and is praised for his bravery and manly bearing by Polydore Vergil. In 1487 he became knight of the Bath. There is a letter from him describing his father's and his own repulse of Warbeck at Exeter in Ellis's ‘Original Letters,’ 1st ser. i. 36. But on the queen's death in 1503, the king, fearing that Courtenay's near relationship to the throne might tempt him to conspiracy, committed him to the Tower on an obscure charge of corresponding with Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, the surviving chief of the Yorkist faction. Attainder followed. On Henry VIII's accession in 1509 he was released from prison, and carried the sword at his coronation. On 10 May 1511 he was allowed to succeed to his father's earldom; but the formalities for restoring him in blood were not completed before his death on 9 June 1511. He was buried in Blackfriars Church. His wife, the Princess Catharine, died 15 Nov. 1527, and was buried at Tiverton.
The boy Henry was treated kindly by his first cousin, Henry VIII; was allowed to succeed to his father's earldom in 1511, and the attainder was formally removed in the following year. He took part in the naval campaign with France in 1513, when about seventeen years old, as second captain of a man-of-war, and in 1520 was made both a privy councillor (May) and gentleman of the privy chamber (July). On 15 April 1521 he was created K.G. in the place of the Duke of Buckingham, who was tried and convicted of treason in May of the same year, and the lordship of Caliland, Cornwall, together with a mansion in St. Lawrence Pountney, formerly Buckingham's property, was conferred on him at the same time. Courtenay attended Henry VIII at Calais, at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, in 1521, and took part in the tournaments. The keepership of Birling manor, the stewardries of Winkeley, Gloucestershire, and of the duchies of Exeter, Somerset, and Cornwall
