Thomas Courtenay Fifth Earl of Devon

I’m still posting about the children of John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset and his wife Margaret Holland. This particular Margaret Beaufort was born sometime around 1409 and was the couple’s youngest daughter.

She was a little older than her husband Thomas Courtney, 5th Earl of Devon. The couple had five children of whom three were sons. All her sons managed to get themselves either killed or executed during the Wars of the Roses. The oldest son was executed in York following the Battle of Towton in 1461; Harry who did not inherit the earldom thanks to the act of Attainder against his brother was executed in 1469 whilst the youngest son John did inherit the title during the Lancastrian Readeption of 1470. Unfortunately this was a rather short lived Lancastrian period of power. John was killed the following year at the Battle of Tewkesbury which saw the Yorkists victorious.

This left two daughters – Joan and Elizabeth. Joan married Sir Roger Clifford – meaning that Hostspur was his grand father and Elizabeth Mortimer, the daughter of the 3rd Earl of March was his maternal grandmother. Put simply yet another cousin. Clifford’s father had been killed at the Battle of St Albans and his father is better known to history as BlackFaced Clifford who swore vengeance on his father’s killers and was himself killed at Ferrybridge in 1461. Roger followed the Lancastrians into Scotland in the aftermath of Towton. Along with his brother Robert he successfully recaptured Skipton Castle from the Yorkists in 1464 but the victory was only temporary. It became apparent that the House of York was in the ascendent- Robert and Roger came to an accommodation of sorts but then Edward IV died unexpectedly. The pair became involved with the Duke of Buckingham’s rebellion against Richard III in 1483 – more family connections remember. Robert managed to flee the country but Roger was captured and despite a mob attempting to free him he was ultimately executed in 1485 at the Tower of London.

Joan and Roger had a son called Charles and two daughters who fade into the gentry during the Tudor period.

Elizabeth Courtney married Sir Hugh Conway but there were no children from the union.

And that ladies and gentleman takes me as far through the descendants of John of Gaunt as I am going to venture at the moment. Once again it is clear that whilst the family were powerful that their daughters married into the country’s leading families. However, in time of trouble the cadet branches swiftly lost their prestige and married into gentry families meaning that the Plantagenet line becomes disguised.

My next post will return us to the remaining children of Edward III – Edmund of Langley who was created Duke of York in 1385 and married the sister of John of Gaunt’s second wife Constanza of Castile. Isabella of Castile had only three children but there is rather a lot of speculation about the legitimacy of her youngest son.

Weir, Alison. Britain’s Royal Families

Yorke, James. 1640 Union of Honour accessed from Google Books

The prelude to the Wars of the Roses and the wars themselves are notable by the role of a number of ambitious and dynastically important women who even managed to get their portraits painted in an age when it wasn’t done to waste paint on the female of the species. There are other women though, wives, mothers and sisters who were part of the Plantagenet tangle but who remain largely in the shadows – leaving modern observers to wonder what they felt about the feuds and wars that saw their families at one another’s throats – and of course to wonder what they looked like. Lady Margaret Beaufort is one such woman… not the mother of Henry Tudor – the aunt of the much more famous Lady Margaret Beaufort.

Our Lady Margaret Beaufort was born at the turn of the fifteenth century, the daughter of the First Earl of Somerset, John Beaufort. This means, that her paternal grandparents were John of Gaunt and Katherine Swynford. Her mother was Margaret Holland, a daughter of the Earl of Kent – so descended from King Edward I through his second wife and the niece of King Richard II.

She married Thomas Courtenay the Fifth Earl of Devon in 1421. Their son was Thomas Courtenay, the sixth Earl of Devon. He was executed in the aftermath of the Battle of Towton in April 1461 an attainted traitor. He was succeeded by his brother John who died in 1471.

Margaret’s husband contributing to the growing antoganism between the Houses of York and Lancaster during Richard, Duke of Lancaster’s first protectorate in 1453. He’d been conducting a feud with Lord Bonville which spread disorder through the southwest since he came of age. As you might expect, the feud was to do with territory and position – both of which required patronage. Despite his marriage to Margaret Beaufort he felt sidelined from his rightful position by Lord Bonville. Matters didn’t improve when Bonville married the Earl of Devon’s aunt nor indeed when Cardinal Beaufort died and the power at court transferred into the hands of the Duke of Suffolk (de la Pole) who Bonville looked to for support.

One thing led to another. The Earl of Devon, despite his marriage into the Beaufort, and therefore Lancaster clan – sidelined from the court party, found himself drawn ever closer to Richard, Duke of York who represented the opposition. Ultimately the Earl of Devon spent some time considering the error of his ways in Wallingford Castle – no doubt his wife uttered the immortal words ‘I told you so’…

The next problem for the Earl of Devon and his friendship with Richard of York was that Richard was drawn into an ever closer alliance with the Nevilles who in their own turn had their own alliances; one of which was with…you’ve guessed it – that pesky Lord Bonville. In fact Bonville’s son married one of Richard Neville’s (Earl of Salisbury) daughters. I wonder if the Earl of Devon gnashed his teeth and wailed when he thought about the way that events in distant London conspired to set him at a disadvantage against his enemy who seemed to have a knack of making important friends.

On the eve of the First Battle of St Albans it was the Earl of Devon who, despite his increasing alienation from York, who carried the Duke’s letters for him and handed them to the king.

As the kingdom unraveled into civil war things in Devon weren’t going any better between the Earl of Devon and Lord Bonville. A man was murdered, the Earl’s son Thomas was implicated. It was a national scandal reported in the Paston Letters. The Earl found himself in the Tower, not because of the murder, but after a nasty incident involving the citizens of Exeter. And that might have been that had it not been for Margaret of Anjou – one of those significant women of the Wars of the Roses- who became the Earl’s patroness; married his son and heir off to one of her own kinswomen, provided him with status and put Bonville in his place – ensuring that the earl was loyal to the Lancaster cause thereafter– something that Margaret Beaufort hadn’t been able to achieve during her marriage to the earl.

Margaret Beaufort’s husband died almost ten years after his wife at Abingdon Abbey in 1458 and was succeeded by his son who’d been cleared of the murder of Nicholas Radford.

It is thought that Margaret Courtenay nee Beaufort, Countess of Devon is buried in St Andrew’s Church Colyton. The effigy at the start of this blog was identified as belonging to Margaret by the Courtenay and Beaufort arms. So although we don’t know what the lady thought about the feuding which lasted throughout her life time we can hazard a guess as to what she looked like. Having said that, as you might expect, things aren’t quite as cut and dried as could be desired. The Courtenay Monument, as it is known, was named for Margaret Courtenay, the daughter of Princess Catherine, daughter of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville, who married Sir William Courtenay, the tenth Earl of Devon in 1495. The earl may have regretted his liaison with a Plantagenet sprig when his brother-in-law a.k.a. Henry VII hustled him and his son off to the Tower of London.