On or about 28 August 1556 a young Englishman, with his hawk on his wrist, took a gondola out of Venice hoping to enjoy a day’s sport among the islands. But the bad luck which had dogged Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, throughout his life pursued him even across the Venetian lagoon. A violent squall of wind and rain caught him on the tiny, shelterless island of Lio and the young man in his light summer clothes was quickly soaked to the skin. A gondola was useless in such conditions, and the Earl and his party were fortunate to be picked up by a Venetian naval craft cruising in the area.
Edward Courtenay was travelling abroad at his sovereign’s command rather than his own inclination. He took no part in the social round of Venice, keeping himself resolutely to himself and admitting to his friendship only a small group of those gentlemen eager to make much of the romantic English milord. Five days after his adventure on the lagoon, which had brought on an attack of malaria, the Earl of Devonshire had a fall on the stairs of his house and decided to move to Padua. The University of Padua was famous for its medical school, and an invalid could expect to receive the most up-to-date treatment from the city’s doctors.
Most people travelled the twenty-five miles from Venice by water, patronising horse-drawn barges which plied up and down the River Brenta. But Edward Courtenay, either from obstinacy or impatience, ‘took the worst way and came by a certain waggons called coches’ – a form of transport which, in the opinion of Peter Vannes, Queen Mary’s agent in Venice, was ‘very shaking and uneasy’. Vannes was himself temporarily resident in Padua to avoid the plague which reigned in Venice during the summer months. News of the Earl of Devonshire’s arrival reached him late on Saturday night, and next morning he hastened to pay his respects to the distinguished visitor. Vannes found the Earl very weak and feverish after his uncomfortable journey, and although two of the best available physicians were summoned to his bedside his condition deteriorated rapidly. The last representative of the old royal house of England, whose grandmother had been a Plantagenet princess, lay alone in his lodgings, gripped by ‘a continual great hot ague’, nursed only by his servants, too ill to see anyone but Peter Vannes and the Italian doctors.
The end came on 18 September. Vannes reported that he believed the Earl of Devonshire had died a good Christian who could hope for God’s mercy. He had listened meekly to spiritual exhortation, lifted up his eyes and knocked himself on the breast in token of repentance of his sins; but by this time ‘his tongue had so stopt his mouth, and his teeth so cloven together’, that he had been unable to receive the sacrament.1
Knowing that news of Edward Courtenay’s death would come as a considerable relief to at least one European power and as a serious disappointment to another, Peter Vannes took the precaution of securing sworn statements from the Earl’s servants, from the physicians who had attended him and the surgeons who had carried out the post-mortem examination that to the best of their knowledge he had died from natural causes.2 Vannes was also saddled with the responsibility of making the funeral arrangements, which he hoped to contrive ‘with as much sparing and as much honour as can be done’. In the event, there was more sparing than honour. Vannes was currently suffering from such an acute attack of penury – the chronic affliction of sixteenth-century ambassadors – that he described himself as being ‘next door to going a-begging’, and Mary Tudor proved unresponsive to suggestions that she should pay for the obsequies of a kinsman she had small reason to regret.3
Half a century later, an English tourist exploring St Anthony’s Church in Padua was deeply shocked when a plain wooden coffin containing the mortal remains of Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire, was pointed out to him stacked casually in the cloister and ‘having neither epitaph nor any other thing to preserve it from oblivion.’4 It was then five years since the House of Tudor had followed the House of Plantagenet off the stage, and the name of Edward Courtenay had long since been forgotten. Worthy Thomas Coryat, gazing on the sight of a noble Englishman so ignobly buried, was struck by compassion and remorse. He was not aware that he was also looking at the last resting-place of a man who, as the predestined bridegroom of Elizabeth Tudor, might so easily have altered the whole course of English history.