Was my ancestor Henry V’s gay lover?
The Earl of Devon has uncovered secrets in his family castle archive that explain why the king is buried with a man. Joe Shute reports
When Charles Courtenay was growing up as the heir apparent to the Earl of Devon, parts of his long and distinguished family history always remained unspoken.
First was the flamboyant William “Kitty” Courtenay, a renowned playboy of the 1780s exiled to France after being caught in bed with another man. Despite his portrait hanging in the music room in the family seat of Powderham Castle – he was only ever described as the “third viscount, rather than the ninth earl” and exiled for “financial reasons”.
“My father was ashamed of that story and never really told it,” recalls Charles Courtenay. “He was always slightly the black sheep.”
And then there was another blip on the records – a man who, in 1953, was discovered buried in the same grave as Henry V in the chapel of St Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey.
Richard Courtenay, known as “the flower of Devon”, was Henry V’s closest advisor who travelled out with him to France ahead of the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and died of dysentery in the royal tent while the English army laid siege to Harfleur. The king was so distraught that he bathed the dead man’s feet and ordered that he was to be buried alongside him, rather than his wife.
But despite Richard Courtenay’s role shaping English history, his ancestor Charles Courtenay knew nothing of him. It took until 2013 and a performance of Shakespeare’s Henry V (starring Jude Law) attended by Courtenay and his wife, the former
Baywatch actress Alison “A J” Langer. “She asked if we were involved in some way,” he says. “I started looking into it and, sure enough, Richard Courtenay came up. As a family, it was just a story we had never told before.”
Now Charles Courtenay, who became Earl of Devon in 2015 following the death of his father, has uncovered unseen documents in the family archive that historians have hailed as vitally important in filling in the blanks in one of England’s most enduring dynasties. More intriguingly, the new information adds further fuel to the suspicions that Henry V may have been gay.
“This shows a much softer guy who had real intimacies with other men and is buried with a man,” says the 41-year-old Earl. “I think that completely changes our understanding of Henry V and maybe our understanding of England, too.”
A strapping 6ft 5in, handsome, with a waft of breezy Californian inflecting his cut-glass accent from 10 years spent training as a lawyer in the US, the Earl of Devon projects something of the image of an outsider on the country estate where he grew up.
Indeed, he admits prior to his time in Los Angeles he struggled to talk about his background at all. “It’s difficult to make friends with people when you grew up in a castle,” he says. “In America, I learnt how to talk to people about it in a way so I didn’t feel embarrassed. Suddenly it made me think: ‘It is actually cool…’”
He did not even tell his wife (whom he met during a rugby club tour of Las Vegas) he lived in a castle until they were halfway down the drive to the vast Devon pile, which is surrounded by some 3,000 acres and towers over the River Exe.
They married in 2004, and again in 2005, followed by a blessing at Powderham and what he describes to me as “a strange shamanic ceremony in Ecuador”. Together, they have two children Joscelyn, 10, and Jack, seven, who is barefoot with surfer dude Californian long blond hair and clambers over his father’s shoulders as we chat in the estate office.
The family relocated to Devon in June 2015 to run the estate, which remains in probate following the death of the 18th Earl, at the age of 73, in August of that year.
Since taking up the reins, Charles Courtenay, who divides his time working as a barrister in London, has devoted himself to ploughing through the archives of the estate and uncovering its secrets.
The most significant find is the Courtenay Cartulary, a leather-bound and beautifully illustrated book documenting the family’s history from the time of William the Conqueror until well into the 15th century.
The book, which has never been seen in public before and forms the centre of a new exhibition at the castle that opens this week, had been in the possession of Sotheby’s after the auction house was asked in 2009 to trawl through the family archive to raise funds for repairs to the 14thcentury castle. When Sotheby’s telephoned asking if he would like it back, the Earl had no idea it existed.
According to Professor James Clark, an expert in medieval history at the University of Exeter who is translating the document, the cartulary helps piece together the early life of Richard Courtenay and his friendship with Henry V. As teenagers, they rose together through the court of Richard II, a place accused of being a hotbed of iniquity. “Homosexuality is a headline issue at the moment this friendship is forged between Richard and Henry,” Professor Clark says. “It’s an accusation that is being hurled at Richard II’s court. There is a lot of finger-pointing that something suspect is going on.”
Even from a young age, Courtenay was renowned for his intellect and striking looks. When he assumed the crown, Henry V appointed Courtenay as Bishop of Norwich and Keeper of the King’s Purse.
Professor Clark believes the king’s confidant was the person most responsible for the transformation of the fun-loving impetuous Prince Hal to wise and respected monarch at the age of 27. He says he mentored him into the role of a monarch and prior to his death helped to mastermind the Agincourt campaign. But the closeness of their relationship has been airbrushed from history.
“For generations of historians wedded to the idea of Henry V as a man of action, it was unwelcome to think that he may have learnt the art of kingship not on the battlefield,” he says, “but through a deep, affective and cerebral attachment to another man.”
Of course, the Earl admits, there is no way to prove their relationship went beyond bromance. All the same, there is a modern relevance to the findings. In 2008, his father provoked headlines and an angry backlash after banning all civil ceremonies at the castle to avoid the prospect of two men marrying there. The decision supposedly cost £200,000 in lost revenue, although the licence has since been restored.
“My dad was never comfortable with gay marriage,” Courtenay says. “I don’t think my dad was a bad man for it, just a man of his views and generation. I didn’t agree with him. That was his religious conviction and so he stood for it.”
Charles Courtenay chose to discuss the his father’s temporary ban in his eulogy to him, and he says it is an important part of the history of Powderham Castle. So too, of course, his attempts to reframe what he calls the family “shame around homosexuality”.
“I love this idea we as a nation can look back and say maybe intimate relationships between men wasn’t something that came to pass 30 years ago,” he says. “We’re not changing history, just readjusting our sights.”
‘My father was ashamed of the story – and never told it’