Thomas Courtenay, 6th Earl of Devon

Thomas Courtenay, 6th/14th Earl of Devon (1432 – 3 April 1461), was the eldest son of Thomas de Courtenay, 5th/13th Earl of Devon, by his wife Margaret Beaufort, the daughter of John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset, and Margaret Holland, daughter of Thomas Holland, 2nd Earl of Kent. Through his mother he was a great-grandson of King Edward III. The ordinal number given to the early Courtenay Earls of Devon depends on whether the earldom is deemed a new creation by the letters patent granted 22 February 1334/5 or whether it is deemed a restitution of the old dignity of the de Redvers family. Authorities differ in their opinions, and thus alternative ordinal numbers exist, given here.

Courtenay was born in 1432, the eldest son and heir of Thomas Courtenay, 13th Earl of Devon, by Margaret Beaufort. He had two brothers and five sisters:

Thomas Courtenay was 26 years old when his father died on 3 February 1458. The Courtenay family were among the greatest magnates of the south-west, particularly in Devon, where they had their greatest concentration of estates and dominated a tightly-knit affinity among the local gentry. In the mid-fifteenth century their local supremacy had been challenged by William, Lord Bonville, leading to a violent feud which culminated in Bonville's defeat by Thomas's father at Clyst Heath in 1455. That Earl, frequently in trouble with the law for his violent behaviour, had been among the closest allies of the disaffected Richard of York in the early 1450s, but a wedge was driven between York and the Courtenays when Bonville became a client of the leading Yorkist magnate Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.

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