Exile and Death of Edward Courtenay, 1555–1556

Edward Courtenay had spent much of his youth in the Tower because of his family’s Plantagenet descent. Mary I released him in 1553 and created him Earl of Devon, but his royal blood made him a possible husband for either Mary or Elizabeth and a focus for opponents of the queen’s Spanish marriage.

Courtenay was imprisoned again after Wyatt’s Rebellion and later held at Fotheringhay. He was released in 1555 on condition that he leave England. After travelling through the Habsburg Netherlands and Italy, he died suddenly at Padua on 18 September 1556. Contemporary suspicion surrounded the death, although there is no firm evidence that he was assassinated.

A Queen’s Executioner fictionalises that uncertainty by sending Richard Fitzwarren to Italy with orders to remove Courtenay as a dynastic threat. The novel therefore connects an invented murder mission with the real earl’s exile, political significance and unexplained final illness.