The UK Parliament gets a much-needed history lesson from Charlie Courtenay - the 19th Earl of Devon.
“A trip down memory lane as I vent the frustrations of the past 800 years.”
Charlie Courtenay, the 19th Earl of Devon, was a guest panel member at our recent Wolf Hall Weekend, where he discussed with Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch and Simon Haisell, the recounting in Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and The Light, of the execution of his famous ancient family member, Henry Courtenay, by Henry VIII - an incident that came to be known as The Exeter Conspiracy.
It seems that the tussles between the Royal establishment, the UK Parliament and the Courtenay family have not ended, even today. It was announced recently that Charlie will lose his seat in the House of Lords under proposals being put forward by the new Labour government.
The change, which will probably take effect next year, has been billed as the biggest parliamentary reform in a quarter of a century…
It will round off changes begun by Tony Blair’s government in 1999, which revoked a 700-year-old right for all peers to sit on and vote from the red benches. Blair excluded 667 hereditary peers from the upper chamber and allowed only 92 of them, elected from the whole group, to continue doing so pending further changes.
Some of the remaining hereditary peers can trace their family’s presence in the Lords back to the middle ages.
Charlie recently commented publicly that sitting in the Lords as a non-aligned hereditary peer had been a “privilege” and argued that replacing it with a second elected chamber would be “complete disaster” that would upend the UK’s constitutional system.
As recently as Monday 2nd September Charlie gave a speech on the new Crown Estate Bill being debated in the House of Lords. The Bill aims to widen the borrowing and investment powers of the Crown Estate to speed up the development of offshore wind projects, in collaboration with Great British Energy, with the aim of delivering long-term financial returns to the taxpayer.
Charlie’s speech highlights some of the insights that a hereditary peer can bring to point out some serious contradictions in the Bill, between the purpose and the consequences of what the government is proposing. It also gave a mostly forgotten historical context to how the Crown Estate came to be in possession of such vast amounts of land in the first place.
Charlie has agreed to share some of his speech here to illustrate his point - much of which presents his family’s unique historical perspective:
‘The Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has made much of his ambition to fix the foundations of our nation; you do not get much more foundational than the Crown Estate. The helpful Library briefing states that the Crown Estate dates from “1760, when King George III handed land and property over to the government … in return for a fixed salary”—now the sovereign grant. This is not strictly accurate in at least two regards. First, the Crown Estate dates from the Norman conquest, when William, Duke of Normandy, took England by force. By 1086’s Domesday audit, it amounted to some 18% of the country and it is therefore an unapologetically feudal landholding.
Secondly, the Crown Estate was not handed over to Parliament. The land and its associated capital still belong to the King in right of the Crown; they are simply managed by the Crown Estate commissioners and the surplus income is directed to the Treasury. I disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on this point. The Crown Estate is therefore a hereditary feudal estate. It is far from the only hereditary feudal estate in the country—here I should note my interests—but it does have the best PR.
I noted in recent debates on leasehold reform how “feudal” is consistently adopted in parliamentary discourse as a pejorative term, used unfairly to denigrate long-established roles, rights and interests that have served our nation well over the last millennium, such as the monarchy. I also note that the current Labour Government’s own manifesto has labelled hereditary interests as “indefensible”. How then do the Government justify, as their first order of business, the modernisation of the hereditary feudal institution of the Crown Estate, particularly when a subsequent order of business is the abolition of the hereditary peerage, one of the other feudal and hereditary mainstays of our constitutional settlement?
This seems a little insensitive. Is it perhaps because the Government see a golden opportunity to extract more revenue for Treasury coffers as a quid pro quo for the Crown Estate’s renewal and continued existence? We should ask ourselves what this transaction will do for the long-term health and well-being of the Crown Estate and its precarious constitutional place. I note the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Howard, in this regard.
I note the Crown Estate’s excellent public relations. The current public consensus is that it is a benign body, managing ancient rights and land for the public benefit, but do not be mistaken. Here, I take the invitation of the noble Baroness, Lady Young, to throw a little more light upon it. The Crown Estate has always been, and will continue to be, an aggressive commercial operator, skirting the edges of the law for maximum gain. Again, I note my interests, particularly as Earl of Devon, as in that capacity I can vouch for the Crown Estate’s dubious foundations. I trust that noble Lords will forgive me the trip down memory lane as I vent the frustrations of the past 800 years.
Take for example, the Isle of Wight—just as the Crown did. Until 1293, it was a largely independent kingdom, governed initially by a Norman comrade of William the Conqueror, Richard de Redvers, whose son Baldwin became Earl of Devon in 1142. The last de Redvers Earl of Devon was a woman—perhaps surprising given the reluctance of Parliament today to countenance female succession to hereditary peerages. The great Countess Isabella de Fortibus expanded Carisbrooke Castle, built the Countess Wear over the River Exe, long outlived her husband and brother and became one of Plantagenet England’s greatest landholders.
Edward I pursued her relentlessly for the Isle of Wight, of which she was titular queen, but she consistently refused him—that is, until her deathbed, to which the King dispatched two bishops to persuade her to give up the island, plus three valuable manors, in return for a cash payment of 6,000 marks. She was an elderly lady in declining health. The deed was drawn up on 9 November 1293. She never signed it, but rather—according to those bishops—waved her hand in acquiescence and died on 10 November, the very next day. Her heir Hugh de Courtenay, the first Courtenay Earl of Devon, never received the payment.
Later raids on Courtenay lands were less subtle. In 1538, Henry VIII simply beheaded his cousin, Henry Courtenay, the Earl of Devon, on baseless conspiracy charges arising from his Plantagenet bloodline. The King seized 13 manors by attainder, and they now form the core of the Duchy of Cornwall. Your Lordships may find this history lesson a little self-indulgent; it is, but in a few months your Lordships will not have many hereditaries present with memories by which to hold our sovereign to account, and our Parliament will be poorer for that.
To view the remainder of his speech, in which Charlie points out the potential pitfalls in the government’s proposal to widen the powers of the Crown Estate in relation to a speed up the development of off-shore wind power see HERE
In his final comment, Charlie engaged his usual poignant humour:
‘I will be willing to forgo my claim to the Isle of Wight if the Government can provide satisfactory assurance that our marine ecosystems will be better safeguarded pursuant to this legislation.’
I would so love to hear Hilary Mantel’s response to this.