#anne wake

And on the first anniversary of his coronation, 16 July 1378, Richard [II] attended the wedding of Anne Wake and his second cousin Sir Philip Courtenay, son of the late earl of Devon and a great-grandson of Edward I, and gave them two silver cups and two silver-gilt ewers as a gift, at a cost of over £22.

Some months before Stanley's arrival in Ireland, however, the charges of oppression and extortion against Courtenay had been revived as an excuse for his arrest, which was ordered on 26th March 1386, and Richard wrote to him, ordering him not to leave Ireland until de Vere had investigated the charges against him. The Archbishop of Dublin had arrived in England by then, and he may well have investigated the order: it is hard to see what interest de Vere or Stanley could have had in the arrest of their predecessor. There is no evidence that the charges of extortion were true, and certainly no basis for the charge made in September 1386 that Courtenay was in debt to the king and the marquis. If anything, the king was in debt to Courtenay: at the time of his dismissal wages of his soldiers were more than £400 in arrears, and the debt was not finally discharged until 1387. But the order for his arrest was never carried out. Hearing of it, he fled to England with his wife and children*, and he sat in the Wonderful Parliament in October as knight of the shire for Devon. Perhaps the Courtenay interest in England was sufficiently powerful to protect him from prosecution, or perhaps the king, with more serious political problems to face, decided to drop the charges against him. The Wonderful Parliament did not discuss Irish affairs, but the change in the political climate in the autumn of 1386 was fortunate for Courtenay. On 28th February 1387 he was formally exonerated of the charges against him, and the Bishop of Meath received instructions to restore to him all his goods and all the profits from Ireland which had been due to him at the time of his arrest. In the Merciless Parliament, in which Courtenay again sat for Devon, the new regime went even further and undertook to pay him a substantial sum as compensation for losses suffered by him when his contract as lieutenant was broken. The whole Courtenay family may well have sided with the Appellants between 1386 and 1388**, partly perhaps because of the treatment Philip had received from the king and de Vere. Philip's brother, Peter, who had been a knight of the king's chamber, was appointed chamberlain of the household by the Appellants in succession to de Vere; and although the king is said to have been well pleased with their choice, the appointment had a certain appropriateness.