Romance, as well as beauty, belongs to Powderham, for it has been for over five hundred years the seat of the Courtenays, a younger branch of the family which was settled at Courtenay, fifty-six miles south of Paris, in the ninth century. They married into the royal family of France, and three in succession were Emperors of Constantinople in the last days of Christian rule there. It seems a proud thing to have numbered emperors among one’s ancestors, but those imperial Courtenays of old Byzantium were, it must be owned, put to many indignities and miserable shifts, and the imperial purple was more than a thought moth-eaten. They were reduced to selling and mortgaging their property, to scouring half Europe for alms, and in the end the Turks captured their sorry empire. Then the elder Courtenays returned to the rank of French nobles, and although they had an admixture of royal blood, sank gradually throughout the centuries until at length they became simple peasants. The last of them died towards the middle of the eighteenth century. The English Courtenays appear to derive from Reginald de Courtenay, who relinquished his French nationality and properties, and in the reign of Henry the Second came to England. He acquired honours and manors, and was the ancestor of Hugh de Courtenay, Baron of Okehampton, created Earl of Devon as heir in right of his mother, to the lands and titles of the De Redvers family, who had previously held the earldom. Powderham came to the Courtenays with the second earl, to whom it was brought by his wife, Margaret, daughter of the Earl of Hereford. He gave it to his sixth son, Philip, who was the builder of the castle. Here his descendants, members of the younger of the branches into which the English Courtenays spread, have ever since resided, and might have been merely squires or knights yet, but for the misfortunes that befell the members of the elder branch, who in the wars of rival York and Lancaster took the losing side, with the result that three brothers in succession, the sixth, seventh and eighth earls, sealed with their blood, on scaffold or in stricken field, their devotion to the Red Rose. With those gallant, but ill-fated partisans of a just cause the elder line became extinct, and when the family honours were revived under the Lancastrian Henry the Seventh, they went to the next branch in order of seniority, represented by Sir Edward Courtenay of Haccombe, the first earl of a new creation. To him succeeded his grandson, son of Sir William Courtenay and the Lady Katherine Plantagenet daughter of Edward the Fourth; second earl, and later advanced to be Marquis of Exeter. The fortunes of the Courtenays now seemed to be again improving, but those were the times of Henry the Eighth, when quick changes and dramatic reverses of fortune were the rule. The same king who had created the earl a marquis later capriciously sent him to the block, confiscated his property, and annulled the family honours.