EAELY HISTORY OF THE MOUNT EDGCUMBE FAMILY. 1 39 



after his defeat by the French at St. Aubyn ; and Lord 

 Willoughby de Broke was placed in command of six thousand 

 men to go to the assistance of his daughter the Duchess Anne. 



Sir Eichard was one of those summoned to report uj)on the 

 quota of archers from Cornwall ; and was afterwards sent to 

 Britanny himself in a diplomatic capacity. 



Hepworth Dixon in his History of Two Queens gives an 

 amusing account of the state of Britanny at the time of Sir 

 Eichard's mission ; of the number of suitors who were rivals for 

 the hand of the young Duchess — or rather for the Duchy of 

 which she was the heiress ; and of their quarrels and intrigues. 

 Ultimately, as you will remember, after having been formally 

 betrothed to Maximilian of Austria, she was induced to throw 

 him over for the treacherous young French King (who was 

 himself as good as married to Maximilian's sister), and Britanny 

 was thus added to the Crown of France. But Sir Eichard did 

 not live to see the failure of his work. He died at Morlaix in 

 September 1489. 



Before sailing from Penryn, he made his will, at the 

 beginning of which he entrusts his soul to the care of St. 

 Thomas a Becket, whose eflB.gy ajDpears on his monumental brass 

 — a copy of which is hung up in the chapel here, the original at 

 Morlaix having been destroyed when the church in which it was 

 placed was desecrated during the French revolution. 



Of Sir Eichard's son, Piers, who, like his father was a 

 trusted supporter of Henry VII, in 1485, and was made one of 

 the Knights of the Bath at the creation of Prince Arthur, I 

 must say a few words, because he is the last of the family who 

 lived altogether at this place. By his first marriage, with Jane 

 Durnford, some time within the last decade of the century, he 

 acquired the estates of the Stonehouse family on both sides of 

 the river-mouth. At East Stonehouse, which is still the legal 

 name of the town, there was a manor-house at which he some- 

 times lived ; while near the site of West Stonehouse, a village 

 which was destroyed by the French in the fourteenth century, 

 and of which every vestige, as well as its name, is lost, his son 

 built Mount Edgcumbe House, in the first year of Queen Mary. 



I may mention, as bearing on the dates of the buildings at 

 Cotele, that the arms of Sir Pier's first wife only appear in the 



