This name, freighted with so lofty a destiny in the years to come, was taken from St. Maur, near Avranches. “Wido de St. Maur came to England 1066, and was deceased before 1086, when William Fitz Wido his son held a barony in Somerset, Wilts, and Gloucester, and ten manors in Somerset­shire (of which Portishead was one) from Geoffrey Bishop of Coutances. He made conquests in Wales c. 1090, which his family afterwards held. He had 1. Peter de St. Maur, who granted Portishead to the Hospitallers (Mon. ii. 530) and was ancestor of the Lords St. Maur, barons by writ 1314, who bore Argent two chevrons Gules: 2. Richard Fitz William, who inherited the Welsh barony, and t. Stephen granted four churches in Wales to Kadwalli Abbey (Mon. i. 425). This marcher barony was re-conquered soon after by the Welsh. His son Thomas de St. Maur held three knts fees from Humphrey de Bohun in Wilts (Liber Niger), and had issue Bartholomew, who witnessed the charter of Keynsham Abbey, c. 1170 (Mon. ii. 298). His son, William de St. Maur, conquered Penhow and Woundy, Monmouth, from the Welsh about 1235, and was the ancestor of the Seymours.” - The Norman People. This is the only attempt that I have met with to connect the historical house of Seymour with the baronial St. Maurs, who bore totally different arms, though Camden believes them to be of the same stock, as seems most probable. But the genealogy of the Lords St. Maur, given by Dugdale, does not extend to nearly so distant a date; for it commences with Milo de St. Maur, who fought in the Barons’ War against King John. His line ended with his grand-daughter; but the male heir, Geoffrey - whose connection with him does not appear - was the grandfather of Nicholas, summoned to Parliament in 1314. The third Lord St. Maur acquired a second barony through Muriel his wife, the heiress of Lord Lovel of Kari, who brought with it the estates of Winfred Eagle in Dorsetshire, and Castle Kari in Somersetshire. His grandson was the first baron who received summons as Seymour, and the next in succession, Richard, proved the last heir male. He died in 1409, and his titles passed to his posthumous daughter, Alice, Lady Zouche of Haryngworth.

The Dukes of Somerset undoubtedly derive from William St. Maur, who in the thirteenth century possessed himself of Woundy and Penhow, where he took up his abode. “The church of Penhow was dedicated to St. Maur; their park there was called by their own name; and here likewise they had their castle, which continued in the family till Henry VIII.’s time.” - Collins. The seal of his son Roger (who died about 1299) shows the Vol, Wings conjoined in Lure, still borne by his descendants, circumscribed Sigill Rogeri de Seimor. In the time of Edward III. they removed from their Welsh home into Somerset­shire, where they had acquired a share in the great Beauchamp inheritance through Cecily, the eldest and most richly dowered of the three heiresses of the last Lord Beauchamp of Hache, who was the wife of a second Roger de St. Maur. Both their son and grandson were again matched with heiresses. The former married Joan de la Mare; the latter Maud Esturmi (see Esturmi), who first transplanted the Seymours into Wiltshire. As the last representative of the ancient Foresters of Savernake, she was very richly dowered, and her house of Wolf Hall thenceforward became their home. Although their possessions thus grew apace, they remained unpretending country gentlemen, till, nearly a century and a half afterwards, by a sudden and violent transition of fortune, they rose, at a single bound, to the highest pinnacle of place and power.

Sir John Seymour, who had been knighted for his bravery by Henry VII.’s own hand on the field of battle of Blackheath, and was no less distinguished at the Battle of the Spurs, became one of the Knights of the Body (now Grooms of the Chamber) to Henry VIII., and as such was in constant attendance at Court. His daughter Jane was placed in the household of Anne Boleyn, and attracted the attention of the King, who transferred the crown from the Queen to her maid of honour. He married her the day after poor Anne’s head had fallen on the block; and in the following year she became the mother of the anxiously- expected Prince of Wales. She only survived his birth for twelve days: happy in dying thus early, before Henry’s fierce love had turned to hate, with the bloom of her fair name “untarnished by the breath of reproach,” honoured and lamented by all.

The Seymours had participated in her fortunes, and risen with her rise. Her father died about six months after she became Queen; but her eldest brother Edward was created Viscount Beauchamp on her wedding day, with the grant of a coat of augmentation, bearing the Royal lions and fleur de lis, ever since quartered with the Seymour Vol, and Earl of Hertford on the birth of her son. Yet he was merely placing his foot on the first steps of the ladder, for his advancement kept pace with his ambition, great as that was, till, on the accession of his nephew, he was proclaimed Lord Protector of King Edward VI. and of the realm. At the same time he was created Duke of Somerset, “whereby,” as the patent recites, “the name of that family from which our most beloved mother, Jane, late Queen of England, drew her beginning, might not be clouded by any higher title or colour of dignity.” By a special provision, it secured the title to the children of his second wife, giving the elder sons a reversion in the succession only on failure of her heirs male. He had first married Katherine Filliol, whom he repudiated (see vol. ii., p. 52), and was then the husband of Anne Stanhope, described on her monument in Westminster Abbey as “a Princesse descended of noble lignage,” traced on her mother’s side from the Plantagenet Kings. She was the daughter of Sir Edward Stanhope by Lady Elizabeth Bourchier, who derived from Anne, sole heir of Thomas of Woodstock, Duke of Gloucester, the youngest son of Edward III. She has been represented as a proud, imperious, meddlesome woman; but the only two indictments against her are that she procured the above settlement on her children, with which, as its cause was her predecessor’s crime, she had not necessarily anything to do, and that she had great “contests”for precedence with her sister in law, the Queen Dowager. Some entries in the inventory of her jewels recall the ideal rope of pearls in ‘Lothair’: Item: a dowble rope of pearle one ell longe.

Item: a chayne of pearle of a bigger sorte, of fower dowble. Nor were these by any means all. The new Protector, “ardent, generous, and enthusiastic, the popular successful general,” was, according to Froude, incapacitated for sovereign power by “a large vanity and a languid intellect;” and his few years of rule record “the story of authority unwisely caught at and unwisely used. Yet, for the most part, he had failed in attempts which in themselves were noble.” We have all read of his pride and ostentation; of his pulling down a parish church and blowing up a chapel to make room for his new palace in the Strand; of his desecrating the N. cloister of St. Paul, and digging up the bones of the long- buried dead, to be carted away to Finsbury Fields. But, on the other hand, we are told that he was greatly beloved; “never man had the hearts of the people as he had;” and at his execution, men and women crowded round the block to dip their handkerchiefs in his blood. When his great adversary, Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, was himself led a captive through the streets of London two years afterwards, a woman shook one of these treasured handkerchiefs in his face, crying, “Behold! the blood of that worthy man, that good uncle of that excellent King, which was shed by thy treacherous machinations, now, at this instant, begins to revenge itself upon thee!”It was Dudley who had charged him with the real or pretended conspiracy for which he suffered the death of a traitor in 1552; and about a month later, Sir Ralph Vane, Sir Miles Partridge, j Sir Michael Stanhope, the Duchess’s brother, and Sir Thomas Arundell, her half- brother, were also executed on Tower Hill as privy to the plot.

His brother Thomas, who was created Lord Seymour of Sudeley on the same day that he became Duke of Somerset, had preceded him on the scaffold by four years. “He resembled the Protector in an ambition that was disproportioned to his ability, in an outward magnificence of carriage, in personal courage, address, and general accomplishments. But here the likeness ended;” for in him the higher and nobler qualities of the elder brother were altogether wanting. “He was,” says Latimer, “a man furthest from the fear of God that ever I knew or heard of in England; . . . and the realm was well rid of him.” He had been named Lord High Admiral of England, and loaded with grants and favours; but continued none the less incurably envious and dissatisfied. Ever tormented by his brother’s pre-eminence, he had the audacity to ask the hand of the Princess Elizabeth before her father was cold in his grave. Failing in this, he turned to the widowed Queen, Katharine Parr (with whom he had had sundry love passages when she was Lady Latimer), and actually persuaded her into a clandestine marriage within four months - some even say within three - of her husband’s death. When she died in childbed the following year, he secretly renewed his suit to Elizabeth, won over her governess and her chamberlain to his side, and succeeded in pleasing her in no common degree. But, schooled to prudence by early adversity, she was wary even as a girl of six­teen, and took care not to commit or compromise herself. For these and other intrigues, he was thrown into the Tower, and beheaded without any form of trial in 1549. His brother, who sought to save him, had to sign his death- warrant, and it was commonly said that “with his left hand he had cut off his right”in so doing. But the odium he incurred would seem to have been undeserved.

Anne Stanhope had brought the Protector three sons and six daughters. The eldest son was stripped of all his lands and titles by special act of parliament, when he was only thirteen, and continued in “this disconsolate condition”till Queen Elizabeth, on her accession, created him Earl of Hertford. Three years later, the Court was electrified by the discovery that he was secretly married to Lady Katherine Grey, who - Lady Jane being dead - was, by the will of Henry VIII., the next in succession to the throne. The vials of Elizabeth’s wrath were at once discharged upon the heads of the unfortunate pair; and to add to her indignation, it was found that her cousin was soon to give birth to a child. The marriage, treated as a State conspiracy, was declared annulled; and both husband and wife thrown into the Tower as traitors and criminals, there to linger through many miserable years of captivity. Lady Katherine, at least, never left her prison-house again alive. All this unhappy lady’s children - three sons and one daughter - were born in the Tower, where, by bribing the jailor, she and Lord Hertford still contrived to meet. But latterly her confine ment was made more severe; she was never allowed to see the husband to whom she was devoted, and pining under the grief of hopeless separation and cruel treatment, she died after a lingering illness in 1567. Lord Hertford remained nine years in prison; and though the validity of the marriage was afterwards tried by common law, and fully confirmed, he was censured by the Star Chamber for having “vitiated a maid of Royal blood,” and condemned to pay a fine of ₤15,000.

Edward, Viscount Beauchamp, their eldest son, died before his father, also leaving three sons; Edward, who died young; William, second Earl of Hertford, and Sir Francis, created Lord Seymour of Trowbridge in 1641, whose grandson succeeded as fifth Duke of Somerset. The tragedy of Lord Hertford’s marriage was exactly repeated by his eldest grandson. He, again, won the affection of a lady who stood dangerously near the throne; - Lady Arabella Stuart, the daughter of the Duke of Lennox, who was uncle to James I. This attachment, formed in childhood, was discovered in 1609; and Mr. Seymour (as he then was) and Lady Arabella were “summoned before the Council, sharply reprimanded, and warned as to their future conduct.” Such warnings are vain; the couple were shortly after privately married, and when the marriage came to light in 1610, it was once more treated as a crime against the State. Not a moment was lost in consigning them to prison; but this time Seymour alone was committed to the Tower, while Lady Arabella was confined elsewhere. Nevertheless, they managed to communicate, and to concert and carry out a plan of escape. Lady Arabella, dressed in men’s clothes, got safely out of prison and made her way to the appointed trysting place at Blackwall; but Seymour was not there; and after waiting for him as long as she dared, she embarked and sailed without him. Seymour, arriving behind his time, followed in another vessel, and landed without accident in Flanders. Lady Arabella was less fortunate; she was captured in Calais Roads by a man of war that had been sent in pursuit, and brought back to the Tower, where she died half crazed in 1615. As she left no children, Seymour was then permitted to return from exile, pardoned, and restored to favour; “the dread of the King lest an heir should be born uniting the claims to the throne of the Stuart and Suffolk branches of the Royal family” having ceased. He afterwards married Lady Frances Devereux, He is said never to have lost, the memory of his early love; and, “though he married again, he christened the daughter of his second wife by the fondly-remembered name of Arabella Stuart.” the daughter of Elizabeth’s favourite; was created Marquess of Hertford in 1640, and commanded the Royal forces in Somerset, Wilts, and Dorset during the Civil War. When Charles I. was ordered for execution, he, with three other peers (the Duke of Richmond and the Earls of Southampton and Lindsay) offered, if the King’s life might be spared, to suffer death in his stead; and when this act of devotion was not permitted, they asked and received licence to pay their last duty to their master by laying him in his grave at Windsor. At the Restoration he received the Garter from the young King on the day after his landing at Dover; and in the following September - a month before his death - the attainder of his great ancestor was reversed, and he was restored as Duke of Somerset. “I have done,” said Charles II., when announcing this act of grace to his parliament, “what a good master should do for such a servant.” He was succeeded by a grandson who died at twenty, unmarried; and whose sister Elizabeth, Countess of Ailesbury, carried away the great Seymour estates in Wiltshire to the Bruces, through whom they were transmitted to her descendants in the female line, the present Marquesses of Ailesbury. This young Duke’s uncle, Lord John, then bore the title for four years, also dying s. p., and it then reverted to his cousin Francis, third Lord Seymour of Trowbridge. He was killed early in life by one Orazio Botti at Lerice, in mistake for another gallant who had insulted the Italian’s wife; and the next and sixth Duke was his brother Charles, “a man,” says Macaulay, “in whom the pride of birth and rank amounted almost to a disease.” His first wife was the heiress of the Percies, and I have elsewhere given an account of their children (see vol. ii., p. 379). The story of his second marriage is characteristic.

He was far too royal to seek a bride for himself, but having decided to marry one of the numerous daughters of Daniel, Earl of Winchilsea and Nottingham, he deputed his chaplain, Matthew Hutton, to go to Burley and report upon the Ladies Finch. His report, still preserved at Petworth, saves appearances by speaking of the four brides-expectant as “Bookes upon the subject of Religion and Morality, which I shall describe to your Grace by the ranks they stand in upon the Classes: - The first is marked L C - Edit - 30 The second „ L B - l - Edit - 26 The third „ L H - Edit - 22 The fourth „ L B - y - Edit - 20 The stile of L C and L H is improved with a degree of learning which is wanting in the other two; and these differ again from one another in this, that the stile of L C is more even and uniform, the sense stronger and containing finer Rules of Æconomy; whereas L B - l is brighter, and has more flights of Witt. The stile of L H is distinguished by a certain degree of skill in Geometry and Mathematics, and several points are prettily enough illustrated by similitudes from Painting and Limning. L B - y has the advantage in the fineness of the Paper and beauty of the Impression; but the stile of it is not embellished either with Learning or Mathematicks as the others are.” Neither the Earl or Countess touched upon the subject of his visit; the negotiations were carried on with “my friend Mr. E.”(Edwards, either their chaplain or secretary) who described the young ladies, and then asked, “in a pleasant manner, whether your Grace had given over buying of Bookes, and mentioned C and H as very well deserving your Grace’s purchasing.” The praises of Lady Charlotte were sung in her absence, as she was then in London; but though it is admitted that, while “not any of them were set off with any uncommon, outward ornament” (Horace Walpole calls them the “black funereal Finches”) “LC has the least” of all, yet she was persistently designated for his choice, and became Duchess of Somerset in 1725. The mathematical Lady Henrietta married the Duke of Cleveland; and the unlearned Lady Betty was the wife of the famous Chief Justice Lord Mansfield; while poor Lady Bell, with all her bright flights of wit, was left out in the cold.

Lady Charlotte brought her august husband only two daughters; and with his son Algernon, seventh Duke, who died in 1750, the last of the male descendants of the Protector’s second marriage failed.

The Dukedom then passed to the long disinherited elder branch, which had altogether escaped the strange vicissitudes of fortune of the more loftily placed descendants of Anne Stanhope. Seven Sir Edward Seymours had followed each other in peaceful and uninterrupted succession, when, after an exclusion of two hundred years, the title reverted to them in 1750. The first of these had been restored in blood by Edward VI. the year after his father’s execution, and received a share of his lands, including Maiden Bradley in Wiltshire, and the castle and honour of Berry Pomeroy in Devonshire, which had been purchased by the Protector. The third Sir Edward made of the old castle “a very stately house” at the cost of the then great sum of ₤20,000. “The number of the apartments of the whole,” writes Prince,” may be collected hence, if report be true, that it was a good day’s work for a servant but to shut and open the casements belonging to them. Notwithstanding which,’tis now demolished, and all this glory lieth in the dust.” It had never been entirely finished, and was left desolate in the very next generation, when, as the home of a staunch and uncompromising Cavalier, it was burnt and plundered by the Parliamentary army. No attempt was made to rebuild so vast and costly a pile, and the family took up their abode at their present seat of Maiden Bradley. The next Sir Edward was, as “the head of a strong Parliamentary connection called the Western Alliance, the leader of the Protestant Tories in the House of Commons,” and, according to Macaulay, “one of the most skilful debaters and men of business in the kingdom.” He was unanimously elected Speaker in 1673, and had the credit of being the first country gentleman who was ever called to the chair, till then invariably occupied by a lawyer. At the Revolution he went to meet the Prince of Orange at Exeter, and William, intending to be very civil, received him with the words, “I think, Sir Edward, that you are of the family of the Duke of Somerset.” Seymour - one of the proudest of men - instantly corrected him. “Pardon me, Sir,” he said, “the Duke of Somerset is of my family.” This pride of place as the head of the house never forsook him. When Queen Anne, of whose household he was Comptroller, offered him a peerage in 1703, he would accept it only for his younger son Francis, preferring for the elder the slender chance - then apparently a sufficiently remote one - of succeeding to his ancestral Dukedom. Yet, within fifty years, this improbable event had actually come to pass, and the long looked-for title devolved upon his grandson, the seventh Sir Edward Seymour, and ninth Duke of Somerset, from whom the present and fourteenth Duke is directly descended.

Francis Seymour Conway, who was created Baron Conway by Queen Anne in 1703, was the second of his six sons by his second marriage with Letitia Popham, on whom their cousin, Earl Conway (whose own mother had been a Popham) settled the whole of his great domain in England and Ireland. The elder brother, Popham, a young gentleman known about town as Beau Seymour, had been killed in a duel by Colonel Kirke, and Francis, thus becoming the heir, had taken the name of Conway, and inherited the English estates with the stately mansion of Ragley, and a wide tract of fertile land in the co. of Antrim. The titles of Earl of Hertford and Viscount Beauchamp were revived in favour of his son in 1750, who further received a marquessate, with the Earldom of Yarmouth, in 1793, and is now represented by the sixth Marquess. But the title came to his father in 1870 shorn of more than half its fair inheritance, for the great Conway estate in Ireland had been separated from it by his predecessor, and bestowed upon Sir Richard Wallace.

St maur: from a place of that name near Avranches. Wido de St. Maur came to England in 1066, but died before Domesday was compiled. His son, William FitzWido, held a barony in Somerset, Wiltshire, and Gloucestershire, and ten manors in Somerset. The name became Seamore and Seymour. But see what is said on that name in the chapter on Trade-names.