The woman at the centre of the historical drama The Mirror and the Light—though she doesn’t say very much—is Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII of England and mother of the future king, Edward VI. Hilary Mantel’s trilogy focuses on the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, from a tradesman’s son to chief minister of the King and Earl of Essex, but there are other similar arcs as well: the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn in books one and two, the fall and rise of Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, the rise and rise of Cromwell’s protegé, Thomas Wriothesley (‘Call-Me Risley’), and the great ascent from country gentry to royal in-laws of the Seymour brothers, Edward and Thomas. Throughout the novels and the television series there is a strong distinction made between a family of ancient lineage, such as that of Thomas Howard, who is confident that his line will endure no matter what the temporary ups and downs of court life bring him—and for the most part, despite a century of executions and attainders awaiting his family, he is correct, and the dukes of Norfolk remain today at the top of the British peerage. Less certain is the fate that awaits those families of ‘newer blood’ who are raised up by Henry VIII: Cromwell’s son survives his father’s downfall and execution in 1540 and retains his barony which is then passed down through generations of Cromwells before it becomes extinct in 1687. Wriothesley continues to prosper in Tudor service and is created Earl of Southampton at the start of the reign of Edward VI (1547). His heirs remain at the top of the court society until this earldom also becomes extinct in 1667. Of this collection of ‘new men’ at the Tudor court, the one that surpasses both of these in terms of longevity is—after a setback of over a century—the Seymours, dukes of Somerset.

The Seymours of Wolf Hall are mostly associated with Wiltshire, the flat and fertile county in the West Country where Henry VIII goes hunting at the end of the book Wolf Hall and discovers his blushing beauty Jane. Though Wolf Hall no longer remains in Seymour hands, their main ducal seat today, Bradley House, is also in Wiltshire. They also held significant lands in the neighbouring county of Somerset (hence perhaps the choice of title for the dukedom), and for a time were based in Devon (at Berry Pomeroy Castle and Stover House). But before any of this, the Seymours came from Monmouthshire in South Wales.

Like so many families of the English aristocracy who wanted to rise at court, having Norman ancestry was of paramount importance, even if you had to fudge it a bit. The later Seymours claimed their name was a corruption of the name St Maur, derived from a village of that name in Normandy near Avranches (though there are several towns in France named for the sixth-century Benedictine monk Saint Maurus). There was indeed a prominent family of that name who settled in Somerset and Wiltshire in the eleventh century and were created Baron St Maur in 1314—they had a different coat of arms to the family that gave rise to the Seymours, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, since heraldry was adopted after many Norman family lines had already split. The Barons St Maur died out in 1409 and their barony passed to the La Zouche family. Their possible relation was William St Maur who lived in Monmouthshire in 1240. His seat was Penhow (where the parish church is named for St Maur), a manor house later built into a castle by Roger de St Maur in the early twelfth century. It passed out of the family in 1359, but just in time to be surpassed by an even grander estate, that of the Beauchamp family in Somerset.

The Barons Beauchamp, of Hatch or Hache in Somerset, were one of the most prominent Norman families in the West Country. Their chief estate was part of a royal hunting forest granted shortly after the conquest of 1066 (a ‘hache’ is a Saxon word for a gateway into the forest). Several branches of the Beauchamp family—whose name means ‘beautiful field’ in French—spread across southern England: aside from the branch in Somerset, the line in Bedfordshire (Bletsoe) ultimately joined with the Beauforts (the family of the mother of Henry VII), while that of Warwickshire became the powerful earls of Warwick of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries—much of their land and titles ultimately passed to another ‘new’ family of the Tudor era, rivals of the Seymours, the Dudleys. The Beauchamps of Hatch had a very simple yet distinctive coat of arms, an alternating pattern of blue and white known as ‘vair’, or squirrel’s fur. It is thought, by the way, that Cinderella’s glass slipper was not in fact verre (glass) in the original French version of the story, but vair, a more sensible material out of which to make shoes…

The Somerset Beauchamps were invited to Parliament as barons in 1299, but they died out in the 1360s—the peerage went into abeyance and has stayed there evermore, despite attempts to revive it. But the feudal barony (different from a peerage) passed to Cecily de Beauchamp, wife of Sir Roger de St Maur (or Seymour as he started to spell it by the 1390s). The Beauchamp name and distinctive arms will re-appear later in the Seymour history, notably as Viscount Beauchamp. Hatch itself passed out of the Seymour family in the 1670s; the house was torn down and replaced, then sold to another family again.

But the Seymours still maintained a residence in South Wales: the manor of Undy (Woundy or Gwndy), in Monmouthshire, which remained their main seat until the early 1400s when they moved to Wolf Hall in Wiltshire.

Another Roger Seymour, Speaker of the House of Commons, married Maud Esturmy, heiress in 1427 of the manor of Wulfhall in Savernake Forest, southeast of Marlborough. Savernake was a royal forest, granted to Maud’s father Sir William Esturmy—it is still privately owned (the only ancient forest in England still in private hands) by the Bruce family, whom we’ll encounter below. It is likely this is the forest in which Henry VIII was hunting when he met Jane. There was a large manor house at Wulfhall in the 1530s, with towers, which was mostly in ruins by the 1570s when the family moved to nearby Totnam (see below). The remains of the house continued to be used by servants, and evolved into a more modest farmhouse, leased out to tenants (and with a newer Georgian wing and a Victorian façade)—but recent archaeological digs have revealed some of the splendours of the original Wolf Hall, notably in tunnels underground.

Roger and Maud’s son John became Hereditary Warden of Savernake Forest, and Sheriff of Wiltshire, as was his son, also called John. Three more Johns followed as eldest son, until the last one died young, leaving his brother Edward as new head of the family. Edward’s mother, Margery Wentworth, had a drop of Plantagenet blood in her veins (via the Cliffords, Percys and Mortimers), which thus entered the Seymour bloodline. Closer to hand, she also shared blood with her half first cousins, Thomas Howard, 3^rd Duke of Norfolk, and Elizabeth Boleyn, mother of Queen Anne. So young Edward Seymour was not without connections when he entered life at the court of Henry VIII. Sir John Seymour had served Henry VII and Henry VIII in various military campaigns and was named Sheriff and Justice of the Peace for Wiltshire, and notably, Constable of Bristol Castle in 1509. He was thus able to use his service and his wife’s connections to get his son Edward a place in the entourage of Princess Mary when she married King Louis XII of France in 1514—and his rise at court started from there.

Edward Seymour served with Henry VIII on his campaigns in France in 1523 and in 1529 was named esquire of the body and became one of the King’s favoured companions. He invited the King hunting at Wulfhall during a royal progress in 1535, and secured the King’s interest in his sister Jane. But Jane and her sister Elizabeth had already been living at court, as maids of honour to Queen Katherine of Aragon by at least 1532, and later in the household of Queen Anne Boleyn, whom she supplanted in May 1536—betrothed to the King only a day after Anne’s execution. Edward Seymour was raised to the peerage as Viscount Beauchamp. Just over a year later, in October 1537, Jane gave birth to Prince Edward—a Tudor heir at last!—and her brother Edward was promoted again, to Earl of Hertford.

The Seymour arms was considerably augmented at this time as well—with a new element derived from the English royal arms, something we don’t see very often in English heraldry (the Howards being another example). In addition to their quite distinctive two golden wings on red, we now see a dramatic design whereby a field of blue fleurs-de-lys on gold (a reversal of the French royal arms) is divided by three gold English lions on red. The new Earl’s arms also included Beauchamp of Hatch on the top row, and below this the other families whose lands and pretensions he had inherited: Esturmy, MacWilliams and Coker.

Sadly Queen Jane died about a week after giving birth to Prince Edward. The Earl of Hertford managed to retain the King’s favour, however, and as uncle to the future king, was in a good position. Seymour’s greatest skill was as a military commander, and he effectively led campaigns against the Scots and the French in 1544-46. He returned from France as a hero in late 1546 and attended the King in his last months, then was named one of sixteen executors of the King’s will and guardians of the realm when Henry VIII died in late January 1547. Within days, Seymour had superseded the terms of the will and declared himself head of the regency council, and on 4 February was named Lord Protector of the Realm in the name of his little nephew, now King Edward VI. Hertford was also raised in the peerage once more: as Duke of Somerset, still an extremely rare title in England.

The regime of Lord Protector Somerset solidified the shift of power at court in favour of the Protestant faction. The Catholic Howards and Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, were now out. Titles were given to Somerset’s allies, Wriothesley (Earl of Southampton) and Dudley (Earl of Warwick), and Somerset’s brother Thomas (created Baron Seymour of Sudeley and Lord High Admiral). There was another Seymour brother, Henry, but although he too had previously held some positions at court (notably in the households of queens Anne of Cleves and Katherine Parr), he preferred to remain in the countryside working as an administrator for the Crown—and he notably survived the tumults of the next decade and died much later.

Sudeley Castle has an ancient an interesting history, with royal roots back into the Anglo-Saxon period, and though most famous today as the resting place for Queen Katherine Parr, it was only a Seymour property for a few years. Most of its story belongs on a future blog post for the Brydges family, dukes of Chandos, who held it for about two centuries. It had been a royal property since the 1470s, granted by young Edward VI to Thomas Seymour in 1547, along with his new wife, the Dowager Queen, Katherine Parr. It returned to Crown ownership in 1553 then was given to Baron Chandos. Mostly ruins by the end of the eighteenth century it was partly restored by the Dent-Brocklehursts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who still live there today.

Meanwhile, the Duke of Somerset needed a London base. He had acquired a plot of land in 1539 in the area between the cities of London and Westminster, with one side facing the Thames and one side facing the old connecting road known as the Strand (for the old word for a river embankment). Now he began to build a new palace, Somerset House, importing newly fashionable architectural styles from the Continent. It was hardly started when it was confiscated by the Crown and from then on housed various members of the royal family, usually women: from Princess Elizabeth in the 1550s, and three Stuart consorts in the seventeenth century, Anne of Denmark, Henrietta Maria of France, and Catherine of Braganza. From 1775 it was completely rebuilt as a space for government offices and learned societies: the Royal Academy was here until the 1830s, and the Inland Revenue was based here until 2013. Since the 1990s Somerset House has been transformed into an arts centre, housing the Courtauld Institute and various independent creative businesses.

The 1^st Duke of Somerset remained a strong military leader, soundly defeating the Scots at Pinkie in September 1547. But cracks in his administration appeared almost immediately, mostly via the ambitions of his friend Dudley and his brother Thomas, who wanted the position of governor of the young King and was jealous of his older brother’s power. He and his new wife Katherine Parr were already looking after her step-daughter and ward, Princess Elizabeth; and when Katherine died in September 1548, Thomas began to make noises about marrying Elizabeth himself—a future king-consort if Edward died, or at least royal brother-in-law (as well as royal uncle). This bold ambition was too much for the Lord Protector and other members of the Council, and in January 1549, he was arrested on charges of embezzlement and was beheaded in March.

Other opposition to Somerset’s rule came from various quarters. His desire to impose Protestant unity on the people of England, via the Act of Uniformity, 1549, and the Book of Common Prayer, annoyed those still faithful to the old church, mostly in rural communities. These were further angered by his reforms to landholding policies that allowed landowners to encroach on common lands. He also raised taxes to pay for the expensive ongoing war with Scotland. Two major rebellions were sparked, in the south and the east, which ultimately led to the financial ruin of the realm and the downfall of Protector Somerset’s regime. He was arrested in October 1549, and though he was soon released, he was replaced as head of the Regency Council by Robert Dudley, Earl of Warwick. In October 1551, Somerset was arrested again and sent to the Tower for treason (on vague charges), then was executed in January 1552 on charges of trying to usurp government back from Dudley (now Duke of Northumberland). Just over fifteen years after the triumph of the marriage of Jane Seymour to Henry VIII, the Seymour dynasty seemed finished.

And the dangers were not completely over. The 1^st Duke of Somerset had had two sons by his first wife, John and Edward. Both had been disinherited back in 1540 when their father suspected their mother of infidelity. It wasn’t a full disinheritance though, but a curious ‘postponement’ of their rights to a succession (including, ultimately, the ducal title) to a position after the sons of Somerset’s second marriage. John had tried to fight back and sued for his mother’s succession, but it had been sold, so he was compensated with a new estate, Maiden Bradley, about which more later. Despite being semi-bastardised, the two older boys were arrested alongside their father in 1551—John died in the Tower in 1552, but Edward survived and formed a separate Seymour line in Devon, to which we will return.

The immediate successors to the 1^st Duke of Somerset thus came from his second marriage. A second Edward (known as Lord Hertford as his father’s heir) had been educated alongside his cousin Edward VI. After his father’s execution, he was at first barred from succeeding to any lands or titles, but later some lands were restored by the young King. In 1559, Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth I and raised Seymour (now age 20) to the peerage once more as Earl of Hertford and Baron Beauchamp of Hatch. But just one year later he took a great risk by marrying in secret the Queen’s cousin and potential heir: Lady Catherine Grey, sister of the executed Jane Grey and granddaughter of Henry VII’s daughter Princess Mary. Although Mary was younger than Margaret, Queen of Scots, the terms of Henry VIII’s will favoured her descendants, the Greys, over the Stuarts, making Catherine Grey the heir. When the Queen discovered this marriage—due to Catherine’s evident pregnancy—she confined both in the Tower, where Catherine gave birth to a son, another Edward. The marriage was declared invalid and the son illegitimate. Somehow they managed to have more children in the Tower, then Catherine died in 1568 and Hertford was released. By 1576 he seemed to be in favour, as he was noted as carrying the Great Sword of State in formal processions at court.

In about 1575, the Earl of Hertford moved his seat from Wulfhall to a new house nearby: Tottenham or Totnam Lodge in Savernake Forest. This house would be enlarged in the 1670s by the 4^th Duke of Somerset, who also redesigned the deer park. He bequeathed it to his niece Elizabeth who took it by marriage to the Bruce family. The Bruces, earls of Elgin and Ailesbury, rebuilt Tottenham in grand Palladian style in the 1720s, and it remained their seat until 1946. Since then it has been a school, then was empty for several years until it was sold in 2014 into private hands.

In 1582, the Earl of Hertford married again, and again secretly. This time it was Lady Frances Howard, daughter of Baron Howard of Effingham. He tried to set her aside in 1595 in order to legitimise his sons from his first marriage to Catherine Grey—and maybe claim their place in the line of succession since Elizabeth I still had not named an heir. Frances Howard died in 1598 and Edward Seymour married Frances Howard…yes, this is confusing. This Frances was daughter of a younger son of the Duke of Norfolk, and widow of a wealthy wine merchant, Henry Pranell. The death of Elizabeth I in 1603 meant it was finally Hertford’s time to shine at court—he and his wife were in great favour with the new sovereigns, James I and Anna of Denmark (despite, or maybe because of, his sons’ potential better claims to the English throne according to the terms of Henry VIII’s will?). He’s sent on diplomatic missions and she forms part of the Queen’s inner circle. In order to reside closer to court, Hertford bought an estate on the coast of Hampshire, Netley Abbey, in 1602. He also maintained a townhouse in London, Hertford House, on Canon Row, in Westminster (where today’s modern police station sits).

Netley Abbey was a Cistercian foundation, built in the 1230s, just outside Southampton. In 1536, it was seized and given to William Paulet, later Marquis of Winchester, who transformed it into a country house. His heirs sold it in 1602 to Hertford, and the Seymours lived here until it passed to the Bruce family as with so much else of the Seymour estates. They sold it right away to the Duke of Beaufort, but it quickly fell into disrepair and was mostly demolished—the remains of the ancient church buildings became a famous ruin. Since 1922 it has been run by the state and is today part of English Heritage.

When the Earl of Hertford died in 1621 he was buried in the Seymour Chapel in Salisbury Cathedral (other family members were buried in the parish church close to Wulfhall, in Great Bedwyn). His widow maintained her great royal favour and married the King’s cousin, the Duke of Lennox. The eldest son of Catherine Grey, Edward, called Lord Beauchamp once his legitimacy was recognised, had died before his father, as indeed had his own first son, Edward. So the succession passed to the second son, William, 2^nd Earl of Hertford.

Trouble seems to follow this family around … so in 1610 when he was 22 years old, and still only the second grandson, William secretly married the one person he really shouldn’t: Lady Arbella Stuart. She was then considered fourth in line to the throne—as a descendant of Margaret Tudor—and had been the subject of plots and counterplots her entire life. William Seymour would himself have been considered seventh in line, so their marriage was a definite challenge to the legitimacy of the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne. Both were confined to the Tower of London—they escaped in 1611, though she was recaptured and died four years later in confinement; he fled abroad to the Low Countries.

But by 1616 Seymour was back at court and was knighted—so I guess all was forgiven. In 1621, he succeeded his grandfather as 2^nd Earl of Hertford and took up his seat in the House of Lords—he was a continual opponent of his cousin King Charles I until about 1640, when politics got too radical and he was wooed into the royalist camp by means of his elevation in rank to Marquess of Hertford in 1641. During the Civil War he remained a moderate royalist and tried to keep open lines of communication through his brother-in-law, the Earl of Essex, a parliamentary commander. Hertford’s loyalty to the King was proven in the years following Charles I’s captivity—unlike other moderate royalists, he stayed with his cousin until his execution. He then retreated from London and laid low during the Commonwealth. In 1660, the Marquess of Hertford’s loyalty was rewarded and he was restored—finally—to his great-grandfather’s dukedom of Somerset. But his joy was extremely brief, enjoying the title for only a month before he died in October.

Another royalist commander in the Civil War was Francis Seymour, the 1^st Marquess of Hertford’s younger brother, who was created Baron Seymour of Trowbridge (Wiltshire) in 1641. Like his older brother, he too had not always been a supporter of the King: elected as a Member of Parliament for Wiltshire in 1621, he was consistently opposed to the King’s plans to raise money for foreign wars. His seat in Parliament represented the Wiltshire town of Marlborough where he acquired Marlborough Castle, an old Norman motte and bailey that had been used for centuries as a dower property for English queens, but had been a ruin since about 1400. Francis built a new house here, which was later replaced by a larger building (1680s) by the 6^th Duke of Somerset. By the late eighteenth century Marlborough Castle had been sold and became the Castle Inn with a prominent gentleman’s club; by the 1840s, this became the nucleus of the new Marlborough College, which it still is today.

The 2^nd Duke of Somerset’s eldest sons had died in their twenties; the third, Henry, Lord Beauchamp, spent several months in the Tower (now a pretty familiar place for the Seymours) in 1651, and died only a few years later, meaning the succession in late 1660 passed to the restored Duke’s grandson, William, who was only eight (though his birth date seems to vary between 1650 and 1654). The new 3^rd Duke was looked after by his mother, the very intelligent Mary Capell—later more famous as the 1^st Duchess of Beaufort. This is where matters could be confusing, as the Beaufort surname was Somerset, and their ancestral title had been Duke of Somerset, as seen in their own separate blog. So in this case her new surname was Somerset, while her son’s title was Somerset.

Little William died in 1671, about twenty, and the succession passed to his uncle John, 4^th Duke of Somerset—himself only about 25, but already the black sheep of the family, with a mountain of debts. His situation was not improved by the fact that most of the Seymour lands were not specifically entailed with the titles, so although he became a duke, his niece Elizabeth (the 3^rd Duke’s little sister), inherited most of the estates: Wulfhall, Tottenham and Savernake Forest in Wiltshire; Hatch Beauchamp in Somerset, and, technically, the claim to the throne of England, by now fairly distant and forgotten. The 4^th Duke died three years later in 1675, and a year later Elizabeth married Thomas Bruce, Lord Kinloss, son of the Earl of Ailesbury—his family were descended from the royal house of Bruce in Scotland, and in some minds, passed along the Grey-Seymour claim to the English throne to their descendants (today it is Teresa Freeman-Grenville, 13^th Lady Kinloss).

The new Duke of Somerset in 1675 was thus a cousin, Francis Seymour, 3^rd Baron Seymour of Trowbridge, of Marlborough Castle. But the 5^th Duke too had a very short tenure, and was killed, aged 20, on the Ligurian Coast, where he duelled with a man whose wife he had insulted. The succession passed to his brother Charles, who in remarkable contrast, enjoyed a long and prosperous life. So enamoured was he with his semi-royal descent and so passionate about the details of court etiquette, that he gained the nickname ‘the Proud Duke’. But since the Seymour inheritance had passed to the Bruce family, he had to marry well, and marry well he did: Lady Elizabeth Percy was the heiress of the vast fortune of the earls of Northumberland, one of the oldest and grandest noble families in all of England. Though she was only fifteen, this was already her third marriage! Her father having died when she was three, Elizabeth was already owner of Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, Petworth Castle in Sussex, Syon House outside of London, and a number of other castles and properties in Cumberland and Yorkshire. A separate blog about the Percys of Northumberland will look more closely at these estates.

Immediately, the 6^th Duke’s career took off as a member of the household of Charles II—but he fell from favour under James II and was dismissed as a Lord of Bedchamber in 1687. He spent the next few years rebuilding Petworth into a monumental ducal palace, in French château style, worthy of the double dynastic identity of Seymours and Percys (as an aside, his marriage contract said he was to change his name to Percy, but he never did). It was the Duchess of Somerset who helped restore her husband’s position at court, as a favourite of Queen Anne. The Duke became Anne’s Master of the Horse in 1702, and his wife eventually replaced the Duchess of Marlborough as Mistress of the Robes and chief confidante. Their proximity to the Queen played a key role at the very end of her life when she began to waver on her commitment to the Hanoverian Succession (perhaps preferring to atone for supporting the rebellion against her father back in 1689); Somerset and other key peers kept her on target. Under George I, the Duke at first retained his post of Master of the Horse, but was dismissed in 1715, and retired to private life. Elizabeth Percy died in 1722, and after a strange unrequited love affair with the Duchess of Marlborough, Somerset married the much younger Lady Charlotte Finch. He died over two decades later in 1748 at his beloved Petworth.

There was only one surviving son, Algernon (a traditional Percy name), who had had a fairly successful career under his courtesy title, ‘Earl of Hertford’. After 1722, he became Baron Percy, as his mother’s heir. He held a succession of administrative posts, from governor of Tynemouth Castle in Northumberland in 1711 to governor of Minorca, 1727, and of Guernsey, 1742. He was also Lord Lieutenant of Sussex as heir apparent to Petworth. But when he succeeded as 7^th Duke of Somerset in 1748, he had already lost his own son, George, Lord Beauchamp, and disliked the idea of his estates passing to a very distant Seymour cousin. So in 1749 there was an extraordinary set of titles created for him by George II designed to favour two different heirs. The Duke was created Earl of Northumberland with a special remainder for his daughter Elizabeth and her husband Hugh Smithson (who changed his name to Percy, and ultimately became 1^st Duke of Northumberland). He was also created Earl of Egremont, named for the Percy estates in Cumberland, with a special remainder for his sister’s son, Charles Wyndham—the Wyndhams inherited Petworth and they still live there today. The 7^th Duke of Somerset died only one year later in 1750.

So once again, the next duke of Somerset inherited the title but very little else.

In order to find the 8^th Duke of Somerset, we need to jump all the way back to the mid-sixteenth century and to the younger of the two disinherited sons of the 1^st Duke: Sir Edward Seymour, Lord of Berry Pomeroy. The castle of Berry Pomeroy, near Totnes in south Devon, was built on an outcrop overlooking a narrow valley by the Pomeroy family in the late fifteenth century (on the site of a much older manor). That family fell onto hard times and sold the manor and castle to Lord Protector Edward Seymour in 1547. His son Edward, disinherited from the Wiltshire estates, was given this instead; he built a new Tudor mansion on the site in the 1560s—huge, with four storeys and dozens of rooms. In 1583, Elizabeth I named him High Sheriff of Devon thus more firmly establishing his branch of the family in the southwest of England. His son Edward was then given the rank of baronet in 1611 by King James. The 2^nd baronet (another Edward) was the governor of Dartmouth (the main port of south Devon) and as a royalist, was imprisoned in London during the Civil War. The house at Berry Pomeroy was abandoned and fell into ruin—mostly demolished in the 1690s. Yet it was given a new lease on life in the more romantic age of the early nineteenth century, when Regency era tourists developed a passion for ancient ruins. Numerous engravings and paintings followed, and gothic novels set in the castle, and in 1830—seeing a good thing—the Seymours engaged in one of the first examples of ‘heritage conservation’, hoping to draw more tourists and earn some money in local hotels and pubs.

The reason for the house’s abandonment was the successful political career of the 4^th Baronet, Edward Seymour, who wished to live closer to London once he became Speaker of the House of Commons in 1673, and Treasurer of the Navy. He based himself at Bradley House on western edge of Wiltshire near the border with Somerset, not far from the more famous country houses of Stourhead and Longleat. The village is called Maiden Bradley and was said to have taken this name from a daughter (a ‘maiden’) of an official of King Henry II who suffered from leprosy and founded a hospital in the village of Bradley in 1164. This later became an Augustinian priory, and when the priories were dissolved, this one was given to Edward Seymour in the 1530s, then passed to his eldest sons of the Berry Pomeroy line. A new house was built in the 1690s (it is said using materials from Pomeroy). It thus became the ducal seat when this branch succeeded in the 1750s, and remains so today. Much of it was dismantled in the 1820s, leaving just one wing. It remains mostly shut for visitors.

The 4^th Baronet’s career continued to rise—in the House of Commons he led a powerful faction (then developing into the Tory Party) that opposed the exclusion of James, Duke of York, from succeeding to the throne; yet he was also one of the first to abandon James in November 1688 and declare for William of Orange in his invasion of England—at Brixham in Devon, quite close to Berry Pomeroy. After he retired from Parliament, he was given the prominent court position of Comptroller of the Royal Household by Queen Anne in 1702.

Sir Edward Seymour married twice—his second wife was a Popham, co-heiress of even more estates in Wiltshire (Littlecote); and his son by his first marriage married a Popham too, to secure the inheritance—as indeed did a younger grandson, to be sure (ultimately founding a separate line, of Knoyle House, Wiltshire; extinct in 1888). The oldest grandson, rather remarkably, succeeded his very distant cousin in 1750 to the Dukedom of Somerset, so we’ll follow his line below. His uncles, the two sons of the 4^th Baronet’s second marriage, instead picked up the succession of another gentry family, the Conways of Warwickshire (with the very brief title, earl of Conway), who also had significant lands in Ireland—a factor which shaped their political fortunes. The elder of these, Popham Seymour-Conway, was killed in a duel in 1699, leaving the estates to his brother, Francis, who was created Baron Conway of Ragley in 1703—but also Baron Conway of Killultagh (Antrim) in 1712, ensuring he had a voice in both English and Irish parliaments. He was also given a seat on the Irish Privy Council. His two sons founded the junior branch of the House of Seymour, the Seymour-Conways. The younger of these, Henry, was a politician and soldier, holding the post of Chief Secretary for Ireland, 1755-57, and Speaker of the House of Commons, 1765-68, and rising in the army to Commander in Chief of the Forces, 1782-93. The older brother, Francis Seymour-Conway, was restored to the old earldom of Hertford, 1750—the same year as his cousin’s succession to the dukedom of Somerset—and was sent to Ireland as its viceroy in 1765-66, then returned to England to serve as Lord Chamberlain at court for nearly twenty years. At the end of his life he was raised a rank to Marquess of Hertford (1793).

Today’s Marquess of Hertford is the 9^th (Harry Seymour—they dropped Conway from the name in 1870—born in 1958). The other main legacy of the Marquesses of Hertford—incidentally a much wealthier and much more aristocratic family than their senior cousins the dukes of Somerset—is the splendid Wallace Collection in London, based in Hertford House and housing artworks amassed mostly by the 3^rd and 4^th marquesses and willed to the latter’s illegitimate son, Richard Wallace, then to the nation in 1897.

Ragley Hall, west of Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, was built by the Earl of Conway in 1680. It has remained the seat of the Seymour-Conway family since then; in the 1950s it was refurbished and opened to the public. In the 1750s, the family bought a second seat, Sudbourne Hall in Suffolk. Richard Wallace purchased it from the Marquess of Hertford in 1871, then sold it in 1884—it passed through various hands until it was demolished in 1953.

Returning to the main line of the Seymours, who seem to be quite good at keeping their line going (and the ducal title), when other similar clans did not, we see yet another Edward Seymour becoming 8^th Duke of Somerset in 1750 (having been merely a baronet). He inherited none of the vast estates, now given to the Smithsons and the Wyndhams, and died only seven years later.

The 9^th Duke of Somerset, also Edward—about whom there seems to be nothing to say—died unmarried in 1792, so the titles passed to his brother Webb (his mother’s maiden name), the 10^th Duke—but only from January 1792 to December 1793 (at nearly 80). His son Edward Adolphus, the 11^th Duke, formally changed the spelling of his surname to St Maur (pronounced ‘seemer’), believing it to reflect the original spelling, and picking up on the air of the neogothic and romantic love of all things medieval—it was he who commissioned the restoration (and marketing) of Berry Pomeroy as a tourist attraction in the 1830s.

The 11th Duke moved his seat closer to the ruin in Devon by acquiring a new residence, Stover House, in Teigngrace, near Newton Abbot. Purchased in 1829, the Georgian mansion had been built by the Templer family in the 1770s (originally merchants from Exeter). They had also constructed a nearby church and the Stover Canal. The Duke of Somerset added a large porte-cochère, or covered gateway for coaches, a clock house and stables. He was a scholar, a mathematician and President of the Royal Institution, 1826-42. In 1808 he purchased a London townhouse on Park Lane in Mayfair, which he named Somerset House, despite there already being a more famous building of this name (see above). He married Lady Charlotte Hamilton an heiress of the 9^th Duke of Hamilton, and filled Stover House with her renowned art collection.

The 11th Duke’s son Edward Augustus became 12^th Duke in 1855. As a younger man, he had married beneath his station, to Georgiana Sheridan, granddaughter of the playwright, and a famous society beauty. As heir he held various posts in the Whig governments of the 1830s-40s, then as Duke he served as First Lord of the Admiralty, 1859-66. He was also honoured with a new title, Earl St Maur, of Berry Pomeroy, in 1863—this was done to ensure his son had a proper courtesy title as the son of a duke (since the earldom of Hertford had not passed from the 7^th to the 8^th Duke back in 1750). His son Edward Augustus (but known as Ferdinand) did use this as his courtesy title, but was also created ‘Baron Seymour’ in a writ of acceleration (also 1863) to allow him to take up his seat in the House of Lords. He led a fairly romantic and wild life as a soldier in India and in Italy, where he became the subject of a scandalous trial where he was accused of horsewhipping a fellow soldier. Some gossipy sources say he went crazy, or that he converted to Islam. Earl St Maur may or may not have secretly married in Tangier in about 1862, then died in England in 1869 after a botched operation, leaving an illegitimate son, Harold St Maur. A younger son, also called Edward, was a diplomat, and was killed by a bear in India in 1865.

The 12^th Duke of Somerset, now heirless, despised his brothers who had so looked down on his wife socially, so he arranged to pass Stover House and its art collection to his illegitimate grandson, Harold, while the rest of the inheritance was divided amongst his daughters (for example, one of the daughters inherited Somerset House on Park Lane, which she soon sold—today the site is occupied by the Marriott Hotel Park Lane). When the Duke died in 1885, Harold did make an attempt to claim the dukedom, but failed (and tried again in 1923, again with no success). Stover House has been leased to a school since 1932.

So the 13^th Duke of Somerset, Archibald, moved back to Maiden Bradley, now stripped of all its contents. He died unmarried a few years later and passed the titles to a third brother, Algernon, who died three years later. The Seymours/St Maurs certainly go through dukes quickly! The last duke of this line was Algernon, 15^th Duke of Somerset, who lived quietly at Bradley House and died in 1923. The succession jumped once more across several generations of male-line kinship, to Col. Edward Seymour (and the more familiar surname was resumed).

Col. Edward Seymour was the great-great-grandson of Lord Francis Seymour, Dean of Wells Cathedral and Chaplain to George II, the third son of the 8^th Duke of Somerset. The new 16^th Duke of Somerset had been a career soldier, in army ordnance. It took two years for the House of Lords to give full approval to his succession to the ducal title (disputed by the Marquess of Hertford), and he died a few years later, in 1931. His son, Evelyn, though by no means one of the great landowners of Britain like his fellow dukes, was nonetheless honoured with the position of carrying the sceptre at the coronation of George VI in 1937, and appointed to one of his family’s longstanding posts, Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire, 1942-1950. Like his father he had a long military career, serving in the Boer War, World War I and World War II. His son Percy, the 18^th Duke from 1954, had also been a soldier, with service in Asia; when he died his title passed to his son John (we seem finally to have run out of Edwards), who worked as a chartered surveyor in the 1970s-80s, then sat in the lords as Duke from 1984 until the hereditary peerage was abolished; he was then selected as one of the elected peers in 2014. His heir is Sebastian, Lord Seymour. There may no longer be a Seymour of Wolf Hall, but the Wiltshire hills at Maiden Bradley are still home to this amazing survivor of a ducal dynasty.

(images Wikimedia Commons)

There’s a fairly common surname in England and America, Compton, and if you want to think it might once upon a time have been connected to the old Anglo-Norman aristocracy, as derived from an old French word connected to accounting (comptant), that’s not a bad deduction; but it just as easily could be derived, like so many English names, from the more mundane world of agriculture: the old English cum tun a farm or settlement in a narrow valley (or coombe). Unsurprisingly, there are lots of small villages in England with this name, especially in the south and west.

Of those Comptons associated with noble titles, the most prominent are the Comptons of Warwickshire, who rose very fast due to great royal favour in the Tudor era and ultimately became earls, then marquises of Northampton, and remain so today—with two very grand family seats: Compton Wynyates in Warwickshire, and Ashby Castle in Northamptonshire. This post will mostly be about them, even though they did not reach the very top of the peerage, the dukedom.

Other noble seats with the same name include the very famous Compton Verney (also in Warwickshire), the seat of the Verney family—today home to a wonderful art gallery. Compton Beauchamp House is a baroque mansion in southwest Oxfordshire. There’s a medieval Compton Castle in South Devon, home to a Compton family in the Middle Ages, but more known as the long-term seat of the Gilbert family. Compton Pauncefoot Castle in Somerset was built for the Hunt family in 1820s, and later became the seat of a baronetcy, Mason of Compton Pauncefoot (1918), whose family were later raised to the title Baron Blackford (1935), before going extinct in 1988. There was also a different Compton baronetcy, of Hartpury (Gloucestershire), granted in 1686. Though they went extinct in 1773, they may have left some distant cousins too poor or too distant to claim the title, as this family was known to have perennial financial difficulties, in part stemming from their status in the seventeenth century (at least) as recusant Catholics.

This leads me to pure speculation, and one of the reasons for justifying this post connecting the noble Comptons of Northampton to my own family (my mother’s surname). In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a large number of junior members of the gentry or lower nobility of England emigrated to the colonies to escape financial or religious difficulties. Unlike France or Germany where noble status was always transmittable to male descendants—no matter how far away from the main line you got—in England only the head of a family was noble, so younger sons could sit in the House of Commons, could enter trade without social or legal impunity, and could easily ‘fall out’ of the upper social orders and become yeoman farmers, or worse, could speculate on investments and lose everything. Many Americans who research their family trees are able to trace their ancestry back to the English aristocracy through this route, though records are often patchy, and some records that do exist should be considered dubious. So my fantasy—I should reiterate, based on no evidence at all—is that it could be possible that one of these poor younger sons, deprived of an inheritance by the system of entail so prevalent in England in this period, and maybe fleeing persecution as a Catholic, managed to travel to America and establish a life there. He wouldn’t be the only one of my ancestors to flee religious persecution to the New World—see my previous blog post about anabaptists from Germany.

What I do know is that a certain Ezekiel Compton (or Cumpton) was born in the colony of New Jersey in 1773, perhaps in Hunterdon County in the Delaware Valley, and moved in about 1800 to the newly established Berkeley County, Virginia. The county was named for a popular governor Norborne Berkeley (who had died in 1770), who came from Gloucestershire in England, so maybe had some connections to English settlers whose families also came from there like the Comptons of Hartpury? The other interesting coincidence is that General Daniel Morgan also came to this area of Virginia (though many years before) from Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Morgan’s grandparents had emigrated from Wales (which borders Gloucestershire), and he settled in Frederick County, Virginia, which was then divided to create Berkeley County in 1772, and then divided again in 1820 to create a new county, which was named for Morgan himself, as a hero of the American Revolution. What is now Morgan County had long been popular with Native Americans for its warm springs bubbling out of the Potomac Highlands, which drew its first settlers, Germans from the Delaware Valley, in about the 1730. The town that grew up around the main springs was called Bath, after the city in England (in Gloucestershire, coincidence?)—but was renamed Berkeley Springs by about 1802.

I too lived in Gloucestershire for a bit in the early part of this century, but I can’t say I felt any deep ancestral tingles there.

Ezekiel Compton died in 1860, and three years later, Morgan County became part of the new state of West Virginia. His son John, born in Berkeley County, died only five years later. John’s son William was known as ‘Doc’—for what reason I do not know—and married a local girl, Martina Casler, whose family takes my lineage back yet again to the Palatinate in Germany. Her ancestor Michael Casler (or Kessler, the surname for a coppersmith) emigrated to north-western Virginia in the 1760s and bought land from Lord Fairfax on Sir Johns Run, near Berkeley Springs, land that eventually became Morgan County. They had five sons, some with intriguing names (Hamil, Leonidus and Newton), and around the turn of the twentieth century, several of these migrated to Washington DC at time when jobs were plentiful as the national capital was finally starting to develop into a real city. Leonidus, who went by his middle name, Smith, married another local girl from back in Berkeley Springs, Virginia Alderton, whose first cousin had married her husband’s sister (and they too moved to Washington). The Aldertons had also settled in the area that’s now Morgan County as early as 1750. One of the more interesting stories to appear when I was looking into this family history is that of Virginia’s uncle, Reverend Thomas Alderton, a Methodist preacher in Great Cacapon, West Virginia, who died in the pulpit, at nearly 7 feet tall and over 300 pounds (says his obituary in The Washington Post from 1906)! Smith and Virginia in turn had a large family of four girls and two boys—one of these, Ralph, was my grandad. Ralph Compton worked for the US government in the boom years of the 1930s-40s and earned enough to send his two sons and one daughter—my mother—to college. His career was in accounting and several of my cousins are today in related fields with very mathematical brains, so I’ve often joked that maybe there was a ‘comptant’ gene in the family after all (and not a ‘farm in a narrow valley’ gene!).

So do I think my Comptons are related to those in Warwickshire or Gloucestershire? Not really. But it could be fun. Maybe one of the earls of the later seventeenth century had an illegitimate son who, shunned by society in London, sought his fortune in the colonies?

Heading for more solid historical ground, we can look at the story of the Compton marquesses of Northampton as a good example of how to shimmy up the pole of the English aristocracy pretty quick if you enjoy royal favour. And the first who really rose to great prominence was indeed great mates with one of the most notorious promoters of new men: Henry VIII. Sir William Compton descended from local gentry with deep roots in rural Warwickshire stretching back to about 1200, and was appointed as a boy to be a page in the household of the Duke of York. When the Duke became King Henry VIII in 1509, he appointed his childhood friend to the extremely important position of Groom of the Stool—the person most trusted to attend the monarch in his most private moments (and I don’t mean sex). Compton became one of the central figures of the Tudor court, and features heavily in the TV dramatization, played by Kris Holden-Ried (maybe not as memorable as Henry Cavill, but a big presence, nonetheless). He accompanied the King on his Flanders campaign of 1513 and was knighted. Over the years he was richly rewarded with lands all over England and offices including the wardenship of Windsor Great Park, Chief Gentleman of the Bedchamber, and even a short stint as Chancellor of Ireland (1513-16). He married an heiress, Werburge Brereton, who was heiress of both her father’s lands in Sussex, and lands from her mother, Katherine Berkeley, in Gloucestershire.

In 1515, Henry VIII gave William Compton the ruined Fulbroke Castle in Warwickshire, southwest of the town of Warwick, which he used as a sort of Ikea for castles, bringing back various ornamental bits to his family’s ancestral seat, further to the south in the same county, Compton Wynyates. This had been a Compton property since about 1200, rebuilt by William’s father in more fashionable brick, with four wings around a quadrangle. William now added a great porch, a chapel, and those twisty chimneys so associated with Tudor style. Compton Wynyates hosted numerous royal visits in the next two centuries—Henry VIII, Elizabeth, James I, Charles I—but it suffered during the English Civil War and the family mostly moved to another property, Ashby Castle, which they modernised and developed, meaning that Compton Wynyates is one of the most well-preserved Tudor houses in England. It was restored by the family in the nineteenth century, to be used as the home for the heir, but it always remained the second home, until the 1980s when Ashby Castle was opened for tourism, and Compton Wynyates became the principal, and still very private, family home.

But the King’s great pal William Compton died of the sweating sickness before he reached fifty. His baby son Peter was put into wardship, first under Cardinal Wolsey, then under the Earl of Shrewsbury, who married him off to his own daughter, Lady Anne Talbot. This meant the Comptons were not only connected to the Talbots, one of England’s premier families, but also, via the bride’s grandmother, Lady Katherine Stafford, to the Plantagenets and the royal family itself. But Peter died very young in 1544, leaving just one son, Henry.

Henry Compton, like his father, married extremely well. In the reign of Elizabeth, his first wife was Lady Frances Hastings, whose father was the Earl of Huntingdon, but whose mother was Katherine Pole, granddaughter of the Countess of Salisbury (niece of Richard III), meaning again that the Comptons were getting a healthy dollop of Plantagenet blood. He became an MP for Old Sarum in Wiltshire. In 1572, royal favour allowed him to move out of the House of Commons and into the House of Lords as Baron Compton of Compton Wynyates. He married a second time in about 1575, Anne Spencer, who, unlike his first wife, was from a relatively new family like his own, raised up to great prominence by favour with the Tudors, and owning significant agricultural lands in the county next door to Warwickshire, Northamptonshire.

Here Henry, Baron Compton, acquired a new family seat: Castle Ashby, a few miles southeast of the city of Northampton. The original manor house, built by the bishop of Coventry, dated back to the early fourteenth century. Lord Compton acquired it in the 1570s, and rebuilt it as an ‘Elizabethan prodigy house’, a princely mansion with space to house over eighty servants, surrounded by an estate that covered several villages. The house was given a grand palladian front enclosing the courtyard in the 1770s. It is still quite grand today, but the house is not open to the public (just the gardens).

Henry Compton died in 1589 leaving three sons. The youngest, Henry, established a secondary branch of the family in the old Brereton estates in Sussex. The second son, Sir Thomas, made an interesting marriage in 1609 as the third husband of Mary Beaumont, the widow of Sir George Villiers and mother of the soon-to-be great favourite of King James, George, Duke of Buckingham—again, as seen recently in a television drama (Mary & George, in which old Sir Thomas does not really come over too well). [see previous blog post on the Villiers family]. Meanwhile, the eldest son, William, made a much better marriage—in terms of finance if not status—but apparently had to fight to get it.  Elizabeth Spencer—not related, I think, to the Spencers of Northamptonshire—was the only child of Sir John Spencer, Lord Mayor of London and one of the richest men in Elizabethan England. He opposed the marriage of his daughter to the 2^nd Baron Compton, who had, it so happened, borrowed a huge amount of money from Spencer so considered getting a dowry and her inheritance would be a great way to cancel this debt. As the story goes, in about 1599, Compton used his influence at court to arrange for old Sir John to be arrested on charges of mistreating his daughter, then abducted Elizabeth—it was said by lowering her in a baker’s basket from her window in Canonbury Tower. Sir John disowned his daughter, but gradually was reconciled once she had a child and his heart softened.

Canonbury House, in Islington, north London, became the new jewel in the Compton real estate crown. It had been a priory, part of the huge monastic complex of St Bartholomew’s, named after its canons (though sometimes called ‘Canbury’). When monastic lands were confiscated in the 1540s, the estate was given to the Dudleys, then passed to others before it was acquired by Spencer in 1570 (and he rebuilt the house on a grander scale in the 1590s). William and Elizabeth didn’t move in here, however—he was too much in favour at court so needed to be closer to King James—but leased it out, notably to Sir Francis Bacon. The family did start to live here after the 1650s. In the eighteenth century the mansion was redeveloped into several smaller houses (again leased out, some to very famous lodgers). One of these became known as Northampton House by the 1850s. Other areas became sportsgrounds. The Tower of Canonbury remained, however, and is still the only major Tudor era building in Islington, restored by the 5^th Marquess of Northampton in about 1910. It still has a ‘Spencer Room’ and a ‘Compton Room’. The London estate is owned by the family trust and includes a pub called the Compton Arms.

As William Compton rose in favour with King James, he was rewarded: in 1617 he was given the very prestigious and powerful post of Lord President of the Marches and Dominion of Wales (with jurisdiction over all of Wales, plus the bordering counties), and a year later elevated in title to Earl of Northampton. Though one of the family seats was in this midlands county, it is thought that this title was selected due to William’s descent from the earls of Huntingdon, who had at one point also been earls of Northampton, way back in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Northampton was in fact one of the most ancient earldoms in all of England, a fact that would come into play again later.

The first Earl of Northampton died in 1630, leaving just one son, with the very distinctive first name ‘Spencer’. This name will recur a lot in the next three centuries of family history, and although it derives from Sir John Spencer in London, it probably also gave a bit of caché to the family in Northamptonshire as the other major county family, the Spencers of Althorp, rose higher and higher in the social hierarchy. The 2^nd Earl became another royal favourite—this time as Master of the Robes to Charles, Prince of Wales, 1621, and accompanying him on his famous trip to Spain in 1623 to try (and fail) to woo a Spanish infanta. Later in life, the 2^nd Earl became a prominent Royalist commander in the Civil War and was killed at the Battle of Hopton Heath in Shropshire. He had married Mary Beaumont, the niece of the earlier Mary Beaumont, and thus first cousin to the Duke of Buckingham.

The 2^nd Earl had six sons, several of whom were prominent Royalist commanders in the war. The eldest, James, became the 3^rd Earl of Northampton and managed to lie low during the Commonwealth so his lands were not confiscated. At the Restoration of 1660, he was restored to his family’s now fairly hereditary position of Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, and later was given the post of Constable of the Tower of London, and member of the Privy Council. But he was never a major political figure and was sidelined in 1679 when tension rose between those who supported and those who feared the succession of the King’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York.

Indeed the 3^rd Earl’s youngest brother, Henry, became one of the chief opponents of the Duke of York once he became King James II. Henry Compton joined the church as a young man and was appointed Bishop of Oxford in 1674, then transferred to London in 1675. He was also given the post of Dean of the Chapel Royal and a seat on the Privy Council, as well as the task of overseeing the education of the royal princesses Mary and Anne, daughters of the Duke of York. As the reign of Charles II waned in the 1680s, the Bishop of London worked to bring dissenters back into the Church of England, but only low church Protestants or Presbyterians, not Catholics—so when James II became King in 1685, his anti-Catholic stance became a liability, and he was dismissed from the Privy Council and the Deanship. He therefore joined the opposition in the House of Lords and became one of the ‘Immortal Seven’ who wrote a letter to William, Prince of Orange, in June 1688, inviting him to invade England in order to remove the perceived threat of an absolutist and pro-Catholic regime. The Bishop of London then performed the coronation of William and Mary in April 1689, since the Archbishop of Canterbury would not do it. Henry Compton is one of my favourite Comptons as he became the first Chancellor of the College of William & Mary in Virginia—my alma mater—which he helped found in 1693. Although he remained a central figure in the reigns of William and Mary and of Queen Anne, and involved, for example, in the commission that drew up the official acts of union between England and Scotland in 1707, he was passed over twice for promotion to the top job, archbishop of Canterbury, which irked him.

This brings us into the eighteenth century and the next great Compton politician, Spencer Compton, younger brother of the 4^th Earl of Northampton. The 4^th Earl, George, was Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire and Constable of the Tower, but led a fairly quiet life. His brother Spencer, in contrast, became a Member of Parliament in 1698 and a close ally of Walpole—a Whig, which went against the Compton family’s traditional Tory stance. Rising with Walpole, Compton was named Speaker of the Commons, 1715, a Privy Councillor in 1716, and Treasurer of the Household of the Prince of Wales. When Walpole became essentially Britain’s first Prime Minister, Compton was appointed Lord Privy Seal, and in 1728 moved to the House of Lords as Baron Wilmington, of Wilmington (Sussex). By this point, political winds changed, and he became one of Walpole’s chief opponents—but he continued to rise in royal favour: created Earl of Wilmington and Viscount Pevensey (also in Sussex) in 1730, and Lord President of the Council. Finally he succeeded Walpole as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury in 1742. He only held these posts for a year before he died. Unmarried and childless, his titles became extinct. His name lives on however in the city of Wilmington in Delaware.

In the 1720s, Spencer Compton purchased the Jacobean mansion of Borne Place on the seaside in Eastbourne, Sussex and rebuilt it along baroque lines. Renamed Compton Place, it became his chief country retreat from London politics. Later it passed back to the main line of Compton earls, then in the 1750s by marriage into the Cavendish family: the dukes of Devonshire still own it today.

The next four earls of Northampton were fairly unremarkable. James, the 5^th Earl, had married an heiress, Elizabeth Shirley, who succeeded in her own right as Baroness Ferrers of Chartley. They had only a daughter, Charlotte, who thus took the barony of Compton and that of Ferrers by marriage into the Townshend family (later elevated to the rank of marquess). The earldom passed to the next brother, George, who died only four years later (1758) and passed the earldom to his nephew, Charles. The 7^th Earl married a society beauty, Lady Anne Somerset, daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, and they were both set to take up a romantic post in the British embassy in Venice when he suddenly died in October 1763, only 26 years old—predeceased by his equally young wife a few months earlier in Naples. Again there was only a daughter (later married to Lord Burlington), so the earldom moved sideways once more, to Spencer, 8^th Earl of Northampton.

The 8^th Earl was a Groom of the Bedchamber to George III in the early years of his reign, but became a rather extravagant spender, so that by the mid-1770s he was forced to live abroad, in Switzerland where it was much cheaper. It was also probably to avoid the scandal of having taken as a second wife, Anne Hougham, the daughter of a London linen-draper. He died in 1796, leaving his son Charles mostly a lot of debt.

Charles, 9^th Earl of Northampton, had one thing in his favour, however: his aunt Catherine had married John Perceval, Earl of Egmont, and their son Spencer Perceval was a rising star in government and Prime Minister from 1809. Compton asked his cousin to raise his peerage title up a grade to marquess, with the argument that it was one of the ‘ancient earldoms’ of England (which it was) so should stand out more against the ever-increasing number of earldoms that had been created in the later eighteenth century. Spencer Perceval agreed, but was assassinated in May 1812, leaving the actual creation to his successor, Lord Liverpool. The first Marquess of Northampton’s subsidiary titles were Earl Compton (used by the heir) and Baron Wilmington.

Spencer, 2^nd Marquess of Northampton, inherited this new title in 1828. He had lived in Italy since 1820, and championed liberal movements in Lombardy and Naples (sort of like Lord Byron fighting for independence of Greece at the same time). He returned to England in 1830 and became a vocal reformer in the House of Lords. He was also a keen scientist and headed up several societies, in particular for geology—he was interested in the earliest discoveries of dinosaur fossils and even had a type of stegosaurus named for him. He was President of the Royal Society, 1838-48, and died shortly after.

The 3^rd and 4^th marquesses were brothers. They also had a younger brother, Lord Alwyne, who became Lord High Almoner to Queen Victoria in 1882, and Bishop of Ely in 1886. The 3^rd Marquess, Charles, was known mostly for his work restoring Compton Wynyates in the 1860s. William, 4^th Marquess, had a long naval carer, with service in the Far East, until he succeeded to his brother’s titles in 1877. In 1894, he donated lands in Clerkenwell, another estate in London (south of Canonbury and Islington), to create the Northampton Institute, which eventually evolved into the City University of London. He died in 1897.

As a sizeable landowner in north London—the district of Clerkenwell still bears the street names of Northampton, Spencer and Compton—William, 5^th Marquess of Northampton, took an active part in the organisation of the new London County Council in the 1890s. He had been a diplomat in the 1870s, and resumed this function in a more honorary way in 1910 as special envoy to the courts of Europe to announce the accession of George V. He died three years later, having added to the family’s fortunes by marrying one of the heiresses of Barings Bank.

In contrast to this marriage, a year before his father’s death, William, Earl Compton, had become engaged to an actress who gave birth to twins—but once he acceded to the marquisate, he backed out. She sued for breach of promise and was awarded £50,000. The 6^th Marquess then went on to marry three times and divorce twice. This is not, I hasten to add, unusual for the British aristocracy of the 20^th century (in fact his son, married six times!). The 6^th Marquess served in the First World War as a major in the Royal Horse Guards, then spent much of his career in local affairs, as lieutenant-colonel of the Warwickshire yeomanry in the 1920s, and as chairman of the Northamptonshire County Council in the early 1950s. He died in 1978 at the ripe old age of 93. His son Spencer (‘Spenny’) is the 7^th and current Marquess of Northampton. He is one of the richest men in the UK, with estates valued at about £120 million. So although not a duke or prince, he certainly lives like one. He is known for having an astute eye in the buying and selling of treasures, from Renaissance art to ancient buried Roman silver. The succession is secure in his son Daniel, Earl Compton (b. 1973), and grandson Henry, Lord Wilmington (b. 2018).

Before concluding, we can look at the current Marquess’s cousins, who, though having no title at all, also live like dukes and princes. The youngest brother of the 5^th Marquess, Lord Alwyne Compton, was a Unionist politician (opposed to the separation of Ireland from the United Kingdom). In 1886 he married Mary de Grey Vyner, heiress of Newby Hall, Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal, all in Yorkshire. Their two sons divided these properties, with the younger taking the surname Vyner and starting a new subbranch (and marrying very well, the daughter of the Duke of Lennox). The ruined abbey at Fountains and its Elizabethan house are now part of the National Trust, while the Wren-inspired Newby Hall remains a Compton family seat.

Newby Hall passed to a younger son, as the elder son, Edward, took the family in another direction entirely by marrying Silvia Farquharson, daughter and eventual heir of the 14^th Laird of Invercauld, the Chief of Clan Farquharson. The lands of the Farquharsons (pronounced like Ferguson) are in Deeside, in the County of Aberdeen. In 1949, Alwyne Compton, now Farquharson, was recognised by the Lord Lyon as head of the Clan. He was a lifelong friend of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and his lordly estate in Invercauld is quite close to the royal family’s estates at Balmoral. The 16^th Laird of Invercauld died in 2021—at 102!—and passed the estates and titles to his great-nephew, Philip Farquharson (b. 1980). Philip’s cousins picked up another part of their Scottish inheritance and changed their surname to Maclean, and took up residence at Torloisk on Mull.

Another set of cousins brought the family even close into the orbit of today’s British royal family. Alwyne Farquharson’s twin sister, Mary Compton, married a millionaire horse-breeder from Suffolk, Bernard van Cutsem. The family hailed from a long line of minor nobles from Belgium and had migrated to England in the nineteenth century. Their children’s links to the royal family are legion: the second son Geoffrey was related to Lady Diana Spencer through marriage (via her sister Sarah McCorquodale); while the first son Hugh became great pals of the then Prince of Wales in the 1960s, so the two families continued to be linked through wedding and godparentage for the next two generations. Hugh’s son Edward is King Charles’ godson and was a page at the wedding in 1981 (and is now married to a Grosvenor, daughter of the Duke of Westminster). Second son Hugh married an Astor—their daughter Grace (Prince William’s goddaughter) captured the world’s attention as the angry three-year-old on the balcony of Buckingham Palace during William and Catherine’s wedding kiss in 2011. Third son Nicholas’s daughter is in turn Prince Harry’s goddaughter, and was also a bridesmaid in his wedding in 2018. Nicholas and the fourth brother, William, are godfathers to Princes George and Louis. Most recently, Grace’s little brother, Charles van Cutsem, was appointed a page of honour to the King in November 2023. Not bad for a family that remain faithfully Catholic.

Royal favour can thus help to solidify a family’s status within elite society in Britain, just as it did for the Comptons of Warwickshire in the Tudor era. Perhaps the Comptons of Berkeley Springs in Morgan County, West Virginia, enjoyed their own degree of notoriety in their corner of the world.

(images Wikimedia Commons)