Kent is one of the most familiar names for an English county—but also unique in that it is one of the few that are never appended ‘-shire’ when giving historic names. It is also said to be one of the oldest place names still in use in England, named by the Greeks as Kantion in the fourth century BC, probably from a Celtic word for ‘land on the edge’ or ‘coast’, which certainly applies to this land famous for its white cliffs. When Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 BC he called this area Cantia and its people the Cantiaci or the Cantii. Their capital eventually became known as Canterbury—bury being a Germanic toponym for a town.

So by the fifth century, it was a Germanic place, settled by Jutes and Saxons who formed a Kingdom of Cantware (‘Kentish people’). The first reliably recorded king was Aethelberht, who converted to Christianity in 597 and set up the first two episcopal seats in England, at Canterbury and Rochester. After 764, his descendants weakened and Kent was often a client kingdom of Mercia, and after 825 was absorbed by Wessex.

The first time Kent was referred to as an earldom was in 1020 when King Cnut gave it to Godwin, already Earl of Wessex (another source says it wasn’t until Edward the Confessor’s reign started in 1042). Godwin died in 1053 and his lands were divided, with Kent going to his fifth son Leofwine (along with Essex, Middlesex and other earldoms in the southeast). Earl Leofwine was killed alongside his brother King Harold at Hastings in 1066 (shown in the Bayeux Tapestry as ‘Lewine’). It’s too bad Leofwine was erased from existence in recent BBC television dramatization of the Norman Conquest.

Kent was one of the few places that really resisted the Normans, so in 1067 it was given the status of a county palatine, and its new earl, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux (William the Conqueror’s half-brother), more extensive powers. He later betrayed his family and forfeited his lands, including the earldom of Kent.

In the next three centuries, the earldom of Kent was re-created several times for key supporters of the English Crown. In 1141, it was for William of Ypres, a lieutenant of King Stephen; in 1227 it was for Hubert de Burgh, Chief Justiciar of England and Regent for the young King Henry III; then in 1321, for Edmund of Woodstock, sixth son of King Edward I. The earldom passed to his two sons, then after 1352 to their sister Joan, the ‘Fair Maid of Kent’. She could pass on the lands to her children, but not the earldom, so her husband, Thomas Holland, was re-created earl of Kent in 1360.

The Holland family held the earldom of Kent for the rest of the fourteenth century, with Thomas and Joan’s grandson Thomas (the 3^rd Earl) being elevated to Duke of Surrey in 1397, though quickly brought down again in 1399 and executed in 1400. His brother the 4^th Earl died in 1408, meaning their sister, another Joan, Countess of Kent, could transmit it to her husbands, one of them being Edmund, Duke of York (though in the end she had no children).

Another very brief creation was for William Neville (younger son of the Earl of Westmoreland), an ally of the Yorkist king, Edward IV, and Steward of his Household. He was named Earl of Kent in 1461, then died in 1463.

Immediately, the earldom was given again in 1465 to another Yorkist supporter, Edmund Grey, Lord Grey of Ruthin, Lord Treasurer of England. His son solidified the Grey family’s place at the top of the English aristocracy by marriage to the Queen’s sister, Anne Woodville (in 1480). So their descendants would be cousins of the Tudors in the century to come. The House of Grey is itself vast, with roots stretching back to the Conquest, and including the powerful Tudor magnate, the Duke of Suffolk, and his daughter, Lady Jane, several earldoms (including that for Prime Minister Earl Grey), and numerous baronies. The multiple branches of this family will have its own blog post in due course, but for now, we can focus on the last of the Grey earls of Kent, who became the one and only non-royal Duke of Kent, in 1710.

Henry Grey, 12^th Earl of Kent, was a moderate politician and courtier, who served in the Household as Lord Chamberlain for Queen Anne, 1704-10, and was created Marquess of Kent in 1706. He agreed to give up his post in exchange for a dukedom, which he got in 1710, with subsidiary titles Earl of Harold and Viscount Goderich. The latter title comes from a castle held by the Greys since the 1610s, Goodrich, a mighty Norman fortress in Herefordshire. I suspect the earldom was also an allusion to Norman ancestry and Harold Godwinson (though it was his brother who was Earl of Kent, as we’ve seen). The Duke of Kent later returned to the Household under the Hanoverians, as Gentleman of the Bedchamber and as Lord Steward, 1716-18, and in the government at Lord Privy Seal, 1719-20. He lived at Wrest Park, in Bedfordshire, which today is the site of a magnificent, very French, country house—but it was a later reconstruction, not the house as the Duke of Kent knew it. Some of the earlier buildings remain, notably the lovely banqueting pavilion.By 1733, all of the Duke’s sons had died, so the King agreed to create a new title for him, Marquess Grey, with a special remainder to his grand-daughter, Lady Jemima Campbell. The Duke died in 1740, and his titles with him, except the marquisate—Lady Jemima married Philip Yorke, 2^nd Earl of Hardwicke, that same year and the history of Wrest Park lies with her family.

And so we come to the first royal dukedom bearing the name Kent. The Hanoverians continued a Stuart practice of pairing together an English and a Scottish dukedom for royal princes, and this was done for the older sons of King George III as they came of age (but curiously not for the youngest two sons, whose dukedoms are English only). Prince Edward, the fourth son, was created Duke of Kent and Strathearn, in 1799. He had made a name for himself as Commander-in-Chief in British North America, 1791-1802 (and was an early advocate of the creation of Canada), then as Governor of Gibraltar, 1802-20. But he is mostly remembered today as the father of Queen Victoria, born when he was already in his fifties.

The Duke of Kent lived at Castle Hill Lodge in Ealing, west of London—he had bought the house from his brother’s secret former wife Mrs Fitzherbert in 1801, but left it in 1812, and it was eventually rebuilt, remodelled, and now serves as a home for wounded soldiers. When he died in 1820, his double dukedom reverted to the Crown.

The title was given out again for Prince Alfred, second son of Queen Victoria, but not as a dukedom. When he was created Duke of Edinburgh in 1866, his subsidiary titles were Earl of Kent and Earl of Ulster. By the 1880s the Duke of Edinburgh was an admiral, and was named Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet, and Admiral of the Fleet in 1893. That same year he inherited the title Duke of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha and moved to Germany. He died in 1900 with no sons, so these titles returned to the Crown.

The Duke of Edinburgh did actually own property in Kent: a house at Eastwell Park near Ashford. There had been a house here since Tudor times, rebuilt in neo-Elizabethan style at the end of the eighteenth century, and occupied by Prince Alfred and his family in the 1870s and 80s. It was mostly destroyed by a fire in the 1920s.

Finally, we come to the present creation of the Dukedom of Kent. The title was raised once more into a dukedom in 1934 for Prince George, fourth son of George V. The new Duke of Kent, the most dashing and sociable brother of George VI, was meant to act as Governor-General of Australia in 1938, but was prevented by the outbreak of war. He was an RAF officer and died in an air crash in Caithness in August 1942. He had married in 1934 the glamourous Princess Marina of Greece, whose mother was a Russian grand duchess, which brought Romanov blood into this branch of the British royal family. Her first cousin Philip of Greece later married Elizabeth II. Princess Marina continued to be an active member of the House of Windsor for another twenty-five years.

From 1935, the Duke and Duchess of Kent lived at Coppins in Buckinghamshire, a nineteenth-century house first acquired by Princess Victoria, daughter of Edward VII. It would remain the family seat for the 2^nd Duke of Kent and his family, until he sold it in 1972, and moved to Amner Hall, a Georgian House that became part of the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk at the end of the nineteenth century (later the residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales), and from 1990, Crocker End in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, until recently. Since 1978, the Kents also resided at Wren Cottage, within the grounds of Kensington Palace.

The 2^nd Duke of Kent, Prince Edward of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is the oldest living member of the British royal family (since September 2025). Born in 1935, he was only six when his father died and he succeeded to his titles. He followed a military career in the 1950s-70s, serving in Hong Kong, Cyprus and Northern Ireland. He became an honorary Field Marshal in 1993, and was colonel of the Scots Guards from 1974 to 2024. He has been very active in carrying out royal duties, often representing his cousin the late Queen overseas (such as independence ceremonies in Uganda and Barbados), and acting as chairman or president for a number of charities relating to sports, business or technology. He shares a passion for tennis for his wife, the now late Katharine Worsley. The daughter of a baronet from North Yorkshire, based at Holvingham Hall, she married the Duke in 1961, and like him became known for her connection to Wimbledon.  The Duchess of Kent converted to Catholicism in 1994, and retreated from many of her royal duties, dropping the HRH styling from 2002 and focusing instead on her support for music, both performance and teaching (as simply ‘Katherine Kent’).

The Duke and his siblings (Prince Michael of Kent and Princess Alexandra, Lady Ogilvy) all retain the style HRH, as grandchildren of a sovereign. Their children are not, however, so when George, Earl of St Andrews (b. 1962) succeeds his father he will be the 3^rd Duke of Kent, but not royal. His son, Edward, Lord Downpatrick (b. 1988) became a Catholic, so while he is in line for the dukedom, is not in line for the throne, nor is his uncle, Lord Nicholas Windsor. The Duke of Kent’s brother, Prince Michael, married a Catholic, as did the Earl of St Andrews, so both lost their place in the line of succession, but were both restored to it by Elizabeth II in 2015. The last in the line of succession to the dukedom is Prince Michael’s son, Lord Frederick Windsor. There are of course Kent daughters and granddaughters as well, but although they are in line for the throne, they are not in line for the dukedom.

(images Wikimedia Commons)

One of the least known dukedoms in the peerages of Great Britain is that of Cleveland. After starting off as a title for one of the most famous duchesses in Europe, Barbara Villiers, the second and third dukes, Charles and William FitzRoy, were very rich but unremarkable. Their successors in the Vane family managed to revive the dukedom in the nineteenth century, and although they maintained one of the greatest estates in England, Raby in County Durham, they too did little to make themselves memorable in the history of the British aristocracy and left little trace when they died out in 1891.

As with many of the great houses of Europe, much of the fame, and the reason for their elevation to the most exalted title, came from whom they descended: in the case of the first dukes, they were the son and grandson of the King of England, Charles II. For the Vanes, the illustrious ancestors were a bit further back, leaders of the Parliamentary party of the seventeenth century, and solid members of the subsequent Whig Party in the eighteenth. So it is interesting to pair them together considering the first were naturally supporters of the Crown, while the latter did much to limit its power. The Vanes are also a good example of the enduring power of a county family in Britain, as one of the largest landowners in County Durham and lords lieutenant there off and on for over two centuries (1753 to 1988).

Where is Cleveland? Aside from the US city in Ohio (named for General Moses Cleaveland), and the ‘Cleveland Street Scandal’ of 1889 (for afficionados of Victorian London), which took place in Fitzrovia, once part of the 2^nd Duke of Cleveland’s estate, the name does not conjure up a specific place. But there is a Cleveland, named for the cliffs that overlook the North Sea in the area just south of the mouth of the River Tees and north of the North York Moors. There was once a County of Cleveland, from 1974 to 1996, with its county town of Middlesbrough. Most of the area is in Yorkshire, but part of the short-lived county was across the Tees in Durham, which is more connected historically to the title of the dukedom that bears its name.

The first bearer of the title was not a duke but a duchess: Barbara Palmer, née Villiers, the most influential of all of Charles II’s mistresses, who was Lady Castlemaine (an Irish title) by marriage, then was elevated to the peerage on her own in 1670 as Baroness Nonsuch, Countess of Southampton and Duchess of Cleveland. She was given Nonsuch Palace, in Surrey, which she had torn down in the 1680s to cover her great debts. Her story is more fully told in the blog about the dukes of Buckingham and the rest of the Villiers family. The letters patent for the duchy specified that it was created for Barbara, and not her husband, and her eldest son by the King, Charles FitzRoy, born in 1662.

At first, the boy, Lady Castlemaine’s second child with the King, was formally recognised by her husband, and baptised a Catholic as Charles Palmer, Lord Limerick (the Castlemaine courtesy title); but only a few days later the King insisted on another Protestant baptism, and the name FitzRoy (‘son of the king’), though this wasn’t formally acknowledged until the creation of the titles in 1670 when the boy was eight. By this point he had two brothers, Henry FitzRoy, soon to be created Earl of Euston then Duke of Grafton; and George FitzRoy, Earl of Northumberland (later also a dukedom). While Henry was soon well set up with the succession of his wife (the Euston estate), and his heirs continue today, George and his potential heirs were named in the remainder for the dukedom of Cleveland after his oldest brother, but did not have any heirs. All three boys were given the coat of arms of the royal Stuarts with a band sinister denoting illegitimacy: a simple band of ermine (a fur symbolising princely rank) for the eldest, a band of silver and blue for Henry and ermine and blue for George. Some of their estate was developed into an urban district north of the City of Westminster and named ‘Fitzrovia’. Most of the subsequent FitzRoy story will be told in a post about the dukes of Grafton.

In 1675, Charles was given a peerage of his own: Duke of Southampton, with subsidiary titles Earl of Chichester and Baron Newbury. The Southampton title, an elevation of his mother’s earldom from 1670, had been an earldom before, notably for the Wriothesley family who rose to such prominence in the Tudor era after the fall of Thomas Cromwell (as depicted so well in the novels by Hilary Mantel). The 4^th Earl was also 2^nd Earl of Chichester (which he inherited from his father-in-law, Francis Leigh), so these titles were already linked when that family went extinct in 1667. Different heiresses took the Wriothesley estates into the Russell and Montagu families (both who grew rich by developing the Bloomsbury estate in London, notably abutting Fitzrovia). Perhaps the King hoped to pick up one of these heiresses to establish his son, as he would do for several of the others (and named Henry ‘earl of Euston’ in anticipation, even before he was engaged). I don’t know why Baron Newbury was chosen—it doesn’t have a history of being a title, and is mostly known as a market town in Berkshire where two significant battles had been fought in the English Civil War (I thought for a moment it might have been named for the King’s favourite country hangout spot, the races, but that’s Newmarket, not Newbury).

In any case, by 1670, Charles FitzRoy was betrothed to Mary Wood, whose family was not eminent, but whose father, Sir Henry Wood, Bt., was a lifelong supporter of the Stuart dynasty and a very rich man. Wood had been Treasurer of the Household of Queen Henrietta Maria, then Clerk of Green Cloth, and he had estates in Suffolk (notably at Ufford, near the coast, and the lands of the former Priory of Campsey), as well as estates closer to London such as Clapton in Hackney Downs in Middlesex. When Henry Wood died, his family, notably brother Thomas, Bishop of Lichfield, tried to take Mary into custody, but Barbara basically kidnapped her, to raise her as her future daughter-in-law. The children were married in 1679, but the new Duchess of Southampton died in 1680, still only seventeen.

The Wood family challenged the Duke of Southampton’s claims to his late wife’s inheritance, and lost. So by 1692, the Duke could establish himself in a country seat in Suffolk, at Loudham Hall. This was an old manor house owned by the de Loudham family from the 1200s, rebuilt in the sixteenth century by the Blannerhasset family, then sold in 1627 to Henry Wood, who enlarged the house. After the Duke of Southampton’s death in 1730, the Wood succession did not pass to his son by a second marriage, but back to the Wood family, who refaced Loudham in Classical style, then sold it in 1792 to the Whitbread family, known for their beer, who owned it until 1919. It was held by the Adeane family for much of the twentieth century, but has since been sold several times and remains private. It was recently in the hands of Mike Lynch, technology entrepreneur whose name was in the papers due to a trial for fraud in the UK in 2019 and in the US in 2023, of which he was acquitted, then his sudden death in a boat accident in the Mediterranean in August 2024 (within a day of his co-defendant, hit by a car while jogging).

Meanwhile, the Duke was married again, in 1694, to another potential heiress, Anne Pulteney, whose family were minor landowners in Leicestershire. At the time, Anne was not an heiress, with two older brothers who produced heirs, but the Pulteney Estate succession will come up again later, with significant lands in Somerset and in Shropshire.

In 1709, the 1^st Duke of Southampton became the 2^nd Duke of Cleveland when his mother died. In 1720, he bought a London townhouse on St. James’s Square—the most fashionable address in London (ultimately housing seven dukes). Built for the Earl of Essex in 1674, this was not the house a few streets away known as Cleveland House, where his mother lived from 1670—that was an older house built by the Howard family in the 1620s, and since the eighteenth century known as Bridgewater House (behind Clarence House and overlooking Green Park). This new Cleveland House was located on the west side of St. James’s Square, No. 19, though in the nineteenth century, its main entrance was re-orientated and became No. 33 King Street. It was completely demolished in 1895 and rebuilt as offices and flats, and again in 1999 (today it notably houses the Rolex headquarters).

As for the Duke himself, Charles FitzRoy left very little tales of political or social life. Though he ranked high, as third English duke in precedence (behind Norfolk and Somerset), he rarely sat in the House of Lords and was considered by many to be ‘not very bright’. He didn’t need to get involved in financial schemes, since his income was already valued around £100,000 a year. At court he inherited the office of Chief Butler of the Household from his brother the Duke of Northumberland in 1716. This at least could have brought him some prominence in his chief duty of organising and hosting the coronation banquet, but more research needs to be done to see what if any tasks he undertook in this guise for the coronation of George II in 1727. He died in 1730.

Charles and Anne had six children: Lady Grace, who will link the FitzRoys to the Vanes; then three sons, William, Charles and Henry. William succeeded as 2^nd Duke of Southampton and 3^rd Duke of Cleveland in 1730. Lord Charles had died in 1723 aged 25, and Lord Henry in 1709, only 8. There were also two sisters, Lady Barbara—finally, some recognition for the former Barbara Palmer!—who did not marry; and Lady Anne, who married John Paddey, Esq., a member of London’s judiciary set (who is sometimes listed as ‘Francis Paddy’, as he appears in some of the printed peerages of the era).

Like his father, William, the 3^rd Duke of Cleveland and 2^nd Duke of Southampton, was said to be ‘not very bright’, and also rarely sat in the House of Lords, spending most of his time, it seems, at the races. Known as the Earl of Chichester as heir, he was rarely seen at court either. Lord William did inherit his father’s court office of Chief Butler, and again it would be interesting to see what role exactly he performed at the coronation of George III in 1760. The Duke was given some political offices, but these were mainly to generate an income and had really interesting names, like Comptroller of the Seal and Green Wax Offices. In 1731, he married Lady Henrietta Finch, daughter of Daniel, 2^nd Earl of Nottingham and 7^th Earl of Winchilsea, a prominent Tory politician in the late seventeenth century, now long retired—so if anything, the Duke of Cleveland supported Tory interests (and he was noted as an ‘opponent’ to the ministry of the Whig Duke of Newcastle in the early 1760s). Henrietta was not an heiress at all, as sixth daughter, but her brother’s political career does link this story again to the Pulteney family, as an ally of the Earl of Bath.

The Duke did not inherit the Wood estate, notably Loudham Hall, and he is noted as early as the 1740s as spending much of his time at his brother-in-law’s estate, Raby Castle, in County Durham. He lived at Cleveland House when in London, and rented out houses in the countryside for short periods. A printed peerage from 1766 lists his residences as ‘Bayles, near Windsor’ (Baylis House in Berkshire, owned by the Osborne family, dukes of Leeds), and ‘Combe-park, Surrey’ (probably Coombe House, near Croydon). Further afield, we see that he rented Rushbrooke Hall, but only for a few years in the 1760s. Like Loudham, Rushbrooke is located in Suffolk, but on the western side of the county, closer to Bury St Edmunds. This moated manor house had been in the Jermyn family since the 1230s. The 2^nd Baron Jermyn died in 1703 and his daughter took the house by marriage into the Davers family (baronets) who rented it out to the Duke of Cleveland, but only for a few years in the 1760s. In the nineteenth century, Rushbrooke was rented out to a family of that name. By the mid-twentieth century it fell into disrepair and was demolished.

Towards the end of his life, the Duke of Cleveland and Southampton was living full time at his nephew’s estate, Raby Castle, where he died in 1774. His titles all went extinct. There was never again a dukedom or even earldom of Southampton—though a few years later, in 1780, a younger son of the Duke of Grafton, another Charles FitzRoy, was created Baron Southampton, a title that continues today.

And so, on to the Vanes and Raby Castle!

The Vane family were originally from Kent, from the area of the upper Medway valley near Tonbridge. They are part of a wider family who spelled their name either Vane or Fane. One branch, the Fanes of Badsell, became earls of Westmorland in 1626, and also inherited the ancient baronies of Bergavenny (from the Nevilles) and Le Despencer. Their seats were Mereworth Castle in Kent and Apethorpe Hall in Northamptonshire. This line continues to the present with the 16^th Earl, Anthony Fane, born in 1951. The ancestor that links these to the Vane family of Cleveland is Sir John Fane, or Ivon Vane, whose name suggests he was from Wales. He made his fortune by capturing King Jean II of France on the battlefield at Poitiers, 1356, and received a large ransom for him. Later genealogists, however, say the common ancestor is the less exciting Henry Vane from Tonbridge in Kent who died a century later. Regardless, both branches of the family bear a golden gauntlet on their coat-of-arms referring back to the Ivon Vane story. They differ in that the Fanes show the back side of the gauntlet and the Vanes use the palm side.

Sir Henry Vane the Elder came from out relative obscurity in the reign of Charles I to become one of the richest men in England. He had served in the King’s household from the time he was Prince of Wales, and became one of the King’s closest financial advisors in the 1630s—rising to Treasurer of the Household in 1639, and Secretary of State in 1640. He sold his ancestral home of Hadlow, Kent, and purchased Fairlawne in Kent, and the huge estates of Barnard Castle, Raby Castle and Long Newton, all in the County of Durham, in the far north of England. Here he was appointed Warden of the Teesside Forests. In May 1641, Vane got caught up in the King’s dismissal and execution of the Earl of Strafford, and was himself dismissed from office. He defected to the Parliamentarian side to oppose royal tyranny and was appointed by them to the post of Lord Lieutenant of Durham—the first of many of his line to hold this position. He died in 1655, a very large landowner.

In Kent, Fairlawne was a large manor in Shipbourne near Tonbridge. Sir Henry the Elder had the house rebuilt in the 1630s, and it was upgraded again in the 1720s. It was given to a younger branch (viscounts Vane) in the eighteenth century, then passed to another family after 1789. Many Vanes are buried in the local church of St Giles’. The Cazalet family, wealthy merchants, took over as lords of the manor in the 1870s, and today it is owned by a Saudi prince. It is still a large estate, with over 1000 acres.

Up in County Durham, Barnard Castle is a Norman castle built to watch over the river Tees as it passes through a gap of the eastern foothills of the Pennines on its way down towards the larger towns of Darlington and Stockton. For centuries the river was the border between Yorkshire and the County Palatine of Durham, so called as its bishop enjoyed ‘palatine’ (or ‘palace-like’) powers, for practical reasons since this area was so far from London. Being so far north, its noble families usually had some connections to Scotland as well, and the family who owned the castle from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries were the Balliols, who even claimed the Scottish throne briefly in the 1290s. Guy de Balliol built the first castle here in about 1095 to protect the first Norman bishop of Durham. His nephew and successor Bernard gave the castle its name. Once the Balliols became too caught up in the Scottish Wars of Independence against King Edward I, the Bishop of Durham confiscated Barnard Castle; a few years later the King granted it to the Earl of Warwick, whose descendant Anne Neville married Richard, Duke of Gloucester, who made the castle one of his preferred seats in the North. He of course became King Richard III and the estate was merged with the Crown until it was sold to Sir Henry Vane. Vane used much of the stone and roof of the already crumbling Barnard Castle to fix up nearby Raby, and it remains a ruin, today in the care of English Heritage. It is still an impressive fortress, and a fun visit alongside the nearby market town of the same name—made famous in the British media in May 2020 by the rather strange drive by Dominic Cummings to ‘check his eyesight’ during lockdown.

It was Raby Castle, a few miles to the northeast, that became the real jewel in the Vane family crown. The castle today is a major attraction in Teesdale and the large estate includes the High Force Waterfall further up the Tees in the North Pennines. The moated castle was built in the 1370s by John Neville, 3^rd Baron Neville of Raby, whose family had owned the site since the thirteenth century, and were called to Parliament as barons of Raby from 1295. The Neville family is one of England’s greatest aristocratic clans, and will receive their own blog post, though they only held a dukedom (Bedford) briefly in the 1470s. John Neville’s son Ralph was created Earl of Westmorland in 1397 and the family held this title until 1571 (after which, as we’ve seen, it passed to the Fane family). There is a link here in that the uppermost reaches of the river Tees forms the boundary between County Durham and County Westmorland. Junior branches of the House of Neville became earls of Salisbury and earls of Warwick, leading to Anne, queen-consort of Richard III as we’ve seen; but there was another Neville queen, Cecile Neville of Raby, daughter of the 1^st Earl of Westmorland, who married the Duke of York and was mother to both Edward IV and Richard III. Raby Castle remained the Neville seat throughout the Wars of the Roses and the early Tudor period. In 1569, the 6^th Earl took part in the Northern Rising in support of Mary, Queen of Scots’ claim to the English throne, and Elizabeth I confiscated his lands and titles. The Crown now held Raby Castle until it was sold to Sir Henry Vane in 1626. It has stayed in this family ever since. Since the 1960s it has been spruced up and opened to the public, and is also often used for television and film crews, for example in 1998’s blockbuster Elizabeth.

The third property purchased by Henry Vane in County Durham was Long Newton, a manor located on the road between Darlington and Stockton. It passed to his younger son, Sir George Vane, who started a separate line that was equally prominent in its own way: Vane-Tempest. The baronetcy of Vane of Long Newton was created in 1782, due to the merger of this family with the Tempests of nearby Wynyard Hall. The Vane-Tempest family made its fortune from shipping coal, which then passed via marriage to the Stewart family of County Down in Ireland. These became the Vane-Tempest-Stewarts, who bore the titles Marquess of Londonderry (1796, peerage of Ireland), and Earl Vane (1823, UK peerage), and continue to the present. The current Marquis of Londonderry, the 10^th (Frederick Vane-Temple-Stewart), was born in 1972; his heir is Viscount Castlereagh of County Down.

The senior branch of the House of Vane, of Raby, was founded by Sir Henry the Elder’s son, Sir Henry, the Younger. His father tried to promote his career at court in the 1630s, but the younger Henry was more passionate about his Puritan beliefs and left for the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1635. A year later he was elected governor of that colony, but only served one year, poorly handling both religious controversy in the colony and military action against the nearby Pequot tribe. He returned to England and championed the Parliamentarian cause against the Crown far more than his father, and during the Commonwealth he served on the Council of State, 1649-53 (and briefly as its president, May to June 1652). In the Restoration he was initially granted clemency by Charles II, but was nevertheless condemned by a government commission and executed in June 1662.

Henry Vane’s son Christopher continued to support the Parliamentary cause, which morphed into the Whig Party by the 1670s. As a supporter of the reign of William and Mary, he was named to the Privy Council, 1688, and later elevated to the peerage by King William in 1698 as Baron Barnard of Barnard Castle. He married Elizabeth Holles, which tied him to one of the premier Whig families (her brother was created Duke of Newcastle in 1694; and her two Pelham nephews would both be Whig prime ministers in the eighteenth century).

Christopher and Elizabeth had three sons. The youngest, William, another Whig politician, was created Viscount Vane in 1720 (of Dungannon, County Tyrone), and was based at Fairlawne in Kent. His line died out in 1789. The second son, Morgan, founded a cadet line who would resurface in the peerage after the senior line died out in the 1890s. The eldest, Gilbert, was 2^nd Baron Barnard. His son Henry was a solidly reliable Whig politician, but never a leader. He was given the very lucrative post of Paymaster General of Ireland and sat on the Irish Privy Council, 1742-44, then became a Lord of the Treasury in 1749, as a client of his cousin the Duke of Newcastle (one of the Pelham brothers). He was also appointed to his great-great-grandfather’s post of Lord Lieutenant of Durham in 1753, starting the long family tradition as the ceremonial representative of the monarchy in the county. That year he succeeded his father as 3^rd Baron Barnard, and the following year the King made his position as royal representative easier by raising him in rank, to Earl of Darlington (after the largest town in the southern part of the county). He died in 1758, a few years before his wife, Lady Grace FitzRoy, daughter of the 2^nd Duke of Cleveland.

Lord Darlington’s sister, Hon. Anne Vane, also had an interesting, if brief, career at court, as ‘the Beautiful Vanella’ (as she was dubbed in the press), the mistress of Frederick, Prince of Wales. She was appointed as a maid of honour to Queen Caroline, Frederick’s mother, and by 1730 was linked to the Prince, by whom she had a son in 1732, the unrecognised child Cornwall FitzFrederick Vane, who died four years later, followed soon after by his mother, aged only 26.

The 2^nd Earl of Darlington, as Viscount Barnard sat in Parliament as a Whig MP, and later held the mid-level posts of Governor of Carlisle, 1763, and Master of the Jewel Office, 1763 to 1782 (who oversaw the safety of the Crown Jewels). His chief interest was in modernising and improving Raby Castle, and carrying on his father’s role as Lord Lieutenant of Durham. He died in 1792 and was succeeded by William, 3^rd Earl of Darlington.

Like his ancestors, William Vane sat in Parliament as a Whig, then took over as Lord Lieutenant of County Durham in 1792. He raised a regiment of cavalry to serve in the wars against France, but did little else to distinguish himself. He did, however, increase his family’s prestige as landowners, however, in positioning himself as heir to the name (if not the titles or lands) of his FitzRoy grandmother, but also as heir to the Pulteney Estate, as distant heir of his great-grandmother, Anne Pulteney, Duchess of Cleveland.

Anne’s nephew, William Pulteney was a significant politician (as Earl of Bath from 1742, and briefly Prime Minister for two days in February 1746), and a great acquirer of lands. In 1726 he purchased the Bathwick estate in Somerset, directly across the Avon from the City of Bath (connected today by the Pulteney Bridge). He also developed real estate in London (like Great Pulteney Street in Soho) and made himself guardian and then heir to the last member of the Newport family (earls of Bradbury) of Shropshire. He had aspirational family interests himself in that West Midlands county, by descent from the Corbets, important medieval marcher lords. In the early 1760s, the Earl of Bath had plans to transform the Newport family seat of Eyton, on the river Severn east of the town of Shrewsbury, but he died before anything could be completed. His heirs instead focused on Shrewsbury Castle, an ancient Norman fortress transformed into a residence in the sixteenth century, owned by the earls of Bradbury since 1666. It was further modernised by the Pulteney family in the 1780s, a notable early project for Thomas Telford. These Shropshire lands (which include the famous landmark, the Wrekin) did pass to the Vane family of Durham when the last Pulteney heiress (Laura, Countess of Bath) died in 1808; they maintained Shrewsbury Castle as a second seat until it was sold in 1924 to the local borough council.

By the start of the nineteenth century, William Vane, 3^rd Earl of Darlington, began to quarter his family arms with the FitzRoy arms, added the Somerset and Shropshire estates of the Pulteneys, and pressed the inheritance claims of his wife, Lady Catherine Powlett, as daughter and co-heir of the last Duke of Bolton who died in 1794 (though most of the Powlett estates went to an illegitimate niece, and the Bolton baronial title passed to a cousin). In 1826, he ‘reminded’ high society of his connection to the last Duke of Cleveland by naming a new bridge over the Avon in Bath after him. So in 1827, King George IV recognised this kinship link by raising Darlington to the rank of Marquess of Cleveland, and then in 1833, Duke of Cleveland. The first Duke was made a Knight of the Order of the Garter in 1839 by Queen Victoria, then died in 1842.

It seemed the Vanes had finally reached the top of the aristocracy and Raby Castle was once again a princely seat in the North. But none of the 1^st Duke’s three sons had male heirs and the dynasty’s senior line died out in 1891. Moreover, the family was outshone in political and social prestige by the junior line of the Marquess of Londonderry, first by Lord Castlereagh (later 2^nd Marquess) one of the leading diplomats at the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, then by the 3^rd Marquess, a prominent soldier and diplomat, who took over as Lord Lieutenant of Durham when the 1^st Duke of Cleveland died in 1842 (and the Londonderry branch would keep this office off and on until 1949).

Henry, 2^nd Duke of Cleveland, was himself a soldier, attaining the rank of major-general in 1851 and retiring as a full general in 1863. He had a long career as a Whig MP in the House of Commons, from 1812 to 1842 when he moved into the House of Lords. He was mostly an absentee landlord in Bath, but focused on improvements to Raby Castle, where he built a neo-gothic entrance hall. He continued to gather the family’s great art collection here, refashioned one of its salons as a Jacobean gallery, and played host to visiting royalty (notably the Prince of Orange who became King William III of the Netherlands while at Raby in March 1849). He died in January 1864 and was succeeded by his brother William.

William, 3^rd Duke of Cleveland, had also spent over forty years as an MP, using the name and arms of Powlett, setting himself up as heir of his mother. As heir, he lived at Harewood House (or Harewood Park), an eighteenth-century house on the edge of Windsor Great Park in Berkshire (still standing today, but privately owned). William Powlett (then briefly Vane again) reigned as duke for only eight months and died in September 1864.

His brother, Lord Harry Powlett (or Powlett-Vane), became the 4^th Duke of Cleveland. He had been a diplomat in the 1830s, and in 1854 married Wilhelmina Stanhope, daughter of Earl Stanhope (Lady Dalmeny by her first marriage). Although they had no children, the Duke raised his step-son, Archibald Primrose, who later became famous as the Earl of Rosebery, Prime Minister in 1894-95. In London, the Duke and Duchess resided at Cleveland House on St James’s Square. In the countryside, the Duke owned over 100,000 acres: 55,000 in County Durham and 25,000 in Shropshire. Wilhelmina, Duchess of Cleveland, had been prominent at the early court of Queen Victoria, having served as a maid of honour at the coronation of 1838, then a bridesmaid in 1840. She later was a bit of a historian, delving into the history of her home at Battle Abbey near Hastings, writing a guidebook for visitors there, and an account of noble families whose ancestors were inscribed in the ‘Battle Abbey Roll’, a list of those who fought at Hastings in 1066.

Lord Harry and Lady Wilhelmina had acquired Battle Abbey in 1857 as a country seat, on the south coast in Sussex. This was the abbey commissioned by William the Conqueror to be built on the site of the Battle of Hastings to atone for all those killed that day. It was constructed in the 1070s and then dissolved as a monastery in 1538 on orders of Henry VIII who gave it to his faithful servant Sir Anthony Browne. Browne demolished most of the abbey and used its materials to reconstruct the abbot’s residence as a country house. In 1721, the Browne family sold the house now known as Battle Abbey to the Webster family, who held it for over a century, selling it to Lord Harry Vane. It became a favoured residence of the last Duke and Duchess of Cleveland, and the Duchess remained here as a widow until she died in 1901. It returned to ownership of the Websters, who converted it into a school in 1923. In 1976 it was finally sold to the state to be maintained by English Heritage, though the school still remains on the site.

When the 4^th Duke of Cleveland died at Cleveland House in London in 1891, the Pulteney Estate in Somerset passed to a nephew, while the Vane estates in County Durham—Barnard Castle and Raby Castle—and in Shropshire passed to the next male heir, Henry Vane, who became 9^th Baron Barnard. Interestingly, his eldest son Henry reunited the distant branches of the Vane/Fane family through his marriage in 1914 to Lady Enid Fane, daughter of the 13^th Earl of Westmorland. Hon. Henry Vane also became Master of Foxhounds for one of the premier hunts in England, the Zetland, formerly known as the Raby, which covered huge amounts of County Durham and North Yorkshire. He died shortly before his father, meaning the barony, and the post of Master of Foxhounds, passed to his brother Christopher, who, as 10^th Baron Barnard, picked up once more the old family post of Lord Lieutenant of County Durham in 1958. He died in 1964, and his son, John, the 11^th Baron, was appointed to this post again in 1970 and held it until 1988. When he died in 2016, the Vane estates were valued at £94 million, currently managed by another Harry Vane, 12^th Baron Barnard (b. 1959).

(images Wikimedia Commons)

I am grateful to the History of Parliament Trust, London, for allowing me to see the unpublished articles in draft on Charles and William FitzRoy, 2^nd and 3^rd dukes of Cleveland, for the 1660-1832 section, by Dr Robin Eagles.

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)