Seymour John Fortescue

Captain Sir Seymour John Fortescue, GCVO, CMG (10 February 1856 – 20 March 1942) was a British naval officer and courtier who was an Equerry to the British sovereign and Serjeant-at-Arms in the House of Lords.

Early life and family

Seymour John Fortescue was born on 10 February 1856, the second son of Hugh Fortescue, 3rd Earl Fortescue, DL (1818–1905), a Liberal Member of Parliament and peer who served in Lord John Russell's administration, and his wife, Georgiana Augusta Caroline Dawson-Damer (1826–1866), eldest daughter of the Hon. George Lionel Dawson-Damer. Fortescue's immediate family were well-connected in the military: his younger brother, Henry Dudley, was killed in action in 1900 and another, John William, was librarian at Windsor Castle and a noted military historian. They were also extensive landowners, with property in Ireland, South Devon, Gloucester and Lincolnshire (including Tattershall Castle), as well as Castle Hill in North Devon, where Fortescue was born.

In 1859, the young Fortescue accompanied his family to live in Medeira for two years, where an uncle was recovering from tuberculosis (the island was then a sort of fashionable sanatorium). While there, he met Captain (later Admiral of the Fleet) Henry Keppel, whose wife-to-be lived in a villa near the Fortescues; Keppel permitted the young Fortescue aboard his ship, the frigate Forte, a visit he would remember fondly in his memoirs, Looking Back. He also recalled the Empress of Austria's visit to the island in 1859, aboard HMY Victoria and Albert. Throughout the 1860s, Lord Fortescue was a sympathiser of the Italian movement and hosted its celebrities in his Devonshire home. In 1865, the young Fortescue started school in Brighton under one Mrs Walker; despite its strong reputation as a feeder preparatory school for Eton and Harrow, he chose not to pursue those routes further: "owning, I suppose, to my thorough dislike of the whole process of education, I made up my mind to go into the Navy".