- Sir Francis Seymour, 1st Baronet
General Sir Francis Seymour, 1st Baronet, GCB (2 August 1813 ,Lisburn ,County Down –10 July 1890 ,Kensington Palace ,London ) was aBritish Army officer and courtier.Seymour was the eldest son of Henry Augustus Seymour (1771–1847) and his wife, Margaret (died 1867). In 1834, he was commissioned as an ensign in the
19th Regiment of Foot and promoted tolieutenant in 1837. At the request ofLeopold I of Belgium , Seymour accompaniedPrince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha on the latter's visit toItaly in the winter of 1838–1839. Upon Albert's marriage to Queen Victoria in 1840, Seymour became hisGroom-in-Waiting , an office he continued as such after Albert's death in 1861, to Victoria until 1876, when he became an Extra Groom-in-Waiting.In 1840, Seymour was promoted to
captain and exchanged to theScots Fusilier Guards in 1842. In 1854, he served with the Guards in theCrimean War and was present at the battles of Alma, Balaclava and Inkerman. He was wounded at Inkerman and also later at the Siege of Sevastopol. In 1854, he was brevettedcolonel and appointed a Companion of the Order of the Bath in 1857, having also received theLégion d'honneur (fourth class) and theMedjidie (fourth class).Promoted to
major in 1858,lieutenant-colonel in 1863 andmajor-general in 1864, Seymour was made abaronet in 1869 and went on to command the troops inMalta from 1872 to 1874. He was promoted tolieutenant-general in 1873, colonel of the11th (North Devonshire) Regiment of Foot in 1874, Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1875 andgeneral in 1877. He was also appointedMaster of the Ceremonies in 1876 and sometime appointed a Knight Grand Cross of theSaxe-Ernestine Order . He retired in 1881 after being promoted to a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath that year.On
25 August 1869 , Seymour had married Agnes Austin, the eldest daughter of Rev. H. D. Wickham ofHorsington, Somerset and they had three daughters and one son, Albert Victor Francis, who was born when Seymour was 74 years old and later served as aPage of Honour to Queen Victoria. Seymour died atKensington Palace in 1890 and his baronetcy was inherited by his two year old son.ource
*E. M. Lloyd, ‘Seymour, Sir Francis, first baronet (1813–1890)’, rev. James Falkner,
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ,Oxford University Press , 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25168, accessed 26 March 2008]
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