SEYMOUR, Algernon, Earl of Hertford (1684-1750).

At the accession of George I, Lord Hertford, an army officer, was appointed to a post in the Prince of Wales’s bedchamber. Returned in 1715 as a Whig for Northumberland, where his mother had inherited the Percy estates, he proposed Spencer Compton as Speaker on 17 Mar. following. In January 1716 he moved for the impeachment of Lord Kenmure, one of the rebel lords. He voted against the Government on Lord Cadogan in June 1717 but on the breach between George I and the Prince of Wales later that year he resigned his place in the Prince’s bedchamber.1HMC Portland, v. 543. He moved the Address in November 1719, and on 16 Oct. 1722 took the chair at a committee of the whole House on the bill to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act. On his mother’s death in November of that year he was summoned (in error) to the House of Lords as Lord Percy.2See CP. In 1749 George II created him Earl of Northumberland with remainder to Sir Hugh Smithson, husband of his daughter Elizabeth, the heiress to the Percy estates, and Earl of Egremont, with remainder to Sir Charles Wyndham, heir to his Sussex and Cumberland estates under the will of his father, the 6th Duke of Somerset. He died 7 Feb. 1750.