SEYMOUR, Henry Danby (1820-1877), of Knoyle House, Hindon, Wilts.; Northbrook Lodge, Devon and 39 Upper Grosvenor Street, Mdx.

Born into a wealthy cadet branch of the duke of Somerset’s family, Seymour travelled extensively through Russia and west Asia after university, becoming only the third explorer to ascend Mount Ararat in 1846, before inheriting his father’s estates and taking up politics. His knowledge of regions rarely visited by Europeans helped to shape his views on foreign policy, which he frequently voiced in the Commons, but his motives in criticising the Indian administration of Sir Charles Wood and turning against Palmerston were attributed by some to pique at being passed over for promotion.

His father had sat for Taunton as an ‘independent’ supporter of the Liverpool and Wellington ministries, 1826-30, whilst his grandfather Henry Seymour (1727-1805), a first cousin of the 9th and 10th dukes of Somerset, had been an MP from 1763-80 and served as a groom of the bedchamber to George III. After graduating from Oxford Seymour had embarked on a continental tour accompanied by his ‘private tutor’ the Rev. Thomas Meyrick, an associate of John Henry Newman and subsequent convert to Catholicism.1The Times, 16 Nov. 1871. Around 1844 Seymour made his way east and began ‘three years of continuous wandering’, visiting ‘many regions at that time little known to Englishmen’ and collecting ‘a vast amount of information with regard to the social and political condition of the inhabitants of western Asia’. After travelling through Russia he ‘passed a season in the Caucasus’, living with the Dadian family in Mingrelia, before riding on to Tehran, Baghdad and the ancient ruins of Babylon and Nineveh, where he joined the archaeologist Austen Henry Layard MP. Taking the ‘difficult route of Bitlis and Van’ across the Kurdish mountains in 1846, Seymour ‘succeeded in ascending’ mount Ararat, ‘a feat’ which at the time had been accomplished by only two previous explorers. He did not return to England until 1847.2Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London (1878), vol. 48, pp. cl-cli; H. D. Seymour, Russia on the Black Sea and Sea of Azof: being a narrative of travels in the Crimea and bordering provinces; with notices of the naval, military, and commercial resources of those countries(1855), p. iii.

Seymour came forward in 1850 for a vacancy at Poole at the invitation of the Liberal MP Josiah John Guest, a relation of Layard who had recently purchased the borough’s influential Canford estates. In his address Seymour cited his support for free trade, civil and religious liberty, and ‘an extension of the franchise to all taxpayers’. After an extremely rowdy contest against a protectionist ultra Protestant, in which both candidates were pelted with missiles on the hustings, Seymour was returned with a slim majority.3The Times, 28 Aug.; Morning Chronicle, 24 Sept. 1850. He took his seat, 4 Feb. 1851, and thereafter followed the Russell ministry into the lobbies on most major issues. In a maiden speech that was missed by the reporters, however, he objected to Russell’s ecclesiastical titles bill outlawing Catholic sees, 17 Mar. 1851, and voted in the minority of 95 against it, 25 Mar. 1851. On the 20 Mar. Guest’s wife Lady Charlotte recorded:

A visit from Mr. Seymour. He had on Monday spoken, for the first time, on the Papal question, and while expressing great horror of the Catholics and their system, he declared his intention to vote against the government measure which he considered to be a violation of the principles of civil and religious liberty. It is an unlucky view for him to have taken, for the Poole people are quite exasperated at it, and they have already raised the “No Popery” cry against us in consequence of it.4Lady Charlotte Guest. Extracts from her journal 1833-52 (1950), ed. earl of Bessborough, 262-3.

Seymour, who the diarist Trelawny noted ‘generally speaks well’, delivered at least 232 speeches during his Commons career and became a regular attender.5The parliamentary diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858-1865 (1990), ed. by T A Jenkins, 289. Seymour was present for 23% of the reported divisions in the 1852-3 session, and 51% in 1856. A leading voice in the campaign to abolish the East India Company, which had completely ‘impoverished’ the Indian people and ‘wholly destroyed’ their material advancement through ‘extravagance, peculation, chicanery and intrigue’, he was appointed the president of the Indian Reform Society established at a meeting of the Friends of India held in Charles Street, 13 Mar. 1855.6Hansard, 11 Mar. 1853, vol. 125, cc. 58-60. Later that year he travelled to India to investigate the condition of its inhabitants and on his return exposed a system of torture carried out by the police in southern India, which was subsequently outlawed.7R. Moore, Sir Charles Wood’s India Policy 1853-66 (1966), 23, 128 132; Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London (1878), vol. 48, p. cli.

Re-elected without opposition at the general election of 1852, by when the ‘No Popery’ feeling against him had subsided, Seymour made a number of contributions in other areas.8Lady Charlotte Guest, 289, 298; Hants. Telegraph, 10 July 1852. A ‘well known art connoisseur’, who had inherited a ‘valuable collection’ of old master drawings from his father, he joined other Members in finding fault with the cleaning and purchasing policies of the National Gallery, on one occasion recounting how a cleaner had been seen using a bucket and sponge to scrub paintings by Rembrandt and Turner with ‘a harsh grating noise’, prompting laughter.9Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London (1878), vol. 48, p. clii; The Times, 9 Apr. 1853. He called for new galleries to house the national collection, 1 Aug. 1854, was a regular critic of the fine arts commission overseeing the rebuilding of Westminster Palace, and in 1863 was appointed to the royal commission of inquiry into the Royal Academy.10The Times, 2 Aug. 1854.

A steady proponent of the need to curb Russian expansionism, Seymour helped to vote the Aberdeen coalition out of office over its management of the Crimean war, 29 Jan. 1855, and during the next four years firmly backed the foreign policy of Palmerston in his speeches and votes. His timely publication in 1855 of an account of that region and its ‘military and commercial resources’, which soon ran to three editions, firmly cautioned against any compromise:

If we yield, as Mr. Gladstone and his friends wish us to do, to the first offers of Russia, we shall fail in our paramount object, and become the laughing stock of the world. ... In dealing with so subtle an enemy it will be wise not to hesitate, but push on, and treating Russia as she wished to treat Turkey, require from her effectual guarantees that she will not again disturb by her ambition the peace of Europe.11Seymour, Russia on the Black Sea, p. x, xii.

In March 1855 the incoming Palmerston ministry appointed Seymour joint secretary to the board of control, the department then responsible for overseeing Indian affairs.12The Times, 28 Feb. 1855. In this capacity he assisted the president of the board Robert Vernon Smith in preparing legislation to transfer the government of India to the crown, which was introduced, 18 Feb. 1858. It was later said that he ‘discharged his duty with alacrity’, making ‘no escapades’ and being ‘dutiful and respectful to his chief’.13London Review, 25 Aug. 1860. He loyally supported ministers on Cobden’s censure motion over the Chinese war, 3 Mar. 1857, topped the poll as a Palmerstonian Liberal at the ensuing general election, and left office with them following their defeat over the conspiracy to murder bill, for which he of course voted, 19 Feb. 1858. When the Derby ministry took up his department’s bill for India later that year, he gave it his general support, though he was in the minorities with Palmerston against some of their new provisions, 25 June, 6 July 1858. He was absent from the division on their reform bill, 31 Mar. 1859.

At the 1859 general election Seymour was re-elected for Poole, where his involvement in a railway scheme to connect Poole to Bournemouth had bolstered his popularity.14T. McDonald, ‘A political man: the political aspirations of William Taylor Haly’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History (2001), xxxi. 12-15, at 14; L. Popplewell, Bournemouth Railway History: An exposure of Victorian engineering fraud (1974), 57. He was passed over for office in Palmerston’s second ministry, however, and his increasingly outspoken attacks on the policy pursued by Sir Charles Wood, the secretary for India, soon began to attract comment. As the London Review noted in 1860:

Palmerston could not ask Gladstone and Milner Gibson and Villiers and Charles Gilpin to become members of his administration without leaving out and passing over some former Whig subordinates. Among these was Danby Seymour, MP for Poole ... This honourable gentleman is not a member of the present government, and he rises night after night, in the loudest voice at present known in St. Stephen’s, to attack the Indian administration of Sir C. Wood. Now to careful observers, there appears a great similarity between Vernon Smith and Charles Wood, as colonial governors ... Danby, however, who was the very humble servant, not to say “slavey”, of Vernon Smith, sets up his back and spits at Sir. C. Wood ... The other night he called him the autocrat of India, and said he administered India as the late emperor Nicholas ruled the Russians ... A very loud voice always makes a great impression ... but I would give a thousand pounds to know whether Danby would have said all this, or even thought it, if Wood had offered him the post of under secretary for India.15London Review, 25 Aug. 1860.

Much of Seymour’s criticism focused on Wood’s failure to address the issue of land taxation in India, which had ‘dried up all the other sources of revenue, checked improvements, and necessitated an enormous expenditure on public works’.16Hansard, 12 May 1863, vol. 170, c. 1612. In a typical ‘bill of indictment’ against Wood, 12 May 1863, he contrasted the ‘liberal spirit’ of the late administrations of Lord Canning and Lord Stanley with ‘the spirit of obstruction ... now in the ascendant’, and moved unsuccessfully for a redemption of the land tax. ‘The House always rejoiced to hear a racy attack upon the India Office by a gentleman who was connected with that department, and who, if he had an opportunity, would doubtless be very glad to connect himself with it again’, quipped the next speaker.17Hansard, 12 May 1863, vol. 170, cc. 1620-23.

One of sixty Liberal Members who signed the memorial to Palmerston urging further retrenchment in February 1861, Seymour also criticised the ministry’s failure to assist the Polish uprising against Russia, 9, 27 Feb. 1863; their breakdown of relations with Japan, which he blamed on ‘the ignorance’ of ‘consular agents’, 13 Mar. 1863; and their unwillingness to help Greece establish a monarchy, 16 Mar. 1863.18Birmingham Daily Post, 5 Feb. 1861. On 17 June 1864 he joined a Conservative-led censure of the government for its handling of military operations on the Gold Coast, after which Gilpin remarked to Trelawny that Seymour ‘wanted office’.19Trelawny Diaries, 289. Another of Seymour’s long-running complaints was the ministry’s failure to act on the findings of a select committee that he had chaired on ecclesiastical law and revenues, to which he had been appointed, 14 Mar. 1862.20PP 1862 (470), viii. 1; 1863 (457), vi. 43. Two abortive attempts to introduce bills consolidating church building and revenue acts had ensued and by 6 June 1864 he had had enough. Demanding to know when the promised bill would be introduced, he protested:

Nothing seemed to induce the Liberal Government to introduce Liberal measures with spirit. There had been a political fallow for the last four years, during which period scarcely one measure a year of any importance to the Liberal party had been introduced. In the present year, as in the last, they dragged on a miserable and sickly existence, and in the end they would be driven from the Ministerial side of the House with ignominy by those who, without declaring any policy of their own, could yet obtain possession of the treasury Benches, simply on account of the universal disgust pervading the whole country at the inactivity of the Government. Year after year the Home Secretary had promised that this question should receive attention—still there were no signs of the promised ecclesiastical reform.21Hansard, 6 June 1864, vol. 175, cc. 1292-3.

Speaking in similar terms against the ministry’s failure to introduce other measures, including a reform bill, 7 Feb. 1865, he contrasted the ‘party in America called the “Know Nothings”’ with ‘the great Liberal party in that House’, which might ‘be appropriately called the “Do Nothings’. The new cry at the next general election, he declared, should be, “Palmerston forever! No politics and no principles!”22Hansard, 7 Feb. 1865, vol. 177, cc. 60-4.

At that year’s general election Seymour offered again for Poole, where his association with the planned Poole and Bournemouth railway, carried out under his ‘aegis’, helped him top the poll.23Popplewell, Bournemouth Railway History, 60. In his last parliament he steadily supported the parliamentary reform bills introduced by Gladstone and Disraeli, criticising those Liberals who opposed the Conservative measure on grounds of ‘party’, 15 July 1867, but speaking and voting against the partial disfranchisement of small boroughs such as Poole.24Hansard, 31 May 1867, vol. 187, c. 1428; 15 July 1867, vol. 188, cc. 1571-74. He also welcomed the Derby ministry’s repeal of various Indian taxes in 1866, noting that ‘if the natives could be induced to invest their wealth in the development of agriculture, there was no reason why the progress of India should not equal that of the United States’.25Hansard, 19 July 1866, vol. 184, cc. 1133-34. Calling attention to the three-quarters of a million who had perished from famine in India the following year, he blamed insufficient investment in irrigation and ‘too much cultivation of cotton’, and insisted that ‘it was the bounden duty of the government to interfere to save the lives of the people’.26Hansard, 2 Aug. 1867, vol. 189, cc. 770-84. In his last known speech, he recommended finding a secure underwater route for telegraphic communication with India, 26 June 1868.

At the 1868 general election Seymour retired from Poole, which had been reduced to one MP by the 1867 Reform Act. He was reported to be in financial difficulties arising from the collapse of various railway and financial speculations, including the Imperial Financial Corporation, for which his liabilities totalled £24,000, as well as a number of speculative railway lines associated with his fellow Liberal MP Charles Waring. ‘By virtue of the magic words MP appended to his name’, noted a hostile local paper, Seymour had ‘obtained directorships of various railway and financial corporations’ in order ‘to make money’, by which he was ‘ultimately ruined’. A modern indictment of Waring as a swindler and fraudster suggests that he was largely to blame for Seymour’s losses. The same author’s assertion that Seymour fled abroad and was ‘reduced to an exiled and broken bankrupt’, however, does not ring true.27Popplewell, Bournemouth Railway History, 67-8, 74.

No bankruptcy against Seymour was gazetted, although one of the railways for which he had provided surety, the Wiltshire Railway Company, did go into formal administration in 1872.28London Gazette, 29 Mar., 19 July 1872. Far from being in exile, between 1871-2 Seymour was present as a leading witness in the celebrated Tichborne case involving a claimant who professed to be his missing nephew Roger Tichborne, whom he had known well as a child and always addressed in French. It was partly on the basis of his and his brother’s testimony that the claimant was eventually exposed as an imposter and convicted.29The Times, 13 May, 16 Nov. 1871, 24 Feb. 1872. He unsuccessfully contested Shaftesbury as a Liberal at a by-election in 1873 and again at the 1874 general election. Three years later he was elected to a seat on the London School Board, where he ‘devoted himself with his accustomed energy to the improvement and extension’ of ‘popular education’.30Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London (1878), vol. 48, p. cliii. As well as his book on Russia, Seymour, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a long serving member of its council, published an enlarged edition of J. P. Ferrier’s Caravan Journeys and Wanderings in Persia, Afghanistan, Turkistan and Beloochistan (1856), translated from the French, and an English edition of the German scholar Heinrich Brugsch’s A History of Egypt under the Pharaohs, which was completed posthumously (1879). He had been called to the bar in 1862, but never practised.

Seymour died ‘quite suddenly’ of apoplexy aged 57, whilst staying with his sister in Brymore, Somerset in August 1877.31Daily Gazette, 6 Aug. 1877; Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London (1878), vol. 48, p. clii. By his will he left all his estate, valued for probate at a very respectable £70,000, to his younger brother Alfred (1824-88), Liberal MP for Totnes, 1853-68, and Salisbury, 1869-74. The legacy included his ‘important collection’ of old master drawings.32The Times, 22 Sept. 1877, 27 Apr. 1927.