SEYMOUR, Alfred (1824-1888), of 47 Eaton Square, London, Knoyle House, Hindon, Wilts. and Trent, Som.

Seymour shared his older brother Henry’s interests in foreign travel and archaeology, funded out of the family’s considerable aristocratic wealth, but although in ‘form and feature not unlike his brother’, he evidently lacked his talents as a speaker and was often reproached for his ‘coarse speech’ in elections.1Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 21 Jan., 18 Feb. 1863. His sojourns abroad included Italy and the ‘whole of America’, and in 1861 he donated artefacts from Egypt and Ninevah ‘either collected in his travels or inherited’ to a local exhibition in Shaftesbury, near the family seat at Knoyle.2Morning Post, 8 Jan. 1863; Wiltshire Archaeology and Natural History Magazine (1862), vii. 239, 245.

A ‘third cousin of the duke of Somerset on his father’s side’, as he billed himself, it was remarked in 1862 that ‘little was known about him’, except for his efforts to woo the Liberals of Exeter as a replacement for the ailing MP Edward Divett.3Daily News, 29 Sept. 1866; Standard, 13 Nov. 1862. Supported by his brother and the former Somerset MP Edward Ayshford Sanford, between 1860-62 Seymour attempted to secure the backing of Exeter’s Liberals, but with limited success. Responding to concerns at one meeting that he was not a local resident, he boasted that ‘by the railway recent opened’ he could travel to the city far quicker than someone from another part of Devon, adding that ‘if I am not a Devonshire man, I am an Englishman’ and ‘not a mulatto’. Although a supporter of the ballot, he refused to commit himself to an extension of the franchise without knowing its details.4Daily News, 21 Sept. 1860. His lectures on Italy, where he had witnessed the ‘recent revolution’, may have done more harm than good - on one occasion it was reported that Exeter’s Working Men’s Association had declined his offer of a talk, as ‘those who had heard’ him at the Athenaeum ‘are of opinion that he is not likely to make a very bright lecturer’.5Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 12, 17 Oct., 1860. ‘Whatever may be Mr. Seymour’s other qualifications for parliamentary representation’, it was later observed, ‘the art of addressing a public assembly is certainly not one of them’.6Treman’s Exeter Flying Post, 21 Jan. 1863.

The death in quick succession of two MPs for Totnes, where the duke of Somerset was the electoral patron, offered the opportunity of escaping Exeter, where Seymour’s chances were said to be ‘ridiculously small’.7Standard, 13 Nov. 1862. He was passed over for the first vacancy after local Liberal leaders insisted on having their ‘own man’, but on the understanding that Somerset’s choice would be supported on the next occasion.8Daily News, 24 Dec.; Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 24 Dec. 1862. Following the death of the earl of Gifford in December 1862 Seymour duly came forward for Totnes, to protests about him being ‘crammed down the throats of the electors by the noble dictator’, which he vigorously rebutted. Speaking at a Liberal meeting, he insisted that he was independent and ‘the nominee of no man’, prompting laughter, and bemused many by reversing his earlier stance in support of the ballot but promising to support a ‘further extension of the franchise’.9Standard, 25 Dec. 1862; Morning Post, 1 Jan. 1863. He was ‘rendered insensible’ after falling from his horse during the local fox hunt, but had recovered sufficiently to attend the hustings, where he faced a hostile crowd and delivered a ‘taunting speech’ in an ‘insulting tone’, using language about his opponents ‘on a par with the roughest remarks of the rough and not a whit more creditable to a gentleman of such antecedents’. After an unruly contest dogged by charges of voter intimidation on the part of Somerset’s agents he secured a narrow victory.10Examiner, 10 Jan., Trewman’s Exeter Flying Post, 21 Jan. 1863.

A regular but mostly silent attender in this period, Seymour voted steadily with the advanced Liberals on most issues, including in support of the abolition of university tests, 16 Mar. 1864, and an extension of the borough franchise, 11 May 1864, but was conspicuously absent from divisions on the ballot. He was founding member of the Danish Soldiers Sick and Wounded Relief Fund established on 24 Feb. 1864, but voted against censuring the policy of neutrality eventually assumed by the Palmerston ministry in the Danish-German war, 8 July 1864.11Morning Post, 25 Feb. 1864. He was appointed to the select committee on British establishments in West Africa, 21 Feb. 1865.

At the 1865 general election he offered again for Totnes as a supporter of Palmerston. Another highly charged campaign ensued, in which a Conservative challenger, Lieutenant Colonel W. G. Dawkins, took exception to Seymour’s comments on the hustings about his being ‘no longer a fighting man’.12Standard, 15 Aug. 1865. Following Seymour’s controversial return, amidst charges of bribery and intimidation by Somerset’s ‘roughs’, Dawkins pursued the matter in the local press, prompting Seymour, who was ‘not in the habit of noticing newspaper electioneering publications’, to offer this explanation:

In speaking of the question of non-intervention, I said that ‘fighting was the colonel’s trade, but it was not now’, implying what I then believed ... that you had left the army. I have now only just learned that instead of leaving the army you elected to be placed on half-pay: it was therefore not strictly correct to state ‘that fighting was no longer your trade’. For this error I beg to express my regret.

With regard to your suggestion that I should meet you at Wormwood Scrubs or elsewhere, in order to give you the opportunity of relieving Totnes at once of a representative not of her choice, I feel deeply sensible of your amiable intentions towards my constituents but at the same time imagine that the days are past when ‘the survivor’ is the gentleman to be elected by a constituency, and therefore I cannot be a consenting party to making myself ridiculous before the public.13Ibid.

A paper war ensued, in which Dawkins accused Seymour of a ‘needless and meaningless insult’ and of having secured his election through corruption.14Ibid; Essex Standard, 18 Aug. 1865. A petition in these terms was eventually lodged against the return and a committee appointed to investigate, 15 Mar. 1866. On 22 Mar. they unseated Seymour’s colleague for extensive bribery, but finding no evidence of Seymour’s direct involvement in practices that were clearly endemic, begrudgingly confirmed his election.15Morning Post, 16, 23 Mar. 1866; Hansard, 22 Mar. 1866, vol. 182, cc. 735-6. The writ for the vacant seat was suspended, however, and the matter passed to a commission of inquiry. Called to give evidence, Seymour again denied all knowledge of payments, 26 Nov. 1866, but in February the following year, the commission’s report decided that both he and his colleague had been ‘privy and assenting’ to corrupt practices, prompting demands for him to be unseated and prosecuted.16Daily News, 29 Sept. 1866, 20 Mar. 1867; Morning Post, 27 Nov. 1866; Pall Mall Gazette, 26 Feb. 1867.

After a motion calling for all those involved to be charged was proposed in the Commons, 9 Apr. 1867, Seymour rose to make an unusual maiden speech. Vigorously denying any wrongdoing, he insisted that he had been ‘entirely ignorant’ of the borough’s venality and had believed that the sums he had paid were ‘to clear some back debts and subscriptions (laughter)’. Accusing his critics of blatant hypocrisy, he warned the House that ‘if action was to be retrospective, it should include all those honourable gentleman, some of whom were sitting on the opposite side of the House ... who were implicated in the same degree’. On the advice of the Conservative solicitor-general the motion was withdrawn.17Daily News, 10 Apr. 1867; Hansard, 9 Apr. 1867, vol. 186, c. 1361. A satirical motion for Seymour and other MPs implicated in bribery to be removed from their commissions (as JPs) also came to nothing.18Hansard, 19 Mar. 1867, vol. 186, cc. 126-8.

Seymour voted for the abolition of church rates, 7 Mar., and loyally supported the Russell ministry’s abortive reform bill, 27 Apr., 18 June 1866. The following year he was one of the ‘Liberal seceders’ who initially rebelled against Gladstone’s ‘rival bill’ to the Conservative reform measure, 8 Apr., although he was soon back in the minorities for the abolition of personal rating, 12 Apr., the disfranchisement of small boroughs, 3 June, the allocation of a third member to large towns, 3 June, and the introduction of cumulative voting, 5 July 1867.19R. Saunders, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848-67 (2011), 247; Lloyd’s Weekly News, 14 Apr. 1867. On 12 July 1867, in his only known vote on the ballot, he was in a minority of 112 for voting by printed papers placed in a glass box. He followed Gladstone into the lobbies on the issue of the Irish Church in 1868.

The 1867 Reform Act’s disfranchisement of Totnes left Seymour without a seat at the 1868 general election, when he appeared on the hustings in Wiltshire South as the proposer of the Liberal Thomas Grove.20Hampshire Advertiser, 21 Nov. 1868. The following year he came forward for a vacancy in Salisbury as a supporter of Gladstone and the ballot, and was elected after a ‘very close and exciting contest’.21Birmingham Daily Post, 31 July; Pall Mall Gazette, 6 Aug. 1869. More active in debate in his last Parliament, he sat until his defeat in 1874.

Between 1871-2 Seymour and his brother were leading witnesses in the celebrated Tichborne case involving a claimant to a fortune who professed to be their missing nephew Roger Tichborne. It was primarily on the basis of their testimony that the claimant was eventually exposed as an imposter and convicted.22The Times, 13 May, 16 Nov. 1871, 24 Feb. 1872. In 1877 Seymour inherited his brother’s substantial estates and ‘important collection’ of old master drawings.23The Times, 22 Sept. 1877, 27 Apr. 1927.

Seymour died in March 1888, leaving three freehold houses in Mayfair and Kensington to his wife, along with all his personal estate, valued at £41,767. His manor house at Trent and collection of pictures were entailed on his only child Jane Margaret (1873-1943).24The Times, 23 Mar.; Standard, 31 May 1888.