and absenting himself from court. Suspected of complicity in the assassination plot, his house was searched in February 1695–6, but nothing was found to compromise him. On 19 March 1696, when expected to attend at the House of Lords to sign the association, ‘he broke his shoulder,’ whereupon the lords sent him the document to sign; but he refused, though he declared his abhorrence of the design against William (cf. Ellis Corresp. ii. 293). By November 1697 he was reconciled to the court, but he suffered a great shock by the loss of his son and heir, Charles, through an accident to his coach in Wales in July 1698, and he died at Badminton on 21 Jan. 1699–1700. He was buried in the Beaufort Chapel in St. George's, Windsor, where an elaborate monument was set up to his memory (for inscription see Ashmole's Berkshire, iii. 163), but was removed in 1878 to Badminton. Beaufort married, on 17 Aug. 1657, Mary (d. 7 Jan. 1714), eldest daughter of Arthur, first lord Capel, and widow of Henry Seymour, lord Beauchamp. By her he had issue Henry, who died young; Charles, marquis of Worcester (1661–1698), father of Henry Somerset, second duke of Beaufort (see below), and three other sons; and four daughters, of whom the second, Mary, married, in 1685, James, duke of Ormonde, and died in 1733; the third, Henrietta, married, in 1686, Henry, lord O'Brien, and, secondly, Henry, earl of Suffolk, dying in 1715; while the fourth, Anne, married, on 4 May 1691, Thomas, earl of Coventry, and died on 14 Feb. 1763.
Lord-keeper Guilford visited the Duke of Beaufort in 1680, and Roger North, in his ‘Life of the Lord Keeper,’ gives a detailed and interesting account of the state maintained by this great magnate of the west: ‘a princely way of living, which that noble duke used, above any other except crowned heads that I have had notice of in Europe; and in some respects greater than most of them, to whom he might have been an example.’ He managed a large and productive estate through his bailiffs and servants; he had ‘about two hundred persons in his family [household] all provided for; and in his capital house, nine original tables covered every day.’ The greatest order prevailed amid this hierarchy of retainers. The duke spent much time in hunting, planting, and building. He was almost puritanic in strictness in matters relating to discipline and conduct, and in every respect his mode of life contrasted with the accepted traditions of the manners of the nobility under Charles II.
A half-length portrait of the first duke, by Sir Peter Lely, is in the possession of the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton.
Henry Somerset, second Duke of Beaufort (1684–1714), grandson of the above, born at Monmouth Castle in 1684, entertained Queen Anne and the prince consort with splendour at Badminton in August 1702. He held aloof from public affairs until the fall of Sunderland heralded the collapse of the whig junto in 1710, when he is said to have remarked to the queen that he could at length call her a queen in reality. As a ‘thorough-going tory’ he was on 21 Feb. 1711, after some opposition from the exclusiveness of Swift, admitted a member of the ‘Brothers’ Club. He was made captain of the gentlemen pensioners in 1712, and elected K.G. in October 1712. Dying at the age of thirty, on 24 May 1714, he was succeeded by his son Henry Somerset, third duke (1707–1745), who married, as his third wife, Frances, sole heiress of James, second viscount Scudamore [see under Scudamore, John, first Viscount], and temporarily assumed the surname Scudamore. He was succeeded by his brother, Charles Noel Somerset, fourth duke (1709–1756), whose grandson, Henry Charles, was father of
Henry Somerset, seventh Duke of Beaufort (1792–1853). Born on 5 Feb. 1792, he joined the 10th hussars in 1810, and was aide-de-camp to the Duke of Wellington in the peninsula from 1812 to 1814, during which period he was once captured by some members of Soult's staff. He was M.P. for Monmouth from 1813 to 1832, when he temporarily lost his seat. Elected for West Gloucestershire in 1835, he succeeded to the peerage in that year. He was made a K.G. in 1842, and voted steadily with the tory party; but he was best known as a sportsman, his portrait being allotted a prominent place in ‘The Royal Hunt’ and ‘The Badminton Hunt,’ while he figures as one of the great hunters in the pages of Nimrod (Sporting Reminiscences, ‘The Beaufort Country,’ chap. viii.) He died on 17 Nov. 1853, and was buried a week later in the chapel at Badminton (Gent. Mag. 1854, i. 80; Illustr. London News, 26 Nov. 1853, with portrait). He married first, in July 1814, Georgiana Frederica, daughter of Henry Fitzroy by Anne, sister of the great Duke of Wellington; and secondly, 29 June 1822, his first wife's half-sister, Emily Frances, daughter of Charles Culling Smith, by the above-mentioned Anne, the widow of Fitzroy. This marriage, being within the ‘prohibited degrees of affinity,’ was voidable by sentence of the Ecclesiastical Court. No such sentence was passed, and the voidability was an-
