Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Seymour, Henry (1805-1859)
SEYMOUR, Lord HENRY (1805–1859), founder of the Jockey Club at Paris, was the younger son of Francis Charles Seymour Conway, third marquis of Hertford, by Maria Fagniani, adopted daughter of George Augustus Selwyn (1719–1791) [q. v.] His grandfather was Francis (Ingram) Seymour, second marquis of Hertford [q. v.] Lord Henry was born in Paris on 18 Jan. 1805, his father, then Lord Yarmouth, having been detained in France on landing there just after the rupture of the treaty of Amiens. Lord Yarmouth was released in 1806 through Fox's intercession with Talleyrand, but his wife remained in France, and Lord Henry is said, though this is a manifest exaggeration, never to have set foot in England. In 1856 he inherited his mother's large fortune. In 1833 he was one of the eighteen founders of a society for the encouragement of horse-breeding in France, to which was attached the Jockey Club, and his horses repeatedly won prizes at the Bois de Boulogne and Chantilly races. A prominent member of the aristocratic society of Paris, he was noted for his eccentricities, and in the carnivals of 1834 and 1835 he attempted to introduce the Italian custom of throwing comfits and coins among the crowd. He died in Paris, unmarried, on 16 Aug. 1859, and was buried in his mother's vault at Père-Lachaise. He bequeathed money for the support of four favourite horses, which were never again to be saddled, and left the residue of his property, about 36,000l. a year, to the Paris hospitals.
[Moniteur, 29 Jan. 1834; Times, 25 Aug. 1859; Ann. Reg. 1859; Gent. Mag. 1859, ii. 432; Revue Britannique, August 1878; Alger's Englishmen in the French Revolution.]