Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset Anne Seymour, Duchess of Somerset (née Stanhope) (c.1510 – 16 April 1587) was the second wife of Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset (c.1500–1552), who held the office of Lord Protector during the first part of the reign of his nephew King Edward VI, through whom Anne was briefly the most powerful woman in England. During her husband's time as Lord Protector she claimed precedence over the dowager queen Catherine. Anne Stanhope was likely born in 1510, the only child of Sir Edward Stanhope (1462 – 6 June 1511) by his wife Elizabeth Bourchier (b.
John Seymour, 19th Duke of Somerset John Seymour, 19th Duke of Somerset John Michael Edward Seymour, 19th Duke of Somerset, (born 30 December 1952), styled Lord Seymour between 1954 and 1984, is a British aristocratic landowner in Wiltshire and Devon, and a member of the House of Lords. Educated at Hawtreys and Eton College, he qualified as a chartered surveyor before succeeding to the dukedom in 1984 on the death of his father. Having lost his seat in the House of Lords under the House of Lords Act 1999, he was elected at the December 2014 House of Lords by-elections, to sit as a crossbencher in