Hoots from the Archive – Focus on Founders and Benefactors - Sarah, Duchess of Somerset

Posted by System Administrator on 06 Nov 2020

Modified by Rachel Kneale on 13 Jan 2023

Sarah duchess of somerset

Sarah, Duchess of Somerset was born Sarah Alston in 1630, the daughter of wealthy London physician Edward Alston. Alston had no sons, and so his two daughters were co-heiresses to a large fortune. Sarah Alston’s first marriage was to George Grimston, the son of prominent Whig MP Harbottle Grimston, who served as Speaker of the House of Commons. He died at the age of twenty-three in 1655. She then married John Seymour, the Whig MP for Marlborough, Lord Lieutenant of Wiltshire and Somerset and subsequently the 4th Duke of Somerset. She was widowed again in 1674 and her final marriage in 1682 was to Lord Henry Coleraine. Her third marriage was not a happy one, and the couple lived apart for most of their marriage. By this point in her life she was a very wealthy woman, having inherited money from both her Father, who had died in 1669, and her first two husbands. She also held the title of Dowager Duchess of Somerset.

                                                                                                     Sarah, Duchess of Somerset

Her first major gift to the Manchester Grammar School came in 1679. At this point her only surviving relative was her niece, her two children having died in infancy. Her niece was married to Lord Delamere of Dunham Massey who was a Feoffee (later to be known as Governors) of MGS. This connection led to the endowment of four exhibitions at Brasenose College, Oxford, the alma mater of her first husband. The money for this endowment came from the profits of a manor at Iver in Buckinghamshire which she had inherited from her second husband the Duke of Somerset. These awards were therefore known as Somerset Iver exhibitions.

In 1686 she drew up her will, giving provision for scholarships for poor scholars from MGS, Marlborough and Hereford Schools to Brasenose College, Oxford and St. John’s College, Cambridge, her Father’s alma mater. Recipients would be known as the Somerset Scholars and the scholarships would also include provision for providing “chambers, gowns, caps and books”. In addition to the family link to MGS via her niece, the Duchess was drawn to all three schools because of their Whig connections. MGS’s High Master at the time, William Barrow, was known to sympathise with the Whig cause. All the Feoffees, including Lord Delamere, were convinced Whigs.

The Duchess also founded various benefactions for the poor including The Somerset Hospital in Wiltshire, The Westminster Benefaction, the Froxfield almshouses for widows and the Tottenham Foundation for the education of the poor.

The Somerset scholarships would increase the attraction of MGS beyond the boundaries of the city to parents further afield, keen for their boys to gain entry to Oxford and Cambridge. Boarding houses sprung up to accommodate the many boys who travelled from well beyond Manchester to attend the School. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, MGS supplied a sixth of the intake to Brasenose College.

                                                                         Monument in Westminster Abbey to Sarah, Duchess of Somerset

Sarah, Duchess of Somerset, died in 1692 at the age of 61 and is buried in Westminster Abbey, where an impressive monument to her memory can still be seen. The transcription, translated from Latin reads:

Here lies the late most illustrious Duchess of Somerset, ever celebrated for her charity and beneficence, who erected a grammar school for boys at Tottenham in the county of Middlesex, enlarged the income of the Green Coat Hospital at Westminster, largely endowed Brasenose College in Oxford, and St John’s in Cambridge, for the education and nourishing of youth in piety and good literature; she was likewise an encourager of trades and handicrafts, and had a tender regard to old age, by erecting an almshouse at Froxfield in Wiltshire for thirty widows: she was very charitable to the poor of St Margaret’s Westminster, where she instituted a lecture, and gave many stately ornaments to the Church. She died the 25th of October 1692.

Many Old Mancunians today will remember receiving Somerset Scholarships and Somerset Iver Exhibitions to Oxford and Cambridge, and they continued to be awarded up until the 1970s.

Comments

There aren't any comments for this article - be the first!

Post your own comment


Subscribe for updates

Subscribe to receive update emails whenever new Hoots from the Archive articles are posted.