Earl turfed off estate seeks to heal toxic family rift

PRINCE Harry and Meghan remain ‘proud’ of their decision to quit royal life amid bitter disputes with the Firm, but at least one aristocratic family has found that even the deepest of rifts can be healed.

William Seymour, the Earl of Yarmouth, was evicted from his family’s £85million estate two years ago by his parents after they fell out with his wife, City high-flier Kelsey Wells.

But amends are now being made following the birth of their child last month, and they have even named him after William’s father, Lord Henry Seymour, 9th Marquess of Hertford.

The Countess of Yarmouth, 36, and her husband, 28, have called him Jocelyn Seymour in honour of William’s father, who bears the same middle name.

‘Both sides want to move on. This touching tribute is an olive branch and the first step in bringing the family back together,’ a friend of the family tells me.

‘There have been years of bad blood, so it won’t be smooth, but there is hope at long last.’

When Kelsey and William married in 2018, his aunt, Lady Carolyn Seymour, mocked their invitation, saying they had not used the family shade of blue and that it was in the incorrect font, adding that her nephew was ‘pompous’ and ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’.

Privately educated Kelsey, whose father is a management consultant and mother a former dance teacher, told how she was ostracised by William’s family due to her alleged social faux pas, including calling the butler by his first name and using her mother-in-law Lady Hertford’s bathroom without permission.

A year after they married, the couple, who co-run a liqueur company, were booted out and made to live in a cottage beyond the boundary of the family’s 6,000-acres while Kelsey was pregnant with their first child — a son, Clement Andrew Seymour, the Viscount Beauchamp.

The family’s 110-room Warwickshire seat, Ragley Hall, is due to be inherited by William, who descends from Henry VIII’s third wife, Jane Seymour.

‘You could fit the entire square footage of this cottage into the Great Hall at Ragley,’ he sighed at the time, admitting he ‘regrets’ the bitter feud because his siblings were no longer speaking to him.