Author: Seton, Alexander
Biography:
SETON, Alexander, formerly BARON (1768-1828: Ballantyne)
He was born into a Scottish family with business interests in Sweden that made them citizens of both countries. The source of their wealth was his great-uncle George Seton (1696-1786), who established himself as a merchant in Stockholm, made a fortune, served as banker to the King, and was raised to the Swedish nobility in 1785. At that point he formally adopted his sister’s son, his nephew and heir Alexander Baron of Preston, Scotland (1738-1814), who thereupon took the additional surname of Seton. In 1786 Baron Seton acquired a former royal palace, Ekolsund, north of Stockholm. He had been in partnership with his uncle since about 1777 but also owned land in Scotland and pursued antiquarian interests in both countries. In 1783 the University of St. Andrews conferred an LLD upon him; Gustav III knighted him in 1793. By his first wife Elizabeth Angus (d 1770) he had four sons, the youngest of them, Alexander, the poet, born on 10 Dec. 1768 and baptised on 27 Dec. at Linlithgow, West Lothian, Scotland. All four sons changed their names along with their father, who remarried at New Grey Friars, Edinburgh, on 13 Aug. 1795. His new wife Anne Innes (b 1770) died at Edinburgh within a few months of the marriage, in the spring of 1796. In 1797-8, the younger Alexander suffered a episode of mental illness and was consigned to a madhouse. The poetry that he wrote in confinement was taken as evidence of continued derangement. He did not regain his freedom until 1822, long after his father’s death in 1814. But he was eventually able to be certified sane, to secure a modest annuity from the family, and to live independently. He returned to Stockholm, where he became a pioneering archaeologist and set about issuing poems one by one in pamphlet form and finally in a collected volume. He died while in the field or as a consequence of exposure in the field, on 1 Oct. 1828. Ballantyne has a useful bibliography, containing many short individual items not included in this bibliography but apparently all in the collective volume. (John H. Ballantyne, “The Swedish Knight and his Lunatic Son,” Northern Studies 39 [2005], 25-50; ancestry.com 9 Oct. 2024; findmypast.com 9 Oct. 2024)
Other Names:
- A. S.