Frederick Edward Grey Ponsonby, 1st Baron Sysonby, GCB, GCVO, PC (16 September 1867 – 20 October 1935) was a British soldier and courtier.

Known as Fritz, Ponsonby was the second son of General Sir Henry Ponsonby and his wife the Hon. Mary Elizabeth (née Bulteel). A member of a junior branch of the Ponsonby family, he was the grandson of General Sir Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby and the great-grandson of Frederick Ponsonby, 3rd Earl of Bessborough. Arthur Ponsonby, 1st Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede, was his younger brother.

His godparents were German Emperor Frederick III and Empress Victoria, which made him godbrother to Emperor Wilhelm II

Ponsonby was commissioned in the Grenadier Guards as a second lieutenant on 11 February 1888, and promoted to lieutenant on 2 July 1892. He was promoted to captain on 15 February 1899, and served with the 3rd Battalion of his regiment in the Second Boer War. Wounded at the end of the war, he returned to the United Kingdom in April 1902.[1] He was later promoted to Major and Brevet Lieutenant-Colonel, and served in the First World War. He wrote the standard history: The Grenadier Guards in the Great War of 1914-1918. 3 vols. Published in 1920.

He also held several court positions, notably as Equerry-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria from 1894 to 1901, as Assistant Keeper of the Privy Purse and Assistant Private Secretary to Queen Victoria from 1897 to 1901, to King Edward VII from 1901 to 1910 and to King George V from 1910 to 1914; as Keeper of the Privy Purse from 1914 to 1935, and as Lieutenant Governor of Windsor Castle from 1928 to 1935.

In 1906, Ponsonby was appointed to the Order of the Bath as a Companion (CB). In 1910, he was promoted to be a Knight Commander (KCVO) and was promoted to Knight Grand Cross (GCVO) in the 1921 New Year Honours. In 1914, he was sworn of the Privy Council. In the 1935 Birthday Honours, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Sysonby, of Wonersh in the County of Surrey

Lord Sysonby married Victoria, daughter of Colonel Edmund Hegan Kennard, on 17 May 1899, at the Guards Chapel, Wellington Barracks. She later became a well-known cook book author.

They had three children: Victor Alexander Henry Desmond Ponsonby (19 June 1900 – 24 November 1900)

Hon. Loelia Mary Ponsonby (1902–1993)

Hon. Edward Gaspard Ponsonby (1903–1956)

Lord Sysonby died in London in October 1935, aged 68, only four months after his elevation to the peerage, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. He was succeeded in the barony by his surviving son Edward. Lady Sysonby died in 1955.

His autobiography Recollections of Three Reigns, edited and published posthumously in 1951, is full, frank and entertaining. Nancy Mitford wrote to Evelyn Waugh that there was "a shriek on every page". He also edited Letters of the Empress Frederick (1928) and published Sidelights on Queen Victoria (1930).

The Ponsonby family has played a leading role in British life for two centuries. His father was the Sir Henry Ponsonby - memorably played by Geoffrey Palmer in the film 'Mrs. Brown' - who was Private Secretary to Queen Victoria. His grandfather was badly wounded at the Battle of Waterloo, but survived to become General Sir Frederick Ponsonby. Lady Caroline, better known to history under her married name of Lady Caroline Lamb, was the wife of the future Prime Minister Lord Melbourne and lover of the poet Lord Byron. This lady was also a key figure in a film - played by Sarah Miles - in 1972. The father of the two siblings, Frederick's great-grandfather, was the 3rd Earl of Bessborough. The man wounded at Waterloo is not to be confused with another Ponsonby depicted on film, his kinsman General Sir William Ponsonby, whose death - possibly due to not risking his best horse in battle - at the hands of a group of lancers is an incident noted in the film 'Waterloo'. Frederick's daughter, Loelia, married the 2nd Duke of Westminster, before remarrying, after the Second World War, to become the alliterative Lady Loelia Lindsay

Captain The Honourable Sir Seymour John Fortescue, GCVO, CMG (10 February 1856 – 20 March 1942) was a British naval officer and courtier who was an Equerry to the British sovereign and Serjeant-at-Arms in the House of Lords.

Early life and family Seymour John Fortescue was born on 10 February 1856, the second son of Hugh Fortescue, 3rd Earl Fortescue, DL (1818–1905), a Liberal Member of Parliament and peer who served in Lord John Russell's administration, and his wife, Georgiana Augusta Caroline Dawson-Damer (1826–1866), eldest daughter of the Hon. George Lionel Dawson-Damer. Fortescue's immediate family were well-connected in the military: his younger brother, Henry Dudley, was killed in action in 1900 and another, John William, was librarian at Windsor Castle and a noted military historian.[1][2] They were also extensive landowners, with property in Ireland, South Devon, Gloucester and Lincolnshire (including Tattershall Castle), as well as Castle Hill in North Devon, where Fortescue was born.[3] In 1859, the young Fortescue accompanied his family to live in Medeira for two years, where an uncle was recovering from tuberculosis (the island was then a sort of fashionable sanatorium). While there, he met Captain (later Admiral of the Fleet) Henry Keppel, whose wife-to-be lived in a villa near the Fortescues; Keppel permitted the young Fortescue aboard his ship, the frigate Forte, a visit he would remember fondly in his memoirs, Looking Back. He also recalled the Empress of Austria's visit to the island in 1859, aboard HMY Victoria and Albert. Throughout the 1860s, Lord Fortescue was a sympathiser of the Italian movement and hosted its celebrities in his Devonshire home. In 1865, the young Fortescue started school in Brighton under one Mrs Walker; despite its strong reputation as a feeder preparatory school for Eton and Harrow, he chose not to pursue those routes further: "owning, I suppose, to my thorough dislike of the whole process of education, I made up my mind to go into the Navy".

Naval and royal service Fortscue joined the Royal Navy in 1869, nominated by his mother's cousin, Captain Beauchamp Seymour, and trained at Britannia as a cadet, remembering that "there is not period of my life that I look back upon with less pleasure than I do to the time I spent on Britannia", owing to its "overdone" schooling and poor food. He graduated first class the following year and was made a midshipman. After a period spent in Portsmouth, he joined HMS Bristol in 1871 and travelled to Brazil, South Africa, Ascension Island, St Helena and Gibraltar. He afterwards sailed with HMS Ariadne in the Mediterranean and then in 1873 HMS Narcissus, which was travelling to the West Indies, before being promoted to Lieutenant in 1878.[5] Later in his career, he served in the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 and the Egytian War, and also in Eastern Sudan in 1885. He was promoted to the rank of Commander in 1890. Fortescue served in the Naval Intelligence Department between 1891 and 1893, and as Naval Aide-de-Camp to the Commander-in-Chief in South Africa in 1899 and 1900.[6] In 1901, he retired from the Navy with the rank of Captain.[1] In 1893, Fortescue was also appointed an equerry in waiting to the Prince of Wales (in the place of Rear-Admiral H. F. Stephenson, CB).[7] He remained in that post even after the Prince became King Edward VII, and served throughout that King's reign. Following the King's death in 1910, his successor George V appointed Fortescue a Groom of the Bedchamber in Waiting,[8] although he served for less than a year before resigning in January 1911.[9] In the meantime, he was made an Extra Equerry to the King, a position renewed by Edward VIII and George VI in 1937.[10] Between 1910 and 1936, Fortescue also served as Sergeant-at-Arms to the House of Lords.[11][12] Fortescue's long service to the Royal Household and the Navy was rewarded with several honours. He was appointed Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George in 1900, followed a year later with an appointment as Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, in which order promotions to Knight Commander (1910) and Knight Grand Cross (1931) followed. He died after stepping from a train and missing the platform at Victoria Station on 20 March 1942

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