Thomas Coke, 4th Earl of Leicester
Thomas William Coke, 4th Earl of Leicester, (9 July 1880 – 21 August 1949) was a British peer and Army officer, styled Viscount Coke from 1909 to 1941. Early life. Coke was the son of Thomas William Coke, 3rd Earl of Leicester, and Hon. Alice Emily White. Educated at Eton and Sandhurst, he entered the Scots Guards as a cadet, and was promoted to second lieutenant on 21 February 1900. Military career. Coke was seconded for service in the Second Boer War in South Africa on 26 November 1901, and was promoted to lieutenant on  10 January 1902. Following the end of the war in June 1902 he returned with most of the men of the guards regiments on board the SS "Lake Michigan", which arrived in Southampton in October 1902. He went on half-pay on 13 April 1905 due to illness, but returned to service on 8 November 1905. Coke was promoted to captain on 14 March 1906. He resigned his commission on 6 March 1909, after his father succeeded to the earldom and he became heir apparent; his uncle John, then a lieutenant in the Guards, was promoted captain in his place . On 1 October 1909, he was commissioned a lieutenant in the Norfolk Yeomanry. Made a captain in the General Reserve of Officers on 4 June 1911, he surrendered his commission in the General Reserve on 10 July 1912 to return to the Scots Guards as a captain. He would serve with the Guards for the duration of the First World War. On 1 May 1917 he was appointed an aide-de-camp. Later life. Coke was also a Knight of the Order of St. John, and a Justice of the Peace for Norfolk. He was a talented violinist. He succeeded  his father as Earl of Leicester in 1941 and was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Norfolk in 1944. He died in 1949 and was succeeded by his elder son Thomas. A recording that his daughter, Lady Silvia, made recounting the history of Holkham Hall was made at the age of 90, and is a British Library exemplar of the conservative received pronunciation accent of English. Family. Leicester was married on 2 December 1905 to Marion Gertrude Trefusis, daughter of Colonel the Hon. Walter Trefusis and Lady Mary Montagu-Douglas-Scott. (Colonel Trefusis was the son of the 19th Lord Clinton and  Lady Mary was the daughter of the 5th Duke of Buccleuch). They had five children: The Trefusis connection reverberated in a later generation. The eldest daughter of the 5th Earl became engaged to Johnnie Althorp, later father to Princess Diana; his father objected to the match on the grounds of "mad blood", a reference to the institutionalised relatives of the queen, and the engagement was broken off. (Much later, the director of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute thought that a genetic disease in the Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis family may have killed male members of the family in early  childhood and caused learning disabilities in females.) She went on to marry the aristocrat and entrepreneur Colin Tennant and is known as Anne Tennant, Baroness Glenconner.