[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).

[4] 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.

After a period spent in Portsmouth, he joined HMS Bristol in 1871 and travelled to Brazil, South Africa, Ascension Island, St Helena and Gibraltar.

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.