Admiral Edwin Clayton Tennyson d’Eyncourt, CB, RN (1813 - 14 January 1903) was a distinguished British naval officer. The second son of Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt, and a first cousin of the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, he entered naval college in 1826 and became a lieutenant in 1837. He served in the South American, East Indies and China Stations during the 1840s. In 1854 he served in the Baltic campaign under Sir Charles Napier as captain of the gunboat HMS Desperate, and returned to that theatre in 1855 under Rear-Admiral Richard Saunders Dundas, as captain of the steam frigate HMS Pylades. He attained the rank of rear-admiral in 1866 and retired in 1870, continuing to rise to the rank of admiral by 1878. He was made a Companion of the Bath in 1873. As a young man he thoroughly embodied his family’s social pretensions and their snobbish behaviour towards their poor relations, the Tennysons of Somersby; but in later years the mutual dislike between him and his famous cousin thawed, and he gave Alfred advice on the law of propriety of accepting the peerage offered to him in 1883.
