Politician. He received recognition as a Conservative politician in Victorian England, who was a colleague of Benjamin Disraeli during his early years in Parliament. He and Disraeli were part of the Young England movement. In 1846 he served briefly as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Sir Robert Peel. Born the oldest son of eight children of Percy Clinton Sydney Smythe, 6th Viscount Strangford, he was educated at Eton and then at St. Johns College at Cambridge. He was born in Sweden while his father was the Swedish Ambassador. Like Disraeli, he had literary interests besides political ones. In 1844 he wrote "Historic Fancies," a collection of poems and essays, and his novel "Angelo Pisani" was published posthumously in 1875 along with a memoir of the author. After building a notorious reputation as a lady's man, he was found alone in a summerhouse with the young maiden, Lady Dorothy Fanny Walpole. After refusing to marry her, she married a cousin twenty-year her senior within months on December 2, 1847. After the negative newspaper accounts of this ordeal, his political career was over. According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, he fought a duel in 1852 at Weybridge with Lieutenant-Colonel of the Scottish Fuselier Guard Frederick Romilly, a Whig politician, which is claimed to be "the last encounter of this kind in England." He and Romilly were both Members of Parliament from Canterbury from March of 1850 to 1852 and he lost re-election by a landslide. Apparently, no injury or death occurred in this duel. There is documented a fatal English duel between two French politicians in England in October of 1852. Upon his father's death in 1855, he gained the Irish title of 7th Viscount Strangford and the English title 2nd Baron of Penshurst, and after dying at age 39 two years later, his younger brother Percy Ellen Algernon Frederick William Sydney Smythe gained the title. Since there were no more male heirs, the titles became extinct after his brother's death. His oil-on-canvas portrait is on display at Disraeli's Hughenden Manor and is part of the National Trust.