BYNG, Sir John (1772-1860), of 6 Portman Square, Mdx., Lavington, Suss. and Bellaghy, Co. Londonderry

Byng, a professional soldier and distinguished veteran of the Peninsular campaigns and Waterloo, had assumed command of the Irish army under the Tory administration of the duke of Wellington in May 1828. His co-operation with the incoming Grey ministry over appointments in 1830-1 so impressed the reappointed viceroy Lord Anglesey, father-in-law of his eldest son George, that Anglesey endorsed his candidature for county Londonderry as a reformer at the 1831 general election. His unexpected defeat ‘on behalf of the government’ at a personal cost of over £2,000 upped his credit further, and after a series of abortive attempts to find him a berth, the Whigs helped him to come in for Poole on a vacancy in October 1831.1Grey mss, Smith Stanley to Lord Grey, 22 May 1831. His subsequent appointment to an Irish governorship, a sinecure worth some £1,200 a year, proved unpopular with Poole’s more advanced reformers, and at the 1832 general election it was expected that he would try again at county Londonderry. In the event, however, he persevered at Poole with the backing of the treasury and a local Whig magnate, and after a ‘severe contest’ against two other Liberals was narrowly elected in second place, the majority of the new constituency’ feeling ‘that they owed a debt of gratitude to the former representatives’.2Dorset County Chronicle, 26 July, 2 Aug., 6 Sept., 13, 20 Dec. 1832; Poole Borough Pollbook (1835), p. 6.

Byng, who joined Brooks’s, 13 Feb. 1833, loyally supported the Whig ministries of Lords Grey and Melbourne when present, but was not a regular presence in the division lobbies and spoke only occassionally on military and Irish matters. ‘Reluctantly’ he acknowledged the necessity of the Irish Coercion Act, 27 Feb., and flogging in the army, which he had suspended temporarily without success in his own command, 2 Apr. 1833. Later that month he appeared, somewhat incongruously, on the platform of the metropolitan meeting for repeal of the assessed taxes, but did not speak.3The Times, 26 Apr. 1833. He welcomed the former war secretary Sir Henry Parnell’s suggestions for economies at the Horseguards, 3 May 1833, but spoke and voted against Hume’s uninformed calls for broader military reductions, 3 Mar. 1834. As chairman of the Newry election committee, to which he had been appointed, 7 Mar. 1833, he unsuccessfully brought up a motion to prosecute a witness for corrupt practices, 8 May 1883. Next month he was one of the ‘influential persons’ who managed to persuade the Irish MPs More O’Ferrall, a treasury lord, and Henry Lambert not to rebel against ministers over their Portuguese policy.4Three Diaries, 334. He was in the government majority on the pension list, 21 Feb. 1834, and presented a constituency petition for the relief of Dissenters, 6 Mar. 1834. He milked the latter for all it was worth in his election campaign at the end of the year, when he stood as both a reformer and ‘a decided churchman’, who was convinced that relieving Dissenters from the payment of church rates ‘and other acts of justice’ would strengthen the established church. After comfortably topping the poll, he deputized in the Middlesex contest for his elder brother George Byng, who had ‘undergone a surgical operation’.5Poole Borough Pollbook (1835), pp. 16, 21-2, 29. In his last known speech in the Commons, he praised the ‘forbearance’ of the troops involved in a fatal clash with Irish anti-tithe protestors at Rathcormac, 2 Mar. 1835.

On 12 May 1835 Byng, who had unsuccessfully solicited a peerage for himself after his elder brother had declined one in September 1831, was created Lord Strafford by the Melbourne administration (a title he took from his maternal grandmother’s father), much to the irritation of the representative of another branch of the family, Earl Fitzwilliam (as Lord Milton had become). Appointed as a ministerial whip in the Lords, his fellow recipient of a barony Lord Hatherton (formerly E. J. Littleton) sniped that he was unfit for the post, being ‘a perfect old woman, totally devoid of the address and tact requisite for the task’, and there was evidently some disappointment at his mustering of the troops during the passage of the English municipal corporations bill and Irish church bill that summer.6Hatherton diary, 20 July 1835; Holland House Diaries, 322-3. He unwittingly had a hand in rekindling the military career of the infamous martinet Lord Brudenell (later Lord Cardigan of Balaclava fame), having written a letter opening the way for his reappointment which was read to the Commons, 3 May 1836. His political influence, however, was insufficient to secure the passage of a bill through the Lords annulling a a questionable Tory victory in Poole’s first council election in August 1836.

Byng, who was elevated to an earldom by the Russell administration in September 1847, died the second oldest member of the Lords in June 1860, ‘after a very short illness’. He was succeeded in his titles and estates, which included the family seat inherited from his childless brother George in 1847, by his eldest son George Stevens Byng (1806-86), a minor Whig officeholder who succeeded him in the representation at Poole.7The Times, 4 June 1860; Gent. Mag. (1860), ii. 89; Oxford DNB.