In 1872, Byng was made a Groom-in-Waiting and then an Equerry two years later. In 1895, he was appointed a CB and knighted KCVO in 1897. On 28 March 1898, his elder brother George Byng, 3rd Earl of Strafford, died and he succeeded to his peerages and estates and his seat in the House of Lords.
Barely a year later, on 16 May 1899, Strafford was killed by an express train at Potters Bar railway station. Witnesses said he appeared to step in front of the approaching engine from the bottom of the slope at the end of the platform. His body was carried fifty yards down the track.[2] A coroner's court was later told he had the nervous condition of catalepsy. The inquest jury – after considering several verdicts including suicide – returned a finding of death by misadventure.[2]
As his sons predeceased him[a] his peerages passed to his brother, Francis.
On 15 October 1863, Strafford married Countess Henrietta Louisa Elizabeth Danneskiold-Samsøe (a maternal granddaughter of the 1st Marquess of Ailesbury) and they had four children:
After his wife's death in 1880, Strafford married on 6 December 1898 Cora Colgatenée Smith (a wealthy American widow), but they did not have any children, Byng dying only five months later.
Strafford was buried in a family vault in the churchyard of St John's, Potter's Bar, with his first wife. In 1935, after the church had become disused and prone to vandalism, the bodies were exhumed and moved to a mausoleum at the nearby family estate of Wrotham Park.[3]
Notes
^Eldest son George was drowned at sea in 1893 between Naples and Gibraltar from the RMS Ophir, second son John died the following year aged 23 in Paris of typhoid.
