Joseph Strutt

Who was Joseph Strutt?

Joseph Holden Strutt, was a British soldier and long-standing Member of Parliament.

Strutt was the member of a family that had made their fortune from its milling business in Maldon and Chelmsford in Essex and which had acquired the estate of Terling Place in Terling, Essex. He served in the Army and achieved the rank of Colonel, and also sat as Member of Parliament for Okehampton from 1790 to 1826 and for Maldon from 1826 to 1830.

He married Lady Charlotte FitzGerald, daughter of James FitzGerald, 1st Duke of Leinster, and Lady Emily Lennox, in Toulouse on 23 February 1789. Throughout his life Strutt refused all honours offered to him. However, when he was offered a peerage in 1821 for his services in the Army and Parliament he proposed that the honour be given to his wife Charlotte, who was elevated to the peerage in her own right as Baroness Rayleigh. Lady Rayleigh died in 1836. Strutt survived her by nine years and died in Bath in February 1845, aged 86. His grandson John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, became a noted mathematician and physicist and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904.