Smythe was born in Stockholm, Sweden, the son of Percy Smythe, 6th Viscount Strangford, by Ellen Burke, daughter of Sir Thomas Burke, Bt.
Baillie married firstly the Honourable Philippa Eliza Sydney Smythe, daughter of Percy Smythe, 6th Viscount Strangford, in 1840.
He was born in St Petersburg, Russia, the son of the 6th Viscount Strangford, the British Ambassador.
Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson | Viscount | Percy Bysshe Shelley | Vickers Viscount | Bernard Montgomery, 1st Viscount Montgomery of Alamein | 6th United States Congress | William Howe, 5th Viscount Howe | Percy Grainger | Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester | viscount | South Carolina's 6th congressional district | Garnet Wolseley, 1st Viscount Wolseley | Charles Lyttelton, 10th Viscount Cobham | William Slim, 1st Viscount Slim | Percy Sledge | Percy Greenbank | Michigan's 6th congressional district | Edmund Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenby | William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne | Minnesota's 6th congressional district | Hugh Percy, 2nd Duke of Northumberland | Hugh Percy, 1st Duke of Northumberland | Charles H. Percy | Percy | Julian Byng, 1st Viscount Byng of Vimy | Alan Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke | William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor | James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce | Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke | Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston |
and translated the Rimas of Luís de Camões, and in 1825 was created Baron Penshurst, of Penshurst in the County of Kent, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, enabling him to sit in the House of Lords.
During all his earlier years Percy Smythe was nearly blind, in consequence, it was believed, of his mother having suffered very great hardships on a journey up the Baltic Sea in wintry weather shortly before his birth.
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At length, however, he returned to England and wrote a good deal, sometimes in the Saturday Review, sometimes in the Quarterly Review, and much in the Pall Mall Gazette.
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While at Constantinople, where he served under Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, Smythe gained a mastery not only of Turkish and its dialects, but of almost every form of modern Greek, from the language of the literati of Athens to the least Hellenized Romaic.