Strutt was Lieutenant Colonel of the western battalion of the Essex militia from 1783–96, Colonel of the South Essex militia in 1798, 1803-5 and 1809, and West Essex militia 1823–31; When the supplementary militia was reduced, Strutt offered William Pitt the Younger, and subsequently Henry Addington, his services in raising a regiment: the advent of peace rendered his offer superfluous.
Parliamentary career
Strutt returned from France to contest his father's seat in Maldon on the latter's retirement in 1790. A mostly silent but conscientious parliamentarian, Strutt made little mark in Parliament; but, he set great store by his and his father's services to government in Essex, where his father was ‘a constitutional pillar’ and where Strutt was active as a militia colonel. They were proudly insistent that Maldon was ‘a county, not a borough interest’ and, waiving pretensions to a county seat, resisted moves by government to influence Maldon elections. Like his father, he generally supported government, describing himself as a Tory in 1816; but he regarded himself as particularly attached to Pitt in politics. At the June 1826 general election Strutt was returned in absentia for Okehampton. Aged 71, he left Parliament at the dissolution in July 1830.
Peerage
Throughout his life Strutt refused all honours offered to him. However, when he was offered a British peerage in 1821 for his services in the Army and Parliament he proposed that the honour be given to his wife, Charlotte, in her own right as Baroness Rayleigh. After a peerage for his wife had been granted as one of the coronation creations in 1821, Strutt, returning thanks to Liverpool, described the honour as ‘requiting the long constitutional conduct in and out of Parliament of my... father and of my humble constant exertions within the sphere of a country gentleman’. However, Lady Rayleigh died in 1836 and Strutt survived her by nine years, which gave his son precedence of rank over him.
Death
In his declining years he was consoled and nursed by his unmarried daughter Emily Anne, for whose future comfort he bought in 1840 St. Catherine's Court, near Bath, where he mostly spent the last five years of his life. Strutt died at Bath in February 1845 aged 86, four weeks after being forced by a fire in his bedroom to take to the street in his nightshirt.
