[2] Orford was a Lieutenant in the Royal Navy, serving on HMS Blanche on the Australian station in the early 1870s, from where he visited New Zealand, New Guinea, Fiji, and other Pacific Islands.
He was part of the Earl of Rosslyn's Special Embassy to the wedding of King Alfonso XII of Spain and Mercedes of Orléans on 9 January 1878, returning 6 February that year.
[1][2] Orford married firstly, 17 May 1888, Louisa (d. 1909), daughter of D. C. Corbin, of New York, United States; they had a son, Horatio Corbin Walpole, who died in 1893 aged two years, and a daughter, the novelist Dorothy (1889–1959).
Thomas Henry Royal Oakes, rector of Thurgarton, Norfolk.
Their elder daughter, Gladys, died in 1919 aged less than a year; the second daughter, Anne (1919–2019)[4] was a horticulturist, and married firstly, in 1939, Colonel Joseph Eric Palmer (1903–1980), CBE, TD, with whom she had two sons; she married secondly, in 1990, the dendrologist Robert James Berry (1916–2018).