A cousin of George Canning, he served as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister-Plenipotentiary to the United States of America between 1820 and 1824 and held his first appointment as Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire between 1825 and 1828.

[4] In 1807 Canning was given a minor role in the Foreign Office by his cousin (as deputy to Col. Norton Powlett, Clerk of the Signet), and was sent with Anthony Merry on a mission to Denmark later that year.

After the negotiation of Swiss neutrality in 1815, Canning's role there became dull to him, but he stayed until 1819, when he was recalled and sent to Washington as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister-Plenipotentiary to the United States.

The initiative of his cousin George, this time as Foreign Secretary, for a joint Anglo-American guarantee of Latin American independence, led to the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine.

Canning returned to London in 1823, and the next year was sent on a mission to Russia, where he negotiated a treaty on the border between Russian and British North America, but failed to come to any agreement regarding the Greek Revolt.

In 1828 he and the other ambassadors participated in the Conference of Poros, which recommended to their respective governments the establishment of a separate Greek state, including the islands of Crete, Samos, and Euboea.

In Constantinople for the last time, Stratford came in the midst of a crisis caused by the dispute between Napoleon III and Nicholas I over the protection of the holy places.

It appears that he was consistently urging the Turks to reject compromises arguing that any Russian treaty, or facsimile thereof, would be to subject the Ottoman Empire to protectorate status under Tsar Nicholas I.

For the next twenty-two years Lord Stratford de Redcliffe lived in retirement, pursuing scholarly activities and deeply bored by his absence from public life.

Winston Churchill said he had "a wider knowledge of Turkey than any other Englishmen of his day," Alfred, Lord Tennyson, said he was "the voice of England in the East."

"[11] In 1879, by then an invalid aged over ninety, Stratford de Redcliffe was painted by Hubert Herkomer for King's College, Cambridge.

Herkomer painted him in a black coat, wearing his Orders, and later recalled that he had found Stratford de Redcliffe "still vigorous in mind, dwelling chiefly on subjects of a poetic and philosophical nature."

On one occasion, the sun had caught a cloth shoe on a gouty foot, and Stratford de Redcliff had commented that it was "kind of old Phoebus to shine on an old boot.