Survived by his father, Maurice Towneley-O’Hagan, 3rd Baron O’Hagan, Anthony never inherited the family title, which passed on to Charles following Maurice’s death in 1961. The 4th Baron O’Hagan was just 16 at the time. He immediately became a member of the House of Lords, where he served until 1999, when he and over 600 other hereditary peers were excluded from the House.
After studying at Eton College, Charles matriculated at New College, Oxford, where he would graduate with a BA in 1961. Charles gave his maiden speech to the Lords while still studying at Oxford, using his time to offer an insider’s perspective on the students who were protesting at the time, many of whom he described as ‘taggers-on, anxious to be progressive and ready for free excitement.’ Six years after graduating, he married a Georgian princess, Tamara Imeretinsky, of the Bagrationi dynasty of Imereti, one of the oldest Christian ruling dynasties in the world. The pair divorced in 1984, but not before they welcomed their daughter, Nino Natalia O’Hagan Strachey, in 1968.
Speaking in 2022, Nino (an art historian and fellow of the Royal Historical Society) offered an insight into a childhood spent in the rarefied air of her gilded family, who moved to the Stracheys’ family seat, Sutton Court, in 1973. The 14th-century estate, once renovated by Bess of Hardwick, was an ‘absolutely fantastic place to grow up’, she told Avenue magazine, despite a somewhat dilapidated interior, described by MailOnline as ‘effectively being a ruin with a leaking bathroom and mushrooms growing out of books in the library.’ Charles sold the estate in 1987.