Hyde was awarded an honorary degree by Queen's University Belfast in 1984. He lived at Westwell House, Tenterden, in Kent, in a house once inhabited by Horatio Nelson's daughter. Hyde was earlier a tenant of Lamb House in Rye, once home to his distant cousin, Henry James. He worked up to his death on 10 August 1989, just short of his eighty-second birthday. His third wife Robbie survived him. Many of his papers are in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI). Others were sold to the University of Texas at Austin.