STURT, Henry Charles (1795-1866), of Crichel House, Wimborne Minster, Dorset

Sturt’s quixotic, Foxite father, who matched his wife in the adultery which wrecked their marriage and exposed them to public humiliation in 1801, encumbered his son’s inheritance. After his death in 1812 his personalty was sworn under £10,000, and the following year his estate was in chancery. Fortunately for Sturt, who was granted letters of administration in 1832, his father’s executors were able to rectify matters.1 M. Soames, Profligate Duke, 51-52, 94-112; Gent. Mag. (1812), i. 596; (1866), i. 912; PROB 11/1535/347; IR26/561/475. In 1817 he sold Brownsea Island in Poole harbour, where he had spent much of his boyhood, for £8,000; but he came to enjoy ‘a splendid inheritance’ of land in Dorset, together with the valuable Pitfield estate at Hoxton in east London, which had been brought into the family by his paternal grandmother. He lent £1,000 to his cousin Charles Sturt (1795-1869), the Australian explorer, who had saved him from drowning off Weymouth in 1813.2 J. Hutchins, Dorset (1868), i. 648; Mrs. N.G. Sturt, Charles Sturt, 2, 14, 319-20; M. Langley, Sturt of the Murray, 30, 228, 237.

Sturt, whose politics were indeterminate, made no mark in the House as Member for Bridport, where the family interest was evidently in decline. He ‘relinquished his pretensions’ there at the dissolution in 1820, when a contest loomed.3 HP Commons, 1790-1820, v. 319; The Times, 22 Feb. 1820. Remaining neutral as sheriff, on 12 Feb. 1823 he told his friend Henry Bankes* that he was bound to win the vacant Dorset seat; however, at the by-election that month he declared the show of hands to be in favour of Bankes’s opponent, Edward Portman.4 Dorset RO, Bankes mss D/BKL; Western Flying Post, 24 Feb. 1823. At the request of his uncle the 6th earl of Shaftesbury, Sturt seconded Bankes at the Dorset by-election in February 1826, repeating the courtesy at the two following elections.5 Bankes mss, Sturt to Bankes, 2 Dec. 1825; Dorset Co. Chron. 23 Feb., 22 June 1826, 12 Aug. 1830. As had been rumoured during the previous two years, at the general election of 1826 he stood for Poole, competing for the second seat with the Whig William Ponsonby*, who was married to his first cousin Barbara, daughter of the 5th earl of Shaftesbury.6 Salisbury Jnl. 18 July 1824, 26 Sept. 1825, 5 June 1826. On the hustings Sturt declined to

enter into any detail upon politics because it is unnecessary ... I am generally inclined to ministerial measures because I imagine them to be the most correct, but I am not tied or pledged to any measure whatever. I am free and uncontrolled as the winds.

He was beaten into third place in the contest, which cost him at least £500, but did not carry out his threat to petition against Ponsonby’s return.7 Dorset Co. Chron. 1, 8, 15 June; The Times, 5, 12, 14 June 1826; Dorset RO, photocopy 348 (from Crichel House mss).

In April 1830, when he became a freeman of the borough for the purpose, Shaftesbury brought him in for Dorchester in the room of one of his sons.8 The Times, 15 Apr. 1830; C. H. Mayo, Municipal Recs. of Dorchester, 434. There was no opposition, but he was quizzed by one voter, who wished to know whether, if Shaftesbury subsequently required him to vacate his seat, ‘he would come forward as a candidate for the free votes of the electors’. Sturt refused to answer and spoke mainly in conventional platitudes, though he was reported to have declared that

wherever he saw a willingness to diminish undue patronage, wherever he saw a willingness to diminish the expenditure and burdens of the nation, and a desire to relieve it from its distress, he should deem it his duty to support such measures.9 Dorset Co. Chron. 8, 15 Apr. 1830.

There is no evidence that he acted up to these professions in the House, where he took his seat, 26 Apr. He divided with the Wellington administration against the Galway franchise bill, 25 May, and for the grant for South American missions, 7 June, when he voted against the abolition of the death penalty for forgery. He is not known to have spoken in debate and at the general election of 1830 he made way for Shaftesbury’s heir, Lord Ashley.10 Ibid. 22, 29 July 1830. He voted for the sitting Members Bankes and Portman, who were opposed by John Calcraft*, at the general election of 1831.11 Dorset Pollbook (1831), 63. The Hollands heard him spoken of as a possible reform candidate for the vacancy created by Calcraft’s suicide in September 1831, but it was Ponsonby who came forward.12 PRO NI, Anglesey mss D619/28A-B/80; Lady Holland to Son, 116. He signed the requisition to Bankes, who declined, and voted for the eventual anti-reform candidate Ashley, whose brother had feared that he was ‘inclined to Ponsonby’.13 Bankes mss, requisition, 15 Sept. 1831; Dorset Pollbook (Sept.-Oct. 1831), 92; Shaftesbury mss OF 50/32. Sturt was also touted as a replacement for Ponsonby at Poole, but it was reported that while ‘his friends appeared anxious to introduce him’ there, ‘unless he will pledge himself to the support of a full and complete reform, the electors will not think of him’.14 The Times, 23 Sept. 1831.

Sturt secured a county seat as a Conservative in 1835 and occupied it until 1846 when, with his cousin Ashley, he resigned it, being then a convert to free trade, but representing an overwhelmingly protectionist constituency. To the prime minister, Peel, who tried to make him sit tight, he administered a ‘gentle’ rebuke, by wondering whether repeal of the corn laws ‘might not have been managed without stranding others and myself’.15 Add. 40583, ff. 280, 282; Parker, Peel, iii. 335, 337; N. Gash, Sir Robert Peel, 571, 613. Sturt, who was ‘not generally prominent in the management of the county business’, preferring to pursue his interests in science and archaeology, was described as ‘a man of mark in his generation’, and credited with a ‘naturally acute and inquiring mind’, a large store of knowledge, and an ‘unusually genial temperament and great conversational powers’. He died in April 1866, being succeeded by his eldest son Henry Gerard (1825-1904), a noted sportsman, who was Conservative Member for Dorchester, 1847-56, and for Dorset from 1856 until 1876, when he was created Baron Alington.16 Gent. Mag. (1866), i. 912; Hutchins, iii. 127.