STYLE, Sir Thomas Charles, 8th bt. (1797-1879), of Wateringbury Place, nr. Maidstone, Kent and Cloghan Lodge, Stranorlar, co. Donegal

Born into ‘one of the oldest and most respectable West Kent families’, Style, ‘a man of talent… possessing liberal but constitutional principles’, succeeded to the baronetcy in 1813 on the death in Spain from fever of his older brother, Sir Thomas Style, an ensign in the 1st Foot.1Morning Chronicle, 31 July 1837; Debrett’s baronetage (1839), 37. To avoid confusion with his brother, Style was usually referred to as Sir Charles Style. After his own undistinguished army career, in 1822 he married the daughter of Sir George Cayley, of Brompton near Scarborough. At around this date he took up residence on the county Donegal estates which he had inherited through his great-uncle, Lieutenant-General William Style. Comprising 16,000 acres, of which around 14,000 were wasteland, he found them ‘in a deplorable condition’, with illicit distillation rife, and endeavoured to improve them, building roads and bridges and encouraging tenants to cultivate wasteland.2Morning Chronicle, 31 July 1837; Belfast News-Letter, 29 Nov. 1842. He became actively involved in Donegal’s politics, proposing one of the candidates at the 1826 election, and finished in third place as a reform candidate at the 1831 contest.3HP Commons, 1820-32, iii. 722-3. In November 1832 he proposed the first resolution at a meeting held at Letterkenny to petition for a revised method of constituting grand juries and levying grand jury cess, which he described as ‘an enormous drain’ on Ireland.4Freeman’s Journal, 23 Nov. 1832. This meeting concluded with ‘three cheers, loud and long, for Sir Charles Style, who seems to be the great popular favourite in this county’.5Freeman’s Journal, 27 Nov. 1832.

Style was rumoured as a candidate for Donegal once more in 1835, but this came to nothing.6Morning Post, 18 Dec. 1834; The Standard, 25 Dec. 1834. Instead he was returned in 1837 as Liberal MP for Scarborough, a seat which his father-in-law, Sir George Cayley, had represented from 1832 until his defeat in 1835. Style had been an occasional presence in Scarborough’s public life since his marriage: in 1826 he deputised for Cayley at the laying of the first stone of the Scarborough cliff bridge.7York Herald, 2 Dec. 1826. In May 1835 the Scarborough Association for the Protection and Extension of Civil and Religious Liberty adopted him as a candidate for the next election.8Leeds Mercury, 9 May 1835. At the 1837 contest, when the Hull Packet accused him of having ‘thrown off his Whig garment, and put on the Radical garb’, he advocated franchise extension, although of more concern to many constituents was his attitude to the Scarborough harbour bill, for which he claimed he would have voted, despite his party’s opposition to it, but would have sought substantial amendments in committee.9Hull Packet, 2 June 1837, 7 July 1837. The Conservative incumbent topped the poll, but Style secured the second seat ahead of the other incumbent, Sir John Johnstone, a result ascribed in part to Johnstone’s ‘trimming’ as one of the ‘Derby dilly’.10Scarborough Chronicle, cited in Leeds Mercury, 29 July 1837; R. Stewart, The foundation of the Conservative party 1830-1867 (1978), 376. Style’s return, said to have cost him £1,000, coincided with his decision to return from Donegal to England, keeping Cloghan Lodge as his ‘occasional residence’, although his health was also reportedly a factor.11Daily News, 7 Feb. 1849; S. Lewis, Topographical dictionary of Ireland (1837), ii. 580; Belfast News-Letter, 29 Nov. 1842. He left his Irish estates in the hands of his agent, John Pitt Kennedy, who in 1838 married one of Style’s cousins.12Belfast News-Letter, 29 Nov. 1842; Marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval, The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal: The Mortimer-Percy Volume (1911), 524-5. Kennedy’s efforts on Style’s behalf, ‘locating the surplus population on the waste lands, and assisting the poor farmers to cultivate them’, were much praised.13R.M. Martin, Ireland before and after the union with Great Britain (3rd edn., 1848), 90. On Kennedy, see Dictionary of Irish Biography, v. 117.

At Westminster Style generally divided with the Liberals, rallying to ministers on the Canadian question, 7 Mar. 1838, and in the confidence votes, 31 Jan. 1840 and 4 June 1841. An active attender, he boasted to his constituents in December 1838 that since the previous January he had voted in 178 divisions, even more than ‘that most indefatigable member, Mr. Hume’.14Morning Chronicle, 1 Jan. 1839. In the 1841 session, Style voted in 60 out of 109 divisions: Leeds Mercury, 10 July 1841. His choice of Hume as a point of comparison reflected his political sympathies: the hostile Hull Packet condemned him as ‘a liberal-political-economist, one of the Hume school’, while the Morning Herald described him as ‘a Finsbury sort of Radical’.15Hull Packet, 2 June 1837; Morning Chronicle, 31 July 1837. He divided for the ballot, 15 Feb. 1838, later explaining to his constituents that although he was not sanguine about its results, some protection against intimidation must be offered.16Morning Chronicle, 1 Jan. 1839. He was in the minority for the equalisation of the county and borough franchise, 4 June 1839, but opposed the motion for going into committee on the Chartist petition, 12 July 1839. In 1837 and 1838 he attended and spoke at London meetings on the abolition of slave apprenticeships, sharing the platform with Daniel O’Connell on one occasion, and divided for their immediate cessation, 30 Mar. 1838.17Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 30 Nov. 1837; Hull Packet, 16 Mar. 1838; Leicester Chronicle, 7 Apr. 1838. Style also presented petitions in support of abolition: Liverpool Mercury, 25 May 1838. His antipathy to slavery undoubtedly explains why he diverged from his usual voting pattern to vote with Peel and Sandon in opposition to a reduction in the sugar duties, 18 May 1841. Having announced in 1838 that, although many constituents might disagree with him, he would support a fixed duty on corn, he divided for going into committee to consider the corn laws, 18 Mar. 1839 and 26 Mar. 1840.18Morning Chronicle, 1 Jan. 1839.

Although he represented an English constituency, it was largely Irish affairs which occupied Style’s spoken interventions, and which sometimes saw him at odds with ministers.19In addition to speaking on Irish questions, Style presented various petitions from Donegal on Irish concerns: Freeman’s Journal, 23 Mar. 1839, 18 Apr. 1839. Broadly supportive of the introduction of an Irish poor law, on which he made a ‘well remarked’ speech, 1 Dec. 1837, he believed that workhouses would provide a sufficient test that only the destitute received relief, but also declared that if it was intended to relieve all destitution, then Irish landed proprietors must be prepared to raise £2,000,000 a year.20The Times, 4 Dec. 1837. His speech was also praised by the Morning Chronicle, 2 Dec. 1837. During the debate on the second reading, 5 Feb. 1838, he argued that Irish landowners must provide either subsistence or employment for the poor, and, reflecting his own experiences in Donegal, suggested that they should ‘[apply] themselves to the better cultivation of their estates, and to the breaking up of waste lands’. He reluctantly supported the second reading, one of his main concerns being that if guardians had discretionary powers, then relief might be limited, despite the obvious suffering in Ireland. He also objected to the proposal that those occupying land worth £5 a year would have to pay one-half of the poor rate, and moved unsuccessfully for the threshold to be raised to £10, 19 Mar. 1838.

While he had quibbled with the details of the Irish poor law, Style was wholeheartedly opposed to the Irish tithes bill, on the grounds that ministers had repudiated the principle of appropriation of Irish church revenues, which he told his constituents was ‘one of the grossest abandonments of a public principle to be met with in the whole annals of political tergiversation’.21Morning Chronicle, 1 Jan. 1839. He was in the minority of 46 for the motion that appropriation should be included in the measure, but his attempt immediately thereafter to impede the bill’s progress to the committee stage failed to secure a seconder and was negatived without a division, 2 July 1838. He was in the minority of 30 against the third reading, 26 July 1838.22Liverpool Mercury, 6 July 1838. However, he rallied to defend the ministry’s conduct of Irish affairs the following year, urging support for ministers at a dinner of the York Liberal Association in January.23York Herald, 26 Jan. 1839. While his first attempt was curtailed due to the House being inquorate, 11 Mar. 1839, he staunchly rebutted attacks on the government the following month, declaring that Ireland was in a better state than it had ever been, and that the ‘enormity and crime’ which ‘lamentably’ existed were due not to the actions of any particular lord lieutenant, ‘but rather to the peculiar condition of society in that country’. He advocated non-sectarian education, which should have ‘the more truly Christian object of inculcating the feeling amongst them “to love one another”, 19 Apr. 1839. His defence of Lord Normanby’s actions had a local dimension, for Normanby was a former Scarborough MP, and still exercised a degree of influence in the constituency.24H.J. Hanham (ed.), Dod’s electoral facts 1832-1853 (1972), 277; N. Gash, Politics in the age of Peel (1953), 209.

Aside from Irish concerns, Style’s only other speech was to ‘cordially’ support the second reading of a Sabbath day observance bill, 21 Mar. 1838, and his only known committee service was on the Roxburghshire election petition.25PP 1837-38 (152-I), xii. 229. Style did not, however, entirely neglect Scarborough’s interests. In October 1837 he was among the local MPs who attended a meeting to establish the North Riding Liberal Association.26York Herald, 14 Oct. 1837. In 1838 he moved for a return of all tolls levied for the maintenance of piers and harbours, which included Scarborough.27PP 1837-38 (659), xlv. 345. He attended the 1838 and 1839 annual meetings of the General Shipowners’ Society, asserting on the former occasion that ‘the maritime interests of the country demanded protection’.28Morning Post, 23 May 1838, 17 Apr. 1839. Among the charities which he patronised were the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, the Merchant Seamen’s Orphan Asylum and Scarborough’s Northern Sea-Bathing Infirmary.29Morning Chronicle, 22 Apr. 1839; The Times, 23 Apr. 1839; York Herald, 15 Aug. 1840.

In November 1840 Style announced his intention to retire at the next dissolution, seemingly on health grounds, and in 1841 he duly stepped down.30The Standard, 14 Mar. 1840, 5 Dec. 1840. He apparently suffered a depressive episode, which led to him amicably separating from his wife for 19 years, during which time he lived at Lausanne, where they had first met, and where their only daughter Emma had been buried in 1834.31R. Dee, The man who discovered flight: George Cayley and the first airplane (2007), 150. Reconciled to his wife, Style from the 1860s resided at Bath, where he took an active interest in the volunteer movement, attending reviews and donating prizes for shooting.32Bristol Mercury, 13 Oct. 1860, 17 Oct. 1863. In February 1858 Style had donated £100 to the Inspecting Field Officer of the Yorkshire District as a bounty for local men enlisting in the army, an action which had the desired effect: Bradford Observer, 25 Feb. 1858. In 1867 he moved for a loyal address from Bath to the Queen following the Fenian outrages.33Morning Post, 1 Jan. 1868. He took a leading role at the 1868 election, serving on the Liberal election committee for East Somerset and chairing the election committee at Bath, where he proposed one of the Liberal candidates at the hustings.34Bristol Mercury, 11 July 1868; Royal Cornwall Gazette, 8 Oct. 1868; Morning Post, 17 Nov. 1868. He was again active in the three by-election contests which Bath experienced in 1873, and often chaired local Liberal meetings.35Bristol Mercury, 3 May 1873, 6 Dec. 1873; The Standard, 26 June 1873; Morning Post, 8 Oct. 1873. Style died at Bath in July 1879, and left personal estate of under £60,000. He bequeathed his wife £2,500 in government bonds, and a life interest in his Bath residence, 102, Sydney Place, with remainder to his cousin, the Rev. Charles Montague Style. He left small legacies to several Bath hospitals, and the rest of his estate was given in trust to his wife (d. 1881), and then passed to his cousin William Henry Marsham Style (older brother to Charles Montague), who succeeded as 9th baronet.36Pall Mall Gazette, 24 July 1879; Morning Post, 10 Oct. 1879; Nottinghamshire Guardian, 6 Jan. 1882. Style’s only daughter, Emma, born in Paris, had died in Lausanne in 1834, aged 5: York Herald, 3 Jan. 1829; Debrett’s baronetage (1839), 37.