MILLS, Charles Henry (1830-1898), of Lamorbey, Bexleyheath, Kent.

Mills came from ‘one of the most distinguished families in English banking’, belonging to the fourth generation of his family to be partners in Messrs. Glyn, Mills & Co. Ltd (from 1864, Messrs. Glyn, Mills, Currie & Co. Ltd.), one of England’s foremost private banks, which provided deposit, investment and merchant banking.1Y. Cassis, ‘Mills family’, Oxf. DNB [www.oxforddnb.com]. His grandfather, William Mills, and great-uncle, Charles Mills, were both directors of the East India Company and served as MPs in the pre-Reform era, William at St. Ives (1790-6) and Coventry (1805-12), and Charles at Warwick (1802-26).2HP Commons, 1790-1820, iv. 590-1, 593-4. Mills entered the bank in 1852, and thereafter took on various directorships, including the Marine Insurance Company.3Cassis, ‘Mills family’; London Gazette, 8 May 1860. In 1853, he married the eldest daughter of the third earl of Harewood, which, according to a family biography, reflected their ‘new social status and their increasing integration into the upper classes’.4Cassis, ‘Mills family’. The Lascelles family were, however, allegedly unhappy with the match due to the Mills’s City background.5R. Fulford, Glyn’s 1753-1953 (1953), 87. When Mills’s mother told his father that ‘she was afraid the Lascelles family would find the marriage a bitter pill to swallow’, his father replied ‘Then, my dear, we must gild it’.

Mills first sought election as Conservative candidate for Northallerton on the Harewood interest in 1859, losing by just two votes to the sitting Liberal MP, William Battie Wrightson. He stood again in 1865, when he stated with regard to church rates that ‘while on the one hand he had every desire to maintain the fabric, he was very much against receiving subscriptions unwillingly’. He was similarly equivocal on parliamentary reform, favouring extension of the suffrage to those suitably qualified, but regarding the franchise ‘as a privilege… not as a right’. If elected, he promised to be bound neither to Palmerston nor Disraeli.6Leeds Mercury, 13 July 1865. His opponents’ insinuations of corrupt practices were flatly denied by Mills at the hustings, and following his return he insisted that ‘we have had a majority by fair and honourable means’, a claim countered by the presentation of a petition against him, 14 Feb. 1866, which alleged bribery, treating and undue influence.7Leeds Mercury, 13 July 1865, 14 July 1865, 17 Feb. 1866. Mills was unseated, 30 Apr. 1866, after the committee found that two voters were offered a ‘valuable consideration’ by his agent, in the form of a remission or reduction of their rent, although Mills was personally absolved of any wrongdoing.8Hansard, 30 Apr. 1866, vol. 183, c.159; PP 1866 (223), xi. 199ff. At the ensuing by-election, his brother-in-law, Egremont Lascelles, was victorious.

Although Mills did not speak in Parliament during his short-lived tenure of the Northallerton seat, he voted in several divisions, including on the cattle diseases bill, 15 and 17 Feb. 1866, a subject of interest to his constituents. He opposed the second reading of the church rates abolition bill, 7 Mar. 1866, and supported Disraeli’s unsuccessful attempt to add an affirmation of the sovereign’s position as ‘the only Supreme Governor of this realm… no Foreign Prince, Prelate, State, or Potentate hath any jurisdiction or authority in any of the Courts within the same’, to the parliamentary oath, 15 Mar. 1866. His last known vote was against going into committee on the fellows of colleges declaration bill, 25 Apr. 1866. The committee on the Northallerton petition finished its deliberations at noon on 27 April, the same day as the crucial division on the Liberal ministry’s reform bill (when they were victorious by only five votes). With the reform debate still going on at midnight, the Speaker was anxiously consulted as to whether Mills was entitled to vote, and whether ‘in point of delicacy and right feeling’ he ought to. He ruled that Mills was eligible, as his unseating had yet to be reported to the House, but left it to the Conservatives to decide on the second point. The duke of Richmond resolved that Mills should abstain, which he duly did, and he was praised in the press for his ‘commendable taste’ in so doing.9J.E. Denison, Notes from my journal when speaker of the House of Commons (1900), 192-3; Glasgow Herald, 30 Apr. 1866.

Mills returned to Parliament in 1868 as Conservative MP for West Kent, where he sat until 1885, taking an interest in agricultural topics.10Fulford, Glyn’s, 218. His father had been created a baronet in 1868, and Mills succeeded to this title and to his father’s estates in 1872, also becoming a senior partner in the bank. Created Baron Hillingdon in 1886, he spoke even less in the Lords than he had done in the Commons. He added to the family properties – Camelford House, Park Lane, where he had been born, and Hillingdon Court, built in the 1850s by his father – with the acquisition of Wildernesse, Kent, in 1884, which augmented the 2,710 acres he owned in 1883.11VCH Middlesex, vi. 55-69; J. Bateman, The great landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (4th edn., 1883), 311; http://www.rlsb.org.uk/Page.aspx?page=AE53FA9B-5405-464E-AE08-57846F43C6BE. Wildernesse (later renamed Dorton Court) is now a school, as is Hillingdon Court (http://www.acs-england.co.uk/schools/hillingdon/index.htm), while Camelford House was demolished in 1913: F.H.W. Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: volume 40: The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2 (The Buildings) (1980), 264-289. Like his father, Mills was a keen art collector, and between them they amassed ‘the equal of the great collections of Leverhulme and Rothschild’, including furniture, porcelain, and paintings by Reynolds, Gainsborough and Rossetti.12The Times, 27 Nov. 2003. The collection is now largely dispersed; one of the paintings purchased by Mills, Reynolds’s Portrait of Miss Hickey, was sold by his descendants for £1.3 million in 2003 (Daily Telegraph, 1 Dec. 2003). Suffering from heart trouble later in his life, ‘one of the clerks [from the bank] always walked a few paces behind him to Cannon Street station in case he should be taken ill on the way’.13Fulford, Glyn’s, 219. He died suddenly in 1898 during a church service at Wilton, where he was visiting the earl of Pembroke.14Manchester Times, 8 Apr. 1898. His Times obituary recorded that ‘though not a man of striking brilliancy, his long experience and sound common sense gave him a good deal of influence in the banking world, and his unfailing courtesy left a pleasant impression on all who came into contact with it’.15The Times, 4 Apr. 1898. His estate was valued at £1,477,268 16s. 1d., the bulk of which went to his oldest son and successor in the barony, Charles William (1855-1919), who had replaced him as MP for West Kent from 1885-92.16Pall Mall Gazette, 11 June 1898. Two of Charles William’s sons also followed their grandfather into Parliament. Charles Thomas Mills (1887-1915) was MP for Uxbridge from January 1910 until his death on active service in the First World War; his brother, Arthur Robert Mills, followed him as Uxbridge’s MP, serving until 1918, and succeeding as third baron the following year.17The complete peerage (1926), vi. 524. The title became extinct with the death of the fifth baron in 1982.18http://www.leighrayment.com/peers/peersH3.htm. Glyn, Mills, Currie & Co. sold its capital to the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1939.19Cassis, ‘Mills family’.