MILLS, Robert William (1777-1851), of Willington, co. Dur.

Mills’s ancestors included members of the Forster family, aldermen of Durham in the eighteenth century. His father was at one time in business in that city as a wine merchant, in partnership with one of his Forster kinsmen, and by 1787 he was senior partner in the Durham banking house of Mills, Hopper and Company, which ceased trading in 1802; by then he had acquired some land and a house at Willington in the parish of Brancepeth, near Bishop Auckland. H.C. Surtees, Hist. Willington and Crook, 5, 10, 12; M. Phillips, Hist. Banking in Northumb. 45, 52-53, 57, 64, 69, 307-10, 354; Gent. Mag. (1807), ii. 1089. Mills pursued an uneventful army career, becoming a brigade major on the staff of the eastern district in 1809 and 1810. On his father’s death in 1807 he received £500, charged on a freehold farm at High Close, Willington, in addition to £1,500 already advanced to him from a legacy by his mother’s half-sister Isabella (Forster) Widdrington of Hawksly. IR26/327/183. The personalty was sworn under £100. At the general election of 1830, when he was described as the ‘steward’ of William Russell*, lord of the manor of Brancepeth, he was returned for Bletchingley on the latter’s interest. However, this was said to be ‘merely ... a temporary arrangement’, until Russell could find an ‘efficient’ nominee from among his Whig friends. Brighton Guardian, 4 Aug.; Lincs. AO, Tennyson D’Eyncourt mss 2 Td’E H89/8, C. to G. Tennyson, 9 Aug.; Brougham mss, Durham to Brougham, 7 Sept. 1830.

The duke of Wellington’s ministry listed Mills as one of their ‘foes’, and he duly voted against them in the crucial civil list division, 15 Nov. 1830. He is not known to have spoken in debate, and he vacated early in 1831 to accommodate Sir William Horne, the Grey ministry’s solicitor-general. NLS, Ellice mss, Ellice to Russell, 25 Dec., reply, 27 Dec. 1830. He lived in comparative obscurity at Willington until his death there in March 1851. He divided his modest estate between his children. IR26/1906/296.