Styche stands proud in the rolling north Shropshire dairy lands, a great cream classical block silhouetted against the woodlands when seen from the Market Drayton to Newcastle road. It is best-known as the birthplace of Robert Clive (1726–1774) – Clive of India – the man whose remarkable career enforced the British position in India, changing the destiny of both countries. Its place in history has not always supported its claims to aesthetic beauty and, writing in the early twentieth century, Fletcher Moss thought it: ‘ugly enough to frighten anyone. It is like one of our Lancashire cotton mills transformed into a house and whitewashed’.

Fletcher Moss, whose true interest was in the vernacular, would have written more appreciatively of the house’s predecessor – the actual Clive of India birthplace – which was a gabled timber-framed building. An old print shows the earlier house as a two-storeyed building, with attics, that appears to have been developed on a U-plan. To left and right were gabled timbered-framed ranges which embraced a recessed range with twin timber-framed gables. This inner range appeared to have been rendered on its lower floors and had a door off-set to the right.

The Clives were originally a Cheshire family, seated at Huxley near Tarporley. They came into Styche when James Clive married the heiress of the estate, Katherine Styche in the late fifteenth century. Their great-greatgrandson, Sir George Clive (d. 1590), divided the Huxley and Styche estates, with the former passing to his eldest son whilst Styche was inherited by his second son, Ambrose Clive. Ambrose’s son, Robert, was a Parliamentarian in the Civil Wars, acting as a Sequestrator in 1644, and serving as MP in the Long Parliament (1640–1660). He served as High Sheriff of Shropshire in 1674 and was married to Mary the daughter of Sir E. Abyn.