GROSVENOR, Sir Richard, 4th Bt. (1689-1732), of Eaton Hall, Cheshire.

The Grosvenors of Eaton, near Chester, were a Cheshire family of great antiquity and substantial fortune, derived mainly from Welsh lead mines. In 1676 Sir Thomas Grosvenor, 3rd Bt., married the heiress to London estates covering a large part of modern Mayfair, Belgravia, and Pimlico, which increased the Grosvenor income from about £4,500 to £22,000 p.a. in 1742. He died in 1700, leaving three minor sons, Richard, Thomas and Robert, and a daughter Anne (m. William Leveson Gower), who all grew up under the care of Francis Cholmondeley, M.P., uncle of Charles Cholmondeley of Vale Royal, their mother having become mentally deranged.C. T. Gatty, Mary Davies and the Manor of Ebury, ii. 185, 197 et passim; AEM & D Angl. 82, ff. 49-57. All three sons were returned as Tories on the family interest for Chester, voting consistently against the Government.

Grosvenor was present in September 1715 at a meeting of the Jacobite Cheshire Club, which decided against taking part in the rebellion.Ormerod, Cheshire, i. 557. His name was included in a list of Jacobite leaders sent to the Pretender in 1721, and in 1730 he was in correspondence with the Stuart court at Rome through the Duchess of Buckingham.Stuart mss 65/16; R. Smith to J. Edgar, 9 Feb. 1730, ibid. 142/146. He was responsible for the development of the Grosvenor estate in London. On 12 July 1725 the Daily Post, a London newspaper, reported:

The several new streets designed in Grosvenor Buildings in the Parish of St. George, Hanover Square, and lying between New Bond Street and Hyde Park were last week particularly named; upon which occasion Sir Richard Grosvenor, Bart, gave a very splendid entertainment to his tenants and others concerned with those buildings ... In the centre of those new buildings there is now making a new square called Grosvenor Square [with gardens designed by William Kent], which for its largeness and beauty will far exceed any yet made in or about London.Quoted in N & Q. (ser. II), iv, 327, 414-15.

He died 12 July 1732.