GROSVENOR, Richard, Earl Grosvenor I (1795-1869), of Eaton Hall, Cheshire

Remembered by the Whig diarist Creevey as ‘an agreeable playfellow’, Grosvenor was heir to the vast estates of the marquesses of Westminster, then as now one of Britain’s wealthiest families.The Creevey Papers, ed. H. Maxwell (1912), 602. After a dozen years as MP for the city of Chester, which lay a few miles north of the family’s extravagantly refurbished family seat at Eaton Hall, Grosvenor had transferred to the county in 1830. An independently-minded Whig, who had helped found but then seceded from the Cheshire Whig Club, Grosvenor had given general support to the Grey ministry’s reform bill in the unreformed Commons, while remaining aloof from firm party attachment.HP Commons, 1820-32, v. 441-45. As one local commentator had observed, ‘he is neither Whig nor Tory; reformer nor anti-reformer’.Chester Courant, 27 July 1830.

At the 1832 general election Grosvenor opted to stand for the newly-created division of Cheshire South, where Eaton, which so impressed the young princess Victoria during a visit there in October 1832, was located.Queen Victoria’s Journals, 15-19 Oct. 1832: http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org. After a ‘desperate’ contest with the Conservatives, who ‘clubbed their purses’ and secured central funding for their candidate, he was narrowly elected in second place behind the ‘popular’ Whig George Wilbraham, from whom he had become estranged after quarrelling over local matters.Morning Chronicle, 19, 22 Dec. 1832; Manchester Times, 22 Dec. 1832. Recording the rigours of the campaign, his wife noted how he often had ‘no time to eat any dinner’ and ‘lost ½ a stone in the last fortnight’.G. Huxley, Lady Elizabeth and the Grosvenors. Life in a Whig family, 1822-1839 (1965), 103-4.

In his final stint in the Commons, Grosvenor continued to give the Whigs general support in the lobbies, through he remained opposed to Jewish emancipation, against which he voted on at least one occasion, 22 May 1833. He served on the Linlithgow election committee, 30 Apr., and brought up its report confirming the result, 6 May 1833. He is only known to have spoken three times. In a speech that was ‘inaudible in the gallery’ to most of the reporters, 10 Mar. 1834, he defended the renumeration of the yeomanry corps, saying that they could not be expected to ‘defray all expenses from their own pockets’, and raised the issue of whether it was ‘constitutional to allow bodies to arm themselves’ without pay.Morning Chronicle, 11 Mar. 1834. On 30 Apr. he sympathised with those pressing for better observance of the Sabbath, citing his presentation of petitions on the issue, but thought the legislation being proposed impractical.Morning Post, 1 May 1834. He also briefly endorsed the beer bill, 14 May 1834.Morning Chronicle, 15 May 1834.

In June 1834 dissatisfaction with Grosvenor and his colleague was reported in the local press, after they declined to contribute to the Chester races.North Wales Chronicle, 3 June 1834. Rather than face the ‘inconveniences’ of another contest with Cheshire’s Conservatives at the end of that year, Grosvenor, who had recently assumed management of his father’s newly acquired Dorset estates and moved to Motcombe House, ‘abandoned politics’ and retired.The Times, 14 Jan. 1835; VCH Cheshire, ii. 153; G. Huxley, Victorian Duke. The Life of Hugh Lupus Grosvenor First Duke of Westminster (1967), 6. According to his wife, he had become ‘heartily tired of the fatigue and work of the House of Commons’ and found the ‘idea of fighting another contest so soon after the last ... very disagreeable’. This did not stop him attempting to bring forward a replacement, however, much to the annoyance of his colleague Wilbraham.Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 107-8. He was later listed by the Tory Morning Post as one of the ‘radical members’ who had withdrawn owing to ‘the reaction’.Morning Post, 3 Jan. 1835. He is not known to have sought re-election elsewhere and by June 1835 had decamped to the Continent for a fourteen month tour of Germany and Italy. Following his return in 1837, he and his wife re-entered London society, where they became closely connected with the new queen.Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 147-60, 164.

Grosvenor is chiefly remembered today for his acts of munificence and exceptionally shrewd custodianship of his family’s London property portfolio, to which he continually added, especially after his succession as 2nd marquess of Westminster in 1845.‘Grosvenor, Richard’, Oxford DNB. The family’s patronage of the turf declined under his stewardship, however, since to his ‘frugal mind racing was a hobby that did not justify its cost’. A parsimonious parent, who at home ‘carried thrift to the point of miserliness’, it was later said that he ‘lived for the pleasure of getting money which he had not the heart to enjoy’.Huxley, Victorian Duke, 71-2, 114.

As marquess of Westminster, he rarely spoke in the Lords but remained active on behalf of his former constituents, for instance backing the campaign of Cheshire’s salt producers against the salt monopoly of the East India Company in the 1850s.Hansard, 27 June 1853, vol. 128, cc. 779-80. He also clocked up 23 years as Cheshire’s lord lieutenant. A close friend of the royal family and the dukes of Cambridge and Gloucester, he served briefly in the royal household during Russell’s first ministry, but in 1853 passed up an offer of the lord stewardship from the premier Lord Aberdeen, with the spectacular excuse that he was ‘much engaged in different ways at home’.Add. 43251, ff. 283-4. Around this time he had started to oversee the construction of a new mansion at Fonthill Giffard, Wiltshire, where he eventually settled in 1859.The Times, 1 Nov. 1869; Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 91.

A martyr to gout, Grosvenor died at Fonthill in October 1869 from a malignant carbuncle.Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 167. He was succeeded in the marquessate by his eldest surviving son Hugh Lupus Grosvenor (1825-99), Liberal Member for Chester, 1847-69, who in 1874 became the 1st duke of Westminster. Hugh’s inheritance included personal estate worth £750,000 and entailed estates in Cheshire, Flintshire and London valued at £4,000,000, making him England’s ‘wealthiest man’.The Times, 22 Nov., 24 Dec. 1869, 1, 4 Jan. 1870.