GROSVENOR, see Richard, Richard, Visct. Belgrave (1795-1869).

Belgrave was heir to the vast wealth of the Whig Lord Grosvenor, who in this period increased his influence by completing the lavish refurbishment of his family seat, Eaton Hall, near Chester, and deploying the proceeds from property developments on his Ebury estate in Belgravia, Mayfair and Pimlico, Middlesex, to purchase the Dorset estates of Gillingham and Motcombe (1822-8), Moor Park, Hertfordshire (1829), and controlling interests in the boroughs of Shaftesbury, Dorset (1820), and Stockbridge, Hampshire (1822-5). HP Commons, 1790-1820, iv. 114-15; Oxford DNB sub Robert Grosvenor, (1767-1845). In 1818 Grosvenor had brought him in for Chester, where his power to return both Members was strongly challenged. Despite criticism of his failure to vote against the repressive measures adopted after the Peterloo massacre, he topped the poll there in a violent contest in 1820. HP Commons, 1790-1820, iv. 115-16; Chester Chron. 11, 17 Mar. 1820; Report of Procs. at Chester Election (1820).

Belgrave’s attendance could be erratic, but his votes and occasional speeches echoed his father’s support for Queen Caroline, parliamentary reform and Catholic relief. In 1825 a radical publication noted that he had ‘attended frequently and voted in opposition to government’. Session of Parl. 1825, p. 450. He divided steadily with the Whig moderates on most major issues, including economy and retrenchment, and he was careful to attend to and represent constituency interests. At Chester, 9 Jan. 1821, he successfully proposed the resolutions for a loyal address and petition criticizing ministers’ conduct towards the queen, which he presented to the Commons on the 26th. He was present at the Cheshire county meeting that terminated in chaos when his father moved a similar address, 11 Jan., signed the ensuing protest, and steadily supported the parliamentary campaign on the queen’s behalf. The Times, 6, 10, 13, 15, 18, 27 Jan.; Chester Courant 9, 16, 30 Jan.; Chester Chron. 12, 19 Jan. 1820. Defending his father, he made what the radical Whig Member Grey Bennet considered ‘a very good speech’ on presenting the Cheshire protest, 9 Feb. In it he explained that the original requisition included freeholders and inhabitants, emphasized the danger of a corrupt meeting chaired by a corrupt sheriff acting ‘in excess of his powers’ and alleged that the affray had been deliberately engineered by members of the ministerialist Cholmondeley family. The Times, 10 Feb.; Chester Courant, 13 Feb. 1821; HLRO, Hist. Coll. 379, Grey Bennet diary, 17. He spoke similarly when Creevey moved unsuccessfully to censure the sheriff’s conduct, 20 Feb., but as the Grenvillite leader Charles Williams Wynn* observed, he deliberately went away without voting. The Times, 21 Feb. 1821; NLW, Coedymaen mss 629. He paired, 28 Feb. 1821, and divided for Catholic relief, 1 Mar., 21 Apr., 10 May, and, watched by his wife, he confirmed his support for it on presenting a hostile petition from Chester, 25 Apr. 1825. The Times, 19 Feb., 26 Apr. 1825; Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 15. He voted for parliamentary reform, 9 May 1821, Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 89. 20 Feb., 2 June 1823. He criticized the house tax, 5 Apr. 1821, 2 Mar. 1824, but condoned that on glasshouses, 5 Apr. 1821. The Times, 6 Apr. 1821. He seconded Burdett’s abortive amendment against the tobacco duties bill, which the Chester trade opposed, 18 June, and supported inquiry into the Llanllechid quarry leases on the 21st. Ibid. 19 June 1821. He was elected an alderman of Chester in October 1821 and became a founder member that month of the Cheshire Whig Club. Chester Chron. 12 Oct.; Chester Courant, 11 Sept., 2, 9, 16 Oct. 1821. He enjoyed hunting, ice hockey and skating on the frozen River Dee, and remained at Eaton at the start of the 1822 session. Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 24. In May his brother Robert joined him in the House as their father’s Member for Shaftesbury. Belgrave presented Chester’s petitions for the small debts bill, 17 Apr., and criminal law reform, 3 June, and voted for the latter, 4 June. His admission to Brooks’s, which Lord Grosvenor had recently joined, 8 May 1822, was proposed by Lords Holland and Lansdowne. Presenting the Chester tobacco manufacturers’ petition, 12 June, he endorsed their claims that tobacco consumption had fallen and smuggling increased as a result of higher duties, and alleged that this had cost the treasury £55,000 in lost revenue. The Times, 18 Apr., 13 June 1822. During the recess he visited Stockbridge, where Lord Grosvenor had recently purchased the Barham interest. Grosvenor mss 9/12/20. He and his brother Robert were talked of but not put forward as candidates for Dorset at the February 1823 by-election. Dorset RO D/BKL, Bankes mss, J. Bond to H. Bankes, 15 Feb. 1823.

Belgrave presented a Chester petition against the Insolvent Debtors Act, 17 Mar. 1823. The Times, 18 Mar. 1823. His eldest son Gilbert, a sickly infant who died aged nine months, was born on 10 Apr. Belgrave himself received a fortnight’s leave on account of ill health, 15 Apr., after undergoing surgery for haemorrhoids. Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 46. Touring the North in August, he and his wife stayed at Castle Howard, where Lord Morpeth† thought Lady Elizabeth ‘very pretty and good humoured and cheerful, he emulating a Jew in appearance, but good natured’. Bodl. Ms. Eng. lett. c. 439, f. 154; Add. 51579, Morpeth to Lady Holland, 14 Aug. [1823]. He presented Chester petitions against the hides and skins bill, the malt, beer and excise licence duties, and the proposed house tax reassessment, 26, 29 Mar., and for the abolition of colonial slavery, 5 Apr., 4 May 1824. The Times, 27, 30 Mar., 6 Apr., 5 May 1824. He endorsed the Shrewsbury brewers’ petition against increasing the duty on malt, 6 May. Ibid. 7 May 1824. He voted in condemnation of the indictment in Demerara of the Methodist missionary John Smith, 11 June, having presented petitions advocating it, 28 May 1824. Ibid. 29 May 1824. During the recess he was a guest of Lansdowne’s at Bowood, ‘where the company included the Hollands, Lord Ellenborough and Lord John Russell*’. Staying afterwards with his wife’s aunt, the duchess of Beaufort, at Badminton, he visited Longleat and Fonthill. Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 46-48. Belgrave could no longer mask his political differences with his colleagues in the Cheshire Whig Club, whose professed creed included triennial parliaments, and, rather than subscribe to it, he resigned before the annual dinner on 9 Oct., stating in an open letter:

I have always felt averse myself to attendance at political clubs and periodical meetings; but it is a great additional objection to my mind where, as in the present instance, it is attempted to form a precise standard of principles, particularly at a time when most political differences are rather differences of degree, than of principle. The Times, 13, 25 Oct.; Chester Courant, 15 Oct. 1824.

The duke of Bedford thought it the work of ‘a foolish conceited young man’ and ‘as shabby and dirty a letter as I ever read’. He wrote to Lord Holland, 31 Oct. 1824: ‘I see Lord Belgrave has ratted. It was always supposed he would, but I am afraid it will annoy Lord Grosvenor’. Add. 51663; 51668, Bedford to Lady Holland, 24, 26 Oct. [1824]. Holland saw ‘nothing that a general Whig has to apprehend in it’, but added, ‘how far a Cheshire Whig has to complain of his writing any, or he has to complain of the Cheshire Whigs for exacting tests and printing creeds unnecessarily, must depend on what has passed in that sapient district’. Lansdowne mss, Holland to Lansdowne, 29 Oct. 1824. Belgrave presented a tobacco growers’ petition for lower duties, 18 Feb. 1825. Commenting on the quarantine bill, 19 May, he expressed astonishment that Members could contend that plague was not contagious. He paired against the duke of Cumberland’s annuity bill, 6 June 1825. Reports in September that he had killed an Irishman in a duel were entirely unfounded. The Times, 13, 17, 19 Sept. 1825 The birth on 13 Oct. of his heir Hugh Lupus was marked by private and public celebrations, and Grosvenor increased his annual allowance by £1,000 in consequence. Chester Chron. 14, 21, 28 Oct. 1825. Before the dissolution in 1826, he criticized the government’s corn importation bill as ‘inexpedient’ and unlikely to afford relief to the manufacturers 8, 11 May. Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 83. After ‘a desperate struggle’, he and his absent brother Robert topped the poll at Chester at the general election in June at an estimated cost of £20,000, and he hinted at the chairing that his family were unlikely to contest both seats in future. Grosvenor mss 9/10/78; The Times, 12, 14, 23 June; NLW ms 10804 D, C. Williams Wynn to Buckingham, 24 June; Chester Chron. 30 June 1826; Procs. at Chester Election (1826).

Belgrave habitually suffered from bouts of earache and temporary deafness, and his absence for this reason from the division on Catholic relief, 6 Mar. 1827, encouraged speculation in the anti-Grosvenor Chester Courant that his indisposition was ‘affected’. This the partisan Chester Chronicle naturally denied. Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 24; Chester Courant, 13 Mar.; Chester Chron. 16 Mar. 1827. He confirmed that the Chester anti-Catholic petition that he presented on 7 May was ‘numerously and respectably signed’, adding that he regarded emancipation as the ‘most effectual means of diminishing the influence of the pope in this empire’; but he cautioned the new Canning ministry against proposing it prematurely. The Times, 8 May; Chester Chron. 11 May 1827. In October 1827 the Goderich ministry turned down Grosvenor’s application for a marquessate. Lansdowne mss, Dudley to Lansdowne, 11 Oct. 1827. Tierney, their master of the mint, included Belgrave in his November 1827 list of possible members of the finance committee, but he was not appointed to it and is not known to have resumed his parliamentary duties before April 1828. His views on the repeal of the Test Acts, which his father and Robert openly supported, are unknown. He presented Chester petitions against the friendly societies bill, 18 Apr., and the alehouse licensing bill, 7 May, which, as it compromised the authority of corporation magistrates in Cheshire, he spoke strongly against, 21 May, 19 June. He divided for Catholic relief, 12 May. He objected to routing the Irish mail through Liverpool, instead of Chester and Holyhead, 6 June. He voted against the Buckingham House expenditure, 23 June 1828, and presented Chester’s anti-slavery petition that day.

A riding accident, in which his wife was ‘violently concussed’, delayed Belgrave’s return to London for the 1829 session, and on 3 Feb. the Chester Courant reported that he had privately informed his supporters on the corporation that the Grosvenors ‘would no longer press for both seats in Chester’. Chester Courant, 3, 10, 17 Feb. 1829. He did not vote ‘with government’ for Catholic emancipation as the patronage secretary Planta had predicted, but he contributed £50 to Peel’s Oxford University election fund. Ibid. 3 Feb.; Chester Chron. 6 Feb. 1829; Keele Univ. Lib. Sneyd mss SC10/89. He endorsed the locally contentious Cheshire constabulary bill, 13 Apr., and, true to his promise to the Chester meeting of 29 Jan., Chester Chron. 6 Feb. 1829. he endorsed their petitions against the Dee Ferry road bill, 4 May 1829. He stayed away from the Cheshire county meeting, 25 Feb. 1830, when Grosvenor’s Member for Shaftesbury, Edward Davies Davenport, carried a controversial petition claiming that distress emanated from currency change. Chester Courant, 26 Jan.; The Times, 28 Jan.; Chester Chron. 29 Jan. 1830. He presented petitions from Chester for criminal law reform, 28 Apr., and against the poor law amendment bill, 6 May, and another that day from Covent Garden backing the proposed Waterloo Bridge road scheme, which was conducive to Lord Grosvenor’s Belgravia development. He divided fairly steadily with the revived Whig opposition in May and June, including for parliamentary reform, 28 May, and paired for abolishing capital punishment for forgery, 3 June. Conscious of the surprise which his opposition to the Jewish emancipation bill would cause, he spoke of his resentment at seeing the measure ‘brought forward under the banner of Roman Catholic emancipation’ and of his conviction that a race who ‘through the medium of religion choose to establish themselves as a separate people’ could not show ‘the same attachment to country’, 17 May. The Times, 18 May; Macclesfield Courier, 22 May 1830. Attending to local interests, on 18 May he presented and had the tobacco manufacturers’ petition referred to the select committee on tobacco cultivation, of which (since 14 May) he was a member, and he presented and endorsed Chester’s petition against renewal of the East India Company’s charter, 4 June. As requested by the corporation and county magistrates, he presented petitions, 6 May, and liaised closely with the lobbying committee appointed to oppose the administration of justice bill’s proposal to abolish Cheshire’s palatine courts. He advocated concessions and criticized the bill’s details, 27 May, 5 July, but confirmed his support for its principle, 2, 7 July, as promoted by his friend Lord Cawdor, and he was later credited (amid allegation of ratting) with securing concessions in the law on evictions. Cheshire and Chester Archives QCX/1/2. Before the 1830 dissolution he declined to join Hume’s Middlesex committee and announced his candidature for Cheshire, where Davies Davenport’s retirement had produced a vacancy, 30 June. Add. 36466, f. 170; Chester Chron. 2 July 1830. He set out for Eaton on 9 July after a preliminary canvass in London. Macclesfield Courier, 10 July 1830. No effort was spared on his behalf and his rivals, including Edward Davies Davenport, who was also nominated, desisted, making his return with the sitting Tory Wilbraham Egerton a formality. Nevertheless, his speeches failed to satisfy those who questioned his recent commitment to the palatine courts, free trade and reform, and the Chester Courant warned:

He is neither Whig nor Tory; reformer nor anti-reformer; free trader nor for restrictions; he has made up his mind on all great national questions, yet publishes his ignorance to the world. To sum up in a few words, his lordship appears anxious to be all things to all men ... If he fails to satisfy, the freeholders will oust him despite the might of his purse. Grosvenor mss 12/1-9; Macclesfield Courier, 24, 31 July, 7, 14 Aug.; Chester Courant, 27 July, 31 Aug.; Stockport Advertiser, 5, 12 Aug. 1830.

Notwithstanding Lord Grosvenor’s recent commitment to strengthening the ministry, they listed Belgrave among the ‘doubtful doubtfuls’. He presented anti-slavery petitions, 10 Nov., and warned against prematurely condemning the disgraced dean of Chester Phillpotts, 11 Nov., but he was absent when the government were brought down on the civil list, 15 Nov. 1830. He presented petitions from the Catholics of St. Nicholas, Galway for equality with Protestants, 19 Nov., and from Cheshire for the abolition of slavery and of the civil list, 22 Nov. He expressed his hostility to the truck system, 13 Dec. Addressing a party dinner in Chester, where Robert’s re-election following his appointment by Lord Grey as comptroller of the household was opposed, he spoke of the unrest generated by the ‘Swing’ riots and promised to do everything in his power to ensure that the constitution was upheld and property protected, 20 Dec. He commanded the Flintshire yeomanry during the disturbances in the North Wales coalfield that winter, but nothing came of his plans to raise an additional cavalry troop in Cheshire. Chester Chron. 3, 10, 17, 24 Dec. 1830; Chester Courant, 18 Jan. 1831. He moved the first reading of the Hyde, Werneth and Newton waterworks bill, 21 Feb., and secured leave to introduce the Grosvenor Chapel bill, 21 Mar. 1831. Later that day he moved the second reading of the second Liverpool-Chester railway bill and presented a petition against the first bill. He presented others favourable to the local courts bill, for amending the rules governing savings bank deposits and for the abolition of slavery, 22 Mar. As the sole diner at Grillion’s, 1 Mar., Belgrave wrote in their record book: ‘Unanimous for reform - in the club. No ballot’. P.M.G. Egerton, Annals of Grillion’s Club, 54. He divided for the second reading of the ministerial measure, 22 Mar., which his father had endorsed at the Cheshire meeting on the 17th, Chester Courant, 15, 22 Mar.; The Times, 21 Mar. 1831. presented a favourable petition, 15 Apr., and voted against Gascoyne’s wrecking amendment, 19 Apr. 1831. At the ensuing general election there was talk of making him a peer, but he came in unopposed for Cheshire where a contest was averted by the retirement of two anti-reformers. PRO NI, Anglesey mss, Holland to Anglesey, 29 Apr.; Grosvenor mss 12/1, 12, 13; The Times, 5, 29 Apr., 5, 14, 18 May; Macclesfield Courier, 30 Apr., 7, 14, 21 May 1831. Edward Stanley, the future Baron Stanley of Alderley, whom Grosvenor had returned for Hindon, commented:

He has come out of it well ... He has refused any coalition with the two others and has been abused by both; he has persisted in it from the first to the last that he came forward to represent the county, not as the champion of reform, and has not lent himself to the popular enthusiasm at all, but gone on, with his imperturbable smile, through all the excitement, cautious to an extreme of committing himself - provoking some by his coolness, yet forcing them to have a respect for his consistent firmness, and here in his speech he stated how it was his attachment to the constitution that induced him to vote for the measure that was to restore and preserve it, but gave in to none of the unqualified expectations, telling them in short, what they were not to expect from it; and there is a simplicity in all he does and says that carries conviction of his honesty with it. Mems. Edward and Catherine Stanley ed. E. and C. Stanley (1880), 284-5.

He divided for the second reading of the reintroduced reform bill, 6 July, against adjournment, 12 July, and to disfranchise Appleby, 19 July, and Downton, 21 July 1831. He paired for its details, 26 July-17 Aug. On 28 July he presented a petition from Congleton seeking separate enfranchisement. He cast a wayward vote for withholding the £10 borough vote from weekly tenants and lodgers, 25 Aug. He assumed the courtesy title Lord Grosvenor when his father became marquess of Westminster at the coronation, and returned from a short family holiday at Hoylake to vote for the bill’s passage, 21 Sept. The Times, 23 Sept. 1831; Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 52. He received three weeks’ leave on urgent private business, which included yeomanry duties, 27 Sept. Congratulating Sir Stephen Glynne* on his brother Henry Glynne’s return as his locum for Flint Boroughs, he observed:

So you have addressed the course I have thought wisest to follow and professed yourself a reformer. It may be the safest line for the country in its present state to pursue, but I own I have great fears for the result and have never hesitated to avow that I think the ministers have pressed their measure much too far. NLW, Glynne of Hawarden mss 5408.

At the Cheshire reform meeting which protested at the bill’s defeat in the Lords, 25 Oct., he reaffirmed his disapproval of ‘parts of the bill’ and thanked the freeholders for approving his conduct. Macclesfield Courier, 29 Oct. 1831. He, like Robert, was inconvenienced when Sir Watkin Williams Wynn terminated their pairing arrangement, and he failed to divide for the second reading of the revised reform bill, 17 Dec. 1831. He voted to proceed with it in committee, 20 Jan., where, differing from Robert, he divided against its provisions for Helston, 23 Feb., and Tower Hamlets, 28 Feb. 1832. He conceded that the Cheshire anti-reform declaration was ‘respectably signed’, 19 Mar. He voted for the bill’s third reading, 22 Mar., but was absent when the House divided on the address requesting the king to appoint only ministers who would carry it unimpaired, 10 May. He presented several Cheshire petitions calling for the withholding of supplies pending its passage, 4 June 1832. He divided with government in both divisions on the Dublin election controversy, 23 Aug. 1831, and on the Russian-Dutch loan, 16, 20 July 1832.

He presented petitions from Cheshire’s grand jury for repeal of the Beer Act, 14 July 1831, and favourable to the bill amending it, 4 June 1832, and brought up others that day against the general registry and factory regulation bills. When in February 1832 Edward Clarke, Samuel Adlam Bayntun’s* former valet, was charged at Bow Street with forging Lord Belgrave’s frank, his lawyers vainly maintained that Belgrave no longer existed and Grosvenor’s testimony was sought. The Times, 1, 4, 8 Feb. 1832. As a spokesman for the depressed Cheshire silk trade, Grosvenor sought the establishment of a select committee to consider and ‘devise some better protection against foreign competition’, 17 Feb., and refused to desist from doing so because of disagreements between the Spitalfields, Macclesfield and Coventry trades, 21 Feb. Introducing his motion, 1 Mar., he spoke of the distress caused by the 1824 and 1826 regulations, the poor rate fluctuations and the decline from 10,229 to 3,622 in the number of employed silk workers, which induced him to advocate protection notwithstanding his prior commitment to free trade. A committee was conceded, but the balance between free traders and protectionists and the likely inclusion of the wealthy merchant and political economist James Morrison, to which Grosvenor objected, proved divisive. The impasse was resolved after ministerial intervention, but Grosvenor failed to prevent Morrison being added to the committee, 5 Mar. Before casting a wayward vote for inquiry into smuggling in the glove trade, 3 Apr., he said that he felt bound to do so because of the close analogy with silk, and, making light of initial ‘irritations’, he praised its members’ work. Differing from its presenter, Wilbraham, he alleged that the county petition against the Cheshire Constabulary Act was the work of Edward Davies Davenport alone and that the Act was popular with the magistracy, 10 July. He presented a petition from the overseers of Stockport against the vagrants removal bill, 13 July 1832.

Grosvenor took charge of arrangements at Eaton during Princess Victoria’s visit in October 1832. Through a late coalition with Wilbraham, he came in for the new constituency of Cheshire South as a Liberal after a severe contest in December. Huxley, Lady Elizabeth, 82-109. He retired rather than risk defeat in 1834 and did not stand for Parliament again. The Times, 14 Jan. 1835; VCH Cheshire, ii. 153. He embarked on a lengthy continental tour with his family and subsequently settled at Motcombe House, near Shaftesbury, where he controlled his father’s business affairs. After succeeding as 2nd marquess in 1845, he purchased and made Fonthill his principal residence. He died there of a malignant carbuncle in October 1869. The Times, 20, 26 Feb., 14, 19 May 1845, 2 Nov. 1869; Add. 40560, ff. 146-52. Famed for his enormous wealth, the excellent care he took of it, and his patronage of the arts, charities and the Turf, he was also remembered as an advocate of corn law repeal and promoter of legislation for juvenile offenders and as lord steward of the household and a privy councillor during Lord John Russell’s administration, for which he was rewarded with the garter in 1857. The Times, 21 Feb. 1846, 2 Nov. 1869, 25 Feb. 1870; Add. 43251, f. 283; Oxford DNB. He was succeeded in the marquessate, to entailed estates in Cheshire, Flintshire and London valued at £4,000,000, and his £750,000 personal fortune by his eldest surviving son Hugh Lupus Grosvenor (1825-99), Liberal Member for Chester, 1847-69, and from 1874 1st duke of Westminster. The Times, 22 Nov., 24 Dec. 1869, 1, 4 Jan. 1870.