1808, and general in 1819. On the Prince of Wales's birthday (9 Nov.) 1846 Grosvenor and Sir George Nugent, the two senior generals in the army, and the Marquis of Anglesey, their junior, were created field-marshals.
Grosvenor represented Chester in the whig interest in eight successive parliaments. He was first returned in 1795, on the death of his father, who had represented the city since 1755, and he vacated the seat in 1825 in favour of the Hon. (afterwards Lord) Robert Grosvenor. Grosvenor was returned for Stockbridge at the same election, and retired from parliamentary life at the general election of 1830. He was for many years a staunch and respected supporter of the turf. Grosvenor married first, in 1797, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Gilbert Heathcote, bart.; secondly, in 1831, Anne, youngest daughter of George Wilbraham of Delamere House, sometime M.P. for Cheshire. Grosvenor died at Mount Ararat, near Richmond, Surrey, on 20 Jan. 1851.
[Foster's Peerage under ‘Westminster;’ Hamilton's Hist. Grenadier Guards, vol. iii.; G. A. Raikes's Roll of Officers 1st York and Lancaster Regiment (late 65th foot); Gent. Mag. 1851, pt. i. 313.]
GROTE, ARTHUR (1814–1886), a younger brother of the historian, George Grote [q. v.], was born at Beckenham 29 Nov. 1814. He passed from Haileybury into the Bengal civil service in 1834, and, rising through the lower grades, held important offices in the revenue department from 1853 till he retired in 1868. He took an active part in the work of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (president from 1859 to 1862, and again in 1865), and later in that of the Royal Asiatic Society. He was a fellow of the Linnean and Zoological Societies, and was an occasional contributor to their 'Transactions.' He died in London on 4 Dec, 1886.
[Family information; personal knowledge.]
GROTE, GEORGE, D.C.L.,LL,D. (1794–1871), historian of Greece, born at Clay Hill, near Beckenham in Kent, on 17 Nov. 1794, was the eldest of eleven children (ten sons and one daughter) of George Grote and Selina Mary Peckwell. His father (b. 1762) was eldest of the nine children (by second wife, Mary Anne Culverden) of Andreas Grote (1710-1788), who came over from Bremen to London towards the middle of the century, and who, after prospering as a general merchant, joined with George Prescott in 1766 to found the banking-house in Threadneedle Street known at first as Grote, Prescott, & Co., later by other titles, which included the name of Grote till 1879. Through his maternal grandmother, named Blosset, Grote was connected with more than one family of Huguenot refugees. His maternal grandfather, the Rev. Dr. Henry Peckwell, rector of Bloxhamcum-Digby in Lincolnshire, but serving a Countess of Huntingdon's chapel in Westminster, was an eminent preacher; struck down in the prime of life (1787) by bloodpoisoning incurred in the post-mortem examination of a young woman whom he had tended medically as well as spiritually, in connection with a charity called 'The Sick Man's Friend,' of his own founding (Gent. Mag. 1787, ii. 384; and Memorial Sermons). Selina Peckwell, thus left fatherless (with one brother, Henry, who later took the maternal name Blosset and became chief justice of Bengal), was of uncommon beauty, and when she married the elder George Grote in 1793 was noted for her gaiety. Afterwards she took a serious turn and sought to bring up her children with great strictness; not helped in this by her husband, who was indifferent in the matter of religion.
After getting his first instruction, including the rudiments of Latin, from his mother, Grote was sent to school at Sevenoaks, under a Mr. Whitehead, when only five and a half. About the age of ten he passed to the Charterhouse, under Dr. Raine, and remained there for six years. At the Charterhouse began his lifelong intimacy with George Waddington (afterwards dean of Durham), whose 'History of the Reformation' he was induced to revise before publication in 1841. Another schoolfellow, who turned like himself to Greek history, Connop Thirlwall, was also an attached friend in later life; but, Grote being elder by some three years, they were not thrown together as boys. The school-work was wholly classical, except for an English theme; mathematics not being introduced till some time after Grote had left (private letter from Thirlwall to Professor Bain, 1872). It sufficed, however, to beget a genuine love of learning, which survived the plunge into business-life at the bank imposed on him by his father at the age of sixteen. Living for the next, ten years under his father's roof, in Threadneedle Street or at Beckenham (with daily rides on horseback to and from the bank), he pursued classical reading, took up German, extended his view to political economy (from 1812), and gave also not a little time to the violoncello. Friendship with two young men of his own age, Charles Hay Cameron [q. v.] and George W. Norman, influenced his mental development; Cameron helping to turn him to the study of philosophy. He was the more thrown upon friends because his father had
