R. H. Gronow

Artist Info

R. H. GronowNeath, Wales, 1794 - 1865, Paris

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n87900174

Gronow, Rees Howell (1794–1865), writer, was the eldest son of William Gronow, a prosperous Welsh landowner of Court Herbert, Glamorgan, and his wife, Anne, only daughter of Rees Howell of Gwryd. He was born on 7 May 1794 and educated at Eton College when John Keate was headmaster and P. B. Shelley was a fellow pupil. On 24 December 1812 he received a commission as an ensign in the 1st foot guards, and after mounting guard at St James's Palace for a few months was sent with a detachment of his regiment to Spain. In 1813 he took part in the final encounters of the Peninsular War, and in the following year returned with his battalion to London. Here he became one of the dandies of the town, and was among the very few officers who were admitted to Almack's assembly rooms, where he witnessed the introduction of quadrilles and waltzes in place of the old reels and country dances.

In need of money to equip himself for further services abroad, Gronow obtained an advance of £200 from his agents, Cox and Greenwood; he went with this money to a gambling-house in St James's Square and won £600, with which he bought two horses at Tattersall's and other necessaries. Then, without troubling to obtain permission, he crossed the channel and, grudgingly allowed to remain with his regiment which was already engaged with the enemy when he arrived at Quatre Bras, he was able to witness the battle of Waterloo, and provided one of the best first-hand accounts of it that has survived. He entered Paris on 25 June 1815 and three days later was promoted lieutenant. He remained in the army for a further six years, obtaining no higher rank than captain in a regiment in which majorities and colonelcies were sold for extremely high sums. These, extravagant as he was, he could not afford. In June 1823 he became insolvent and was briefly imprisoned under the Insolvent Debtors Act. In 1830 his father died, and the next year—his finances consequently in a far more healthy condition—he was established in a house in Mayfair which had once belonged to Beau Brummell. He was now able to enter upon a political career. After unsuccessfully contesting Grimsby in 1831, he was returned for Stafford the following year by means of extensive bribery. In 1835, however, he was defeated by F. L. Holyoake Goodricke who distributed bribes on a scale described as ‘profligate’. Abandoning hope of a further political career, Gronow devoted the next thirty years to a life of idleness and fashionable pursuits in London and, later, in Paris, where he was present during the coup d'état of 1–2 December 1851.

Gronow's name is chiefly remembered in connection with the four volumes of his reminiscences. The first, entitled Reminiscences of Captain Gronow, formerly of the Grenadier Guards and member of parliament for Stafford, being anecdotes of the camp, the court, and the clubs, at the close of the last war with France, related by himself, was published in 1861. A second revised edition appeared the following year. In 1863 he published Recollections and Anecdotes, being a Second Series of Reminiscences by Captain R. H. Gronow, and in 1865, the year of his death, appeared Celebrities of London and Paris, being a Third Series of Reminiscences and Anecdotes. This was followed in 1866 by Captain Gronow's last recollections, being the fourth and final series of his reminiscences and anecdotes. In 1889 a new edition of the above volumes was published under the title The reminiscences and recollections of Captain Gronow with illustrations from contemporary sources by Joseph Grego. When Gronow relates his personal experiences, as in his account of the state of Paris in 1815, the condition of society in London in his own time, and the doings of the court of Napoleon III, his testimony is to be relied on, but his second-hand stories and anecdotes of persons whom he did not know, while almost unfailingly entertaining, are ben trovato rather than historically accurate.

Gronow was a handsome man, always faultlessly dressed and well liked in society. An engraving of a portrait by J. C. Armytage appears in the Reminiscences (1889). With the exception of one Captain Ross he was said to have been the best pistol-shot of his day, and in early life took part in several duels. He married first, in 1825, Antoinine Didier of the Paris Opera, with whom he had a daughter, Mathilde. His second wife was a Mlle de St Pol, with whom he had four more children, who were said to have been left by their impoverished father ‘wholly unprovided for’ following his death in Paris on 20 November 1865.

Christopher Hibbert

Sources

R. H. Gronow, The reminiscences of Captain Gronow, 4 vols. (1861–6) · Captain Gronow: his reminiscences of Regency and Victorian life, ed. C. Hibbert (1991), vii–xvii · A. H. Guernsey, ‘Last of the dandies’, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 25 (1862), 745–53 · GM, 4th ser., 1 (1866), 148 · H. de Villemessant, Mémoires d'un journaliste: souvenirs de jeunesse (Paris, 1867), chap. 9 · Walford, County families · DNB

Likenesses

J. C. Armytage, stipple (after P. Bossange), NPG [see illus.] · P. Bossange, miniature; Christies, 25 Nov 1980, lot 24 · G. Hayter, group portrait, oils (The House of Commons, 1833), NPG

Christopher Hibbert, ‘Gronow, Rees Howell (1794–1865)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/11654, accessed 18 Oct 2017]

Rees Howell Gronow (1794–1865): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/11654