He was born on 21 January 1806, the eldest son of Henry de Grey Warter (1770–1853) of Cruck Meole, Shropshire, and his wife Emma Sarah Moore (died 1863), daughter of William Wood of Marche Hall and Hanwood, Shropshire; the naturalist John Clavering Wood was his uncle.
He travelled in Norway and Sweden, knew scholars including Rasmus Rask, and used the royal library of Denmark, becoming familiar with Nordic and German literature of all sorts.
In 1834, just before his marriage, he was appointed by the archbishop of Canterbury to the vicarage of West Tarring and Durrington, Sussex, a peculiar of the archbishopric, with the chapelries of Heene and Patching.
He was an old-fashioned churchman of the high and dry school, constantly at odds with the ecclesiastical commissioners.
[1] A window under the tower of West Tarring church was erected by his wife Edith as a memorial to her father, Robert Southey.
of Southey's long novel The Doctor and an edition in one volume of the whole work (London, 1848); A Love Story: History of the Courtship and Marriage of Dr. Dove, a fragment of it, was published by him in 1853, in the Traveller's Library.
[1] Edith Warter began in 1824 a collection of Wise Saws and Modern Instances: Pithy Sentences in many Languages.
He was able to enter Queen's College, but it was dominated by students from the north of England, whom Warter considered "sadly unpolished".
[7] The physician John Southey Warter (1840–1866) was their second son; he was one of those who attempted to rationalise the taking of a case history.
[9] His elder brother, Henry de Grey Warter (born 1837), was a Royal Artillery officer.