Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle

“ Charles recommended Granvelle to his son as every way deserving of his confidence. Granvelle knew that the best recommendation—the only effectual one—must come from himself. He studied carefully the character of his new sovereign, and showed a wonderful flexibility in conforming to his humors. The ambitious minister proved himself no stranger to those arts by which great minds, as well as little ones, sometimes condescend to push their fortunes in a court.
Yet, in truth, Granvelle did not always do violence to his own inclinations in conforming to those of Philip. ”

“ Was it to be wondered at that many did not see the precipice towards which the bark which held their all was gliding under the same impulse?
No man has ever disputed Granvelle's talents. From friend and foe his intellect has received the full measure of applause which it could ever claim. No doubt his genius was of a rare and subtle kind. ”

“ When raised to the see of Arras, Granvelle was but twenty-five years old. It is rare that the mitre has descended on a man of a more ambitious spirit. Yet Granvelle was not averse to the good things of the world, nor altogether insensible to its pomps and vanities. He affected great state in his manner of living, and thus necessity, no less than taste, led him to covet the possession of wealth as well as of power. He obtained both; and his fortunes were rapidly advancing when, by the abdication of his royal master, the sceptre passed into the hands of Philip the Second. ”

“ He saw that without him the other nobles would be nothing; he was the guiding spirit of Egmont and Hoorne, neither of whom could have stood alone, and the first of whom, at least, would easily have been won by the Cardinal but for Orange.
"He is a dangerous man," said Granvelle with admiration, 133and loyally warned his master; then, with an unruffled spirit and a smile for all, set out on his journey to Burgundy. ”

“ Considering the natural bent of the king's disposition, there seems no reason to charge Granvelle, as was commonly done in the Low Countries, with having given a direction to his policy. It is, however, certain, that, on all great questions, the minister's judgment seems to have perfectly coincided with that of his master. "If your majesty mitigates the edicts," writes the cardinal, "affairs will become worse in Flanders than they are in France." [664] No change should be allowed in the council of state. ”

“ Granvelle was well used to such jests; the Netherlanders were famous for their pasquils, their pamphlets, their medals, and their rhetoric plays, and Granvelle had been the butt of all in turn; not even the terrors of the dreaded Inquisition itself could restrain the sharp and lively wits of the people from ridiculing their enemy. ”

“ SHE was the daughter of John Granville, first Earl of Bath, by Jane, daughter of Sir Peter Wyche. The Granvilles, or Grenvilles, as they were originally called, were a noble and heroic race; witness the exploits by sea of Sir Richard, immortalised in history and poetry, who lived in the time of Queen Elizabeth, and of the brave Sir Bevil, who perished in arms for King Charles I. at the battle of Lansdowne, he on whose death it was written—
‘Where shall the next famed Grenvil’s ashes stand? ”

“ Chapuys tried Granvelle again. "Every man of position here," he said, "is in despair at the Pope's inaction. If something is not done promptly there will be no hope for the ladies, or for religion either, which is going daily to destruction. Things are come to such a pass that at some places men even preach against the Sacrament. The Emperor is bound to interfere. What he has done in Africa he can do in England with far more ease and with incomparably more political advantage." [8]
Granvelle could but answer that Henry was a monster, and that God would undoubtedly punish him ”

“ As Granvelle is an important personage, as his character has been alternately the subject of much censure and of more applause, and as the epoch now described was the one in which the causes of the great convulsion were rapidly germinating, it is absolutely necessary that the reader should be placed in a position to study the main character, as painted by his own hand ”

“ Grenville died in 1658; of the last four years of his life Lord Lansdowne writes (with some exaggeration) : ‘He retired from all conversation with mankind, shut himself up from the world to prepare himself seriously for another, never so much as suffering his beard to be shaven from that moment to his dying day, which followed soon, his great heart not being able to hold out any longer. He lies buried in a church in Ghent, with this inscription only upon a plain stone, “Sir Richard Granville, the King's general in the West”’ (Lansdowne, Works, i. 560) . ”

“ From 1855 Lord Granville led the Liberals in the Upper House, both in office, and, after Palmerston’s resignation in 1858, in opposition. He went in 1856 as head of the British mission to the tsar’s coronation in Moscow. In June 1859 the queen, embarrassed by the rival ambitions of Palmerston and Russell, sent for him to form a ministry, but he was unable to do so, and Palmerston again became prime minister, with Lord John as foreign secretary and Granville as president of the council. ”

“ George Granville, afterwards Lord Lansdowne of Biddiford, in the county of Devon, was born in 1667. He was descended from the illustrious family of that name, seated for many ages in Devonshire and Cornwall, the founder of which was Richard de Granville, second son of Rollo, first Duke of Normandy, who accompanied William the Conqueror, in his expedition to England, and was rewarded for his services with the castle and lordship of Biddiford. ”

“ Richard Penderel, having consented to attend him in the capacity of a guide, conducted him first to his own house, Hobbal Grange, "where the old good-wife Penderel had not only the honor to see his majesty," pursues our authority, "but to see him attended by her son." A greater honor far, it was for her to feel that she was the mother of five sons, whom all the wealth of England would not have bribed, nor all the terrors of a death of torture intimidated, to betray their fugitive sovereign to those who thirsted for his blood. ”

“ He seldom took part in the debates in the lower house; but he was known and respected as an able and consistent advocate of a liberal policy. He held the offices of master of the buckhounds and vice-president of the board of trade under Lord John Russell, and, by diligent application to the business of his department, soon became distinguished for practical knowledge, no less than for his courtesy and kindness. On the dismissal of Lord Palmerston in December, 1851, Lord Granville became his successor in the foreign office ”

“ Lord Granville stood high both in the eyes of the King and the Publick, and could not have been passed by. He was the opposite of Sir Robert Walpole. He had been bred a Tory, was a great scholar, brilliant, witty, despised the House of Commons, loved society when he shone, could not stoop to cultivate. He was ambitious, but with a mixture of love of ease and of letters. He looked to the crown, and to the brilliancy of his own actions for support. [50] He had served in foreign embassies, [51] when very young, was the favourite of the favourite, Lord Sunderland. ”

“ GRANVILLE, JOHN CARTERET, Earl (1690–1763) , English statesman, commonly known by his earlier title as Lord Carteret, born on the 22nd of April 1690, was the son of George, 1st Lord Carteret, by his marriage with Grace Granville, daughter of Sir John Granville, 1st earl of Bath, and great grandson of the Elizabethan admiral, Sir Richard Grenville, famous for his death in the “Revenge.” The family of Carteret was settled in the Channel Islands, and was of Norman descent. John Carteret was educated at Westminster, and at Christ Church, Oxford. ”

“ Grenville, though strictly upright, was grasping and parsimonious. Pitt was a man of excitable nerves, sanguine in hope, easily elated by success and popularity, keenly sensible of injury, but prompt to forgive; 28Grenville’s character was stern, melancholy, and pertinacious. Nothing was more remarkable in him than his inclination always to look on the dark side of things. He was the raven of the House of Commons, always croaking defeat in the midst of triumphs, and bankruptcy with an overflowing exchequer. ”

“ Lady Granville [13] has a great deal of genial humour, strong feelings, enthusiasm, delicacy, refinement, good taste, naïveté which just misses being affectation, and a bonhomie which extends to all around her.
[13] [Henrietta Elizabeth, daughter of William, fifth Duke of Devonshire, married in 1809 to Lord Granville Leveson Gower, created Viscount Granville in 1815, and Earl Granville in 1833, during his embassy at the Court of France.]
Nothing could exceed the agreeableness of the life we led at Tixall. ”

“ The rhodomontade, to which he was addicted, was set off by parts and wit, or forgiven to his good-humour. It was very unlike the presumptuous ascendant of Pitt, or the lofty ignorance of Lord Bute. Pitt, unsociable and muffled in clouds, was adored from the terror imprinted by his lightnings. Bute thought distance and obscurity sufficient characteristics of divinity; but Granville, like Bacchus, rattled his car among men, and was but the more admired the more he familiarized himself with mortals. ”

“ As member of Parliament, first for Cornwall, then for Launceston, Grenville supported Sir John Eliot and the opposition, and his intimacy with Eliot was life-long. In 1639, however, he appears as a royalist going to the Scottish War in the train of Charles I. The reasons of this change of front are unknown, but Grenville’s honour was above suspicion, and he must have entirely convinced himself that he was doing right. At any rate he was a very valuable recruit to the royalist cause, being “the most generally loved man in Cornwall.” ”

“ George Grenville is minister of the House of Commons. I don't know who will be Speaker. They talk of Prowse, Hussey, Bacon, and even of old Sir John Rushout. Delaval has said an admirable thing: he blames Pitt not as you and I do; but calls him fool; and says, if he had gone into the city, told them he had a poor wife and children unprovided for, and had opened a subscription, he would have got five hundred thousand pounds, instead of three thousand pounds a year. In the mean time the good man has saddled us with a war which we can neither carry on nor carry off. ”

“ Of the former, his historical performances afford some pleasing proofs; of the latter, there are extant two letters, one to his cousin the last Earl of Bath, and the other to his cousin Mr. Bevil Granville, on his entering into holy orders, written with a tenderness, a freedom, and an honesty, which render them invaluable.
The general character of his poetry, is elegance, sprightliness, and dignity. He is seldom tender, and very rarely sublime. In his smaller pieces he endeavours to be gay ”

“ There were many men who, without any show of austerity or any burden of morality, were at least of a very different order from the creatures whom the King did not indeed delight to honor, but whom he condescended to employ. The Earl of Granville, with the weight of seventy years upon his shoulders, carried into active political life under his fourth sovereign the same qualities both for good and evil that adorned or injured the name of Carteret. He accepted Lord Bute's authority, and he did not live long enough to witness Bute's fall. ”

“ Grenville's reasons for abandoning the opposition are obscure. In 1639, when the king raised an army against the Scots, he manifested the greatest alacrity in his cause. ‘I go with joy and comfort,’ he wrote, ‘to venture a life in as good a cause and with as good company as ever Englishman did ; and I do take God to witness, if I were to choose a death it should be no other but this’ (Thurloe State Papers, i. 2 ; cf. Nugent, Life of Hampden, ii. 193) . In the Long parliament Grenville again represented the county of Cornwall, but took no part in its debates. ”

“ Lord Granville, who narrowly missed the premiership in 1859, and is pretty sure to hold it before many more years are passed, would be the second prime minister of the title. Lord Carteret, who became Earl Granville in 1744, was never indeed at the head of the treasury, but was virtually chief of the cabinet formed on the retirement of Walpole. Though far from being the ablest or the most patriotic of English statesmen, there are perhaps few on that bead-roll of fame who could more justly be styled "men of genius" than he. ”

“ Thus Granville was a mark for the mean ideas, the vacuous arguments, the narrow views by which his wife—fancying she had achieved the first victory—tried to gain a second by bringing him back within the pale of the Church.
This was the last straw. What can be more intolerable than the blind struggle in which the obstinacy of a bigot tries to meet the acumen of a lawyer? What more terrible to endure than the acrimonious pin-pricks to which a passionate soul prefers a dagger-thrust? Granville neglected his home. ”

“ In point of ability, Lord Grenville is, I think, far superior to any one I have seen here. Lord Lansdowne, with whom I had a delightful tête-à-tête walk yesterday, told me that Lord Grenville can be fully known only when people come to do political business with him: there he excels. You know his preface to Lord Chatham's Letters. His manner of speaking in the House is not pleasing, Lord Lansdowne says: from being very near-sighted he has a look of austerity and haughtiness, and as he cannot see all he wants to see, he throws himself back with his chin up, determined to look at none. ”