William Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville

“ In 1749 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir William Wyndham, by whom he had a large family. His son, the second Earl Temple, was created marquess, and his grandson duke, of Buckingham. Another son was William, afterwards Lord 581 Grenville. Another, Thomas Grenville (1755-1846) , who was, with one interval, a member of parliament from 1780 to 1818, and for a few months during 1806 and 1807 president of the board of control and first lord of the admiralty, is perhaps more famous as a book-collector than as a statesman; he bequeathed his large and valuable library to the British Museum. ”

“ A majority for the peace had to be insured before the preliminaries came before parliament. Grenville was dissatisfied with some of the articles, and would in any case have been too scrupulous for the work which had to be done. Bute was driven to apply to Henry Fox, whom both the king and he cordially disliked. Fox, who had previously sold his support to Bute at the price of a peerage for his wife, was offered Grenville's place as secretary of state and a peerage for himself, if he would take the management of the commons. "We must," George said, "call in bad men to govern bad men." ”

“ Blessed or cursed with a solemnity that never was enlivened by a gleam of humor, a ray of fancy, or a flash of eloquence, Grenville regarded the House of Commons with the cold ferocity of a tyrannical and pompous schoolmaster. A style of speech that would have made a discourse upon Greek poetry seem arid and a dissertation upon Italian painting colorless—if it were possible to conceive Grenville as wasting time or thought on such trifles—added no grace to the exposition of a fiscal measure or charm to the formality of a phalanx of figures. ”

“ The members of the House of Commons can cough an orator down, or can walk away to dinner; and they were by no means sparing in the use of these privileges when Grenville was on his legs. But the poor young King had to endure all this eloquence with mournful civility. To the end of his life he continued to talk with horror of Grenville’s orations. ”

“ Through his instrumentality, George had already secured a set of ministers who would, they both believed, be content to carry out the king's will. Grenville, though he had opposed Bute in the cabinet with reference to the negotiations with France, professed that as prime minister he would try to win his complete approval, and with only one exception allowed Bute to form his administration for him. Bute and his master thought they had secured a useful tool, a subservient and hard-working drudge. They were mistaken in their man; Grenville was independent and self-confident. ”

“ His indomitable spirit rose up stronger and stronger under the load of public hatred. He fought out the battle obstinately to the end. On the last reading he had a sharp altercation with his brother-in-law, the last of their many sharp altercations. Pitt thundered in his loftiest tones against the man who had wished to dip the ermine of a British King in the blood of the British people. Grenville replied with his wonted intrepidity and asperity. ”

“ Pitt was a man of excitable nerves, sanguine in hope, easily elated by success and popularity, keenly sensible of injury, but prompt to forgive; Grenville'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. ”

“ Lord Bute, who was of a different opinion with regard to Germany, and who talked as if he was determined to recall the troops or make the peace, and was hard pushed by the Duke of Bedford to this (whose friendship he was obliged to court, notwithstanding what had passed) , as well as some other of his friends who were determined to continue their opposition to it, thought therefore a single million sufficient. Mr. Grenville, who was intrusted chiefly in the House of Commons, and the other Lords of the Treasury were strongly for asking only a single million. ”

“ Lysons’s Cornwall is the best account that the Editor can give of the distinguished family of Grenville.
The manor of Kilkhampton is supposed to have belonged to the Grenville family from nearly the time of the Conquest; 344 Dugdale says, that they were seated here in the reign of William Rufus. Richard de Grenville, who came over with William the Conqueror, is said in the pedigrees of the family to have been a younger brother of Robert Fitzhamon, Earl of Carbill, Lord of Thurigny and Grenville, in France and Normandy, and to have been lineally descended from Rollo, Duke of Normandy. ”

“ But the Ministry which the King accepted because he could get nothing better, and because he would have welcomed something much worse so long as it delivered him from {95} Grenville—the Ministry that provoked the derisive pity of most of its critics was destined to attain an honorable immortality. The heterogeneous group of men who called themselves or were called, who believed themselves or were believed to be Whigs, had obtained one recruit whose name was yet to make the cause he served illustrious. Lord Rockingham had many claims to the regard of his contemporaries ”

“ Unfortunately, though Grenville could manage business, he could not manage men; and at this point he failed to make good a defect in the political panoply of Pitt. On neither of the cousins had nature bestowed the social tact which might have smoothed the rubs of diplomatic discussion, say, in those with the French envoy, Chauvelin, in 1792. That fervid royalist, Hyde de Neuville, complained bitterly of the freezing powers of Downing Street. The enthusiastic young Canning found it impossible to work with Grenville, who was also on strained terms with Dundas. ”

“ Fox in lights I should rejoice we did not. Yesterday was but a confirmation of what I have before seen. Before I proceed further therefore, let me premise, if you are not sure of getting and keeping the King to yourself, at least from him, don't harbour any the smallest thought of accepting his offer. If you are, he will act agreeably, and look up to you; if not, I am sorry to say you know what will be the case you know too all his weaknesses—George Grenville's—you can only guess at. There is a possibility of our correcting and influencing the one though not the other. ”

“ George Grenville saw great promise in North. He even predicted that if he did not relax in his political pursuits he was very likely to become Prime Minister. Unhappily for his country, North did not relax in his political pursuits. There was an ironic fitness in the fact that North should be admired by Grenville and should succeed to Townshend, for no man was better fitted to carry on the fatal policy of the two men who had outraged the American colonies by the Stamp Act and the tax on tea. ”

“ Earl of Albemarle's Memoirs of the Marquis of Rockingham; R. Grenville's (Earl Temple) Grenville Papers; [Conway's] Military Arguments, &c.; [H. Walpole's] Counter-Address, &c.; Burke's Works and Correspondence (1852) ; Lord E. Fitzmaurice's Life of the Earl of Shelburne; Chatham Correspondence, ed. Taylor and Pringle, iii. iv.; R. P. T. Grenville's (Duke of Buckingham) Courts and Cabinets of George III; Earl Russell's Life of C. J. Fox; Stanhope's Life of Pitt; Sir G. C. Lewis's Administrations of Great Britain; Return of Members of Parliament; Annual Register; Parliamentary History ”

“ The negotiation failed, for Grenville and Temple, who were then united to the Bedfords, represented to their allies that no union was possible without agreement as to American policy. This ended the matter, for the Grenville and Bedford parties were strongly in favour of American taxation. Rockingham therefore told the king that he was unable to act upon his invitation. Grafton remained in office. A man of pleasure and of culture, in some points a true descendant of Charles II., he was out of his proper element in political life. ”

“ Charles Townshend was asked what he thought of the new administration. "It is," said he, "mere lutestring; pretty summer wear. It will never do for the winter."
At this conjuncture Lord Rockingham had the wisdom to discern the value, and secure the aid, of an ally, who, to eloquence surpassing the eloquence of Pitt, and to industry which shamed the industry of Grenville, united an amplitude of comprehension to which neither Pitt nor [Pg 656] Grenville could lay claim. A young Irishman had, some time before, come over to push his fortune in London. He had written much for the booksellers ”

“ Such were the views of the Duke of Bedford and of the Earl of Hardwicke; but no member of the government held these opinions so strongly as George Grenville, the treasurer of the navy. George Grenville was brother-in-law of Pitt, and had always been reckoned one of Pitt’s personal and political friends. But it is difficult to conceive two men of talents and integrity more utterly unlike each other. Pitt, as his sister often said, knew nothing accurately except Spenser’s Fairy Queen. He had never applied himself steadily to any branch of knowledge. ”

“ Hitherto parliament had imposed customs duties on the colonies solely for the purpose of regulating trade; he designed to raise revenue from them. The idea was suggested to Walpole as a means of obtaining money on the failure of his excise scheme, and that wary statesman promptly rejected it. The money, however, which Grenville hoped to raise from the colonies was not to swell the revenues of England; it was to be applied to their own defence. His design was reasonable. The [Pg 58] war had enormously increased the public debt. ”

“ Pitt and the Grenvilles among others, followed this course, which I have heard assigned as the reason of the unconquerable aversion which George Grenville afterwards experienced on the part of the present King.
"The Prince's life may be judged in some degree from the account given of it in Lord Melcombe's Diary, a man who passed his life with great men whom he did not know, and in the midst of affairs which he never comprehended, but recites facts from which others may draw deductions which he never could. ”

“ Grenville could see nothing but the bill. Pitt boasted that England was victorious at once in America, in India, and in Germany, the umpire of the Continent, the mistress of the sea. Grenville cast up the subsidies, sighed over the army extraordinaries, and groaned in spirit to think that the nation had borrowed eight millions in one year.
With a ministry thus divided it was not difficult for Bute to deal. Legge was the first who fell. He had given offence to the young King in the late reign, by refusing to support a creature of Bute at a Hampshire election. ”

“ On Pitt's death the king sent for Lord Grenville, who at once said that the first person he should consult on the formation of an administration would be Fox; the king readily assented (ib. p. 331) . By the end of the month Fox took office as foreign secretary in Grenville's administration, called ‘All the Talents’ or the ‘Broad-bottomed,’ and was caricatured by Gillray in ‘Making Decent,’ and as a led bear, for he was supposed to be under Grenville's influence. His union with Grenville was not like his coalition with North ”

“ Every feature of the parent was found in the child. A timid statesman would have shrunk from a step, of which Walpole, at a time when the colonies were far less powerful, had said—“He who shall propose it will be a much bolder man than I.” But the nature of Grenville was insensible to fear. A statesman of large views would have felt that to lay taxes at Westminster on New England and New York, was a course opposed, not indeed to the letter of the Statute Book, or to any decision contained in the Term Reports, but to the principles of good government, and to the spirit of the constitution. ”

“ William Wyndham Grenville (1759–1834) is a less interesting man than Dundas. First cousin to Pitt, and born in the same year, he seemed destined to advance hand in hand with him, just as his father had signally helped Chatham in certain parts of that meteoric career. Nature, however, had clearly designed the Grenvilles, both father and son, not to be comets, scarcely planets, but rather satellites. ”

“ Thomas Pitt came under Grenville's influence at the fiercest moment of this rancour, and seems to have been the only person on record who was fascinated by him. Thomas writes of him with affectionate enthusiasm long after his death, and in his life waged his wars with zeal. One of these led to a quarrel with Horace Walpole, arising out of the dismissal of Conway, which produced a lengthy correspondence, still extant. But to become the disciple of George Grenville it was necessary to abhor William Pitt. Thomas took the test without difficulty, and adhered to it conscientiously. ”

“ It was probable that Pitt, the great Whig connection, and the multitude, would all be on the same side. The favourite had professed to hold in abhorrence those means by which preceding ministers had kept the House of Commons in good humour. He now began to think that he had been too scrupulous. His Utopian visions were at an end. It was necessary, not only to bribe, but to bribe more shamelessly and flagitiously than his predecessors, in order to make up for lost time. A majority must be secured, no matter by what means. Could Grenville do this? ”

“ But he was soon released; he went to France and Italy, and after visiting England in disguise passed some time in Holland. He was excepted by parliament from pardon in 1648, and after the king’s execution he was with Charles II. in France and elsewhere until some unfounded accusation which he brought against Edward Hyde, afterwards earl of Clarendon, led to his removal from court. He died in 1658, and was buried at Ghent. In 1644, when Grenville deserted the parliamentary party, a proclamation was put out against him ”