BOOK III, Chap. V. THE FOUNDER crisis in affairs one GRENVILLE, of ability and prominence, is seen in tolerably active opposition to the rest of the GRENVILLES. In the political history of the man who GRENVILLE forms the subject of this brief memoir the family peculiarity, it will be seen, came out saliently. OF THE LIBRARY. PARENTAGE AND EARLY LIFE OF GRENVILLE. HIS SHORT See above, Book 11, Chap. III, page 431. The political GRENVILLES were offshoots of an old stock which, in the days of eld, were richer in gallant soldiers than in peace-loving publicists. The old GRENVILLES dealt many a shrewd swordthrust for England by land and by sea, in the Tudor times, and earlier. The younger branch has been rich in statesmen and rich in scholars. Not a few of them have shone equally and at once in either path of labour. Thomas GRENVILLE was the second son of the Minister of GEORGE THE THIRD, George GRENVILLE,-himself the second son of Richard GRENVILLE, of Wotton, and of Hester TEMPLE (co-heiress of Richard TEMPLE, Lord Cobham, and herself created Countess TEMPLE in 1749). He was born on the thirty-first of December, 1755, and entered Parliament soon after attaining his majority. In the House of Commons he voted and acted as a follower of Lord ROCKINGHAM and a comrade of Charles Fox, in opposition to the other GRENVILLES and the Grenvillite' party. Had the famous India Bill of Fox's ministry been carried into a law, Thomas GRENVILLE, it was understood, would have been the first Governor-General of India under its rule. His first entrance into the diplomatic service was made in 1782. His mission was to Paris. Its purpose, to negotiate with Benjamin FRANKLIN a treaty of peace with America. The circumstances beneath the influence of which it was undertaken I have had occasion to advert to, already, in the notice of Lord SHELBURNE. It is needless to return to them now. Chap. V. FOUNDER LIBRARY. Thomas GRENVILLE's union in the double negotiation Book III, with Mr. OSWALD (instructed by SHELBURNE, it will be re- THE membered, as GRENVILLE was by Fox) proved to be very OF THE distasteful to him. From the beginning it boded ill to the GRENVILLE success of the mission. As early as the 4th of June, 1782, we find Mr. GRENVILLE writing to Fox thus:-'I entreat you earnestly to see the impossibility of my assisting you under this contrariety. . . . I cannot fight a daily battle with Mr. OSWALD and his Secretary.* It would be neither for the advantage of the business, for your interest, or for your credit or mine; and, even if it was, I could not do it.' THE MIS SION TO PARIS, 1782-3. T. Grenville to Fox; 4th June, 1782. Comp. also same to same. The then existing arrangements of the Secretaryship of State gave the control of a negotiation with France to one Secretary, and of a negotiation with America to the other. The reader has but to call to mind the well-known political relationship between Fox and SHELBURNE in 1782, to gain a fully sufficient key to the consequent diplomatic relationship between OSWALD and Thomas GRENVILLE, when thus engaged in carrying on, abreast, a double mission at the Court of Paris. To add to the obvious embroilment, OsWALD had shortly before received from Benjamin FRANKLIN a suggestion that Britain should spontaneously' cede pp. 36-51.) Canada, in order to enable his astute countrymen at home the better to compensate both the plundered Royalists and those among the victorious opponents of those Royalists who had, from time to time, sustained any damage at the hands of the British armies. The most earnest entreaties, from many quarters, were used to induce GRENVILLE to remain at Paris. His political friends, and his family connections, were, on that point, alike urgent. But all entreaties were in vain. When the *Meaning Lord Shelburne. See, heretofore, pp. 431-433. June 16. (Court and Cabinets of BOOK III, THE LIBRARY. to T. Gren ville, 12th July. news reached him of Lord ROCKINGHAM'S death, and of the break-up in the Cabinet which followed, his decision was, if possible, more decided. He still clave to Fox, while GRENVILLE his brother, Lord TEMPLE, accepted from SHELBURNE the Lieutenancy of Ireland. A Lordship of the Treasury or the Irish Secretaryship was by turns pressed upon Mr. GRENVILLE by Lord TEMPLE with an earnestness which Lord Temple may be called passionate. Let me hope,' said he, that you will feel that satisfaction that every [other] member of my family most earnestly feels at my acceptance of the Lieutenancy of Ireland. . . I conjure you, by everything that you prize nearest and dearest to your heart; by the joy I have ever felt in your welfare; by the interest I have ever taken in your uneasiness; weigh well your determination; it decides the complexion of my future hours. . . . I have staked my happiness upon this cast.' The resolve of Thomas GRENVILLE to adhere to the position he had taken was the cause of a family estrangement which endured for many years. But the more a reader, familiar with the annals of the time (and especially if he be also familiar with the personal history of Lord TEMPLE before and after), may study Lord TEMPLE's letters of 1782, the less he is likely to wonder that the peculiar line of argument they develope failed to attain the aim they had in view. The vein that runs through them is plainly that of personal ambition; not of an adherence-at any cost-to a sincere conviction, whether right or wrong, of public duty. Such a line of argument was, at no time, the line likely to commend itself to Thomas GRENVILLE. Both his virtues, and what by many politicians will be regarded as his weaknesses, alike armed him against obvious appeals to mere self-interest or self-aggrandisement. Chap. V. T FOUNDER OF THE GRENVILLE LIBRARY. THE WITH One result and the not unanticipated result of the Book III, family estrangement of 1782 was that, two years later, Mr. GRENVILLE found himself to have no longer the command of a seat in Parliament. For four years to come he gave most of his leisure to a pursuit which he loved much better -as far as personal taste was concerned-namely, to the DRAWAL resumption of his systematic studies in classical literature. LIAMENT, But in 1790 he was elected a burgess for the town of Aldborough. Thenceforward, and for a good many years, politics again shared his time with literature, and with those social claims and duties to which no man of his day was more keenly alive. In 1795 a second diplomatic mission was offered to him, and it was accepted. In the interval, another and more lasting change had come across his career in Parliament. He was one of the many Foxites' who utterly disapproved the course which their old leader adopted in regard to the French Revolution and to the rising passion to glorify and to imitate it at home. To the 'Man of the People' (as he was very fancifully called), the English countershock to the French overturn was, in one sense, specially fatal. It ripened peculiar, though hitherto in some degree latent, weaknesses. And with these, when they became salient, Thomas GRENVILLE had really as little fellow-feeling as had Edmund BURKE. Alike both men now supported PITT, with whom, as experience increased and judgment matured, they both had always had intrinsically far more in common. And among the results of the new political relationships came a restoration of family harmony. George GRENVILLE became PITT'S Foreign Secretary; Thomas GRENVILLE became PITT's Minister to the Court of Berlin. One year later, he again sat in Parliament for Buckingham. FROM PAR 1784-90. Book III, THE OF THE LIBRARY. THE MIS- BERLIN, 1795. The mission to Berlin was first impeded by a threatened shipwreck among icebergs at sea, and, when that impediment had been with difficulty overcome, the journey was GRENVILLE again and more seriously obstructed by an actual shipwreck upon the coast of Flanders. Mr. GRENVILLE'S life was exposed to imminent danger. After a desperate effort, he succeeded in saving his despatches and in scrambling to land. But he saved nothing else; and the inevitable delay enabled the French Directory to send SIÈYES to Berlin, in advance of the ambassador of Britain. The able and versatile Frenchman made the best of his priority. Mr. GRENVILLE was not found wanting in exertion, any more than in ability. But in the then posture of affairs the advantage in point of time, proved to be an advantage which no skill of fence could afterwards recover. Hence it was that the mission of 1795 became practically an abortive mission. With it ended the ambassador's diplomatic THE career. Almost equally brief was his subsequent actively official career in England. On the formation of Lord GRenville's Cabinet (February, 1806), no office was taken by the Premier's next brother. But on the death of Fox, six months later, he became First Lord of the Admiralty. That office he held until the formation of the Tory Government, in the month of April, 1807. It was too brief a term to give him any adequate opportunity of really evincing his administrative powers. And during almost forty remaining years of life he never took office again, contenting himself with that now nominal function (conferred on him in the year THE CHIEF 1800), the Chief-Justiceship in Eyre, to the south of the river Trent,' of the profits of which, as will be seen presently, he made a noble use. That office in Eyre had once been a function of real gravity and potency. It was still JUSTICE SHIP IN EYRE,' SOUTH OF TRENT. 1800-1845. |
