George Grenville, during his first 20 years in politics, was overshadowed by his rich and domineering brother, Lord Temple, on whose interest he sat at Buckingham (and who could have cut him out of the entail), and by William Pitt, since 1754 his brother-in-law, to whom he played second fiddle in the Commons. They treated him with patronising benevolence, but neither greatly exerted himself on his behalf.
In the reshuffle on Pelham’s death in March 1754, Pitt thought that Grenville should have the Exchequer or the War Office; when he was made treasurer of the navy, hoped this would lead on to the Exchequer; and wrote to Temple on 8 Apr.:
In October 1756, when Pitt was negotiating with Hardwicke for a re-entry of their group into the Government, ‘he informed us’, writes Grenville, ‘that he had stated me for the office of paymaster ... and that it was consented to without any difficulty’. But a few weeks later Pitt let the pay office be divided between Potter and Dupplin.
Grenville was a favourite with the new court, addressed by Bute as ‘Dear George’. ‘The King commended George Grenville extremely’, wrote Newcastle to Hardwicke, 9 Jan. 1761; ‘approved him very much [for Speaker], if he liked it; but would himself have rather kept him for some employment of greater consequence.’
On Pitt’s resignation, 2 Oct., Bute offered his place to Grenville who declined it; even so the King pressed him to assume the leadership of the House. But Grenville, frightened of Pitt and distrustful of Newcastle and Fox, begged the King to let him ‘go into the Chair, which situation was on many accounts far the most eligible to him’; and stated his own want of support and the danger of being finally abandoned ‘in the midst of his enemies’.
You desired me at parting [wrote Bute in the opening paragraph] to think on the painful discourse that we had had together, painful to me indeed beyond description wherein I saw manifestly all the symptoms of a mind extremely agitated turning every incident in the blackest light and viewing with an eye of despondency every part of your intended situation.
Yet even then Grenville was already subconsciously cutting out Bute as a superior intervening between himself and the King—this is shown by two omissions in his summary, significant because unintentional. Bute wrote:
Your eyes will see and from you I shall hear the transactions of each day. Part of your duty will be to report to the King the conduct of these gentlemen. The King will be informed. That is sufficient. For when you know him better you will find a firmness extremely calculated to support his own authority delegated by him to others.
But this is how Grenville remembered it—‘myself’ being Grenville:
Information from myself of what passed: daily representation by myself in the Closet of the conduct and proofs which I should daily receive from experience of the King’s resolution.
Daily reporting by him to the King but none to Bute. Again in Bute’s letter:
... from the minute you are there, your honour my honour, your disgrace, my disgrace is his, to all intents and purposes ...
But in Grenville’s summary:
... that the King ... would support me to the utmost, my honour his honour, my disgrace his disgrace ...
Once more Bute is eliminated, and Grenville remains alone with the King: long shadows of a future as yet unperceived.
Grenville was nearly 50, and had never stood alone. Now Temple forbade him the house, and Pitt treated him with cold contempt: he felt unnerved. Could he assume the leadership of the House without parliamentary backing of his own? When Bute secured for him Fox’s support,
What a figure shall I make? [Grenville said to Newcastle] Mr. Fox has superior parliamentary talent to me; Mr. Fox has a great number of friends in the House of Commons, attached strongly to him; Mr. Fox has great connections, I have none; I have no friends; I am now unhappily separated from my own family.
Newcastle to Devonshire, 31 Oct., Add. 32930, ff. 225-6.
So Bute, ‘teased out of his life’, had now to save Grenville from being eclipsed by Fox’s support. ‘Mr. Fox will attend every day’, wrote Shelburne to Bute,
An illuminating sketch of Grenville is given by his cousin and devoted but not uncritical follower, Thomas Pitt jun.
Mr. Grenville ... was of all the heads of party the worst patron ... he weighed every favour in the nicest scale; but I knew my honour would be always safe with him ... He had nothing seducing in his manners. His countenance had rather the expression of peevishness and austerity ... He was to a proverb tedious ... he was diffuse and argumentative, and never had done with a subject after he had convinced your judgment till he wearied your attention—the foreign ministers complained of his prolixity which they called amongst each other, the being Grenvilisé. The same prolixity rendered him an unpleasant speaker in the House of Commons ... Yet though his eloquence charmed nobody, his argument converted ... The abundance of his matter, his experience of the forms and practice of the House ... his accurate knowledge of the laws and history of his own country ... his wariness never to suffer himself to be drawn out beyond the line he had prescribed to himself ... his skill upon all matters of finance, of commerce, of foreign treaties, and above all the purity of his character ... gave him ... weight ... He never took notes; he never quitted his seat for refreshment in the longest debates, and generally spoke the last, when his strength and his memory served him to recollect every argument that had been used, and to suffer scarce a word of any consequence to escape his notice ... He was a man born to public business, which was his luxury and amusement. An Act of Parliament was in itself entertaining to him, as was proved when he stole a turnpike bill out of somebody’s pocket at a concert and read it in a corner in despite of all the efforts of the finest singers to attract his attention. Order and economy were so natural to him that he told me from the first office he ever held till he became minister he had made it an invariable rule to add the year’s salary to his capital contenting himself with carrying the interest the succeeding year into his expenses. His prudence rather bordered upon parsimony.
During the session Nov. 1761-May 1762, as leader of the House Grenville had to face Pitt in debates on foreign affairs. Bute’s congratulations on 10 Dec. were warm but condescending: ‘this will do, my dear friend, and shows you to the world in the light I want.’
Grenville succeeded Bute as secretary of state, for which post he was ill-qualified. In the summer further differences arose between them: Grenville insisted on peace terms higher than Bute ‘could be brought to consent to’; and as manager of the House desired authority to talk to the Members ‘upon their several claims and pretensions’, which Bute would not concede. Consequently a Government reshuffle was undertaken, but Grenville was informed only after things had been fixed:
‘Grenville has thrown away the game he had two years ago’, wrote the King to Bute, 14 Mar. 1763, when discussing who should succeed him at the Treasury.
One reason for Bute’s wishing to remove Egremont had been that, in order to preserve the King’s independence, men ‘too much allied’ should not hold ‘the active posts of Government’. The King agreed, but hoped that ‘Grenville’s coming into the Treasury will so hurt Halifax that it will dissolve his union’ with the two brothers-in-law.
Bute haunted the new Administration: had he never again interfered in government, the part of ‘minister behind the curtain’ would still have been ascribed to him; and within a month the ministers were saying that they would quit if they found him acting it.
To follow up the history of Grenville’s Administration would by far transcend the scope and limits of this biography: only certain aspects characteristic of him and of his position especially with regard to the King, colleagues, and the House of Commons, can be touched upon. In the new Government Bedford was president of the Council, and Sandwich and Halifax secretaries of state, and the three formed with Grenville an Inner Cabinet or junta within the Effective Cabinet: when in January 1764 they decided to dine together once a week, the King’s suggestion (he wanted an observer at these meetings) that the chancellor should be included, was ignored.
The conversation with the King as related in the Grenville diary on 8 Sept. 1763, the day before the new ministers kissed hands, gives the leitmotif of many a later entry. Grenville started by trying to rechew the story of the late crisis.
The King said ... let us not look back, let us only look forward; nothing of that sort shall ever happen again. Mr. Grenville said he hoped not; that he put himself entirely upon his Majesty’s protection.
He had advised the King to call to his Government Bedford and Sandwich in order to strengthen it—
these might prove too strong for him, his only reliance was upon his Majesty’s truth and honour, and on that he trusted he might depend. The King assured him he might; that he would never fail him, nor forget his services. His Majesty again dropped something of Lord Bute’s retreat not being necessary, or at least might be shortened.
Mr. Grenville dissented, and spoke again of the great uneasiness and ferment there was against him.
Within a week of joining the Government Bedford raised the question of ‘the disposal of offices’; a month later, Halifax and Sandwich suggested that Grenville should continue with them the Triumvirate’s partnership in patronage. But Grenville’s invariable reply was that while he was understood to manage the King’s business in the House of Commons, he would never consent that any offices tenable by Members ‘should go through any channel but his own’;
Nor did he realize how much his manner and discourses irritated George III, and with obtuse pertinacity he tried to force his way into the King’s private life and favour. In September 1763 he pressed the King to let him succeed Bute as keeper of the privy purse, which the King refused: Bute had held it not as first lord of the Treasury but as ‘his immediate friend’, and the King ‘claimed the right of disposing of an office so immediately about his person’.
his years compared to the King (52 to 26) did not promise any great degree of intimacy as a favourite, that if it were feasible to become so, he had not time for that character, and to do the public business—that he was perfectly well with Lord Bute.
By the end of the year there were expostulations and ‘pretty strong’ remonstrances on Grenville’s part, while the King was cold, distant, and embarrassed.
No office fell vacant in any department that Mr. Grenville did not declare he could not serve if the man he recommended did not succeed. A very strong instance of this insolence appeared in his sending for Mr. Worsley, the surveyor of the works, and abusing him for my having curtailed the painter’s office, and he used this very remarkable expression, that if men presumed to speak to me on business without his leave that he would not serve an hour; had I followed my own inclinations I certainly should have dismissed him the moment I heard this.
It was typical of Grenville that he raged over the curtailing of a painter’s office, but did not object in the least when about an important talk which Sandwich had with the Austrian ambassador he spoke to the King before acquainting Grenville with it.
Opponents as well as friends paid tribute to Grenville’s budget of March 1764: Horace Walpole wrote that Grenville opened it fully, ‘for brevity was not his failing; but he did it with art and ability’;
Relations between the King and his ministers were, however, already moving toward a crisis when his illness in Feb.-Mar. 1765 caused him, on recovering, to propose a Regency bill in which he reserved to himself the power to appoint the Regent without naming the person in the Act. This revived anti-Bute suspicions, and the attempt of the ministers to exclude the Princess Dowager from the Regency (in which Halifax and Sandwich involved the King) hardened his determination to change the Government. During these tense weeks Grenville, feeling the ground slip from under his feet, plied the King with exhortations and reproaches: ‘with a firm and steady countenance’ he complained of being shown little ‘confidence and communication’ upon the subject of the bill; of the King having visibly withdrawn ‘even his approbation from him’; and he engaged in long self-laudatory discourses.
That he told him [Grenville] he saw evidently that they were not satisfied with his parting with his power, but that nothing would content him, but his parting with his honour too—bid him take notice what he told him—and earnestly and in great anger bid him take notice of this—more than once—that he had forced him to part with his honour—that as a King for the safety of his people he must submit.
Thereupon Grenville, according to his diary, begged the King rather to dismiss him ‘than to put him under the cruel dilemma of thinking that he was forcing his inclination’.
Dismissed he was seven weeks later without a chance of return. When on 10 July he surrendered the seal of his office, he went once more over the story of his official career (the summary of his discourse in the diary exceeds 1700 words). The King ‘was civil, imputing no blame, but giving no word of approbation throughout the whole conversation’. George III recalled Pitt and Newcastle after having vowed never to employ them again; but not Grenville. Lord Holland wrote to George Selwyn, 27 Aug. 1765:
I am persuaded, Selwyn, that the King, who we can see can swallow anything almost, could not, however, bear his conversation. A dose, so large and so nauseous, often repeated, was too much for any body’s stomach.
In October 1761, and even in April 1763, Grenville was without a following of his own; in July 1765 quite a respectable array of Members went with him into opposition. Most of these could, however, hardly be classed as followers: there were the Bedfords who under the Rockingham Administration invariably went with Grenville, but began to waver under Chatham; similarly, unconnected officeholders, displaced by the Rockinghams and gradually reinstated 1766-8. Grenville’s personal followers (to whom Grenville’s reconciliation with Temple in May 1765 added none in the Commons) were a small and heterogeneous group, dwindling and neglected by him once it became clear that he would not return to office.
Great encomiums of Mr. Grenville by all persons. The persons of the first rank and credit at the Cocoa Tree declared for him. On Tuesday last [21 May] he had a very full levée, when were Sir James Dashwood, Sir Charles Tynte, Sir Robert Burdett, Sir Walter Bagot, and many others.
And as their support was disinterested, it was more enduring—in January 1767 Charles Townshend, in an incomplete list places against 14 of them ‘Grenville’, to whom several others could certainly be added. They respected Grenville’s character, approved of his economy, and also of his American measures.
Grenville in his last talk with the King, on 10 July, besought him
not to suffer any one to advise him to separate ... his British and American dominions; that his Colonies was the richest jewel of his Crown; that for his own part he must uniformly maintain his former opinions both in Parliament and out of it; ... that if any man ventured to defeat the regulations laid down for the Colonies, by a slackness in the execution, he should look upon him as a criminal and the betrayer of his country.
The defence of his American policy, especially of the Stamp Act, stood now in the centre of Grenville’s parliamentary activities: an amendment to the Address declaring America in rebellion, 17 Dec.; a motion for American papers, 19 Dec.; a speech on 14 Jan. 1766 insisting, as usual, on the ‘strict dependence’ of America; on 17 Jan. against rescinding the order to print the American papers (‘very angry’, Conway put against his name in a list of speakers sent to the King):
America would not have been in this condition if they had believed that we would enforce the law ... Whoever advises the King to give up his sovereignty over America is the greatest enemy to this country and will be accused by all posterity.
Says he finds the Americans disputing the authority of this country and was willing to try how far their disobedience could reach ...
Let those who encourage America and have raised and increased this condition by such encouragement extricate us out of it, and God grant that they may meet with success.
He was ready to join anyone, even Bute, in an attempt to defeat the repeal of the Stamp Act; and avidly listened to any gossip alleging that this was also the wish of the King—who might have favoured enforcing the Act had it not been Grenville’s (see the King’s ironic remarks to Grafton, 17 Dec. 1765,
Under the Chatham Administration Grenville from the outset favoured sharp Opposition, while his allies, the Bedfords, oscillated between Opposition and negotiations for a re-entry into Government. With Pitt removed to the House of Lords, Grenville grew in stature—he was, wrote Walpole, ‘confessedly the ablest man of business in the House of Commons, and, though not popular, of great authority there from his spirit, knowledge, and gravity of character’.
Two things became obvious in the negotiations for a Government reconstruction in July 1767: that the King gave ‘an implied exclusion’ to Grenville; and that, because of Stamp Act memories, Grenville could never join in office with the Rockinghams. With the accession of the Bedfords to the Chatham Administration in December 1767, the last, illusory, hopes of his return to office vanished, and with them his interest in parliamentary manoeuvres: henceforth it was his man of business, Thomas Whately, rather than Grenville, who looked after what remained of their group in the House.
Detachment from struggles for office added dignity to Grenville’s position as foremost senior statesman among commoners. In February 1768 all debate on the principle of a bill was deferred to the third reading on account of Grenville’s absence, ‘sent word that he had some objections to the preamble’.
On 5 Dec. 1769 he suffered a grievous loss through his wife’s death. ‘I know you wish to avoid every attendance [in the House] which the occasion does not call for,’ wrote Whately to him, 12 Jan. 1770.
Seriously ill in the summer, in October Grenville was brought to London ‘in a state of languor and debility’; and died on 13 Nov. 1770. A post mortem disclosed an advanced condition of decay of several ribs and the skull.
In Grenville’s will estates are mentioned which he had purchased in Eastern Florida; and in 1770 he secured through Thomas Pitt and Samuel Wharton a share in the Vandalia scheme on the Ohio River.