Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/George Grenville

GRENVILLE, George (1712-1770), an English states man, second son of Richard Grenville and Hester Temple, afterwards Countess Temple, was born October 14th, 1712. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, and in his twenty-fifth year was called to the bar. The habits of industry, the technical knowledge, and the intellectual discipline which he acquired in connexion with his legal training were of great advantage to him in his political career, and for a considerable period sufficiently compensated for the absence of every oratorical gift except inexhaustible fluency, and of all but the merest rudimentary qualities of statesmanship. He entered Parliament in 1741 as member for Buckingham, and continued to represent that borough till his death in 1770. In December 1744 he became a lord of the admiralty, in June 1747 a lord of the treasury, and in 1754 treasurer of the navy and privy councillor. He remained in office in 1761, when his brother Lord Temple and his brother-in-law Pitt resigned upon the question of the war with Spain, and in the administration of Lord Bute he was entrusted with the leadership of the House of Commons. In May 1762 he was appointed secretary of state, and in October first lord of the admiralty ; and in April 1 763 he became first lord of the treasury and chancellor of the exchequer. The most prominent measures of his administration were the prosecution of Wilkes and the passing of the American Stamp Act, which led to the first symptoms of alienation between America and the mother country. During the latter period of his term of office he was on a very unsatisfactory footing with the young king George III., who gradually came to feel a kind of horror of the interminable persistency of his conversation, and whom he endeavoured to make use of as the mere puppet of the ministry. The king made various attempts to induce Pitt to come to his rescue by forming a ministry, but without success, and at last had recourse to the marquis of Rockingham, on whose agreeing to accept office Grenville was dismissed July 1765. He never again held office, and died 13th November 1770. In 1749 he was married to Elizabeth, daughter of Sir William Wyndham, by whom he had a large family. His son, the second Earl Temple, was created Marquis, and his grand son Duke, of Buckingham. A contemptuous application by Pitt to Grenville of the lines " Gentle Shepherd, tell me where," caused him to be dubbed the "gentle shepherd" for the remainder of his life ; and this would seem to indicate a deficiency in the personal characteristics which insure any high degree of general respect. Exemplary in the observance of all the decencies of private life, and upright and honourable in all his political relations, he yet possessed none of those attrac tive or commanding qualities which are sometimes found an advantageous substitute for strict moral integrity, and which the possessor of moral integrity cannot afford to despise. He was moreover under the dominion of an ambition ludicrously out of proportion to his abilities, and the self-confidence with which he pursued his own purposes can be attributed only to the narrow range of his political vision. Though few excelled him in a knowledge of the forms of the House or in mastery of administrative details, his tact in dealing with men and with affairs was so defec tive that there is perhaps no one who has been at the head of an English administration to whom a lower place can be assigned as a statesman. The Grenville Papers, being the Correspondence of Richard Grenville, Earl Temple, K.G., and the Right Hon. George Grenville, their Friends and Con temporaries, was published at London in 1852.