Grenville (Rigby to Bedford, 30 Sept. 1762). An attempt made to separate the brothers-in-law in the early summer, by inducing Egremont to take the viceroyalty of Ireland in exchange for the seals, had failed; but in October Grenville consented to give up the leadership of the commons to Fox, and to exchange the seals for the admiralty. The relations between Egremont and Bedford became severely strained; but the former succeeded in gaining over Bute and the majority of the cabinet to his views about the terms of peace, and when the preliminaries were signed on 2 Nov. it was agreed that Florida should be given in exchange for the recently captured Havannah. Rigby had charged Egremont with ‘cordial hatred’ of Bedford and mischief-making for its own sake, but Fox thought that Grenville and Mansfield were rather to be blamed. Junius declared there was a moment at which Egremont ‘meant to have resisted [the peace] had not a fatal lethargy prevailed over his faculties’ (Letter to the Duke of Bedford, 19 Sept. 1769).
Fox, in a memorial he prepared for Bute after his resignation, said that in 1762 Egremont was ‘led by Mansfield through George Grenville to very bad purpose, and talked publicly of the necessity of widening your bottom by a reconciliation with the Duke of Newcastle.’ Since Bute came into office Egremont's attitude towards him had been that of ‘a useless, lumpish, sour friend,’ whose sincerity was open to doubt. Yet Egremont is said to have been selected to break the news of his favourite's retirement to George III (Walpole to George Montagu, 14 April 1763).
In addition to his disputes with Bute and Bedford, Egremont had differences with Shelburne (whom the king, on the advice of Mansfield, supported against him) on American affairs. Egremont, on 5 May 1763, enclosed to the president of the board of trade a paper in which he asked for a report ‘in what way least burdensome and most palatable to the colonies can they contribute towards the support of the additional expense which must attend their civil and military establishments upon the arrangements which your lordships shall propose.’ Upon its reception he refused to allow the department to correspond directly with the colonial military officials; and when Shelburne cited the order in council by which it was instructed to do so, Egremont had to admit he had never read it. Shelburne, on his side, resisted the secretary of state's proposal to include in the new province of Canada all the British possessions in the continent of North America.
When Bute retired from office in April 1763 Grenville succeeded him as premier. The brothers-in-law with Halifax, the other secretary of state, formed a kind of triumvirate which carried out the king's wishes, but resisted the secret influence of Bute and opposed a general proscription of the whigs. The king employed Egremont to induce Hardwicke to join the ministry. In an interview on 13 May Egremont ‘professed to wish of all things to see the bottom [of administration] widened,’ seeing in it the interest of both king and country, and made strong declarations that, should he discover that Bute still had any influence, he would immediately ‘have nothing more to do’ with office. The conferences were resumed in the summer, the chief difficulty being the readmission of Newcastle to power, which the triumvirate opposed. Egremont was associated with Halifax in the prosecution of Wilkes for No. 45 of the ‘North Briton.’ According to Almon he gave the messengers verbal orders to enter Wilkes's house even at midnight, and to seize his person and papers. After his arrest Egremont assisted Halifax in examining Wilkes, who ‘grievously wounded the haughty dignity attempted to be assumed by Lord Egremont.’ When committed to the Tower the demagogue ‘desired to be confined in the same room where Sir William Wyndham (Egremont's father) had been kept on a charge of Jacobitism’ (Walpole); and when in Paris in the following August he was challenged to a duel by a Scots captain in the French service, named Forbes, he pleaded in excuse a ‘previous account he had to settle with Lord Egremont.’ Walpole is sceptical as to the reality of this engagement, which Egremont did not live to fulfil. After Hardwicke's rejection of office on 3 Aug. the king had promised that if within ten days he could not bring him over, he would abandon the attempt and ‘strengthen the hands of his three ministers’ (Grenville, Diary). But on the 19th inst. he seemed by his language to the secretaries and Grenville to be ‘in the resolution of changing his ministers’ (ib.) Next day, however, the king saw the two secretaries (Egremont and Halifax), ‘and seemed more inclined to abide by his then present ministers’ (ib.) On the 21st Grenville was on his way to give Egremont an account of a similarly favourable interview which he had just had with George III, when he was met by Dr. Duncan, who told him that the secretary was struck down with an apoplexy and was past hope of recovery. Walpole, in recounting his seizure to Sir Horace Mann, writes that ‘everybody knew he would die suddenly;
