Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography/Volume 2/Granville, George
GRANVILLE, George, Viscount Lansdowne, figures in the collections as one of the English poets, but is chiefly remembered as a friend and patron of poets. He was born in 1667, of a high family noted for its loyalty to the family of Stewart. Receiving his earlier education in France, he was sent at the precocious age of ten to Trinity college, Cambridge, and was known as a university poet before he was twelve. With hereditary loyalty, he offered his services in behalf of James when William of Orange meditated his expedition. His father restrained his ardour, and nothing was left him when the crown changed wearers but to devote himself to literature under a government which he could not serve. He wrote plays and poems, one of the former, the “Heroic Lover,” was praised by Dryden, whose later politics were his own, and who, in his commendatory verses, calls him “friend.” His poems were a mere faint echo of Waller. On the accession of Anne he appeared at court, and was received with great favour; but on the fall of his political friends from power he retired into private life to court the company of the muse and her cultivators. It was he who introduced Wycherley and the youthful Pope to Bolingbroke. Pope dedicated to him Windsor Forest, and has recorded his sense of the early encouragement which he received, and of the courtly manners of his noble patron, in the well-known passage—
After the trial of Sacheverell Granville’s friends returned to power, and he was not forgotten. He succeeded Walpole as secretary at war, was raised to the peerage, and step by step advanced to the dignity of treasurer of Queen Anne’s household, from which he was naturally removed on the accession of George I. His old loyalty to the Stewarts breaking out anew, he was apprehended on suspicion and committed to the Tower, from which, after an imprisonment of some duration, he was discharged without a trial. Forewarned by this experience, he removed to France at the time of Bishop Atterbury’s affair, and amused himself in his self-exile revising his works and writing in prose a vindication of General Monk and his own kinsman, Sir Richard Greenville, from the reflections of Burnet, Clarendon, and Echard. His prose has been more highly praised than his poetry. He published a handsome edition of his collected writings on his return to England in 1732, and died in the January of 1735.—F. E.