George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne

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George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdown (9 March 1666 – 29 January 1735), was an English author and politician who served as a Privy Counsellor from 1712.

[edit] Early life

Granville was the grandson of Bevil Grenville, a Royalist commander in the English Civil War. His uncle was John Granville, 1st Earl of Bath, and Monck was another relative; these influences guaranteed that Granville began life as a staunch Tory and Jacobite.

Still, his early interests were as much literary as political. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1677. Among his productions while there were poems welcoming Mary of Modena when she visited the university. By the mid-1690s, after a period in Paris, and another, after the Glorious Revolution, in retirement in England, he had befriended John Dryden and begun to write plays. He had written an undistignuished comedy of manners, The She Gallants, which was staged unsuccessfully in 1695. His adult plays bear the marks of Dryden's influence. The Heroick Love is taken from the first book of The Iliad. Granville also followed Dryden in adapting Shakespeare; The Jew of Venice (1701) was a successful updating of The Merchant of Venice. Perhaps his greatest success was The British Enchanters (1705), a pseudo-operatic extravaganza staged by Thomas Betterton's company.

In the opinion of Samuel Johnson, Granville's nondramatic poetry is slavishly imitative of Edmund Waller; some of it, however, was popular in its day. Perhaps Granville's most useful act as regards poetry was the encouragement he gave Alexander Pope, which Pope remembered with gratitude in the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.

[edit] Political life

The death of Granville's parents and uncle in 1701 placed Granville in a position of power which the accession of Anne in 1702 allowed him to employ. With the help of his uncle's family, he was elected MP for Fowey in 1702, and made governor of Pendennis Castle the following year. In Parliament, he operated in the sphere of Harley, who was an indifferent patron at first. The height of his fame during the Godolphin-Marlborough administration came from his spirited defense of Henry Sacheverell in 1710.

After the fall of the Godolphin government, Granville was made MP for Cornwall and Secretary of War; in this capacity, he oversaw the passage of important bills on munitions and recruitment. However, his experience in the Tory government was marked by family and legal strife. He expended time and money in an ultimately futile effort to secure the title of Earl of Bath. Despite some success, his tenure in the War Office was marred by accusations of corruption and expensive contested elections. He was made a Privy Counsellor in 1712.

He was created Baron Lansdown (Lansdowne) on January 1st, 1712 in the Peerage of Great Britain. The peerage was extinct on his death.

After the succession of the Hanoverian George I, who notably favoured the Whigs, Lord Lansdown lost his political influence, as did almost all the Tories who held office under Queen Anne. He entered into a correspondence with the Jacobite pretender "James III", by whom he was created on November 3rd 1722 "Duke of Albemarle", "Marquis Monck and Fitzhemmon", "Earl of Bath", "Viscount Bevil" and "Baron Lansdown of Bideford" in the Jacobite Peerage of England. He died in London on 29 January 1735, his wife having predeceased him by a few days, and he was buried, as she was, in St Clement Danes on 3 February 1735.