William Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville

William Wyndham Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville (born October 25, 1759 in Wotton House , Buckinghamshire , † January 12, 1834 in Burnham , Buckinghamshire), was a British politician of the Whig Party and Prime Minister .

William Wyndham Grenville

Life

Grenville was the third son of Prime Minister George Grenville and his wife Elizabeth , a daughter of Tory politician William Wyndham . He attended Eton College in Eton , then studied at Christ Church College , Oxford and then at Lincoln's Inn . In 1782 he became a member of the House of Commons and soon became a close ally of the younger William Pitt . In his government he was paymaster of the armed forces from 1784 to 1789 . In January 1789 he was first speaker of the House of Commons. In the same year he joined the cabinet as Minister of the Interior . The following year he was raised to hereditary nobility as Baron Grenville , of Wotton under Bernewood in the County of Buckingham , and he became leader of the House of Lords . In 1791 he took over the Foreign Ministry as the successor to Francis Osborne, 5th Duke of Leeds . His ten-year term in office was dramatic because of the wars against Napoleon . During the war, Grenville led the group that saw the war on the continent as the path to victory. Opposite her was the faction around Henry Dundas , which preferred naval warfare and war in the colonies. In 1801 Grenville and Pitt resigned from office because of the dispute over the emancipation of Catholics .

In the years of inactivity, Grenville came closer to the leader of the Whig opposition, Charles James Fox . So he did not go with it when Pitt came back to power in 1804. After Pitt's death in 1806, Grenville became head of the " government of all talents, " a coalition of Grenville's supporters, Fox's Whigs and supporters of former Prime Minister Henry Addington, 1st Viscount Sidmouth . Grenville as finance and Fox as secretary of state shared the lead. Grenville's older brother, Thomas, was first lord of the Admiralty for a short time in that government, which ultimately achieved little. She succeeded neither in a peace treaty with France nor in the emancipation of the Catholics - the attempt to do so ultimately led to her overthrow in March 1807. However, she achieved an outstanding achievement: the Slave Trade Act of 1807, passed by an overwhelming majority, which abolished the slave trade.

Grenville spent the years following the fall of the government in opposition. He maintained his alliance with Lord Gray and the Whigs, criticized the Spanish War of Liberation and, like Gray, refused to join Lord Liverpool's government in 1812 . In the post-war years, Grenville came closer to the Tories again , but did not return to the cabinet.

His political career was ended by a stroke in 1823. He died in 1834. Since he had no descendants, his baron title expired on his death.

literature

• George Fisher Russell Barker: Grenville, William Wyndham . In: Leslie Stephen , Sidney Lee (Eds.): Dictionary of National Biography . Volume 23, Smith, Elder & Co, London 1890, pp. 133-138.

Web links

Commons : William Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

• William Wyndham Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville on thepeerage.com , accessed August 13, 2015.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Frederick Maurice Powicke, Edmund Boleslav Fryde: Handbook of British Chronology. Royal Historical Society, London 1961, p. 115.
2. ^ Frederick Maurice Powicke, Edmund Boleslav Fryde: Handbook of British Chronology. Royal Historical Society, London 1961, p. 116.
3. ^ Frederick Maurice Powicke, Edmund Boleslav Fryde: Handbook of British Chronology. Royal Historical Society, London 1961, p. 108.