In 1795 a second diplomatic mission was offered to him, and it was accepted. In the interval, another and more lasting change had come across his career in Parliament. He was one of the many ‘Foxites’ who utterly disapproved the course which their old leader adopted in regard to the French Revolution and to the rising passion to glorify and to imitate it at home. To the ‘Man of the People’ (as he was very fancifully called), the English countershock to the French overturn was, in one sense, specially fatal. It ripened peculiar, though hitherto in some degree latent, weaknesses. And with these, when they became salient, Thomas Grenville had really as little fellow-feeling as had Edmund Burke. Alike both men now supported Pitt, with whom, as experience increased and judgment matured, they both had always had intrinsically far more in common. And among the results of the new political relationships came a restoration of family harmony. George Grenville became Pitt’s Foreign Secretary; Thomas Grenville became Pitt’s Minister to the Court of Berlin. One year later, he again sat in Parliament for Buckingham.
The mission to Berlin was first impeded by a threatened shipwreck among icebergs at sea, and, when that impediment had been with difficulty overcome, the journey was again and more seriously obstructed by an actual shipwreck upon the coast of Flanders. |The Mission to Berlin, 1795.| Mr. Grenville’s life was exposed to imminent danger. After a desperate effort, he succeeded in saving his despatches and in scrambling to land. But he saved nothing else; and the inevitable delay enabled the French Directory to send Sièyes to Berlin, in advance of the ambassador of Britain. The able and versatile Frenchman made the best of his priority. Mr. Grenville was not found wanting in exertion, any more than in ability. But in the then posture of affairs the advantage in point of time, proved to be an advantage which no skill of fence could afterwards recover. Hence it was that the mission of 1795 became practically an abortive mission. With it ended the ambassador’s diplomatic career.
The Cabinet of 1806.
Almost equally brief was his subsequent actively official career in England. On the formation of Lord Grenville’s Cabinet (February, 1806), no office was taken by the Premier’s next brother. But on the death of Fox, six months later, he became First Lord of the Admiralty. That office he held until the formation of the Tory Government, in the month of April, 1807. It was too brief a term to give him any adequate opportunity of really evincing his administrative powers. And during almost forty remaining years of life he never took office again, contenting himself with that now nominal function (conferred on him in the year 1800), |The ‘Chief-Justiceship in Eyre,’ south of Trent. 1800–1845.| the ‘Chief-Justiceship in Eyre, to the south of the river Trent,’ of the profits of which, as will be seen presently, he made a noble use. That office in Eyre had once been a function of real gravity and potency. It was still a surviving link between the feudal England of the Henrys and the Edwards, on the one hand, and the industrial England of the Georges on the other. Under a king who could govern, as well as reign, the ‘Chief-Justiceship in Eyre’ might have shown itself, in one particular, to possess a real and precious vitality still. By possibility, the sports of twelfth century and chase-loving monarchs might have been made to alleviate the toils, to brighten the leisure, and to lengthen the lives, of nineteenth-century and hard-toiling artisans. |The Chief-Justiceship in Eyre, and what might have come of its perpetuation.| For in exerting the still legal powers (long dormant, but not abolished) of the forest justiceship, a potent check might have been provided against the profligate, although now common, abuse of the powers entrusted by Parliament to the Board of Woods and Forests. No new legislation was wanted to save many splendid tracts of forest land (over which the Crown then—and as well in 1845, as in 1800—possessed what might have been indestructible ‘forestal rights’), for public enjoyment for ever. Existing laws would have sufficed. But no blame on this score lies at the charge of the then Chief Justice in Eyre. Had Mr. Grenville, for example, ever conceived the idea of using the Forest Laws to preserve for the English people, we will say, Epping Forest, or any other like sylvan tract on this side of Trent, as a ‘People’s Park’ for ever, he would have been laughed at as a Quixote. If Parliament in 1870 is fast becoming alive to the misconduct of those ‘Commissioners’ who have dealt with the Forestal rights of the Crown exactly in the spirit of the pettiest of village shopkeepers, rather than in the spirit of Ministers of State, there was in Mr. Grenville’s time scarcely the faintest whisper of any such conviction of public duty in regard to that matter. Not one Member of Parliament, I think, had ever (at that time) pointed out the gross hypocrisy, as well as the folly, of selling by the hands of one public board and for a few pounds hundreds of acres of ancient and lovely woodlands, and then presently buying, by the hands of another public board, acres of dreary and almost unimprovable barrenness by the expenditure of several thousands of pounds, in order to provide new recreation grounds for ‘public enjoyment!’
Of that forestal Chief-Justiceship Mr. Grenville was the last holder. The office had been established by William the Conqueror. It was abolished by Queen Victoria. One of the chief pursuits of those forty years of retirement which ensued to the founder of the Grenville Library, upon the breaking up of the Grenville Administration of 1806, was book-buying and book-reading. ‘A great part of my Library’—so wrote Mr. Grenville, in 1845—‘has been purchased by the profits of a sinecure office given me by the Public.’ If that sinecure was not and, under the then circumstances, could not have been by its holder’s action or foresight, made the means of preserving for public enjoyment such of the ancient forests as, early in this century, were still intact in beauty, and also lay near to crowded and more or less unhealthy towns, it was at least made the means of giving to the nation a garden for the mind. ‘I feel it,’ continued Mr. Grenville, in his document of 1845, |Will of the Rt. Hon. T. Grenville; Oct., 1845.| ‘to be a debt and a duty that I should acknowledge my obligation by giving the Library so acquired to the British Museum for the use of the Public.’
Mr. T. Grenville’s intercourse with, and esteem for, Sir A. Panizzi.
I have had occasion, already, to mention that many years before his death Mr. Grenville formed a very high estimate of the eminent attainments and still more eminent public services of Sir A. Panizzi. No man had a better opportunity of knowing, intimately, the merits of the then Assistant-Keeper of the printed portion of our National Library. Mr. Grenville showed his estimate in a conclusive and very characteristic way. |Minutes of Inquiry, &c., 1848, and subsequent years, pp. 141, seqq.| He had earnestly supported (in the year 1835) the proposal of a Sub-committee of Trustees that Mr. Panizzi’s early services—more especially in relation to the cataloguing of what are known, at the Museum, as ‘the French Tracts,’ but also as to other labours—should be substantially recognised by an improvement of his salary. At a larger meeting, the recommendation of the smaller sub-committee was cordially adopted in the honorary point of view, but was set virtually aside, in respect to the ‘honorarium,’ That latter step Mr. Grenville so resented that he rose from the table, and never sat at a Trustee meeting again. |Minutes of Evidence, as above.| He many times afterwards visited the Museum; and I well remember the impression made upon my own mind by his noble appearance, at almost ninety years of age, on one of the latest of those visits—not very long before his death. But in the Committee Room he never once sat, during the last eleven years of his life.
Circumstances which marked the Gift to the Nation of the Grenville Library.
The fact being so, Readers unfamiliar with the ‘blue-books’ will learn without surprise that a conversation between Mr. Grenville and Mr. Panizzi, in Hamilton Place, was the prelude to his noble public gift of 1846. That conversation took place in the autumn of 1845. |Ibid.; and comp. p. 780 of the Minutes of 1849.| He, in the course of it, assured Mr. Panizzi (by that time at the head of the Printed Book Department) of his settled purpose, and evinced a desire that his Library should be preserved apart from the mass of the National Collection. He then remarked, ‘You will have a great many duplicate books, and you will sell them,’ speaking in a tone of inquiry. ‘No,’ replied Panizzi, the ‘Trustees will never sell books that are given to them.’ Mr. Grenville rejoined with an evident relief of mind, ‘Well, so much the better.’ Long afterwards, when visiting Mr. Panizzi in his private study, he asked the question—‘Where are you going to put my books? I see your rooms are already full.’ He was taken to the long, capacious, but certainly not very sightly, ‘slip,’ contrived by Sir R. Smirke on the eastern outskirt of the noble King’s Library. |See the Plan, hereafter.| ‘Well,’ was the Keeper’s reply, ‘if we can’t do better, we will put them here; and, as you see, my room is close by. Here, for a time, they will at least be under my own eye,’ The good and generous book-lover went away with a smile on his genial face, well assured that his books would be gratefully cared for.
The reception at the Museum of the Grenville Collection.