His brother, another Sir Richard, was a Cavalier, too, and a Grenville to the backbone; hated by his men for his iron discipline—“no doubt,”
says Clarendon, “the man had behaved himself with great pride and tyranny over them”—he was even more intolerable to his superiors; he flatly refused to act under Hopton, and drove the Prince of Wales to imprison him in despair. A more attractive, but still characteristic, member of the family was Bevil’s son, Denis, Archdeacon of Durham, whom we find, after James II had already fled the kingdom, preaching in the midst of his enemies “a seasonable loyall Sermon”; collecting a war fund from the prebendaries for his fallen sovereign; bolting to Scotland on horseback; captured, but escaping to France; coming back incognito and escaping again. Ardent Jacobite and equally ardent Protestant, he defied the Court at St Germain to convert him to Romanism, and when they would
not allow him to read the English Service, consoled himself by publishing at Rouen a manifesto with the exquisite title of “The Resigned and Resolved Christian and Faithful and Undaunted Royalist in two plain farewell Sermons and a loyal farewell Visitation Speech.”
It must be admitted that even so late as the eighteenth century—the Venerable Denis lived till 1703—these gentlemen were the opposite of tame; even when they were “Resigned” they were at the same time “Resolved” and “Undaunted.” This is even more true of their fourteenth-century ancestor, Sir Theobald, the first Grenville of whom I have found anything essential to relate. He, at the age of twenty-two, thought fit to rebel against the paternal despotism of John Grandison, Bishop of Exeter, who had
