cr. 13 Mar. 1703 Bar. GRANVILLE OF POTHERIDGE
First sat 22 Apr. 1703; last sat 1 Dec. 1707
MP Launceston 1685-7, Plymouth 10 July 1689-98, Newport 1698-1700, Fowey Feb.-Nov. 1701, Cornwall Dec. 1701-13 Mar. 1703
b. 12 Apr. 1665, 2nd s. of John Granville, earl of Bath, and Jane Wyche; bro. of Charles Granville, styled Ld. Lansdown (later 2nd earl of Bath); nephew of Bernard Granville‡ (d.1701); cos. of Bevill‡ and Bernard Granville‡; stepfather of Henry Somerset, 2nd duke of Beaufort; uncle of John Leveson Gower, later Bar. Gower, and of John Carteret, 2nd Bar. (later Earl Granville). educ. Christ Church, Oxf. 1680; DCL 1706. m. 15 Apr. 1703, Rebecca, da. of Sir Josiah Child, bt. and 2nd w. Mary Atwood, wid. of Charles Somerset‡, styled mq. of Worcester; sis. of Sir Josiah Child, 2nd bt.‡ and Sir Richard Child, 3rd bt.‡, s.p. ?suc. fa. at Potheridge 1701. d. 3 Dec. 1707; will 20 Aug. 1703, pr. Mar. 1708.
Commr. of public accts. 1696–7; PC 18 June 1702–22 May 1707; lt. gen. of the Ordnance June 1702–May 1705; ranger of St James’s Park Mar. 1703–d; gov. Q. Anne’s Bounty 1704.
Capt. earl of Bath’s regt. (later 10th Ft.) by 1687–Dec. 1688; capt. and brevet col. 1 Ft. Gds. ?1689–90; capt. RN 1689–Dec. 1690.
Commr. assessment, Devon 1690; freeman, Plympton Erle 1685; gov. Deal by Apr.–Dec. 1690; recorder, Launceston 1701–d.; ld. warden of the stannaries and steward of the duchy of Cornw. (jt.) 1701–2, (sole) 1702–5; ld. lt. and custos rot. Cornw. 1702–5.
ld. proprietor of Carolina 1701–d.
John Granville made his mark in the Commons as something of a renegade Tory, often acting in alliance with his father and the extensive but somewhat loose west country Granville connection to embarrass the government of William III in an attempt to force the payment of the rewards (financial and honorific) that Bath believed, with some justification, to be his due. The death of his father in 1701, closely followed by the suicide of his older brother left Granville as the senior adult in the family, as his nephew, William Henry Granville, 3rd earl of Bath, was still a young child. His leadership of the family did not go unchallenged. The young earl’s maternal relatives gained guardianship and control of his estates, which were entangled in an intricate web of litigation resulting from the long-standing disputes over the Albemarle inheritance and complicated still further by his father’s decision to include the disputed properties in the disposition of his own estates. During his lifetime, Granville was involved in several suits over the Albemarle estate; the various disputes were still unresolved at his death.1
Granville had extensive connections to the political elite. In addition to those listed in the heading above, his niece Jane was married to Henry Hyde, styled Viscount Cornbury, later 2nd earl of Rochester and 4th earl of Clarendon. He was also a close ally of Robert Harley, the future earl of Oxford. His Toryism was of a brand that meant his political career was often tainted by suspicions of Jacobitism. A prominent member of the Commons, he was active in pursuing the impeachments of the Whig lords and at one point was considered a candidate for the Speakership. The accession of Queen Anne revived Tory political fortunes in general and Granville’s in particular. He began to acquire local offices, including the lord lieutenancy and the influential post of steward of the duchy of Cornwall, although not, despite lobbying for it, the post of governor of Plymouth, which was held by his local rival, Charles Trelawny‡ (younger brother of Jonathan Trelawny, the then bishop of Exeter). In 1703 he received the peerage that he thought he deserved and that he needed to bolster his local influence. Potheridge was the ancestral home of the dukes of Albemarle so its use as the territorial appellation for the new peerage underlined the Granville claims to that inheritance, even though possession of the property itself was disputed. Within a month of his promotion he had married the widowed Lady Worcester, thus strengthening both his Tory connections and his fortune.
Granville took his seat at the earliest opportunity, an inter-sessional prorogation day, introduced between John West, 6th Baron De la Warr, and William Legge, 2nd Baron (later earl of) Dartmouth. On that day he acted as one of the commissioners charged with proroguing the Parliament. He went on to attend as a commissioner on a further three of the four remaining prorogation days before the beginning of the session on 9 Nov. 1703, when he was named to the usual sessional committees. Thereafter he was present on just under 83 per cent of sitting days, rapidly becoming one of the most active peers. On 10 Nov. he was named to the committee to draw the address. On 22 Nov. he began the process of obtaining a bill to enable trustees to administer the estates of the young earl of Bath; when the bill was given its second reading on 29 Nov. he was himself named to the select committee to consider it. Along with others present in the chamber he was also named as a matter of routine to several other committees during the course of the session. On 6 Dec., together with De la Warr he introduced his nephew, the newly ennobled John Leveson Gower, as Baron Gower. Not surprisingly, since he had been an avid supporter of the bill in the Commons and was in the process of encouraging similar legislation in Carolina, where he was one of the lords proprietors, all the surviving lists indicate that Granville would support the bill to prevent occasional conformity and on 14 Dec. he signed two dissents objecting to its failure. Four days later he was named to the select committee to draw the address in response the queen’s speech of the previous day referring to the alleged ‘Scotch Plot’. That day he was also named to the small select committee to examine the ballots for membership of the secret committee to examine the conspirators, Boucher and Ogleby. Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham included him in a list he drew up in 1704 of members of both Houses which might indicate his support for him over the plot.
On 14 Jan. 1704 Granville entered a dissent to the resolution to reverse the judgment in the case of the Aylesbury men. On 29 Feb. he was a teller in the division over the case of Scott v Hilton. The Scotch plot continued to exercise him: he entered a dissent on 1 Mar. to the resolution to retain words in the address to the crown for a pardon for Boucher ‘that he may have no hopes given him for a pardon’ without making a full confession of his knowledge of conspiracies involving France against William III, Queen Anne, or the Protestant succession. On 3 Mar. he entered another dissent to the resolution that the key to the ‘Gibberish letters’ be made known only to the Queen and members of the Lords’ committee investigating the plot. The same day he also chaired the committee of the whole that discussed the bill to allow extra time for payments by the purchasers of forfeited estates in Ireland, and was a teller on 13 Mar. for the division in a committee of the whole on the first fruits and tenths bill. He entered two further dissents on 16 Mar., this time over the decision of the House to support the Whig initiative to remove Robert Byerley‡ from the list of commissioners named in the bill for public accompts. On 20 Mar. he chaired a committee of the whole considering the bill for the discharge of imprisoned insolvent debtors on condition of serving the queen in the army or navy.
The following day he entered three dissents during the third reading of the bill for raising recruits for the land service and marines, particularly objecting to the implications of the bill for local poor relief and the failure to include a clause that would require the consent of the churchwardens and overseers of the poor to the conscription of individuals as soldiers. On 25 Mar. the House took up the question of the Scotch plot once more, voting that Robert Ferguson’s two narratives were seditious and tended ‘to create an ill opinion of Her Majesty of her good subjects, and to promote the interest of the pretended Prince of Wales’. Granville again dissented, first at the resolution to put the question that the failure to censure Ferguson amounted to an encouragement to the queen’s enemies and then, when the question was put and carried, to the resolution itself. After the end of the session, on 4 July 1704, he was again present as one of the commissioners when the House was further prorogued.
Granville was present for the opening of the 1704–5 session but was then absent for nearly a month, covering this with a proxy to Francis Seymour Conway, Baron Conway. He himself held Gower’s proxy from 15 Oct. 1704 until it was vacated by Gower’s presence on 7 Feb. 1705. His attendance over the rest of the session was not as regular as it had been in 1703–4: overall he attended on just under 52 per cent of sitting days. The major issue of that autumn and winter was yet another attempt to pass an act against occasional conformity. Granville, still deeply committed to the bill, entered two dissents on 15 Dec. at its failure. On 17 Jan. 1705 another bill for the management of the young earl of Bath’s estate was brought to the House. Granville and several of his Tory allies entered a protest against its first reading, arguing,
that the main foundation and greatest motive for the legislative authority to intermeddle in the settlement of private men’s estates, is the desire and free consent of all parties concerned in the said settlement first had and obtained and the Lord Granville, next heir to the present earl of Bath, having, in his place in this House, declared ‘that he conceived his interest in that estate, to be prejudiced by this bill, and that he could by no means give his consent to it’.
Meanwhile the disputes over the Aylesbury men continued and on 27 Feb. 1705 Granville was named to the committee to draw up heads for the forthcoming conference with the Commons on the subject.
Throughout the session the Duumvirs – John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, and Sidney Godolphin, Baron (later earl of) Godolphin – had been working behind the scenes against the occasional conformity bill; at the end of the session its most vociferous supporters, including Granville, were removed from office. For this Granville blamed Marlborough, but Marlborough told his duchess that ‘I am so ignorant that I did not know that he was out of his place’, blaming Godolphin, who was closely associated with Granville’s local rivals, the Trelawnys, and ‘who has been desirous to have it done all this winter’.2 At or about this time an analysis of the peerage in relation to the succession deemed Granville to be a Jacobite.
During the 1705–6 session Granville’s attendance rose to 68 per cent. The defence of the Church of England was still his major political objective and on 30 Nov. 1705 he entered a protest at the failure to instruct the committee of the whole considering the bill for securing her majesty’s person (better known as the Regency Act) to insert a clause that would prevent the repeal of the Act of Uniformity; he had earlier acted as teller for the proposition. Then on 3 Dec., despite his reputed Jacobite leanings, he entered three protests at the failure to prevent the lords justices from giving the royal assent to the repeal of what he and his fellow protesters deemed to be the crucial statutes for the preservation of the Protestant religion and the rights and liberties of the subjects of England. These were the Habeas Corpus Act, the Toleration Act, the Triennial Act, the Treason Trials Act, the Test Acts, and the Act of Succession. When the bill passed he protested against that too, though he disassociated himself from the first of the reasons given, which amounted to a revival of the proposal, so inimical to the queen, that her Hanoverian heir be invited to reside in Britain. Three days later, on 6 Dec., he entered another protest, this time at the resolution to agree that the Church was not in danger. On 31 Jan. he entered three further dissents, also to the Regency bill, but this time concerning the House’s decision to alter amendments suggested by the Commons. He held the proxy of his stepson, Beaufort, from 26 Feb. until it was vacated by Beaufort’s presence on 18 Mar. 1706. On 9 Mar. he entered a dissent to the resolution to agree with the Commons that Sir Rowland Gwynne’s Letter was a scandalous, false, and malicious libel.
On that day the House also took into consideration complaints about the government of Carolina that had first been brought to its attention on 18 Feb. 1706. Preliminary discussions of the issue on 2 Mar. had generated a ‘warm’ debate and brought to light what William Wake, then bishop of Lincoln (later archbishop of Canterbury), described as ‘a very foul business’.3 Political life in Carolina had been dominated by Dissenters but, as the senior proprietor, Granville saw it as his responsibility to promote Anglican worship. In 1704 his high Tory nominee as governor, Sir Nathaniel Johnson‡, used a packed session of the Assembly to pass an act (the Exclusion Act) that not only mirrored the requirements of the English Test Acts but included provisions to prevent occasional conformity, thereby excluding Dissenters from public office. He also secured an act (the Church Act) making the Anglican Church the established church of Carolina. Both acts had been ratified by Granville; both had provided propaganda material for opponents of the occasional conformity bill, most notably in Defoe’s 1705 pamphlet Party Tyranny, or an Occasional Bill in Miniature; As Now Practised in Carolina.
The debate on 9 Mar. was a long one: the House sat until 6 p.m.4 Having heard counsel on both sides, the House resolved that the Church Act was not warranted by the Carolina charter and was ‘not consonant to reason, repugnant to the laws of this realm and destructive to the constitution of the Church of England’. It declared that the Exclusion Act was ‘an encouragement to atheism and irreligion … destructive to trade and tendeth to the depopulating and ruining the said province’ and went on to resolve in favour of an address to the queen imploring her to deliver Carolina ‘from the arbitrary oppressions under which it lies and to order the authors thereof to be prosecuted according to law’. Not surprisingly the peers named to the committee to draw the address were overwhelmingly associated with the Junto Whigs. Granville was present on 12 Mar. when the text of the proposed address, with its transparent attack on his conduct, was agreed by the House. Given the comprehensive success of the Whigs’ revenge, his attendance as a commissioner on the inter-sessional prorogation day, 21 May, was perhaps something of an act of bravado.
Granville missed the first two months of the 1706–7 session, not arriving in the House until 3 Feb. 1707, after which he rarely missed a day. The initial long absence, however, meant that overall his attendance was only just over 51 per cent. His absence was covered by a proxy to Beaufort; on arrival he held Gower’s proxy. On his first day in the House he entered a protest against the failure to instruct the committee of the whole to whom the bill for securing the Church of England was entrusted, to insert a clause declaring the Test Act of 1673 perpetual and unalterable. Later that month, on 27 Feb., he dissented to all the resolutions for a union with Scotland. On 3 Mar. he acted as teller opposite the Whig Charles Mohun, 4th Baron Mohun, in a division on the first enacting clause in the Union bill. The following day he entered a dissent to the failure of the resolution to declare that nothing in the Union bill should be construed to be an acknowledgment of the truth of Presbyterian worship, or that the Church of Scotland was the true Protestant religion. He then went on to protest the passage of the bill in its entirety. On 27 Mar. he was named as one of the managers of the conference with the Commons on the Fornhill and Stony Stratford highways bill, and on 8 Apr. as one of the managers of the conference on the vagrants bill. The very short session of Apr. 1707 saw him present on five of the nine sitting days. Shortly after the session ended, Godolphin reported that at the first meeting of the privy council after the Union the queen had left out a swathe of Tory peers, including Granville.5
In July 1707, during the recess, Granville suffered a fit of apoplexy, followed by convulsions. His condition was so serious that it was thought that ‘he can never be perfectly well again’ but his health had improved by August.6 He was still weak when he wrote to Harley in September explaining that,
The town of Monmouth having sent up to me their humble address to her majesty at a time when my ill health will not give me leave to go so long a journey as to Windsor, and if I were able I am afraid I am not well at court to have anything there graciously received from so uncertain a hand, therefore that my neighbours may in no manner suffer by the misfortune of their ill chosen agent, I beg of you the favour to be so kind both to them and me as to present to her majesty this their humble and loyal address, and that you will believe that (however I may be misrepresented or misunderstood) I ever was and ever shall be, whatever usage I meet with, a dutiful and loyal subject of the queen and a hearty wellwisher to her majesty’s prosperity and that of my country …7
He was also well enough to write a stern letter to Gower the same day, berating him for his attitude to the projected marriage of Gower’s nephew, Sir William Wyndham‡.8
Ill health perhaps explains why Granville missed the initial two days of the first session of the first Parliament of Great Britain; however, he was then present on all but two days, until his last attendance on 1 Dec. 1707. He was as usual named to a number of committees as a matter of course but he was also named to two genuinely select committees. On 17 Nov. he was named to the committee to consider the petition and appeal of Sarah, dowager countess of Radnor, against Sir Richard Child‡. There was a clear personal interest here since the Radnors were local rivals in the west country and Sir Richard Child (later Viscount Castlemaine [I] and later still Earl Tylney [I]) was his brother-in-law. On 21 Nov. he was named to the committee to consider the standing order concerning the presence of sons of peers in the House. He died of apoplexy on 3 Dec. 1707; his honours died with him.9
R.P.- 1 HMC Lords, n.s. viii. 316–19.
- 2 Marlborough–Godolphin Corresp. 423.
- 3 LPL, ms 1770 (Wake’s diary), f. 12v.
- 4 Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 24.
- 5 Marlborough–Godolphin Corresp. 787–8.
- 6 Add. 61164, f. 179; Add. 70288, G. Granville to R. Harley, 2 Aug. 1707.
- 7 Add. 70288, Granville to [Robert Harley], 4 Sept. 1707.
- 8 Staffs RO, Sutherland mss, D868/6/24b.
- 9 Luttrell, Brief Relation, vi. 241.