1755-1846. The son of George Grenville and Elizabeth Wyndham and the brother of Nugent Buckingham (family tree), Tom Grenville was a largely unsuccessful politician, an ill-fated diplomat and a remarkable bibliophile. 

• 1755: Born on 31 December
• Educated at Eton
• 1771: Matriculated at Christ Church Oxford on 9 December
• 1774: Entered Lincolns Inn
• Died on 17 December 1846 at Hamilton Place, Piccadilly. "He dined and went to sleep in a chair, and from that sleep he never awoke" (Greville).

Tom Grenville was occasionally lively in his youth (he took part in the Keppel riots of 1778) but overall, he was a mellow and scholarly man. Lord Auckland remembered:

I knew Tom Grenville at Eton very well; he was good-humoured and apparently of placid disposition, nothing particularly brilliant about him, and in scholarship and exercises extremus primorum extremis, &c. (Auckland I, page 332)

In politics and family, Tom was a a more popular, diplomatic and approachable man than his austere brother, William Wyndham. He often acted as a mediator. 

Tom was reputed by Greville to have fallen in love with Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire in his youth but he remained unmarried. Sylvester Douglas suggested that he was homosexual. Thomas Moore may have been hinting that that he had an affair with Richard Brinsley Sheridan beginning in 1772(?):

It was at first the intention of the elder Mr. Sheridan to send his daughters, in the course of this autumn, under the care of their brother Richard, to France. But, fearing to entrust them to a guardian who seemed so much in need of direction, he altered his plan, and about the beginning of October, having formed an engagement for the ensuing winter with the manager of the Dublin theatre, gave up his house at Bath, and set out with his daughters for Ireland. At the same time, Mr. Grenville (afterwards Marquis of Buckingham), who had passed a great deal of this and the preceding summer at Bath, for the purpose of receiving instruction from Mr Sheridan in elocution, went also to Dublin on a short visit, accompanied by Mr. Cleaver and his brother, Mr. Thomas Grenville—between whom and Richard Sheridan an intimacy had at this period commenced, which continued with uninterrupted cordiality ever after. [Memoirs of the Life of Right Honorable Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Volume 1.]

However, "intimacy" might equally suggest a non-sexual friendship.

Military

Grenville's military career was brief. On 18 May 1778, he joined army as Ensign in Coldstream Guards and in October 1779, he was appointed as lieutenant in the foot regiment (later known as 80th or Rutland regiment). He resigned these positions in February 1780. He told the House of Commons of his ill treatment in the military; he had been refused promotion four times, even when the Duke of Rutland offered him a captaincy in a new corps, because of political bias. However, it is difficult to imagine this scholarly, gentle man in a long-term military career.  

Politics

Tom Grenville from Courts and Cabinets of George III, V3

Tom Grenville was MP for Buckinghamshire from 1717 to 1784. He lost his seat in the dissolution of 1784 and was returned for Aldborough in 1790. In 1796, he was returned for Buckingham, which he held until 1810. On Richard Temple's elevation of the Lords in1813, Tom rather reluctantly stood for his Buckinghamshire seat and only attended parliament infrequently. 

Although he was under the patronage of his brother, Nugent Buckingham, and he was notionally a member of the Grenvillites, Tom Grenville was independent in his views and actions. He  joined with the leading Whig, James Fox, and the men became good friends. His liberal views were often in opposition to those of the Grenvillites but this did not diminish the affection between the Grenville brothers (George, Thomas and William Wyndham). Tom Grenville's amiability considerably eased the tensions between the Grenvillites and Foxites after their union of 1804. 

• 1782: Prime Minister Rockingham and James Fox selected Grenville to represent the British interest in negotiations with Benjamin Franklin to bring an end to the American Revolution (further details). The talks in Paris made some progress but Grenville was recalled at the death of Lord Rockingham. 
• 1783: Voted to censure his brother, Nugent Buckingham, for relaying messages from the King to the House of Lords on the East India Bill. 
• 1791: Proposed a motion against the Russian Armament; defeated 208 to 214. 
• 1793: Supported the Alien Bill, which permitted the King to order any foreigner out of the country at will.
• 1793: Supported William Pitt and the war against France alongside the 'old Whigs' and in opposition to Fox. 
• 1796: Sent with Earl Spencer as minister extraordinary to the court of Vienna. 
• 1798: Created a privy councillor. 
• 1798: June. Refused post of Chief Secretary of Ireland. 
• 1799: Appointed special ambassador to Berlin with the aim of proposing an alliance with Prussia against Napoleon and France. The mission was ill-fated. His first ship was driven back by ice and his second ship, the Prosperpine, was wrecked off Newerke Island on the Elbew with the loss of several of the crew. Grenville escaped with difficulty losing all but his dispatches. During this delay, the French persuaded the king of Prussia to remain neutral and Grenville's mission failed. (See letters from Henry Watkins Williams Wynne).
• 1800: If negotiations had commenced with France after the battle of Marengo, George III had wished Thomas Grenville to conduct them. 
• 1801-04: Opposed the Addington administration
• 1802: Opposed Treaty of Amiens. 
• 1805: Voted for the prosecution of Lord Melville for misappropriation of public monies.  Nothing more than negligence was found and Melville was acquitted.
• 1806-07: President of the Board of Control and First Lord of the Admiralty.
• 1807: Withdrew from public life in March, voting only three times thereafter: in favour of catholic emancipation; for the repeal of income tax; in support of his nephew Charles Watkin Williams Wynn becoming speaker. 
• 1818: Retired from Parliament. 

Politics

James Sack summed up Tom's failure of political potential:

One of the great disappointments of Grenville’s experience as a party leader was the failure of Thomas Grenville to emerge as a successful House of Commons man. When Francis Horner first heard Thomas speak in the Commons in 1804, at a period when he was making an effort to take a decided part in the debates, he confided to a friend: “He is very sensible, distinct and acute in his manner; but after the first twenty minutes, his delivery becomes unpleasant. His indiscriminate emphasis… comes to no more effect in one respect, than no emphasis at all… at the same time… your attention is fretted and worried by… misplaced phrases & emphasis upon nothings.” During the Talents Ministry, it became obvious to friends and enemies of the Administration that Thomas Grenville’s lack of attendance, his ineffective debating when he did attend, and his surface coldness of character precluded him from occupying the one role his brother desired him to play, that of leader of the Grenvillites in the House of Commons. Lord Grenville himself, by the conclusion of his Ministry, finally faced this fact. At the general election of 1807, Thomas even desired to retire from Parliament and unsuccessfully requested that the Marquis of Buckingham give his seat to George Tierney. (Sack, page 99)

Thomas Grenville was a member of Brooks's Club from 1779 to 1794. Also an early member of the Whig Club. 

Finance

• Tom received £1200 a year from his brother Nugent Buckingham (Beckett). Sack suggests this comprised £600 from a charge on Nugent Buckingham's estates and £600 as a gift from Buckingham. Part of the latter was secured from William Henry Fremantle's fees as Deputy Teller. 
• In 1800, he received the sinecure office of Chief Justice in Eyre, south of Trent, with a salary of £2,316. Grenville was the last to be appointed to this post which was abolished in 1817. 
• James Grenville, Lord Glastonbury, left Tom all his landed and rented property on his death in 1825, with the remainder to the Reverend Neville of Windsor. Tom immediately gave the landed property to Neville. 

Bibliophile

Grenville was an avid collector of books, and began collecting early in life. "He was wont to say that when in the guards he bid at a sale against a whole bench of bishops for some scarce edition of the bible" (quoted in DNB). 

Although a Trustee of the British Museum, he had originally bequeathed his library to the Duke of Buckingham. He revoked this request in a codicil, stating that as his book has in great part acquired from a sinecure office, he felt it right to leave them to the Museum, and to leave only a few manuscripts to the Duke:

The impression of debt & obligation which I owe the publick has recently but irresistibly overpowered in my mind all other considerations. (Thomas Grenville to the Richard Chandos; 25 October 1845. Quoted in Sack, p41.)

He bequeathed, approximately 16,000 works (in 20,240 volumes) to the British Museum, including:

• printed books from the 15th to 19th centuries
• copies of Gutenberg's 42-line Bible (1454/5) 
• Shakespeare's First Folio (1623)
• second Caxton edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The contemporary value of the collection was more than £50,000. 

• Description of his book collection.

Leighton on Tom Grenville

In Thomas, the second brother, the Wyndham strain was perhaps more clearly marked than in the other members of the family. He was Charlotte’s favourite brother, and “Uncle Tom” became the counsellor and confidant of the whole party at Wynnstay. He entered Parliament as a follower of Mr. Fox in 1779, and was employed on short missions abroad; in 1798 he was sworn a member of the Privy Council, but his powers were social rather than political, and his tastes those of a scholar than of a statesman. The famous Lady Bessborough,[1] in a letter to Lord Granville Leveson Gower, hints of his universal popularity. In 1799 he narrowly escaped from drowning on his way to Berlin in charge of a mission, accompanied by Henry, Charlotte’s youngest son, and Lady Bessborough writes as follows of this event:

Grenville is safe, thank God. The general anxiety about him, and joy for his safety must be very flattering to him if he ever knows it, It was the highest of all honours, the homage paid to worth, for had either of his Brothers been in the same situation, neither their titles, their riches, or their places, would have gained them half the interest that was shown for him.

Thomas Grenville’s public life practically closed in 1807, though he did not retire from Parliament until 1818. He held the sinecure office (carrying with it a salary of £2,000 a year) of Chief Justice in Eyre, and in his brother’s Cabinet (1806–7) he was made successively President of the Board of Control and First Lord of the Admiralty. Two great social reforms were dear to his heart: the abolition of the slave trade, which he saw accomplished in l806–7 during his own term of office, and the emancipation of the Roman Catholics, the rock on which the Grenville Ministry was wrecked, but which was successfully carried through Parliament, by the Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel, twenty-one years later.

"Uncle Tom’s hobby-horse” mentioned in the letters, his collection of books, an occupation and interest begun early in life, culminated in the bequest to the nation of a library of over 20,000 rare editions at his death in 1846. Most of the volumes in the Grenville library, now in the British Museum, contain a slip of paper on which he has written some indication or note of the history of their acquisition.

He outlived all his brothers and sisters, but in his old age he reaped, in the affection and regard of his sister’s children, what in earlier days he had sown by his unfailing sympathy and kindliness. “Uncle Tom” was always a name to conjure with amongst the numerous nephews and nieces and great-nephews and great-nieces, and the tradition of his gracious and intellectual personality has descended even to the third generation now living in the twentieth century.

[1] Lady Bessborough and Lord Granville Leveson-Gower’s private Correspondence, pub. 1916.

Portraits

Click for a larger image where available.

	Thomas Grenville by Zoffany
	Thomas Grenville by [Hoppner?] 1830

Sources

DNB. Beckett. Leighton.