Colonial Despatches

Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, Granville spent time in Paris during the 1830s when his father was British ambassador, during which period he gained the nickname, “Pussy.”1 He entered the House of Commons in 1831, became a peer in 1846, and joined the whig cabinet for the first time in 1851 as post-master general.2 Appointed secretary of state for the colonies in 1868, Granville settled terms and compensation for the transfer of Rupert's Land to Canada, but his dilatoriness played a role in sparking the Riel Resistance of 1870.3 His successor, Earl Kimberley, lamented that he seems never to give himself the trouble to reason out any matter completely, and he is singularly ignorant of the details of the questions he has to deal with…. Besides being deaf, [he] has a slipshod way of doing business.4 Perhaps because of his administrative failings, Granville authorized the undersecretaries to sign routine dispatches for him, which relieved the secretary of state of needless work.5 As foreign secretary during parts of the 1870s and 1880s, he struggled to carry out Gladstone's policies in the face of German and Russian demands.6

• 1. Muriel E. Chamberlain, Gower, Granville George Leveson-, second Earl Granville, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
• 2. Ibid.
• 3. A. S. Morton, A History of the Canadian West, 2nd ed., (Toronto: UTP, 1973), 848-50, 895, 901.
• 4. E. E. Rich, The History of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1670-1870, vol. 2: 1763-1870 (London: Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1959), 884.
• 5. R. Blakeley, The Colonial Office 1868-1892, (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1972), 22-23.
• 6. Muriel E. Chamberlain, Gower, Granville George Leveson-, second Earl Granville, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.