GRENVILLE (GRANVILLE), Richard (1612-66), of Wotton Underwood, Bucks.

Writing in the late 1650s, Richard Grenville claimed that his family had owned most of the land at Wotton Underwood ‘for divers hundreds of years’.23‘Wotton Underwood in 1657’, 136. This was true. The Grenvilles had owned estates in Buckinghamshire since the twelfth century and had held the manor of Wotton since the thirteenth century.24J. Beckett, The Rise and Fall of the Grenvilles (Manchester, 1994), 9-10. That said, Grenville did not regard those lands as especially valuable. He wrote of Wotton Underwood that

it lieth in the very depth of the Vale of Aylesbury in an exceeding dirty clay soil, and altogether some of the enclosed pastures are indifferent good ground, yet are the enclosed woods very bad for wood by reason of their wetness and coldness; and common fields, common meadows, the land and other commonable wastes are generally very wet and cold land, and much annoyed with winter floods.25‘Wotton Underwood in 1657’, 134-5.

Grenville inherited these lands aged 15 when his father died in 1628.26VCH Bucks. iv. 131. His mother subsequently married a rising barrister from another Buckinghamshire family, Thomas Tyrrell*.27Lipscombe, Buckingham. iv. 175. This may have influenced Grenville’s choice of career. Shortly before his father’s death, Grenville had been admitted as a student at the Inner Temple, the inn of court of which Tyrrell also happened to be a member.28I. Temple database. Called to the bar in 1635, Grenville probably never became as successful a lawyer as his stepfather, but the likelihood is that he did practise the law during the late 1630s.29CITR ii. 226. Meanwhile, he extended his estates by acquiring the manor of Ashendon in the neighbouring parish to Wotton Underwood in 1632.30VCH Bucks. iv. 4. Seven years later he appointed Tyrrell, together with Tyrrell’s nephew, Edmund West*, as trustees to manage his Buckinghamshire lands.31PROB11/320/115.

Grenville was propelled into county politics in 1641 when he was appointed sheriff of Buckinghamshire.32List of Sheriffs, 9. When reports arrived of a planned meeting at Kingston-upon-Thames in January 1642 following the king’s attempted arrest of the Five Members, Grenville’s initial instinct was to raise forces in Buckinghamshire to prevent it. He was deterred from acting only by an order from the Commons advising that the matter was being dealt with anyway.33Stowe 188, f. 1. The more mundane side of the job was tax collection. In the spring of 1642 it fell to him to organise the collection of the loans raised to assist in the planned campaign against the Irish rebels. Grenville’s surviving accounts show that he managed to raise a total of £1,098 12s 10½d.34Bucks. Contributions for Ireland, 1-109. This made him one of the more successful collectors of that loan.35Bucks. Contributions for Ireland, p. x. It helped that he had the assistance of a number of enthusiastic friends and colleagues, including John Hampden* and Arthur Goodwin*.36Stowe 188, ff. 5, 7. Surviving notes on how Sir Alexander Denton* had allocated the Ship Money payments throughout the county during his shrievalty four years previously were probably compiled by Grenville at about this time to help him decide on the assessment allocations.37Ship Money Pprs. ed. C.G. Bonsey and J.G. Jenkins (Bucks. Rec. Soc. xiii), 91-110.

Grenville was still sheriff when the civil war broke out. Attempted neutrality was therefore not an option. But he is likely to have been a strong supporter of Parliament anyway. He was among the group of Buckinghamshire gentlemen who met at Aylesbury on 17 June 1642 to form a committee to take over county administration.38Nugent, Hampden, ii. 458. Then, like his stepfather, he was one of the pro-parliamentarian deputy lieutenants appointed the following month and he quickly raised his own troop of horse for Parliament’s army.39Whitelocke, Diary, 131 and n; SP28/1a, f. 184; BHO, Cromwell Assoc. database. That troop was then placed under the command of Goodwin. Their immediate task was to secure control of Buckinghamshire. Grenville was one of the deputy lieutenants to whom Hampden wrote in late October 1642, after the king had taken control of Oxford, warning them that a royalist attack on the county might follow.40Nugent, Hampden, ii. 318-19. Their prompt action helped deter that attack and the lands between Oxford and Aylesbury became a crucial battleground fought over repeatedly during the next few years. Wotton Underwood lay right in the middle of that disputed territory. A major strongpoint in the area was the fort constructed by the royalist forces at Brill, less than three miles from Wotton. Grenville was therefore the obvious choice to assist Hampden and Goodwin in their attack on the fort in late January 1643. That attack, which took place on 27 January, went badly wrong and Grenville was wounded in the stomach. Initial reports claimed that he had been killed.41Mercurius Aulicus no. 4 (22-28 Jan. 1643), 52-3 (E.246.9); no. 5 (29 Jan.-4 Feb. 1643), 1-2 (E.246.16).

For how long this put him out of action is not clear. The assumption must be that during the rest of 1643 and in early 1644 he and his men continued to operate in and around Aylesbury. When, in early June 1644, the king marched from Worcester back into Oxfordshire and so threatened Buckinghamshire, Grenville was one of the army officers ordered to assemble his forces at Aylesbury. His commander, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, also hoped that Grenville would be able to raise additional mounted forces.42CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 215, 220, 251. Several weeks later, in the aftermath of the king’s victory at Cropredy Bridge, Grenville was ordered to move his troops to Greensland, presumably to protect the Thames crossing at Henley.43CSP Dom. 1644, p. 325. The following month he and his stepbrother, Captain Thomas Tyrrell, were stationed in Berkshire.44CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 394, 396, 422. Most of Grenville’s men probably remained for the remainder of the year at Abingdon, from whence there were several reports of them being discontented because of lack of pay.45CSP Dom. 1644, p. 527; 1644-5, p. 205. In early March 1645 Grenville and Tyrrell were instructed to march their men to Coventry, but within weeks Grenville was told to march them back to Abingdon. He was then to place them under the command of the governor of the town, Richard Browne II*.46CSP Dom. 1644-5, pp. 336-7, 386. This was the preliminary to their incorporation into the New Model army and, as such, marked the point at which Grenville ceased to be an army officer.

It has been claimed that Grenville spent the years following the civil war in retirement compiling genealogical records on the history of his family.47T. Moule, Bibliotheca Heraldica Magnae Britanniae (1822), 564. This is clearly an oversimplification, for during those years he remained active as a supporter of Parliament at a local level. In late 1646 and early 1647 he and Sir Richard Pigott* organised the assessment collections in the Ashendon hundred.48SP28/148, ff. 73-95. It was not until 1653 that he was removed from the commission of the peace.49C231/6, p. 259. As for his antiquarian research, little evidence survives, probably because many of his papers were destroyed when Wotton House burned down in the nineteenth century.50Beckett, Rise and Fall of the Grenvilles, 10. Those papers in the Stowe manuscripts of the British Library which belonged to him are annotated in his hand, suggesting that he took care to keep his archives in good order.51Stowe 188. In the summer of 1649 he commissioned a survey of his estates. This later provided the basis for his terrier of the lands at Wotton that has already been quoted above.52‘Wotton Underwood in 1657’, 133-48. Another of the landowners at Wotton had been the archbishop of Canterbury. Since confiscated by Parliament, that property had been bought by the late Sir Robert Honywood. Grenville acquired these lands from Sir Robert’s son in 1655.53‘Wotton Underwood in 1657’, 139-40. These years also saw changes in Grenville’s personal life, for his first wife died in 1647 giving birth to their only son, Richard junior. He then remarried, choosing as his new wife Eleanor Tyrrell, daughter of Sir Timothy Tyrrell and thus his stepfather’s niece.54Collins’ Peerage, ii. 409; Foster, Peerage, 100.

Grenville had continued to hold local office under the republic and the protectorate, remaining a prominent county figure. His election as one of the five MPs for Buckinghamshire in 1654 was therefore not unexpected. Little is known of his activities in the 1654 Parliament. He was named to only one committee – privileges – and seems not to have spoken in any of the debates.55CJ vii. 366b. His re-election in August 1656 was probably straightforward enough.56Whitelocke, Diary, 447. Problems only arose after he had been endorsed by the Buckinghamshire electors, for he was then one of the MPs prevented from taking their seats by order of the protectoral council.57CJ vii. 425b. It may be that he was seen as a potential opponent of the protectorate, although quite why he had given that impression remains unclear. Allowed to take his seat in the second session in early 1658, he was no more active than he had been four years before, for he was included only on the committee considering the bill for the repair of highways.58CJ vii. 592a. Elected as a Buckinghamshire MP for a third successive time in 1659, he barely improved on his record of apparent inactivity, managing to be named to only three committees, although they did include the committee for privileges and the committee preparing the declaration about the excise.59CJ vii. 595a, 639a. His silence in this Parliament contrasts sharply with the garrulousness displayed by his stepfather.

Grenville continued to serve as a justice of peace after the Restoration, so any doubts he may have had about the return of the king were kept to himself. That he served as one of the stewards for the reader’s dinner at the Inner Temple in 1662 suggests that he had not completely abandoned his links with the London legal world.60CITR iii. 9. He died in January 1666 aged only 53 and was then buried in the church at Wotton Underwood.61Lipscombe, Buckingham. i. 612. Sir Timothy Tyrrell, Sir Peter Tyrrell† (Grenville’s stepbrother) and Sir Richard Pigott acted as his executors, administering the estates until Grenville’s son, Richard junior, came of age six years later.62PROB11/320/115. The Grenvilles would go on to become one of the great aristocratic dynasties of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What more than anything else transformed their fortunes from a county family into perhaps the leading noble dynasty in the land was the marriage in 1710 of this MP’s grandson, Richard Grenville† (1678-1727), to Temple’s granddaughter, Hester Temple.63HP Commons 1715-1754. Three of their descendants, George Grenville† (1712-70), William Wyndham Grenville†, Lord Grenville (1759-1843) and William Pitt† the younger would become prime minister.