GREVILLE, Sir Charles John (1780-1836), of 15 Chesterfield Street , Middlesex

An army officer who had served in the Peninsula War, Greville, whose family were of ‘the high Tory party’, was first returned to Parliament after filling a vacancy at Warwick created by his elder brother’s succession as 3rd earl of Warwick in 1816.1The assembled Commons (1837), 84. He sat on the ‘Castle’ interest of his brother, whose anti-Catholic views he reflected in the unreformed House, until his opposition to the reform bill led to his ousting by a Whig at the 1831 general election.2‘Greville, Sir Charles’, HP Commons, 1820-1832, v. 420-1. His brother’s shameless use of bribery, treating, electoral fraud and intimidation ensured Greville’s return at the 1832 general election, but it came as no surprise when he was unseated on petition, 15 May 1833, by which time he had recorded votes in favour of currency reform and against the secret ballot, 24, 25 Apr. 1833.

Greville was, however, re-elected in first place at the 1835 general election, where he promised firm support for Peel’s new Conservative ministry, after colourfully describing the Whigs as a party who had ‘smothered themselves in their own dunghill’.3Warwickshire Advertiser, 10 Jan. 1835, qu. in Parliamentary test book for 1835 (1835), 72; Morn. Chro., 7 Jan. 1835. Greville, who is not known to have spoken in the reformed House, followed a Conservative line in the major divisions of the 1835 session, supporting Manners Sutton for the speakership, voting with Peel on the address, 19, 26 Feb. 1835, and opposing Russell’s Irish church resolutions, 2 Apr. 1835. ‘Severe indisposition’ prevented him attending to support Edward Stanley’s amendment to the Irish church bill, 3 June 1836, an indication of the deteriorating health that prompted his resignation in August 1836.4The Times, 5 Dec. 1836; The Standard, 6 June 1836. He was subsequently presented with an address of thanks by electors.5Worcester Guardian, qu. in Blackburn Standard, 21 Sept. 1836. Greville died in London that December, and his body was transported to Warwick, after passing his old regiment at Weedon, where a three gun salute was fired over his coffin. His funeral was a private affair, the mourners consisting of his brother and a handful of others.6Gent. Mag. (1837), i. 203. Although his parliamentary career was undistinguished, the Conservative diarist Raikes noted that Greville ‘was a good officer, [who] had served during all the campaigns in Spain and Portugal, & was a mild, amiable man’.7T. Raikes, Raikes journal (1857), iii. 90-1. Another who had met Greville and the earl, considered the former to be ‘the superior man of the two’.8C. Redding, Past celebrities whom I have known (1866), i. 146.