page_title: George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne / Career
caption_attribution_description: English: A portrait of George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, from “A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors,” by Horatio Walpole.
context_page_description: George Granville, 1st Baron Lansdowne PC, of Stowe, Cornwall, was an English Tory politician who sat in the English and British House of Commons from 1702 until 1712, when he was raised to the peerage as Baron Lansdown and sat in the House of Lords. He was Secretary at War during the Harley administration from 1710 to 1712. He was also a noted poet and made a name for himself with verses composed on the visit of Mary of Modena, then Duchess of York, while he was at Cambridge in 1677. He was also playwright, following in the style of John Dryden.
context_section_description: Granville  was sent to France at the age of ten, with his tutor, William Ellis, who was a proponent of passive resistance and later a servant of James II at St  Germain.  He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1677. Among his productions while there were poems welcoming Mary of Modena when she visited the university. In 1682, he went to Paris with his brother Sir Bevill Granville, where they studied fencing, riding, dancing,  mathematics and   military science.  He stayed in France until 1687, accumulating a  £500 debt. He then lived  in England at his mother's house at Marr, near Doncaster. His early interests were literary and by the mid-1690s he had befriended John Dryden and begun to write plays. He wrote an undistinguished comedy of manners entitled The She Gallants, which was staged unsuccessfully in 1695. His adult plays bear the marks of Dryden's influence. The Heroick Love is taken from the first book of Homer's Iliad. Granville also followed Dryden in adapting Shakespeare and Granville's The Jew of Venice (1701) was a successful updating of The Merchant of Venice. Perhaps his greatest success was The British Enchanters (1705), a pseudo-operatic extravaganza staged by Thomas Betterton's company.
  In the opinion of Samuel Johnson, Granville's non-dramatic poetry is slavishly imitative of Edmund Waller. However some of his poetry was popular in its day. Perhaps Granville's most useful act as regards poetry was the encouragement he gave to Alexander Pope, which Pope remembered with gratitude in his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.
caption: Granville as depicted in Walpole's A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors, 1806.
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