George Grenville was a British Whig statesman who rose to the position of Prime Minister of Great Britain. Grenville was born into an influential political family and first entered Parliament in 1741 as an MP for Buckingham. He emerged as one of Cobham's Cubs, a group of young members of Parliament associated with Lord Cobham.
Portrait by William Hoare, 1764
Stowe House in Buckinghamshire, the political base of the Cobham faction; in 1749, ownership of the estate passed to Grenville's brother Richard.
Grenville served under British Prime Minister Lord Bute between 1762 and 1763 and later succeeded him.
Cartoon depicting the repeal of the Stamp Act as a funeral, with Grenville carrying a child's coffin marked "Miss America Stamp born 1765, died 1766" (The Skulls refer to the Scottish Rebellions of 1715 and 1745)
Whigs (British political party)
The Whigs were a political party in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and the 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs merged into the Liberal Party with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s. Many Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Conservative Party in 1912.
Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, painted more than once during his chancellorship in 1672 by John Greenhill
Equestrian portrait of William III by Jan Wyck, commemorating the landing at Brixham, Torbay, 5 November 1688
A c. 1705 portrait of John Somers, 1st Baron Somers by Godfrey Kneller.
In A Block for the Wigs (1783), caricaturist James Gillray caricatured Charles James Fox's return to power in a coalition with Frederick North, Lord North (George III is the blockhead in the centre)
