He was born
in 1773, entered Parliament at twenty-two, and "found himself a
diplomatist as well as a politician before he was thirty years of
age." In 1804 he was appointed Ambassador to St. Petersburg, where
he remained till 1807. In 1813 he was created Viscount Granville,
and in 1824 became Ambassador to the Court of France. "To the
indignation of the Legitimist party in France, he made a special
journey from Paris to London in order to vote for the Reform Bill
of 1832, and, to their astonishment, returned alive to glory in
having done so." For this and similar acts of virtue he was raised
to an earldom in 1833; he retired from diplomacy in 1841, and died
in 1846.
Before he became an Ambassador, this Lord Granville had rented
a place called Wherstead, in Suffolk. It was there that Freddy
Leveson passed the first years of his life, but from 1824 onwards
the British Embassy at Paris was his home. Both those places had
made permanent dints in his memory. At Wherstead he remembered
the Duke of Wellington shooting Lord Granville in the face and
imperilling his eyesight; at Paris he was presented to Sir Walter
Scott, who had come to dine with the Ambassador. When living at
the Embassy, Freddy Leveson was a playmate of the Duc de Bordeaux,
afterwards Comte de Chambord; and at the age of eight he was sent
from Paris to a Dr.
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