Who was the chief of this combination? Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham, best remembered as the 'brave Cobham' to whom Pope addressed his first Epistle and as the founder of the dynasty and palace of Stowe, was not merely a soldier who had served with distinction under Marlborough, but a fortunate courtier on whom the House of Hanover had heaped constant and signal honours. He was created first a Baron, then a Viscount, Constable of Windsor Castle, Governor of Jersey, a Privy Councillor, Colonel of the First Dragoons, and was afterwards to become a Field Marshal and Colonel of the Horse Guards. He had, hints Shelburne, some of the Shandean humour of Marlborough's veterans, but his portrait shows a keen, refined, perhaps sensitive countenance; he was also something of a bashaw.[93] Sated with military honours, and always a staunch Whig, he had now taken to conspicuous politics and splendour; politics exacerbated by a personal slight, and splendour displayed in sumptuous hospitality, princely buildings, and lavish magnificence of gardens. These, laid out under the supervision of Lancelot Brown, extended at last to not less than four hundred acres. Here he erected pavilions and shrines in the fashion of those times; the most daring of which was one to commemorate his friendships, with which politics had made sad havoc before the temple was completed. Here he kept open house in the spacious and genial fashion of that time, and entertained Pope, Congreve, Bolingbroke, Pulteney, the wits as well as the princes of the day. From these pleasing cares he had recently been diverted by one of those needless affronts which seem so inconsistent with the robust and genial character of Walpole, but to the infliction of which Walpole was singularly prone. On account of his opposition to the Excise Bill, Cobham had been deprived of his regiment, the same, by-the-bye, in which Pitt was a subaltern. Stung to political ardour by this insult, he had begun to form a faction of violent opposition, of which his nephews and their friends were the nucleus. Thus began that formidable influence which had its home and source at Stowe for near a century afterwards, and which for three generations patiently and persistently pursued the ducal coronet which was the darling object of its successive chiefs. Cobham, then, founded the family, and, so long as he lived, directed their operations, with too much perhaps of the spirit of a martinet. When he died his fortune and title passed to his sister, afterwards, as we shall see, Countess Temple in her own right, the mother of the Grenvilles with whom we are concerned.