There were originally five Grenville brothers: Richard, George, James, Henry, and Thomas. Three of these, however, are outside our limits. Thomas, a naval officer of signal promise, was killed in action off Cape Finisterre in May 1747. James and Henry were cyphers, not ill provided for at the public charge. Both seem to have broken loose at one time from the tyranny of the brotherhood: James at first siding with Richard against George in 1761; and Henry, whom we find Richard anxious, on opposite grounds it is to be presumed, to oust from the representation of Buckingham in 1774. James, who, says Horace Walpole, 'had all the defects of his brothers and had turned them to the best account,' was Deputy Paymaster to Pitt; and Henry was a popular Governor of Barbadoes, as well as Ambassador at Constantinople for four years, after which both subsided into the blameless occupation of various sinecures. Never, indeed, was family so well provided for during an entire century as the Temple-Grenvilles. Although the system by which the aristocracy lived on the country was not carried nearly as far in Great Britain as in the France of the fourteenth Louis and his successor, yet it had no inconsiderable hold. Even the austere George, though averse in Burke's expressive language to 'the low, pimping politics of a Court,' did not disdain, when Prime Minister, to hurry to the King to announce the death of Lord Macclesfield and secure for his son, afterwards Marquis of Buckingham, the reversion of the Irish Tellership of the Exchequer thus vacated;[94] nor, a few months later, to obtain the grant of a lighthouse as a provision for his younger children.[95] The Tellership, held as it was under the unreformed conditions, was a place of vast emolument; it is not now easy to compute the amount.[96] Nor is it necessary for the purpose of this book to follow up these details. Cobbett reckoned from returns furnished to the House of Commons that this Lord Buckingham and his brother Thomas, the sons of George Grenville, had in half a century drawn 700,000_l._ of public money, and William, another brother, something like 200,000_l._ more. These figures, of course, are open to dispute, but they indicate at least that the revenues from public money of this family of sinecurists must have been enormous. Of English families the Grenvilles were in this particular line easily the first. Had all sinecurists, it may be said in passing, spent their money like the younger Thomas, who returned far more than he received by bequeathing his matchless library to the nation, the public conscience would have been much more tender towards them.