Another distinguished prisoner at this time in the Tower was George Granville, Lord Lansdowne of Bideford. Descended from that race of heroes, the Grenvilles of the West, of whom Admiral Sir Richard of the _Revenge_ was the most famous, and grandson of Sir Bevil Grenville, killed at the Battle of Lansdowne, George Granville belonged by race and conviction to the party of the Stuarts, and, too proud to seek safety in flight, as did so many of his contemporaries at the accession of the House of Hanover, he remained in England, and even protested from his place in the House of Lords against the Bill for attainting Ormonde and Bolingbroke. Strongly suspected of favouring the cause of James Stuart, Lansdowne was accused of having taken part in a plot for raising an insurrection in the West Country, where his name was a pillar of strength, “being possessed,” as Lord Bolingbroke said, “now with the same political phrenzy for the Pretender as he had in his youth for his father.” The plot was discovered, and at the close of September 1715, Lansdowne and his wife were committed to the Tower and kept there in close confinement until all danger of insurrection had passed away, and until the rising in the North had been crushed. In Queen Anne’s time, Lansdowne had been sung as “Trevanion and Granville as sound as a bell For the Queen and the Church and Sacheverell.” [Illustration: _View of the Tower in the time of George I_] In 1710 he had succeeded Walpole as Minister for War, but he prided himself more upon his literary gifts than upon those of his birth and rank, or upon his political eminence. He wrote poetry, sad stuff, and plays which were worse than his poems, for in these he out-Wycherlyed Wycherley. The plays of the days of the Restoration not excepted, there is nothing more indecent in theatrical literature than Granville’s “The Old Gallant.”