William Wyndham Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wyndham_Grenville

William Wyndham Grenville, 1st Baron Grenville PC, PC (Ire) (25 October 1759 – 12 January 1834) was a British Whig statesman and Prime Minister.

Grenville studied at Eton, Christ Church, Oxford, and Lincoln's Inn. The son of Whig Prime Minister George Grenville and Elizabeth Wyndham, daughter of Tory statesman Sir William Wyndham, 3rd Baronet, he entered the House of Commons in 1782 where his elder brother, Thomas, was already sitting as an MP.

Grenville soon became a close ally of the Prime Minister, his cousin William Pitt the Younger, and served in the government as Paymaster of the Forces from 1784 to 1789. In 1789 he served briefly as Speaker of the British House of Commons before he entered the Cabinet as Home Secretary. He became Leader of the House of Lords when he was raised to the peerage the next year as Baron Grenville, of Wotton under Bernewood in the County of Buckingham. The next year, in 1791, he succeeded the Duke of Leeds as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

Grenville's decade as Foreign Secretary was a dramatic one, seeing the Wars of the French Revolution. During the wars, Grenville was the leader of the party that focused on the fighting on the continent as the key to victory, opposing the faction of Henry Dundas which favoured war at sea and in the colonies.

Grenville left office with Pitt in 1801 over the issue of Catholic Emancipation.