Into this privileged society Frederick Leveson-Gower was born on the 3rd of May, 1819, and within its precincts he “kept the noiseless tenour of his way” for nearly ninety years.  Recalling in 1905 the experiences of his boyhood, and among them a sharp illness at Eton, he was able to add, “Never during my long life have I again been seriously ill.”  To that extraordinary immunity from physical suffering was probably due the imperturbable serenity which all men recognized as his most characteristic trait, and which remained unruffled to the end.

It is recorded of the fastidious Lady Montfort in Endymion that, visiting Paris in 1841, she could only with difficulty be induced to call on the British Ambassador and Ambassadress.  “I dined,” she said, “with those people once; but I confess that, when I thought of those dear Granvilles, their entrees stuck in my throat.”  The “dear Granvilles” in question were the parents of the second Lord Granville, whom we all remember as the most urbane of Foreign Secretaries, and of Frederick Leveson-Gower.  The first Lord Granville was a younger son of the first Marquess of Stafford and brother of the second Marquess, who was made Duke of Sutherland.  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. Everard’s school at Brighton, “which was called the House of Lords, owing to most of the boys being related to the peerage, many of them future peers, and among them several dukes.”  Here, again, the youthful Whig found himself a playmate of Princes.  Prince George of Hanover and Prince George of Cambridge were staying with King William IV. at the Pavilion; their companions were chosen from Dr. Everard’s seminary; and the King amused his nephews and their friends with sailor’s stories, “sometimes rather coarse ones.”  In his holidays little Freddy enjoyed more refined society at Holland House.  In 1828 his mother wrote with just elation:  “He always sits next to Lord Holland, and they talk without ceasing all dinner-time.”