286 JOURNAL OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
or the cause of continual jealousies among the Royalist leaders in 
the West, which at length led to his being thrown into prison. 
That he was not, however, altogether destitute of good qualities, is 
shown by the fact that an earnest petition was at once presented 
for his release. He died in exile at Ghent. 
So far Clarendon. But Grenville has a defender. His grand- 
nephew, George Grenville, Lord Lansdowne,* accuses Clarendon of 
being actuated by personal hatred. He throws all the blame of 
the dissensions on the other leaders ; considers that in the matter 
of his wife, Grenville was the illused party—the said wife being 
‘‘a buxom widow, rich in lands and moveables, but clogged with a 
lawsuit, and a rebel in her heart ;” and justifies his conduct to the 
foraging soldiers and the lawyer. How, Lord Lansdowne asks, 
could rogues be better employed than in hanging each other? as to 
the lawyer, he was found in Grenville’s quarters in disguise, and if 
he was not a spy it did not matter—he was only a country attorney ! 
A lawyer more or less, was evidently not of very much consequence. 
We shall have to note hereafter, more in detail, a circumstance 
which tended much to embitter Grenville’s mode of warfare; but 
I will here only add further that he was most cordially hated by 
the Roundheads, who applied to him the most terrible word in the 
vocabulary of abuse—‘“‘Skellum” Grenville. I don’t in the least 
know what skellum means, but it sounds very bad, and Grenville 
appears to have been correspondingly aggravated. There was good 
cause for this hatred, for Grenville had been guilty of cool and 
deliberate treachery to the Parliamentary cause. When he returned 
from Ireland, the King ordered his arrest at Bristol. He gave his 
parole, and went straight to London, as Lord Lansdowne suggests to 
get the arrears of his pay from the Parliament, whom he held to be 
responsible, as they had taken the Irish war out of the king’s hands. 
The Parliament made him a major-general, with the right to raise 
troops and appoint his own officers. The first service he was sent 
upon was the siege of Basing House, and the first thing he did was 
to take all his forces over to the King at Oxford, where he was of 
course well received. I am glad to say that Lord Lansdowne, 
though he considers that his kinsman in all this was only “ putting 
the old soldier on a pack of knaves,” is not quite able to reconcile 
the proceeding to his own conscience. 
Robartes is painted in various colours, after the sympathies of the 
* Vide his collected works. 1736. 
