Description:Amongst the bundles of letters received by the second Duke and Duchess of Sutherland is a letter from Thomas Grenville, dated 31st December 1844. Grenville had been a close associate of George Granville Leveson-Gower (1758-1833), the second Duke’s father. After retiring from public politics in 1818, Thomas Grenville spent the remaining years of his life developing his private library. Like the second Duke himself, Grenville served as a Trustee of the British Museum, leaving his vast and valuable collection of books to the Museum on his death in 1846. Grenville’s letter indicates that the second Duke of Sutherland remained close to his father’s old friend and was responsible for providing him with accommodation in his old age.
Grenville writes 'my old years grow young again by being nurtured with so much affectionate kindness…while I daily pace up & down the cheerful & spacious rooms which you have given me’. Grenville thanks the second Duke for his kindness, suggesting that his ‘indulgences…tend so much both to prolong my years & to enliven them’.
Grenville also demonstrates an active interest in the Leveson-Gower family’s estates. He writes about ‘a Clergyman’ who ‘has taken out a patent for converting Peat into Coal’. Grenville informs the Duke that the same clergyman ‘has taken out the same patent in Holland, & in France but there Louis Philippe has insisted upon the French publick dividing the profits with the patentee’. Grenville concludes by writing ‘I congratulate you upon this discovery which brings coal to the kitchen at Dunrobin’.