Джордж Гранвилл Левесон-Гоуэр: Саяхатшы, дипломат және жер иесі

English politician, diplomat and landowner

George Granville Leveson Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland KG, PC (9 January 175819 July 1833), known as Viscount Trentham from 1758 to 1786, as Earl Gower from 1786 to 1803 and as the Marquess of Stafford from 1803 to 1833, was an English politician, diplomat, landowner and patron of the arts from the Leveson Gower family. He was the wealthiest man in Britain during the latter part of his life. He remains a controversial figure for his role in the Highland Clearances.

Sutherland was the eldest son of Granville Leveson Gower, 1st Marquess of Stafford, by his second wife, Lady Louisa, daughter of Scroop Egerton, 1st Duke of Bridgwater. Granville Leveson Gower, 1st Earl Granville, was his half brother. He was educated at Westminster and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated MA in 1777.

Sutherland sat as Member of Parliament for Newcastle under Lyme from 1779 to 1784 and for Staffordshire from 1787 to 1799. The latter year he was summoned to the House of Lords through a writ of acceleration in his father's junior title of Baron Gower.

Between 1790 and 1792 he was Ambassador to France. Gower was appointed ambassador in Paris in June 1790 at the age of 32. Due to Louis XVI being under house arrest in the Tuileries Palace, Gower was unable to become 'an ornament at Versailles', i. e. was unable to work closely with the royal family. Gower was scarcely better equipped to handle the complexity of the French Revolution than his predecessor, the Duke of Dorset. He had no previous experience of diplomacy. Gower's main priority in Paris was to provide news from the French court back to Britain, however trivial. Though Gower also reported some popular 'disturbances', he had little comprehension of the broader political climate. On 10 August 1792 an insurrection by the newly established Paris Revolutionary Commune drove the royal family from the Tuileries and three days later Louis was arrested and imprisoned in the Temple fortress. Britain broke off diplomatic relations in protest. The closure of the British embassy meant that the intelligence operations could no longer be run from it, resulting in Britain replacing the ambassador with Captain George Monro, removing Gower from diplomacy in France. Sutherland also held the honorary posts of Lord Lieutenant of Staffordshire from 1799 to 1801 and Lord Lieutenant of Sutherland from 1794 to 1830. He was invested as a Privy Counsellor in 1790, a Knight of the Garter in 1806 and was created Duke of Sutherland on 28 January 1833. In 1831, the then Marquess of Stafford served the annual post of treasurer of the Salop Infirmary in Shrewsbury.

The Leveson Gower family owned extensive lands in Staffordshire, Shropshire and Yorkshire. In 1803 Sutherland also succeeded to the vast estates of his maternal uncle Francis Egerton, 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, which included the Bridgewater Canal and a major art collection including much of the Orleans Collection; both Gower and his uncle had been members of the consortium which brought it to London for dispersal. According to the will of the Duke of Bridgewater, these passed on the death of the first Duke of Sutherland to his third son Lord Francis Leveson Gower (see below). This inheritance brought him great wealth. Sutherland is estimated to have been the wealthiest man of the 19th century, surpassing even Nathan Rothschild. The precise value of his estate at death is unknown, as it was simply classed as 'upper value'. He was described by Charles Greville as a "leviathan of wealth" and " the richest individual who ever died". Following the death of the Duke of York in 1827 he purchased the leasehold of Stafford House (now Lancaster House), which became the London residence of the dukes of Sutherland until 1912.

Sutherland and his wife remain controversial figures for their role in carrying out the Highland Clearances, where thousands of tenants were evicted and rehoused in coastal crofts as part of a program of improvement. The larger clearances in Sutherland were undertaken between 1811 and 1820. In 1811 Parliament passed an Act granting half the expenses of building roads in northern Scotland, on the provision that landowners paid for the other half. The following year Sutherland commenced building roads and bridges in the county, which up to that point had been virtually non existent. Appalled by the poor living conditions of his tenants and influenced by social and economic theories of the day as well as consulting widely on the subject, he and his wife (to whom much of the proprietorial oversight of the estate had been delegated) became convinced that subsistence farming in the interior of Sutherland could not be sustained in the long term. Much higher rents could be obtained from letting land for extensive sheep farms – so providing a much better income from the estate. The Sutherland estate management had had plans for clearance for some years, with some clearance activity in 1772 when Lady Sutherland was still a child. However, a shortage of money stopped these plans from progressing to any greater degree – a situation that continued after her marriage to Leveson Gower. However, when he inherited the vast wealth of the Duke of Bridgewater, plans could proceed – and Leveson Gower was happy for large amounts of his wealth to be spent on the changes to the Sutherland estate. In 1814, one of the estate's factors, Patrick Sellar, was supervising clearances in Strathnaver when the roof timbers of a house were set on fire (to prevent the house being reoccupied after the eviction) with, allegedly, an elderly and bedridden woman still inside. The woman was rescued, but died six days later. The local law officer, Robert Mackid, was an enemy of Sellar and started taking witness statements so that Sellar could be prosecuted. The case went to trial in 1816 and Sellar was acquitted. The publicity arising from the trial was not welcome to the Sutherlands. Sellar was replaced as factor and further, larger clearances continued in 1818 to 1820. Despite efforts to avoid press comment, in 1819 The Observer newspaper ran the headline: "the Devastation of Sutherland", reporting the burning of roof timbers of large numbers of houses cleared at the same time.

There is a monument to Leveson Gower in Shropshire. The Lilleshall Monument, built in 1833, is a 70 foot (21 m) high obelisk, a local landmark visible for some distance around which stands on top of Lilleshall Hill, within the original estates of the Leveson family acquired on the dissolution of Lilleshall Abbey. The tablet on the north face of the monument reads "To the memory of George Granville Leveson Gower, K. G. 1st Duke of Sutherland. The most just and generous of landlords. This monument is erected by the occupiers of his Grace's Shropshire farms as a public testimony that he went down to his grave with the blessings of his tenants on his head and left behind him upon his estates the best inheritance which a gentleman of England can bequeath to his son; men ready to stand by his house, heart and hand." There is also a monument erected in the Trentham Gardens Estate, Trentham, Staffordshire. This colossal statue, designed by Winks and sculptured by Sir Francis Leggatt Chantrey, surmounts a plain column of stone on a tiered pedestal. The monument was raised in 1834 at the instigation of the second Duke, a year after the first Duke's death. In 1837 a large monument, known locally as the Mannie, was erected on Ben Bhraggie near Golspie to commemorate the Duke's life. The existence of this statue has been the subject of some controversy—in 1994, Sandy Lindsay, a former Scottish National Party councillor from Inverness proposed its demolition. He later altered his plan, asking permission from the local council to relocate the statue and replace it with plaques telling the story of the Clearances. Lindsay proposed moving the statue to the grounds of Dunrobin Castle, after the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles declined his offer to take it. There was a failed attempt by vandals to topple the statue in November 2011. A BBC news report of this incident quoted a local person saying that few people wished the statue removed; instead they saw it as an important reminder of history. as of 2017, however, the statue still stands.