INTRODUCTION

In the course of a long political career as a prominent Liberal statesman the second Earl Granville was best known for his service in the Foreign Office, where he won a reputation for his pragmatic approach to international affairs. Granville George Leveson-Gower, to give his full name, was still in his thirties when he was appointed under-secretary during the first Opium War, and he went on to serve as foreign secretary three times. The first occasion was in his midforties when he very briefly took charge of the Foreign Office from December 1851 to February 1852. He never visited East Asia himself, but during his second and third terms as foreign secretary he often encountered Japan in a professional capacity. Moreover, he was in office during some key episodes in Japan's campaign to revise the 1858 Ansei Treaties, among them the visit to Britain of the Iwakura Embassy in 1872, and the preliminary conference on treaty revision held in Tokyo a decade later.

The question of treaty revision, and relations with Japan more broadly, were important topics but not always the most pressing concerns at the Foreign Office. Granville's years there were punctuated by international conflicts such as the Franco-Prussian War and the aftermath of the Russo-Turkish War, while Britain's armed forces were kept preoccupied by campaigns stretching from Egypt to the Transvaal and Afghanistan. It was also a time of transition as Britain's relations with the European Powers moved into a new phase, notably with Russia as the Great Game expanded across Asia, besides growing concern over the emerging power of now unified Germany. Britain's relations with Japan in these years were often framed within this wider context. Indeed, in the substantial two-volume Life of Granville written by one of his former staff, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, and published in 1905, Japan is mentioned just once, and even then only in the context of narrowly avoiding war with Russia in 1885. This was the occasion when, ‘on April 26 the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Governments were notified that the British had occupied Port Hamilton off the southern coast of Korea’.