Eustace Clare Grenville Murray

Eustace Clare Grenville Murray (1824 – 20 December 1881) was an English journalist.

Life

Murray was the illegitimate son of Richard Grenville, second duke of Buckingham and Chandos. Born in 1824, he matriculated from Magdalen Hall, Oxford, on 1 March 1848, and was entered a student of the Inner Temple in 1850.

Diplomat

He attracted the notice of Lord Palmerston at an early age, entered the diplomatic service at Palmerston's instigation, and was sent as an attaché to the embassy at Vienna on 14 July 1851. At the same time, Murray entered into an agreement with the Morning Post, by which he undertook to act as Vienna correspondent. Such a contravention of the usages of the foreign office was by an accident brought to the notice of the British ambassador, Lord Westmorland, by whom Murray, though protected against dismissal by the interest of Palmerston, was ostracised from the British chancery.

On 7 April 1852, he was temporarily transferred to Hanover, and on 19 October 1852, he was appointed fifth paid attaché at Constantinople, where his relations with Sir Stratford Canning were from the first the reverse of cordial, and resulted in his being banished as vice-consul to Mitylene.

In 1854, his "Roving Englishman", a series of chapters on travel, appeared, in which the Turkish ambassador was satirised as "Sir Hector Stubble".

Palmerston was unwilling to recall Murray, but in 1855 he was transferred to Odessa as consul-general.

Writer

He returned to England, after thirteen years of discord with the British residents in Odessa, in 1868, and contributed to the first numbers of Vanity Fair. In the following year he started a weekly journal of the most mordant type, entitled The Queen's Messenger, a prototype of the later "Society papers".