In St George's Church in Bloomsbury is a marble memorial. A life-size male figure lounges in a reverie, his pen resting in one hand and a scroll in the other. He reclines on the bosom of a severe classical female: Faith, cradling a large cross. She points – summoning him, perhaps – towards heaven. The seated figure has turned away from his desk and his eyes follow her gesture. The symbolism is apt: the subject was a man of business and he expired in the midst of his work, returning from a day in the City of London and dying of a heart attack at home, soon after family prayers. He was, the inscription proclaims, Charles Grant: Chairman of the EIC, one of its Directors for many years and MP for Inverness, and a member of William Wilberforce's inner circle. The focus of his memorial was, however, very specific. It writes Grant up as a Christian empire-builder: one whose business life was shaped by his faith and dedicated to the promulgation of that faith abroad. Beneath him, a turbaned cherub lifts the veil on an impressive list of achievements:

The text inscribed at the base of the memorial is still more laudatory.

Behind this declaration of consensus, however, lay controversy. The scheme was put forward at a Special Court of the EIC on 17 December 1823. Notwithstanding the encomiums heaped on the dead man by the London banker and MP John Smith, cousin of Wilberforce, several speakers were sceptical. William Fullerton Elphinstone (1740–1834) opposed singling Grant out: were not all Company men honest?