GRAY, ROBERT (1809-1872), first bishop of Cape Town and metropolitan of South Africa, was born at Bishop Wearmouth, Durham, and was the son of Robert Gray, bishop of Bristol. He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and took orders in 1833. After holding the livings of Whitworth, Durham, 1834-1845, and Stockton-on-Tees, 1845-1847, he was consecrated bishop of Cape Town in 1847; the bishopric having been endowed through the liberality of Miss (afterwards Baroness) Burdett-Coutts. Until 1853 he was a suffragan of Canterbury, but in that year he formally resigned his see and was reappointed by letters patent metropolitan of South Africa in view of the contemplated establishment of the suffragan dioceses of Graham’s Town and Natal. In that capacity his coercive jurisdiction was twice called in question, and in each case the judicial committee of the privy council decided against him. The best-known case is that of Bishop Colenso, whom Gray deposed and excommunicated in 1863. The spiritual validity of the sentence was upheld by the convocation of Canterbury and the Pan-Anglican synod of 1867, but legally Colenso remained bishop of Natal. The privy council decisions declared, in effect, that the Anglican body in South Africa was on the footing of a voluntary religious society. Gray, accepting this position, obtained its recognition by the mother church as the Church of the Province of South Africa, in full communion with the Church of England. The first provincial synod was held in 1870. During his episcopate Bishop Gray effected a much-needed organization of the South African church, to which he added five new bishoprics, all carved out of the original diocese of Cape Town. It was also chiefly owing to his suggestions that the universities’ mission to Central Africa was founded.
GRAY, SIR THOMAS (d. c. 1369), English chronicler, was a son of Sir Thomas Gray, who was taken prisoner by the Scots at Bannockburn and who died about 1344. The younger Thomas was present at the battle of Neville’s Cross in 1346; in 1355, whilst acting as warden of Norham Castle, he was made a prisoner, and during his captivity in Edinburgh Castle he devoted his time to studying the English chroniclers, Gildas, Bede, Ranulf Higdon and others. Released in 1357 he was appointed warden of the east marches towards Scotland in 1367, and he died about 1369. Gray’s work, the Scalacronica (so called, perhaps, from the scaling-ladder in the crest of the Grays), is a chronicle of English history from the earliest times to about the year 1362. It is, however, only valuable for the reigns of Edward I. and Edward II. and part of that of Edward III., being especially so for the account of the wars between England and Scotland, in which the author’s father and the author himself took part. Writing in Norman-French, Gray tells of Wallace and Bruce, of the fights at Bannockburn, Byland and Dupplin, and makes some mention of the troubles in England during the reign of Edward II. He also narrates the course of the war in France between 1355 and 1361; possibly he was present during some of these campaigns.
The Scalacronica was summarized by John Leland in the 16th century; the part dealing with the period from 1066 to the end, together with the prologue, was edited for the Maitland Club by J. Stevenson (1836); and the part from 1274 to 1362 was translated into English by Sir Herbert Maxwell (Glasgow, 1907). In the extant manuscript, which is in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, there is a gap extending from about 1340 to 1355, and Gray’s account of this period is only known from Leland’s summary.
GRAY, THOMAS (1716-1771), English poet, the fifth and sole surviving child of Philip and Dorothy Gray, was born in London on the 26th of December 1716. His mother’s maiden name was Antrobus, and in partnership with her sister Mary she kept a millinery shop in Cornhill. This and the house connected with it were the property of Philip Gray, a money-scrivener, who married Dorothy in 1706 and lived with her in the house, the sisters renting the shop from him and supporting themselves by its profits. Philip Gray had impaired the fortune which he inherited from his father, a wealthy London merchant; yet he was sufficiently well-to-do, and at the close of his life was building a house upon some property of his own at Wanstead. But he was selfish and brutal, and in 1735 his wife took some abortive steps to obtain a separation from him. At this date she had given birth to twelve children, of whom Thomas was the only survivor. He owed his life as well as his education to this “careful, tender mother,” as he calls her. The child was suffocating when she opened one of his veins with her own hand. He went at her expense to Eton in 1727, and was confided to the care of her brother, William Antrobus, one of the assistant-masters, during some part at least of his school-life.
At Eton Gray’s closest friends were Horace Walpole, Richard West (son of the lord chancellor of Ireland and grandson of the famous Bishop Burnet), and Thomas Ashton, afterwards fellow of Eton. This little coterie was dubbed “the Quadruple Alliance”; its members were studious and literary, and took little part in the amusements of their fellows. In 1734 Gray matriculated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, of which his uncle, Robert Antrobus, had been a fellow. At Cambridge he had once more the companionship of Walpole and Ashton who were at King’s, but West went to Christchurch, Oxford. Gray made at this time the firmest and most constant friendship of his life with Thomas Wharton (not the poet Warton) of Pembroke College. He was maintained by his mother, and his straitened means were eked out by certain small exhibitions from his college. His conspicuous abilities and known devotion to study perhaps atoned in the eyes of the authorities for his indifference to the regular routine of study; for mathematics in particular he had an aversion which was the one exception to his almost limitless curiosity in other directions. During his first Cambridge period he learnt Italian “like any dragon,” and made translations from Guarini, Dante and Tasso, some of which have been preserved. In September 1738 he is in the agony of leaving college, nor can we trace his movements with any certainty for a while, though it may be conjectured that he spent much time with Horace Walpole, and made in his company some fashionable acquaintances in London. On the 29th of March 1739, he started with Walpole for a long continental tour, for the expenses of which it is probable that his father, for once, came in some measure to his assistance. In Paris, Gray visited the great with his friend, studied the picture-galleries, went to tragedies, comedies, operas and cultivated there that taste for the French classical dramatists, especially Racine, whom he afterwards tried to imitate in the fragmentary “Agrippina.” It is characteristic of him that he travels through France with Caesar constantly in his hands, ever noting and transcribing. In the same way, in crossing the Alps and in Piedmont, he has “Livy in the chaise with him and Silius Italicus too.” In Italy he made a long sojourn, principally at Florence, where Walpole’s lifelong correspondent, Horace Mann, was British envoy, and received and treated the travellers most hospitably. But Rome and Naples are also described in Gray’s letters, sometimes vividly, always amusingly, and in his notes are almost catalogued. Herculaneum, an object of intense interest to the young poet and antiquary, had been discovered the year before. At length in April 1741 Gray and Walpole set out northwards for Reggio. Here they quarrelled. Gray, “never a boy,” was a student, and at times retiring; Walpole, in his way a student too, was at this time a very social being, somewhat too frivolous, and, what was worse, too patronizing. He good-humouredly said at a later date, “Gray loves to find fault,” and this fault-finding was expressed, no doubt with exaggeration, in a letter to Ashton, who violated Gray’s confidence. The rupture followed, and with two friends, John Chute of the Vyne, Hampshire, and the young Francis Whithed, Gray went to Venice to see the doge wed the Adriatic on Ascension Day. Thence he returned home attended only by a laquais de voyage, visiting once more the Grande Chartreuse where he left in the album of the brotherhood those beautiful alcaics, O Tu severa Religio loci, which reveal his characteristic melancholy (enhanced by solitude and estrangement) and that sense of the glory as distinct from the horror of mountain scenery to which perhaps he was the first of Englishmen to give adequate expression. On the 18th of September 1741 we find him in London, astonishing the street boys with his deep ruffles, large bag-wig and long sword, and “mortified” under the hands of the English barber. On the 6th of November his father died; Philip Gray had, it is evident, been less savage and niggardly at last to those who were dependent upon him, and his death left his wife and son some measure of assured peace and comfort.
London was Gray’s headquarters for more than a year, with occasional visits to Stoke Poges, to which his mother and Mary Antrobus had retired from business to live with their sister, Mrs Rogers. At Stoke he heard of the death of West, to whom he had sent the “Ode on Spring,” which was returned to him unopened. It was an unexpected blow, shocking in all its circumstances, especially if we believe the story that his friend’s frail life was brought to a close by the discovery that the mother whom he tenderly loved had been an unfaithful wife, and, as some say, poisoned her husband. About this tragedy Gray preserved a mournful silence, broken only by the pathetic sonnet, and some Latin lines, in which he laments his loss. The year 1742, was, for him, fruitful in poetic effort, of which, however, much was incomplete. The “Agrippina,” the De principiis Cogitandi, the splenetic “Hymn to Ignorance” in which he contemplates his return to the university, remain fragments; but besides the two poems already mentioned, the “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” and the “Hymn to Adversity,” perhaps the most faultless of his poems, were written before the close of the summer. After hesitating between Trinity Hall and Peterhouse, he returned to the latter, probably as a fellow-commoner. He had hitherto neglected to read for a degree; he proceeded to that of LL.B. in 1744. In 1745 a reconciliation with Walpole, long desired probably on both sides, was effected through the kind offices of Chute’s sister. In 1746 he spent his time between Cambridge, Stoke and London; was much with Walpole; graphically describes the trial of the Scottish rebel lords, and studied Greek with avidity; but “the muse,” which by this time perhaps had stimulated him to begin the “Elegy,” “has gone, and left him in much worse company.” In town he finds his friends Chute and Whithed returned to England, and “flaunts about” in public places with them. The year 1747 produced only the ode on Walpole’s cat, and we gather that he is mainly engaged in reading with a very critical eye, and interesting himself more in the troubles of Pembroke College, in which he almost seems to live, than in the affairs of Peterhouse. In this year also be made the acquaintance of Mason, his future biographer. In 1748 he first came before the public, but anonymously, in Dodsley’s Miscellany, in which appeared the Eton ode, the ode on spring, and that on the cat. In the same year he sent to Wharton the beginning of the didactic poem, “The Alliance of Education and Government,” which remains a fragment. His aunt, Mary Antrobus, died in 1749.
There is little to break the monotony of his days till 1750, when from Stoke he sent Walpole “a thing to which he had at last put an end.” The “thing” was the “Elegy.” It was shown about in manuscript by his admiring friend; it was impudently pirated, and Gray had it printed by Dodsley in self-defence. Even thus it had “a pinch or two in its cradle,” of which it long bore the marks. The publication led to the one incident in Gray’s life which has a touch of romance. At Stokehouse had come to live the widowed Lady Cobham, who learnt that the author of the “Elegy” was her neighbour. At her instance, Lady Schaub, her visitor, and Miss Speed, her protégée, paid him a call; the poet was out, and his quiet mother and aunts were somewhat flustered at the apparition of these women of fashion, whose acquaintance Gray had already made in town. Hence the humorous “Long Story.” A platonic affection sprang up between Gray and Miss Speed; rumour, upon the death of Lady Cobham, said that they were to be married, but the lady escaped this mild destiny to become the Baroness de la Peyrière, afterwards Countess Viry, and a dangerous political intriguante.