In public life, Grey could always be upon occasion bold, strenuous and self-sacrificing; but he was little disposed for the active work of the politician. He was not one of those who took the statesman’s duty “as a pleasure he was to enjoy.” A certain stiffness and reserve ever seemed in the popular eye to hedge him in; nor was his oratory of the kind which stirs enthusiasm and delight. A tall, stately figure, fine voice and calm aristocratic bearing reminded the listener of Pitt rather than of Fox, and his speeches were constructed on the Attic rather than the Asiatic model. Though simple and straightforward, they never lacked either point or dignity; and they were admirably adapted to the audience to which they were addressed. The scrupulous uprightness of Grey’s political and private character completed the ascendancy which he gained; and no politician could be named who, without being a statesman of the highest class, has left a name more enviably placed in English history.
(E. J. P.)
GREY, SIR EDWARD, 3rd Bart. (1862- ), English statesman, was educated at Winchester and at Balliol College, Oxford, and succeeded his grandfather, the 2nd baronet, at the age of twenty. He entered the House of Commons as Liberal member for Berwick-on-Tweed in 1885, but he was best known as a country gentleman with a taste for sport, and as amateur champion tennis-player. His interest in politics was rather languid, but he was a disciple of Lord Rosebery, and in the 1892-1895 Liberal ministry he was under-secretary for foreign affairs. In this position he earned a reputation as a politician of thorough straightforwardness and grit, and as one who would maintain British interests independently of party; and he shared with Mr Asquith the reputation of being the ablest of the Imperialists who followed Lord Rosebery. Though outside foreign affairs he played but a small part in the period of Liberal opposition between 1895 and 1905, he retained public confidence as one who was indispensable to a Liberal administration. When Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s cabinet was formed in December 1905 he became foreign minister, and he retained this office when in April 1908 Mr Asquith became prime minister.
GREY, SIR GEORGE (1812-1898), British colonial governor and statesman, only son of Lieutenant-Colonel Grey of the 30th Foot, was born in Lisbon on the 14th of April 1812, eight days after the death of his father at the storming of Badajoz. He passed through Sandhurst with credit, and received his commission in 1829. His lieutenancy was dated 1833, and his captaincy 1839, in which year he sold out and left the army. In the early ’thirties he was quartered in Ireland, where the wretchedness of the poorer classes left a deep impression on his mind. In 1836 the Royal Geographical Society accepted his offer to explore the north-west region of West Australia, and accordingly he landed at Hanover Bay at the end of 1837. The surrounding country he found broken and difficult, and his hardships were aggravated by the tropical heat and his ignorance of the continent. In a skirmish with the natives, in which he was speared near the hip, he showed great courage, and put the assailants to flight, shooting the chief, who had wounded him. After a brave endeavour to continue his journey his wound forced him to retreat to the coast, whence he sailed to Mauritius to recruit. Next year he again essayed exploration, this time on the coast to the north and south of Shark’s Bay. He had three whale-boats and an ample supply of provisions, but by a series of disasters his stores were spoilt by storms, his boats wrecked in the surf, and the party had to tramp on foot from Gantheaume Bay to Perth, where Grey, in the end, walked in alone, so changed by suffering that friends did not know him. In 1839 he was appointed governor-resident at Albany, and during his stay there married Harriett, daughter of Admiral Spencer, and also prepared for publication an account, in two volumes, of his expeditions. In 1840 he returned to England, to be immediately appointed by Lord John Russell to succeed Colonel Gawler as governor of South Australia. Reaching the colony in May 1841, he found it in the depths of a depression caused by mismanagement and insane land speculation. By rigorously reducing public expenditure, and forcing the settlers to quit the town and betake themselves to tilling their lands, and with the opportune help of valuable copper discoveries, Grey was able to aid the infant colony to emerge from the slough. So striking were his energy and determination that when, in 1845, the little settlements in New Zealand were found to be involved in a native war, and on the verge of ruin, he was sent to save them. The Maori chiefs in open rebellion were defeated, and made their submission. Another powerful leader suspected of fomenting discontent was arrested, and friendly chieftains were subsidized and honoured. Bands of the natives were employed in making government roads, and were paid good wages. The governor gained the veneration of the Maori tribes, in whose welfare he took a close personal interest, and of whose legends and myths he made a valuable and scholarly collection, published in New Zealand in 1855 and reprinted thirty years afterwards. With peace prosperity came to New Zealand, and the colonial office desired to give the growing settlements full self-government. Grey, arguing that this would renew war with the Maori, returned the constitution to Downing Street. But though the colonial office sustained him, he became involved in harassing disputes with the colonists, who organized an active agitation for autonomy. In the end a second constitution, partly framed by Grey himself, was granted them, and Grey, after eight years of despotic but successful rule, was transferred to Cape Colony. He had been knighted for his services, and had undoubtedly shown strength, dexterity and humanity in dealing with the whites and natives. In South Africa his success continued. He thwarted a formidable Kaffir rebellion in the Eastern Provinces, and pushed on the work of settlement by bringing out men from the German Legion and providing them with homes. He gained the respect of the British, the confidence of the Boers, the admiration and the trust of the natives. The Dutch of the Free State and the Basuto chose him as arbitrator of their quarrels. When the news of the Indian Mutiny reached Cape Town he strained every nerve to help Lord Canning, despatching men, horses, stores and £60,000 in specie to Bombay. He persuaded a detachment, then on its way round the Cape as a reinforcement for Lord Elgin in China, to divert its voyage to Calcutta. Finally, in 1859, Grey almost reached what would have been the culminating point of his career by federating South Africa. Persuaded by him, the Orange Free State passed resolutions in favour of this great step, and their action was welcomed by Cape Town. But the colonial office disapproved of the change, and when Grey attempted to persevere with it Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton recalled him. A change of ministry during his voyage to England displaced Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton. But though the duke of Newcastle reinstated Grey, it was with instructions to let federation drop. In 1861 the colonial office sent him, for the fourth time in succession, to take up a post of exceptional difficulty by again entrusting him with the governorship of New Zealand, where an inglorious native war in Taranaki had just been succeeded by an armed truce. Grey did his best to make terms with the rebels and to re-establish friendship with the Maori king and the land league of tribes formed to stop further sales of land to the whites. But the Maori had got guns and powder, and were suspicious and truculent. In vain Grey, supported by Bishop Selwyn and by Fox and the peace party among the settlers, strove to avert war. It came in 1863, and spread from province to province. Ten thousand regulars and as many colonial riflemen were employed to put it down. The imperial troops were badly handled, and Grey, losing patience, became involved in bitter disputes with their commanders. As an example to the former he himself attacked and captured Weraroa, the strongest of the Maori stockades, with a handful of militia, a feat which delighted the colonists, but made him as much disliked at the war office as he now was at Downing Street. Moreover, Grey had no longer real control over the islands. New Zealand had become a self-governing colony, and though he vindicated the colonists generally when libellous imputations of cruelty and land-grabbing were freely made against them in London, he crossed swords with his ministers when the latter confiscated three million acres of tribal land belonging to the insurgent Maori. Yet through all these troubles progress was made; many successes were gained in 1866, chiefly by the colonial militia, and a condition of something like tranquillity had been reached in 1867, when he received a curt intimation from the duke of Buckingham that he was about to be superseded. The colonists, who believed he was sacrificed for upholding their interests and good name, bade farewell to him in 1868 in an outburst of gratitude and sympathy; but his career as a colonial governor was at an end. Returning to England, he tried to enter public life, delivered many able speeches advocating what later came to be termed Imperialism, and stood for Newark. Discouraged, however, by the official Liberals, he withdrew and turned again to New Zealand. In 1872 he was given a pension of £1000 a year, and settled down on the island of Kawau, not far from Auckland, which he bought, and where he passed his leisure in planting, gardening and collecting books. In 1875, on the invitation of the Auckland settlers, he became superintendent of their province, and entered the New Zealand House of Representatives to resist the abolition of the provincial councils of the colony, a change then being urged on by Sir Julius Vogel in alliance with the Centralist Party. In this he failed, but his eloquence and courage drew round him a strong Radical following, and gave him the premiership in 1877. Manhood suffrage, triennial parliaments, a land-tax, the purchase of large estates and the popular election of the governor, were leading points of his policy. All these reforms, except the last, he lived to see carried; none of them were passed by him. A commercial depression in 1879 shook his popularity, and on the fall of his ministry in 1879 he was deposed, and for the next fifteen years remained a solitary and pathetic figure in the New Zealand parliament, respectfully treated, courteously listened to, but never again invited to lead. In 1891 he came before Australia as one of the New Zealand delegates to the federal convention at Sydney, and characteristically made his mark by standing out almost alone for “one man one vote” as the federal franchise. This point he carried, and the Australians thronged to hear him, so that his visits to Victoria and South Australia were personal triumphs. When, too, in 1894, he quitted New Zealand for London, some reparation was at last made him by the imperial government; he was called to the privy council, and graciously received by Queen Victoria on his visit to Windsor. Thereafter he lived in London, and died on the 20th of September 1898. He was given a public funeral at St Paul’s. Grey was all his life a collector of books and manuscripts. After leaving Cape Colony, he gave his library to Cape Town in 1862; his subsequent collection, which numbered 12,000 volumes, he presented to the citizens of Auckland in 1887. In gratitude the people of Cape Town erected a statue of him opposite their library building.
Lives of Sir George Grey have been written by W. L. and L. Rees (1892), Professor G. C. Henderson (1907) and J. Collier (1909).
(W. P. R.)
GREY, HENRY GREY, 3rd Earl (1802-1894), English statesman, was born on the 28th of December 1802, the son of the 2nd Earl Grey, prime minister at the time of the Reform Bill of 1832. He entered parliament in 1826, under the title of Viscount Howick, as member for Winchelsea, which constituency he left in 1831 for Northumberland. On the accession of the Whigs to power in 1830 he was made under-secretary for the colonies, and laid the foundation of his intimate acquaintance with colonial questions. He belonged at the time to the more advanced party of colonial reformers, sharing the views of Edward Gibbon Wakefield on questions of land and emigration, and resigned in 1834 from dissatisfaction that slave emancipation was made gradual instead of immediate. In 1835 he entered Lord Melbourne’s cabinet as secretary at war, and effected some valuable administrative reforms, especially by suppressing malpractices detrimental to the troops in India. After the partial reconstruction of the ministry in 1839 he again resigned, disapproving of the more advanced views of some of his colleagues. These repeated resignations gave him a reputation for crotchetiness, which he did not decrease by his disposition to embarrass his old colleagues by his action on free trade questions in the session of 1841. During the exile of the Liberals from power he went still farther on the path of free trade, and anticipated Lord John Russell’s declaration against the corn laws. When, on Sir Robert Peel’s resignation in December 1845, Lord John Russell was called upon to form a ministry, Howick, who had become Earl Grey by the death of his father in the preceding July, refused to enter the new cabinet if Lord Palmerston were foreign secretary (see J. R. Thursfield in vol. i. and Hon. F. H. Baring in vol. xxiii. of the English Historical Review). He was greatly censured for perverseness, and particularly when in the following July he accepted Lord Palmerston as a colleague without remonstrance. His conduct, nevertheless, afforded Lord John Russell an escape from an embarrassing situation. Becoming colonial secretary in 1846, he found himself everywhere confronted with arduous problems, which in the main he encountered with success. His administration formed an epoch. He was the first minister to proclaim that the colonies were to be governed for their own benefit and not for the mother-country’s; the first systematically to accord them self-government so far as then seemed possible; the first to introduce free trade into their relations with Great Britain and Ireland. The concession by which colonies were allowed to tax imports from the mother-country ad libitum was not his; he protested against it, but was overruled. In the West Indies he suppressed, if he could not overcome, discontent; in Ceylon he put down rebellion; in New Zealand he suspended the constitution he had himself accorded, and yielded everything into the masterful hands of Sir George Grey. The least successful part of his administration was his treatment of the convict question at the Cape of Good Hope, which seemed an exception to his rule that the colonies were to be governed for their own benefit and in accordance with their own wishes, and subjected him to a humiliating defeat. After his retirement he wrote a history and defence of his colonial policy in the form of letters to Lord John Russell, a dry but instructive book (Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration, 1853). He resigned with his colleagues in 1852. No room was found for him in the Coalition Cabinet of 1853, and although during the Crimean struggle public opinion pointed to him as the fittest man as minister for war, he never again held office. During the remainder of his long life he exercised a vigilant criticism on public affairs. In 1858 he wrote a work (republished in 1864) on parliamentary reform; in 1888 he wrote another on the state of Ireland; and in 1892 one on the United States tariff. In his latter years he was a frequent contributor of weighty letters to The Times on land, tithes, currency and other public questions. His principal parliamentary appearances were when he moved for a committee on Irish affairs in 1866, and when in 1878 he passionately opposed the policy of the Beaconsfield cabinet in India. He nevertheless supported Lord Beaconsfield at the dissolution, regarding Mr Gladstone’s accession to power with much greater alarm. He was a determined opponent of Mr Gladstone’s Home Rule policy. He died on the 9th of October 1894. None ever doubted his capacity or his conscientiousness, but he was generally deemed impracticable and disagreeable. Prince Albert, however, who expressed himself as ready to subscribe to all Grey’s principles, and applauded him for having principles, told Stockmar that, although dogmatic, he was amenable to argument; and Sir Henry Taylor credits him with “more freedom from littlenesses of feeling than I have met before in any public man.” His chief defect was perceived and expressed by his original tutor and subsequent adversary in colonial affairs, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who wrote, “With more than a common talent for understanding principles, he has no originality of thought, which compels him to take all his ideas from somebody; and no power of working out theory in practice, which compels him to be always in somebody’s hands as respects decision and action.”