THE GREYS OF HOWICK.
TT seems scarcely fair to tell the story of the Greys immediately
after that of the Percies, it will read beside theirs so short and so insignificant. Our object, however, is to explain the existence of the governing families, and for the last sixty years the great house of Northumberland has had less influence over the course of British policy than its comparatively feeble county rival, and once at least thelesser House has performed an incomparable service to the nation. The Greys are in a genealogical sense some five hundred years old, though they claim, or the " Peerages " for them, a much higher antiquity. Sir Thomas de Grey was a gallant soldier in the wars of Edward 111., and held among other manors in Northumberland that of Howick, but the historian who cares about accuracy instead of heraldic probabilities will prefer to date the existing family from Sir John Grey of Berwick, who was alive in 1372. His son, Sir Thomas Grey of Berwick and Chillingham, had by his wife Jane, a daughter of John Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, two sons, from the eldest of whom, Sir John Grey, were derived the Lords Grey of Powys, Earls of Tankerville in Normandy, who became extinct in 1551. This Sir John was a distinguished soldier under Henry V., pushed his fortunes in the war which so nearly ended in the conquest of France and ruin of England, and was at last killed with Thomas, Duke of Clarence, in the disastrous defeat which that Prince suffered at the hands of the French King's Scotch auxiliaries. From his brother, Sir Thomas Grey of Werke, descended, through three intermediate generations, Sir Ralph Grey of Chillingham, in the reign of Henry VIII., who possessed a moiety of the manor of Howick. His second son, Sir Ralph Grey of Chillingham, who ultimately became his heir, was the father of the first Lord Grey of Warke, who played an important part in the civil war, fought on the popular side, and for some time acted as Speaker of the House of Lords. The great- grandson of this Lord Grey, though a man devoted at heart to the same cause, is probably the one ancestor of whom the family is ashamed, being Forde, third Lord Grey of Werke and Earl of Tanker- vile, one of the very few men of his time and class ever convicted of a want of nerve sufficient to overpower alike the pride of class and the sense of duty. He had the courage to stake head and lands in open resistance to James II., and accepted the command of Monmouth's cavalry, but fled with it from the field of Sedgemoor. He saved himself by giving evidence against his friends, and his in- trigue with his sister-in-law, Lady Henrietta Berkeley, which gave rise to a cause clabre, seems to have outraged even the ideas of that wild age. His trial is one of the strangest records of real overmastering passion ever written. He committed a great crime, but it is impossible to read the dully picturesque report in the State Trials without perceiving that the private defence of the accused noble, that he was utterly overmastered by his over love, was true—an admission which, in the majority of such cases, would be utterly false—that by one of those, strange accidents which are never impossible, yet so seldom occur he had in Henrietta Berkeley found his double, and that for once, in open court, before all Eng- land, Paul Ferroll's dream was realized—the dream of a love which could survive alike ruin, and sarcasm, and crime. At the last moment, when all ignominy might have been avoided, and Lord Grey had worked himself up to promise that he would never see his paramour again, he broke down, and refused all terms unless he were permitted to see her. The case was ultimately withdrawn,why was never explained. His sole surviving child, a daughter, carried the estate of Chillingham into tIte family of Bennet, Lord Ossulston (Arlington of the Cabal belonged to these Benneta), who was therefore created Earl of Tankerville, and her descendants to this day own the great Chillingham Park, and the breed of white wild bulls, and divide with the Greys of Howick and the Percies the political influence of Northumberland.
Sir Ralph, the father of the first Lord Grey of Werke, had a younger brother, Sir Edward Grey of Howick, whose descendant, Henry, was in 1736 owner of the whole of the manor of Howick, and was created a baronet. Two of Sir Henry's sons died un- married, the eldest having represented the county in 1751 and 1762; another was killed in a duel with Lord Pomfret, and the fourth, Charles, was the founder of the existing peerage. He was a soldier of some mark, and distinguished himself so far as anybody did in the American war, fought with Earl St. Vincent in the West Indies, and in 1801, under the Addington administration, was raised to the Peerage as Baron Grey de Howick, and in 1806 was created Viscount Howick and Earl Grey. He died on the 14th November, 1807, leaving his dignities to his eldest surviving son Charles, second Earl, and founder of the modern political great- ness of the family. He was elected in 1786, being then only twenty- two, member for Northumberland, and threw himself with ardour into political life. Like all his family he was a determined 1Vhig, followed Fox, shared in the convivialities of Carlton House, and perhaps believed that the Prince who had betrayed every human being who trusted him would not betray a Grey. He was soon known as one of the smallgroup of aristocrats who clearly foresaw the future, who contended for Catholic emancipation, the removal of the disabilities of the Dissenters, the reform of Parliament, the suppression of the slave trade, and the purification of the ad- ministrative machine, which had slowly rotted into an engine for efficient corruption. In 1806 he entered the Grenville cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty, and on the (13.1th of Fox succeeded him as Secretary for Foreign Affairs. The question of Catholic emancipation formed, however, a bar to his further rise under George IH.,—Whigs in those days having convictions as well as traditions,—and on the Regent's accession he was like the rest of his party betrayed, the King hoping to compound for a hundred perjuries by keeping one oath which he did not comprehend. The Earl, fortified by a pride such as only an English Whig Peer, a Cardinal, or a Brahmin over honestly feels, neither compromised nor gave way, and even when Canning made a movement towards Liberal opinions, and drew around him some of the leading Whig statesmen, Lord Grey stood haughtily aloof, proclaiming in no whispered voice his want of confidence. The people admired his consistency, and on the accession of William IV. he was the recognized head of the Whigs, and in that capacity succeeded the Duke of Wellington as Premier. Then came the Reform struggle, in which the unbending character of the Earl was the very main- stay of his party, and enabled them for the first time in English history to effect a complete transfer of power without an appeal to arms or a change of dynasty. Mr. Roebuck will have it that the Earl quailed at last, and would, had the King been firm, have declined to swamp the Upper House ; but the statement is incon- sistent with the fact that the vote could have bean carried by the elevation of elder sons and other devices without that possibly disastrous result. Be that as it may, in the first Reform Administration the special character of the Pre- mier and the special uses of an aristocracy came out in their strongest colours. No Parliament ever sat in which " danger- ous " tendencies were more apparent. Brains had grown hot in the contest, and the people were more than half inclined to plunge at once into the unknown, and effect farther radical changes in the constitution which had worn so well. Fortunately for all the empire except Ireland—which under the new middle-class power lost its best chance of final re-organization,—every mood of the popular mind had to be strained first through the aristocratic sieve, which when it included Earl Grey had very close meshes indeed, and time was allowed for the trial of an organization which, after thirty years of determined and not inglorious effort, now once more seems feeble, because throughout an empire whose power, as Pozz.o di Borgo said, "has earth for its base," there is not out of Ireland a grievance sharp enough to stir the national blood. Earl Grey retired in 1834 from official life, but the political influence of his family founded on his reputation has not been diminished in the hands of his successor—a man in whom all his father's qualities seem intensified. If he were not the most impracticable of man- kind there would be in England no statesman with a chance against Earl Grey, and his administration of the colonies, still but partially understood, will one day be found to have involved as bold, as successful, and as important a revolution as that which his great father carried through. At this moment there is, perhaps, no family in England more largely employed in the public service than that which looks to Earl Grey as its head, and scarcely one in which there have been so few conspicuous failures.
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