Some time still remained before the bill could be committed and read a third time. It was not until the 9th of April that Grey moved the second reading in the Lords. A sufficient number of the opposition temporized; and the second reading was allowed to pass by a majority of nine. Their intention was to mutilate the bill in committee. The Ultra-Tories, headed by the duke of Wellington, had entered a protest against the second reading, but they were now politically powerless. The struggle had become a struggle on the one hand for the whole bill, to be carried by a creation of peers, and on the other for some mutilated measure. Grey’s instinct divined that the crisis was approaching. Either the king must consent to swamp the House, or the ministry must cease to stand in the breach between the peers and the country. The king, a weak and inexperienced politician, had in the meantime been wrought upon by the temporizing leaders in the Lords. He was induced to believe that if the Commons should reject the mutilated bill when it was returned to them, and the ministry should consequently retire, the mutilated bill might be reintroduced and passed by a Tory ministry. He was deaf to all representations of the state of public opinion; and to the surprise of the ministry, and the terror and indignation of every man of sense in the country, he rejected their proposal and accepted their resignation, May 9, 1832. The duke of Wellington undertook the hopeless task of constructing a ministry which should pass a restricted or sham Reform Bill. The only man who could have made the success of such a ministry even probable was Peel, and Peel’s conscience and good sense forbade the attempt. He refused, and after a week of the profoundest agitation throughout the country, the king, beaten and mortified, was forced to send for Grey and Brougham. On being told that his consent to the creation of peers was the only condition on which they could undertake the government, he angrily and reluctantly yielded. The chancellor, with cool forethought, demanded this consent in writing. Grey thought such a demand harsh and unnecessary. “I wonder,” he said to Brougham, when the interview was over, “you could have had the heart to press it.” But Brougham was inexorable, and the king signed the following paper: “The king grants permission to Earl Grey, and to his chancellor, Lord Brougham, to create such a number of peers as will be sufficient to ensure the passing of the Reform Bill, first calling up peers’ eldest sons.—William R., Windsor, May 17, 1832.”
Grey had now won the game. There was no danger that he would have to resort to the expedient which he was authorized to employ. The introduction of sixty new peers would have destroyed the opposition, but it would have been equivalent to the abolition of the House. The king’s consent made known, a sufficient number of peers were sure to withdraw to enable the bill to pass, and thus the dignity of both king and peerage would be saved. The duke of Wellington headed this movement on the part of the opposition; and the third reading of the bill was carried in the Lords by a majority of 84.
It is well known that in after years both Grey and Brougham disclaimed any intention of executing their threat. If this were so, they must have merely pretended to brave a danger which they secretly feared to face, and intended to avoid; and the credit of rescuing the country would belong to the duke of Wellington and the peers who seceded with him. To argue such cowardice in them from statements made when the crisis was long past, and when they were naturally willing to palliate the rough policy which they were forced to adopt, would be to set up a needless and unjustifiable paradox. Nothing else in the career of either Grey or Brougham leads us to suppose them capable of the moral baseness of yielding up the helm of state, in an hour of darkness and peril, to reckless and unskilled hands. Such would have been the result if they had lacked the determination to carry out their programme to the end. The influence of every statesman in the country would then have been extinguished, and the United Kingdom would have been absolutely in the hands of O’Connell and Orator Hunt.
Grey took but little part in directing the legislation of the reformed parliament. Never anxious for power, he had executed the arduous task of 1831–1832 rather as a matter of duty than of inclination, and wished for an opportunity of retiring. Such an opportunity very shortly presented itself. The Irish policy of the ministry had not conciliated the Irish people, and O’Connell denounced them with the greatest bitterness. On the renewal of the customary Coercion Bill, the ministry was divided on the question whether to continue to the lord-lieutenant the power of suppressing public meetings. Littleton, the Irish secretary, was for abolishing it; and with the view of conciliating O’Connell, he informed him that the ministry intended to abandon it. But the result proved him to have been mistaken, and O’Connell, with some reason supposing himself to have been duped, called on Littleton to resign his secretaryship. It had also transpired in the discussion that Lord Althorp, the leader of the House of Commons, was privately opposed to retaining those clauses which it was his duty to push through the house. Lord Althorp therefore resigned, and Grey, who had lately passed his seventieth year, took the opportunity of resigning also. It was his opinion, it appeared, which had overborne the cabinet in favour of the public meeting clauses; and his voluntary withdrawal enabled Lord Althorp to return to his post and to proceed with the bill in its milder form. Grey was succeeded by Lord Melbourne; but no other change was made in the cabinet. Grey took no further part in politics. During most of his remaining years he continued to live in retirement at Howick, where he died on the 17th of July 1845, in his eighty-second year. By his wife Mary Elizabeth, only daughter of the first Lord Ponsonby, whom he married on the 18th of November 1794, he became the father of ten sons and five daughters. Grey’s eldest son Henry (q.v.) became the 3rd earl, and among his other sons were General Charles Grey (1804–1870) and Admiral Frederick Grey (1805–1878).
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.
