account of the defence of Guînes was used by Holinshed in his Chronicles.
When he died on the 14th of October 1593 he was succeeded as 15th baron by his son Thomas (d. 1614), who while serving in Ireland incurred the enmity of Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, and of Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton; and after fighting against Spain in the Netherlands he was a member of the court which sentenced these two noblemen to death in 1601. On the accession of James I. he was arrested for his share in the “Bye” plot, an attempt made by William Watson and others to seize the king. He was tried and sentenced to death, but the sentence was not carried out and he remained in prison until his death on the 9th of July 1614. He displayed both ability and courage at his trial, remarking after sentence had been passed, “the house of Wilton hath spent many lives in their prince’s service and Grey cannot beg his.” Like his father Grey was a strong Puritan. He left no children and his barony became extinct.
In 1784 Sir Thomas Egerton, Bart., a descendant in the female line of the 14th baron, was created Baron Grey de Wilton. He died without sons in September 1814, when his barony became extinct; but the titles of Viscount Grey de Wilton and earl of Wilton, which had been conferred upon him in 1801, passed to Thomas Grosvenor (1799–1882), the second son of his daughter Eleanor (d. 1846), and her husband Robert Grosvenor, 1st marquess of Westminster. Thomas took the name of Egerton and his descendants still hold the titles.
Roger Grey, 1st Baron Grey de Ruthyn, who was summoned to parliament as a baron in 1324, saw much service as a soldier before his death on the 6th of March 1353. The second baron was his son Reginald, whose son Reginald (c. 1362–1440) succeeded to the title on his father’s death in July 1388. In 1410 after a long dispute the younger Reginald won the right to bear the arms of the Hastings family. He enjoyed the favour both of Richard II. and Henry IV., and his chief military exploits were against the Welsh, who took him prisoner in 1402 and only released him upon payment of a heavy ransom. Grey was a member of the council which governed England during the absence of Henry V. in France in 1415; he fought in the French wars in 1420 and 1421 and died on the 30th of September 1440. His eldest son, Sir John Grey, K.G. (d. 1439), who predeceased his father, fought at Agincourt and was deputy of Ireland in 1427. He was the father of Edmund Grey (d. 1489), who succeeded his grandfather as Lord Grey de Ruthyn in 1440 and was created earl of Kent in 1465.
One of Reginald Grey’s younger sons, Edward (1415–1457), succeeded his maternal grandfather as Baron Ferrers of Groby in 1445. He was the ancestor of the earls of Stamford and also of the Greys, marquesses of Dorset and dukes of Suffolk.
The barony of Grey de Ruthyn was merged in the earldom of Kent until the death of Henry, the 8th earl, in November 1639. It then devolved upon Kent’s nephew Charles Longueville (1612–1643), through whose daughter Susan (d. 1676) it came to the family of Yelverton, who were earls of Sussex from 1717 to 1799. The next holder was Henry Edward Gould (1780–1810), a grandson of Henry Yelverton, earl of Sussex; and through Gould’s daughter Barbara, marchioness of Hastings (d. 1858), it passed to the last marquess of Hastings, on whose death in 1868 the barony fell into abeyance, this being terminated in 1885 in favour of Hastings’s sister Bertha (d. 1887), the wife of Augustus Wykeham Clifton. Their son, Rawdon George Grey Clifton (b. 1858), succeeded his mother as 24th holder of the barony.
GREYMOUTH, a seaport of New Zealand, the principal port
on the west coast of South Island, in Grey county. Pop. (1906)
4569. It stands on the small estuary of the Grey or Mawhera
river, has a good harbour, and railway communication with
Hokitika, Reefton, &c., while the construction of a line to connect
with Christchurch and Nelson was begun in 1887. The district
is both auriferous and coal-bearing. Gold-dredging is a rich
industry, and the coal-mines have attendant industries in coke,
bricks and fire-clay. The timber trade is also well developed.
The neighbouring scenery is picturesque, especially among the
hills surrounding Lake Brunner (15 m. S.E.).
GREYTOWN (San Juan del Norte), the principal seaport on
the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, in the extreme south-eastern
corner of the republic, and at the mouth of the northern channel
of the San Juan river delta. Pop. (1905) about 2500. The town
occupies the seaward side of a narrow peninsula, formed by the
windings of the river. Most of its houses are raised on piles
2 or 3 ft. above the ground. The neighbourhood is unhealthy
and unsuited for agriculture, so that almost all food-stuffs must
be imported, and the cost of living is high. Greytown has
suffered severely from the accumulation of sand in its once fine
harbour. Between 1832 and 1848 Point Arenas, the seaward
end of the peninsula, was enlarged by a sandbank more than
1 m. long; between 1850 and 1875 the depth of water over the
bar decreased from about 25 ft. to 5 ft., and the entrance channel,
which had been nearly 12m. wide, was almost closed. Subsequent
attempts to improve the harbour by dredging and building
jetties have only had partial success; but Greytown remains
the headquarters of Nicaraguan commerce with Europe and
eastern America. The village called America, 1 m. N., was
built as the eastern terminus of a proposed interoceanic canal.
The harbour of San Juan, discovered by Columbus, was brought into further notice by Captain Diego Machuca, who in 1529 sailed down the river from Lake Nicaragua. The date of the first Spanish settlement on the spot is not known, but in the 17th century there were fortifications at the mouth of the river. In 1796 San Juan was made a port of entry by royal charter, and new defences were erected in 1821. In virtue of the protectorate claimed by Great Britain over the Mosquito Coast (q.v.), the Mosquito Indians, aided by a British force, seized the town in 1848 and occupied it until 1860, when Great Britain ceded its protectorate to Nicaragua by the treaty of Managua. This treaty secured religious liberty and trial by jury for all civil and criminal charges in Greytown; its seventh article declared the port free, but was never enforced.
GREYWACKE, or Grauwacke (a German word signifying
a grey earthy rock), the designation, formerly more generally
used by English geologists than at the present day, for impure,
highly composite, gritty rocks belonging to the Palaeozoic
systems. They correspond to the sandstones, grits and fine
conglomerates of the later periods. Greywackes are mostly
grey, brown, yellow or black, dull-coloured, sandy rocks which
may occur in thick or thin beds along with slates, limestones, &c.,
and are abundant in Wales, the south of Scotland and the Lake
district of England. They contain a very great variety of
minerals, of which the principal are quartz, orthoclase and
plagioclase, calcite, iron oxides and graphitic carbonaceous
matters, together with (in the coarser kinds) fragments of such
rocks as felsite, chert, slate, gneiss, various schists, quartzite.
Among other minerals found in them are biotite and chlorite,
tourmaline, epidote, apatite, garnet, hornblende and augite,
sphene, pyrites. The cementing material may be siliceous or
argillaceous, and is sometimes calcareous. As a rule greywackes
are not fossiliferous, but organic remains may be common in
the finer beds associated with them. Their component particles
are usually not much rounded by attrition, and the rocks have
often been considerably indurated by pressure and mineral
changes, such as the introduction of interstitial silica. In some
districts the greywackes are cleaved, but they show phenomena
of this kind much less perfectly than the slates. Although the
group is so diverse that it is difficult to characterize mineralogically,
it has a well-established place in petrographical
classifications, because these peculiar composite arenaceous
deposits are very frequent among Silurian and Cambrian rocks,
and rarely occur in Secondary or Tertiary systems. Their
essential features are their gritty character and their complex
composition. By increasing metamorphism greywackes frequently
pass into mica-schists, chloritic schists and sedimentary
gneisses. (J. S. F.)
GRIBEAUVAL, JEAN BAPTISTE DE (1715–1789), French
artillery general, was the son of a magistrate of Amiens and was
born there on the 15th of September 1715. He entered the
French royal artillery in 1732 as a volunteer, and became an
officer in 1735. For nearly twenty years regimental duty and
scientific work occupied him, and in 1752 he became captain of a
company of miners. A few years later he was employed in a
military mission in Prussia. In 1757, being then a lieutenant-colonel,