Grey succeeded to his father’s title on 15 June 1675 while still underage.
Less than a year after the death of his father, the young Baron Grey attempted, through a suit in Chancery brought against his mother, to abrogate the debts and annuities charged on the Gosfield estate by his late father, including the maintenance intended for his younger brothers. He claimed, in what was a long-running dispute involving many members of the extended Grey family, that Gosfield had been entailed to the heirs male by his grandfather the first Baron Grey in 1672, and it had not been in his own father’s power to alienate it and place charges on it for other purposes.
Country Peer, 1677-81
Grey first sat in the House on 22 Feb. 1677 and was quickly named to a number of select committees, principally on private bills. On 13 Apr. he was named as a reporter for a conference at which the Commons presented their objections to the Lords’ amendment to the supply bill for building more warships. He was then placed on the committee to draw up the explanation for the House’s continuing insistence on this amendment and was most likely a manager for the free conferences held on 14 and 16 Apr., after which the House receded from its amendment. Grey was not an assiduous attender of the House in 1677-8. He came to 53 per cent of the sittings in 1677 and left the House on 14 Apr., attending none of the sittings when Parliament briefly reconvened in late May. He returned to the House when Parliament assembled on 28 Jan. 1678, but still he only attended 38 per cent of the sittings of this latter part of the session. On 4 Apr. he voted Philip Herbert, 7th earl of Pembroke, guilty of manslaughter. He came to slightly more sittings in the session of spring 1678 when his attendance stood at 53 per cent.
Shaftesbury considered Grey as singly ‘worthy’ in his political analysis of the peers in the spring of 1677, at which time Grey would still have been largely unknown to him. But in the session of autumn 1678, during which he attended 61 per cent of the sittings, he became one of Shaftesbury’s most loyal and able political associates. His political positions may partly be attributed to the Presbyterian and Parliamentarian history of his family. His grandfather had been Speaker of the Lords during the Civil War and promoter of a ‘godly’ and Presbyterian Church settlement, although there is admittedly little similarity between the 3rd Baron’s shameless actions and the deep sense of personal sin and reprobation expressed in his grandfather’s long will.
From late 1678 Grey became an integral part of Shaftesbury’s campaign of ‘country’ agitation against both James Stuart, duke of York, and Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby. As a list of Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton noted, Grey’s proxy for the session was held by Shaftesbury. It was assigned to him on 15 Nov. 1678, a day when an important division was held in committee of the whole House on the motion to exclude from the House those lords who refused to sign the Test bill’s declaration against transubstantiation. Shaftesbury voted for the motion and presumably was able to cast Grey’s vote in its favour as well. Certainly, Wharton listed Grey as voting for it, even though his name is not on the attendance list for that day.
As Danby himself predicted, Grey continued his attacks on the former lord treasurer in the first Exclusion Parliament. He attended 69 per cent of sittings in its second session. On 22 Mar. 1679 Grey was appointed to the committee of 13 members—almost entirely made up of country peers such as himself, Shaftesbury, Wharton, Monmouth, George Savile, Viscount (later marquess of) Halifax, Arthur Annesley, earl of Anglesey, and John Egerton, 2nd earl of Bridgwater—assigned to draft a bill barring Danby from ever again holding office or attending the king. He was also named a manager of the conference held that day to discuss this bill. The Commons instead produced their own bill threatening Danby with attainder unless he surrendered himself to face the charges against him. Grey voted in favour of all versions of this attainder bill, both the House’s first amended bill, which effectively reduced the penalty to banishment, and the final version of the bill, closer to the Commons’ original intention, which passed the House on 14 April. He was even appointed one of the members of the House—with Monmouth, Halifax, Anglesey and Bridgwater—delegated to attend the king at court to present him with the bill and urge his speedy assent to it. During this period Grey also put his name to the dissent of 7 Apr. against the decision that John Sidway should be committed for making false allegations against Peter Gunning* [2024], bishop of Ely, and other bishops. Danby surrendered himself by the deadline of 21 Apr. set in his Act of Attainder and the debates soon turned to the procedure for the trials of both Danby and the five Catholic lords. On 8 May Grey was made a reporter for the conference in which the Commons suggested that there should be a joint committee of both Houses to settle the details of the trials and he entered his dissent when the House rejected this proposal. That same afternoon he was named as a reporter for the conference in which the Commons stated their objections to the House’s amendments to the supply bill, but the House more readily receded from their changes in this case, mindful of the urgency of voting through supply. On 10 May he was one of the many dissenters when the Commons’ suggestion for a joint committee to sort out the procedure for the trials was once again rejected. The following day the House relented and agreed to a joint committee, but Grey was not appointed to it. On 13 May Grey joined in the dissent of 21 country peers from the resolution that the bishops would be allowed to take part in the trials, despite their capital nature. Ten days later the country peers, once again including Grey, dissented from the House’s instructions to its representatives on the joint committee that they were to insist on the right of the bishops to attend the trials and on the condition that the trials of the five Catholic peers were to take place before that of Danby. Grey was appointed on 26 May a reporter for a conference to ‘maintain a good correspondence’ between the Houses, and the following day he subscribed to the dissent of 28 peers from the House’s continuing insistence on the bishops’ rights to assist in capital trials. Grey’s last activity that day, and indeed in that Parliament, was perhaps both his most important and his characteristic, for he may have been instrumental, through underhanded methods, in having the habeas corpus bill passed, one of the few successful legislative measures from that Parliament. On 27 May Grey, acting as teller in a division on whether to hold a last-minute conference requested by the Commons to discuss the bill, was said to have counted, ‘as a jest at first’, a particularly fat peer as ten votes in favour of the conference. Noticing that his opposite teller, James Bertie, 5th Baron Norreys, reputedly ‘a man subject to vapours’, was not paying attention, Grey decided to turn his jest to advantage and maintained this false tally. According to the manuscript minutes the vote in favour of a conference won by only 57 to 55, even though the attendance list for the House on that day only counts 107 peers present. The Commons agreed with the House’s amendments in the free conference, and the habeas corpus bill received the royal assent that afternoon before the king prorogued Parliament.
From 1677, if not before, Grey had been a friend, as well as a romantic rival, of his near contemporary the duke of Monmouth, with whom he shared a love of country sports, as well as of gallantry and womanizing. It was an open secret from at least 1677 that Grey’s wife had been conducting an affair with Monmouth, perhaps a continuation of a liaison inaugurated before her marriage to Grey. The affair appears to have been largely countenanced by Grey himself, as is suggested by a number of bawdy poems and lampoons, as well as from comments in contemporary correspondence.
this vain scruple shows clearly the impudence of the faction at that time, that would insist, in the face of the government, upon arrant nonsense … And it argues also a concern of theirs for the [Scottish] rebels; why else should they, by foolish cavils, endeavour to stay the forces going in aid to suppress them.R. North, Examen (1740), 80-81.
Following the unexpected dissolution of the Parliament on 12 July 1679, Grey proved himself highly adept at managing the elections for the Parliament scheduled for October. His brother Ralph, while still underage, was returned on the family interest for Berwick-upon-Tweed, which lay close to Chillingham Castle, for all three of the Exclusion Parliaments of 1679-81.
the ever noble and renowned Lord Grey met the Colonel [Henry Mildmay‡, the exclusionist candidate] in a most sumptuous habit, with his led horses in rich trappings, and about 2,000 horse attending him; then the Lord Grey with the Colonel began to march into the town, where they were met with near 2,000 horse more, and so passing through the town into the field in very good order, with their mouths loudly hollowing for A Mildmay only and crying out, God bless my Lord Grey.
Mildmay and his partner John Lamotte Honeywood‡ won the poll and ‘the truly noble Lord Grey’ ended the election with a speech to the freemen of Essex extolling them for their ‘zeal and courage for the maintaining your liberties, and the Protestant religion’.
During the long series of prorogations which delayed the meeting of Parliament, Grey was an active member of the Green Ribbon Club and of other Whig groups dining in the taverns of London.
Family and domestic problems also caused Grey concern during this period. Not only was there the matter of Monmouth’s continuing affair with his wife, which led him to pack off Lady Grey to Northumberland in January 1680 to keep her away from temptation, but perhaps as disruptive was Grey’s battle with other members of his family over the authenticity and terms of the will of his grandfather, especially as his enemy in this cause was his uncle Charles North* [1773], Baron North and Grey of Rolleston, another member of Shaftesbury’s circle. The case came to a head in late 1679 when it was heard by the court of delegates, which ultimately rejected North and Grey’s claims that the old baron’s will had been forged to disinherit his own wife Katherine, who was Grey of Warke’s paternal aunt. In February 1680 North and Grey exhibited yet another bill in chancery, aiming at recovering some of Grey of Warke’s estates.
When the Parliament for which Grey and his colleagues had petitioned assembled on 21 Oct. 1680, Grey was present and attended all but three of its 59 days. He was, on 8 Nov., named to the committee assigned to enquire into the recent alterations to the commissions of the peace, through which he could try to rectify his own recent omission from the commissions for Sussex, Essex and Northumberland. In the debate on the exclusion bill on 15 Nov. he sought to demolish the case against the bill. Against the argument that it was not certain that York was a Catholic he pointed to the proviso in the 1678 Test Act excepting the duke as well as the content of Colman’s letters as definitive proof of the duke’s religion. To those who claimed that passing the bill would abrogate the oath of allegiance that all those in Parliament had sworn, he insisted that the bill’s advocates were not violating the oath, because it merely enjoined them ‘not to undermine the government’, while this bill was merely ‘skipping the duke and so it goes to the right heir’. To the point that it was not in Parliament’s power to pass such a measure he challenged the bill’s opponents that ‘if any man knows that the king will not pass this bill, let him speak’. He was one of the peers who signed the dissent from the rejection of the bill at the first reading.
Grey joined 15 other opposition peers in the petition of 25 Jan. 1681 requesting the king not to convene the next Parliament at Oxford.
Radical Whig and rebel, 1681-8
From that point Grey joined the more radical Whigs in taking ever more extreme, provocative and potentially treasonous routes to demonstrate their anti-Catholicism and opposition to York and his succession. In May 1681 he attended the first political trial of the ‘Tory reaction’, that of Edward Fitzharris, and he also signed the petition begging the king to grant a pardon to Philip Herbert* [429], 7th earl of Pembroke, for yet another one of his violent murders.
Many contemporaries in 1681, and some scholars in the years following, thought that Grey of Warke was ‘cold Caleb’, mentioned fleetingly with ‘well-hung Balaam’ (most frequently assumed to be Huntingdon) and ‘canting Nadab’ (supposedly Howard of Escrick) among those ‘lords, below the dignity of verse’, ‘kind husbands’ and ‘mere nobles’ who were part of the circle of ‘Achitophel’ (Shaftesbury) manipulating ‘Absalom’ (Monmouth) in John Dryden’s satirical poem, Absalom and Achitophel. One reason for identifying Grey as Caleb is the epithet ‘cold’ and his placement among ‘kind husbands’, reflecting the complaisancy with which Grey faced his wife’s open affair with Monmouth.
Grey’s erotic adventures were made even more titillating to Behn’s readers because by the time the work was published, it was known that he had been engaging in potentially treasonous activity at the same time as he was seducing his sister-in-law. Most open and public was Grey’s involvement in the tumultuous politics of the City of London. On midsummer’s day in June 1682 he helped to orchestrate the riot at the London shrieval elections in which the incumbent sheriffs Thomas Pilkington‡ and Samuel Shute presided over the election of the Whig candidates Thomas Papillon‡ and John Dubois‡, in defiance of the lord mayor’s adjournment of the poll. The trial of Grey and his accomplices for inciting riot was originally scheduled for 16 Feb. 1683, but was put off until the following term when Grey challenged the make-up of the jury.
Less well-known at the time was Grey’s central place in the plots of autumn 1682 for a co-ordinated national rebellion in which Shaftesbury and William Russell‡, styled Lord Russell, would lead an insurrection in the City, while Monmouth would raise the western counties of Lancashire and Cheshire. For his part, Grey was to foment rebellion in Essex. Grey stood bail for Monmouth after he was arrested in late September 1682 for the riotous behaviour of his followers during his progress in the west.
In the weeks following James II’s accession to the throne, Grey and Robert Ferguson acted as Monmouth’s principal advisers, spurring him on to raise rebellion in the west of England. Grey sailed with Monmouth and served as his general of horse, but his irregular and inexperienced cavalry was quickly dispersed at Sedgemoor. Grey’s contemporaries delighted in attributing it to the peer’s own cowardice and military ineptitude.
the finest, the best delivered, and the most like a gentleman I ever heard, in which he evidenced as much regret to appear in such circumstances, as much penitence for his past errors, and as much gratitude to the king as any creature could do, and as much resentment against those who invited them over and left them in the lurch when they were come, as was possible.
Morrice, Ent’ring Bk. iii. 65-7; NAS, GD 406/1/9224.
Grey also testified at the trial of Henry Booth, 2nd Baron Delamer (later earl of Warrington), on 14 Jan. 1686, but as he could only give a general account of the plotting of 1682-3 without pointing to any specific involvement of the peer, Delamer was ultimately unanimously acquitted by his peers.
Revolution, 1689-95
Grey spent most of the rest of James II’s reign out of public life, probably concentrating his energies on recovering his fortunes. When his kinsman John Caryll, secretary to Mary of Modena, wrote asking him to assist James II during William of Orange’s invasion, Grey declined with the excuse that he had just had a bad fall from a horse.
On 21 Mar. 1689 Lord ‘Grey’ signed the protest against the rejection of the proposed repeal of the sacramental test from the bill to formulate oaths to the new monarchs. Both Grey and Henry Yelverton, 15th Baron Grey of Ruthin, were in the House that day and as both were confirmed Williamites either of them could be the dissenting Lord Grey. More unambiguously ‘Grey of Warke’ was in these early weeks placed on committees for legislation which reflected the Whigs’ attempts to reverse the effects of James II’s reign. Considering his previous radical Whig activities and involvement in Monmouth’s Rebellion, it was fitting that he was named to the committees to consider the bills for voiding the attainders of Lord Russell (on 8 Mar.) and Alice Lisle (3 May), as well as the bill to make it treason to correspond with the exiled king (25 April). On 8 May he was named a reporter for a conference on the bill for convicting and disarming papists, but on 10 May his proxy was registered with Lumley. Grey returned to the House on 30 May, just in time to vote, the following day, in favour of reversing the harsh judgments levelled against Oates in 1685 and then to enter his protest when that motion failed. He last sat in the first session of the Convention on 13 June 1689 and in total came to just under half of its sittings.
Grey’s attendance in the House after that was sporadic and he does not appear to have been active for the few years. He was still suffering the consequences of his involvement in Monmouth’s Rebellion; most of his energies were probably devoted to clearing his debts to Rochester, and in 1691 he and his brothers were compelled to sell the disputed Gosfield estate in Essex.
Grey was present at 27 per cent of the sittings in 1691-2, first attending on 23 Nov. and last attending on 14 Dec. before a specific occasion brought about his return to the chamber. On 22 Jan. 1692, on a day when Grey was not present in the House, Rochester presented a petition in which he complained that he was being refused possession of the unentailed lands, still encumbered with debts and annuities, now due to him by the expiration of the five-year lease to Grey stipulated in the 1686 agreement, and further that there was still a substantial amount due to him from the original grant of £16,000. Rochester requested that Grey’s privilege of Parliament be waived so that he could be pursued him in law. This roused Grey who began to sit regularly from 26 January. On 2 Feb. he signed the dissent from the resolution to adhere to the amendments to the bill to establish commissioners for public accounts. Later that day he submitted his answer to Rochester’s petition and requested the House not to take away his privilege, complaining, among other charges levelled against Rochester, that he was now reduced for his only income to precisely the unentailed estate of which Rochester was now wishing to deprive him. Grey’s answer was referred to the committee for privileges to ‘consider precedents of when privileges had been disallowed and taken away’ and the committee chairman, Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis, delivered his report in favour of Grey’s claiming privilege on 6 February.
Grey did not sit in the House again after that decision until 5 Dec. 1692, a month into the following session, when he became involved in the discussions on the ‘advice’ to be given to the king in the light of the military reverses of the previous summer. On 20 Dec. he was named a manager for the conference at which the House delivered to the Commons the papers submitted by the secretary of state Daniel Finch* [877], 2nd earl of Nottingham, on the failure of the planned ‘descent’ on France the previous summer, with a request that the Commons consider and report on them. The following day he attended the conference where the Commons returned the papers without comment and instead delivered to the House’s reporters a vote praising their own Member, Edward Russell later earl of Orford, for his conduct as admiral. Having attended on 22 Dec., the penultimate day before the House adjourned for Christmas, Grey did not return until 13 Jan. 1693. On 16 Jan. 1693 he was named to a committee to draw up clauses for the bill for the frequency of Parliaments, to ensure that Parliament would meet annually and would be newly elected every three years. The following day he joined in the two protests against the House’s rejection of the right of Charles Knollys to claim the earldom of Banbury, or even to have his case referred to the judges. On 19 Jan. he protested against the House’s abandonment of its amendment to the land tax bill which provided for a separate body of commissioners, drawn from the upper House, to assess the value of the peers’ lands. He also signed the protest against the House’s refusal to have the amendment considered by the committee for privileges.
Earl of Tankerville, 1695-99
It was only mid-way through the following session of 1694-5, from December 1694, that Grey became a constant attender of the House, a major parliamentary figure and an effective and leading spokesman for the Whigs. Despite arriving a month into the session’s proceedings, he attended just over two-thirds of its sittings, his highest rate since the Exclusion Parliaments. Possibly, the ‘turn to the Whigs’ that had been slowly going on since 1693, and had seen the promotions in the peerage of Whig political leaders in the summer of 1694, encouraged Grey to re-enter politics. He quickly took to it and was a natural leader in the House. On 24 Jan. 1695 he first served as chairman for a meeting of the committee for the bill to vest in trustees lands belonging to Grey’s distant kinsman John Caryll, then in exile with James II at St. Germain. By 4 Feb. he appears to have been sole chairman and reported the bill to the House as fit to pass on 12 February.
The under-secretary of state James Vernon‡ informed Robert Sutton, 2nd Baron Lexinton, in a letter of 1 Mar. 1695, of the reasons for Grey’s rapid rise in the estimation of the House:
I perceive my Lord Grey is in great reputation for the late speeches he has made upon these two great occasions of the [Lancashire] Plot and the Fleet[.] He has been the greatest champion for both and not put himself always upon the defensive but as it came in his way[.] He has edged his eloquence with that keenness as to show the finders of faults have not kept themselves clear of them. In the debate on Wednesday [27 Feb.] when he highly extolled the sending the Fleet into the Mediterranean he said he did not know whose advice it was or whom we were obliged to for the counsel, but he was satisfied it did not come from France, though he feared there might have been a time when we received French advice and followed it too.Add. 46527, f. 66.
Grey had taken part in both these contentious matters. On 22 Feb. he had been a teller—probably, judging by Vernon’s comments, for the minority not contents—in the division on a successful motion to adjourn the House, at a point when the Lords were debating motions affirming the veracity of the allegations of the Lancashire Plot.
For his eloquence in support of the king’s interests, Grey was amply rewarded. A warrant for his creation as earl of Tankerville, a town in France where a 15th-century ancestor had performed signal military actions (contemporaries were quick to waggishly contrast it with Grey’s own performance at Sedgemoor) was dated 3 May, the day of the prorogation. Two days later he was sworn to the Privy Council as earl of Tankerville, even though the patent creating him under that title had not yet passed the seals and was only enrolled eight days later, on 11 May.
Tankerville did not sit in the first session of the new Parliament until 10 Feb. 1696, when he was introduced in his new title. With this late start he attended in total only 45 per cent of the session’s sittings, but within two weeks of his arrival he became a major actor in the House as a result of his response to the news of the assassination attempt against William III. On 24 Feb. he chaired and reported from the drafting committee for the address to the king following his speech to Parliament informing them of the conspiracy.
In the following session of 1696-7, of which he attended 62 per cent of the sittings, Tankerville was on 30 Nov. 1696 appointed to represent the House in a conference on the Commons’ bill to reform and limit privilege of Parliament, a matter which continued to capture his personal interest. The main business to occupy Tankerville in this session, though, was the attainder of Sir John Fenwick‡, 3rd bt. Before the debates began in the House, Vernon wrote to Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, that ‘some are sensible there will be a want of speakers to support the bill. My Lord Tankerville will signalize himself, but it is hard to find him seconds’, and after the first day of debate Vernon reported that Tankerville had managed the bill in the House.
Tankerville continued as a spokesman for the Whigs in the last (1697-8) session of the Parliament, when he came to 70 per cent of the sittings. On 10 Jan. 1698 he was named as a manager for the conference on the House’s amendments to the bill to prohibit correspondence with James II and his adherents at St. Germain, despite the recently-concluded peace with France. He was a teller in the division of 15 Mar. on whether to commit the bill to punish Charles Duncombe‡. He told for the contents as he was listed as voting in favour of commitment and subscribed to the protest when the motion was lost by one vote.
For the elections to the 1698 Parliament, Tankerville and Somerset decided to cooperate for both Chichester and Sussex. They were unsuccessful in getting Ranelagh re-elected for Chichester, which prompted Tankerville to offer Somerset some advice from his long experience in managing the borough: ‘I will make a demonstration to your grace when I have the honour to wait on you, and will propose such a method to you of commanding that city for the future that in all elections to come it shall be at your disposal’. For the Sussex election, Tankerville still refused to support Orme, though he assured Somerset he was eager ‘to preserve the good understanding which has so happily begun between us’, but his pleas to Somerset to find a candidate on whom they could agree were fruitless, as this time Orme was successful in winning a seat.
Tankerville maintained his previous attendance rate of 70 per cent in the first session of the new Parliament. On 27 Jan. 1699 he was named as a manager for the conference on the amendments to the bill to prohibit the export of corn, malt and meal for one year. Vernon reported to Shrewsbury on 31 Jan. that various members of the Lords objected to the small peacetime standing army provided for in the disbanding bill sent up from the Commons, but felt that it was imperative for maintaining peace between the two Houses and getting business done not to reject it. ‘My lord chancellor [John Somers, Baron Somers] and my Lord Tankerville were the most copious on the subject’, he added.
Whig minister, 1699-1701
By this point, favours and offices were heaped on the increasingly sickly Tankerville. He was offered the post of first commissioner of the Admiralty in May 1699, after Orford had resigned from the post. But, as Vernon reported, he had heard that Tankerville had said that ‘he would be drawn through a horse pond before he would take that employment’. L’Hermitage thought that Tankerville had turned down the post, ‘for fear of being the target of the House of Commons, as have been all the others’. Nevertheless, only four days after turning down this post, Tankerville accepted the offer to be second commissioner of the Treasury, serving under a commoner, Charles Montagu, the future Baron Halifax. As Vernon reported to Shrewsbury, ‘he did it with so good a grace, that the king is very well satisfied in the giving it to him’.
The mismanagement of this bill, which led to a breakdown between the government and Parliament, led to rumours of wholesale changes in the ministry, including the possible replacement of the Whigs, including Tankerville, by Tories.
Parliament was dissolved on 19 Dec. 1700, shortly after these complex negotiations to form a new ‘mixed ministry’ were completed. By the time the new Parliament met on 6 Feb. 1701, Tankerville was seriously ill and could only manage to come to five meetings of Parliament in March 1701 before slipping back into absence. In a letter of 29 May, written with ‘a trembling gouty hand’, Tankerville expressed his fears to his Whig colleague, Somers, of the progress in the Commons of the bill to take away privilege of Parliament, for if the bill passed ‘it will enable Lord Rochester to pursue me with a most terrible persecution from which I cannot hope for any relief’ as the king had not made good his previous promises, procured by Somers, Shrewsbury and Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, to make Tankerville ‘easy’ in relation to Rochester’s claims on his estate. Tankerville was well aware though that Somers had more pressing matters on his mind at this point, namely his impeachment by the Commons. He promised his colleague his support at the trial despite his poor health: ‘I will be carried thither if alive; I had almost said if in my grave I should rise again upon that occasion’. Tankerville did rouse himself from his bed one more time to vote on 17 June for Somers’s acquittal and died at his house on Pall Mall only a week later, on 24 June, the day when Parliament was prorogued and the Act of Settlement received the royal assent.