GREY, Ralph (1661-1706)

In April 1695 the crown granted Ralph Grey a lease of five lighthouses in Winton Ness (Winterton Ness) and Orford Ness in Norfolk, with an estimated income of £1,200 p.a., for £20 annual rent and an entry fine of £750 ‘only and in consideration of the said Grey’s good services’. CSP Dom. 1694–5, p. 484; CTB, 1693–6, pp. 952, 977, 992. He later conveyed part of this lease to his brother-in-law Richard Neville^‡, with whom he was closely associated (it was Neville who informed him in long, chatty letters of his brother’s final illness and death). Essex RO, D/DBy/O25/10, 12. In December 1695 he was given a further £750 as royal bounty to help him with his financial difficulties. CTB, 1693–6, p. 1257. Meanwhile, Grey of Warke, increasingly prominent in the House for his speeches supporting the Whig ministry, had been created earl of Tankerville in June 1695. Later that year Ralph Grey was returned for Berwick for the new Parliament, where he supported the Whig policies being promoted by his brother in the upper House. HP Commons, 1690–1715, ii. 449–51.

Tankerville was appointed a commissioner of the board of trade in May 1696, and in this position was able to acquire for Ralph the governorship of Barbados and the Windward Islands in July 1697. CSP Dom. 1697, p. 135; TNA, C231/8, 382. Ralph set out for the Caribbean the following spring, and, after having narrowly escaped being kidnapped at sea, arrived in Barbados almost a year after his commission, on 27 July 1698. CSP Dom. 1698, p. 396. William Penn valued his new colleague in colonial government, or at least thought it worthwhile to correspond with Grey expressing his admiration, with one eye always on his influential brother on the board of trade. Essex RO, D/DBy/O25/2, 4. Grey’s governorship was a period of widespread piracy and of disputes between the colonial powers in the West Indies. In November 1700 he was appointed a commissioner for the trial of pirates and was ordered to seize Captain Kidd. TNA, C231/9, 16. Occasionally he was too zealous in his duties, as when he tried to expel French planters from St Lucia during the brief period of peace between the two countries, and when he barred a Scot from holding office on the island, claiming that they were reserved for Englishmen alone. On both occasions he had to be called up short by the government in England. CSP Dom. 1700–2, pp. 129–30; Essex RO, D/DBy/O25/3. Aggrieved inhabitants brought various charges of his maladministration before the Privy Council in 1701 and 1702, but he appears to have gathered around him a coterie of adherents, who continued to correspond with him well after he had left the island and returned to England. Essex RO, D/DBy/O25/8, 9, 11, 13 et seq. The board of trade saw fit to consult with him in 1706 on his knowledge of Barbadian affairs after it had received reports of the corruption of his successor, Sir Bevill Granville^‡. Essex RO, D/DBy/O25/54–5.

Despite his absence in the West Indies, Grey was returned once more for Berwick in the first election of 1701. He did not attend, but his elder brother died on 24 June 1701, the very day on which that Parliament was prorogued. Tankerville had no male heirs, so while the earldom did not pass to his younger brother, Ralph did inherit their grandfather’s title of Grey of Warke. The new 4th Baron Grey of Warke was still marked as ‘abroad’ at a call of the House on 5 Jan. 1702, but had arrived home in time to take his seat on 22 January. After this late arrival he sat in a further 35 sittings of that Parliament, which saw the death of his patron William III and the accession of Anne.

In the early days of the new reign, John Macky described the new baron (mistakenly named Ford Grey in the printed edition of the Memoirs), as: ‘A sweet disposed gentleman. He joined King William at the Revolution, and is a zealous asserter of the liberties of the people – a thin, brown, handsome man, middle stature’. Jonathan Swift, though, appended to this character sketch the comment, ‘Had very little in him’. Macky Mems. 103. Swift’s animosity would have come from Grey’s allegiance with the Whigs, both as a Member for Berwick in the Commons and in the Lords. In the 1702–3 session of Anne’s first Parliament (during which he attended for 59 per cent of the sittings), Grey of Warke acted as a manager for conferences on the Occasional Conformity bill on 17 Dec. 1702 and again on 9 Jan. 1703. Contemporaries fully expected him to be opposed to the bill and on 16 Jan. he voted in favour of the Whigs’ wrecking amendment to the penalty clause of the bill. He voted to reject it when it came before the House again on 14 December 1703 in the session of 1703–4, when he attended a full 84 per cent of the sittings, the highest attendance level of his career.

On the same day as this important vote, Grey of Warke petitioned the House to bring in a bill which sought to confirm complicated arrangements he had made with both Rochester and his own nephew Charles Bennet, 2nd Baron Ossulston (married to Tankerville’s daughter), regarding the disposition of the encumbered Grey estates. The bill was read for the first time on 21 Dec. 1703 and passed the House on 14 Jan. 1704, before receiving the royal assent on 24 February. By this act Grey of Warke agreed to compound with both Ossulston and Rochester for £15,000 each to discharge various debts and free up the encumbered estates. HLRO, HL/PO/JO/10/6/48, no. 1938; TNA, PROB 11/489.

During his brief career in the House, Grey of Warke occasionally chaired committees. At the latter part of the 1704–5 session (during which he was present for 79 per cent of the sitting days), he chaired and reported from a committee of the whole considering the recruiting bill on 2 Mar. 1705. He also chaired select committees on three separate estate bills and on 16 Mar. reported to the House from one of these, the bill for John Proctor of Northumberland to sell part of his estate, for which Grey’s northern connections and knowledge may have been called upon. HLRO, HL/PO/CO/1/7, pp. 67, 73. His Northumberland background probably also coloured his opinion of the Scots. In November 1704 he ‘nettled at the Scotch Act’, probably meaning the Scots Parliament’s Act of Security, and predicted ‘that Nation’s over-running this as the Goths and Vandals did the Roman Empire’. In the discussion of the English Parliament’s Aliens bill, he responded to the proposal that the Scots not be excluded from offices in the English plantations by pointing out that they were already excluded by statute and proudly pointed out that he had put this law into effect himself while in Barbados. Nicolson, London Diary, 234, 250; Essex RO, D/DBy/O25/3. Despite this obvious hostility to his northern neighbours, Grey of Warke was appointed a commissioner for the union with Scotland in March 1706. CSP Dom. 1705–6, p. 110; Lockhart Mems. 119.

He was registered as the holder of the proxy of the Whig Charles Cornwallis, 4th Baron Cornwallis, on 14 Mar. 1705, but had no opportunity to use it as Parliament was prorogued that very day and then dissolved barely a month later. He was marked as a Hanoverian in a list analysing the attitudes of the peerage towards the succession that appeared shortly after the dissolution. During the first session of the 1705 Parliament, for which he was present at just over three-quarters of the sittings, Grey continued to be active in the proceedings of the House, and was named manager for a number of conferences in February and March 1706: for the Regency bill (7, 11 and 19 Feb.); for the consideration of the printed letter of Sir Rowland Gwynne^‡ to Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford (11 Mar.), and for the militia bill (13 March).

Grey of Warke died suddenly of apoplexy on 20 June 1706. By the provisions of a settlement drawn up by his grandfather in 1672 the Epping estate passed to his cousin, the Tory William North, 6th Baron North. Morant, History and Antiquities of Essex, i. 46–48; North, Lives, iii. 249–51. Grey charged debts totalling at least £30,000 on his remaining real estate in several counties, including the compositions of £15,000 which he owed to Ossulston and Rochester, ‘all which several sums of money’, he added in his will, ‘I am obliged to pay and discharge on account of my brother the late Earl of Tankerville’. He bequeathed the remainder of the estate as well as his personal estate in England and Barbados (which included a plantation) to his nephew, Henry Neville^‡, on condition that he change his surname to Grey and that he pay bequests of £2,700 and annuities totalling £110 p.a. out of this estate. At his death without male heirs the barony of Grey of Warke became extinct.