© The Brabant Press, 2014. All rights reserved.

Cover design: Kachergis Book Design

Cover photo: Katharine Lyttelton, Queen Mary University London Archives

Typesetting and index: Diane Collins

ISBN: 9780989099394

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Illustration Credits

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

EDWARD GREY

KATHARINE LYTTELTON

SMALL WORLD:
EDWARD AND KATHARINE'S CIRCLE

THE LETTERS OF SIR EDWARD GREY TO KATHARINE LYTTELTON

APPENDIX Sex and the Foreign Secretary

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I'm very grateful to the Queen Mary University London Archives for permission to print the letters from Edward Grey to Katharine Lyttelton in the Lyttelton Papers. I would especially like to thank archivist Lorraine Screene for her assistance when I read the letters at the Mile End campus and to Lorraine and to Victoria Platt for photocopying the correspondence last fall and locating and scanning pictures of the Lyttelton family.

Archivists and staff at the following institutions were unfailingly kind and helpful: the British Library, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, Churchill College Cambridge, Durham University, the National Archives, the National Archives of Scotland, the National Library of Scotland, the Times International Archive, Winchester College, and, in the U.S., the Hoover Library of Stanford, the New York Public Library, and the Fales Library of NYU.

Apart from Lorraine, Colin Harris of the Bodleian, Ian Dawson of the Royal Society for Protection of Birds, Maria Castrillo of the NLS, and Nick Mayes of the TIA especially extended themselves, and Suzanne Foster of Winchester College graciously took me on a tour of the buildings and grounds.

I appreciate as well the following public archives for sending photocopies or scans: the Devon County Archives, Duke University, The Royal Society for the Preservation of Birds, University of Newcastle, and the Harry Crowe Ransome Center.

I'm grateful to individuals who permitted me to consult papers in their possession or corresponded with me or spoke with me about Grey. Hugo Vickers was particularly helpful, letting me look at letters from Pamela Grey and other material and introducing me to Dame Frances Campbell-Preston, a granddaughter of Katharine Lyttelton, who kindly shared recollections of her grandparents and of Grey himself. The late Michael Foote saw the former Foreign Secretary briefly when he was a schoolboy at Winchester, and sent me an amusing account of the episode. Carolyn Dakers introduced me to the Francis Dineleys, who permitted me to look at early letters from Pamela in their possession, rescued from Clouds, and sent a photocopy of one. I'm grateful as well to the Earl of Wemyss, who allowed me to look at material relating to Pamela, and who kindly showed me around the storied Stanway. I must thank also the holders of other private papers who permitted me access to them: the Duke of Westminster for letters from Pamela to George and Sybell Wyndham in the Grosvenor Papers at the Easton Estate Archives, Cheshire, and the Marquess of Lansdowne for access to letters between Grey and Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice. I'm especially grateful to the archivist at Bowood, Kate Fielden, for transcribing and taking notes on these letters.

I'd like to thank the historians who corresponded with me about Grey: Jim Covert, Cameron Hazelhurst, who generously offered to read sections of The Lamps Go Out, Gordon Martel, Keith Neilson, and Keith Robbins. I'm glad also for the chance to have spoken with Zara Steiner at Cambridge and with Mike Waterhouse at Winchester.

Individuals with connections to Grey also corresponded with me about him: Sir William Curtis, the grandson of his youngest sister, Agatha-Ann Graves, the widow of his oldest sister's grandson, who wrote me extensively about the family, and Richard Graves, nephew and biographer of the poet, a nephew of the oldest sister, Alice Graves. Cecilia Chance, grand-niece of Dorothy Grey, very kindly photocopied for me the part of her great-grandmother's diary that was devoted to Dorothy. I appreciate being introduced to her by her nephew Anthony Heaton-Armstrong. I'm particularly indebted to Alice Graves' great-grandson Adrian, who hosted me in Essex and showed me some of the Greyiana in his possession, including the Foreign Secretary's fishing tackle and his garter, as well as family photos, and later sent me a memoir by his father, Christopher Graves. Janet Babbitt, a conjectural grand-daughter, spoke with me by phone about her search for records of her mother and grandmother, and conjectural grandson Hans-Joachim Heller generously shared the interesting documents in his possession.

Bruce Kinzer read the introduction and made some helpful comments. My greatest debt to any individual is to Pat Brockway, author of Sir Edward Grey: More Than a Politician, focusing on Grey at Winchester and in Hampshire, and her husband Derek. Pat accompanied me along the route Grey used to take from Winchester to Itchen Abbas, where she has restored the site of Cottage, and then, with Derek, we did part of the legendary walk the Foreign Secretary and Teddy Roosevelt took in the New Forest in June, 1910. Pat has a great fund of knowledge about Grey, and has been immensely helpful. She has read the entire introduction, asked some provocative questions, and saved me from some errors.

My apologies to any individuals I may have overlooked.

The place from which Grey wrote each letter is indicated before the date, except when he used blank stationery and didn't note his location.

I have omitted some sentences, and a few letters, which only discuss plans for meetings or travel arrangements, and are otherwise of no interest, and have very occasionally modernized Grey's punctuation, if the sentence was otherwise not immediately intelligible. I've dispensed with the salutations and closings after they settle into "My Dearest Katharine" and "Yours ever, Edward Grey," apart from a few jocular greetings.

Though Grey refers to his close friend Edward Tennant as "Eddie," both his wife and his sister always wrote the name "Eddy," and this is the version I've used in the introduction.

Not knowing one's readers, one always runs the risk of saying too little or too much in footnotes, and I'm sure I've done both, though I expect I've erred more on the side of the latter. In particular, places that will be familiar to British readers are identified for the benefit of Americans who may not be.

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Illustrations appear between pages 120 and 121.

Quotations are from the text, unless noted in parentheses; full citations are in the notes. My thanks to Adrian Graves for permitting me to use family photographs in his possession, to Queen Mary University London Archives, and to the National Portrait Gallery, London.

1. Louise Creighton, Dorothy Grey (C. Chance, The Widdrington Women, 84)

2. Adrian Graves

3. Adrian Graves (L. Creighton, Dorothy Grey, 112)

4. Adrian Graves

5. Adrian Graves (G. Trevelyan, Grey of Fallodon, 43)

6. L. Creighton, Dorothy Grey

7. L. Creighton, Dorothy Grey

8. National Portrait Gallery, London (first two lines of "Non Nobis Domine" by Harry Cust)

9. National Portrait Gallery, London (H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, 269)

10. National Portrait Gallery, London

11. Adrian Graves (S. Gordon, Edward Grey of Fallodon and his Birds, 5)

12. Adrian Graves

13. L. Creighton, Dorothy Grey (final sestet of a sonnet by Dorothy Grey, p. 61)

14. through 20. Queen Mary University London Archives

ABBREVIATIONS

The papers are always those of the recipient of the letter, unless otherwise indicated.

BL: British Library

Bodleian: Bodleian Library Archives, Oxford University

CUL: Cambridge University Archives

Durham: University of Durham Archives

Grosvenor: Grosvenor Papers, Eaton Estate Archives, Cheshire

NA: National Archives, Kew

NAS: National Archives of Scotland

Newcastle: University of Newcastle Archives

NLS: National Library of Scotland

INTRODUCTION

People who know nothing else about Sir Edward Grey (1862–1933), the longest-serving British Foreign Secretary (from December 1905 to December 1916), are familiar with his uncharacteristically fatidic observation on the eve of the First World War: "The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."¹

The remark was made at dusk on August 3^rd, 1914. At a little after 7:00 a.m. that morning, the Belgian government had rejected an ultimatum demanding that German troops be permitted to pass through the country. Kaiser and Reichskanzler were reminded of their nation's solemn pledge to respect Belgium's neutrality, and were told that the Belgian Army would resist the invasion.²

Rising at a little after 3:00 that afternoon in the House of Commons, Grey had given a speech that had shifted sentiment among members.³ A majority, in the Cabinet as well as the House, may still have supported British neutrality before he spoke. This was not the case afterward. Grey pointedly refrained from mentioning repeated German and Austrian rejections of British proposals for a negotiated settlement, and, with characteristic scrupulousness, did not even refer to the insulting bid for British neutrality that German Chancellor Theobald Bethmann Hollweg had made the day before. Instead, he stressed the country's moral obligation to defend the northern coast of France from the German Fleet. He and the Prime Minister both seem to have hoped that naval action was all that would be required of the U.K. in the coming war.⁴ Then, at some length, he made the case that it was in Britain's vital interest to preserve Belgium's neutrality.⁵

Now he and the country were waiting for the first shots to be fired, presumably in the vicinity of the Liege forts. There would be a British ultimatum to Berlin the next day, but everyone assumed it would be ignored.

The Foreign Secretary was standing at his office window, looking across St. James Park to the Mall. It was around 9:00 p.m. The street lights flickered on. Grey's friend J. A. Spender, editor of the Westminster Gazette, was beside him, and it was to Spender that he addressed the remark. Grey later recalled that the lamps were "being lit," but they'd been electric for over a decade, and came on without the benefit of a lamplighter.

The lamps never came back on. About 16.5 million soldiers⁶ and civilians lost their lives in the conflict,⁷ but historians cannot even estimate to the nearest 10 million how many individuals were killed as an indirect result of the war, for the triumph of National Socialism and Communism are inconceivable without it. We are still living with the war's consequences a century later.

If someone knows anything else about Sir Edward apart from the "lamps" quote, it's likely that the Foreign Secretary was regarded by friend and foe alike–save for German propagandists during the war–as an exceptionally honest, straightforward, sincere, and trustworthy individual, a man of his word. "Lies and intrigue are equally repugnant to him," wrote the last pre-war German Ambassador to London, Prince Max Lichnowsky.⁸

If a third thing is known about Grey, it is surely his love of the countryside, and his preference for fishing and bird-watching to politics. In fact, he is remembered today by some individuals primarily for his contributions to ornithology and for his nature writing. His Fly Fishing (1899) and The Charm of Birds (1927) are regarded as classics, and the Edward Grey Center for Ornithology at Oxford, founded in 1937, commemorates Grey the naturalist. The Foreign Secretary recalled for Katharine Lyttelton how he used to look longingly out the window while cramming for his exams at Balliol, wishing he could exchange places with the gardener, who was trundling by with his wheelbarrow.⁹ On the hustings and attending sessions of the House and Cabinet meetings, or writing despatches and letters at the Foreign Office, he also often seemed to wish he were elsewhere–pulling trout from the Itchen or salmon from the Spey, or feeding the ducks beside the ponds at Fallodon.

While there is something charming about the notion of the gentleman politician, a throwback to the eighteenth century, this picture of Grey has for decades provided ammunition for critics. Not only was he insular, incurious, and unambitious, but he lacked the seriousness, the professionalism, required of a Foreign Secretary in the tumultuous years before the outbreak of the First World War, and particularly during the crisis of July 1914. He was an amateur, a dilettante, who permitted the country to drift into war while he went fishing.

The first biography of Grey, by the Oxford historian George Trevelyan,¹⁰ did much to reinforce this impression of the Foreign Secretary. And because it was so well-written, it enshrined the image of the upright, utterly candid, but disengaged Whig patrician, who, but for the call of duty, would have happily immersed himself in rural pleasures.

Keith Robbins, thirty-one when his biography of Grey was published thirty-four years later, in 1971, found Trevelyan's book "suffused with a rather oppressive sentimentality." Robbins' book is also well-written, as well as thoroughly researched. There's a reason that, in the eighty years following Grey's death, only two full-length biographies of the Foreign Secretary appeared. But Robbins' is a political biography and the "rough places" Trevelyan made "smoother" and the "puzzles" that he neglected have mostly to do with Sir Edward's career, not his private life.¹¹ One gets a better sense of the man himself from Trevelyan's book–Grey's profound feeling of loss after his first wife's death, his flashes of schoolboy humor, his appreciation not only of the Northumberland and Hampshire countryside, but of books and people.

For Trevelyan, Grey was above all a tragic figure, "one whom Fortune loved and hated out of the common measure."¹² Grey's first wife, Dorothy, was killed when she was thrown from an open carriage after her horse shied. His second wife, Pamela, died of a heart attack after just six years of marriage. One brother, George, was killed by a lion in Kenya, a second, Charlie, by a buffalo in Tanganikya. His beloved ancestral home Fallodon was destroyed by fire in 1917; his fishing cottage in Hampshire burned to the ground in 1923.

Grey was exceptionally close to both wives. His relationship with the reclusive Dorothy was especially intimate.¹³

Grey was very fond of both brothers, and Cottage and Fallodon were sacred places.

In 1914 Grey's eyesight began to deteriorate rapidly. By 1916 he was nearly blind. For so passionate a naturalist, someone who was so keen an observer of birds and so avid a fisherman, this was a terrible blow. As Trevelyan puts it, "It was an irony that tested the unconquerable sanity of his spirit, to be set free at last,¹⁴ too late; the leisure he had longed for was his, and the bounty of nature's loveliness was spread before him, invisible... He returned to his birds but he could no longer see them; to his books, but he could no longer read them."¹⁵ "It is a living death," Grey told a friend of his last years, Seton Gordon.¹⁶

But the tragedy that will always be associated with Grey is, inevitably, the outbreak of World War I. The Foreign Secretary was preeminently a man of peace. He had organized and chaired the conference that resolved disputes arising from the first Balkan War, and offered to do the same for the far less thorny disagreements that were the pretext for the third Balkan War, World War I. The offer was rejected by the German Chancellor, as were other suggestions for a negotiated settlement of the crisis.

Late in the afternoon on August 3, when he was congratulated by Sir Arthur Nicolson, the Permanent Under-Secretary, after his speech to the House, Grey didn't reply. "He moved to the center of the room and raised his hands with clenched fists above his head," Nicolson recalled. "He brought his fists with a crash upon the table. ‘I hate war,' he groaned, ‘I hate war.'"¹⁷

After the outbreak of hostilities, he lay awake at night wondering if there were anything more he could he might have said or written during the preceding years to have prevented the conflict.¹⁸ He concluded that there was little he could have done. Not all historians have agreed with him.

Anyone reading Grey's letters to Katharine Lyttelton, or to his other confidantes, will see at once how bitterly he resented being trapped in London by his office. If the July Crisis had been amicably resolved, if he had not lost the people and homes he most loved, he would still be a tragic figure for the sacrifices he made. Again, one has to read his letters, and Cottage Book and Fly Fishing, to appreciate what he gave up to go to the Foreign Office each morning and sit on the front bench, to attend Cabinets when Parliament was in session, and give speeches when it adjourned.

It wasn't merely that he enjoyed nature. He had a heightened capacity to observe birds and wildlife, and derived something more intense and transcendent from watching and listening than mere pleasure. Trevelyan believed he had a "genius" for observation and, blessed with the additional gift of being able to share what he saw and felt with others, he helped thousands "to enjoy the purest and most lasting joys of mind and heart."¹⁹ What makes Grey's misery in office tragic is the knowledge, by the spring of 1914, that in remaining Foreign Secretary, he was sacrificing his eyesight.

Why did he not fling open the cage door then or earlier? He was not pinioned, as Trevelyan points out, any more than the Fallodon ducks. The Regius Professor goes on to suggest that Grey derived real satisfaction from directing the nation's foreign policy: "the exercise of great talents on great affairs gave him more intellectual pleasure during his working hours than he records in his private letters, perhaps more than he was conscious of himself."²⁰

Except for the final phrase, this may have been true. But there were other motives that his friend and biographer ignored or chose not to mention. Grey very much wanted to see the Liberals enact the reforms to which they had pledged themselves. The need in particular to ameliorate the conditions of the working class and rural poor, and to grant unions some of the power to which they aspired, was much more acute in 1906 than when the Liberals had last held office over a decade earlier. But Grey did not trust any of his colleagues to preside over British foreign policy. One can't help but feel he would not have minded so much had Lord Lansdowne, his Conservative predecessor, returned to office. But he no more wished to see Harcourt or Bryce in his place than to see Balfour or Bonar Law installed in 10 Downing Street. So it was not merely the case that he found the transacting of Foreign Office business intellectually stimulating. His Liberal colleagues (with the possible exceptions of Asquith, Haldane, Crewe, and, to a lesser degree, Morley and McKenna, and, later, Churchill) admirable as they might be in other respects, were, to put it baldly, too naïve, too insular, too insensitive to the complexities of the domestic politics of the continental Powers, and too indifferent to the requirements of India and the Empire.²¹

If Trevelyan did not conceal from readers Grey's misery in office, he drew a veil around his subject's private life. This is not what Grey himself would have wanted. Writing to Maud Selborne, he observed, "a man's biography unless it tells what things made him happy, in what thoughts he found the means of bearing grief and what his relations with women were, is nearly useless; and the telling of these things is necessarily intimate: it is of no use telling about them, they must be told in the man's intimate private letters."²² But all of Grey's correspondence was destroyed–including letters his second wife Pamela had wished to publish. It was likely Grey's oldest sister, Alice Graves, who burned the letters. It was certainly she who chose Trevelyan. He was selected not only for his "real love and immense admiration for Edward," but for his "delicacy of feeling." The project, she trusted, would be "safe in his hands."²³ Trevelyan was asked to submit copies of each chapter to Graves. She was "quite delighted" with the book, she told a friend. Trevelyan's "delicacy of feeling and his discretion are perfect. ...I do not think we could have chosen a better biographer."²⁴

Graves' confidence was not misplaced. In a characteristic example of his delicacy and discretion, Grey's biographer neatly excised references to his subject's poor health and financial worries in a letter to Katharine Lyttelton that he quotes on page 387. The omitted passages are in italics: "I am now comfortable-no sickness and hardly ever pain or even discomfort, but I am not fit for a day's work yet. After 5 o'clock I do little but read gently and rest on the sofa. It is comfortable but there is so much to be done and enjoyed with a library inside and one's own house and home and I feel that my weakness wastes it. On coming outside I see whole vistas of enjoyment if the war were over and if I were sure of money enough to live here...²⁵ In another letter to Katharine later in the year, Trevelyan omits Edward's mildly ironic conclusion: "I am sure I can do no good by talking: and I am disposed to think Lloyd George is doing well, considering all the difficulties he has to face; but I admit I have little else but his own speeches to go by..."²⁶

At some point Grey wrote, or at least began, an autobiography, apart from his political testament, Twenty-Five Years. This disappeared after Trevelyan consulted it, as did a journal Grey kept in the mid-1880s. We have only a few quotations from each in Grey of Fallodon.

The discreet official biographer naturally did not mention that Grey had acceded to his first wife's request during their honeymoon that they abstain from sexual intercourse, and honored the request for the twenty years of their marriage. Nor did he mention the Foreign Secretary's long extra-martial affair with Pamela Glenconner, probably begun at least four years after Dorothy's death and apparently carried on with his friend Eddy Glenconner's consent. Indeed, Trevelyan virtually ignored Grey's second wife. Though she and Dorothy had gotten on well, they were quite unalike, save for their love of the outdoors, and Grey's friends seem to have chosen one or the other. Few had nice things to say about both. Robbins also appears to have had as little time for Pamela as did Trevelyan, and makes no mention of the affair between her and Grey.

Britain and the world are very different places than they were in 1971, and it's no surprise that Grey's most recent biographer, Michael Waterhouse, has taken off in the opposite direction.²⁷ Naturally, he describes the marriage blanc and the menage à trois. (The insular Foreign Secretary's sexual relationships were so exotic that there are no English words for them.) But Waterhouse believes the affair with Pamela Tennant, as she was then called, commenced very early, before 1900, when Dorothy was still alive, and that his best friend's wife bore him at least one son. Not only was Grey's relationship with Katharine Lyttelton an intimate one, Waterhouse suggests, but the Foreign Secretary also engaged in several one-night stands or brief flings as well, at least two of which resulted in additional illegitimate children.²⁸ These claims are discussed in the Appendix, "Sex and the Foreign Secretary."

Readers can make up their own minds about the relationship with Lyttelton. I don't believe there is sufficient evidence in the letters to support the notion that she and Grey were sleeping together. Indeed, there are many lines that suggest this was not the case. One is not likely to write the following to one's mistress:

I could to another woman now give more kindness, more patience, more understanding, more unselfish sympathy than ever before; only I couldn't give the love to anyone but Dorothy. There is more to give than ever before, but to no one but her could I give it all; I give some things to friends and take all gratefully that they can give to me, but only in such a way that if Dorothy came again I could give all to her with undivided love.²⁹

Lines that sound suggestive out of context are immediately followed by sentences or phrases that make them seem less so. "It is after midnight and I am only writing to tell you that I have been thinking of you," Edward writes to Katharine on 31 July 1910, but then adds, "I have just been reading two or three of Dorothy's letters written to me in this month in 1903: every now and then I find something written to me which makes me feel it is worth having lived and which makes me feel very grateful. Don't think, however, that I am not grateful also to some living friends, both because she liked them and because they have been kind to me since." "I hunger to see you," he writes on 15 February 1911, but this is followed by "–the number of friends who knew and loved both Dorothy and George is not so very many, though each had many friends who loved them especially well."

If there is no evidence of a sexual relationship between Edward and Katharine, there are signs in the earlier letters that he may subconsciously have desired one. After first giving Katharine an update on Dorothy's health and then telling her how much he looked forward to seeing her at Fallodon, he adds coquettishly: "You will no doubt observe that his letter has now said two distinct things: I wonder whether you will have any decided instinct as to which of the two is the chief reason for my writing. I am not sure that I know, though one came into my mind before the other."³⁰ Then, ten months later, speaking of the feelings that the Sudan campaign has elicited, he writes:

it is so good to be stirred by something big, and nothing does this better than great work with some risk about it. Don't you feel already how all the trivial things are losing their hold? All the horrible little worries and busy-nesses and planning, which creep upon one in numbers and cling and cluster upon the spirit and drain its energy and make it anaemic and weak–all these cannot stand the throbbing of a pulse which is stirred, and fall from one and shrink and perish on the ground, and you feel that you are standing erect and strong and clean.

He says later that he feels a "glowing sympathy" for her, not another "sort, which is like a limp figure climbing out of a weedy pool dripping..."³¹

In March, 1905, Edward told Katharine, "I live in a whirl of trains and speeches and weekends in the North; sometimes I imagine I am Chairman of a Railway, sometimes that I am an M.P., sometimes that I am married, sometimes that I am not..."³² His previous letter was signed "yours sickly," after he had joked about the differences between home-sick, sea-sick, and love-sick.³³

If the letters do not reveal any clandestine relationships, they also don't disclose much that is new about the foreign policy questions Grey grappled with during his eleven years in office, nor, in particular, his thoughts during the July Crisis. There are some piquant observations about the Kaiser, the Czar, and their ministers, and Grey's Cabinet colleagues and critics. But no secrets are unveiled.

What the letters do reveal, though, is a Grey who has not quite been captured by his three biographers. "Interesting" was for Edward a very high term of praise, and his letters to Katharine Lyttelton are interesting. There is wit and whimsy, not just schoolboy jokes. Grey emerges as someone wise, shrewd, and humane, as well as amusing, someone well read and with a prodigious memory. His observations still speak to us. They will resonate with everyone who loves the outdoors and solitude. Those coping with an overpowering grief, with a strong distaste for their work, or with approaching blindness may find them especially poignant. But others not so afflicted may discover they have become kinder, more courageous, and more observant for having read Grey's letters.

EDWARD GREY

Sir Edward Grey was born in London on April 25, 1862, the first child of Captain, later Colonel, George Henry Grey and the former Harriet Pearson. The Greys could trace their ancestry back to the Conquest,¹ but it was only comparatively recently that the Northumberland branch of the family had become politically prominent.

Grey's great-great grandfather, Charles, the first Earl, a general under George II and George III, had been ennobled for his exploits against the French in North America and on the continent. His eldest son, also called Charles, headed the Whig ministry that passed the Great Reform Bill in 1832. Edward, however, was descended from the first Earl's youngest son, George. Shipped off to sea at age eleven, despite his pleas to be permitted to continue his education, George Grey became a devout Evangelical—something not likely to have happened had he gone to Oxford. He married the daughter of the wealthy brewer and anti-slavery campaigner Samuel Whitbread. Awarded a baronetcy after directing the Portsmouth Naval Yard for many years, he sent his only son to Oriel, then the most intellectually distinguished of the Oxford colleges. Young George (1799–1882), Grey's grandfather, shared his parents' piety: troubled by an "ever-present sense of sin," he felt himself unworthy of becoming a clergyman, as his father had wished, switched to law, was called to the bar, and entered Parliament. Handsome and eloquent, trusted and admired by the House, he became Home Secretary in 1846, and served with distinction in that office for seventeen of the next twenty years. "Really Prime Minister in all internal affairs," according to Lord Granville, Sir George, more than any individual, was responsible for the fact that 1848 did not play out in Britain as it did on the continent.²

To the Home Secretary's disappointment, his only son, still another George, had no political ambitions. He joined the army against his father's wishes—it was not a reputable profession—and served in India and the Crimea before being named first equerry to the wayward Prince of Wales, for whom it was hoped he would set a good example. His oldest son saw little of him. Colonel Grey was frequently at Windsor, Balmoral, and Sandringham, and Edward was sent off to school at age nine. Two years later, George Grey died of septic pneumonia. In his autobiography, Edward Grey says nothing about his father's influence on his mind and character, only that "he liked all country life and country pursuits" and was affable and handsome, "always in good spirits, with that sort of manner which made him exceedingly popular with both men and women." However, "he had no intellectual interests and did not care for reading or any discussion such as politics."³

Edward's mother was no more influential. She came from a Shropshire family of small landowners, soldiers, and clergymen. In his autobiography, Grey wrote only about how accommodating she was. His mother "was one of the gentlest of human beings. She shrank even from argument and in order to make life go smoothly was always prepared to efface herself."⁴ Grey's later confidante Louise Creighton, after moving to Embleton from Oxford, hoped to be her friend, but found her "rather dull and commonplace."⁵

Fortunately, after Colonel Grey's death at age thirty-nine, two surrogate fathers stepped into the breach, Edward's grandfather and Sir George's friend Mandell Creighton, then rector of Embleton. Both did much to shape Grey's character and beliefs.

Though a devout Evangelical, the former Home Secretary was a vigilant defender of religious freedom and toleration. He had worked to limit the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts and had opposed the Anglican monopoly in Ireland, defending the grant to the Catholic university at Maynooth.⁶ Two maxims from his commonplace book nicely illustrate a conscience simultaneously Evangelical and Whig: "There are few things so helpful to our growth in grace as concerning ourselves actively for the souls of others." "A man is not tolerant till he is tolerant of the intolerance of others."⁷

"My grandfather," Grey recalled, "was very religious, but his nature was such that he brought sunshine wherever he was." (Sir George would have winced at the post-Victorian "but.") "In any problem he would ask one question—what was right—and follow it without hesitation... When once he had said, ‘That is wrong,' or ‘That is not right,' he had no wish to say anything more about it, or anything about the person who did it. We all felt...his presence as a blessing."⁸

To the dismay of his wife, Mandell Creighton (1843–1901), tiring of Oxford and wanting more time to write, applied for the living at Embleton, which was at the disposal of Merton College, where he was a fellow. Abandoning their circle of University luminaries,⁹ the Creightons moved to Northumberland and soon became good friends with their Fallodon neighbors. When Edward appeared to be in danger of not passing his Moderations with honors, Creighton offered to tutor him over the summer.

"When they meet in after years, students talk about their tutors, not their books," Creighton wrote, and, despite his great erudition and his ability to make the past come alive for students, molding character rather than imparting knowledge was always his first object. One of the things he tried to teach was intellectual humility.¹⁰ "The important thing," he urged, "is to know what you know and to know what you do not know."¹¹ "Give an opinion about the things you know, but refuse to give an opinion about the things of which you know nothing." Another favorite maxim: "Self-satisfaction is the death of the mind, as truly as it is the death of the soul." "I never knew any one who did anything worth doing without taking a great deal of trouble."¹²

"Would you doubt the word of a Wykehamist?" Edward Grey is supposed to have asked, and many critics have assumed that both his strengths and weaknesses as Foreign Minister derived from the ethos he imbibed at Winchester and at Balliol, "le fairplay" of the former and the high-minded idealism of the latter. But Sir George Grey and Mandell Creighton were more responsible for his high-minded outlook, and they implanted a more venerable and demanding Victorian credo.

"He was a very remarkable man," Grey wrote of Creighton in his lost autobiography.¹³ He kept a bust of his mentor at Fallodon.¹⁴ "I want to have it in the library," he told the friend who sent it to him, "where I can see it constantly and be intimate with it; and I have put it there... It is difficult to get a place where it shall always be seen and be an intimate thing and yet be in the best light."¹⁵ A year before the outbreak of war, in the midst of problems foreign and domestic, he wrote wistfully to Louise Creighton, "I have thought sometimes of my grandfather and the Bishop and of how I should like to have talked to them."¹⁶

Grey was already fourteen when he was transferred by his grandfather to Winchester. He'd attended a small school in Yorkshire, Northallerton, and then Temple Grove in Richmond. Grey had done well there, being head of school during some terms, but had no real taste for scholarship, he later confessed. It was the competitive spirit that moved him to excel. At Winchester this was extinguished. He had been placed in the highest class to which students were admitted upon entrance, moved up quickly, and looked forward to entering "Sixth Book" at the end of term. But this was against the school's tradition. However, instead of merely being informed of this, Grey was made to stand up for an hour in front of class while the master fired question after question. The shaken fifteen-year-old was then placed near the bottom of the class. After this ordeal, he "was a changed being," he recalled, and "from that moment ceased to do any work ... Desire to succeed had been my motive. I was not allowed to succeed, and the motive was gone."¹⁷ It would not return until after he left Balliol.

However, over time he became a Wykehamist: "the ways of the place, its traditions, and the country in which it is set, were all getting a hold upon my heart."¹⁸ But it was the latter, the water meadows and the Itchen, that most deeply impressed him, not the captain's hand on his shoulder and the voice urging "Play up! play up! and play the game!" He participated only desultorily in team sports, but became a keen fisherman. Once, in fact, his fishing disrupted a cricket match. He'd hooked a very large trout, and half the students who'd been assembled for the match rushed over to look. The captain had to threaten them to return to their places.¹⁹

Balliol had become famous by the end the nineteenth century as the nursery of statesman, a reputation Benjamin Jowett had worked assiduously to cultivate for over three decades.²⁰ But Edward himself, though he admired the Master, was less susceptible than others to his exhortations. In January 1884 he was "rusticated."²¹ With Creighton's assistance, Grey had received a Second in Classical Moderations, but Creighton had since moved to Cambridge. Still, inspired by a personal plea from the Master, Grey switched from Greats to Jurisprudence, which he thought would be easier, and scraped by with a Third.²²

After the exam, Grey might have retired to Fallodon and devoted himself entirely to his ducks—he began collecting them when he was sent down—and to bird-watching and fishing. Instead, he began on his own to read voraciously. "Last June," he wrote in a diary he began keeping,

I had hardly formed one political idea; now ideas have formed and are forming daily. Then I knew no Political Economy: now I have even got glimmerings of original ideas on it. In June I cared little for Music and not at all for Poetry, Nature or Art: now I have strong feelings about them all. I have dipped into Ruskin with great pleasure, and I have read and even committed to memory a good deal of poetry. I have enjoyed a good deal of sport but it has become a recreation, and the consuming interest I felt in it is now employed in carving my way into Politics, Social Problems, moral philosophy and culture. Oh! If I could only progress every year by such strides as this!²³

This journal, like his autobiography, was destroyed or lost, and we have only the following brief inventory of Grey's reading: "Meanwhile the tale of books read continues daily: Vergil [sic], Tennyson, Wordsworth, Mill's Political Economy, Milton, More's Utopia, George Eliot's Life, Progress and Poverty, Seeley's Expansion of England." If he commented further on any of the books, we have no record.²⁴

However, from statements Grey made and positions he adopted over the next several years, it's possible to infer the influence of at least two of these books, Mill and Seeley. Though he never embraced the "single tax," it would not be surprising if the eager autodidact was impressed by Henry George as well, as were so many others in the '80s.

Seeley's Expansion of England, when it appeared in 1883, caused nearly as much of a sensation as George's book.²⁵ It's an exhilarating attack on the great theme of 19th century historians of modern Britain: that the nation's history is the story of the slow but steady growth of constitutional liberty, Protestantism fronting for Liberalism until it found its legs. For Seeley, the real story from the 16th century to the present was England's triumph in the great contest for overseas colonies, besting its four European rivals. Wars fought in the name of religion in the 17th century were actually waged in pursuit of commercial interests in North America and Southeast Asia, and the confusing sequence of wars between England and France in the 18th was really part of a single contest for the possession of India and the New World. French assistance to the rebel colonists and even Napoleon's conquest of Europe were attempts to avenge earlier losses to England.

Seeley was no advocate of imperialism, as is sometimes believed. The expansion he celebrates is the spread of native stock. The subjection of peoples of different races and cultures, he clearly sees, will lead to difficulties, and he is concerned about the vulnerability of the Empire. But having read and absorbed Seeley, Grey would never join forces with the Radicals on colonial questions, and would especially value maintaining good relations with the "white" colonies and with the United States. He would be sensitive to the long struggle against the French, revived in the 1890s, and be anxious to dampen hostile feelings on both sides.

But if one book may have helped make him a more "conservative" Liberal, another may have helped make him more radical than most of the party, and, along with a series of newspaper articles, helped convince him to remain a Liberal when so many individuals of his background fled to the Unionists. This was Mill's Principles of Political Economy.

For Mill, as for his classical economic predecessors, value was determined by cost of production, and there were three "factors of production," land, labor, and capital, which were rewarded by rent, wages, and profits, respectively. Mill's departure, to oversimplify, was to focus not on how productivity was to be maximized, but on how the "shares" accruing to each might be made more equitable. Though there were iron laws of production, the laws governing "distribution," he claimed, were more flexible. As Jevons clearly saw, Mill's warm heart led him to fudge the inexorable logic of Ricardian economics, as it did that of Benthamite ethics and Hartleyean associationalist psychology.

Mill's successors generalized economic rent—all goods were subject to diminishing returns—but for the Saint of Rationalism, land-owners, largely aristocrats, alone benefitted from the fact that, as population increased and dubious marginal land was resorted to, the price of food soared and the value of their property rose without any effort on their part: landowners "enriched themselves even in their sleep," reducing real wages and profits in a zero-sum game.

The solution, for Mill, was, along with birth control (through abstinence, of course), co-ownership of factories—called "co-operation"—and small holdings for agricultural workers—"peasant proprietorship." Factory workers would thus earn profits and agricultural workers rent. There was little the government could do to facilitate "co-operation," but he believed it could and should take an active role in the redistribution of land. After all,

no man made the land. It is the original inheritance of the whole species. Its appropriation is wholly a question of general expediency. When private property in land is not expedient, it is unjust... The state is at liberty to deal with landed property as the general interests of the community may require.²⁶

Any aspiring politician would have turned to Book V of the Principles, "On the Influence of Government," and here Mill stressed again that the concept of a "nightwatchman" state—only protecting against force and fraud—was obsolete. In particular, the government was entitled to tax the "unearned increment" that accrued to landowners: the increase in the value of the land that owed nothing to their efforts. He was perfectly confident this could be assessed.

Other arguments perhaps appealed to Grey, particularly Mill's passionate case for the government to preserve the nation's uncultivated land.²⁷

Grey's reading of Mill almost cost him his seat during his first election campaign. "Albert,"²⁸ he confided to his diary, "came to see me at the Treasury," where Grey was working for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Childers. He "says my chances for North Northumberland are ruined by my unsound Radical views as to fixity of tenure and fair rents."²⁹ But given "the accumulation of evil of hundreds of years of bad land system, I believe I am...on the right track." He later asked his cousin, "Have you ever read any account of Belgian peasant proprietorship? It has undoubtedly done great things."³⁰ This was the favorite example of Mill's, described at length.³¹

Perhaps the best evidence for Mill's influence is Grey's only publication before the 1920s, apart from Fly Fishing (1899)—Rural Land ³² He advocated, he declared, changes for which "the name of revolution will, perhaps, be more appropriate than that of reform." Local authorities were to be established, elected by manhood suffrage, and "given large powers of acquiring land compulsorily by purchase for public purposes..." He makes the very Millite argument that "first among the advantages" would be "moral rather than material ones." "Pride in possession" would lead to "keen personal interest in the forces of nature," and would "restore a vigorous tone of mind." The creation of local bodies wielding great powers will also reinvigorate the electorate, and spur capable men to devote time to public service. Among the material advantages would be better, cheaper, and more plentiful supplies of milk, eggs, vegetables, and fruit. Landowners normally extract high rents for allotment land, located around villages. This is "distinctly a part of that 'unearned increment' of which all reformers just now are in hot pursuit..." The land will be taken over by public authorities, rents will be set by the parish council, and fixity of tenure and compensation for improvements granted.³³

The shrewd Cabinet diarist Charles Hobhouse recognized that Grey was "more radical than is commonly supposed."³⁴ Arthur Balfour concurred: the Foreign Secretary was "a curious combination of the old-fashioned Whig and the Socialist."³⁵ Grey went so far as to threaten to resign when the Cabinet opted for a more moderate solution to the House of Lords question than he favored.³⁶ When the Miners Federation called out its members in March 1911 and the strike threatened to paralyze the country, it was Grey who took the leading role in negotiations, and eventually effected a compromise. On all domestic questions, including women's suffrage, he remained the stalwart Millite Radical he had become in 1885.

A series of articles by Mill's erstwhile disciple John Morley in the Pall Mall Gazette is also credited with keeping Grey a Gladstonian Liberal after 1886, when so many members of his class defected. Morley made the case that coercion would never succeed in Ireland, and that some form of autonomy would have to be conceded.³⁷ But it was his Radical views on land as well as his conviction that granting autonomy to Ireland would strengthen rather than weaken the bonds between the two islands that kept him from joining the Unionists.

The decision was very important for Grey's career. Old, established families were thin on the ground in the Liberal Party by the beginning of the twentieth century. Undoubtedly, Grey owed his rapid rise in the party—and his being the only serious contender for Foreign Secretary when the Liberals finally returned to power—to his gifts as a speaker and to general admiration for his sterling character—the directness, simplicity, and candor inevitably mentioned by contemporaries. But it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of his social position at a time when deference to rank was still the rule. The Greys, as mentioned, could trace their roots to the Conquest. The lineage of the few aristocrats and gentry in the Liberal Cabinet of 1905 were otherwise mostly dubious.³⁸ The Foreign Secretary in particular was expected to be an aristocrat. The ambassadors and ministers he received were, with the exception of the French and Americans, usually counts, at the very least. The Secretary conferred with the Sovereign and met visiting royalty.³⁹ When Grey initially refused the Foreign Office in December 1905, there was virtually no one else to whom the incoming Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman could offer the position.⁴⁰

The author inevitably associated with Grey is not, of course, Seeley or Mill, but William Wordsworth. However, as the letters to Katharine Lyttelton reveal, the notion that Grey was infatuated with Wordsworth to the exclusion of all other writers is hardly accurate.⁴¹ Wordsworth was nevertheless of paramount importance. He articulated Grey's lebensphilosophie. In doing so, he simply expressed Edward's own inner feelings. He is a "special poet," Grey wrote, because "as we read him, we constantly find ourselves saying, 'I know that I have felt that.' And sometimes he reveals to us what we have not been previously conscious of, so that we say, 'I have felt that without knowing it.'

Thus, to those of us who have the same sort of susceptibility that Wordsworth had to all the aspects of natural beauty, his poetry becomes something not to be measured merely by poetic merit, but something which reproduces, interprets, and reveals to us our own experiences, and is therefore not like something outside appealing to our admiration, but like something which is akin to us, part of ourselves, part of our lives.⁴²

And these exalted experiences in the countryside, Grey believed, following Wordsworth, offered intimations of immortality. "To be out of doors with a heart that watches and receives is to be, if not on holy ground in the same sense as a Church, at any rate in the presence of much that is not limited to this world."⁴³ He told the Vicar of Embleton, R. B. Dawson, that he regarded "the growing knowledge of the life of nature as a preparation for life to come, when a man will find his true place if he has learnt to love beauty here."⁴⁴ As Grey's first wife Dorothy breezily put it: "it is nice to have one's pleasures made into a religion."⁴⁵

⁴⁶Prelude