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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Best remembered for his portentous remark at the outbreak of the Great War, 'The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime', Sir Edward Grey was a consummate Edwardian politician and one of the most notable statesmen of an era abounding with them. In the first biography of Grey in forty years, Michael Waterhouse vividly depicts a man full of contradictions. Deep in his heart he was a country-loving fisherman, a sensitive naturalist and ornithologist who preferred reading Wordsworth to giving speeches in his constituency and answering questions on foreign policy in the House. Yet it fell to this peace-loving gentleman who rarely left his shores to ask his country to go to war with Germany. Grey spent nearly thirty years in Parliament and only reluctantly became Foreign Secretary of a country that presided over the greatest empire the world had seen since Roman times. Yet it was a position he filled for more than a decade, the longest anyone has ever served continuously in his or any age, firstly under Campbell-Bannerman and then Asquith. During this time he battled relentlessly to protect and advance the interests of his country against the volatile backdrop of a Europe in which the balance of power was tilting wildly. Edwardian Requiem is the remarkable portrait of a complex and enigmatic politician who presided over the twilight of old Europe.
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Seitenzahl: 742
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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A Fallodon Memory
by Siegfried Sassoon
One afternoon I watched him as he stood
In the twilight of his wood.
Among the firs he’d planted, forty years away,
Tall, and quite still, and almost blind,
World patience in his face, stood Edward Grey;
Not listening,
For it was at the end of summer, when no birds sing:
Only the bough’s faint dirge accompanied his mind
Absorbed in some Wordsworthian slow self-communing.
In lichen-coloured homespun clothes he seemed
So merged with stem and branch and twinkling leaves
That almost I expected, looking away, to find
When glancing there again, that I had daylight dreamed
His figure, as when some trick of sun and shadow deceives.
But there he was, haunting heart-known ancestral ground;
Near to all Nature; and in that nearness somehow strange;
Whose native humour, human-simple yet profound,
And strength of spirit no calamity could change.
To whom, designed for countrified contentments, came
Honours unsought and unrewarding foreign fame:
And, at the last, that darkened world wherein he moved
In memoried deprivation of life once learnt and loved.
In memory of my great-grandmother, Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, who as an eighteen-year-old American heiress, having reluctantly married the 9th Duke of Marlborough, became a much-loved and respected hostess at the apex of Edwardian high society. Her elegant beauty, great taste, charm, intelligence and kindness shine out from this delightful portrait by Paul César Helleu.
Contents
PROLOGUE
3 August 1914
At around 2.45 p.m. on that Monday afternoon, a tall, clean-shaven, good-looking man walked down the steps of the Foreign Office, turned onto the baking pavements of a crowded Whitehall and made his way briskly to the House of Commons. Some said his deeply etched features and strong aquiline nose gave the impression of a large bird of prey at the despatch box. The Foreign Secretary would need all the fortitude of a raptor to deliver his hour-long statement on the European crisis in fifteen minutes’ time. It would prove to be the defining moment of his life and represent one of the most dramatic occasions in the long history of parliamentary debate. He had to prepare a divided Cabinet and Parliament for war with Germany.
Sir Edward Grey was fifty-two years old and had been Liberal Foreign Secretary for nine years; he was close to breaking records for longevity in office. The stress of work over one of the most turbulent decades in British history, and more particularly the European crisis of the previous few weeks, had taken its toll. He looked pale and drawn and the bags under his eyes suggested long sleepless nights. He was slowly going blind in the service of his country.
High up on the façade of the Foreign Office, early swallows were gathering for their long journey to South Africa and in the process were refuelling over the insect-rich waters of St James’s Park. Grey cast his mind back to his duck ponds at Fallodon and wondered whether a green sandpiper had dropped in on its way south, always the first sign of the autumn migration. His thoughts then turned to his late wife, Dorothy, who although dreading the prospect of public life, had given him so much support during his early days in office. He had resigned himself to live in a sexless marriage for twenty years yet he had still loved Dorothy as deeply as Pamela, the other great love of his life, who would eventually become his second wife and was rumoured by some to have been his mistress for many years.
Grey was something of an enigma. He was full of contradictions. Deep in his heart he was a country-loving fisherman and ornithologist who preferred reading Wordsworth to giving speeches in his constituency and answering questions on foreign policy in the House. Yet he had been in Parliament for nearly thirty years and reluctantly became Foreign Secretary of a country that presided over the greatest empire the world had seen since Roman times. This peace-loving statesman who had rarely left his shores for foreign climes was now about to ask his country to go to war, because the German legions were violating the sovereignty of the Low Countries on their long march to Paris. If this wasn’t enough, by birth he was a member of the ruling classes yet he felt no guilt for enthusiastically supporting the Parliament Act which had removed the power of veto from the House of Lords.
As he crossed into Parliament Square, Grey felt strangely calm. He had done all in his power over the past weeks and years to keep the peace. If Parliament now decided to abandon the French in their hour of need, he would resign and retire to the rural life he loved. His speech was not as highly polished as he would have liked; there just was not time to learn it by heart – a technique at which his colleague Winston Churchill was most proficient – but he was confident of his facts and he was convinced that British national interests necessitated fighting for an independent France. Grey had been forced to prepare his notes late on Sunday night. There had been Cabinet meetings throughout Sunday and another on Monday morning, so he did not return to his room at the Foreign Office until two o’clock.
The House was overflowing with members sitting in rows of chairs placed four abreast in the Gangway. The Press Gallery, the Peers’ Gallery and the Diplomatic Gallery were packed with expectant faces. Even so, as the Foreign Secretary rose to speak, one could hear a pin drop. His simple, unemotional, serious style of speaking was tailor-made for the occasion. These characteristics, together with his charismatic good looks, meant that Grey held the floor of the House like few others. In grave, dignified and precise terms, he informed the House that Germany was now at war with Russia and that, because of France’s treaty with Russia, she was also being dragged into the conflict.
Grey was determined not to stoke up the emotions of the House by accusations of blame over who started the war. He wanted his audience to approach the crisis in a rational fashion, ‘from the point of view of British interests, British honour and British obligations, free from all passion as to why peace has not been preserved’. There was no better man for the task. He would later write in his autobiography,
At first it was in my mind to read to the House the German Chancellor’s bid for our neutrality, and the reply made to it; but this was deliberately discarded. To read that would stir indignation and the House ought to come to its decisions on grounds of weight, not passion. We were not going into war because Bethmann-Hollweg had made a dishonourable proposal to us. We should not be influenced by that decision. When the decision was made, then the communication with Bethmann-Hollweg should be published and it would no doubt strengthen the feeling; this ought to be later, after the decision, not before it. I was myself stirred with resentment and indignation at what seemed to me Germany’s crime in precipitating the war, and all I knew of Prussian militarism was hateful; but these must not be motives of our going into the war.
The Foreign Secretary began his speech by relating the history of the Entente Cordiale. He told the Commons that the country was not legally committed to defend France, as evidenced by the exchange of letters following the naval conversations of 1912. He assured the House that Britain was not bound by any secret treaties that might restrict her freedom to act independently; France was obligated to Russia by treaty, but Britain did not even know the terms of the alliance. He took his audience through the developing friendship with France. He outlined the joint military conversations whereby a plan was drawn up for Britain to send an Expeditionary Force to France in the event of an unprovoked attack on France by Germany; then the Algeciras and the Agadir crises where German diplomatic aggression was countered by Anglo-French defiance.
He moved on to the naval arrangement with France under which Britain had moved her modern battleships into the North Sea, countering the increasing German threat, whereas the French had concentrated their forces in the Mediterranean, leaving their Channel and Atlantic shores undefended. He told the House, ‘If the German fleet came down the Channel and bombarded and battered the undefended coasts of France, we could not stand aside and see this going on practically within sight of our eyes, with our arms folded, looking on dispassionately, doing nothing.’ The Foreign Secretary was not given to passion, but as he spoke the words ‘doing nothing’ his clenched fist crashed down on the despatch box and the House burst into cheers. He left them in little doubt that in his personal opinion there was a moral obligation to support the French: ‘How far that friendship entails obligation – it has been a friendship between the nations and ratified by the nations – how far that entails an obligation, let every man look into his own heart, and his own feelings, and construe the extent of the obligation for himself.’
He then covered questions of national interest and the neutrality of Belgium. He informed his audience how British interests would be adversely affected both by the fall of France and if Continental Europe were to be dominated by a single power. If Britain stood aside, he warned the House, ‘We would sacrifice our respect and good name and reputation before the world and should not escape the most serious and grave economic circumstances.’ The final part of his speech was devoted to Britain’s commitments to Belgium under the Treaty of 1839, whereby the young country’s sovereignty was guaranteed by the great powers. Here he was on safer ground, as public opinion, together with radical opinion in Cabinet, had recently swung massively towards Grey with the German ultimatum to invade Belgium. Grey was from the school of ‘old diplomacy’. He was a man of honour and the House knew it. He had been on his feet for an hour and a quarter before he sat down. The Prime Minister’s wife, Margot Asquith, wrote that the House broke into ‘a hurricane of applause’.
The speech had a remarkable impact on its audience. Asquith wrote to his lover, Venetia Stanley, that evening: ‘Grey made a most remarkable speech – about an hour long – for the most part almost conversational in tone and with some of his usual ragged ends; but extraordinarily well reasoned and tactful and really cogent – so much so that our extreme peace-lovers were for the moment reduced to silence.’
A discerning intellect in the shape of Lord Hugh Cecil wrote to a friend,
Grey’s speech was very wonderful – I think in the circumstances one may say the greatest speech delivered in our time or for a very long period, taking the importance of the occasion, the necessity of persuading many doubtful persons, the extraordinary success which it had in that direction, its great dignity, warm emotion and perfect taste … I could deliver a lecture on the merits of the speech – its admirable arrangement, its perfect taste, and the extraordinary dexterity with which it dealt with the weak spot in his argument. This was the nature of our obligation to France under the Entente. With wonderful skill he did not argue the point, but he changed to a note of appeal to the individual conscience, thereby disarming criticism in the one matter where he was weak, without any departure real or apparent from perfect sincerity. All these substantial merits set off by his wonderful manner go to make his speech the greatest example of the art of persuasion that I have ever listened to.
People liked Grey; they trusted his judgement. Time and time again observers refer to his honesty and sincerity. These were qualities that reassured waverers, won gritty diplomatic victories and gave him the ear of the House of Commons. Arthur Murray, Grey’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, wrote in his retirement:
The House of Commons is not only a very human assembly, but it is an excellent judge of character. Grey never sought popularity; had shunned self-advertisement and had never at any time endeavoured to build up a political following. He was just himself – and because he was himself; because the House knew from long experience that there was no guile or trickery in him and felt that he had done all that was possible to avoid hostilities; because it admired his sense of justice and had faith in his judgement, it listened to the simple phrases in which he told his story and pointed the path of duty and honour and handed him its trust.
At the Foreign Office, the Permanent Under-Secretary Sir Arthur Nicolson sat waiting in his room in ‘an agony of suspense’. A little after 5 p.m., a private secretary rushed in to inform him that Grey had received a tumultuous reception in the Commons. He had been backed by the whole House with the exception of the Labour Party leader, Ramsay MacDonald. An hour later an exhausted Foreign Secretary returned to the Foreign Office. On being congratulated by Nicolson, Grey remained silent. He merely slammed his fists down on the table and cried, ‘I hate war, I hate war.’
Grey worked late at his desk that evening. As dusk drew near he was joined in his room by his good friend J. A. Spender, the editor of the Westminster Gazette. They were standing at a window overlooking St James’s Park. In the street below the lamplighter was busy with his daily task. One can imagine the silence, broken only by the sharp metallic cry of a coot or the whinnying of a dabchick coming from the lake across Horse Guards Parade. He then uttered the words that would bring him immortality: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’
1862–1892
Early Life
Tragedy visited Edward Grey early in life. His father, Colonel George Grey, after serving in the Crimea and India with the Rifle Brigade, became equerry to the Prince of Wales. Edward was only twelve years old and away at prep school when the Colonel unexpectedly died of pneumonia at Sandringham aged thirty-nine. Thereafter, Edward’s mother, Harriet Pearson, daughter of an army officer descended from a long line of Shropshire clergymen, brought up her six children at Fallodon Hall near Alnwick in Northumberland, under the protective wing of her father-in-law, Sir George Grey. Edward learnt about duty and responsibility at a tender age. Many years later, one of his sisters recalled,
After father’s death Edward looked on himself as my mother’s chief protector. I well remember when he returned with her to Fallodon from Sandringham his collecting us younger children together and telling us that she was to be our first consideration, that we must be very quiet and thoughtful and do everything we possibly could to help her and be a comfort to her.
Edward Grey’s Whiggish tendencies were in his genes. His most celebrated ancestor was Charles, second Earl Grey, who, as Prime Minister in 1832, introduced the Reform Bill. But it was Sir George Grey, Earl Grey’s nephew and Edward’s grandfather, who had the most influence on his upbringing in rural Northumberland. Edward Grey’s first biographer, G. M. Trevelyan, describes Sir George as ‘a fine example of one of those liberal-minded lay Evangelicals who did so much to found the greatness of nineteenth-century England’, and ‘a country gentleman, neither rich nor fashionable, devoted to nature and rural pursuits, popular with his neighbours of all ranks of life, wholly without ambition but constrained by a sense of duty to enter the wider sphere of national public life’. He could have been referring to his grandson.
Sir George was a member of the House of Commons for forty years, an immensely experienced Home Secretary, holding office three times under Russell and Palmerston, and an expert on parliamentary procedure. A devout Christian, he kept the interests of the poor close to his heart, introducing a Private Member’s Bill for the erection of public baths and wash-houses in towns. He became a national hero in 1848 when the British Establishment watched in horror as revolution swept through the capitals of Europe. In London, the Chartists staged a massive rally on Kennington Common and delivered a petition to Parliament, calling for a wider franchise and generally a more democratic society. Sir George’s calm, sensitive handling of the situation allayed people’s fears and saved the country from social upheaval.
In 1845, Sir George, at the age of forty-six, inherited the Fallodon estate from an unmarried uncle. He gave up the safe seat of Davenport to put down roots in Northumberland. At the general election in 1847 he managed to win the constituency of North Northumberland, long regarded a Percy, Duke of Northumberland family fiefdom, a feat that was later repeated by his grandson Edward. In the 1852 election, the will of the Tory landowners prevailed in rural Northumberland. Sir George lost his seat and was denounced in the process as an associate of Richard Cobden, the Radical businessman who campaigned for the repeal of the Corn Laws and championed the rights of working people. At a by-election in 1853, Sir George was returned for Morpeth, which he served for the balance of his parliamentary career. After a further Reform Bill in 1867, the miners, now forming a majority of the electorate, put up their own candidate, Thomas Burt, who won the seat in 1874. He was unopposed, as Sir George, who had represented the miners’ interests for many years, decided to retire from public life to farm at Fallodon, which was located a few miles from the family seat of the Earls Grey at Howick.
The Grey family line stretched back to the Conquest in the guise of the then newly arrived Norman family of Croy. The family changed their name to Grey and were sent up to guard the Scottish Marches. Here they occupied three castles along the Tweed before acquiring Chillingham and Howick in the thirteenth century. The Greys had soldiering in their blood, commanding armies in the crusades and in the great European battles of the thirteenth century. The family received an earldom in 1419 for taking Le Havre in Normandy, adopting the title of the Earls of Tankerville and incorporating the unusual scaling ladder into the family crest – evidence of a long and proud military heritage. The Tankerville Greys of Chillingham soon died out and it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that a new earldom was bestowed on the Howick branch. Charles, the first Earl Grey, had fought at Minden in 1759 with Robert Clive, the British officer who secured India and its associated wealth for the British crown, and Grey then became famous in the American War of Independence. He had earned the nickname of ‘No-Flint Grey’ by giving the order that his men should execute a night attack with no flints in their muskets, relying only on the bayonet.
Edward Grey’s love of the countryside was nurtured during a happy childhood at Fallodon. His grandfather’s influence was yet again predominant, Grey writing in an unpublished autobiography:
My grandparents were very sensible to natural beauty and I have a vivid recollection of his tall figure and her short one, going round the path that went through the trees in front of the house, with gaps that gave a view as far as the moor at the top of Chillingham Park. They would make a point of doing this at the time of sunset on a clear, fine evening.
Fallodon is sandwiched between the Cheviot Hills and the wild, romantic Northumbrian coast, enshrined by Lindisfarne, the Farne Islands and the great castles of Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh. The small estate offered Grey the opportunity at an early age to indulge his passion for country sports. He writes in his autobiography,
I never cared much for riding, being naturally a bad rider who was never on good terms with a horse, but I had a passion for fishing and shooting. The fishing at home and the shooting did not amount to much, but there were small burns and one little river, the Aln, within reach. There were a few partridges and pheasants, and the seashore, and these provided the occupation for my holidays, even if the results of my efforts were small. So my holidays were very happy times.
Grey’s childhood was sunny enough, yet having to assume the mantle of responsibility at so young an age, it must also have been a relatively lonely one. One can only guess that his early years lacked the relaxed rough-and-tumble and distraction of constant company characteristic of most normal households. He would find himself repeatedly turning to his inner resources to get him through the dull and lonely times. By the time he went away to boarding school this skill would have been highly developed. He would have had more experience than most in organising his own life and that of others. Little wonder Grey became a respected prefect at school and, with angling being a solitary sport, such an accomplished fly fisherman. From early childhood it was second nature for him to compartmentalise his life, which throughout his career would make it easy for him to suddenly turn to fishing and nature, thereby relieving the boredom and pressure of political life. Early self-reliance made Grey very much his own man. Besides giving him an independent nature it also encouraged personal characteristics such as stubbornness and inflexibility which would manifest themselves at a later date by way of resignation threats when in Cabinet.
Grey honed his skills as a fly fisherman at his public school, Winchester College; however, he acquired his passion for angling some years earlier, as a child in Northumberland. In the north country burns ‘which run in narrow stony channels between overgrown banks’, he would fish stealthily for wild brown trout with a worm and a short line. It was on the Fallodon estate that he learnt the importance of patience and of coping with the disappointment of failure. In Fly Fishing he writes,
There was one burn that I knew intimately from its source to the sea. Much of the upper part was wooded, and it was stony and shallow, till within two miles of its mouth. Here there was for a child another world. There were no trees, the bottom of the burn was of mud and sand and the channel was full of rustling reeds with open pools at some depth at intervals. These pools had a fascination for me, there was something about them which kept me excited with expectation of great events, as I lay behind the reeds, peering through them and watching the line intently. The result of much waiting was generally an eel, or a small flat fish up from the sea; or now and then a small trout, but never for many years one of those monsters which I was sure must inhabit such mysterious pools.
Sure enough, one day Grey caught a three-pound sea trout. He was hooked for life.
There were five defining moments in Grey’s early life. In chronological order, they began with his arrival at Winchester College in September 1876 and ended with the acquisition of a lease on the Itchen Cottage in 1890. In between there were equally important events: rustication from Balliol College, Oxford; marriage to Dorothy Widdrington and his entry into politics in November 1885. At Winchester Grey was considered clever but, preferring outdoor activities, he failed to achieve much academic success. He did, however, admit to owing a debt of gratitude to his form master, Dr Fearon, who was responsible ‘for the first awakenings of my intellect’. Aside from preparing its students for Oxford entry, Winchester’s real gift to Grey lay in nurturing a love for dry-fly fishing, where, on the clear chalk streams of Hampshire, a floating fly is used to hook a fish, as opposed to the sinking fly normally preferred in the fast-running waters of the north. At school he played cricket, fives and racquets. When at Oxford, he took up real tennis, moving on to be British amateur champion at Queen’s and Lord’s. His special passion, however, was for dry-fly fishing on the river Itchen – perhaps not surprising for someone with a self-contained and independent nature. He would spend the happiest days of his life at the cottage in Itchen Abbas and mature into one of the most accomplished fly-fishermen of his generation, as witnessed by his best-selling book Fly Fishing.
It is perhaps interesting that Grey attended Winchester as opposed to another of the top public schools such as Eton or Harrow. The latter two would draw on the offspring of the aristocracy or the landed gentry, while Winchester’s constituency tended to be more middle class, attracting boys whose parents had a background in the Church or Civil Service. However, Winchester always topped the academic charts and Grey was one of the brightest pupils of his year. Grey’s life at Winchester is best described by Herbert Fisher, Warden of New College, Oxford, who contributed to Grey’s obituary in an edition of The Wykehamist.
I came as a new man to Du Boulay’s in September 1878. Edward Grey was head of the house, and on the strength of previous acquaintanceship my father, much to my consternation, for it seemed a most audacious thing for any parent to do, caught hold of a small boy and sent him into ‘toy room’ to fetch Grey out into the road. A most brilliant and vivid impression he made upon my immature mind. I can see him now standing bare-headed as he talked to my father with the charming unaffected ease which his friends know so well and I remember how handsome and all alive he looked. As our parents had been friends, he took me under his protection, made me his fag and was as great a friend to me as one of his eminence in the House and School could be expected to be.
Grey was a ‘jig’ [clever]. Of that we juniors were convinced. Though we believed he did no work, we knew that from time to time he tossed off a copy of Greek and Latin verses which was marked alpha in Senior Division Sixth Book and we were ready to believe that if he had a mind to do it he could sweep the board of school prizes. As with work, so with games, he went his own way. The belief among the juniors in Du Boulay’s was that Grey could have got into Lord’s as easy as look at you – but there it was, he couldn’t be bothered. To us it seemed mysterious, that a man with such a genius for ball games, a man without a scrap of practice could knock up sixty in a House match by most effective though unconventional methods should have so little wish to excel in the game of all others which brought renown.
But Grey was not like that. He went his own way and thought his own thoughts. His heart was not in School games, much as he enjoyed them, or in building up for himself a School reputation for athletics. His heart was in fishing. So on ‘half-rems’ he would go off by himself to throw his fly on a stream of water in the upper Itchen, nearly always returning with a well-filled basket, some of the contents of which would be judiciously distributed amongst the Dons. ‘Why Grey, I take it that even a trout can sometimes rise’, observed Doidge Morshead, himself an angler often propitiated by the spoils of these expeditions, on one occasion when Grey came up to books unusually tardy.
He seemed rather solitary. We knew that his father and mother were dead [the latter inaccurate] but that there was a distinguished old grandfather living far away in Northumberland to whom every Sunday he wrote a long letter. Another fact about Grey was a matter of comment among us. It was whispered that he read English poetry for pleasure, and I think also, though here memory may play a trick, that we already knew that his favourite was Wordsworth.
There was something in him which made him stand out from other prefects, a self-sufficiency and aloofness, a certain gravity mingled with his boyish high spirits and rich laughter. His tastes seemed to be fully formed, his mind to be constituted not in opinions but in convictions. The vanities in dress, then much affected, made no appeal to him. So far as I can recollect he showed no interest in politics and never talked in debating societies. All these grave preoccupations came later, when, having gone down from Balliol, he was living at home in Northumberland and there came under the influence of Mandell Creighton; but our Housemaster always predicted a great political future for him and we juniors were certainly of the opinion that Grey could do something big if he wanted.
Not surprisingly, it took Grey time to develop his expertise with a dry fly at Winchester. This is demonstrated by his fishing records. Any fish below three-quarters of a pound had to be returned to the river; in 1877, he caught one trout, in 1878, thirteen, in 1879, thirty-two and in 1880, seventy-six. He writes in Fly Fishing,
Many things are taught at public schools, but Winchester is probably the only school at which the most scientific and highly developed form of angling can be learnt. The art was not taught at Winchester in my time but there were opportunities for learning it which a few of us did not neglect.
School lessons ended at midday. Every day in the spring and early summer, Grey would tear off to the water meadows in his quest for a rising trout. He was only spared an hour before lunch, but luckily this coincided with the best hour of the rise in the day.
In the autumn of 1880, Grey went up to Oxford to read Classics at Balliol. In January 1884, he was sent down for idleness. Before he departed he managed to persuade his tutor to let him change to Law, and after a short period of cramming at home in Northumberland he returned to Oxford that summer to take a third in jurisprudence, commonly known as a ‘gentleman’s degree’. Midway through his Oxford career, his grandfather died and the young undergraduate had to assume the responsibilities of running the estate and heading the family. This would have weighed heavily on his conscience and might well have explained his lack of academic success. There was, however, one compensation. Grey was a natural athlete with an eye for a ball and Oxford, unlike Winchester, boasted a real-tennis court. In 1883 he achieved a Blue, became Oxford champion and beat his Cambridge opponent in the varsity match by three sets to love.
As at Winchester, Grey spent more time enjoying himself at Balliol than buried in his books. In his book, Life, Journalism and Politics, Liberal journalist J. A. Spender tells a story about the antics of a high-spirited group of undergraduates led by Edward Grey:
The rest of the University encouraged the notion that Balliol men were ‘smugs’ [swots], but this was not my experience. The College was large and lively; it had all kinds in it and quite its due proportion of ‘young barbarians’. In my first term, I shared a double set of rooms in the small front quad with a youth who is now a well-known peer and we had only one ‘oak’ or outer door between us. This ‘oak’ was the subject of incessant assaults by my neighbour’s friends and he and I were constantly on the defensive. One night we sat for two hours in a vain attempt to keep the invaders out. They finally brought red-hot pokers and pierced holes which fatally weakened the fabric of the ‘oak’ and then in a rush through landed on top of us. They left me alone, but carried off my partner and did to him the sort of things that undergraduates do to their most intimate friends.
There was an unexpected silver lining to Grey’s ‘rustication’ from Oxford. In the new year of 1884, when living back in the north, he started to build a wildfowl collection. The breeding of ducks in the garden at Fallodon would become a lifelong passion and was documented in the Fallodon Green Book. This journal, covering duck-breeding success from 1886 to 1905, covers some 150 pages in Grey’s own handwriting. By May 1885 he had already collected seventeen different species of wildfowl. The following year, Grey established another pond in the garden, planting it out with shrubs for nesting cover and surrounding the whole area with a ‘fox-proof fence’. He writes:
When I was sent down from Oxford I lived the months of February and March entirely alone, but I was never dull. I bought my first five pairs of waterfowl, which afterwards became a great interest in life, and I remember finding it extraordinary the opinion of one of my Oxford friends that I should have been bored at home, when on the contrary I had not been conscious of one dull moment. This fact was the first thing that gave me some idea that I was different from other people in this respect.
During his time at Oxford, Grey came under the influence of two remarkable individuals. In their own ways they both left their mark on this headstrong undergraduate, turning him into a serious young man with a strong sense of responsibility and public duty. Benjamin Jowett was Master of Balliol at this time and was renowned as an influential tutor and administrative reformer. A theologian and classical scholar, he became one of the great public figures of Victorian England. A well-known Balliol rhyme about him runs: ‘Here come I, my name is Jowett / All there is to know, I know it / I am Master of this College / What I don’t know isn’t knowledge!’ He held court at the Master’s Lodge and surrounded himself with leading politicians, lawyers and scientists. He took an immense amount of trouble with any of his undergraduates that he considered to have potential, and laid much store in formulating their future careers. Grey’s contemporaries included Lord Curzon and Cosmo Lang, later Archbishop of Canterbury. Frank Pember, a future Warden of All Souls, would become a lifelong friend, as would Louis Mallet, later Grey’s private secretary at the Foreign Office. Jowett loved ‘a name’ and obviously saw in Edward Grey the potential to carry on his family’s tradition of public service. It was Jowett who cleared the path for Grey’s return to take his finals, imploring him to work studiously while at Fallodon. J. A. Spender also spotted Grey’s hidden talent, writing: ‘Grey describes himself as having taken his Oxford career lightly, but before he went down he had somehow got the reputation of being a man who could do anything he liked, if he chose to take the trouble.’
Perhaps the real turning-point in Grey’s life came in the summer of 1881, his first long vacation at Oxford, when he became a pupil of Mandell Creighton, then vicar of the neighbouring parish of Embleton and a close friend of his grandfather, Sir George Grey. Creighton was a charismatic churchman of striking presence. He was tall with piercing blue eyes and a full beard. He was confiding and courteous along with the wicked sense of humour which so endeared him to his students. A generation older than Edward Grey, he was a ‘self-made man’, having been born above his father’s furniture shop in Carlisle. He won scholarships to both Durham Grammar School and Merton College, Oxford where he was awarded a fellowship in addition to becoming President of the Oxford Union. He went on to write a celebrated history of the Papacy, becoming Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, and he capped a highly successful career by being appointed Bishop of London.
At Sir George’s request Creighton agreed to tutor Edward for his Oxford exams. So it was at the Embleton vicarage with its imposing thirteenth-century peel tower that Edward Grey was forced to read his set books for Classical Moderations. Here he learnt the meaning of concentration and developed an interest in politics, economics, literature and poetry. While walking in the vicarage garden with the great man, his intellect began to stir and he eagerly embraced the radical Liberalism of his mentor. But Creighton’s influence did not cease here. The year 1885 would prove to be a most significant one in Grey’s life. He would be selected as Liberal candidate for Berwick-on-Tweed in the summer and marry Dorothy Widdrington in the autumn. Creighton would encourage him in both these endeavours.
Grey’s interest in politics was aroused during his undergraduate days by Creighton, who, like Jowett, encouraged a sense of public duty. Grey later wrote,
I do not remember taking any interest in public events till the news of the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish in Dublin in 1882. I was then an undergraduate at Balliol and I joined in the clamour for martial law. This I repeated to my grandfather who met it with the critical comment, ‘Martial law is the suspension of all law.’
On coming down from Oxford in the summer of 1884, Grey made his first move into the real world of politics. He asked his great-uncle, Lord Northbrook, who was First Lord of the Admiralty in Gladstone’s administration, to find him some work experience. As a result, in July, at the tender age of twenty-two, he began public life as a private secretary to Sir Evelyn Baring, moving on in October to work for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, H. C. E. Childers. At the same time, while in Northumberland, he began to take an interest in local politics, where he was rapidly to acquire a reputation for his contentious radical views, as witnessed by a special interest in land reform and an extension of the voting franchise. Grey writes,
In 1884 Gladstone’s Government proposed an extension of the franchise to counties on similar terms on which a Conservative Government had given it to the boroughs in 1867. The House of Lords rejected the proposal; there was great indignation in the counties and a franchise demonstration was arranged at Alnwick, the county town near Fallodon.
Grey saw the rejection of the Bill as an affront to the working people he had been brought up with in rural Northumberland and, when asked, willingly accepted the invitation to chair the Alnwick meeting. It was his first attempt at a public speech and it turned out such a success that a movement was initiated to put him forward as the local Liberal candidate for Berwick in the following year’s general election. Creighton coached Grey in the art of public speaking, encouraging him, in the process, to stand for election. The Grey family name was as celebrated as that of Percy in north Northumberland and because of the wider franchise he would stand a good chance of winning the seat for the first time since his grandfather took it nearly forty years earlier. On 22 January 1885, Creighton wrote to Grey, ‘It will be a great thing to fight Percy in Berwick and will cover you with glory.’ Meanwhile Grey continued to devour his books, reading, according to Trevelyan, Virgil, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Mill’s Principles of Political Economy, Milton, More’s Utopia, George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and Seeley’s Expansion of England. He was duly selected in the summer and set off on a round of speech making in the local villages. The local electors obviously liked the cut of his jib. At the general election in November, Grey defeated Earl Percy with a majority of over 1,400 votes and was to hold the Berwick division for thirty years.
On 20 October 1885, in the middle of the election campaign, Grey married Dorothy Widdrington, which provided Creighton with further satisfaction. The Widdringtons lived at Newton, some sixteen miles south of Fallodon, and were close friends of the Creightons. Although the Widdringtons were by tradition moderate Conservatives, Dorothy had also come under the influence of Mandell Creighton, who decided to promote a union between the young pair. Grey had first met Dorothy when out hunting with the Percy foxhounds in the winter of 1884–5. The courtship then continued amongst London’s high society, an environment which proved anathema to both parties. In many ways Dorothy was the perfect partner for Grey. He was deeply in love with her and shared many of her interests. She would take over from Creighton in nurturing Grey’s enthusiasms, most importantly turning him into an accomplished ornithologist. They gradually forsook the hunting field for rod and line, often fishing with the Buxtons on the river Spean in Scotland. Mildred Buxton wrote of Dorothy,
She always fished with Edward, generally taking out her book and reading at odd moments, but preferring as a rule to watch him when she was not fishing. She was very strong and remained as erect and graceful as ever while wading in deep water and casting the heavy salmon line, even at the end of a long day.
No one is perfect and Dorothy was not an exception. Grey would have liked to have started a family, but Dorothy had an aversion both to the physical side of marriage and to children. Mrs Belloc Lowndes, sister of the ‘man of letters’ and Liberal MP Hilaire Belloc, writes of the Greys in her book A Passing World,
It was known that their marriage was what is called in France ‘un mariage blanc’. The knowledge must have come from Lady Grey, for Grey was deeply reserved. It gave rise to an impression, perhaps natural under the circumstances, that Grey was not what in the Middle Ages was called ‘a full man’. This however was not the case. It was, nevertheless, true that when the honeymoon was over, Dorothy Grey told her husband she had discovered in herself a strong aversion to the physical side of marriage. As a result of this admission, Grey agreed that henceforth they should live as brother and sister. This was plainly stated as a fact in a report sent to the German Government by their Ambassador in London just before the outbreak of war in 1914.
Dorothy and Edward’s courtship was brief. They met around Christmas and were engaged in July. Shortly afterwards Edward Grey was thrown into a general election campaign and perhaps for political expedience the marriage was brought forward three months to October. They would have had little time together and it is unlikely that Dorothy would have plucked up the courage to admit to her future husband she didn’t enjoy the prospect of sex. The very fact that the honeymoon was spent at Fallodon, a shared home with the Dowager Lady Grey and her four additional children, must have been most inhibiting for the young couple.
Dorothy’s biographer suggests Grey was a virgin at this time of his marriage. She further implies that Grey may have been relieved at his wife’s suggestion that they live a happy, chaste existence as brother and sister in much the same way as their beloved poet William Wordsworth did with his sister, also a Dorothy. This is surely unlikely. Grey was fit, good looking and healthy and, as Mrs Belloc Lowndes reminds us, herself a most reliable society gossip, he was no homosexual. Bearing in mind the frisky company he kept at Oxford, there is every chance he lost his virginity while at university. After all, a generation before, Queen Victoria was convinced that the Prince of Wales nearly caused his father’s death through Albert’s worry over his son’s activities with prostitutes as an undergraduate at Oxford.
Presumably Grey had only discovered his wife’s frigidity after they were married; being so in love, it would have come as a huge disappointment. Their relationship, bonded by so many common interests, must have been immensely strong to function without sex. It is, however, worth remembering that many marriages amongst the upper classes at the time were for convenience. Sex could and would be found elsewhere, so one must assume he quickly came to terms with his predicament. Within weeks of his marriage Grey was to find himself yet again coping with bachelor life in London, as Dorothy preferred to remain in the country. As a good-looking young Member of Parliament he must have been in great demand with society hostesses. Surely it would only be a matter of time before he took a mistress? This might explain how he was able to sustain such a quirky marriage for over twenty years. In the process, because he was so reserved, he managed to cover his tracks surprisingly well for a public figure.
Grey had an exciting political career before him and he would need the skills of a political hostess to further his prospects. Dorothy certainly did not see herself filling this role. Although tall, beautiful and charismatic, she was a solitary woman who, according to Louise Creighton, ‘was somewhat cold in manner with a kind of shy aloofness which kept others at a distance’ – so much so, it seems, that her biographer and distant relation Cecilia Chance refers to her as ‘an ice maiden’. She disliked society and rarely attended political parties and court balls, preferring to spirit herself away into the countryside where she could read quietly and commune with nature.
Dorothy was adored by her small group of close friends but to an outsider, particularly a ‘townie’, she could appear arrogant, self-absorbed and abrupt. She was highly intelligent and chose her few friends carefully. She was almost certainly an intellectual snob. Her demigods of the political world were Lord Rosebery and Richard Haldane, two of the most brilliant minds at Westminster. Rosebery would scale dizzy heights in his political career, proving a most effective Foreign Secretary before disappointing as a short-term Prime Minister. He never really fulfilled his true potential, whereas Haldane was an immensely successful Minister for War who was responsible for finally pushing through Britain’s much-needed army reforms. Outside politics, she related to bright people with similar interests, whether it was the countryside or literature; men such as W. H. Hudson, the celebrated nature writer, or Henry Newbolt, the poet and Liberal MP. Lady Monkswell in A Victorian Diarist wrote, ‘She is a very handsome, delightful and clever woman but could anybody be more “madly with blessedness at strife”?’ In her native Northumberland where she felt at home and secure, it was a different story, although her biographer thought she lacked the common touch and was ‘too stiff and shy to play the Lady Bountiful’. Even so, Dorothy worked tirelessly for her husband’s constituency association, increasing the membership and forming new ward committees. Through her friendship with Ella Pease of Alnmouth she became involved in Poor Law work and set up a new committee around Fallodon for boarding out workhouse children.
In 1887 the Greys spent three winter months on holiday in India. This journey was no doubt instigated by Dorothy, Louise Creighton informing the reader in her appreciation of Dorothy Grey that she ‘had dreams of foreign travel’. Money was always tight in the Grey household and this had precluded an earlier visit to the Far East. The celebrated Liberal war leader, David Lloyd George, unfairly mocks Grey in his War Memoirs for his lack of overseas travel:
He was the most insular of our statesmen and knew less of foreigners through contact with them than any Minister in the Government. He rarely, if ever, went abroad. Northumberland was good enough for him, and if he could not get there and needed a change, there was his fishing cottage in Hampshire … He had no real understanding of foreigners – I am not at all sure that for this purpose he would not include Scotland, Ireland and Wales as foreign parts.
Grey relished his trip to India and although he kept muttering to Dorothy of the ‘Sun, Moon and Taj’, it was the Himalayas that moved him most of all. Perhaps they should have capitalised on the success of their Indian venture and undertaken more foreign travel, particularly as they were to have no family, but as Louise Creighton relates, ‘The claims of politics made long journeys impossible for the Greys and a love of fishing and of the English countryside became too strong to allow a taste for foreign travel to grow up … As the years went on, they grew increasingly sure of what they wanted.’ It was during their Indian progress that the Greys met the Neville Lytteltons, who would become friends for life. Neville was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade and served as Military Secretary to the Governor of Bombay from 1885 to 1890. He had a very successful army career which would culminate in his appointment as the first Chief of General Staff in 1904. When back in London, his wife, Katherine Stuart-Wortley, struck up a close friendship with Dorothy when in 1892 they became neighbours in Pimlico. Grey, who knew next to nothing about military matters, would find Neville an excellent sounding board in the years to come.
In 1885, Grey was elected as the youngest Member of the House of Commons. He writes in Twenty-Five Years of his first years in Parliament: ‘Of the first six years spent in the House of Commons little need be said.’ This is not entirely true as it was during these early days in Westminster that Grey cemented close political allegiances with a group of talented ‘radical thinkers’ in the Liberal Party who would in due course become known as the Liberal Imperialists. In 1886, Gladstone advocated a policy of Home Rule for Ireland and split the Liberal Party down the middle. The Liberal Unionists were set against a policy of Home Rule, and powerful figures such as Joseph Chamberlain, the Marquis of Hartington and George Goschen (who famously replaced Lord Randolph Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer) left the government and allied themselves with the Conservatives. Grey was an ardent admirer of Gladstone’s intellect and convinced himself that a more enlightened system of governing Ireland was badly needed. He was finally converted to the Home Rule banner by John Morley’s articles in the Pall Mall Gazette. Morley, an intellectual heavyweight, was editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and, as a passionate Home Ruler, would be appointed Irish Secretary in Gladstone’s final administration. Grey was not called to make his maiden speech on the second reading of the Home Rule Bill on 8 June. The government was defeated by 343 votes to 313 and Gladstone dissolved the six-month-old Parliament.
In the resulting general election the Liberals were defeated, but Grey held on to his seat with a reduced majority against a Liberal Unionist candidate. He finally managed to make his maiden speech on 8 February 1887, when he attacked the government’s policy of continued coercion in Ireland and went on to outline the Liberal principles of Home Rule. Over the next two years Grey showed little interest in foreign affairs, yet he was to demonstrate an independently minded radical streak when it came to domestic issues, which the House, and Lloyd George in particular, would come to respect in the years ahead. In 1888 he spoke against the party line and voted in favour of Irish land purchase with the objective of turning tenants into owners. The following year he spoke in favour of payment for Members of Parliament, with the miners’ representatives at the forefront of his mind. Throughout his long career, Grey would always fight for the interests of the less privileged.
Grey’s early years in the House, characterised by a period of opposition from 1886 to 1892, were the most formative of his political career. It was at this time that a small group of Liberal MPs came together – notably Edward Grey, Richard Haldane, Henry Asquith, Ronald Munro Ferguson and Arthur Acland – who would lay the foundations of the so-called Liberal Imperialist group. They represented an élite band of intellectual Whigs who were concerned at the lack of progressive thought in the Liberal Party. Although the name has connotations of ‘right-wing’ politics with a penchant for foreign affairs, the Liberal Imperialists were in fact moderate politicians who advocated policies of the centre. During the 1880s the group was almost exclusively interested in domestic politics, at times promoting some quite radical legislation under the influence of Sidney Webb and the Fabians. In 1891, for example, Haldane sponsored the Local Authorities Bill, which gave councils powers for the compulsory purchase of land. It wasn’t until the Liberals gained office in 1892 that the Liberal Imperialists began showing an interest in foreign affairs. They saw themselves as a national party with patriotism as an essential part of their creed, hence they supported the Conservative Party on Kitchener’s Sudan expedition and the Boer War. The group looked to Lord Rosebery for political leadership and John Morley for intellectual guidance. Haldane was their ‘mover and shaker’, while Sir William Harcourt and Henry Labouchère proved thorns in their flesh.
Grey’s closest parliamentary colleagues at this time were two barristers of formidable intellect, Richard Haldane and Henry Asquith. Haldane was a member of an ancient landed Scottish family but was not wealthy. After attending Edinburgh University he studied philosophy at Gottingen and Dresden, becoming a disciple of everything German – which ironically, in 1915, would lead to his grossly unfair dismissal from office. At the age of twenty-one, Haldane decided to study law, and was called to the Bar at Lincoln’s Inn in 1879. He was blessed with both a powerful intellect and an ability to work all hours, and in the following year he set up his own practice. Although it was a struggle at the outset, within four years his income was £1,100 a year, rising to £20,000 in 1905. In 1885 he entered the House of Commons as Liberal member for East Lothian. He quickly caught the eye of Liberal leaders such as Morley and Rosebery. Here was a man who would inject the fresh ideas into moderate liberalism for which the young ‘Imperialists’ so yearned. Haldane did indeed become an energetic coordinator of policy and as a result was all too often viewed as an unpopular intriguer, which would place him at a disadvantage with both the Liberal leadership and the opposition parties.
Haldane soon became friends with Edward and Dorothy Grey. They both admired his intellectual abilities, Dorothy having a particular empathy for Haldane. He was shy, awkward, and in his own words had ‘no attractive presence’, which combined to detract from his speaking abilities and give him a tendency to mumble. Like Dorothy, he was a solitary person who disliked London society and was uneasy with the opposite sex. Although he once fell in love, he was deeply hurt by the subsequent termination of the engagement. Thereafter he lived alone with an unmarried sister, writing every day to his elderly mother who lived in Perthshire. For his part, Haldane admired the Greys’ simplicity of character and outlook, writing to his mother after a visit to Fallodon, ‘He is the same as ever – they have a good life here – at a very high level and with no pretence of any kind.’
Asquith was an altogether different character. Unlike Grey and Haldane, he originated from a modest family who lived in the textile community of Batley, West Yorkshire. Leaving his family behind at the age of twelve, Asquith had to board with friends in London in order to attend a more suitable school to further his career path. The pain of separation proved worthwhile, as he won a scholarship to Balliol at seventeen. Success followed success for Asquith, with the brilliant, driven undergraduate achieving a First Class Honours in Classics and becoming President of the Oxford Union. He left Oxford after taking his finals to read for the Bar, supplementing his paltry earnings through political journalism. At a dinner in 1881 at Lincoln’s Inn, he met Haldane, and four years later became a Member of Parliament representing East Fife, a seat he would hold for over thirty years. A short time later he persuaded his friend Haldane to join him in the House of Commons. Asquith had married a childhood sweetheart, Helen Melland, at a young age and in 1891, having given birth to five children, she died of typhoid while on holiday in Scotland. Soon afterwards the ambitious young parliamentarian began seeing the rich socialite Margot Tennant. Unlike his late wife and future close colleague Edward Grey, Asquith had a liking for society and country house weekends. Having been appointed Home Secretary in Gladstone’s fourth ministry, he married Margot at St George’s, Hanover Square, in May 1894. His financial security and place in society were now assured.
Asquith, like Haldane, could master any brief, but unlike his friend he had the advantage of being a fine orator. Above all he was a consummate politician who was always careful not to associate himself too closely with any one grouping. In short, he was a leader in the making. Once Prime Minister, he would become a most effective and decisive chairman in Cabinet. He was a man of few words who, not surprisingly for an experienced barrister, would home in on an issue and ask searching questions. He had the difficult task of keeping his Cabinet together and always sought consensus. He trusted Grey implicitly and gave him a free hand in conducting foreign policy, but at the same time sensibly kept close to Lloyd George, who led the Radical wing of the party. If Asquith had a weakness, it was for the ‘good life’. He adored society, women, wine and good food. After his marriage to Margot his relationship with Haldane cooled, the latter disliking what he regarded as Asquith’s more ‘frivolous’ lifestyle. Interestingly, the same would happen to Haldane’s relationship with Grey when the then Foreign Secretary took up with Margot’s sister-in-law, Pamela Tennant, another powerful Liberal hostess. Haldane, the now confirmed bachelor, disapproved of his friends taking their eyes off the political ball.
Two less heavyweight members of ‘the Imperialist group’ were Sydney Buxton and Ronald Munro Ferguson, both of whom became close personal friends of Grey, united by a love of fishing and the countryside. Munro Ferguson was a Scottish laird who between 1886 and 1892 became Rosebery’s private secretary. Buxton was from a distinguished Quaker family, lived in Sussex and became Governor-General of South Africa in 1914, having held Cabinet jobs as Postmaster-General and President of the Board of Trade. Arthur Acland was the final influential member of the group. He provided some ‘grey hair’ and was the man who would finally persuade Grey to accept office in December 1905. He was an expert on education and social issues but was forced to retire from politics in 1898 on the grounds of ill health. The group initially sought out the enigmatic Rosebery as their leader, but were soon to be disillusioned by his lack of interest and unreliability. As Prime Minister he had rapidly lost all enthusiasm for running the government. In the last year of his premiership he became increasingly tired as he suffered from insomnia due to the continual dissension in his Cabinet, and took to opium as a result. Policy details were discussed over dinner at meetings of the Articles Club, a dining club set up by a group of young, ambitious and intellectual Liberal MPs led by Asquith who met weekly at the National Liberal Club.
Liberal Imperialism had two main watchwords: ‘clean slate’ and ‘efficiency’. The ‘clean slate’ advocated a new pragmatic approach to politics, for example a break from the old Gladstonian policy of Home Rule for Ireland. Turning the slogans into policy accepted unanimously by the group proved next to impossible. Grey was initially an enthusiastic Home Ruler, then at a later date accepted Haldane’s ‘step-by-step’ policy, while Rosebery became an evangelistic
