Edward Grey

British politician

• Born: April 25, 1862
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: September 7, 1933
• Place of death: Fallodon, Northumberland, England

As British foreign secretary for more than a decade, Grey set the course of British policy before and during the early years of World War I.

Early Life

Edward Grey was the eldest of seven children in a prominent English family. His father, Colonel George Henry Grey, had left his career in the army by the time Edward was born and managed the family estates in Fallodon, Northumberland, where the boy grew up. When his father died suddenly in 1874, Edward’s grandfather, Sir George Grey, second baronet, became the most important influence on him. Sir George had been a member of Parliament who had held cabinet offices in several governments.

Grey was sent to preparatory school in 1871, first to a small school in Northallerton, then to Temple Grove, a more distinguished school at East Sheen. He went to Winchester, one of the country’s elite public schools, in 1876, and then to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1880, where he became active in outdoor sports and a variety of other concerns but not in his studies. He was expelled from the university in 1884.

Grey did not lack the means to support himself once he left Oxford. When his grandfather died in 1882, he had inherited the family estates and title. He energetically pursued activities that were to dictate the course of his later life. One was the study of nature. A dedicated fisherman and bird fancier, he pursued his interests actively. The other field was public affairs, and he was able to begin an apprenticeship in it in July, 1884, as private secretary to Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer. In October, 1885, Grey married Dorothy Widdrington, the daughter of a neighboring squire from Northumberland, who shared his enthusiasm for country pursuits.

Life’s Work

Grey’s career as a Liberal politician was launched in 1885, when he was chosen to stand for election to his grandfather’s old seat in Berwick-on-Tweed. His victory at the age of twenty-three made him the youngest member of the House of Commons. Under the influence of his rector, Mandell Creighton, Grey had adopted fairly progressive views on domestic reform. He took an especially intense interest in the most divisive issue of the day, home rule for Ireland. Like the colleagues in the House with whom he worked most closely, H. H. Asquith later prime minister and Richard Haldane, Grey backed home rule but was critical of the way party leader William Ewart Gladstone had handled it.

The Liberal Party, divided by the Irish question, was out of office during Grey’s first years in Parliament. When they returned to power in 1892, he was made a parliamentary undersecretary in the Foreign Office. Serving first under Lord Rosebery and then Lord Kimberley, he was able to achieve some unusual prominence in the post. Because both of his foreign secretaries sat in the House of Lords, he had to speak for his department in the Commons. This he did most effectively. It was his duty in 1895 to deliver one especially important statement, “the Grey declaration,” warning the French against encroaching on the upper waters of the Nile River.

Grey may have been fairly radical on some domestic issues; he was a supporter of free trade and the educational rights of religious Nonconformists. Yet in the foreign policy area that was now his specialty, he was emerging as a strong imperialist. Out of office when the Liberals left power in 1895, Grey became an ardent supporter of the Boer War (1899-1902). In the struggle for leadership of the Liberal Party, he shifted his allegiance at first toward and then away from Lord Rosebery, the choice of the more conservative wing of the party, but never backed Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Rosenbery’s rival and party leader.

It was by no means certain, then, that Grey would be invited to join the cabinet when the Liberals came back into office in 1905. Another factor, a rather unusual one for a rising politician, mitigated against his assuming high office: It was unclear whether he really wanted to serve. Coupled with his ambition there was always a certain reluctance that made him a rather puzzling figure to his contemporaries. He genuinely loved the world of nature and appeared to be so devoted to it that he resented time spent away from bird-watching and fishing. His classic book Fly Fishing had appeared in 1899, and his later The Charm of Birds (1927) showed his expertise in these fields. Moreover, Grey’s wife, who was to die in an accident in 1906, was not interested in politics and preferred not to live in London.

When the call came, Grey hesitated and needed some convincing from his friends, but he finally went to the Foreign Office to serve Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman. Despite his protestations that he would really like to be elsewhere and his frequent retreats to Fallodon or another country house closer to London, he stayed for eleven years, an unusually long and eventually crippling period of service at Whitehall. His policies, such as support of closer ties to France, became those of his country.

Grey was able to implement that policy during his first weeks in office in dealing with a major crisis that had erupted over Morocco. Germany had raised objections to French plans to annex that North African country, posing the question of how firm Great Britain’s commitments to France were. Many Liberals, including Rosebery, had spoken out against the Conservative government’s policy of the Entente with France, so there were doubts about which way Grey would take Great Britain.

Grey made it clear from the start that he intended to continue a bipartisan policy of support for France, the United States, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. This position made him popular with opposition Conservatives, who lauded him as more of a statesman than a politician. Back-bench Liberals were unhappy with this direction but unable to do much about it. They criticized Grey as being too insular to be foreign secretary because he had not traveled or lived abroad and could speak French only haltingly. Grey had no personal following as a politician, but Liberal leaders and the general public found him a reassuring figure to keep at Whitehall, in part because he was so purely English. Moreover, the suspicion of Germany that was at the heart of his policies was something they shared. The Germany thrust onto the center of the world stage, and especially its building a fleet that could challenge British supremacy at sea, was deeply resented.

Great Britain’s firm support of France in the aftermath of the Moroccan crisis caused Germany to back down somewhat. Grey was able to use the support of President Theodore Roosevelt of the United States in opposing excessive German demands. He cultivated the relationship with Roosevelt, another keen naturalist, as part of his broader policy of Anglo-American cooperation. He also secured an agreement with Russia in 1907, which strengthened the Entente and further isolated Germany. Friendship with the repressive Russia of the czars was a bitter pill for English Liberals to swallow, but Grey was able to get his way.

In the succession of crises that paved the way to war in 1914, Grey stuck to his course of backing the Entente. Ultimately, this policy led to the creation of two rival alliance systems in Europe, which allowed a small incident to escalate into a major war. If only the Entente had been less threatening to Germany, his critics argued, it might not have pursued the aggressive policies that caused war. Alternately, if Grey had only made it clear that the Entente was an alliance, that Great Britain would necessarily line up with France in the event of a German attack, Germany might have held back. Yet it is doubtful whether the surge of German nationalism could have been contained by any British policy, no matter how astute. Grey can perhaps be blamed for not appreciating the military imperatives of foreign policy better. He clearly did not understand how Great Britain’s diplomatic options were limited by the military conversations that were held between Great Britain and France after 1906.

When the assassination of Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand triggered the crisis of 1914, Grey played a pivotal role. He tried to urge settlement of the dispute through European arbitration, only to have his suggestion rejected by Austria and Germany. When the German plan to attack France through Belgium unfolded, Grey convinced a wavering British cabinet of the need to enter the war with its Entente partners. Grey, making clear his revulsion to war and the sadness of the moment, was able to strike the right note to convince the British public that the right course was being pursued. That Belgian neutrality was being violated gave him a high-minded and understandable issue around which to rally the nation. In fact, the nation learned only later about the extent of its military commitment to protect France against aggression.

Grey’s record as a wartime foreign secretary was mixed. His health, and in particular his eyesight, was failing by then. He was able to maintain some of the policy priorities he had set fairly well: He kept good relations with the United States by limiting the imposition of the blockade. A less successful part of his policy was the conclusion of the secret Treaty of London, signed in April, 1915, which bought Italy’s entry into the war for the Entente with the promise of territory on the Dalmatian coast. This and other secret treaties he signed in 1915 were later widely criticized.

When his old friend H. H. Asquith was forced out as prime minister in 1916, Grey finally left Whitehall. He was given a peerage, assuming the title Viscount Grey of Fallodon. His prestige remained high; hence, the support he gave to the League of Nations movement was critical. Increasing blindness limited his role in politics in the last years of his life. He led a mission to the United States in 1919, attempting in vain to get Americans into the league. In 1928, he was elected chancellor of Oxford, the university that had expelled him years before. He died at Fallodon on September 7, 1933.

Significance

Grey was not a great statesman, but it would be unfair to place too much stress on his limitations as foreign secretary. In routine administration, he was competent, and it is doubtful if anyone else put in his place could have averted World War I. Once the war came, he was clearly not the right person to have in control at Whitehall, and his conduct of affairs was open to criticism.

In at least two other roles, Grey’s contribution was noteworthy. As a writer on nature, he won a wide and devoted following. As an internationalist, in the years after he left office in 1916, he made important contributions to the establishment of the League of Nations. This world body represented for him, as for most British liberals, the path away from international anarchy and toward disarmament and peace. His leadership of the League of Nations Union gave that society the prestige it needed to build widespread support for the league in Great Britain.

Bibliography

Birn, Donald S. The League of Nations Union, 1918-1945. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1981. A study of the voluntary organization to bolster support for the League of Nations. Grey founded this group and was its president until his death.

Bonakdarian, Mansour. Britain and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911: Foreign Policy, Imperialism, and Dissent. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2006. Includes information about Grey and Britain’s support for the revolution. Published in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation.

Crawford, Timothy W. Pivotal Deterrence: Third-Party Statecraft and the Pursuit of Peace. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003. Includes information about Grey’s unsuccessful efforts in July, 1914, to prevent Germany and France from going to war.

Egerton, George W. Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations: Strategy, Politics, and International Organization, 1914-1919. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. A scholarly study of the founding of the League of Nations that contains a discussion of Grey’s role.

Goldstein, Erik, and B. J. C. McKercher, eds. Power and Stability: British Foreign Policy, 1865-1965. Portland, Oreg.: Frank Cass, 2003. Contains an essay about Grey, the British Foreign Office, and the balance of power in Europe from 1905 through 1912.

Grey, Viscount of Fallodon. Twenty-five Years: 1892-1916. 2 vols. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925. Not a complete autobiography, but a useful memoir of Grey’s career in politics. It is a dated but still invaluable perspective on Grey’s contribution.

Robbins, Keith. Sir Edward Grey: A Biography of Lord Grey of Fallodon. London: Cassell, 1971. A reliable and well-documented scholarly biography with a balanced perspective on Grey’s career.

Steiner, Zara S. Britain and the Origins of the First World War. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1977. A balanced account of British foreign policy during the period of Grey’s stewardship at the Foreign Office. It contains many useful observations on his approach to policy-making.

Trevelyan, George Macaulay. Grey of Fallodon. London: Longmans, Green, 1937. A very readable but somewhat oversympathetic account of Grey’s life by an eminent historian.