Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey — In the Footsteps of Fox

Abstract

If Earl Grey is a household name, it is less through his political accomplishments, than because a popular brand of tea has been named after him. Nevertheless, he must be reckoned as one of the more significant of Nineteenth-century premiers, as the architect of the ‘Great Reform Bill’, of 1832, an important staging post on the long road to parliamentary democracy. Charles Grey was born on 13 March 1764. He was the second of nine children, but effectively the eldest, as his elder brother Henry died a few days after his birth. His father, Sir Charles Grey, was a general, who distinguished himself as commander-in-chief in the West Indies during the American War of Independence, and a sizeable landowner in Northumberland, where the family had been established since the fourteenth century. His mother, Elizabeth Grey, was possibly a distant cousin of his father. Of great significance in young Charles’s life was his uncle, Sir Henry Grey, a bachelor who made him his heir. He was Sir Charles’s elder brother, and his estate, at Howick, was rather grander than the former’s at Fallodon.KeywordsPrime MinisterEuropean Economic CommunityParliamentary DemocracyPolitical CareerSecret BallotThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.