suc. grandfa. 26 July 1614 (a minor) as 2nd Bar. Grey of Groby; cr. 26 Mar. 1628 earl of STAMFORD
First sat 30 Jan. 1621; first sat after 1660, 1 May 1660; last sat 1 May 1668
MP Leics. 1654
b. c.1600,1 1st s. of Sir John Grey‡ of Pirgo, Essex (1576–1611), and Elizabeth (1577–1642), da. of Edward Nevill†, 8th Bar. Abergavenny. educ. matric. Trinity, Cambridge 1615, MA 1615; Padua 1618;2 G. Inn 1632. m. lic. 19 July 1620, Anne (d. c.Oct. 1676), da. and coh. of William Cecil†, styled Ld. Burghley, later 2nd earl of Exeter, 5s. (1 d.v.p.), 5da. d. 21 Aug. 1673; admon. 2 Oct. 1673 to wid.3
Ld. lt. Leics 1642–9; commr. maintenance of Somerset forces 1643, militia, Leics. Mar. 1660;4 custos rot. Leics. Mar.–Aug. 1660.
Col. regt. of foot (parl.) 1642–3; capt. tp. of horse (parl.) 1642;5 gov. (parl.), Hereford Oct.–Dec. 1642;6 c.-in-c. (parl.), Heref., Glos., Salop., Worcs. and Wales Dec. 1642–Sept. 1643,7 Devon and Cornw. Jan.–Sept. 1643.
Commr. excise 1645, to treat with Scotland 1645, 1646, 1648, exclusion from sacrament 1646, sale of bishops’ lands 1646, compounding 1647, visitation of Oxford Univ. 1647, indemnity ordinance 1647, navy and customs 1647, scandalous offences 1648.8
Associated with: Bradgate House, Leics.9
Likenesses: oil on canvas by C. Johnson, 1638, National Trust, Dunham Massey Hall; oil on canvas by J-B. Gaspars, c. 1665, National Trust, Dunham Massey Hall; Wenceslaus Hollar, etching, late 1640s, NPG D28239.
Henry Grey came from a long-distinguished Leicestershire family.10 His great-grandfather was Lord John Grey, a son of Thomas Grey†, 2nd marquess of Dorset and younger brother of Henry Grey†, duke of Suffolk, who was attainted in 1554 for his attempt to place his own daughter Lady Jane Grey on the throne. Lord John Grey’s son, Sir Henry Grey†, was in his own turn created Baron Grey of Groby in 1603, and when he died on 26 July 1614 it was his 14-year-old grandson Henry who inherited the title and estate, his own son Sir John Grey having predeceased him in 1611. Through his marriage to Anne Cecil, Henry Grey acquired the castle, borough and manor of Stamford in Lincolnshire. He first sat in the House as Baron Grey of Groby on 30 Jan. 1621, but was promoted to an earldom in recognition of the increased standing that his Cecil inheritance had given him.
A prominent, and often aggressive and violent, landowner in both Leicestershire and Lincolnshire, with an estimated income of £4,000 p.a., Stamford was also a man of puritan inclinations, strongly opposed to the clericalism of the Laudian Church. Although Charles I had paid a royal visit to Stamford’s house at Bradgate in 1634, by the end of the decade Stamford was one of the many puritan peers disgruntled with his rule. In the Long Parliament, Stamford, stood in opposition to the king in the Lords, while his son and heir apparent, Thomas Grey‡, styled Lord Grey of Groby, sitting for Leicester in the Commons, was equally, if not more, active against the king. In February 1642 Parliament appointed Stamford its lord lieutenant of Leicestershire, and when war began he was made a colonel of a parliamentary regiment of foot and captain of horse.
Appointed governor of Hereford in October 1642 and then commander-in-chief in Wales and its bordering marcher counties in December, from May 1643 he also led the parliamentary armies in Devon and Cornwall. He was defeated at Stratton on 16 May, and ‘having stood at a safe distance all the time of the battle’, according to the later account of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, ‘as soon as he saw the day lost … made all imaginable haste to Exeter’, where he endured a siege for three months before surrendering the town to Prince Maurice on 5 Sept. 1643.11 He retired to Westminster, where he set about defending himself against the charges of cowardice and military incompetence levelled against him, but the House eventually recognized his services in 1644 by granting him £1,000 and awarding him the sequestered estate of Charles Stanhope, Baron Stanhope of Harrington. From this point, Stamford played no further role in the military events of the civil wars.
The attacks that he faced in Parliament and his opposition to the Independent scheme of a New Model Army, as well as perhaps some local rivalries, may explain Stamford’s physical assault on the Member for Leicestershire, Sir Arthur Hesilrige‡, in 1645, for which misdemeanour he was impeached by the Commons on 28 June. Despite the fact that he was a peer, he made his defence before the Commons on 30 Sept. and, although the case was later dropped, this was to become an important precedent in later years as the members of the upper House tried to assert their right to be tried only by their peers. Throughout 1645–8 he was an intermittent member of the House and was often placed on parliamentary commissions, especially those concerning lay control of the church.12 He was also closely involved in managing Parliament’s increasingly fractious relations with the Scots and their army in England.13 In divisions in the House Stamford initially sided by and large with the group of Independent peers headed by Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland, but he became increasingly dismayed by the radical turn of politics after 1648.14
Although he remained among the small number of peers continuing to attend the House in the latter half of 1648, on 6 Dec. 1648, the day after Pride’s Purge, Stamford was granted leave of the House to go into the country for six weeks, and was not in Westminster for the execution of the king and the abolition of the House of Lords.15 In contrast his own radical son Grey of Groby played a prominent part as an orchestrator of the Purge and later as one of the judges in Charles I’s trial, his signature on the death warrant appearing prominently. Grey of Groby went on to hold a number of important military and government posts in the Commonwealth but was hounded during the Protectorate for his close contacts with Levellers and other radicals, and in April 1657 this young firebrand, who increasingly caused distress to his more conservative father, died of the gout, leaving behind only a young son, Thomas Grey, later 2nd earl of Stamford.
Stamford himself remained aloof from the Interregnum governments, except for a brief period in the first Protectorate Parliament of 1654 when, although a peer, he sat for Leicestershire, for which county he also continued to serve as a justice of the peace. Perhaps spurred on by his son-in-law Sir George Booth, later Baron Delamer, in August 1659 he tried to raise a small number of forces in Leicestershire for the restoration of Charles II, but was quickly apprehended.16 He was released from his incarceration by the Long Parliament in March 1660 and at the opening of the Convention Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, in drawing up his list of potential members of the House, marked Stamford as one of only six peers who had actually sat in both Houses during the preceding twenty years.
As a peer who had remained in the House in 1648 it was determined that Stamford could be admitted to the House at its opening, but he did not appear until its fifth day, 1 May 1660. He continued to sit for a further 80 meetings of that assembly, just under a half of the total sittings, until it adjourned in September 1660. He did not come to any of the meetings in the winter of 1660. He did not take an active role in the Convention, being nominated to just two select committees on 16 and 19 July 1660. On 11 July he did submit a petition to the House complaining of the harsh treatment dealt to him, and particularly to his house at Bradgate, by Major William Hubbert at the time of Booth’s rising. The commissioners for settling the militia in Leicestershire had later determined that Hubbert’s actions had been ‘without any order or authority’, and it was decided that this petition would be more fully considered when the House took up the Act of Indemnity for discussion.17 No further reference to this petition appears in the Journal, but the dispute between Hubbert and Stamford appears to have still been rumbling along in chancery as late as 1668.18 Stamford probably exerted some influence, as one who had tried to bring the king back in 1659, in ensuring that his son Grey of Groby did not have his corpse disinterred and hanged, as was done to the bodies of the other prominent regicides, and that his son’s estate was not exempted from the Act of Oblivion.19
The frequent illnesses which had long plagued Stamford took their toll. He was absent for all of the meetings of the first session of the Cavalier Parliament before the summer recess. He registered his proxy with Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton, on 16 May 1661 and his absence was excused by the House on 15 June, ‘he being not well’.20 He returned to the House on 21 Nov. 1661, and was present for just over half of the meetings in the winter of 1661–2, but again played little role, being named to only five select committees during that entire time, largely for bills involving trade and manufacture. He came to only eight meetings in the 1663 session, quitting the House on 21 May 1663, and his illnesses and absence appear to have been so well known and accepted at this time that Wharton did not even include his name in his forecast of opponents and supporters of the lord chancellor Clarendon in the impeachment attempt of July 1663. However, he was not completely divorced from parliamentary affairs and at some point early in Charles II’s reign put forward to him (or more probably to Clarendon) a proposal for a parliamentary bill that would ensure that a proportion of the revenue of every city, borough, corporate town and livery company in England would be directed to the royal coffers to assist in the rebuilding of Whitehall.21
After 1663 Stamford did not reappear in the House for five years. He seems to have been abroad for part of that time, returning to England in March 1666.22 During his absence from the House his 1645 impeachment by the Commons came to the attention of the Lords in their wrangle with the lower House over the Commons’ attempt to impeach John Mordaunt, Viscount Mordaunt. At the heart of the quarrel was Mordaunt’s right to have counsel plead his defence in the lower chamber and the Lords in a decision of 28 Jan. 1667 pointed out that such a right had been extended to Stamford in 1645.
Stamford did devote part of his time during this period to looking after his own and his family’s interests. In the spring of 1663 he petitioned the king to re-grant to him the 4,000 acres of Wildmore Fen and Armtree manor in Lincolnshire, property which Stamford had conveyed to Charles I in the 1630s in order to have royal assistance in his enclosure of this fenland. A compromise was reached with the grantees of part of the estate, Robert Bruce, 2nd Baron Bruce of Whorlton (later earl of Ailesbury), Stamford’s son-in-law, and Henry Hungate. In July 1666 Armtree and Wildmore Fen were granted to Stamford in the name of three of his younger children.23
Stamford returned to the House on 17 Feb. 1668, probably in order to manage a petition submitted by him and Thomas Howard, earl of Berkshire, for the title of the manor of Hedingham in Essex, then in the possession of Brien Cockayne, Viscount Cullen [I]. Both Stamford and Berkshire were married to daughters of the 2nd earl of Exeter, co-heiresses of their third sister, the late Diana Cecil, who had come into this property as part of her jointure at the death of her first husband, Henry de Vere†, 18th earl of Oxford. Oxford himself had been granted the property from his mother, Elizabeth Trentham, and by a settlement she made in 1609 the reversion of the property, failing heirs of the 18th earl, was to go to the heirs of her brother Francis. Cullen claimed the property through his wife, Elizabeth, Francis Trentham’s heiress, and the House, hearing his argument on 30 Mar. 1668 that his wife’s claim to the property had never been disputed in a court of law, dismissed the petition of Stamford and Berkshire.24
Stamford was present when the petition was first presented on 24 Feb. 1668 but left the House three days later and did not attend for its dismissal. He only sat again on 20 Apr. and came to the House for the last time on 1 May 1668, having attended in total only 16 sittings of this session. In the following years he began to register his proxy with other peers. On 13 Nov. 1669 he gave it to William Cavendish, 3rd earl of Devonshire, for the session of winter 1669. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley (later earl of Shaftesbury), held his proxy from 4 Mar. 1670 until the end of the session in April 1671 and Stamford later registered it with Basil Fielding, 2nd earl of Denbigh, on 8 Mar. 1673. A marginal note next to this proxy registration indicates that it was vacated by his death, but the earl died at his house at Bradgate on 21 Aug. 1673, well after that session had ended. He died intestate and his estate was put into administration to his widow in October 1673. His title and estate were inherited by his grandson, Thomas Grey, still a minor.
The first earl of Stamford may not have had a politically active career in the Restoration, but both his grandson, Stamford, and his younger son, Anchitell Grey‡, were leading figures in the politics of the period, and Anchitell’s record of debates in the Commons has become one of the principal sources for its history.
C.G.D.L.- 1 HMC Hastings, ii. 62.
- 2 S.L. Andrich, De natione Anglica et Scota juristarum Universitarum Patavinae, 138.
- 3 TNA, PROB 6/48, f. 118.
- 4 A. and O. ii. 1434; A Perfect List of all such Persons … as are now … justices of the peace (1660), 27.
- 5 CSP Dom. 1641–3, p. 366; LJ, vi. 284; HMC 5th Rep. 46.
- 6 CSP Dom. 1641–3, pp. 398, 400.
- 7 LJ, v. 488.
- 8 A. and O. i. 691, 853, 905, 914, 927, 937, 1047, 1208; CSP Dom. 1645–7, pp. 23, 499; HMC 6th Rep. 158, 164; LJ, x. 4, 7, 239.
- 9 Nichols, Hist. of Leics. iii. 680–1.
- 10 Much of this biography dealing with the period before 1660 is based on Trans. Leics. Arch. Hist. Soc. lxii. 33–52.
- 11 Clarendon, Rebellion, iii. 69–70.
- 12 A. and O. i. 853, 905, 927, 1208.
- 13 CSP Dom. 1645–7, pp. 23, 499; HMC 6th Rep. 158, 164; LJ, x. 4, 7, 239.
- 14 J.S.A. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics’ (Camb. Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1986), apps. A and B.
- 15 Ibid. app. D.
- 16 CSP Dom. 1659–60, pp. 113, 114, 120, 125, 137, 164–6, 199.
- 17 HMC 7th Rep. 114.
- 18 TNA, C 10/477/115.
- 19 HMC 5th Rep. 184.
- 20 PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/29.
- 21 Bodl. Clarendon 92, ff. 106–7.
- 22 CSP Dom. 1665–6, p. 306.
- 23 CSP Dom. 1663–4, pp. 82, 155, 209; 1665–6, pp. 448, 449, 573; 1670, p. 628.
- 24 HMC 8th Rep. pt. 1, p. 117; CP, x. 256.