Sir Edward Grey: A Biography of Lord Grey of Fallodon

Sir Edward Grey is one of the enigmas of British political history. In an age of political giants--Lloyd George, Asquith, Curzon and Churchill--his position as Foreign Secretary in the last years of the great Liberal Governments has been shadowy and unresolved.His detractors dismiss him as the quintessence of incompetence, the upper-class 'amateur' statesman, a dilettante concerned more with his fishing and his ducks than with foreign affairs, with his Northumbrian estates rather than with the Realpolitik of the great Empire in a time of gathering troubles. His supporters, even his only previous biographer, fellow-Northumbrian, and fellow-nature lover, G. M. Trevelyan, have unwittingly contributed to the view that Grey would have done better to stick to his rods and the breeding habits of his ducks; seeking to delineate the qualities of his character, often knowing little and caring less about his public life, they have emphasized his attributes as a 'country gentleman' and ignored his patent ability to survive successfully the rough and tumble of Edwardian politics in the years leading up to the first World War.For this same Grey brushed challenges aside to remain the seemingly irreplaceable head of the Foreign Office, the most important department of state, for eleven consecutive, crucial years of war and peace, from 1905 until 1916. Why this was so, given Grey's other interests, has been to many the most baffling problem in any assessment of his place in history. But in re-examining all the seemingly contradictory facets of Grey's life in depth, and in the light of the new evidence he has assembled, Dr Robbins shows them to be not only credible, but wholly compatible. The tough, tenacious politician who hated politics was indeed the man whose memorial is in part the Edward Grey Ornithological Institute at Oxford; the naturalist author was the parliamentarian with forceful views on Ireland, female suffrage, and the future of the House of Lords; the man whose personal life was dogged by tragedy and dimmed by growing blindness was, as Dr Robbins clearly shows, the last but by no means least of a long line of great British Foreign Secretaries.Sir Edward Grey is a revisionist biography of the finest sort. Dr Robbins's researches have brought to light a mass of previously unexamined or unpublished material in private and public collections in Britain and overseas, and in the Royal Archives. It is likely to remain the definitive work on Grey, a comprehensive portrait of an experienced, positive statesman with a degree of professional toughness which, unrevealed before, makes understandable at last the respect and trust accorded Grey by great contemporaries in his own country and overseas during his long years in high office.