The Great Governing Families of England (Volume 1) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Cfje )T seems scarcely fair to tell the story of the Greys immediately after that of the Percies; it will read beside theirs so short and so insignificant. Our object, however, is to explain the existence of the governing families; and for the last sixty years the great house of Northumberland has had less influence over the course of British policy than its comparatively feeble county rival, and once at least the lesser house has performed an incomparable service to the nation. To write a history of the families in the north of England which bear or bore the name of Grey, would be a work in itself. Our present object is simply to give a brief notice of the one Grey family which is a great political house at the present day, viz., the Greys of Howick, and of other Greys, only those who can be proved to have been of the same blood. The Greys are, in a genealogical sense, some five hundred years old, though they claim, or the " Peerages" for them, a much higher antiquity. SirThomas de Grey was a gallant soldier in the wars of Edward III., and held, among other manors in Northumberland, that of Howick; but, as we have no links to connect him with the subsequent Greys of Howick, the historian who cares about accuracy instead of heraldic probabilities will prefer to date the existing family from Sir John Grey of Berwick, who was alive in 1372. His son, Sir Thomas Grey of Berwick and Chillingham, had two sons, from the eldest of whom, Sir John Grey, were derived the Lords Grey of Powys, Earls of Tankerville in Normandy, who became extinct in 1551. This Sir John was a distinguished soldier under Henry V., pushed his fortunes in the war which so nearly ended in the conquest of France and ruin of England, and was at last killed with Thomas, Duke of Clarence, in the disastrous defeat wh...