Edward Grey

Edward Grey was British foreign secretary for eleven years, longer than anyone before or since, and took the country into the First World War. Born in 1862 into a Northumberland landowning family, he inherited a baronetcy at twenty, was sent down from Oxford for idleness, and entered parliament at twenty-three. He was an ornithologist and a fly-fisherman who wrote a book on each, and he preferred his cottage on the Itchen to London throughout. He took the Foreign Office in 1905 and continued the policy of his Conservative predecessors — the entente with France of 1904 turned into military and naval staff conversations, and an agreement with Russia followed in 1907 settling Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet. Those conversations are the charge against him. They created an obligation in practice that the cabinet had never approved and most of it did not know about, and by 1912 the French fleet had concentrated in the Mediterranean on the understanding that Britain would cover the Channel. He worked hard for a negotiated settlement in July 1914, proposing a conference of the four powers not directly involved, and Germany would not accept it. He then had to bring in a cabinet and a party half of which was against intervention, and Belgium is what did it — the treaty of 1839 gave a legal and moral case that France did not. He is said to have watched the lamps being lit in St James's Park on 3 August and remarked that they were going out all over Europe. He went blind and died in 1933.

• Lived: 1862 CE – 1933 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: foreign_secretary, diplomat

Related

• Entente Cordiale
• July Crisis
• German Invasion of Belgium and British Entry into the War