GREY, Thomas, Ld. Grey of Groby (c.1623-57), of Bradgate, Groby, Leics.

Early parliamentary career, 1640-2

Styled Lord Grey of Groby after his father’s first title, the future parliamentarian general and regicide was still a minor when Stamford recommended him to Leicester corporation for election to the Long Parliament. The earl claimed that Grey had been offered places elsewhere but that he was ‘more desirous to do service herein to your corporation to whom he is like to be a neighbour, than to any other corporation’.60Leics. RO, BRII/18/22, f. 8. On 23 October 1640, the Leicester voters re-elected Thomas Coke, who had represented the town in the Short Parliament, but rejected his fellow MP – the crown nominee Sir Simon Every – in favour of Grey.61Supra, ‘Leicester’. Grey’s return represented a major victory for Stamford in his power-struggle with Henry Hastings, 5th earl of Huntingdon, the lord lieutenant of both Leicestershire and Rutland and a firm supporter of the personal rule of Charles I.62Supra, ‘Leicestershire’. In a debate on 2 December concerning words spoken by one of Huntingdon’s deputy-lieutenants against the return for Leicestershire of the Greys’ ally Sir Arthur Hesilrige, ‘Lord Grey’ – either Grey or, less probably, his kinsman Henry Grey, Lord Grey of Ruthin*, who was usually styled Lord Ruthin – referred to the offending gentleman as ‘an advisor of hogs not long since. This man’s wealth makes him proclaim in pride, and therefore we ought to open a vein, for his is a lion couchant, but in the country a lion rampant...’.63Procs. LP i. 425.

Grey was named to 12 committees between the assembling of the Long Parliament in November 1640 and the autumn 1641 recess, of which half related to the reform of the ‘abuses’ of the personal rule.64CJ ii. 43a, 91a, 98a, 101a, 102b, 114a, 166b, 187b, 190b, 196a, 198b, 201a. Thus he was appointed to committees for investigating the proceedings of the Laudian bishops Matthew Wren and William Piers; to expedite the prosecution of the earl of Strafford; and to confer with the Lords concerning the Ten Propositions (28 June) – a series of proposals for (among other things) placing the trained bands under the command of ‘faithful and trusty’ commanders.65CJ ii. 43a, 91a, 98a, 101a, 166b, 190b. On 27 May, Grey had joined Henry Marten, Sir Henry Mildmay and other Members in demanding the removal from the House of William Tayleur for having declared that passing the bill of attainder against Strafford would be ‘to commit murder with the sword of justice’.66Infra, ‘William Tayleur alias Domville’; Procs. LP iv. 613. As the son of a peer, Grey was a natural choice for serving as a messenger to the Lords – which role he performed on three occasions before the autumn recess.67CJ ii. 181a, 183a, 264a; LJ iv. 280b, 282b, 371a.

Many of Grey’s appointments and activities at Westminster between the autumn of 1641 and the outbreak of civil war in the summer of 1642 point to his alignment with the parliamentary ‘junto’. During that period he was named to eight committees and one team for reporting and managing a conference and served as a messenger to the Lords on twelve occasions.68CJ ii. 308b, 315a, 336a, 338a, 339a, 376b, 381b, 384a, 396a, 439a, 446a, 514b, 519b, 530b, 591b, 592a, 622a, 678b; LJ iv. 429b, 438a, 466b, 471a, 510b, 515b, 593a, 703a; v. 92b, 178a, 193a, 216b. His most important appointment of 1641 was that of 30 November, when he was named with Hesilrige and ten other MPs to a committee for presenting the Grand Remonstrance to the king.69CJ ii. 327a. Granted leave of absence on 18 December, he had returned to Westminster by 13 January 1642, when he was a messenger to request that the Lords reveal who had initiated proceedings there against the Five Members.70CJ ii. 348b, 376b; LJ iv. 510b. Four days later (17 Jan.), he was named to a committee of both Houses for preparing a petition to the king, protesting at his perceived breach of parliamentary privilege in attempting to arrest the Five Members.71CJ ii. 384a. However, this was the only occasion on which he was nominated to a committee for prosecuting Parliament’s ‘paper skirmishes’ with the king in the months before the outbreak of civil war. On 15 February, Grey moved (successfully) to bring in a petition from Leicestershire against ‘the pressing grievances and deadly distempers in this church and state’ and urging ‘that delinquents may be brought to speedy and condign punishment, [and] the counsellors, contrivers and actors of that late surpassing breach of Parliament privileges [the attempted arrest of the Five Members] may be manifested, their aims and intentions discovered and their persons rewarded according to their deep demerits’.72CJ ii. 434a; LJ iv. 589b; PJ i. 392.

Grey doubtless supported the Militia Ordinance – by which his father had displaced Huntingdon as lord lieutenant of Leicester – and on 30 May 1642, he carried up to the Lords an order for executing the ordinance in Leicestershire and three other midland counties.73CJ ii. 592a; LJ v. 92b. On 4 June, in response to the king’s proclamation against the ordinance, Grey, Lord Ruthin and Hesilrige were sent to Leicestershire to oversee its execution in the county.74CJ ii. 604b. But Grey was still at Westminster on 13 June, when he procured a Commons order for sending muskets and swords to Leicestershire.75CJ ii. 621b. That same day he was named as a reporter and manager of a conference with the Lords concerning his father’s attempts to execute the Militia Ordinance in the county.76CJ ii. 622a. The leading figures in the attempt to secure Leicester and its magazine for Parliament were Stamford, Lord Ruthin and Hesilrige.77Supra, ‘Henry Grey, Lord Grey of Ruthin’; ‘Henry Grey, 1st earl of Stamford’; infra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; ‘Letters from a seventeenth century rector of Lutterworth’, Leics. Historian, iii. 16. Grey returned home to assist the earl and his confederates no earlier than 18 June and was back at Westminster by 28 June.78PJ iii. 83, 101, 148; Richards, Grey of Groby, 57. On 4 July, he carried up the Commons order for establishing the Committee of Safety* and served as a messenger to the Lords again on 8 and 18 July.79CJ ii. 662a; LJ v. 178a, 193a, 216b. Having received commissions as a captain of horse and colonel of foot respectively in Parliament’s main field army under Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex, Grey and his father largely abandoned the fight in Leicestershire during the late summer of 1642 and devoted their energies to their new commands and the campaigning that would precede the battle of Edgehill in October.80Supra, ‘Henry Grey, 1st earl of Stamford’; SP28/170, pt. 3, unfol.; HMC Portland, i. 64; Richards, Grey of Groby, 68, 70. Groby fought in Sir William Balfour’s regiment of horse at Edgehill, alongside Hesilrige and Nathaniel Fiennes I*.81N. Fiennes, A Most True and Exact Relation of Both the Battels Fought by His Excellency and His Forces (1642), 8; Richards, Grey of Groby, 73, 75.

Commander of the East Midlands Association, 1642-4

Grey returned to Westminster after the Edgehill campaign and was present in the House during November and at least the first half of December 1642. His appointments as a committeeman and messenger during this period, though few, suggest his affiliation with the war-party interest in the Commons.82CJ ii. 840a, 841a, 858b, 890b; LJ v. 454a. This can also be inferred from his nomination early in December to command the forces of the projected East Midlands Association – an initiative that was spearheaded by the ‘fiery spirits’ (Grey’s backers in the Commons included Henry Marten and Sir Henry Mildmay).83CJ ii. 875a, 881b; LJ v. 474b; Harl. 164, ff. 174v, 177v, 243v, 244r-v, 369v; Add. 18777, f. 79. The Lords insisted that his authority be subordinate to the earl of Essex – a decision that the Commons endorsed – and hence late in December the lord general granted Grey a commission as sergeant-major-general of the forces to be raised in the association: an area comprising Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Derbyshire, Huntingdonshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Nottinghamshire.84CJ ii. 881b, 897a, 901b; Harl. 164, ff. 267v, 268; L. Beats, ‘The E. Midlands Assoc. 1642-4’, MH iv. 162-6.

That Grey landed this command is astonishing. He was no more than 20 at the time, had very little military experience, and belonged to a family whose pre-eminence even within its native Leicestershire was contested. Moreover, his unremarkable career as a soldier and his failure to make any notable impression at Westminster either as a draftsman or orator, support the assessment of (Sir) Edward Hyde* that he was a man ‘of no eminent parts’.85Clarendon, Hist. ii. 473. The House entrusted no major committee to Grey’s chairmanship before 1649 – contrary to the assertion of one authority – or policy initiative to his pen.86Richards, Grey of Groby, 91. The claim that he was appointed almost by default, as the scion of only ‘major family’ in the region to side with Parliament, is equally inaccurate.87S. Barber, Regicide and Republicanism (Edinburgh, 1998), 72; ‘”A bastard kind of militia”, localism and tactics in the second civil war’, in Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution ed. I. Gentles, J. Morrill, B. Worden (Cambridge, 1998), 134. The parliamentarian peers the 1st earl of Bolingbroke and the 1st earl of Peterborough were seated in Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire respectively and both were senior officers under Essex. The only obvious factor that would have recommended Grey for high military office in 1642 was his status as the son of an east midlands peer who enjoyed Essex’s favour (the lord general had just appointed Stamford commander-in-chief of Wales and the Welsh Marches) and the concomitant influence to compete for military resources with Parliament’s other regional commanders.88Supra, ‘Henry Grey, 1st earl of Stamford’. Certainly Grey’s appointment brought him firmly within the political orbit of Essex and his circle. Denzil Holles* would later refer to him as ‘zealous for my lord of Essex, as he had good reason for the respects he had receiv’d from him’.89D. Holles, Mems. (1699), 137.

Grey succeeded in garrisoning and fortifying Leicester over the winter of 1642-3 (prompting a purge of the town’s leading royalists), securing Leicestershire and Rutland for Parliament, and in joining with Essex in April 1643 to capture Reading.90Bodl. Add. C.132, ff. 40v-41, 42v; Richards, Grey of Groby, 94, 98-100, 103-4. But his irresolution as a commander – which may have owed something to his small physical stature as well as to his youth and inexperience – was almost certainly a factor in the generally poor military performance of his unwieldy and divided association.91Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 35 (21-8 Nov. 1648), sig. Bbb3v (E.473.35); R. Overton, Overton’s Defyance of the Act of Pardon (1649), 7 (E.562.26); Richards, Grey of Groby, 311, 384. His unfitness for high command would also contribute to the failure of the association’s most ambitious endeavour – the lord general’s scheme in mid-1643 for Grey’s forces to combine with those of Oliver Cromwell*, Captain John Hotham* and other regional commanders in an effort to intercept the queen’s munitions convoy on its march to Oxford.92CJ iii. 65a, 75a, 138b; Harl. 164, ff. 384r-v, 389v; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, i. 228, 232; HMC Portland, i. 707; Hutchinson Mems. ed. Sutherland, 81-2; Richards, Grey of Groby, 104-13; M. Wanklyn, The Warrior Generals (New Haven, 2010), 58-9; Beats, ‘E. Midlands Assoc.’, 167-8. Though Grey was criticised by Essex for his part in this bungled campaign and faced a serious mutiny among the Leicestershire forces in its aftermath, he ‘readily’ obeyed orders to join the lord general on his march to relieve Gloucester in September. Grey and his regiment fought at the first battle of Newbury, and he was among the party of officers that accompanied Essex on his triumphal return to London on 25 September.93Harl. 164, f. 389v; Add. 31116, p. 98; Bodl. Add. C.132, ff. 54v, 55v, 68v; A Remonstrance to Vindicate His Excellence Robert Earle of Essex (1643), 8-9 (E.71.7); Whitelocke, Mems. i. 216; Richards, Grey of Groby, 131, 135; M. Wanklyn, F. Jones, A Military History of the English Civil War (Harlow, 2005), 116. On 28 September, Grey, Sir Philip Stapilton*, Sir John Meyrick* and other prominent Essexian officers received the thanks of the House for their ‘late great services to the commonwealth’.94CJ iii. 256b. Two days later (30 Sept.), Grey took the Solemn League and Covenant.95CJ iii. 259a.

The ill-discipline of Grey’s pay-starved forces, and the high-handed proceedings of some of his officers – notably, Thomas Waite* – in Leicestershire and Rutland, sparked a series of local feuds during the winter of 1643-4 that brought him into conflict with his former ally Hesilrige.96Infra, ‘Sir Thomas Hesilrige’; ‘Thomas Waite’; Add. 18779, f. 51; Bodl. Tanner 62, f. 459; Certaine Informations no. 54 (22-9 Jan. 1644), 419-20 (E.30.13); HMC Cowper, ii. 341. On 20 January, the Commons set up a committee to investigate complaints against Grey and his troops from some of Leicestershire’s leading county committeemen.97CJ iii. 372a, 429b-430a; Harl. 166, f. 31. Grey’s return to the Commons in – certainly by – early March 1644 may well have been prompted by a desire to defend his reputation at Westminster as well as secure money, horses ‘and other necessaries’ for his troops.98CJ iii. 452b, 486b, 506b; Harl. 166, f. 30v; Richards, Grey of Groby, 152. In the Commons, Hesilrige, Oliver St John, Zouche Tate and other war-party MPs clashed repeatedly with Grey, Stapilton and their Essexian allies over who was principally to blame for Leicestershire’s woes. Hesilrige claimed that Grey’s soldiers had ‘utterly ruined and destroyed’ Leicestershire, and he demanded either that they be properly paid or that they leave the county altogether. Hesilrige and his friends seem to have had the better of these exchanges, ‘to the great disheartening of Lord Grey’.99Harl. 166, ff. 10, 31, 34; D.R. Costa, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige and the Development of the Civil War in England (to 1645)’ (Oxford Univ. DPhil. thesis, 1988), 247-57. Grey’s anger boiled over early in May, when he had a violent altercation with Hesilrige’s brother in Westminster Hall, ‘calling him rascal and base fellow and other threatening language’.100CSP Dom. 1644, p. 188; CJ iii. 489a; Add. 18779, f. 104. His efforts to demonstrate that the Leicestershire committee was so ‘penny-wise’ that it hindered effective military operation in the county were regarded as politically-motivated and were ‘generally distrusted’ by the House.101Harl. 166, ff. 65r-v.

In between quarrelling with the Hesilriges, Grey was named to two committees in April and May 1644 and served twice as a messenger to the Lords – on both occasions in connection with the Commons’ efforts to expedite the renewal of the ordinance for the Committee of Both Kingdoms*.102CJ iii. 467b, 492b, 497b, 507b; LJ vi. 553b, 556b. His continuing alignment with Essex is evident from his appointment with the Essexian grandee Holles on 9 May to persuade the lord general against allowing the parliamentarian turncoat Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland to accompany him on campaign.103CJ iii. 487a. Hesilrige appeared to have obtained the upper hand in his feud with Grey when, on 9 May, the House ordered him to bring in an ordinance for raising forces in Leicestershire and remodelling the county committee.104CJ iii. 486b. As reported by Hesilrige on 27 May, this draft ordinance omitted a number of Grey’s supporters from the county committee and gave it a ‘vast power’ to raise sufficient taxes and troops to wage war independently of his command. Grey, Sir Martin Lister and ‘divers’ other MPs spoke against Hesilrige’s ordinance, whereupon the House recommitted it – with Grey named in first place – but voted to accept all of Hesilrige’s nominees to the county committee and ordered that no taxes should be levied upon Leicestershire ‘but by the order of the committee there’.105CJ iii. 507b-508a; Harl. 166, ff. 65v, 67; Costa, ‘Hesilrige’, 256-7. Having returned to the county by early June, Grey took his revenge by imprisoning several of his local opponents, prompting the Commons to demand an explanation of his proceedings.106CJ iii. 525b, 526a; Harl. 166, f. 72. The House also did not take kindly to his defiance of its order for suspending Waite as governor of Burley House.107CJ iii. 550b, 558b; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 361.

Several minor victories in the field during July and August 1644 eased the pressure on Grey a little, as did the nomination to the new county committee in Hesilrige’s ordinance – which passed both Houses on 10 July – of Lister and Gray’s kinsman Colonel Theophilus Gray.108CJ iii. 557b, 567b; Harl. 166, ff. 80, 91, 99v; Richards, Grey of Groby, 155-8. Nevertheless, Grey’s relations with the new committee, which was dominated by Hesilrige’s friends, were apparently rancorous.109CJ iii. 592a. In September and again in November, Grey’s supporters in Leicestershire, headed by Thomas Beaumont*, petitioned the Commons, requesting that he be ‘armed with power to protect the country [i.e. county]’ and complaining that the new committee could not operate effectively until it contained more ‘gentlemen of known integrity and interest’, as opposed to the men of mean estate and reputation who had (allegedly) dominated its proceedings hitherto.110Infra, ‘Thomas Beaumont’; CJ iii. 618a, 688b; Nichols, Leics. iii. app. iv. 38-9. A vote by the Lords in March 1645 to add more of Grey’s allies to the committee was not consented to by the Commons.111LJ vii. 276a.

From Essexian to Independent, 1644-7

Grey had returned to Westminster by late August 1644 and seems to have attended the House until at least mid-December of that year. During that period he was named to eight committees, including two set up in response to the elector palatine’s arrival in London in August and to a committee of both Houses to consider the king’s offer of peace after his victories in the west country.112CJ iii. 612b, 615a, 629a, 645b, 661a, 687b, 688a, 725b. On receiving news that the lord general ‘labours under some sickness’, the two Houses appointed Grey, his father the earl of Stamford, and another Essexian, Sir Nevill Poole, on 26 October to attend Essex, inquire of his health and present him with the ‘love and respects’ of Parliament.113CJ iii. 677b; LJ vii. 39a. Grey looked for political advice that autumn to one of Essex’s closest adherents, Sir Samuel Luke*, and would work with Stapilton, Holles and another leading Essexian Walter Long* in attempting to secure the appointment in 1645 of Luke’s lieutenant-colonel as governor of Newport Pagnell.114Infra, ‘Sir Samuel Luke’; Luke Letter Bks. 343-4, 516, 533, 539.

Grey made no recorded impression upon the Commons’ proceedings between mid-December 1644 and early March 1645 and played no known part in the political controversies surrounding the new modelling of Parliament’s armies and the passing of the Self-Denying Ordinance – which obliged him to surrender his command as sergeant-major-general. His parliamentary career continued along its modest track between the spring of 1645 and the summer of 1646, when he took leave of absence for upwards of four months.115CJ iv. 588b, 650a. Thus he was named to a mere 12 committees and once as a reporter of a conference with the Lords; served as a messenger to the Lords on three occasions; and was a teller in two, relatively minor, divisions.116CJ iv. 67b, 97b, 130a, 147a, 156b, 162b, 163a, 177b, 191b, 193b, 229a, 244b, 298b, 373a, 399a, 525a, 588b; LJ vii. 399a, 403b. Following the royalists’ storming of Leicester early in June 1645, Hesilrige’s allies on the county committee published a pamphlet in which they pinned some of the blame for the town’s capture on Grey’s negligence. But a vigorous rebuttal of these allegations was quickly published, in which it was argued that Leicester would have been better defended if the county committee had agreed to work with Grey’s supporters.117A Narration of the Siege and Taking of the Town of Leicester (1645), 6, 8-9 (E.289.6); An Examination of a Printed Pamphlet (1645), 2, 4-6 (E.261.3). Grey received several appointments in relation to the fall of Leicester and was apparently given oversight of legislation introducing a public benevolence for the relief of the townspeople – only to have the House then assign this task to Hesilrige.118CJ iv. 162b, 163a, 221a, 232a, 254b, 263b.

Hesilrige and Grey resumed their rivalry in November 1645 during canvassing for the Leicestershire recruiter election. In the event, it was Hesilrige’s interest that prevailed on election day (20 Nov.), with his nominee, Henry Smyth, defeating Grey’s own, Thomas Beaumont. The election of Peter Temple for Leicester on 17 November – when both Grey and Hesilrige were in temporary residence in or near the town – may also have represented a victory for Hesilrige. Although Temple was one of Grey’s officers and has been described as his ‘personal supporter’, in fact he had sided with Hesilrige’s faction in the county that summer.119Supra, ‘Leicester’; ‘Leicestershire’; infra, ‘Peter Temple’; Bodl. Rawl. D.116, pp. 18-19; Richards, Grey of Groby, 220.

Grey’s partner in both of his tellerships in 1645-6 was Holles, while the opposing tellers in the second of these divisions, on 26 June 1646, were Hesilrige and his fellow Independent Sir Michael Livesay.120CJ iv. 193b, 588b. That same month (June), he married Lady Dorothy Bourchier, having first obtained the consent of her guardian – and Essex’s close ally in the Lords – the earl of Bolingbroke.121London Mar. Lics. ed Foster, 277; J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics, 1645-9’ (Cambridge Univ. PhD thesis, 1986), app. B. It would appear, therefore, that Grey remained close to the Essexian, Presbyterian faction at Westminster until at least the summer of 1646. In July 1646, he was present at the Rutland recruiter election, when his name headed the list of those who voted for his former military protégé Thomas Waite.122Supra, ‘Rutland’. In October, Grey joined his erstwhile enemies on the Leicestershire committee, including Hesilrige’s brother Thomas – with whom he had clashed violently at Westminster in May 1644 – Francis Hacker* and William Stanley* in a letter to the Speaker concerning the grievances of the county’s ‘well-affected party’.123Bodl. Tanner 59, f. 555.

Grey was named to only six committees during the first half of 1647 and none later than 27 March.124CJ v. 47a, 74a, 77b, 90a, 122b, 127b. The most revealing of these appointments is that of 6 February, when he was named to a nine-man committee that was dominated by Independents and chaired by Harbert Morley to ensure that Parliament’s commissioners with the king at Holdenby did not allow Charles to reconstruct his court there.125CJ v. 77b. Grey may have owed his nomination to this committee simply to the fact that the Committee for Revenue* had appointed him keeper of Holdenby House.126Bodl. Nalson XIV, f. 218. Nevertheless, it was the first occasion on which he was joined at Westminster almost exclusively in the company of confirmed Independents. And the likelihood that this was no accident is suggested by events seven months later when, following the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster on 26 July, he joined Hesilrige and many other prominent Independents in signing the 4 August ‘engagement’ of the Members who had taken refuge with the army in which Sir Thomas Fairfax* and his men were eulogised for their ‘Christian, noble and public affection to the good, peace and prosperity of this kingdom and ... faithfulness to the true interest of the English nation’.127LJ ix. 385b. Certainly from August 1647 onwards, Grey would consistently make common cause with the Independents – and often with the more radical wing of that interest.

Why Grey abandoned the Essexians for their political enemies is not immediately apparent, although Essex’s death in September 1646 would probably have weakened, and perhaps even severed, the ties of personal and familial obligation that had bound Grey to the earl’s circle. Perhaps, too, it was a case of him emerging from his father’s shadow and finding his own political identity (Stamford would continue to align with the Presbyterians). The notion that his ‘political transformation’ was occasioned by his ‘conversion’ to ‘sectarian religion’ is implausible.128Barber, Regicide and Republicanism, 73. In the first place, there is insufficient evidence to assign him with confidence to any specific doctrinal or denominational camp; and secondly, there is very little to suggest that he was fired with godly enthusiasm before the later 1640s – in other words, until after he had joined the Independents.

On the day that the fugitive Members returned to Westminster, 6 August 1647, Grey carried up to the Lords a Commons’ resolution for giving additional powers to a committee that had been set up to investigate the ‘force and violence offered to the Parliament’ on 26 July.129CJ v. 269b; LJ ix. 379a. Five days later (11 August), he was named to a committee on an ordinance for repealing all legislation passed between 26 July and 6 August.130CJ v. 272a. However, he received no further appointments during the next two months and was declared absent and excused (on the grounds of ill health) at the call of the House on 9 October.131CJ v. 329b. He had returned to Westminster by 18 October, and during the next six months he was named to seven committees, was a teller in four divisions and served once as a messenger to the Lords.132CJ v. 336a, 348a, 351b, 357a, 370a, 374b, 416a, 447b, 474a, 486a, 500b. He chaired a committee set up on 2 November to collect and catalogue the papers of Parliament’s clerks and secretaries in order to facilitate the Commons’ transactions with the king and the Scots.133CJ v. 348a; Add. 72439, ff. 18, 19; CSP Dom. 1648-9, p. 13.

But Grey’s most revealing contribution to the House’s proceedings that autumn was on 9 November 1647, when he presented to the Commons a copy of the Agreement of the People and a petition in support of it from the so-called ‘new agents’ in the army, headed by the radical army officer Edward Sexby.134CJ v. 354a; Bodl. Clarendon 30, f. 181v; Add. 78198, f. 19; BL, Verney mss: William Denton to Ralph Verney, 11 Nov. 1647 (M636/8).. The petitioners, who referred to the Commons as ‘the supreme authority of this nation’, lamented the prospect of being ‘enslaved by king or Lords’ and demanded an end to ‘all conferences and addresses ... by those we trust [i.e. Oliver Cromwell*, Henry Ireton* and their fellow Independent grandees]’ towards ‘such as have manifested their tyrannical purposes towards us’. They described Grey as an ‘honest’ Member of the Commons, while branding the king as the nation’s ‘capital enemy’.135Two Petitions from the Agents to Ten Regiments of Horse (1647). The Commons voted the petition and the Agreement ‘destructive to the being of Parliaments and to the fundamental government of the kingdom’.136CJ v. 354a. Given Grey’s involvement with the new agents it is very likely that he was also on familiar terms by this stage with their other principal friends in the House, namely Henry Marten and Thomas Scot II.137Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; ‘Thomas Scot II’; E. Vernon, P. Baker, ‘The history and historiography of the Agreements of the People’ in The Agreements of the People ed. Vernon, Baker (Basingstoke, 2012), 4; E. Vernon, P. Baker, ‘What was the first Agreement of the People?’, HJ liii. 56. Grey’s tellership on 26 November in a division concerning the Four Bills confirms his support for the radical Independent interest at Westminster and its campaign to frustrate further attempts to seek a settlement with the king. Grey and Sir Henry Mildmay were minority tellers against considering a proposal from the Lords for dispatching the Four Bills to the king and negotiating on the rest of the propositions at a later date.138CJ v. 370a.

Grey, Marten and another of their likely collaborators Thomas Chaloner were among the nine Independents named to a committee on 3 January 1648 to prepare a declaration justifying the vote of no addresses – the parliamentary resolution prohibiting further negotiations with Charles.139CJ v. 416a. Widely perceived as a major step towards the Independents ‘settling the republic they have long since resolved on and modelled’, the vote was welcomed by Marten and his ‘regiment of new lights’ in the Commons.140Bodl. Clarendon 30, ff. 288, 291; Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 17 (4-11 Jan. 1648), sig. Rv (E.422.17). According to Holles, it was Grey who moved on 27 January for the expulsion from the House and impeachment of the Eleven Members who had gone into exile on the continent following the collapse of the July-August 1647 Presbyterian ‘counter revolution’.141CJ v. 445a; Holles, Mems. 198. A month or so later, on 29 February, Grey was a teller with the radical Independent Sir Peter Wentworth in favour of a declaration to the Scots, justifying Parliament’s proceedings concerning the king.142CJ v. 474a; A Declaration of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament (1648), E.432.1. Following a report by Marten from the committee for major-generals on 20 March, the two Houses ordered that Grey receive £5,120 out of the earl of Chesterfield’s sequestered estate in satisfaction of his arrears of army pay.143CJ v. 506a, 526a; LJ x. 124b; CCC 1830.

The second civil war and regicide, 1648-9

Grey took the lead in raising troops and mobilising Leicestershire during the second civil war and played a useful role in securing the midlands for Parliament. His most active collaborators in this endeavour were Thomas Beaumont, Thomas Waite and two of Hesilrige’s local allies, Peter Temple and Francis Hacker.144HMC Portland, i. 455, 468, 475; Desiderata Curiosa ed. Peck, ii, lib. ix, 45-6; CJ v. 620b; vi. 248a-b; CSPD 1648-9, pp. 168-9, 236, 247; Two Letters Sent out of Scotland (1648), 5-6 (E.449.24); A Petition Presented at a Common-Hall in London (1648), 3-4 (E.449.35); Moderate Intelligencer no. 177 (3-10 Aug. 1648), 1473 (E.457.33); Richards, Grey of Groby, 262-5; Barber, Regicide and Republicanism, 83-4; ‘A bastard kind of militia’, 134-6. The earl of Stamford, lord lieutenant of Leicestershire, nominated Grey, Waite, Beaumont and Hesilrige as his deputy lieutenants in July, but the Commons failed to ratify these appointments.145LJ x. 356b. Grey’s Leicestershire volunteers were among the forces that pursued the Scottish troops defeated at the battle of Preston; and it was Waite who, on 22 August, took the surrender of the Scottish commander-in-chief James Hamilton, 1st duke of Hamilton at Uttoxeter.146Infra, ‘Thomas Waite’; CJ v. 688b; Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS LXX, ff. 124-8; Ludlow, Mems. i. 202; Richards, Grey of Groby, 270-3. In a letter to the commander of Parliament’s forces in London, Philip Skippon*, on 24 August that was subsequently published, Grey described the zeal of his volunteer force in resisting ‘our proclaimed enemies (the Scots)’. ‘It would rejoice our hearts’, he declared, ‘to see English blood stirring in the veins of men at this juncture, professing to yourself that your honourable carriage in order to the good of this poor shattered nation makes us to assure you we can ... readily live and die with you upon your pious and noble principles’.147Old English Blood Boyling Afresh in Leicestershire Men (1648, E.461.7). His godly expressions in this letter were typical of the kind that one officer might employ in an open letter to another, and it is revealing that he directed them not towards the likes of Marten but to Skippon, who was closely connected with the Derby House Committee* and espoused ‘an uncomplicated, non-sectarian brand of puritanism’.148Supra, ‘Derby House Committee’; Oxford DNB, ‘Philip Skippon’. Moreover, there is no firm evidence for the claim that Grey raised the Leicestershire well-affected by appealing to ‘radical political principles’, as opposed to a concern common to most of the region’s parliamentarians to defend themselves against Scottish incursion and royalist insurrection.149Barber, Regicide and Republicanism, 83; ‘A bastard kind of militia’, 135. Grey’s six ‘new levied’ regiments of horse were recognised and warranted by the Commons and certainly bore little resemblance to the unruly troop of ‘mad boys’ which Marten raised that summer to fight ‘against [all] tyranny and oppression whatsoever’ and which Parliament sought to suppress by force.150Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ v. 620b; CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 175, 236, 247, 252, 269-70; Add. 5508, f. 3.

Although it is clear that Grey, like Marten, opposed Parliament’s impending treaty with the king at Newport, his efforts to agitate against an accommodation were apparently more subtle. Thus one royalist newsbook reported in mid-August 1648 that Grey’s close ally Thomas Beaumont had been sent down to London with a petition from Leicestershire ‘for no treaty, no king’; and allegations to this effect would certainly be levelled against Beaumont after the Restoration.151Supra, ‘Thomas Beaumont’; Mercurius Elencticus no. 38 (9-16 Aug. 1648), 292 [recte 309] (E.459.8). Grey returned briefly to Westminster late in August, when he was named in first place to a committee for interrogating Hamilton – who was then Grey’s prisoner at Ashby-de-la-Zouch – concerning the identity of his chief backers in England.152CJ v. 689a; Moderate Intelligencer no. 181 (31 Aug.-7 Sept. 1648), 1519 (E.462.18); OPH xviii. 253. The next day (29 August), the Commons appointed Grey governor of Ashby-de-la-Zouch; and in mid-September, at Leicester, he feasted the 150 or so officers who had served under him that summer, ‘each engaging to [the] other, never to decline their first undertakings with his lordship, but to hazard all that was dear unto them (if occasion be) in prosecution of a good, firm and well-grounded peace, wherein liberty and property may be ascertained to posterity ...’.153CJ v. 692a; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vii. 1265. On 26 September, he was declared absent and excused at the call of the House.154CJ vi. 34a. He was almost certainly the chief promoter of a petition – very probably that which Beaumont had reportedly brought down to London – that some of Leicestershire’s leading parliamentarians presented to the Commons on 2 October, citing the king’s ‘heaven-provoking crimes’ and urging the abandonment of the Newport treaty and the bringing to justice of Parliament’s ‘principal enemies’. This petition referred to Parliament’s declaration justifying the vote of no addresses and that of early March 1648 to the Scots – both of which Grey had been associated with at Westminster.155CJ vi. 41b; The Humble Petition of the Committee, Gentry, Ministry and Other the Inhabitants of the County of Leicester (1648, E.465.34); HMC Portland, i. 497; HMC 7th Rep. i. 121. He had returned to Commons by 23 November, when he received the thanks of the House ‘for his eminent good services ... upon the defeat and taking of Duke Hamilton’.156CJ vi. 85b. It was reported that he had then left Westminster for army headquarters at St Albans, accompanied by the Independent divine Hugh Peters, ‘to make legs unto his Excellency [Fairfax] and represent the well-wishes of the cunning knaves in the county of Leicester to the late Remonstrance [the army’s Remonstrance demanding an end to the Newport treaty and justice against the king]’.157Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 35 (21-8 Nov. 1648), sig. Bbb3v. When the army marched into London early in December, Grey was among those MPs who welcomed Fairfax; indeed, according to several reports he held the lord general’s stirrup as he alighted from his horse at Whitehall and then helped show him to his lodgings in the palace.158Mercurius Elencticus no. 54 (29 Nov.-6 Dec. 1648), 523-4 (E.475.22); Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 135. In the series of divisions preceding the crucial vote on 5 December that the king’s answers at Newport formed a satisfactory basis for settlement, Grey was a teller in favour of continuing a debate on the army’s seizure of Charles at Carisbrooke Castle.159CJ vi. 93a. That same day (4 December), he signed a warrant of the Committee for Revenue*, although he was not formally added to that body until 18 December.160Add. 63788B, f. 43; CJ vi. 99a; LJ x. 632b.

Grey figured prominently in the revolutionary events at Westminster during the winter of 1648-9, for which he was villified by the Rump’s enemies as a ‘renegado’ (a reference to his Essexian past) and ‘that arse-worm of nobility’.161[C. Walker], Anarchia Anglicana (1649), 55 (E.570.4); Mercurius Pragmaticus no. 39 (19-26 Dec. 1648), sig. Eee3 (E.477.30). Grey may have been a member of the committee of army officers and radical Commons-men that met at Whitehall on 5 December to discuss arrangements for purging the House the next day. And he was certainly on hand at the entrance of the Commons on 6 December to assist Colonel Thomas Pride* and his men in identifying the Members as they turned up, who were then arrested, turned away or admitted accordingly.162Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 468; Whitelocke, Diary, 225; Ludlow, Mems. i. 210; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 141. Later that day (6 December), Grey advised Bulstrode Whitelocke* and the other commissioners of the great seal to conduct their business as normal. But on 11 January, he urged them not to hold court the following day because their attendance would be required in the House – leading Whitelocke to conclude that Grey was ‘acquainted with the private counsels of the army’.163Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 470, 473; Whitelocke, Diary, 226; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 157.

Grey’s first appointment in the Rump was to a committee set up on 13 December 1648 for preparing a protestation ‘in detestation’ of several Commons votes relating to the Newport treaty.164CJ vi. 96b; Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 160. Two days later (15 Dec.), he was added to the Committee for the Army* and was then sent with Mildmay to request Fairfax to provide a guard for the Commons – reporting the lord general’s compliance on 16 December.165CJ vi. 96b, 97b, 98a; LJ x. 630b. Predictably, Grey was among those Commons-men who entered their dissent to the 5 December vote (that the king’s answers at Newport were a sufficient grounds for a settlement) on 20 December: the day on which the dissent was introduced as a test of the Rump’s membership.166[W. Prynne*], A Full Declaration of the True State of the Secluded Members Case (1660), 21 (E.1013.22). That same day (20 Dec.), he was a minority teller against renewing a request to Fairfax to allow the re-admission of those secluded Members ‘against whom there was no charge’.167CJ vi. 101a-b; Mercurius Elencticus no. 56 (12-19 Dec. 1648), 539 (E.476.36); Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 166. Named to a committee set up on 23 December ‘to consider how to proceed in a way of justice against the king’, he was also included on its successor of 29 December – which Marten probably chaired – for perfecting an ordinance reported the previous day by Thomas Scot I to establish a high court of court for trying the king and other ‘capital offenders’.168Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; ‘Thomas Scot I’; CJ vi. 103a, 106a. The royalist newsbook editor, Marchamont Nedham, claimed that when Scot brought this ordinance into the House, Grey, ‘that ignoble brat of nobility ... made a speech to promote it and concluded that rather then justice should not be done, he himself would be the executioner’.169Mercurius Pragmaticus nos. 40&41 (26 Dec. 1648-9 Jan. 1649), sig. Fff3v (E.537.20). On 2 January 1649, Grey served as a messenger to the Lords, carrying up a vote of the Commons declaring it treason in the king to continue levying war against Parliament – a reference to Charles’s refusal to stand down his forces in Ireland – and the ordinance for erecting a high court of justice.170CJ vi. 107b, 108b; LJ x. 641b. When this first ordinance was rejected by the Lords, Grey was named to the committee set up on 3 January to bring in a new ordinance to the same effect.171CJ vi. 110a. He was almost certainly present in the House on 4 January to endorse the three resolutions: that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’; that the Commons, being chosen by the people, ‘have the supreme power in this nation’; and that ‘whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons, in Parliament assembled, hath the force of law’ (on 18 January and again on 6 February, he and resolutions’ likely author, Marten, were majority tellers against seeking the Lords’ concurrence with these votes).172CJ vi. 111a, 121a, 132b. On 6 January, Grey was added to the Committee for Advance of Money*, the Committee for Plundered Ministers*, the Committee for Compounding* and the soon-to-be-defunct Derby House Committee.173CJ vi. 112a, b, 113b. Evidently trusted by both the army and the Levellers, he was named with Sir John Danvers* in the redrafted Agreement of the People – which was presented to the Commons on 20 January – as a commissioner to oversee elections in the proposed New Representative.174A Petition from his Excellency Thomas, Lord Fairfax and the General Council of Officers of the Army (1649), 19 (E.539.2).

Grey was one of the more active members of the high court of justice, attending 12 of the 18 meetings of the trial commission.175Muddiman, Trial, 195, 227. He attended all four sessions of the trial itself and signed Charles’s death warrant in second place after John Bradshawe* – an indication, perhaps, of his commitment to regicide as well as his status as the highest-ranking of the signatories.176Muddiman, Trial, 76, 89, 96, 105, 227. At his trial in 1660, Thomas Waite testified that having been assured by Grey that the king would not be executed he had attended the Commons on 29 January, whereupon Cromwell had forced him to sign the death warrant.177Infra, ‘Thomas Waite’; State Trials, v. 1219. Rumours were circulating by 1660 at the latest that Grey had been the king’s executioner.178HMC Le Fleming, 25. And an anonymous letter to Archbishop Thomas Tenison in 1696 would claim that Charles had stated that he recognised Grey as one of the hooded executioners on the scaffold (Grey’s ‘dwarfish’ stature would certainly have rendered him distinctive).179LPL, Ms 930, no. 21. The notion that Grey was a member of the execution party is impossible to credit, even in the light of his alleged comments in the House on 28 December. Nevertheless, the payment of £100 that he received on the Rump’s order on 31 January – the day after the regicide – may well have been for expenses incurred in connection with the king’s trial and execution.180CJ vi. 126b. In mid-February, he would join Waite, Hugh Peters and Robert Lilburne* (among others) as witnesses for the prosecution at the duke of Hamilton’s trial for high treason.181Worc. Coll. Oxf. Clarke MS LXX, ff. 113, 126v-127; G. Burnet, The Memoires of the Lives and Actions of James and William, Dukes of Hamilton (1677), 387.

Career in the Rump, 1649-53

Grey’s 109 committee appointments and 46 tellerships between Pride’s Purge and April 1653 mark him out as one of the most active and dedicated members of the Rump. Indeed, in the early months of 1649, he was part of, or very close to, that small group of Members who sought to shape its political priorities and complexion. On 31 January, he was included on the Rump’s first committee relating to social reform – that chaired by his ally Marten to draw up proposals for the release of poor debtors (which disposes of the fanciful tale that Grey took horse to Bradgate immediately after signing Charles’s death warrant in order to inform Stamford of the king’s imminent demise).182CJ vi. 127a; Worden, Rump Parl. 202; Richards, Grey of Groby, 319-20. And on 1 February, he was named to a committee to take the dissent of Members seeking admission to the House, from which he made at least four reports and was evidently one of its leading members.183[Prynne], Secluded Members Case, 25; PA, Ms CJ xxxiii, pp. 632, 645, 711; CJ vi. 148a. In the first of his five tellerships with Marten in the Rump, on 6 February, the two men told for the majority against seeking the advice of the Lords ‘in the exercise of the legislative power’ in pursuance of the votes of 4 January.184CJ vi. 132b. Almost immediately after this division, the Rump voted the Lords ‘useless and dangerous’ and set up a ten-man committee – to which Grey and Marten were named – for preparing an act to abolish the Upper House. The following day (7 Feb.) this committee was also charged with bringing in an act for abolishing the office of king as ‘unnecessary, burdensome and dangerous ...’.185CJ vi. 132b, 133a. Both men were elected to the first council of state on 14 February and were among the 19 councillors who made no scruple about taking the conciliar ‘engagement’, which required the subscriber to assent to ‘all that was done concerning the king [i.e. the king’s trial and execution] and kingship and for taking away the House of Lords and against the Scots’ invasion [in 1648]’.186CJ vi. 141a; SP25/1, unfol. (17 Feb. 1649); CJ vi. 141a, 146b; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 537; Worden, Rump Parl. 181. Algernon Sydney* would later complain that his opposition to this engagement earned him the enmity of Cromwell, Grey and other Rumpers, ‘who did from that time continually oppose me’.187J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic 1623-77 (Cambridge, 1988), 93. On 19 February, Grey and Sir Michael Livesay were minority tellers against referring consideration of the engagement to the councillors themselves, most of whom had refused to take it. The majority tellers were Hesilrige and William Purefoy I.188CJ vi. 147a. The next day (20 Feb.), he reported the council’s recommendation to the House that the ordinance and commission constituting the earl of Warwick as lord high admiral be revoked.189CJ vi. 147b.

After returning to Leicestershire briefly in late February or early March 1649, Grey took a lead in organising a petition to the Rump from the county’s ‘well-affected’ interest – an initiative that may have been intended, in part, to counter a ‘representation’ to Fairfax, purportedly from the ‘committee, gentry, ministry and other well-effected persons in the county of Leicester’, attacking the provisions in the Agreement of the People for establishing freedom of worship. Grey’s petition, which was presented to the Rump on 19 March, requested (among other things) that ‘all lands and public advantages now in your hands may be improved and employed towards the pay of the army’; the wholesale reform of the law ‘which for so long time by corruption hath been so heavy a burden and oppression to this nation’; that the ‘unequal, burdensome and contentious way of tithes be taken away and a more equal course provided for the maintenance of the ministry’; and that ‘every one may enjoy the just freedoms to worship God according to His Word, without any coercive or restrictive courses to the contrary’.190CJ vi. 168b; Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 552; The Humble Representation of the...County of Leicester (1649, E.545.22); To the Supreme Authority the Commons of England (1649, 669. f.14.6). Grey’s support for a radical overhaul of clerical maintenance can be inferred from his tellership with Nathaniel Rich on 18 May against moves to have ‘the business of tithes’ shunted off to a relatively minor committee on the probate of wills.191CJ vi. 211b. His desire to replace or abolish tithes represents the best, indeed only, evidence that he was at least sympathetic towards the sects, if not necessarily a member of a gathered congregation himself.

As well as trying to push the fledgling Rump in a more radical direction than that favoured by ‘oligarchical’ republicans such as Hesilrige, Grey was associated with the efforts of ‘Marten and his Levelling crew’ to resist the establishment of a Cromwellian ‘superiority’ in the army.192Infra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; ‘Henry Marten’; Worden, Rump Parl. 187. In mid-February 1649, it was rumoured in London that a petition was ‘fomenting privately in the City for the Lord Grey of Groby to be general [in place of Fairfax] and Henry Marten lieutenant-general [in place of Cromwell]’.193Original Lttrs. and Pprs. ed. T. Carte (1739), i. 225. Like Marten, however, Grey was thought to have fallen away from the Levellers and their radical agenda by mid-1649; and commentators concluded that both men had been bought off by the Rump grandees – which, if true, was a process in which Grey himself was actively complicit.194Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; Overton, Overton’s Defyance, 7; Mercurius Pragmaticus (for King Charls II) no. 12 (3-10 July 1649), sig. M3 (E.563.12). A petition to the House from Marten in June was referred to a committee dominated by his allies and from which Grey reported, on 3 July, the recommendation that an estate of £1,000 a year be settled upon his friend in respect of his pay arrears as a colonel, ‘his great losses...his good affections and his constant and faithful service to the commonwealth’.195CJ vi. 241b, 248a. That same day (3 July), the Rump approved a recommendation from the Army Committee that Grey be awarded £1,500 out of the revenues of the Committee for Advance of Money for his ‘very great expense’ in mobilising the east midlands for Parliament during the second civil war.196CJ vi. 248a-b. Grey evidently made sure that he received this sum in full, as well as the outstanding balance of the £5,120 he had been awarded in March 1648.197CJ vi. 448b-449b; CCAM 80, 1505, 1506; CCC 1830; Richards, Grey of Groby, 364.

The House’s grants to Marten and Grey were particularly resented by radical elements within the army, who complained that while MPs rewarded themselves out of the public treasury, ‘the soldiers’ wants are great and all the people are in great necessity’.198[Walker], Anarchia Anglicana, 213. Unabashed by such criticism, Grey may well have used his position on the Committee for Revenue to secure the House’s grant in March 1650 of the custody of Hyde Park, where he kept 400 deer and was doubtless as determined to prevent poaching by the common people as he was as keeper of Whittlewood Forest, in Northamptonshire.199CJ vi. 384b; Lodewijck Huygens: the English Jnl. 1651-2 ed. A.G.H. Bachrach, R.G. Collmer (Leiden, 1982), 97; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 367. He had no qualms about discovering and selling the concealed lands and goods of delinquents nor in purchasing their estates from the treason trustees.200CCAM 209, 796, 1034; CCC 2257, 2258; CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 288; Holles, Mems. 137. Indeed, early in 1653 he bought Combe Abbey, Warwickshire – part of the forfeited estate of William Lord Craven – for the huge sum of £42,000 and was reportedly obliged to sell land worth £800 a year in order to finance this deal. One of the three parties named with Grey on the deed of sale was Hugh Peters.201C54/3705/7; Clarke Pprs. v. 86; LJ xi. 52a. In his eagerness to aggrandise himself, Grey (knowingly or not) overstepped the law, for at least £2,484 of the debentures he used to purchase crown lands were forged.202SP29/390/14vii, f. 37v; I. Gentles, ‘The Debentures Market and Military Purchases of Crown Land, 1649-1660’ (London Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1969), 98. A committee set up in August 1651 to recompense him for the expenses he had incurred during the second civil war recommended that land worth £1,000 a year be settled upon him ‘as a mark of favour and respect from the Parliament ... for his great services done to this Commonwealth’. But nothing seems to have come of this proposal.203CJ vi. 618b; vii. 52b.

Grey’s political career peaked in the six months or so after Pride’s Purge; and by December 1649 he had received almost as many committee appointments in the Rump as he would accrue between then and April 1653. He enjoyed sufficient approval at Westminster to secure election to all but the fourth of the Rump’s five councils of state. But his indifferent attendance record at Whitehall, and the fact that he was named to relatively few of the council’s principal executive committees, do not support the claim of the Dutch visitor Lodewijck Huygens in 1651 that Grey was among the leading councillors.204CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. lxxv, 131, 429, 430, 480, 502; 1650, pp. xli, 3, 18; 1651, pp. xxxv, 11, 48, 53, 66, 67, 85, 218, 235, 315, 453, 462; 1652-3, pp. xxxiii, 127, 130, 137; Huygens: the English Jnl. ed. Bachrach, Collmer, 97. Grey’s most important conciliar appointments were to the February 1650 and March 1651 committees for the admiralty – on which he was apparently a peripheral figure; to the March 1650 and 1651 committees to confer with the army; to the committee for preparing instructions for the Rump’s ambassadors to the Dutch republic (Feb. 1651); to several committees for receiving foreign ambassadors and other envoys; to the committee ‘to consider of the manner of giving audience to public minister of foreign princes’ (June 1651); and to the committee for securing the commonwealth against Scottish invasion (Aug. 1651).205CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 502; 1650, pp. 3, 18; 1651, pp. 53, 66, 67, 85, 218, 235, 315; 1652-3, p. 127; Bodl. Rawl. A.226, f. 51. He is known to have delivered only eight reports from the council to the House and none in the two years before the Rump’s dissolution in April 1653.206CJ vi. 147b, 183b, 202a, 352b, 368b, 454a, 542b, 550b. It was Grey who reported the council’s recommendations ‘touching styles to be given to this Commonwealth in foreign negotiations’ (January 1650) and who was appointed by Whitehall to seek the Rump’s approval for vesting the offices and powers of the lord admiral and warden of the Cinque Ports in the council (February 1650).207CJ vi. 352b, 368b.

Grey’s committee appointments tell a similar story. Although nominated to over a hundred committees in the Rump, he was named in first place to only five and is known to have chaired (or, at least, to have reported from) a mere four – those to secure the king’s personal belongings, including the crown and sceptre (1 Feb. 1649); to treat with the Commons Council of London for a loan of £120,000 for the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland (9 April); to consider Marten’s petition of June 1649; and to select the names of delinquents for inclusion in a bill for the sale of forfeited estates towards the maintenance of the navy (20 July 1652).208CJ vi. 119b, 127b, 128b, 129a, 181a, 183a, 185b, 241b, 248a; vii. 146a, 147a, 147b, 156b, 158a, 159b, 160a. If his committee appointments are any guide, his main fields of activity in the Rump were the administration and sale of crown and other forfeited estates; the improvement of state revenues; the management and supply of the armed forces; the House’s dealings with the City and its commercial interests; the meeting and greeting of foreign diplomats; and the settling of a godly ministry, but with toleration for tender consciences.209CJ vi. 116a, 118a, 119b, 127b, 180b, 181a, 183a, 185b, 187b, 245b, 246a, 250a, 275b, 352a, 358b, 368a, 393b, 398a, 400a, 436b, 513a, 524a, 544b, 576b, 618b; vii. 46b, 104a, 130a, 135a, 146a, 147a, 147b, 156b, 158b, 159a, 162a. Grey was named in November 1649 to two committees for implementing the general subscription of the Engagement, but he seems to have made no major contribution to this initiative.210CJ vi. 321b, 326b. Similarly, the thin scattering of committee appointments he received relating to legal reform, improving the lot of the poor, and the travails of the Leveller leader John Lilburne, are perhaps further evidence that the support he had shown since late 1647 for a radical overhaul of the established order had waned by the early 1650s.211CJ vi. 127a, 432b; vii. 55b, 107b, 127b. His lordly status recommended him to the House for inclusion on six committees set up between May 1651 and June 1652 to receive or otherwise attend diplomatic representatives from the continent.212CJ vi. 576b; vii. 104a, 130a, 135a, 146a, 147b. He was active on at least two of the Rump’s standing executive committees: the Committee for Revenue (re-branded in 1649 the Committee for the Public Revenue), of which he was a leading member, and the Army Committee.213Supra, ‘Committee for the Revenue’; CJ vi. 368a; E404/237-8; SP28/56-88; Add. 21482, f. 15; Add. 63788B, ff. 47, 62, 68, 74, 101, 102; HMC Portland, i. 508, 509, 511. But although he contributed to the work of the Rump’s commission for presenting ministers to church livings, he is not known to have attended any meetings of the Committee for Plundered Ministers (even Marten attended at least one).214Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; Add. 36792, ff. 5v, 86v.

Perhaps Grey’s principal importance to the commonwealth, certainly in the eyes of the council of state, was in performing his customary role of rallying Parliament’s forces in Leicestershire and the counties of the former East Midlands Association in the face of royalist insurrection and Scottish invasion.215CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 181, 197, 240, 279; 1650, pp. 150, 263, 290, 303, 449, 453, 505; 1651, pp. 42, 72, 77, 313, 316, 323, 325, 326, 327, 339, 341, 344, 352, 369, 516. He mobilised, or at least readied, the region’s militia units as a precautionary measure during the Cromwellian invasion of Scotland in 1650 – although a rumour among the Covenanters in August that Grey was advancing northwards with 3,000 troops was nothing more than that; he was still in London at the time.216CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 263, 298; CJ vi. 456a, 484b; HMC Eglinton, 57. He capped his career as a parliamentarian soldier by commanding the east midlands militia forces in Cromwell’s victory at Worcester in September 1651, for which he received the thanks of the House.217CJ vii. 22a; Abbott, Writings and Speeches, ii. 451, 452, 459; Richards, Grey of Groby, 374-5. A few days after the battle the royalist commander – and Stamford’s former officer – Edward Massie* surrendered to Grey at Bradgate.218CJ vii. 15a; Richards, Grey of Groby, 376-9.

Grey’s numerous tellerships are particularly revealing of his priorities and allegiances in the Rump. He had 29 different partners as teller, and of these he was paired more than three times only with Marten (five tellerships), although the two men also clashed in four divisions, the first as early as 1 February 1649.219CJ vi. 121a, 128b, 132b, 188a, 533a, 538a; vii. 61a, 130b, 147a. In terms of their tellerships at least, both men’s leading adversary was the godly Warwickshire Rumper William Purefoy I, who opposed Grey in 9 divisions in the Rump and Marten in 19.220Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ vi. 101b, 121a, 132b, 147a, 211b, 440a, 619b; vii. 86a. After Purefoy, Grey’s leading antagonists as opposing tellers were Hesilrige, Mildmay and Denis Bond, each of whom he crossed swords with on five occasions in the division lobbies. These men, who were also among Marten’s leading opponents in the Rump, tended to shy away from initiatives for wide-ranging reform, although Bond’s commitment to overhauling the legal system seems to have exceeded Grey’s own.221Supra, ‘Denis Bond’; infra, ‘Sir Arthur Hesilrige’; ‘Henry Marten’; ‘Sir Henry Mildmay’. Grey and Marten were tellers in February 1651 against appointing the godly but politically conservative Rumper Sir William Brereton to the council of state.222Supra, ‘Sir William Brereton’; CJ vi. 533a. Grey’s tellership just a few weeks earlier (28 Jan. 1651), in favour of sending Oliver St John* and Walter Strickland* as ambassadors extraordinary to the Dutch republic, leaves little doubt that he sided with those in the Rump who favoured Anglo-Dutch union.223CJ vi. 528b. In contrast to Marten, however, Grey was not regarded as a major figure in the formulation of the Rump’s foreign policy. If he favoured the advancement of English commerce and maritime power, if necessary at the expense of the Protestant Dutch – as the pro-Spanish Chaloner and Marten did – it has left no obvious impression upon the Rump’s or the council of state’s proceedings.224Supra, ‘Thomas Chaloner’; infra, ‘Henry Marten’. A significant proportion of his tellerships in the Rump concerned the management and sale of crown and delinquents’ estates – most of the proceeds of which went towards payment of the army – although, surprisingly, he was a teller against the sale of Lord Craven’s estate (part of which he subsequently purchased).225CJ vi. 348b, 446a, 528a, 530a, 543a, 587a; vii. 86a, 160b. He was conspicuous in siding with the army against the ‘country’ interest on 15 April 1651, when he was a majority teller against specifying the exact number of horse and dragoons to be maintained in a bill for continuing the monthly assessment.226CJ vi. 561b. On two occasions in the Rump, he represented those MPs who favoured lenient treatment towards Catholics. On 24 April 1651, he was a minority teller with Marten’s ally Harbert Morley against ratifying a clause in a document sent from Lord Deputy Henry Ireton* and his commissioners in Ireland for exempting from pardon all priests who had been in any way complicit in the Irish rebellion.227Infra, ‘Harbert Morley’; CJ vi. 566, 567a. And on 30 June 1652, Grey and Marten were majority tellers in favour of giving a reading to a petition from a group of English recusants – presumably pleading for toleration. But having read this petition, the House promptly rejected it.228CJ vii. 147a.

The intellectual basis of Grey’s apparent willingness to consider toleration for Catholics is not easy to fathom. Was he following Marten, who tended to evaluate issues of church government and toleration largely in terms of ‘the principles of civil liberty’?229Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; Worden, Rump Parl. 260. Or was his commitment to toleration more the product of a scripturally-infused piety that reverenced the role of the individual’s conscience in religion, as in the case of Edmund Ludlowe II*?230Infra, ‘Edmund Ludlowe II’. It is worth noting here that there is no hard evidence for claims that Grey was a sectarian or was consumed by ‘a fierce and intense puritanical zeal’.231Barber, Regicide and Republicanism, 73; Richards, Grey of Groby, 385. That he shared some of Marten’s desire to purge the Rump of secular pluralism and self-interest is evident from his tellership with him on 31 December 1651 against the appointment of MPs as treasurers-at-war in a bill for continuing the Army Committee.232Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ vii. 61a. He also joined Marten in supporting the endeavours of Cromwell and his fellow officers to make the terms of a bill for general pardon and oblivion – part of the army’s broader campaign for settlement and healing – that the House debated early in 1652 as generous as possible to the royalists. In two of Grey’s three tellerships relating to this bill, he partnered Cromwell himself. Among the opposing tellers were Grey’s established opponents, Brereton, Hesilrige and Purefoy.233Infra, ‘Henry Marten’; CJ vii. 76b, 86a, 87a. In May 1652, however, he partnered Hesilrige against Cromwell as a minority teller against appointing the lord general’s former colleague from his Eastern Association days, Sir William Rowe, a commissioner in a bill for relief of persons who had surrendered upon articles of war.234CJ vii. 129b; Holmes, Eastern Assoc. 101, 103, 104. That same day (5 May), Grey was a minority teller with Skippon in favour of naming Thomas Pride as a commissioner in this bill.235CJ vii. 130a.

Political eclipse and death, 1653-7

Grey received no committee appointments in the Rump between mid-September 1652 and late January 1653, although he was re-elected to the council of state in November and continued to attend the Committee for Revenue and, very occasionally, the Army Committee.236CJ vii. 182b, 220b, 221a, 250b; SP28/88, f. 414; SP28/90, f. 259. Whether this lack of appointments was a consequence of absenteeism on his part, and, if so, whether this was a product of disenchantment either with the Rump or army pressure for its dissolution, the evidence does not say. His last committee appointment in the Rump was on 25 January 1653, although he was still signing warrants from the Committee for Revenue on 10 May – some three weeks after Parliament’s dissolution by the army.237CJ vii. 250b; E404/238 (warrant 10 May 1653). By December of that year, he had retired to Lord Craven’s former property at Combe Abbey in Warwickshire, where an attack of the gout had rendered him lame and ‘not able to stir’.238Stowe 185, f. 38; CCC 1624. His recovery would not have been helped by a rumour circulating in the spring of 1654 that the Dutch ambassadors intended to push for the restitution of Craven’s estate.239Clarke Pprs. v. 181.

In the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1654, Grey stood with Stamford, Beaumont and Thomas Pochin*, who defeated a rival group of candidates headed by Francis Hacker.240Supra, ‘Leicestershire’. But though successful in the shire election, Grey came a distant third behind William Stanley and Sir Arthur Hesilrige on a poll to elect Leicester’s two burgesses.241Supra, ‘Leicester’. Stamford and Grey were omitted from a list of Members approved by the council early in September.242Severall Procs. of State Affaires no. 258 (31 Aug.-7 Sept. 1654), 4093 (E.233.22). Shortly afterwards, however, the French ambassador reported that Stamford and another, unnamed, Member (almost certainly Grey), having been disqualified from sitting by the council, ‘declared that if their country had done them the honour of choosing them, they could not be prevented from serving ... and the same evening they had their tickets [to sit in Parliament]’.243PRO31/3/96, ff. 365v-366. On 20 September, the committee for privileges approved the returns for Leicestershire.244Severall Procs. of Parl. no. 260 (14-21 Sept. 1654), 4128 (E.233.5). But though Stamford, Beaumont and Pochin attended their seats at Westminster, Grey was excluded at Cromwell’s insistence – or so Edmund Ludlowe II claimed – as a republican opponent of the protectorate.245Ludlow, Mems. i. 390. There is certainly no evidence that Grey attended this Parliament.

Grey allegedly did much to promote a plot hatched at some point in 1654 – September, according to an informant of Secretary John Thurloe* – by Sexby, John Okey*, Thomas Sanders*, John Wildman* and other Commonwealthsmen for overthrowing the protectorate. Hesilrige, Marten and many other former Rumpers were also said to have been complicit in this design. The conspiracy was quickly broken by Thurloe, however, and Grey was arrested by Hacker early in 1655 and – though ‘much distempered with the gout’ – imprisoned in Windsor Castle, where he remained until late July.246TSP iii. 147-8; vi. 829-30; Clarke Pprs. iii. 23, 24, 40; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 241; Mercurius Politicus no. 268 (26 July-2 Aug. 1655), 5514. According to Ludlowe, Grey ‘could not obtain his liberty till he had given a pecuniary security not to act against the government, which he chose to do rather than to engage his parole, thereby hazarding only the loss of so much money and preserving his honour and integrity’.247Ludlow, Mems. i. 414.

Grey stood for Leicester in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in the summer of 1656, but was again beaten into third place on a poll by Hesilrige and Stanley.248Supra, ‘Leicester’. The often-repeated, but completely groundless, assertion that Grey had become a Fifth Monarchist by the mid-1650s derives either from his alleged involvement in the 1654-5 conspiracy or from the fabrications of the regicides’ eighteenth century biographer Mark Noble, who claimed that Grey was implicated in Thomas Venner’s ‘Shoreditch plot’ of April 1657 – that is, when he was ‘weak in body’ and within a few weeks of dying.249PROB11/263, f. 377v; M. Noble, Lives of the English Regicides (1798), i. 271-4; Barber, Regicide and Republicanism, 73; Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Grey, Baron Grey of Groby’; Richards, Grey of Groby, 425-6; ‘The Greys of Bradgate in the Eng. civil war’, Trans. of the Leics. Arch. and Hist. Soc. lxii. 48.

Grey died at some point between 4 April 1657, when he made his will, and 8 May of that year, when it was proved.250PROB11/263, ff. 377v-378. His place of burial is not known, but it is most likely to have been the Grey family chapel at Bradgate.251Richards, Grey of Groby, 439. In his will, he charged his estate with annuities of £1,000 for his wife and £500 for the child with whom she was then pregnant (who was never baptised and presumably died before or soon after birth) and bequests of £4,000 apiece to his two daughters and £200 apiece to his two overseers, one of whom was Thomas Waite.252PROB11/263, f. 377v-378. It would appear, therefore that Grey and Waite had remained on close terms to the last, although two weeks after the will had been entered in probate, Waite testified in court that he knew nothing of its existence.253C6/149/16. Grey’s younger brothers Anchitel and John sat for Derby and for Leicester and Staffordshire respectively in many of the Parliaments between 1660 and 1695.254HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Grey, Hon. Anchitell’; ‘Grey, Hon. John’. His only son Thomas succeeded as 2nd earl of Stamford and became one of Queen Anne’s privy councillors.255Oxford DNB, ‘Thomas Grey, 2nd earl of Stamford’.