GREY, Henry (c.1541-1615)

Settled in Bedfordshire by the thirteenth century, the Greys sat in Parliament as lords Grey de Ruthin from 1290. An act of betrayal by Edmund, Lord Grey secured victory for the Yorkists at the battle of Northampton in 1460, for which he was rewarded with the lord treasurership (in 1463) and the earldom of Kent (in 1465). However, as the 6th earl recalled in his will, ‘the vain prodigality of Richard, [3rd] earl of Kent’ ruined the family’s fortunes.1PROB 11/125, f. 313. Earl Richard’s brother and heir Henry (nominally the 4th earl) renounced the peerage on grounds of poverty but rebuilt the family estates which, in 1601, comprised 14,600 acres in Bedfordshire, 2,000 acres in Leicestershire and 500 acres in Buckinghamshire.2 J. Godber, Hist. Beds. 84-5, 135-8, 174; C142/349/172.

Reynold Grey^† petitioned Queen Elizabeth for recognition as 5th earl of Kent, and was summoned as such to the 1572 Parliament. It may have been on this occasion that he procured a seat in the Commons for his younger brother Henry, the subject of this biography, an event the latter recalled much later in life, albeit without recording any details.3 LPL, ms 3202, ff. 40, 47. Earl Reynold died in the following year, leaving both the peerage and his estates to Henry, then in his early thirties. The new earl waited several years before marrying the widowed countess of Derby, but she died shortly thereafter, and he never remarried. Kent was not appointed to the commission of the peace until 1577, a four year delay which may be related to his father’s financial troubles. His funeral sermon would later commend his tireless stewardship of local affairs: ‘there the recusant and ill-affected subject were convented, examined, persuaded; and if all would not serve, restrained from infecting the credulous multitude’.4 C142/163/8; J. Bowle, A Sermon Preached at Flitton (1615), sig. E3r-v. He was also appointed, in 1586, lord lieutenant of Bedfordshire, in which capacity he diligently raised troops for service at home and abroad for the duration of the war with Spain. However, his only appearance on the national stage was as one of the commissioners for the trial and execution of Mary, queen of Scots at Fotheringay, Northamptonshire in the winter of 1586-7.5 APC, 1586-7, p. 217; HMC Hatfield, iii. 217, 224.

In 1589 Kent and Sir John Harington^* (later 1st Lord Harington), two of the executors of the will of their relative Frances, countess of Sussex (widow of Thomas Radcliffe^†, 3rd earl of Sussex), were appointed to oversee the spending of £5,0000, which sum the countess left to found Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. However, as the actual sum raised from the countess’ estate was only just over £4,000, this involved Kent and Harington in a great deal of effort. They selected the site of the former Greyfriars, then owned by Trinity College, which had been earmarked as the site for a new college in a statute of 1558. However, their choice required a fresh statute (in 1593) to confirm the alienation of Trinity’s interest, and the sitting tenants also had to be bought out. The foundress’ great-nephew James Montagu^* (later bishop of Winchester), appointed master, managed the building works cheaply and efficiently, and Kent expressed his ‘assured confidence’ in Montagu by endorsing the latter’s choice of fellows when the college opened its doors in August 1598. However, there were complaints about meagre stipends, and the ten fellows originally planned were reduced to seven.6 T.S. Wyatt, ‘Building and endowment of the Coll.’, Sidney Sussex Coll. Camb.: Historical Essays ed. D.E.D. Beales and H.B. Nisbet, 43-5, 49-53; Sidney Sussex Archives, Cambridge, Box 1/6, 8, 17, and various letters, unnum. (Kent to Montagu, 1 Feb. 1593/4; v. chan. John Duport to Kent, 21 Nov. 1594; Kent to Montagu, 28 Aug. 1598; master and fellows of Sidney Sussex to Kent, n.d. [?later 1590s]). Between them, Kent, Harington and Montagu controlled the college’s patronage until their deaths, usually by mutual agreement: the earl secured a scholarship for one of the sons of his second cousin Anthony Grey^† (later 9th earl of Kent), and another for a grandson of his estate steward. In 1611 Kent gave the college a set of communion plate, and in the following year he pronounced that the foundation was ‘so well furnished and fitted with great and religious governors’ that he was willing to relinquish his oversight of its affairs – although no such renunciation ever took place.7 Sidney Sussex Archives, Box 1/17/5; unnum. letters (Kent to Dr. Samuel Ward, 3 Apr. 1611; Richard Bowle to Sidney Sussex Coll. 6 Dec. 1612); Wyatt, 52.

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth in March 1603, the Bedfordshire gentry convened a meeting at which, having considered a copy of the accession proclamation made at London a day or two earlier, they drafted a declaration recognizing James as ‘immediate and undoubted heir’ to the throne. They also volunteered to ‘withstand and suppress’ any rival claimants. Kent headed the list of signatories, a courtesy James swiftly acknowledged by letter; the new king also knighted Kent’s nephew, Henry Grey^* (later 8th earl of Kent).8 Beds. RO, L.29/22; Eg. 2877, f. 80; Shaw, ii. 101. In May 1603 James briefly contemplated removing his troublesome kinswoman Lady Arbella Stuart to Kent’s Bedfordshire estate, on the grounds that the earl’s nephew was married to a daughter of Arbella’s relative Gilbert Talbot^*, 7th earl of Shrewsbury. However, after some debate, she was allowed to come to court instead.9 HMC Hatfield, xv. 65, 82. Kent excused himself from attendance at the coronation in July 1603 on the grounds of age and deafness, and at the Parliament which met the following year he appeared only on the opening day (19 Mar. 1604). Shrewsbury quickly secured for him a licence of absence, which was renewed in January 1606; he is not recorded to have attended the House again before his death, over a decade later.10 Cal. of Talbot Pprs. ed. G.R. Batho (Derbys. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. iv), 228, 270; LJ, ii. 264a, 361a.

The earl’s almost complete absence from the House of Lords may have been attributable to deafness, but he interested himself in proceedings which affected his own circumstances. For many years he had coveted the Huntingdonshire manors of Brampton and Hemingford Grey and the lordship of Ruthin, Denbighshire (from which his subsidiary title of Lord Grey of Ruthin derived), properties which had been exchanged with the crown by the 3rd earl. Ruthin lordship had been granted in 1564 to Ambrose Dudley^†, earl of Warwick, who left no heirs, and shortly before the death of Warwick’s widow, in February 1604, Kent’s solicitors began searching for defects in the exchange concluded by his impecunious ancestor. Kent recruited Shrewsbury to lobby on his behalf, and in March 1604, just as Parliament began, he petitioned the king to ‘repair the ruined estate of an earl’. However, his request was ignored, though Shrewsbury did manage to procure a grant of the stewardship of Ruthin for one of Kent’s counsel, Eubule Thelwall^‡.11 S. Adams, Leicester and the Court, 235, 258; Beds. RO, L.24/535, 542; Cal. of Talbot Pprs. 227, 235, 270; Cal. of Shrewsbury Pprs. ed. C. Jamison and E.G.W. Bill (Derbys. Arch. Soc. rec. ser. i), 166; E315/310, f. 24v. In February 1606 Kent learned from Shrewsbury that the lordship of Ruthin was to be included in the entail of crown lands about to be laid before Parliament. He urged the earl to retain Randall Crew^‡ as counsel to argue for a proviso similar to that in the 1584 statute for fines and recoveries in Wales (27 Eliz cap. 9), which would reserve his rights to reclaim the property from the crown, if he should uphold his title at law. If enacted, the bill would have left any prospect of the recovery of his ancestral lands extremely dim, and in April he was relieved to learn that the Lords had left the bill to sleep, ‘neither shall it be awaked by me’.12 LPL, ms 3202, ff. 40, 47, 49; D. Dean, Law-making and Soc. in late Eliz. Eng. 196.

As lord lieutenant of Bedfordshire, Kent helped to suppress the enclosure riots which broke out across the Midlands in the early summer of 1607, and participated in the investigation of illegal enclosures which followed.13 Cal. of Talbot Pprs. 247, 285; C205/5/3. In 1609 he became involved in a protracted dispute with Trinity College, Cambridge about the tithes of Over Gravenhurst, Bedfordshire.14 Beds. RO, L.24/100-1, 108-9, 129, 131, 187, 777, 790. It was doubtless the earl who secured the return of his nephew Henry Grey as MP for Bedfordshire in 1614, and he contributed £100 to the benevolence collected after the stormy dissolution.15 E351/1950. He remained active in local affairs until his death, on 31 Jan. 1615. As his estates had been entailed upon his brother and nephew since the latter’s marriage in 1601, his will, written 12 days before his death, merely concerned itself with assigning legacies worth a total of £1,700 to his servants. He was buried, as requested, at Flitton, Bedfordshire, next to his long-deceased wife, on which occasion the sermon was preached by John Bowle^* (later bishop of Rochester), the son of his estate steward.16 PROB 11/125, ff. 313-17; C142/349/172; Bowle, A Sermon.