Life of Sir George Grey: Governor, High commissioner, and Premier. An Historical Biography.
In Parliament
In Parliament.
He had not only the cold chills of the Colonial Office to encounter. He had to meet the fury of the British Parliament. In the House of Commons the attack was led by legislators so authorised as Sir John Pakington and Sir Charles Adderley, and withstood by the Under-Secretary, Sir Frederick Peel; in the House of Lords Grey was attacked by Lord Lyttelton and defended by the Duke of Newcastle. He might well have been summoned, a new Clive or Hastings, to the bar of either Chamber when he was thus virtually impeached. Grey claimed, or his official apologist claimed for him, that he had often been silent when he was attacked or condemned. This was not an occasion for being silent, and in a memorandum, dated July 1854, he made a capital defence of himself. We will not say that he practically exonerated himself from the charges brought against him, nor that this was proved, as he himself held, by the withdrawal of the motions in both chambers. A Parliamentary resolution is often moved with the sole object of drawing public attention to the facts stated and withdrawn when that object has been gained. But the charges made, though grave in the eyes of the Colonial Office, were light in the public eye, and he left the court, so to speak, without a stain on his character. His mana was still unimpaired, and his fame was augumented. High-handed doings are not often visited with censure at Oxford, and the honorary degree of D.C.L., bestowed on a man who had just turned forty, amid the frenzied applause of the Sheldonian Theatre, must have consoled him for the disapproval of the Tite Barnacles and biased legislators.