The Last Greys of Grays
Table 2 shows that one result of the third baron's longevity was that his son, Henry, who married Joan, daughter of Lord Cobham, predeceased him, so John's successor was his grandson. Richard, fourth Lord Grey of Codnor, inherited during the reign of his namesake, Richard II (1372-99), but it was under Henry IV (1399 - 1413) and Henry V (1 413 - 22) that he flourished. In 1401 he was made admiral of the fleet from the mouth of the Thames to the north. In 1405 he was king's chamberlain and joint deputy constable and marshall of England. In 1415 he was one of the negotiators arranging a truce with Scotland. In 1417 he was appointed Captain of the castle of Argentan in Normandy. Richard appears to have been married to Elizabeth, daughter of Lord Basset, in 1378, when both bride and groom were seven years old. She outlived him by some thirty years and, near the end of her life, arranged to be buried beside him at Aylesford.
Richard's eldest son, John, fifth Lord Grey of Codnor, died without issue and was succeeded by his younger brother, Henry. Henry's wife, Margaret, was coheiress to the estate of her father, Sir Henry Percy of Atholl, so the family tradition of marrying well was maintained by the sixth Lord Grey of Codnor. Soon after Henry's death, in 1444, his widow married Sir Richard Vere, a younger son of the earl of Oxford, whose family was of major importance in Essex for many centuries following the Norman Conquest.
Henry, seventh Lord Grey of Codnor, was aged nine when his father died and for some time was a ward of John, Viscount Beaumont. In the Wars of the Roses (1455 - 85) he was firstly a Lancastrian, being with Queen Margaret when she won the second battle of St. Albans (1460/ 1), but must have become a Yorkist later, since Edward IV (1461 - 83) made many grants to him (one of them concerning experiments in transmuting metals). Richard III (1483 - 5) granted him some manors in 1484, for good service against the rebels. He survived the change from York to Tudor and obtained precedence over Lord Clifford at the creation of the duke of York, the future Henry VIII, in 1494. Despite three marriages, the last to Catherine Stourton, widow of Sir William Berkeley, he left no legitimate issue, so the barony fell into abeyance after his death in 1496. Like many of his ancestors, he was buried at Aylesford.
In his will, Henry made generous provision for his three illegitimate sons and for his widow, whose portion included both Thurrock and Aylesford. There was thus a Grey connection with Grays after Henry's death, but Catherine did not waste much time before finally ending it. She caused quite a stir when, in 1497, she married the impoverished Lord William de la Pole, a brother of Edmund, earl of Suffolk. William, some thirty years his wife's junior, was arrested in 1502 on suspicion of treason and was probably still a prisoner in the Tower when she died in 1521, although Mackie (17) says that most of those arrested in 1502 were freed after Henry VII's death in 1509.
A Resuscitation
The manor was probably seized by the Crown on de la Pole's arrest, but by 1527 it was held by Sir Thomas Cornwell, a descendant of Richard, fourth baron of Codnor. The subsequent history of the manor of Grays Thurrock is both complex and interesting but not linked to the Grey family.
Following the death of the seventh Lord Grey of Codnor, the barony was in abeyance for almost five centuries, but the abeyance was terminated in 1989 and there is once again a baron of Codnor Charles, Lord Grey of Codnor, has kindly spent time reading this article and it is hoped that his comments will appear in the next issue of Panorama.
Two Loose Ends
What about the pseudo-queen and the regicide? They were descendants of the first Henry de Grey through his second son, John of Shirland. She was Lady Jane Grey, whose father's ambition was exceeded only by his stupidity; a combination which led to her early death, after being 'queen' for nine days. The regicide was Thomas, eldest son of Henry, first earl of Stamford (who outlived his son by sixteen years). Thomas, who took his father's first title when Henry was elevated by Charles 1 in 1628, was a judge at the king's trial in 1648 and signed the death warrant ahead of Cromwell. Wedgwood (18) says he was reputed to be ready personally to execute Charles. He was a member of the Council of State in 1649, but some five or six years later joined one of the extremist religious groups and was imprisoned in Windsor castle. Once released he quit politics, but he would certainly have been executed with the other leading regicides in 1661 if he had not died four years earlier.
Fig.3 is a facsimile of Richard I's charter of 11 th June 1195, taken, with the editor's permission, from reference 15.
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