
Sir Edward Grey has entered the consciousness of most historically literate Britons for the remark he made on the eve of the Great War to the Liberal commentator JA Spender: “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”
Grey had already come to embody an era in British diplomacy, and despite his sense of defeat at not being able to prevent the war (which led him to the edge of a nervous breakdown) he was not done yet. Appointed foreign secretary in 1905 when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman became Prime Minister, he outlasted his friend, leaving office with Asquith in 1916, 11 years to the day after he had entered it. No Foreign Secretary has ever served continuously for so long.
Thomas Otte, a professor of diplomatic history, takes Grey’s famous line as the title of his chapter on the outbreak of the Great War, though strangely he misquotes it, having “lights” for “lamps”: but then I have always suspected that Spender, who recorded the phrase years later in his memoirs, misquoted Grey too, since an Englishman of Grey’s era and education would almost certainly have said “lighted” and not “lit”. And, also strangely, it is the least satisfactory chapter in an otherwise solid, intelligent and well-researched book.
Otte is peculiarly uncritical of Grey’s relative inertia during those fateful days in July 1914: he could, and should, have caught a train to Berlin at any time after it became apparent to the Foreign Office that Austria was slavering for revenge after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife at the end of June, and that the only people who could talk them out of it were their German allies. In his summing-up, Otte calls it a “canard” that Grey could have put more pressure on the Germans, noting Grey’s extensive warnings in July to the German ambassador of the consequences of German aggression. He also points out that Berlin took no notice of their ambassador, believing him unduly pro-British.
But that is precisely why Grey should have gone to Berlin: cutting out the middle man and discussing the perilous situation with his counterpart, von Jagow, might just have made a difference. A quarter of a century later, Chamberlain made such a trip in vain, but Chamberlain was dealing with a gangster with no grasp of morality, whereas there was still some old-world decency left in the house of Hohenzollern and its court.
Otte is good on the difficult relationships Grey had with two key Foreign Office officials – his permanent secretary, Sir Arthur Nicolson, and Sir Eyre Crowe – but he underplays their importance in forcing Grey to realise the danger posed by German endorsement of Austria’s bloodlust in July: the so-called “Blank Cheque”. Grey was concerned to preserve France against a German onslaught that many felt had been brewing since 1871. But for all that Cambon, the French ambassador, sat weeping in Grey’s office or his anteroom, Britain only resolved to fight when Germany violated Belgian neutrality, and with it the 1839 Treaty of London, of which Britain was a guarantor. The speech Grey made in the House of Commons on August 3 1914, just before his “Lamps” remark, was the apogee of his political life, making the case for war more cogently than anyone in public life at the time could have done.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaJqfpLi0e9ahmK1lpKR6s7HAnWalmZ2lwG6zzqKloGWVqr%2BwvMRmpJ6dpGK6orqMn6arnaOWxG6yyKuqrWWnpL%2BtsIywmKtn