By inclination Sir Edward Grey (1862–1933) was a countryman, coming from a landed family in Northumbria. To his dying day he enjoyed rural pursuits like fishing, bird-watching, walking and even bicycling and valued detachment from urban conviviality. Yet there was instilled in him a sense of public duty and he was persuaded with reluctance to enter party politics. He devoted himself to the Liberal Party and, when the party took office and triumphed in the general election of January 1906, he accepted the office of foreign secretary. Grey was to occupy this onerous post for a decade and set a record for length of service.

It would be misleading to suggest that Japan was at the top of his agenda but it certainly required constant attention, even if its problems were not of the highest priority globally. Compared with other contemporaries, Grey was not a great traveller but he had visited India in 1887–88. It is not our purpose to describe Grey's policy towards Japan, largely the work of his officials in the ordinary diplomatic correspondence. Instead by looking at his writings, his minutes, the impressions of his closest officials and the impressions of Japanese diplomats, we hope to glimpse part of the thinking which underlay his policy-making.

APPRENTICESHIP

Educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, Grey became member of parliament for Berwick-upon-Tweed in November 1885 as a Liberal Party member. When the party came to power in 1892, he was selected by the foreign secretary, Lord Rosebery, as parliamentary under-secretary for foreign affairs at the age of thirty. Two years later when Rosebery became prime minister, he made it a condition that he would still control foreign policy. Grey continued to serve under the amenable newcomer, Lord Kimberley. Since both foreign secretaries were members of the House of Lords, Grey became in effect the Foreign Office spokesman in the lower house. But he writes self-deprecatingly in his autobiography, Twenty-five Years, that he was merely supporting and defending policies formulated by the cabinet of which he was not a member and did not really have a policy-making role.