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Ralph Grey, 4th Baron Grey of Werke

English Member of Parliament (1661-1706)

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History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionFeb 24, 2026
Entity authorityQ26213317 ↗
Source-derived summary

Ralph Grey, 4th Baron Grey of Werke (c. 1661 – 1706) was an English peer who served as Governor of Barbados and as one of the English commissioners for the negotiations on the Treaty of Union between England and Scotland.

The second son of Ralph Grey, 2nd Baron Grey of Werke, he became an officer in the Army. A Whig, he was a Member of Parliament for Berwick from 1679 to 1681 and attended King William III following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. He was again a member for Berwick from 1695 to 1698 and briefly in 1701. He was Auditor of Wales from 1692 to 1702 and also Governor of Barbados from 1698 to 1701. On 24 June 1701, on the death of his older brother Ford Grey, 1st Earl of Tankerville, he succeeded as Baron Grey of Werke, taking him from the House of Commons into the House of Lords.

Appointed as one of the thirty-one English commissioners for the negotiation of the Treaty of Union, he died on 20 June 1706, shortly before the Articles of Union were settled on 22 July, and was buried at Bocking, Essex.

Grey's estates in Northumberland were inherited by a nephew, Henry Neville, a son of his sister Katherine Grey by her marriage to Richard Neville, and Henry Neville then changed his name to Grey by a private act of Parliament, Neville's Name Act 1706 (6 Ann. c.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Ralph Grey, 4th Baron Grey of Werke” is english Member of Parliament (1661-1706). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Ralph, Grey and Baron, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful synthesis for locating the documentary relationships between formal authority, participants and affected communities. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1661, 1706, 1679, 1681—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1661-11-28. For this dossier, Ralph, Grey and Baron is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “english Member of Parliament (1661-1706)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q26213317. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1661, 1706, 1679 and 1681.

Critical limits

Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Ralph Grey, 4th Baron Grey of Werke”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Ralph Grey, 4th Baron Grey of Werke primary sources, Ralph Grey, 4th Baron Grey of Werke archive and Ralph research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Ralph Grey, 4th Baron Grey of Werke”?
  2. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
  3. Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Ralph Grey, 4th Baron Grey of Werke” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.