This article examines the opinions of Henry, third Earl Grey on Britain’s empire over the course of his long life, which spanned the trajectory of Victorian political Liberalism. He was a junior minister in the government of his father (the second Earl Grey) when it brought in the first Reform Bill in March 1831; he lived to see the end of Gladstone’s final premiership in 1894. Grey was an influential Liberal party policy-maker in the twenty years after 1832, particularly in colonial affairs.2 He was also self-consciously an intellectual in politics, who took extreme care to ground his policy positions in political principle, to the extent that he was often seen as crotchety