Josephine Elizabeth Grey was born at Milfield Hill, in the county of Northumberland, on April 13th, 1828. She was the fourth daughter of John Grey, and of his wife Hannah Annett. In her Memoir of John Grey of Dilston, she writes thus of her birthplace and family.

It seems to me that any life of my father must include, to some extent, a history of the county in which he was born, lived and died. He loved the place of his birth, sweet Glendale. His affections were largely drawn out to that Border country; not only to the living beings who peopled it, but to the scenes themselves—the hills, the valleys, and the rivers. All through his life there will be found evidence of the heart-yearnings towards them; and these are shared by his children, to whom there seems no spot on earth like Glendale. This attachment to our native country is perhaps stronger among us than among some families, because for so many generations back we were rooted there. Greys abounded on the Borders; they were keepers often of the Border castles and towers, living a life not always very peaceful in regard to their Scottish neighbours.

Glendale is rich in romantic associations: every name in and around it brings to the mind some incident of war, or lover’s adventure, or heroic exploit recorded in English ballads, or sung to sweet Scottish tunes, or woven later into the poems of Sir Walter Scott. It is a very beautiful range of hills which skirts Glendale to the west; their very names, Yeavring Bell, Heathpool Bell, Newton Torr, Hetha, Hedgehope, and Cheviot—were delightful to my father’s ear. Directly in front of our old home, Milfield Hill, lies the scene of innumerable fights between Scotch and English, Milfield Plain, and from its windows might have been seen the famous battle of Humbledon Hill.

Flodden Hill, about a mile north of Milfield Hill, hides beneath its soil traces of the great battle of 1513: broken pieces of armour of men and horses were sometimes dug or ploughed up, and brought to the house, to be treasured up as relics. Many a time did my father recite to his children every incident of that battle, as he rode or walked with them over Flodden, sometimes resting at the “King’s Chair,” or by “Sybil’s Well.” His memory was so good that he could go through almost the whole of Marmion, and other poems relating to that woeful day,

His dislike of the Stuarts was great, but he would tell, with a sorrowful sympathy, how the “flowers of the forest,” the noble youth of Scotland, “were a’ wede away.”

After the battle of Flodden the Border warfare degenerated into a system of recriminative plunder, which continued till comparatively recent times. It is only a few generations back that our Northumbrians used to watch the fords all night long, with their trained mastiffs, to prevent the Scotch from carrying away their cattle. At one of the early meetings of the Highland Society at Kelso, my father said: “There was a time, and that at no distant period, when, had it been possible for such animals as we have seen to-day to exist, it would have required the escort of our honourable Vice-President, Sir John Hope, and his cavalry in bringing each lot to the show-ground, to secure it against the chance of being roasted among the heather of the Highlands or boiled in the pots of Cumberland.”

But the time came for this fair Border country to wake up to new life. Probably no part of England has undergone so rapid a change as Northumberland has done in the last eighty or ninety years. The half-barbarous character which I have been describing clung to the people long after it had given place to civilisation elsewhere. The soil and climate were rugged, and resisted for a long time the first efforts at cultivation; but its inhabitants, rugged too, were energetic, and the impulse once given, it required not many years to place Northumberland at the head of agricultural progress.

The part which my father had in bringing about this great change in Northumberland, and in the progress of agriculture generally, was not inconsiderable. How great the change must have been, in a short time, those of us can imagine who have witnessed the rich harvests of the last twenty years, and the merry harvest-homes on Tweedside and Tillside. Not less striking, perhaps, was the change brought about later on the banks of the Tyne. When he migrated thither in 1833, Tyneside, which is now so richly cultivated, presented in many parts miles of fox-cover and self-sown plantations of fir and birchwood.

John Grey was born in August, 1785. He was the son of George Grey, of West Ord, on the banks of the Tweed, and of his wife, Mary Burn. He himself thus writes of his ancestry, in answer to a question addressed to him by a friend.

“He [an antiquarian] imagines that he brings the Greys down from Rollo, whose daughter Arletta was mother of William the Conqueror; but I think their Norman origin is doubtful. Undoubtedly, however, they were derived from a long line of warriors, who were Wardens of the East Marches, Governors of Norham, Morpeth, Wark, and Berwick Castles in the old Border days, and were also dignified by great achievements in foreign wars. Sir John Grey, of Heaton, 1356, was valorous in the army of Henry V, and gained, or had conferred on him, castles in Normandy, and the title of Tankerville, which is now an offshoot of the old stock. His figure is given as a knight of great strength and renown, and he was distinguished by the capacious forehead which is said to have marked the race through all ages; see the late Charles Earl Grey for its full development. [The writer was not less remarkable for this feature than any who bore the name.] A son of Sir John Grey, Governor of Morpeth Castle 1656, gave offence by a marriage with a buxom daughter of a farmer, at Angerton. In the records it is shown that he had an annuity from the family estate at Learmonth. From this offshoot comes our degenerate tribe!”

My mother’s parents were good people, descended from the poor but honest families of silk-weavers, driven out of France by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. They were in the habit of opening their hospitable doors to everyone in the form of a religious teacher, of whatever sect, who happened to pass that way. One of my mother’s earliest memories was of being lifted upon the knee of the venerable John Wesley, a man with white silvery hair and a benevolent countenance, who placed his two hands upon the head of the golden-haired little girl and pronounced over her a tender and solemn benediction.

In 1833 John Grey was appointed to take charge of the Greenwich Hospital estates in his native county, and moved to a new house built for him at Dilston, in the vale of the Tyne.

Our home at Dilston was a very beautiful one. Its romantic historical associations, the wild, informal beauty all round its doors, the bright, large family circle, and the kind and hospitable character of its master and mistress, made it an attractive place to many friends and guests. Among our pleasantest visitors there were Swedes, Russians and French, who came to England on missions of agricultural or other inquiry, and who sometimes spent weeks with us. It was a house the door of which stood wide open, as if to welcome all comers, through the livelong summer day (all the days seem like summer days when looking back). It was a place where one could glide out of a lower window and be hidden in a moment, plunging straight among wild wood paths and beds of fern, or find oneself quickly in some cool concealment, beneath slender birch trees, or by the dry bed of a mountain stream. It was a place where the sweet hushing sound of waterfalls, and clear streams murmuring over shallows, were heard all day and night, though winter storms turned those sweet sounds into an angry roar.

I have thought that the secret of my father’s consistency lay in the fact that his opinions had their root very deep in his soul and affections, that they were indigenous, so to speak, not grafted from without. God made him a Liberal, and a Liberal in the true sense he continued to be to the end of his life. In conversation with him on any public questions, one could not but observe how much such questions were matters of feeling with him. I believe that his political principles and public actions were alike the direct fruit of that which held rule within his soul—I mean his large benevolence, his tender compassionateness, and his respect for the rights and liberties of the individual man. His life was a sustained effort for the good of others, flowing from these affections. He had no grudge against rank or wealth, no restless desire of change for its own sake, still less any rude love of demolition; but he could not endure to see oppression or wrong of any kind inflicted on man, woman, or child. “You cannot treat men and women exactly as you do one pound bank-notes, to be used or rejected as you think proper,” he said in a letter to The Times, when that paper was advocating some ill-considered changes, beneficial to one class, but leaving out of account a residue of humble folk upon whom they would entail great suffering. In the cause of any maltreated or neglected creature he was uncompromising to the last, and when brought into opposition with the perpetrators of any social injustice he became an enemy to be feared. Some who remembered him in early manhood have described his commanding presence when he stood forth on public occasions as the champion of Liberal principles, “unsubdued by the blandishments of his partisans, and unabashed by the rancour of his opponents.” There was seldom to be found a flaw in his argument or a fault in his grammar on those occasions, when “he carried confusion and dismay into the enemy’s camp.” Yet the force which his hearers acknowledged lay in his love of truth, his clearness of judgment, and the known innocency of his life, rather than in rhetoric. The true key to an occasional bitterness against those whom he thought wrong-doers lay also in his great sensitiveness to wrong done. There was no self-satisfaction in his denunciation of evil; the contemplation of cruelty in any form was intolerable to him. He would speak of the imposition of social disabilities of any kind, by one class of persons on another, with kindling eyes and breath which came quickly; but he always turned away with a sense of relief from the subject of the evil-doers, or the evil done, to the persons who suffered, whose position his compassionate instinct would set him at once to the task of ameliorating. His children remember the large old family Bible, which he used punctually to bring forth every Sunday afternoon and peruse for hours, and his appeals to them to listen to the grandeur of certain favourite passages, which he often read aloud. The Book of the Prophet Isaiah was a great favourite, and his love for such words as the following, which he often quoted, was an index of the complexion of his mind: “Is not this the fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?”

The Greys were a loving family, but of all the family Josephine’s life-long favourite was her sister Harriet, afterwards Madame Meuricoffre. In her she realised the perfect fulfilment of Christina Rossetti’s lines—

There is no friend like a sister

In calm or stormy weather;

To cheer one on the tedious way,

To fetch one if one goes astray,

To lift one if one totters down,

To strengthen whilst one stands.

My sister Harriet and I were a pair, in our family of six daughters and three sons. We were never separated, except perhaps for a few days occasionally, until her marriage and departure from her own country for Naples. We were more, I may venture to say, than many sisters are to each other; we were one in heart and soul, and one in all our pursuits. We walked, rode, played, and learned our lessons together. When one was scolded, both wept; when one was praised, both were pleased. In looking back to those early days, the characteristics which stand out the most in my memory are her love of free outdoor life, of nature, and of animals. It may be said that these are common to most country-born children, but they were very strongly marked in her.

Among the many good dogs who were personal friends in our family was one, Pincher, whom she loved much. She was sometimes missing when lesson hours came round, and would be found in Pincher’s kennel, quite concealed from view, holding pleasant converse with her dear dog. A tragic event occurred. Twelve of our father’s sheep were found one early morning cruelly worried and bleeding to death in the field. Suspicion fell on Pincher, although there were other dogs of the agents and farmers about, who were much more probably the criminals; but their masters preferred to impute the crime to our dog. Pincher was tried, condemned, and executed, he, poor dog, wagging his tail to the last, and offering his paw, in sign, my sister said through her tears, of forgiveness of his murderers. She was heart-broken, and cried herself to sleep many nights after, her persuasion of the injustice of the sentence making her sorrow very bitter. Trifling incidents often rest in the memory when important things are forgotten. I recall, some time after this, that when we were in the schoolroom, drilled by a strict governess in close attention to our books, the silence was nevertheless broken by my sister’s voice asking suddenly, and with a pathetic earnestness, “Miss M——, had Pincher a soul?” “Silence!” was the reply. “Attend to your books! No silly questions!” But this same question has arisen many a time in the hearts of both of us, when we have witnessed the death of those dear companions, and seen the dumb and almost awful appeal in their dying eyes, fixed upon those whom they loved with a love which seemed out of all proportion to the limitations of their being. The desired solution of the child’s question, “Had Pincher a soul?” was a momentous one for her; but the child’s heart was then, as often, little understood.

Her interest in animal life was not restricted to the nobler beasts. She made collections of creatures as low in the scale as newts and frogs and other aquatic and amphibious beings, declaring that they also were worthy of affection. We had our little beds side by side, and above them there was a shelf on which she arranged these creatures in rows of pots and jars filled with water. An accident occurred one night—the shelf gave way and emptied its burden of pots and jars and water and creatures into our beds. The incident rather damped my ardour in the pursuit of this branch of natural history, I believe, but not so with her. I recollect how tenderly she gathered up the newts, frogs, &c., and replaced them in fresh water, hoping they had got no harm. We had many pets—ferrets, wild cats from the woods, and owls. Some of the latter were magnificent people, with their large eyes and look of profound wisdom worthy of the classic attendant of Pallas Athene. Ponies also we had. On one of these, a beautiful snow-white pony called Apple Grey, many of us had our first lessons in riding. My sister’s ideal at one time of the vocation, which she would choose above others, was that of a circus girl, and in the hope of possibly realising some day that ideal, she began early to practise equestrian exercises. Putting off her shoes, she would leap on to the unsaddled back of Apple Grey, and standing up, guiding her only by the bridle, would essay to trot and then to canter round the fields. By perseverance, and after many falls, she had attained to some degree of excellence in these gymnastics, when her thoughts were turned in other directions than that of the vocation of a circus girl.

She wrote some years later of the death of this dear pony: “Poor old Apple was shot to-day by the side of her grave in the wood. They say she died in a moment. Papa could not give the order for execution, but the men took it on themselves, as she could scarcely eat or rise without help. It was the kindest thing to do. Think of the gallops and tumbles of our young days, and all her wisdom and all her charms! Emmy and I have got a large stone slab, on which Surtees the mason has carved, ‘In memoriam, Apple,’ and I shall beg a young weeping ash from Beaufront to plant on her grave.

now, and if she is gone to the happy hunting grounds, so much the better for her, dear old pet.”

We had our sorrows; clouds sometimes seemed to darken our horizon; and we would speak together in whispers of some family grief which was not wholly understood by us, or of certain things in the world which seemed to us even then to be not as they should be. We had a handsome brother, John, who used to entertain us in a gentle way with stories of the sea, which we loved to hear; and who on one occasion returned home with his pockets filled with young tortoises for us. He died at sea. We were awed by the grief of our father and mother. We reminded each other of Mrs. Hemans’ Graves of a Household—

Later our eldest sister married and went out to China. Her letters from the Far East were read aloud in the family, and our curiosity and interest were immensely stirred by her descriptions of that country, of storms at sea, of the customs and ways of the people, of her visit to the house of a great Mandarin, &c. China seemed then much farther away than it seems now.

Living in the country, far from any town, and, if I may say so, in the pre-educational era (for women at least), we had none of the advantages which girls of the present day have. But we owed much to our dear mother, who was very firm in requiring from us that whatever we did should be thoroughly done, and that in taking up any study we should aim at becoming as perfect as we could in it without external aid. This was a moral discipline which perhaps compensated in value for the lack of a great store of knowledge. She would assemble us daily for the reading aloud of some solid book, and by a kind of examination following the reading assured herself that we had mastered the subject. She urged us to aim at excellence, if not perfection, in at least one thing.

Our father’s connection with great public movements of the day—the first Reform Bill, the Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery, and the Free Trade movement—gave us very early an interest in public questions and in the history of our country.

For two years my sister and I were together at a school in Newcastle. My sister did not love study, and confessed she “hated lessons.” The lady at the head of the school regretted this. She was not a good disciplinarian, and gave us much liberty, which we appreciated, but she had a large heart and ready sympathy. In spite of the imperfectly learned lessons, she discerned in my sister some rare gifts—a spark of genius (a word which would have been strongly deprecated by my sister as applied to herself); and used furtively to gather up and preserve (we discovered afterwards) scraps of original writings of my sister, and copy books full of quaint pen-and-ink drawings. She also appropriated, and would privately show to friends, a book, a History of the Italian Republics, on the margins of which throughout my sister had illustrated that history in a most original and humorous manner.

The following extract from one of Josephine Butler’s last letters, written to friends in Switzerland in 1905, tells how her “travail of soul” on behalf of oppressed womanhood began at an early age when she was only seventeen.

My father was a man with a deeply rooted, fiery hatred of all injustice. The love of justice was a passion with him. Probably I have inherited from him this passion. My dear mother felt with him, and seconded all his efforts. When my father spoke to us, his children, of the great wrong of slavery, I have felt his powerful frame tremble and his voice would break. You can believe, that at that time sad and tragical recitals came to us from first sources of the hideous wrong inflicted on negro men and women. I say women, for I think their lot was particularly horrible, for they were almost invariably forced to minister to the worst passions of their masters, or be persecuted and die. I recollect the story of a negro woman who had four sons, the sons of her master. The three eldest were sold by the father in childhood for good prices, and the mother never knew their fate. She had one left, the youngest, her treasure. Her master, in a fit of passion, one day shot this boy dead. The mother crawled under a ruined shed of wood, and with her face to the earth she prayed that she might die. But first she prayed, for she was a Christian, that she might be able to forgive her cruel master. The words, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you,” sounded in her heart; and she cried to heaven, “Jesus, help me to forgive!” And so she died, her poor heart broken. I remember how these things combined to break my young heart, and how keenly they awakened my feelings concerning injustice to women through this conspiracy of greed of gold and lust of the flesh, a conspiracy which has its counterpart in the white slave owning in Europe.

Something of her struggles at this period is shown in the following memories, recorded in 1900.

My early home was far from cities, with parents who taught by their lives what true men and women should be. Few “priests or pastors” ever came our way. Two miles from our home was the parish church, to which we trudged dutifully every Sunday, and where an honest man in the pulpit taught us loyally all that he probably himself knew about God, but whose words did not even touch the fringe of my soul’s deep discontent.

It was my lot from my earliest years to be haunted by the problems which more or less present themselves to every thoughtful mind. Year after year this haunting became more tyrannous. The world appeared to me to be out of joint. A strange intuition was given to me whereby I saw as in a vision, before I had seen any of them with my bodily eyes, some of the saddest miseries of earth, the injustices, the inequalities, the cruelties practised by man on man, by man on woman.

For one long year of darkness the trouble of heart and brain urged me to lay all this at the door of the God, whose name I had learned was Love. I dreaded Him—I fled from Him—until grace was given me to arise and wrestle, as Jacob did, with the mysterious Presence, who must either slay or pronounce deliverance. And then the great questioning again went up from earth to heaven, “God! Who art Thou? Where art Thou? Why is it thus with the creatures of Thy hand?” I fought the battle alone, in deep recesses of the beautiful woods and pine forests around our home, or on some lonely hillside, among wild thyme and heather, a silent temple where the only sounds were the plaintive cry of the curlew, or the hum of a summer bee, or the distant bleating of sheep. For hours and days and weeks in these retreats I sought the answer to my soul’s trouble and the solution of its dark questionings. Looking back, it seems to me the end must have been defeat and death had not the Saviour imparted to the child wrestler something of the virtue of His own midnight agony, when in Gethsemane His sweat fell like great drops of blood to the ground.

It was not a speedy or an easy victory. Later the conflict was renewed, as there dawned upon me the realities of those earthly miseries which I had realised only in a measure by intuition; but later still came the outward and active conflict, with, thanks be to God, the light and hope and guidance which He never denies to them who seek and ask and knock, and which become for them as “an anchor of the soul, sure and steadfast.”

Looking my Liberator in the face, can my friends wonder that I have taken my place, (I took it long ago)—oh! with what infinite contentment!—by the side of her, the “woman in the city which was a sinner,” of whom He, her Liberator and mine, said, as He can also say of me, “this woman hath not ceased to kiss My feet.”