For her Piece of Stuff this week, Ashley showed us the world’s oldest surviving tea from the tomb og Emperor Jing Di, and we talked about various types of tea, including Earl Grey which is flavored with oil of bergamot. As Ashley was talking, I realized that I didn’t know what bergamot is, why Earl Grey is considered a “posh” tea, or who Earl Grey was and why he had a tea named after him. I had to investigate!
Earl Grey is a black tea, such as Chinese keemun, or a smoky tea such as lapsang souchong, which has been flavored with oil of bergamot. Bergamot is made from a small citrus tree, bergamot orange, which is grown in Calabria, Italy. It is thought perhaps to be a hybrid of sweet lime and bitter orange,
The Grey family are a very old aristocratic family, who came over with William the Conqueror in 1066; Anchetil de Grey was a vassal of William’s known companion, William Fitz Osbern. The Greys were ennobled in the thirteenth century, but perhaps the most famous Grey lived in the tumultuous sixteenth century: Lady Jane Grey, the “Nine Day Queen,” who ruled from just 10-19 July, 1553. Jane Grey was embroiled in that whole Tudor political and religious mess, as she was the great granddaughter of Henry VII, and the Grand niece of Henry VIII. Her half cousin, Edward VI, named her as his successor, as she was a Protestant unlike his half-sister, Mary Tudor. After Edward’s death, Jane became queen and stayed in the Tower of London awaiting coronation, but during her short reign support for Mary grew and the Privy Council switched sides, declaring Mary queen on 19th July, 2023: Jane was executed on 12 February, 1554, at just 16 or 17 years old.
The family, however, survived and clawed their way back to the forefront of the British aristocracy. The title of Earl Grey was created in 1806, for General Charles, 1st Earl Grey, a career soldier who served in the Seven Years War, the American Revolutionary War, and the French Revolutionary Wars. He earned the nickname “No-flint Grey,” after ordering his men to remove the flints on their guns and fight only with bayonets, on a night approach to a hamlet where American troops were stationed on Over Kill Road in New Jersey. The road name proved appropriate (though Kill derives from the Duch word for creek), as the British under Earl Grey went from house to house killing the American troops as they slept. The incident became known as Baylor’s Massacre after the American leader.
Early Grey tea, however, was not named for this hero of the British Empire, but for his son, Charles, 2nd Earl Grey, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1830 to 1834. This Charles, was a prominent Whig politician, which at this time meant he supported the primacy of parliament, free trade, expanded voting rights, and the abolition of slavery; the Whigs drew their support from industrial reformists and the merchant class. Their political rivals, the Tories, had more deeply entrenched attitudes supported royalty, aristocratic privilege, and military spending and were supported by farmers and landowners.
Charles, 2nd Earl Grey’s tenure as prime minister saw three very important events: first, the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832, which was designed to expand enfranchisement and make elections more representative; second, the ending of the monopoly of the British East India company; third, the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which saw the abolition of slavery in most of the British Empire, with compensation paid to slave owners.
While Earl Grey tea is named for Charles, 2nd Earl Grey, there are several tales about how this came to pass. It could be that merchants grateful for ending the monopoly of the British East India Company presented him with the blend as a gift. Other tales are more colorful, such as Charles being given the tea as gift by a Chinese father, whose son he had saved from drowning. There are two problems with this version of the story, however, Charles never went to China and the Chinese did not drink tea flavored with bergamot.
Another story suggests that the tea was specially formulated to taste okay with the water at Charles’ Northumbrian seat. Then Lady Grey served it to her friends in London, and it became such a new fad that Twining’s marketed the brand. It does not, however, seem that plausible that either Earl or Lady Grey were associated with a bergamot flavored tea in their lifetimes, as it had something of a shady reputation for being poorer quality tea flavored to mask its failings.
It has been suggested that perhaps the bergamot flavored tea originally had nothing to do with the Grey family, but that it was a type of tea sold by a tea merchant called William Grey, who in 1852 (Charles. 2nd Earl Grey died in 1845) marketed a blend known as “Grey’s Tea.” While this may be true, the first advertisements for “Earl Grey,” did not come until the 1880’s, when it was sold by Charlton & Co. Perhaps the “Earl” was added simply to make the tea sound posher, aa a rebranding on what had been seen as poor-quality tea.
If this is true, adding the “Earl” and a vague rumor of a connection to the famous Grey family was a very successful rebranding campaign. In Britain today Earl Grey is seen as a fancy, upmarket tea, reversing its former shady reputation. It tends to be more expensive than other teas, sold in boxes of twenty tea bags, rather than the large boxes of PG-tip, Tetley, or my favorite, Yorkshire Tea.
Picture credit: Thomas Phillips, Portrait of Charles Grey, c.1820. In public domain – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Grey,_2nd_Earl_Grey#/media/File:Grey2.JPG
“Earl Grey,” Wikipedia, accessed August 30, 2023 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Grey_tea
Jane Pettigrew, Tea Classified: A Tea Lover’s Companion (Pavilion Books, 2014).