Dates

• Existence: 1688 - 1766

Biography

Zachary Grey (1688-1766) was a staunch Church of England Clergyman and writer. He was born in Yorkshire to George Grey (1652-1711), a Church of England clergyman, and Elizabeth Cowdray. Grey was admitted a pensioner at Jesus College, Cambridge, on 18 April 1704 but migrated to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he was elected a scholar on 6 January 1707. He was ordained deacon by the bishop of Lincoln on 25 July 1711, becoming a priest on 22 September. He served as rector of Houghton Conquest, Bedfordshire, from 4 April 1725, and was vicar of St Giles and St Peter's, Cambridge. Grey published (often anonymously) a large number of outspoken pamphlets attacking other academics and writers, especially those of a Presbyterian disposition. Notable are his critiques of Sir Isaac Newton and Daniel Neal: Examination of the 14th chapter of Sir Isaac Newton's observations upon the prophecies of Daniel (1736) and A Review of Mr Daniel Neal's History of the Puritans (1744). Grey frequently argued that the Church of England was the best of churches, seeing all opponents of this view as wishing to return to 1649, this view is represented in his edited prefaces for Samuel Butler's Hudibras (1744). Grey married twice, first to Miss Tooley, and second, in 1720, to Susanna Hatton (née Hinton) (c.1690-1771). With Hatton he had three children, his two daughters survived into adulthood. His second wife outlived Grey by five years after his death in Ampthill, Bedfordshire aged 78.

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