’Being abroad one day with my gun, I noticed a group of peasants at work in a field.  Anxious for their counsel towards a bag, I jumped the wall into the field where they were.  What was my astonishment to discover that I was in the midst of an illicit still!  You can imagine my position!  I, an officer holding the King’s commission, had, as a private person, become aware of an offence against the law.  My worry was so keen, over the awkward relationship in which I stood towards the party, that I expressed it.

’"It is,” I said, “frequently my duty to protect preventive men, and if that duty were ever to bring me this way, you would feel that I had informed upon you.”  “No, no,” was the answer in chorus, “you only protect the excise men, that forming part of your duty; you are not an informer but a protector, and we know you won’t tell.”  They were good enough to emphasise this vote of confidence with an invitation that I should try their poteen.  Naturally I declined, but in a manner, I hope, calculated not to wound their feelings.’

This demeanour Sir George Grey carried into his office as a centurion of soldiers, at a date when the lash still plied viciously in the British army.  He sat on a court-martial which had to try a private soldier for habitual drunkenness.  As the youngest officer present, he was the first to be asked what the sentence ought to be.  He suggested a light punishment, one that was not perhaps in harmony with ideas then prevalent as to the best manner of preserving military discipline.  To him flogging was abhorrent, and entertaining that view, he had fallen into debate with brother officers.  The sentence which he proposed caused a roar of laughter among some of the members of the court-martial.  ‘Gentlemen,’ interjected the general at the head of the table, ’mercy is a very becoming characteristic of youth, and I do not understand this laughter.’  That cut it short.

Daniel O’Connell was at the height of his influence in Ireland, and Sir George could look back on the military duties which once or twice brought him into the precincts of the Tribune.

‘Agitate, agitate, agitate,’ a sympathetic Viceroy had written to O’Connell, upon the subject of Catholic emancipation, and an official stir followed.  The Marquis of Anglesey, who led the cavalry at Waterloo, and lost a leg there, had not hesitated to utter his mind about Ireland.  O’Connell unthinkingly read the letter at a meeting, and the Viceroy found himself in trouble with his Government.  That was within Sir George’s memory; but take, as touching O’Connell more intimately, an election meeting at Limerick, where the regiment was paraded to keep order.