Lord John Grey - Appearance and Personal Life

Appearance and Personal Life

Grey is about five six, slight and good-looking, with fine-boned features. He has long, blond hair, "large, beautiful" blue eyes and a "beautiful" mouth.

His first lover was Hector, a twenty-year-old lieutenant in the 46th Regiment who died in the Battle of Culloden.

Around 1747, John's cousin, Olivia Pearsall, was orphaned and became Harold's ward. She moved in with Benedicta and lived there until marriage. As such, John seemed to be closer to her than his other cousins, or even his half-brothers.

At eighteen, John entered into a relationship with George Everett, who took him to the Lavender House—a discreet club in London that catered to gay men. The relationship seemed to have ended by 1755, when a scandal involving George Everett caused John to be reassigned to Ardsmuir.

After meeting Jamie Fraser again at the prison, John became friends with Fraser over their weekly dinners and fell in love with him. John made advances towards Fraser but was rejected. Nonetheless, he remains in love with Fraser throughout the Outlander series.

In 1757, John began investigating Olivia's fiancé, Joseph Trevelyan, whom John suspected to have syphilis. John visited the Lavender House during the course of his investigation and had an one-night-stand with a young man there. During the investigation, John gains a new valet, Tom Byrd.

In 1758, John was formally introduced to Percy Wainwright, the stepson of General Sir George Stanley, who was John's new stepfather. John and Wainwright had actually met a year before at the Lavender House and became romantically involved after their formal introduction. The relationship ended when Percy was discovered in flagrante delicto with another man by John and two other soldiers. This was at the time a capital crime. John helped Percy escape to Ireland in order to avoid being hanged.

In 1760, Lord John and Jamie Fraser end up traveling together to Ireland to try to bring back an English soldier with the intent of instigating court-martial procedures against him. During this process they manage to begin to rebuild their friendship. Lord John also has a brief marmaliaison with Stephan von Namtzen, whom he has been good friends with through several other books.

John later married Isobel Dunsany, the daughter of family friend Lord Dunsany, at least in part to take care of Jamie Fraser's illegitimate son, William. The boy was left in Isobel's care because his mother Geneva Dunsany—Isobel's sister—had died soon after giving birth to him. Jamie Fraser killed William's putative father, the Earl of Ellesmere, when the Earl threatened to kill the infant.

During John's journey to Jamaica, he met Claire Fraser again, and was later re-acquainted with Jamie in Jamaica. Afterwards, Isobel and William went to join John in Jamaica, but Isobel died during the sea voyage. At the end of his governorship, John took William with him to visit Jamie Fraser at Fraser's Ridge, en route to a Virginian plantation that belonged to William. Later, John went to North Carolina to visit Jocasta Cameron, Jamie's aunt, and was introduced to a very pregnant Brianna Fraser, to whom John became temporarily engaged so that she would not be bombarded by suitors.

While in Virginia, John kept up a correspondence with the Frasers and bought for Claire several of the ingredients she needed to create ether. He also became involved again with a Native American man called Manoke, who took a job at the plantation as John's cook. He originally met Manoke years earlier in Canada during the short story The Custom of the Army, which was published in an anthology titled Warriors.

After the American Revolutionary War broke out, John went to Philadelphia to check on the status of his nephew Henry, who was wounded in the war, with the bullets still stuck in him. Claire, who was also visiting Philadelphia at the time, was able to operate on Henry and save his life. John and Claire then received the (erroneously reported) news of Jamie's death, and John later married Claire to keep her from being arrested as an American spy. Though homosexual, he has had sex with a few female prostitutes and the two women he married.