ea or graphite to black to make them look better (facing them was the trade term) or variously adding black lead, copper carbonate, lead chromate and turmeric to used tea leaves to tart them up and sell them as fresh. In this context, flavouring cheap tea with bergamot was a trivial offence, though in 1837 an injunction was awarded against a London grocer to prevent it selling its tea:
Brocksopp and Co.’s Mowqua’s small-leaf gunpowder was so inferior a tea, that deponents could not set any price upon it ... it was artificially scented, and appeared to have been drugged with bergamot in this country.
The Bristol Mercury, 13 May 1837.
It’s hardly likely that an aristocrat such as Earl Grey would have lent his name to a mixture that had such unsavoury undertones. The absence of any contemporary evidence of a link means that we have to look elsewhere for the origin of the name. Perhaps the Grey mixture sold by Charlton and Co later in the century was named after some other Grey? The Foods of England site identified a candidate in William Grey & Co of Morpeth, which advertised in 1852 (it may be merely a coincidence that its shop was only about 25 miles from Howick Hall).
As always, there are loose ends. But the stories that connect Earl Grey tea to a nineteenth-century aristocrat have been debunked. Earl Grey never drank Earl Grey.