[2] In 1837 he was made clerk of appeal and then registrar to the judicial committee of the Privy Council..[3] From 1840 to 1855 he wrote for The Times, his close touch with men like Guizot, Christian Bunsen, Lord Clarendon, and his own chief at the Privy Council Office, Charles Greville, enabling him to write with authority on foreign policy during the critical period from 1848 to the end of the Crimean War.

Upon the promotion of Sir George Cornewall Lewis to the Cabinet early in 1855 Reeve was asked by Longman to edit the April number of the Edinburgh Review, to which his father had been one of the earliest contributors, and in the following July he became the editor.

In April 1863, he published perhaps the most important of his contributions—a searching review of Kinglake's Crimea;[4] and in 1872 he brought out a selection of his Quarterly and Edinburgh articles on eminent Frenchmen, entitled Royal and Republican France.

[6][7] A purist in point of form and style, of the school of Thomas Macaulay and Henry Hart Milman, Reeve outlived his literary generation, and became one of the most reactionary of old Whigs.

[3] A striking panegyric was pronounced upon him by his lifelong friend, the duc d'Aumale, before the Académie des Sciences on 16 November 1895.