Edward Stanley, Fourteenth Earl of Derby

Prime minister of Great Britain (February 21-December 17, 1852; 1858-1859; 1866-1868)

• Born: March 29, 1799
• Birthplace: Knowsley Park, Lancashire, England
• Died: October 23, 1869
• Place of death: Knowsley Park, Lancashire, England

One of the leading British politicians at a time when Great Britain was at the height of its economic and political power, Derby oversaw the relatively peaceful democratic reform of his country.

Early Life

The fourteenth earl of Derby (DAR-bee) was born Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley into one of the greatest and oldest aristocratic families in Great Britain. The Stanleys had been ennobled in the fifteenth century and the first earl of Derby was created by Henry VII as a reward for abandoning Richard III. This was not the last time that the Stanleys would change their political allegiance dramatically. So great was their preeminence in the north of England that the earls of Derby were virtually uncrowned kings of Lancashire.

Young Edward Stanley was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. He was the Stanley family heir, and a brilliant political future was predicted for him. In March, 1822, he was first elected to the House of Commons as a moderate Whig for Stockport, in his native Lancashire, a borough that his father had represented. His first session in Parliament established his reputation as a fine speaker.

Over the years, Stanley’s brilliance as a slashing parliamentary debater was of major importance in bringing him political leadership, which even wealth and title could not guarantee. Perhaps the most significant development during his maiden session was personal. He was married in May, 1825, to Emma, the second daughter of Edward Wilbraham, later Lord Skelmerdale. In July, 1826, she gave birth to a son, Edward Henry Stanley, who would carry on the family tradition of political leadership as the fifteenth earl. Just before his son’s birth, in June, Stanley was elected for Preston, which, unlike Stockbridge, was a popular borough, with a substantial electorate. One of the borough’s two seats was usually held by a nominee of the Stanleys, and Stanley easily defeated the popular Tory journalistWilliam Cobbett . In April, 1827, he accepted his first ministerial position, undersecretary for the colonies in George Canning’s moderate Tory government, only leaving office when an ultra-Tory government came in (January, 1828).

Life’s Work

Stanley’s rise to the highest ranks of politics began when, after a long period of Tory dominance, the Whigs returned to power in July, 1830, under the second Earl Grey. Stanley was offered the post of secretary for Ireland, a thankless but important task because, following Daniel O’Connell’s leadership, a revived Irish nationalism was stirring. Stanley’s satisfaction at being offered this challenging post was chastened by an electoral setback. Ministers at this time, on appointment, were obliged to resign their seats and stand for reelection. When Stanley did so in August, 1830, a time of enthusiasm for reform, he was defeated by the radical candidate Henry “Orator” Hunt, and a safe seat had to be found for him before he could take up his responsibilities in July. A seat was found in Windsor in February, 1831. While Stanley generally acquitted himself well as Irish secretary, his personal relationship with O’Connell was extremely bitter. At one point he challenged the Irish leader to a duel, though nothing came of it.

The principal business of the Grey ministry was to deal with the demands for electoral reform. There had been virtually no redrawing of the boundaries of election districts for two centuries, though there had been much population growth and, more recently, movement of people as industrialization began to urbanize the country. As a result, virtually unpopulated areas had representation—“pocket” or “rotten” boroughs, such as Stanley’s own first seat—while the newly grown cities were underrepresented or completely unrepresented.

Property qualifications for voting also excluded from political participation substantial numbers of prosperous literate citizens. The remedy for these complaints was electoral reform, which finally passed into law after some grave difficulties, in June, 1832. Stanley had a leading role as one of the managers of the legislation’s successful passage through the house, though he had begun as a rather skeptical supporter of reform. He was hardly a believer in pure democracy, and his personal attitude is best exemplified by his suspicion that the secret ballot (not yet adopted at this time) would be used principally to conceal electoral fraud.

In December, 1832, following the elevation of his father to the peerage in his own right, as Lord Stanley of Bickerstaffe, he was elected to his father’s seat as member for North Lancashire, which he held for the balance of his service in Commons. Then, in October, 1834, on the death of Stanley’s grandfather (the twelfth earl), Edward Stanley became known by the courtesy title Lord Stanley, though still a commoner.

In March, 1833, Stanley changed office and became secretary for war and the colonies, and it became his responsibility to steer through the Commons a bill for the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. Despite his success, and the growth of his reputation, Stanley was displeased with his colleagues on the Irish issue, most particularly with Lord John Russell . Stanley was adamant that nothing should be done that might lead to depriving the Irish church of its privileged position. The state church in Ireland had more income than it could employ for ecclesiastical purposes. Russell pressed for the government to appropriate these funds for secular purposes. In protest, in May, 1834, Stanley led his followers, including three other cabinet ministers, out of the Whig Party and into opposition. O’Connell promptly dubbed them sarcastically “the Derby Dillies.”

While reluctant, at first, to make more than a tactical alliance with the Tories under Sir Robert Peel, and declining to enter the first Peel ministry, eventually, in July, 1835, Stanley cast his lot with them. He was quickly accepted as one of the principal Tory leaders, second only to Peel. By 1841, Stanley had joined the Carleton Club, making permanent his adherence to the Tories. Peel, forming his second ministry, that year offered Stanley the Colonial Office, which he accepted. As a result of Stanley’s objections, a relatively new Tory member, Benjamin Disraeli, was kept from a place. Stanley thought him a scoundrel.

In October, 1844, accepting a peerage as Lord Stanley of Bickerstaffe, probably because of growing differences with Peel, Stanley gave up his place in the Commons. At the time, Peel’s ministry was confronted with a growing demand for free trade, ending the protection of British agriculture by the Corn Laws. While many Tory landlords believed that this would ruin them, the rest of the Tory Party, and about a third of the Tory M.P.’s, following Peel, conceded that free trade was necessary.

The party split sharply, and Stanley, though not an ardent protectionist, led the Tory backbenchers out of the government and into opposition. Together with his sporting friend Lord George Bentinck, who was as passionately devoted to horse racing and breeding as Stanley himself, Stanley provided the natural leadership of the anti-Peelite Tories. Bentinck brought in his train the unlikely figure of Disraeli, hardly a rural Tory but useful in the Commons as an effective speaker. When Bentinck died unexpectedly in 1848, Stanley found himself linked with Disraeli in an enduring political partnership that, not many years before, would have been thought impossible.

Peel died suddenly in 1850, which added to the continuing political instability. Leaderless, his followers gradually drifted toward the emerging Liberal group within the Whig Party. Liberalism was beginning to divide the Whigs as free trade had split the Tories, but the process was a slower and less dramatic one. In the meantime, Stanley’s protectionist Tory Party, though the largest group in Parliament, was not numerous enough to form a ministry on its own. Despite Disraeli’s urgings, Stanley declined to abandon protectionism, at least until public opinion had been tested on the issue by a general election. The Tory rejection of free trade isolated them, making it difficult, if not impossible, to join any governing coalition.

In February, 1851, when the government fell, Stanley failed to organize a ministry. In June of that year, his father died, and he succeeded to the earldom. The following February, Lord Derby, as he now was, finally became prime minister, with Disraeli as his Chancellor of the Exchequer. The rest of the government (which included his son at the Foreign Office) was so young, inexperienced, or insignificant that it was dubbed contemptuously the “who, who ministry.”

The government was crippled from the start and never possessed the strength to carry on effectively. Derby clung to power, without a majority, until the end of the year. The succeeding government, Lord Aberdeen’s coalition of Whigs and Peelites, lasted until it blundered unprepared into the Crimean War. Once again, in 1855, Derby was offered the opportunity to form a government. Despite much grumbling from his followers, again, he was reluctant to accept responsibility without any prospect of success. When he finally managed to form his second ministry in February, 1858, on the fall of Lord Palmerston’s ministry, he had little success and was succeeded by Palmerston’s returning to office in June, 1859.

A central difficulty for Derby was that, in addition to his own antipathy to the Whig leader Russell, Palmerston declined service in any government that included Derby. Palmerston’s breezy popularity, in Parliament and the country, made him virtually indispensable in all the coalitions of the midcentury. Derby’s problems with forming a government were thus nearly impossible to surmount, despite the impatience of his party to enter a government coalition.

When the American Civil War interrupted the supply of raw cotton to British mills (many of which were in Lancashire), Derby played a leading role in organizing voluntary relief. Eventually supplies of cotton from the empire ended the “cotton famine” and its devastating unemployment.

After Palmerston’s death in 1865, the way was open, and Derby succeeded, in June, 1866, in organizing his third ministry with Disraeli as his chancellor and Leader of the House. Derby found widespread demand for electoral reform and a larger measure of democracy. Rather than leave the issue to the Whigs and Liberals, the Tories stole their program and passed the Reform Bill of 1867, which dramatically enlarged the electorate. Derby, carrying the bill through the Lords, conceded frankly that the new course, however necessary, was a leap in the dark. Derby’s last ministry, like its predecessors, was too weakly based to survive for long. Derby, now close to seventy, in poor health, much troubled by gout, resigned in February, 1868. He went home to Lancashire in the summer of 1869 and died, after a lingering illness, on October 23, 1869.

Significance

The fourteenth earl of Derby’s career in politics spanned half a century. Though almost from the first he was near the pinnacle of power and a brilliant success was expected for him, it was thirty years before he led a government. In the end, his record was one of disappointment and frustration. All three of his ministries were relatively short-lived; the first two accomplished little and in the third the lion’s share of the credit for its singular accomplishment, the passage of the Reform Bill, went to Disraeli.

Derby played a leading role in passing three of the century’s most important pieces of legislation: the abolition of slavery and the two reform acts. It is a curious achievement and legacy for a highly aristocratic and intensely conservative politician that he had a central role in laying the foundation of modern democracy in Great Britain. Derby was not a democrat, or even a political reformer, as a matter of conviction. His goal was to preserve the existing social order, church, and empire. The concessions made to democracy were, in his own eyes, a statesmanlike gamble, which he had the necessary self-assurance to make, in order to preserve as much as possible of the world he knew.

Despite his important achievements, Derby has been seen essentially as a failure. Peel and Disraeli have overshadowed him in the annals of his party. His contemporaries feared his sharp tongue and regarded him as unstable because he had twice broken with his leadership. He had the bad luck to lead the Tories at the nadir of their fortunes, when they were politically isolated and impotent, for which he received much of the blame. Even his frustrated Tory followers, though they respected him, tended to view him as an aloof, remote figure, not as much interested in political success as in horse racing, shooting partridges, and winning at whist.

It is undeniable that Derby was, in his personal habits, a country squire, though on a vast scale. The pose of the amateur politician, indifferent to power, however, masked, in classic Victorian fashion, a more complicated figure, a classical scholar who translated Homer and, above all, a shrewd lifelong professional politician who tried to cope with a society changing in unprecedented fashion and with extraordinary velocity. Modern historians, whether fairly or not, have tended to follow the Victorian judgment. On the crowded stage of Victorian statemanship, despite his accomplishments, he is seen as a supporting player.

Bibliography

Conacher, J. B. The Peelites and the Party System. Newton Abbott, England: David and Charles, 1972. A careful political study of 1846-1852. Together with his work on the Aberdeen government and Gash’s work, Conacher’s book contains a detailed study of the critical decade following the repeal of the Corn Laws when both parties, Whig and Tory, were deconstructed and new ones created out of their pieces.

Disraeli, Benjamin. Benjamin Disraeli Letters: 1862-1856. Vol. 6 in Benjamin Disraeli Letters. Edited by J. A. W. Gunn, et al. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982-2004. This volume of Disraeli’s letters contains sixty-three letters to Derby, including thirty-four previously unpublished letters, written when Disraeli was Chancellor of the Exchequer and attempting to unify the Conservative Party.

Gash, Norman. Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel After 1830. London: Longman, 1972. The second of two volumes covering the whole of Peel’s career. Whether as Derby’s collaborator or antagonist, he was the dominant figure in British politics from the first reform bill to his death.

Hall, Catherine, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall. Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender, and the British Reform Act of 1867. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A new interpretation of the second Reform Act. The authors maintain its passage was marked by controversy about the extension of the vote, concepts of masculinity, and the beginnings of the woman suffrage movement. Includes several references to Derby and an explanation of his reform proposals.

Harrison, Brian, and H. C. G. Matthew. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in Association with the British Academy: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. This standard reference work contains a biography of Derby. In addition to the print version, the dictionary is available in an on-line format that can be purchased by libraries and accessed by patrons.

Jones, Wilbur D. Lord Derby and Victorian Conservatism. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1956. The standard modern work on Derby. Covers the whole career but the value is limited because its author did not have access to the Derby papers.

Prest, John. Lord John Russell. London: Macmillan, 1972. The political career of Derby’s contemporary and lifelong rival.

Stewart, Robert McKenzie. The Politics of Protectionism: Lord Derby and the Protectionist Party, 1841-1852. London: Cambridge University Press, 1971. A sympathetic treatment of the critical political decade, based on the Derby manuscripts. Stewart’s later work, The Foundations of the Conservative Party, 1830-1867 (New York: Longman, 1978), is a careful and well-documented overview of party politics.