Edward George Geoffrey Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby (29 March 1799 – 23 October 1869), known as Lord Stanley from 1834 to 1851, was a British statesman and Conservative politician who served three times as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. To date, he is the longest-serving leader of the Conservative Party (1846–68). He is one of only four British prime ministers to have three or more separate periods in office. However, his ministries each lasted less than two years and totalled three years and 280 days. Derby introduced the state education system in Ireland, and reformed Parliament.
Historian Frances Walsh has written that it was Derby:
who educated the party and acted as its strategist to pass the last great Whig measure, the 1867 Reform Act. It was his greatest achievement to create the modern Conservative Party in the framework of the Whig constitution, though it was Disraeli who laid claim to it.
Scholars long ignored his role but in the 21st century rank him highly among all British prime ministers.
Edward Smith-Stanley was born on 19 March 1799 at Knowsley Hall, Lancashire. He was the eldest son of Edward Smith-Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby, and his wife (and first cousin) Charlotte Margaret Hornby. He was educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford.
Stanley's ancestors were Kings of Man from 1405 and later Lords of Man. Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby, switched sides at the Battle of Bosworth and placed the crown of the fallen King Richard III upon the head of Henry Tudor.
Early political career, 1822–1852
In 1822 Edward Stanley, as he was then, was elected to Parliament in the rotten borough of Stockbridge as a Whig, the traditional party of his family. In 1824, however, he alienated some of his Whig colleagues by voting against Joseph Hume's motion for an investigation into the established Protestant Church of Ireland. He lost his seat in 1826. When the Whigs returned to power in 1830, Stanley became Chief Secretary for Ireland in Lord Grey's Government, and entered the Cabinet in 1831. As Chief Secretary Stanley pursued a series of coercive measures which frequently brought him into conflict with the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Anglesey. In October 1831, Stanley wrote the Stanley Letter, to Augustus FitzGerald, 3rd Duke of Leinster, establishing the system of National Education in Ireland. This letter remains today the legal basis for the predominant form of primary education in Ireland. In 1833, Stanley moved up to the more important position of Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, overseeing the passage of the Abolition of Slavery Bill.
Stanley, a religiously devout Anglican, broke with the ministry over the reform of the Anglican Church of Ireland in 1834 and resigned from the government. He then formed a group called the "Derby Dilly" and attempted to chart a middle course between what they saw as the increasingly radical Whiggery of Lord John Russell and the conservatism of the Tories. Tory leader Sir Robert Peel's turn to the centre with the 1834 Tamworth Manifesto, published three days before Stanley's "Knowsley Creed" speech, robbed the Stanleyites of much of the uniqueness of their programme.
The term "Derby Dilly" was coined by Irish Nationalist leader Daniel O'Connell. Besides Stanley, the other principal members of the Dilly were Sir James Graham, who had resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty; Lord Ripon, who had resigned as Lord Privy Seal; and the Duke of Richmond, who had resigned as Postmaster General. These four ministers had come from notably different political backgrounds—Stanley and Graham were old Whigs, Ripon was a former Canningite Tory prime minister, while Richmond was an arch-conservative Tory who had incongruously found himself in the Grey cabinet.
Although they did not participate in Peel's short-lived 1835 ministry, over the next several years they gradually merged into Peel's Conservative Party, with several members of the "Derby Dilly" taking prominent positions in Peel's second ministry. Joining the Conservatives, Stanley again served as Colonial Secretary in Peel's second government in 1841. In 1844 he was summoned to the House of Lords as Lord Stanley of Bickerstaffe in his father's Barony of Stanley by a Writ of acceleration. He broke with the Prime Minister again in 1845, this time over the repeal of the Corn Laws, and managed to bring the majority of the Conservative Party with him (including, among others, the young Benjamin Disraeli). He thereafter led the protectionist faction of the Conservative Party. In the House of Lords, on 23 November 1847, he accused the Irish Catholic clergy of using the confessional to encourage lawlessness and crime. This was disputed in a series of letters by the coadjutor Bishop of Derry, Edward Maginn. In 1851 he succeeded his father as Earl of Derby.
The party system was in a state of flux when the Conservatives left office in 1846, the outstanding issues being the question of Ireland and the unresolved franchise. The protectionists had a core of leaders, of whom Derby was a leading light.
He is the only modern-era prime minister who never enjoyed a parliamentary majority. In his private diary, the Earl of Malmesbury in 1857 commented on Derby's failure to exploit the press:
Lord Derby has never been able to realise the sudden growth and power of the Political Press, for which he has no partiality, which feeling is reciprocated by its members. In these days this is a fatal error in men who wish to obtain public power and distinction. Lord Derby is too proud a man to flatter anybody, even his greatest friends and equals, much less those of whom he knows nothing.
Derby formed a minority government in February 1852 following the collapse of Lord John Russell's Whig Government. In this new ministry, Benjamin Disraeli was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. With many senior Conservative ministers having followed Peel, Derby was forced to appoint many new men to the office of the Cabinet, only three were pre-existing Privy Counsellors. When the aged Duke of Wellington, by then very deaf, heard the list of inexperienced cabinet ministers being read aloud in the House of Lords, he gave the government its nickname by shouting "Who? Who?". From then this government would be known as the "Who? Who?" ministry.
Traditionally Derby's ministries were thought in hindsight to have been dominated by Disraeli. However, recent research suggests that this was not always the case, especially in the government's conduct of foreign policy. There, Derby and his Foreign Secretaries, Lord Malmesbury and later his son Lord Stanley, pursued a course of action that was aimed at building up power through financial strength, seeking to avoid wars at all costs, co-operating with other powers, and working through the Concert of Europe to resolve diplomatic problems. This contrasted sharply with the policy of military strength and prestige that Disraeli would later pursue, and Derby's very different take on foreign policy could be seen as the precursor of "splendid isolation", as well as the diplomatic settlement of Europe pursued by later Conservatives in the late 19th century and the 1930s.
In the general election of June 1852, the Conservative party under Derby and Disraeli won only 330 seats in the House of Commons—42.9% of the total. Although the Whigs actually won fewer seats—292 seats—there were several small groups in Parliament that might be willing to side with the Whigs on particular issues, including the 38 Conservative members of Parliament who were Peelites, who had already joined with the Whigs in June 1846 to repeal the Corn Laws; the 113 members who were Free Traders and who were interested in eliminating all tariffs on consumer goods; and the 63 members of the Irish Brigade who were interested in the independence of Ireland and Tenant's Rights for Irish tenants. Immediately following the election in June 1852, none of these small groups were willing to work with the Whigs to form a government. Accordingly, the Earl of Derby was invited to form a minority government. Derby did so and appointed Disraeli as the new Chancellor of the Exchequer.