STANLEY, William Richard George (1655-1702)

STANLEY, William Richard George (1655–1702)

styled 1655-72 Ld. Strange; suc. fa. 21 Dec. 1672 (a minor) as 9th earl of DERBY

First sat 15 Feb. 1677; last sat 25 May 1702

b. 18 Mar. 1655, 3rd but 1st surv. s. of Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby, and Dorothea Helena (d. 6 Apr. 1703), da. of Jan van den Kerckhove, Ld. of Heenvliet [Dutch]; bro. of James Stanley, later 10th earl of Derby and Charles Zedenno Stanley‡. educ. travelled abroad (France and Italy) (tutors, James Forbes, Thomas Fairfax) 1673-5;1 m. 10 July 1673 (with £10,000), Elizabeth (1660-1717), da. of Thomas Butler, Bar. Butler of Moore Park, styled earl of Ossory [I], 4s. d.v.p., 2da.2 suc. fa. 21 Dec. 1672 as Ld. of Man; d. 5 Nov. 1702; will 19 May 1692; pr. 7 July 1705.3

Steward, Furness, Lancs. 1672-d.;4 ld. lt. Lancs. 1676-Sept. 1687, Oct. 1688-May 1689, June 1702-d., Cheshire 1676-Jan. 1688, Oct. 1688-Apr. 1689, N. Wales June 1702-d.; cust. rot. Lancs. 1681-87, June 1702-d., Cheshire 1682-88;5 chamb., co. palatine of Chester 1677-d.; freeman, Preston by 1682;6 vice-adm., Lancs. and Cheshire 1684-91.7

Associated with: Knowsley Hall and Lathom House, Lancs. 1672-d.; Castle Rushen, Isle of Man.

Likenesses: mezzotint by R. Tompson, after Sir P. Lely, 1679, NPG D1744.

Succession and marriage 1672-7

Stanley was still a minor at his father’s death in December 1672, but his uncle William Wentworth, 2nd earl of Strafford, quickly found him an influential guardian by helping to arrange his marriage in July 1673 to Lady Elizabeth Butler, the daughter of the earl of Ossory [I], the eldest son of James Butler, duke of Ormond [I].8 Strafford always remained interested in the education of his nephew, but it was primarily Ormond who took the young earl under his protection. In November 1673 Ormond wrote to him that

it is certain there are few things in the world I have set my heart upon or that I am more desirous to employ my uttermost industry and interest in than to be an instrument of restoring your family in your person to that greatness and honour which hath so long been hereditary to it.9

This reassurance came at a time when the duke’s initial hopes for Derby had been dashed by the young man’s irresponsibly spendthrift and scandalous behaviour during his travels in France, where he appears to have been complicit in an attempt to assassinate his tutor and keeper James Forbes, while a later tutor, Thomas Fairfax, later wrote in despair to Ormond from Venice that ‘I hope we may persuade him [Derby] to do something of reason till he comes to be of age; but what may happen after, God knows’.10 Later Ossory was to describe Derby as ‘ill-natured and obstinate’ towards his daughter Elizabeth and Derby’s ill-treatment of his wife was lamented by many associates of the Butlers.11

Derby reached his majority in March 1676, and quickly had responsibility thrust upon him. In May he took over the Stanleys’ quasi-hereditary offices of lord lieutenant of Lancashire and Cheshire, which had been exercised in trust by John Egerton, 2nd earl of Bridgwater, since the 8th earl’s death. The young earl was chosen to sit in the court of the lord high steward, convened on 30 June 1676 for the trial of Charles Cornwallis, 3rd Baron Cornwallis, whom he found, with the majority, not guilty of murder.12 Derby first sat in the House itself on 15 Feb. 1677 when it reconvened after its long prorogation, and he proceeded to sit in four-fifths of the meetings of the long and frequently adjourned session of 1677-8. On 2 Apr. 1677 a private bill for ascertaining ‘the interest’ regarding fines of the lord (Derby himself), and tenants of West Derby and Wavertree in Lancashire was introduced in the House and went through both chambers before eventually receiving the royal assent on 20 Mar. 1678. Derby entered his first dissent on 16 Apr. 1677, against the decision to acquiesce with the Commons in their insistence that the Lords could not make amendments to the bill for building 50 new warships, which the Commons considered a supply bill. Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, at this time considered Derby a ‘worthy’ member of the House, and Derby gave a strong hint of his political leanings by assigning his proxy on 25 Mar. 1678 to Charles Powlett, 6th marquess of Winchester (later duke of Bolton), who held it for the remainder of the session.

Pleasing neither side, 1678-85

Derby missed the following session completely, although on 14 June 1678 he made the House aware of a breach of privilege committed against him, and from 12 Nov. 1678 his proxy was again held by Winchester. He appeared in the House on 23 Dec. 1678 to ‘great rejoicing’ among the enemies of the beleaguered lord treasurer Thomas Osborne, earl of Danby (later duke of Leeds). One contemporary thought that he and the two other new arrivals in the House, Henry Herbert, 4th Baron Herbert of Chirbury, and George Coventry, 3rd Baron Coventry, ‘must be worked on by the king’, and that, of the three, Derby was considered the most likely to be amenable to the court’s persuasions.13 For the remaining five days of the session, however, Derby acted consistently with the country opposition against Danby. On his first day back in the House he dissented from the decision that Danby did not have to withdraw after the articles of impeachment against him were read, while on 27 Dec. he voted to commit the lord treasurer and signed his dissent against the House’s rejection of this motion. On 26 Dec. Derby had registered his opposition to the House’s insistence that the money for disbandment of the troops raised for intervention in the war on the continent be placed in the exchequer (rather than in the chamber of London, as the Commons wished), and on the last day of the session he was appointed a manager for a conference on the disbandment bill.

Derby was a diligent attender of the first Exclusion Parliament, coming to 95 per cent of the 61 sitting days of its second (full) session. In March and April 1679, Danby consistently forecast that Derby would be in the opposite camp. In early April Derby voted for the bill of attainder against him. On 7 Apr. he dissented from the resolution that John Sidway stand committed to the Gatehouse for his allegations against Peter Gunning, bishop of Ely, and other bishops. Derby was named a reporter for a conference on 24 Apr. concerning the answers of the impeached lords. On 2 May he protested against the passage of the bill to remove Catholics from London, on the grounds that the required oaths would entrap ‘honest Dissenters’ as well as Catholics. Between 8 and 27 May he signed a series of six protests by which he showed his support for the proposal for a joint committee to discuss arrangements for the trials, his objections to the right of the bishops to sit and vote in hearings of capital cases and his opposition to the House’s decision that the Catholic peers should be tried before Danby.

It is not immediately apparent why Derby should have been so driven against the lord treasurer and such a firm adherent of country positions in 1679. Perhaps he hoped to avenge his father against Charles II, who in 1662 had vetoed the 8th earl’s bill for the resumption of lands in Flintshire confiscated and sold in the Civil War. But his royalist family background and Anglican religious leanings point to him favouring the court and pressure from his uncle Strafford and from members of the Butler clan, especially Ormond, may have helped to cool his country fervour.14 In any case, his enthusiasm for opposition appears to have diminished quickly as, once the matter of Danby and his trial had died down, he did not attend any of the sittings of either the second or third Exclusion Parliaments, probably to avoid getting involved in the far riskier issue of the exclusion of James*, duke of York from the throne.

The elections following the dissolution of the Cavalier Parliament had provided Derby with his first opportunity to exercise his family’s local electoral influence, but there is little evidence that he took an active role in the Lancashire and Cheshire elections of 1679, and his most prominent involvement was in negotiating with Thomas Belasyse, 2nd Viscount (later earl of) Fauconberg, over their selection of the Members for the borough of Thirsk, where the returning officer was elected in the manorial court still controlled by the Stanleys.15 Later, during the elections of 1681, Ormond strongly encouraged Derby to support ‘men of moderation and temper, true lovers of their religion, king and country’ in Cheshire, but later heard to his distress that at the poll Derby did not side with ‘the better party’.16 Derby may have wished to act as a unifying figure in the bitterly divided counties under his stewardship, which had large pockets of both Catholics and radical nonconformists. The clerk of the peace Roger Kenyon‡, one of his principal supporters, considered that

he is not swayed with the violent humour of this impetuous age and discourses of the high flyers of either side find no hearty entertainment with him. He is faithfully loyal and a true son of the Church of England; free from fanaticising and far from popery as any subject whatsoever.17

By trying to sit on the fence, however, he did not please anybody, least of all the court. Ormond heard rumours that the king was intending to divest him of his lieutenancies and in May 1682 he brusquely informed him that the king was not at all pleased with a half-hearted loyal address recently sent from Lancashire, even though Derby himself had expressed his satisfaction that ‘there are more hands to it than I expected there would have been, considering the diversity of opinions the gentlemen are of in this country’.18 Derby’s loyalty was questioned in the summer of 1682 over the visit of James Scott, duke of Monmouth, to the notoriously whiggish Chester.19 The earl managed the embarrassing situation the best he could in the face of the popular rejoicing at Monmouth’s entry into the city, and purposely stayed away from the duke at the Wallasey races, only giving him a short, civil greeting when Monmouth approached him. This polite avoidance of the duke ‘disgusted some persons’ among the county’s Whigs, while Ormond and the rest of the court did not think the earl had sufficiently shown his disregard for Monmouth and were concerned by his lax military provisions against the possibility of a rising in Chester.20

The Reign of James II, 1685-8

After having received only criticism for his attempts at neutrality during Monmouth’s visit, Derby sided more decisively with the court as the Tory reaction took hold. Despite earlier complaints about his ‘slackness’, Derby proved himself energetic in rounding up suspects, searching for arms and engineering fulsome loyal addresses after the Rye House Plot, when disaffected Cheshire again came under suspicion, and the king responded by approving both of his conduct and of his proposed deputy lieutenants.21 For the elections of 1685 Derby promised Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, that ‘I will be very diligent in employing my interest for the election of good members for the Parliament. I will attend as many of the elections as possible and take care that none be chosen but persons of approved loyalty’.22 For the election at Wigan he was able to assist in the return of two cousins: Lord Charles Murray‡ (later earl of Dunmore [S]) and Charles Kerr‡, 2nd earl of Ancram [S], the latter having been the borough’s Member since 1661. At the county election he successfully opposed two sons of peers who had been among Monmouth’s leading supporters in 1682 and against whom he was going to struggle for the rest of his career—Richard Savage, styled Lord Colchester (later 4th Earl Rivers), who was also his sister’s brother-in-law, and Charles Gerard, styled Viscount Brandon (later 2nd earl of Macclesfield). One of the successful candidates for the county seat, Sir Roger Bradshaigh‡, 2nd bt., was concerned by Brandon’s last-ditch attempt to win a seat at Lancaster and felt that ‘if we can but keep Lord Brandon out of Lancaster, I hope the king will have no cause to fault our elections in this county’. To prevent this Derby stationed part of the county militia in Lancaster, ‘for the rabble will certainly commit some grand riot if they do not actually rise in rebellion’.23

Derby assiduously attended James II’s Parliament in its first few weeks, primarily in order to oversee the passage of his bill, read for the first time on 26 May 1685, to restore to him the manors of Hawarden and Mold in Wales, Bidstone in Cheshire and Broughton in Lancashire.24 This was an attempt in part to revive the bill to recover the former Stanley estates in Flintshire, sold in the Interregnum, which his father had introduced in 1661 and which had been vetoed at the last minute by the king because it tried to void sales legally entered into during the Interregnum and thus went against the Act for confirmation of judicial proceedings. Derby clearly harboured the Stanleys’ resentment against the loss of these lands and their subsequent treatment by the ‘ungrateful’ Charles II, for as he told his family steward, ‘he possessed no estate in Lancashire, Cumberland, Westmorland, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Warwickshire and Wales, but whenever he viewed any of them he could see another near or adjoining to that he was in possession of equal, or greater of value, lost by his grandfather [James Stanley†, 7th earl of Derby] for his loyalty and service to the crown and his country’.25 Upon inheriting the title in 1672 Derby and his guardians had sought out legal advice to determine the best course to repossess the lands by law and from almost the moment he reached his majority he brought suits in the courts to enter into possession of those lands, particularly the forest of Macclesfield, which had originally been entailed on the Stanley male heirs.26 In this way in 1682 he had been able to regain Hope in Flintshire, which had been in his father’s original bill, as heir in tail.27 Resuming this campaign through Parliament in 1685, Derby prepared himself for the opposition his bill in 1685 would inevitably face. He drew up answers to the various points made against his father’s bill in the Lords’ protest of 6 Feb. 1662, including an answer to the objection that the 8th earl had voluntarily entered into legal conveyances in the 1650s, which the 9th earl thought was ‘no more than when a man beset with robbers delivers them nine parts of his goods to save the tenth and perhaps his life’.28 Derby further offered to reimburse the present occupants the original purchase price with interest (less the profits accrued from the land) but all his preparations and concessions were for nought as the bill was held up by the panic surrounding Monmouth’s landing in the west, and was never considered when the House resumed briefly in November 1685.

Lukewarm Williamite and Lancashire rivalries, 1688-92

Derby remained a firm Anglican in a county well-known for its large number of Catholics, and as early as July 1686 there were rumours that James II intended to replace him in the lieutenancy of Lancashire by the leading Catholic peer of the county, Caryll Molyneux, 3rd Viscount Molyneux [I].29 In about May 1687 his name appeared on a list of lords opposed to James II’s policies. In September 1687 Derby was replaced by Molyneux as lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum of Lancashire. In three lists covering late 1687 and early 1688 Derby was listed as an opponent of repealing the Test Act. In January 1688 the king removed Derby from his offices in Cheshire and replaced him with the Catholic William Herbert, marquess of Powis. At around this time Danby listed Derby among the opposition to the king in the Lords. By October, however, James was prepared to reinstate Derby in his former lieutenancies in an attempt to shore up his flagging support. While Derby was in Westminster consulting with the king about his counties, he was also learning of William of Orange’s invasion plans at conclaves of the ‘Cockpit’ circle, to which he had probably been introduced by his brother-in-law James Butler, 2nd duke of Ormond. Henry Compton, bishop of London, convinced Derby to accept the king’s commission so that he could use the Lancashire and Cheshire militias in support of William’s invasion and also advised him to consult with the Cheshire Whig Henry Booth*, 2nd Baron Delamer (later earl of Warrington), who was planning his own rising for the prince of Orange. In early November, while Derby was still waiting for the king’s official commission to arrive in Lancashire, he and Delamer met and agreed that Delamer would rise and join William as soon as he landed, while Derby would stay behind in the northwest to raise the militia of the two counties and use it to hold the counties for the prince. On 15 Nov. 1688 Delamer duly declared for William and marched towards Nottingham, but impetuously claimed that Derby would soon join the revolt himself. This was not what Derby had agreed and he forwarded Delamer’s declaration to James with a note distancing himself from his actions. He then hesitated in raising the militia, allowing independent forces, which contained a large number of Catholics, to hold Chester until the royal army was formally disbanded. It was only when William had arrived in London on 17 Dec. that Derby felt he should take sides and he entered Chester that day with a declaration in support of William, which the mayor and corporation of the city refused to sign, ‘resolved to address (as they had acted) apart’.30 He also, belatedly, ordered the confinement of the disbanded Catholic officers of the garrison, and on 19 Dec. anxiously wrote to Ormond for his advice and ‘assistance that the prince of Orange may have a true account of what I have done’.31 It was too late. Derby’s dithering and hesitation in raising the militia, and the presence of Catholic forces in Chester, convinced Delamer that Derby had gone back on his side of the agreement (an accusation which Derby’s man of business and stalwart defender Roger Kenyon was later at pains to refute) and he took advantage of his proximity to William to turn him against the earl. Delamer himself wrote to Derby ‘your lordship must think you cannot be esteemed by the Prince or those with him as a man that has given any assistance to the cause, and I believe the nation will have the same opinion of you’.32 Delamer later assured George Savile, marquess of Halifax, that the king had known very well that Derby had decided ‘not to do anything till the business was decided in the west’.33

Perhaps wishing to recover from the damage thus done to his reputation, Derby supported the Orangist claims to the throne in 1689, both in the Lancashire elections to the Convention and in the House itself.34 Derby himself attended just over two-thirds of the first session of the Convention, where on 31 Jan. 1689 he voted to declare William and Mary king and queen and protested against the rejection of this motion. Through his votes and protests over the first week of February he supported the motion that the throne was ‘vacant’ and that James had abdicated. On a personal matter on 7 Mar. Thomas Savage, 3rd Earl Rivers, submitted an appeal against chancery’s dismissal in July 1688 of his suit against Derby and his uncle Strafford. In 1688 Rivers had presented a bill in chancery to reclaim family lands in Essex which had been put in trust to Derby and Strafford to raise a £10,000 portion for Charlotte Katherine Savage, the only daughter of Derby’s sister Charlotte Stanley and Thomas Savage‡, styled Lord Colchester, who had been Rivers’ heir presumptive before his death in 1680 (and thus the elder brother of Derby’s Cheshire rival, Lord Colchester). Charlotte Katherine had died unmarried and underage in 1686 upon which Rivers, always eager to extract himself from his financial worries, thought that the trust settlement, ostensibly for his grand-daughter’s portion, was made void and tried to re-enter his estates. He was blocked by Derby who claimed that Charlotte Katherine had made a will making him an executor charged to pay debts and fulfil several legacies with the £10,000. The House heard counsel for both sides in this case on 29 Apr. after which they dismissed Rivers’ appeal, but the issue over this portion and the Essex estates was to keep the Stanleys and Savages at loggerheads for several decades. On 31 May Derby voted against reversing the two punitive judgments against Titus Oates and on 2 July dissented from the resolution to proceed upon the impeachments of Sir Adam Blair and others, who were accused by the Commons of publishing libels against the new monarchs. On 14 July he was given leave to go into the country for a fortnight and the following day he registered his proxy with his uncle (married to Ossory’s sister) the Williamite, William Cavendish, 4th earl (later duke) of Devonshire. He returned to the House on 2 Aug. 1689 and on 16 Aug. told in the division on a clause in the bill against the export of wool which would exempt the Eastland, African and Russian companies from its provisions.35 In the winter he came to 54 per cent of the meetings of the second session of the Convention, where he was named to three committees.

By this time Derby had been sorely disappointed in his search for preferment from the new regime. There was a stark contrast between the advancement of his wife (the daughter of an old favourite of William), who was appointed groom of the stole to her friend Queen Mary, and who was also well-known in the ‘Cockpit’ circle of Princess Anne, and Derby himself who lost all his local positions.36 In April 1689 William III installed Delamer in Derby’s place as lord lieutenant and custos rotulorum of Cheshire and then, after Derby proudly asserted that he would not serve in only one lieutenancy, added to his humiliation the following month by appointing Brandon to Derby’s positions in Lancashire. Derby quickly took a prominent position as the leader of the Tory gentry in Lancashire against the controversial Whig lord lieutenant. Carmarthen (as Danby had since become) classed him as among the supporters of the court on a list of October 1689 to Feburary 1690. Even so, in the run-up to the 1690 elections Derby identified with the local Tories, telling his principal associate Roger Kenyon ‘we must bestir ourselves’ and ‘I hope all our party will unite and lay aside all animosities among one another’.37

Derby and Kenyon, clerk of the peace for Lancashire and Member for Clitheroe in William and Mary’s first Parliament, worked very closely together until Kenyon’s death in 1698. In 1691 Derby, as hereditary lord, appointed Kenyon governor of the Isle of Man. Derby himself made a rare visit to the island in July 1691, where he indulged in some elaborate ceremonial but also further prosecuted his long-standing dispute with the commissioners of the customs over their competing jurisdictions over the island and its trade, which came to a head that summer in the affair of the ship the St. Stephen and its suspect cargo. Derby’s claims to independent sovereignty over an island that played such an important role in the sea lanes around Ireland could not have endeared him to the government—despite the continuing pension he received from the Crown for the maintenance of poor ministers on the Island—and may account for Derby’s removal from the vice-admiralty of the Lancashire and Cheshire coasts in 1691, which was also given to Brandon.38

After attending a little less than half of the sittings of the first two sessions of William and Mary’s first Parliament in 1690-1, Derby came to about two-thirds of the meetings in 1691-2. On 3 Dec. 1691 William Widdrington, 3rd Baron Widdrington, as executor of the will of William Stanley, a second cousin of Derby, petitioned that the earl be made to waive his privilege so that evidence and depositions concerning the will could be taken in chancery. Stanley had been entitled after his father’s death in 1676 to an annuity of £600 charged on the estates of the earls of Derby but, Widdrington claimed, Derby had long refused to pay this even though chancery had already decreed against him in 1688. Now Derby was claiming privilege and making objections in order to further obstruct probate. Despite Derby’s assertion that the will, disinheriting him as Stanley’s heir general, had been fraudulently obtained by Widdrington and his Catholic coterie at Stanley’s deathbed, the committee for privileges on 15 Dec. found in favour of Widdrington’s petition.39

Barely was that case settled when Derby raised controversy again by reintroducing on 16 Dec. his bill for the resumption of his father’s estates in Mold, Hawarden, Broughton and Bidstone. Using a printed list of the peerage of England as his template, he forecast that at least 59 peers would vote for his resurrected bill, based on what he estimated had been his support in 1685, while he considered only 13 definitely against it and nine ‘doubtful’. Unfortunately for him, the 13 included some of the most influential officials, ministers and courtiers of William III’s government: Devonshire; Halifax; Carmarthen; the earl of Warrington (as Delamer had become); Daniel Finch, 2nd earl of Nottingham; Charles Sackville, 6th earl of Dorset; and Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton. It is doubtful that Derby was even close to accurate in his optimistic prediction of the forces ranged in his support, for in the event the bill and the legal arguments underpinning it were thrown out of the House at the second reading on 25 Jan. 1692.40 Derby continued to attend the House until the end of the session, and on 16 Feb. he protested against the resolution that proxies would not be allowed during proceedings on the divorce bill of Henry Howard, 7th duke of Norfolk. On 23 Feb. he signed protests against the passage of the poll tax to which the Commons had tacked on a clause establishing a commission of accounts, and against the insufficient response of the House to this, in making only a half-hearted entry in the Journal against the measure.

Withdrawal from Westminster, 1693-1702

Perhaps because of his disappointment at the harsh rejection of his estate bill, Derby withdrew even further from public life. He was largely absent from the following three sessions from 1692 to 1695 and in all three entrusted his uncle, Lord Steward Devonshire, with his proxy, first on 10 Nov. 1692 for the entire 1692-3 session and then on 14 Nov. 1693, although he did eventually appear on 13 Mar. 1694 for a total of six meetings of that session. Devonshire again received his proxy on the second day of the 1694-5 session, 12 Dec. 1694, but Derby arrived on 26 Feb. 1695, after which he sat for another 26 meetings until 30 Apr., just before the prorogation. On 15 Feb. 1695 a private bill to ratify a lease made by Derby for Marton Meare in Lancashire had been introduced in the Lords; it passed smoothly through both Houses, receiving the royal assent on 22 Apr., though Derby was largely absent during the proceedings on the bill.41

A series of deaths among the northwest’s Whigs in 1694 changed the political landscape. Warrington and Macclesfield died within a week of each other in early January, thus in a short space of time removing Derby’s principal rival in Cheshire (Warrington’s heir was a minor) and raising his Lancashire rival, Brandon, to the peerage as 2nd earl of Macclesfield. The Tory gentry were anxious that Derby, melancholy and withdrawn through his recent reverses, should more strenuously petition the king for the vacant lieutenancy of Cheshire. Once again Derby hoped to get the lieutenancies of both counties, but William III denied him, keeping Macclesfield in the role in Lancashire, and not filling the Cheshire lieutenancy until April 1695, when he gave it to the 4th Earl Rivers, as Lord Colchester had become on the death of his father in September 1694. Derby seems to have blamed his brother James, knight of the shire for Lancashire as well as a groom of the bedchamber and a military confidant of William III, for his disappointment, believing that he had not promoted his cause sufficiently at court. From this point relations between the brothers steadily declined.

Macclesfield’s divisive approach in Lancashire caused the county’s Tories to look all the more to Derby for leadership. Macclesfield was the main impetus behind the prosecution of the so-called ‘Lancashire Plot’ in the summer of 1694, in which eight of the county’s leading Tories, six Anglicans and two Catholics, were arrested and charged, but ultimately acquitted, of plotting a Jacobite rising in the northwest. The deep divisions within Lancashire led to bitterly contested elections in 1694 and 1695, during which Derby unsuccessfully opposed Macclesfield’s candidates and supported Tories on the weakened Stanley interest. Roger Kenyon’s son reported to his father on 16 Nov. 1695, after the Lancashire elections were over, ‘My lord is uneasy under his disappointment, and quarrelsome with everybody that is concerned with him’.42

A discontented Derby continued his low attendance of the House in the first two sessions of the new Parliament and he only seems to have appeared in 1695-6 at the continued urging of the House in order to sign the Association. He arrived on 13 Apr. 1696, well after the deadline of 31 Mar. set by the House, duly signed the Association and then only stayed for a further five meetings. The House cracked down on absent peers again in the following session, ordering Derby (and others) on 14 Nov. 1696 to attend by the end of that month. He appeared late on 1 Dec. and was thus able to cast his vote in favour of the attainder of Sir John Fenwick‡, 3rd bt., on 23 December. During the 1696-7 session he was confronted in the House with a series of petitions against him. The first came on 26 Oct. 1696 when Roger Sawrey and his son Jeremiah petitioned successfully to be allowed to move for a new trial, after Derby had won an action of ejectment from the manor of Broughton, which the Sawreys had occupied for more than 40 years and which Derby had tried to reclaim in his bills of 1685 and 1691. The House ordered that if the Sawreys applied to the exchequer for a new trial and an arrest of the current judgment, it would not be considered a breach of privilege. On 2 Mar. 1697, Derby in turn complained to the House of a breach of privilege because the exchequer had arrested his attorney, Edmund Gibson, for refusing to hand over to the court the attornments the Broughton tenants had signed for Derby. Two weeks later the Sawreys answered that Gibson had procured these attornments through threats after the Sawreys had successfully moved for a new trial. They hoped that the attornments would be vacated and their ownership of the manor, as it existed before the judgment in Derby’s favour, would stand for the purposes of the new trial. The report from the committee for privileges on these petitions was considered on 23-24 March. The House determined (and entered the resolution among its standing orders), that a common attorney or solicitor employed by a peer did not enjoy privilege of Parliament. It also persuaded Derby to vacate the attornments collected since the initial verdict and to recognize the Sawreys’ ownership of Broughton for the purposes of the new trial.43

The Sawreys’ case was only one of the legal difficulties Derby had to deal with in 1697. On 18 Mar. he signalled to the House his consent to the petition of Charles Fairfax, 5th Baron Fairfax of Elmley [I] and Colonel Ralph Widdrington‡, executors of the 1694 will of the 3rd Baron Widdrington, to examine additional witnesses to prove the wills of both Widdrington and William Stanley.44 On 20 Mar., in response to a petition submitted a week earlier, Derby assured the House he would waive his privilege in the suit Thomas Cooper and his wife, a cousin of Charlotte Katherine Savage, wished to bring against him as executor and trustee of Charlotte’s will.45 He was also confronted on 23 Mar. with a petition from his own mother, who wished to settle in the courts her dispute with her son over the matter of arrears of £600 in her annuity. There was a bad-tempered dispute with the widow of Vere Fane, 4th earl of Westmorland, who on 25 Mar. submitted to the House her claim to arrears of a fee-farm rent payable out of Derby’s Isle of Man estate, which involved accusations against him that Derby deemed ‘scandalous’. It was reported on 7 Apr. that the two had come to a private settlement of the matter.46

Derby came to only four of the meetings of the 1697-8 session. On the first of them, 15 Mar. 1698, he voted against committing the bill to punish Charles Duncombe‡, before registering his proxy on 29 Mar. with Charles Boyle, 2nd earl of Burlington, and leaving the House for the session. In his absence Fairfax and Widdrington had complained again on 18 Feb. 1698 that Derby was invoking his privilege in order to stop the executors of Lord Widdrington and William Stanley from publishing depositions taken in proving the wills. Derby tried to refute this in late March. On 5 May the House was informed that he had come to a private agreement with Fairfax and Widdrington, the terms of which were to be entered in the House’s Journal.47 This case rumbled on for many years outside of Parliament, however, until finally in July 1702 chancery decreed that Derby was to pay the executors’ arrears on the annuity amounting to £15,380.48

Meanwhile Derby’s relationship with his brothers had become so fractious that he opposed (though unsuccessfully) the candidacy of James for knight of the shire in August 1698. On 9 Jan. 1699 James and Charles submitted a petition against him in the Lords, requesting Derby waive his privilege so they could sue him in chancery for the recovery of arrears of the annuities due to them. Derby was clearly annoyed by this further attack from his own family and in his brief answer to the petition he claimed that he had always been ready to pay them if they would merely state their accounts and argued that ‘the petition is unnecessary and frivolous’.49 Derby was not then in the House having missed the beginning of the session. Only after letters from the House had been dispatched to him on 17 Jan. and 13 Mar. 1699, did Derby take his seat on 24 Mar. for the trial of Edward Rich, 6th earl of Warwick, but he only came a further four times, leaving as soon as the trial was over.

Under Macclesfield’s lieutenancy, Derby’s local influence declined to such a low point that he was left out of the quorum in the commission of the peace for Lancashire in April 1699, for the first time in his long career on the county magistrates’ bench, which had begun in 1681 (apart from his brief removal from the bench entirely from April 1688 to March 1689).50 He faced another personal and public blow in October 1699 when his only surviving son and heir James, styled Lord Strange, died of smallpox in Italy during his travels abroad, aged 19. The tragedy also affected Derby politically, for it made his brother James heir to the earldom and a leading power for the Whigs in the county. In the aftermath of the death of his son, Derby did not attend any of the sittings of the 1699-1700 session. Derby campaigned, again unsuccessfully, against his brother, James in the two elections of 1701. In January 1701 he was particularly bitter and wrote letters to his associates ‘in hopes to remove (if there be occasion) a scruple in some to oppose Colonel Stanley, being my brother, which title I may freely quit him of, after what he has done to me… He makes use and slights the alliance as a man changes his habit according to the weather’.51 Derby came to one-fifth of the meetings of the 1701 Parliament, most likely spurred on by the Tory impeachments of the Junto ministers, and he tried to block the acquittal of John Somers, Baron Somers, signing protests against him on 9 and 17 June and voting against the acquittal on that latter date.

A glimmer of hope for the renewal of his influence came with the death of Macclesfield in November 1701. In the run-up to the elections of winter 1701 it was reported that Derby was ‘making all the court to the gentry he can’ to regain the lieutenancy, partly so that he could use its electoral influence against his brother. William, however, gave the lieutenancy and custos of Lancashire to Rivers instead. 52 Derby first sat in the next Parliament on 17 Mar. 1702, after William III had died, and went on to sit for a further 13 meetings. After years in the political wilderness, he was quickly rewarded by Queen Anne as part of the Tory purge of local government. In June he was re-granted his long-coveted offices of lord lieutenant and custos of Lancashire. He does not appear to have objected to not receiving the same offices for Cheshire, at this point at least. He was also given command of North Wales, which had previously been held by Macclesfield. Derby now campaigned to replace his brother James as ranger of the ‘five forests’ in Lancashire and once again tried, though unsuccessfully, to unseat him from the county representation for Anne’s first Parliament.53 Derby did not have long to enjoy his new position in county society. It was probably illness which kept him from attending the new Parliament, and he died on 5 Nov. 1702. In his final days, without male heirs, he revised his will to ‘prevent suits after my death’ concerning the estate. Its terms made disputes almost inevitable. Scarred by the recent history of the estate, he was intent on keeping its entail intact and bequeathed all the lands to brother James, now termed ‘beloved’ despite their recent acrimonious history, and his male heirs and, failing any in his line, to his youngest brother Charles and his heirs. At least, a copy of this will survives in the Derby family papers, but either it was not known of at the time of death or it was disputed, for it was said that Derby ‘died without will who was giving with one favourite daughter £20,000’, and the will proved in the registers of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury dates from 1692 and is concerned wholly, to the exclusion of all other matters, with the tuition and maintenance of the (now deceased) Lord Strange.54 Certainly there was extended litigation over the estate between the new earl, and his nieces, between whom the family’s subsidiary barony of Strange was in abeyance. By an agreement hammered out in 1715 after much dispute the 10th earl maintained control of Knowsley (which he rebuilt and made the grand home of successive earls of Derby) and the Isle of Man, while his nieces kept, and eventually sold, the estates of Lathom, West Derby, Upholland, Wavertree and Everton. Thus the 9th earl of Derby, much embittered by disappointment and failure during his life, did not leave a happy legacy, with a divided and estranged family engaged in disputes over politics and the disposition of the dismembered family estate.

C.G.D.L.

  • 1 CSP Dom. 1673, p. 443; HMC Ormonde, n.s. iii. 331-72.
  • 2 Add. 33589, ff. 102-7; HMC Ormonde, n.s. iii. 326, 452-3; Lancs. RO, DDK/13/8; 14/1.
  • 3 TNA, PROB 11/482.
  • 4 Duchy of Lancaster Office-Holders ed. Somerville, 135.
  • 5 Glassey, JPs, 275, 279, 285; CSP Dom. 1689-90, pp. 181, 335, 404; HMC Kenyon, 213.
  • 6 Preston Burgesses (Lancs. and Cheshire Rec. Soc. ix), 180.
  • 7 Sainty, Vice-admirals (correcting CP).
  • 8 Add. 33589, ff. 102-7; Lancs. RO, DDK/13/8; 14/1; HMC Ormonde, n.s. iii. 453; Bodl. Carte 243, ff. 81-82.
  • 9 Add. 33589, ff. 118-9, 166-7.
  • 10 Add. 33589, ff. 147-231, 246-277; HMC Ormonde, n.s. iv. 338-9, 365-70.
  • 11 HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 80, 235, vi. 59.
  • 12 State Trials, vii. 157-8; HEHL, EL 8419.
  • 13 Add. 28049, ff. 34-35.
  • 14 HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 80, 234-5, 343, 567, vi. 126; Add. 28042, f. 83.
  • 15 HMC Var. ii. 164-6.
  • 16 HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 611, vi. 151.
  • 17 HMC Kenyon, 148.
  • 18 HMC Ormonde, n.s. vi. 151, 362, 369-70; HMC Kenyon, 142.
  • 19 CSP Dom. 1682, pp. 313, 342-3, 389-90.
  • 20 HMC Ormonde n.s. vi. 428, 436-7, 444-5, 453, 455-6; HMC 7th Rep. 533; CSP Dom. 1682, pp. 393, 396-9, 406-11, 421-2, 431-2; Trans. Hist. Soc. Lancs. and Cheshire, clxiii. 30-31.
  • 21 CSP Dom. July-Sept. 1683, pp. 61, 111, 186, 273, 314, 350; HMC Ormonde, n.s. vii. 58-59, 95, 229.
  • 22 CSP Dom. 1685, p. 30.
  • 23 HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 284, 286-7, 292, 294; HMC Kenyon, 178-80; CSP Dom. 1685, pp. 119-20.
  • 24 HMC Lords, i. 285-6.
  • 25 Seacome, Mems… of the… House of Stanley (1793), 385.
  • 26 Lancs. RO, DDK/1604/2-4, 1602/4.
  • 27 Lancs. RO, DDK/1608/1-47, 1609/1-17, 1610/1-23, 1611/1-44, 1612/1-15, 1613/1-6.
  • 28 Lancs. RO, DDK/1602/9, 1615/7, 8.
  • 29 Verney ms mic M636/41, E. to Sir R. Verney, 19 July 1686.
  • 30 Bodl. Eng. Hist. c. 711, f. 100.
  • 31 Add. 33589, ff. 302-5.
  • 32 HMC Kenyon, 197-202, 204-7, 431-2; Hosford, Nottingham, Nobles and the North, 37-8, 87-9, 105-7.
  • 33 Chatsworth, Holland House Notebk. section W, f. 1r.
  • 34 HP Commons, 1660-90, i. 284, 290; HMC Kenyon, 210.
  • 35 HMC Lords, ii. 258.
  • 36 Morrice, Entring Bk. iv. 531; Add. 61432, f. 2.
  • 37 HMC Kenyon, 213, 233-4, 236-7.
  • 38 HMC Kenyon, 135-6, 149, 251-66; CSP Dom. 1690-1, p. 406; HMC 13th Rep. VI, 166-9, 381, 387.
  • 39 HMC Lords, iii. 346-7; Lancs. RO, DDK 15/5; 1614/10; 1616/1.
  • 40 HMC Lords, iii. 450-3; Lancs. RO, DDK 1615/9.
  • 41 HMC Lords, n.s. i. 508.
  • 42 HMC Kenyon, 281, 284-7, 386.
  • 43 HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 251-3; Lancs. RO, DDK 1613/9.
  • 44 HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 536; Lancs. RO, DDK 1616/2, 3a.
  • 45 HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 532-3.
  • 46 HMC Lords, n.s. ii. 537-41; Lancs. RO DDK 1616/3b.
  • 47 HMC Lords, n.s. iii. 99-100.
  • 48 Lancs. RO, DDK 1614/9.
  • 49 HMC Lords, n.s. iii. 276-7; Lancs. RO, DDK 15/15.
  • 50 Glassey, JPs, 275, 284n.7; Lancs. RO, DDK 15/1.
  • 51 Lancs. RO, DDK 15/22; HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 320.
  • 52 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 320; Glassey, JPs, 285.
  • 53 HP Commons, 1690-1715, ii. 321; Add. 29588, ff. 85-87, 91-92, 121-2.
  • 54 Lancs. RO, DDK 1617/7; TNA, PROB 11/482; C 9/345/43; Verney ms mic M636/52, C. Gardiner to Sir J. Verney, 24 Nov. 1702.