Earl of Derby(1799–1869)

Edward Smith-Stanley was born at Knowsley Hall in Lancashire on 29 March 1799, heir to one of the oldest and greatest landed families in England, the Stanleys, earls of Derby since the fifteenth century. He was a gifted classical scholar who would later publish a respected verse translation of Homer's Iliad, a fine shot and sportsman, and from his entry into the House of Commons in 1822 one of the most powerful debaters of his generation, quick, fluent and combative, nicknamed in time the Rupert of debate.

His first great achievement came as a reforming Whig. As Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in the government of Earl Grey, it fell to him in 1833 to bring forward and carry through the House of Commons the bill for the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire. He introduced it in a powerful speech, steered it through the house, and saw it become the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which freed some eight hundred thousand enslaved people across the empire. It was one of the great humane measures of the century, and he was its parliamentary author.

Over the following years he crossed the floor on a matter of principle and became, in time, the leader of the Conservative Party, which he led for twenty-two years, longer than anyone before or since. Through the long mid-century dominance of his rivals he held a divided party together and kept it a serious force, the patient steward of a cause often out of power, waiting for his openings and taking them when they came.

He formed a government three times, in 1852, in 1858 to 1859, and from 1866 to 1868, the last great political chief to lead from outside the House of Commons in the modern era. The crown of his career came in his third ministry: the passing of the Reform Act of 1867, carried by his government, which roughly doubled the size of the electorate and gave the vote to a large part of the urban working class for the first time, a measure he called, with characteristic boldness, a leap in the dark.

Ill health, a lifetime of gout, forced him to give up the premiership in 1868, and he died at Knowsley the following year, on 23 October 1869. The Stanley name carries his memory as the scholar-aristocrat of Knowsley who put his eloquence to the freeing of the enslaved, led his party through a generation in the wilderness, and three times rose to govern the country, leaving the franchise wider than he had found it.