been too loth to commit himself, had even tried to go beyond the popular anti-Austrian feeling, and at the Guildhall banquet on 25 April had spoken of the ‘criminal step which had been taken by Austria.’ A vote of want of confidence was carried on the motion of the Marquis of Hartington (the present Duke of Devonshire) in June, and Lord Derby gladly resigned, Palmerston once more becoming prime minister. The queen thereupon made him an extra knight of the Garter. He was also a G.C.M.G.
He had now to consider how best to deal with the existing political situation. The attempt to reunite the party which had followed Peel had been tried and had failed. A union with Lord Palmerston had been suggested and had failed also. His own followers were numerous, but insufficient in themselves to support a stable ministry. He therefore endeavoured to come to an understanding with Palmerston by which, in return for support against the radicals, the whig government was to promise the conservatives to govern on substantially conservative lines. In the main this understanding was successful; Lord Derby, as he put it, ‘kept the cripples on their legs.’ Accordingly, except for criticism on Lord John Russell's foreign policy, he had little to say to the ministerial policy for several years. This state of peace was grateful to him. His health was failing and he was more and more incapacitated by gout. Knowing that, although he might upset the liberal government, he was not strong enough to take and keep their place, he was content to exercise occasional authority through the House of Lords, and to leave to Disraeli the task of maturing combinations for the next election. One of these, the understanding with the Roman catholics, he himself imperilled by one of his characteristically rash pleasantries in a speech on the Roman Catholic Oaths Bill on 26 June 1865. On the other hand, in 1864, when leading liberals and many conservatives were strongly for intervention in the German-Danish war, it was due to Lord Derby's influence, and to a great speech, lasting three hours, which he delivered in the House of Lords on 4 Feb., that the government took no active step.
When he was sent for by the queen on the resignation of Russell's administration in June 1866, Derby exchanged a position of power without office for one in which he was much less able to support the causes with which his career had identified him. He again endeavoured to obtain the support of others than his own regular followers, notably of Robert Lowe (afterwards Lord Sherbrooke) [q. v.], but failed, and took office as before as the head of a purely conservative ministry. But in his impaired state of health most of the impulse of legislation lay with Disraeli. Derby spoke on the Parliamentary Oaths Bill, and though he described the ministerial reform bill in his speech on the third reading as a ‘leap in the dark,’ 6 Aug. 1867, and would have preferred, if he could, to let the question alone, he felt that something must be done, and nothing better was open than household suffrage. To this view he had been steadily coming for some time, and the bill was probably quite as much his own measure as Disraeli's. Whatever else may be said of it, two things are true—that it changed the current of English history quite as much as the Reform Bill of 1832, and that its consequences were probably as little desired as foreseen by one half of those who voted for it.
Almost his last appearance in parliament was in the debate on the address at the beginning of the autumn session of 1867. In January 1868 he was again attacked by gout; in February his life was in danger, and on 24 Feb. he retired, and Disraeli became prime minister. He at the same time gave up the formal leadership of his party in the House of Lords, though he continued to take part in debate. He spoke repeatedly and with great force against the disestablishment of the Irish church, both before and after the general election. His last speech was on 17 June 1869. At the end of the session he returned to Knowsley, was again attacked by gout, and, after a lingering and hopeless illness, died on 23 Oct., and was buried in the Knowsley village church. He left three children: Edward Henry, fifteenth earl of Derby [q. v.]; Frederick, afterwards baron Stanley of Preston and sixteenth earl of Derby (1841–1908); and Emma Charlotte, who married the Hon. W. Talbot.
There are several portraits of Derby at Knowsley: one, by Harlowe, representing him as a boy of eighteen, of which a replica is at Eton and an engraving was published in Baines's ‘History of Lancashire,’ vol. iv. A full-length by W. Derby was painted about 1841, and another by Sir F. Grant, P.R.A., engraved and published in 1860. There is a statue of him in Miller Square, Preston; and another, in Parliament Square, Westminster, was unveiled by Disraeli in July 1874, when he summed up Derby's achievements in the sentence, ‘He abolished slavery, he educated Ireland, he reformed parliament.’
Derby's reputation as a statesman suffers from the fact that he changed front so often. A whig, a Canningite, a strenuous whig
