Colonel Rawstone after the fatal battle of Marston Moor, and was ultimately abandoned at the express command of the king, having cost the enemy not less than six thousand men. Meanwhile the earl and countess had retired to the Isle of Man, and remained there during the years that followed the final overthrow of the royal cause, holding out their little kingdom in spite both of the threats and the persuasions of the parliament. In 1651, however, when Charles II. entered England at the head of the Scottish army, he summoned Derby to meet him in Lancashire. The earl instantly obeyed the command, and fixed his head-quarters at Wigan, while his emissaries attempted to raise the military array of the county. But while waiting the arrival of his friends, he was suddenly attacked by Colonel Lilburn at the head of an overwhelming force, and after a desperate resistance, his little band were nearly cut to pieces. The earl himself, having had two horses killed under him, escaped almost alone and covered with wounds, and joined Charles at Worcester. On the final overthrow of the royal army, he quitted that city in company with the king, whom he directed to the celebrated retreat of Whiteladies and of Boscobel, and then made for his own country. He was taken prisoner, however, on the borders of Cheshire, and conveyed to Chester, where he was tried by a commission for treason and rebellion, and condemned to die. By a cruel aggravation of his sentence, the execution was appointed to take place in his own town of Bolton. He was beheaded 15th October, 1651. When his body was laid in the coffin, the following lines, referring to his ancestry, were thrown into it by an unknown hand:—
" Wit, bounty, courage: all three here in one lie dead—
A Stanley's hand, Vere's heart, and Cecil's head."
After her husband's death, the countess still held out her domain of Man with unbroken spirit, till at length it fell by treachery into the power of the government. This intrepid woman died in 1652.—J. T.
DERBY, Edward Geoffrey Smith Stanley, fourteenth earl of, for many years chief of the conservative party, was born at Knowsley Park, Lancashire—son of the thirteenth earl—in 1799. He was educated at Eton, and at Christchurch, Oxford, gaining at the latter, in 1819, the Latin verse prize; the subject of it being "Syracuse." In 1822 Mr. Stanley entered the house of commons as member for Stockbridge in Hampshire, one of the boroughs afterwards disfranchised by the reform bill. He seems to have been in no hurry to take a part in the discussions of the house. His maiden speech was not delivered until the 30th of March, 1824, but it is described by the usually uncritical and uncriticising reporter of Hansard as one "of much clearness and ability," though the subject, a Manchester gas bill, was not particularly suggestive. Sir James Mackintosh, who followed the young member for Stockbridge, complimented him on his success, and hailed him as a promising supporter of liberal principles. Mr. Stanley's second parliamentary speech, delivered on the ensuing 6th of May, showed, however, that on one subject his views were not those of ordinary liberalism. It was the very question on which he afterwards seceded from his whig colleagues, the question of the Irish church establishment, which he defended with conservative energy from an assault formally made upon it by Mr. Joseph Hume. During succeeding years, Mr. Stanley was recognized as a skilful debater, and his combination of talent with social position led to his receiving the appointment of under-secretary of state for the colonies in Lord Goderich's ministry of transition. He had become member for Preston in 1826, and his liberalism received, perhaps, a slight check when, at the general election of 1830, he found his former constituents rejecting him in favour of Henry Hunt, the mob orator. Room was made for him at Windsor, and in Lord Grey's ministry he was appointed, with a seat in the cabinet, to the then very important and trying post of chief secretary for Ireland, one which brought him into contact and collision with O'Connell and his followers. He remained Irish secretary until March, 1833, lending his aid to his colleagues in the discussion on the reform bill, founding the system of mixed education in Ireland, and already beginning to make oratorical war upon O'Connell and repeal. In March, 1833, he became secretary of state for the colonies, and had in that capacity to propose and conduct through the house the celebrated act for the emancipation of the slaves. He had brought to a successful issue, about the same time, the church temporalities act; but in the summer of the following year he took umbrage at the further concessions of his colleagues in the direction of reducing the Irish church establishment, and, with Sir James Graham, resigned office—an example speedily followed by the duke of Richmond and the late earl of Ripon. The Melbourne ministry, which succeeded the resignation of Earl Grey, was followed by Sir Robert Peel's short premiership, and one of the first acts of Sir Robert, when called on to form an administration, was to offer high office to Mr. Stanley. The letter in which the offer was made, and that in which it was declined, are published in the second volume of Sir Robert Peel's lately published memoirs, and it will be enough to state that Mr. Stanley, while delicately hinting at the possibility of a future coalition, shrank from it at the moment, on the ground that the new premier had steadily opposed the whole policy of Lord Grey's administration, while he, Mr. Stanley was at issue with his former colleagues on only a single question, the Irish church. From that period onward, however, Mr. Stanley found himself in steady opposition to the whigs, and on the formation of Sir Robert Peel's second administration in 1841, he became once more secretary of state for the colonies. He held this post until December, 1845, when he resigned from an inability to assent to the policy of corn-law repeal. Meanwhile, having represented North Lancashire since 1832, in September, 1844, he had been raised to the upper house, during his father's lifetime, as Lord Stanley, nominally to augment the debating strength of the conservative party in the lords by the addition of his polished, vivid, and trenchant oratory. On the break-up of the conservative party and deposition of Sir Robert Peel, which followed the repeal of the corn laws. Lord Stanley became its acknowledged leader; and, succeeding his father as earl of Derby in 1851, he was called on by the queen to form his first conservative administration in February, 1852, on the resignation of Lord John Russell. It fell in the following December, and for upwards of six years Lord Derby resumed the leadership of the conservative opposition. Once during the interval, on the resignation of Lord Aberdeen's coalition-ministry in February, 1855, he received her majesty's commands to attempt to form a ministry, but resigned the task on finding Lord Palmerston decline his overtures for a coalition. When Lord Palmerston was defeated in February, 1858, on the second reading of the conspiracy bill. Lord Derby, in compliance with the emphatically-expressed wishes of the sovereign, formed his second administration, which was overthrown by a vote of want of confidence passed by the house of commons in June, 1858, in answer to the speech from the throne. In 1866, on the defeat of the reform bill introduced by Mr. Gladstone, he again became prime minister; and in the following year, under the "educating" influence of Mr. Disraeli, passed a more radical measure that granted household suffrage. Soon after this his health gave way before his enemy the gout—the statesman's disease. He resigned the premiership in favour of Disraeli, and made but one more conspicuous appearance in public life, when in 1869 he rose to oppose Mr. Gladstone's bill for the disestablishment of the Irish church. He died at Knowsley on the 23rd October, 1869. In 1854 he was elected lord rector of the Glasgow university, and in 1852 chancellor of that of Oxford. His lordship was the author of a translation of Homer's Iliad, and of a little work, "Conversations on the Parables," which first appeared many years ago.—F. E.
* DERBY, Edward Henry, fifteenth earl of, eldest son of the preceding, was born at his father's seat of Knowsley, July 21, 1826, and was educated first at Rugby under the late Dr. Arnold, then at Trinity college, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1848, taking a first class in classics and other honours, bearing the courtesy title of Lord Stanley. In the same year he contested unsuccessfully the representation of the borough of Lancaster, and started on a transatlantic tour, in the course of which he visited the United States, Canada, and the West India islands. While absent he was elected (September, 1848) member for King's Lynn, succeeding Lord George Bentinck. On his return, he published in May, 1850, a pamphlet in the form of a letter to Mr. Gladstone, entitled "The Claims and Resources of the West India Colonies;" and on the 31st of the same month he delivered his maiden speech in the house of commons. It was in support of a motion of Sir Edward Buxton, asking the house to affirm the injustice of admitting slave-grown sugar to compete with the free-grown sugar of our colonies. His views on the West India question were more fully developed in another letter to Mr. Gladstone, July, 1851,
