STANLEY, Charles (1628-72)

Son of a royalist hero, 1651-60

For those royalists disappointed by Charles II’s failure to reward them adequately after the Restoration, Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby, became a talismanic figure. He had a distinguished royalist pedigree. His mother was a grand-daughter of William the Silent and niece to many of the leaders of the European Calvinist movement. She showed some of her grandfather’s martial spirit in her defence in her husband’s absence of Lathom House when besieged by Parliament in 1644 and in her initial haughty refusal to surrender the Isle of Man, over which the earls of Derby had a hereditary lordship, in 1651. Her husband, the 7th earl, was less militarily successful and Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, who appears to have had a long-standing distaste for the Stanley family, felt that the royalist loss of Lancashire, where the earls of Derby were the leading noble family, was entirely his fault and ‘proceeded from want of conduct and of a vigorous and expert commander’. Clarendon, Hist. Rebellion, ii. 470-71. The earl more than redeemed himself in royalists’ eyes by leaving the Isle of Man to join Charles II in his desperate invasion attempt in 1651, where after the defeat at Worcester he was captured, tried and condemned for treason in a show trial before a hastily-established court martial. He was executed at Bolton on 15 October. The 7th earl soon became, after Charles I himself, the best known and most lamented ‘martyr’ and his wife one of the foremost heroines of steadfast loyalty in the royalist pantheon. Their son the 8th earl further burnished his own and the family’s royalist credentials when he joined Sir George Booth, later Baron Delamer, in his rising in Lancashire and Cheshire in August 1659. He was one of the last insurgents to be captured. CSP Dom. 1659-60, pp. 114, 139, 145, 193. Upon his release from the Tower in February 1660 he wrote to the king expressing his devotion to him and desire to serve. John Barwick reported to Hyde that ‘all the gentry in those parts [Lancashire] … except those formerly in arms for the Parliament would willingly follow him [Derby]. … His reputation is now higher than ever because he was last in the field.’ Clarendon SP, iv. 498, 500-1.

The treatment of the earls of Derby in the memoirs of Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, indicates the significance royalists placed on the fate of the 7th earl’s unfortunate heir. To Ailesbury the 7th earl and his countess were exemplars of ‘steady and generous and loyal conduct’. In the troubled time of rebellion the earl was ‘most barbarously murdered by a pretended court martial, his estate confiscated or rather sequestered and from that time to the king’s joyful and happy restoration that noble lady and children lived, as one may term it, on the charity of friends’. After the return of Charles II, Ailesbury described how the dowager countess ‘presented a bill to the Parliament for to be restored to those lands her lord was obliged to divest himself of by force’ which

passed the two houses unanimously, and the Commons agreeing with the Lords, the whole house, save the Speaker and a few to attend him, went up with the bill to do it honour, and the king after having given his consent by the mouth of the Clerk to all save this, the Clerk pronounced Le Roy s’avisera, on which I have been told that the two houses fetched a deep sigh.

In fact, it was Derby himself and not his mother who presented the bill, or rather bills, for the restoration of the estate. Also the subscription of a large number of peers to the protest against the House’s passage of this bill on 6 Feb. 1662 suggests that support for it was far from ‘unanimous’. Nevertheless, Ailesbury crystallizes those events which make the 8th earl of Derby important to the parliamentary history of the early Restoration as well as the royalist, and later Tory, gloss on them. Ailesbury Mems, i. 4-6. The numerous bills Derby introduced in Parliament in an attempt to retrieve the Stanley estates lost in the 1650s became a cause célèbre between 1660 and 1662 and brought to the fore many of the contentious issues surrounding the Restoration settlement and the peace hoped for after the civil wars.

The extensive Stanley estates were centred in southern Lancashire, formed around a nucleus of the manors of Knowsley and Lathom in the hundred of West Derby. They also had subsidiary estates in other regions, particularly Flintshire in Wales, which were to be of great importance. Derby spent most of the 1650s engaged in risky schemes to claw back these confiscated lands which the Commonwealth government had begun selling off in June 1651. He made arrangements with his agents, most often the existing tenants on his property who had the right of pre-emption of the confiscated lands, that they would purchase the land in trust for him until he was able to reimburse them. However, he was frequently unable to make the required repayments, and often in return for a further ‘consideration’ (sometimes equivalent to three years’ value of the land), he entered into legal agreements formally conveying the land to his trustees and recognizing their title to it. The earl evidently saw this as a short-term measure before he could use the money accumulated by these transactions to buy the property back. More often than not he was unable to do so, though, and thus found that he had been complicit in signing Stanley land over to others. B. Coward, The Stanleys, Lords Stanley and earls of Derby (Chetham Soc. 3rd ser. iii), 71-73; Lancs. RO, DDK/12/4, DDK/1451-1474.

In his analysis of the peerage made to determine admission to the 1660 Convention, Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, considered Derby one of those peers ‘with the king’. The committee of which Wharton was part, largely made up of Civil War Presbyterian peers, did not initially summon Derby to attend the House, but he was among those royalist peers who, with the forbearance of George Monck, (later duke of Albemarle), were able to enter the House on 27 April. Bodl. Carte 214, ff. 69-70. Derby’s standing in the new political scene was also indicated by his presence among the king’s attendants at his entry into London on 29 May upon his return from exile. HMC 5th Rep. 184.

The Convention and Royalist Revenge, 1660

Derby was absent for only 20 sittings throughout the entire Convention. His first significant involvement in the House’s proceedings was a confrontation with his redoubtable mother, who had never been reconciled to him since he had (as she considered) married beneath him and without her permission in 1650. Her petition against the Convention’s confirmation on 23 May of her son’s title as hereditary lord of the Isle of Man (‘Lord of Mann’) was referred on 6 June to the committee of petitions, which set about arranging an agreement to divide the revenue equally between mother and son for a period of 21 years. The earl however still had effective government of the island and sole right to appoint its officials. PA, HL/PO/CO/7/3, 6 June 1660; Lancs. RO, DDK/12/11, 21. On 9 June her petition to have Parliament exempt from the bill of indemnity those men who had sentenced her husband to death was referred to the committee for privileges, and on 6 Aug. Philip Herbert, 5th earl of Pembroke, reported that the committee recommended that those who sat and gave judgment on the late earl should receive the punishment of the House. PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, pp. 15, 17, 18, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 45, 46, 48-49. The following day one of the earl’s judges, Colonel Thomas Croxton, was formally excepted from the indemnity bill, but on 25 Aug. Derby and Charles Dormer, 2nd earl of Carnarvon, were the only two peers to sign a protest against the House’s resolution to concur with the Commons in their desire to lessen the penalties against Croxton.

Derby was most concerned to recover the estates lost in the 1650s and his legal advisers first tried to do this through provisos exempting him from the bill for confirmation of sales as on 10 May 1660, and later through a series of private bills. JMH xxvi. 317-18; Lancs. RO, DDK/12/15-18. On 13 June a bill for the recovery of his Flintshire estates of Hope, Mold and Hawarden was introduced in the House and referred to the committee of petitions. PA, HL/PO/CO/7/3, 13 June 1660. Of all the sales of Derby’s lands these Flintshire estates were the most controversial and Derby perhaps saw this initial bill as a test case to gauge if he could proceed with claiming the remainder of his estate. Derby presented his case to repossess the estates in a long printed account. Add. 33589, ff. 217-20. That, and the extensive testimony given before the committee for petitions from 27 June to 12 July, set forth that in April 1652 the serjeant-at-law John Glynne^‡, acting as broker, had overseen an agreement between Derby and a consortium of Commonwealth officials, led by Sir John Trevor^‡ of Trevalyn, whereby they would buy the Flintshire estates in trust for Derby who engaged himself to reimburse them within a year. Derby had been unable to make this payment and in late 1653, at Derby’s request, Serjeant Glynne agreed to act ostensibly as trustee and purchase Hawarden, for which he paid the former purchasers £9,000. The earl though was paid only £1,700 to enter into a legal confirmation of the conveyance of Hawarden to Glynne and the other estates to the consortium. Derby and his counsel claimed that Glynne and the other purchasers had used coercive and fraudulent means with both Derby’s tenants and the earl himself to force this disadvantageous transfer of property to go through. In their defence the purchasers insisted that Derby had willingly entered into the agreement and even asked them to buy the estates in trust for him. They warned the committee ‘if your lordships shake the security of all purchases the whole nation will be in an earthquake’. PA, HL/PO/CO/7/3, 27 June, 3, 7, 12 July 1660. This was to be the crux of the matter. On the same day, 14 July, when Pembroke reported from the committee that there had been ‘force and fraud’ in gaining the conveyances from Derby, the bill for the confirmation of judicial proceedings was given its first reading in the House. Realization of this bill’s potential conflicts with Derby’s led to the continuous postponement of further consideration of his case throughout late July and early August. Derby’s cause received a boost by an order of the House on 14 Aug. that restored to him and to his fellow royalist sufferer John Paulet, 5th marquess of Winchester, all those estates which either of them had not conveyed away by law. It was perhaps because of this order that three days later the House finally gave Derby’s bill a second reading and committed it. This committee met from 21 to 27 Aug. and here Derby began to encounter more serious opposition among his peers, some of whom, such as William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele, had personal and familial connections with members of the purchasing consortium. PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/287 (13 June 1660), cttee mins. 21, 23, 25, 27 Aug. 1660.

The bill seems to have stalled in committee, probably because it was quickly superseded when Derby, perhaps encouraged by the tenor of the order of 14 Aug. 1660, introduced a more general bill on 22 August. This aimed to preserve his right of action and entry into all of his father’s former estates and offered to repay, at 6 per cent interest, those whose title to the property the earl had confirmed, after deducting the value of the profits the purchasers had received in the intervening years. The following day, 23 Aug., this bill was given its second reading and committed to the same one as was considering his Flintshire estate bill. PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/298A (22 Aug. 1660). On the 29th Derby’s bill to restore him to all the estates of his father passed the House. It was sent down to the Commons the following day but, probably owing to the press of business, was not further prosecuted before the summer recess. A bill to naturalize Derby’s Dutch wife Dorothea Helena also passed the House on the last day of August, only four days after having been first introduced. On 11 Sept. Derby dissented from a proviso devised by the House to concur with the Commons’ objections to recent amendments in the bill for confirming ministers. At the adjournment of Parliament for the summer two days later his wife’s naturalization bill received the royal assent while Derby’s own bill for the restoration of his estates was still stuck in the Commons. The Lords committee continued discussing Derby’s bill throughout the summer and in early September Derby’s claim to the manor of Gadsden in Hertfordshire, which had been part of a tangled inheritance dispute between William Stanley^†, 6th earl of Derby, and his sister-in-law, the wife of Thomas Egerton^†, Baron Ellesmere, was firmly quashed by the committee which upheld its possession by John Egerton, 2nd earl of Bridgwater, Ellesmere’s grandson. Herts. RO, AH 1058; PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/287 (13 June 1660), cttee mins. 31 Aug., 4, 5 Sept. 1660.

Neither of Derby’s estate bills may have been passed by the summer recess but the House had handed to him a number of decisions which greatly helped his condition and belie his later complaints of poverty and neglect. On 21 and 23 May 1660 the House ordered that Derby was to retake possession of all of his father’s property which was then in the hands of regicides such as Henry Marten^‡. On the same day as his bill for the Flintshire estates was first introduced, 13 June, he was formally put in possession of his lands which were still in sequestration and on 4 July another order of the House provided that Derby be supplied with all the relevant papers from the committee of sequestrations. On 29 June the House further gave him the right to search the premises of those suspected of having taken goods and papers from his family’s properties. Most importantly, orders of 16 July and 14 Aug. effectively put him into possession of those former lands ‘which he hath not passed away by any legal course of law’. Lancs. RO, DDK/12/13, 14. Derby was thus restored to a large portion of his real and personal estate, but a significant part, and one he felt keenly, was still barred to him by this proviso upholding those conveyances he had legally entered into and confirmed.

On their return from the summer recess the Commons had little time or inclination to deal with his bill and it does not appear to have received a second reading before the dissolution of the Convention at the end of the year. On 21 Dec. 1660 Derby submitted a petition for the hereditary office of lord great chamberlain, claiming to be through his grandmother the proper heir general of the de Vere earls of Oxford, against the competing claims of Aubrey de Vere, 20th earl of Oxford. CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 424. The House postponed the consideration of this matter to the next Parliament. Derby’s petition consequently came before the House again on 15 June 1661, but his claim to the great chamberlaincy dropped quickly from the Journal while that of the earl of Oxford came to a head in July. HMC 7th Rep. 145. At that time it was forecast that Derby would, understandably, support Oxford’s case against that of their mutual rival, Montagu Bertie, 2nd earl of Lindsey, the current holder of the office.

Estate bill and veto, 1661-2

Derby’s principal concern remained regaining his estate, so he had good cause to attend the first session of the Cavalier Parliament assiduously. His attendance level during the session stood at 93 per cent. When not overseeing his own bills he was nominated to 53 select committees, exactly half of those established on his days of attendance. He was also active in the sub-committee for the Journal, frequently signing his approval to the record of the House’s proceedings. Particularly in the winter of 1661-2 he chaired select committees on private legislation and during 13-25 Mar. 1662 he reported three bills from committee. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, 224, 267-68. On 17 May he reported from a conference on the bill to prevent thefts on the northern borders and two days later entered his protest against the House’s resolution to agree with the Commons in dropping two of the amendments from the highways bill, which the lower chamber had objected to because they considered the measure a money bill.

His own bill for restoring him to all his father’s estates, lost at the dissolution, was reintroduced in the House on 24 May 1661 and when it came up for a second reading on 5 June it already faced a petition against it from Sir John Trevor. The committee of 26 members appointed on 7 June to consider the bill was first assigned to determine whether the bill infringed the provisions of the recently-passed Act for Confirmation of Judicial Proceedings and Act of Indemnity. Pembroke reported to the House on 15 June that both the judges assisting and the committee itself considered that the bill did not contravene those acts. PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/304 (25 May 1661); HL/PO/CO/1/1, 23-24, 26. On 18 June the House was inundated with petitions from the purchasers of Derby’s land against the bill and these were referred to the committee, which considered them in detail two days later. By this time the tide of sympathy was beginning to turn against Derby. The petitioners argued that they had bought their property with Derby’s consent, acting as his trustees and agents, and in many cases had paid him up to three years’ value of the land to have their titles confirmed. Furthermore they pointed out that in the intervening time many of them had already sold their property to other people and that nowhere in his bill did Derby propose how he would raise the money, and interest, to redeem the properties. Derby’s counsel trotted out their usual arguments, that the earl’s conveyance of his property was ‘not a free act, but [done] when reduced for his allegiance to greater straits’. The committee began to waver, inserted various provisos put forward by purchasers and decided to leave it to the House to determine whether Derby should be relieved, as the committee could now find ‘no fraud or force’ in the majority of these transactions. However they did draw an exception with the consortium’s purchase of the Flintshire estates, ‘by reason of the undue practices which seem to be in the case’ and they felt the matter should be heard at the bar. On 26 June this report was made to the House and, after some delays, counsel for both Derby and the purchasers were heard on 6 July. Opposition, both from the purchasers and from members of the House, to this attempt to overturn mutually agreed legal contracts was too strong, and on 16 July it was ordered that further consideration of Derby’s case would not be heard until after the summer recess. In the meantime those purchasers of Derby’s lands who had been expelled by any previous act of Parliament or who had had their rent suspended were allowed to take possession of their properties pending the determination of the case. PA, HL/PO/CO/1/1, 29, 33-34.

Derby must have realized that his general bill for the restoration of his estates was unlikely to succeed in the current climate. He took advantage, therefore, of the only glimmer of hope the committee had provided him – the Flintshire estates and ‘the undue practices’ detected in their purchase. He proceeded no further with the general bill and on 10 Dec. introduced a revised bill for the recovery of Mold and Hope (no longer claiming Hawarden from Glynne, which even his supporters had told him was a lost cause), in which he offered to repay the consortium for the purchase of the estate with interest. The case was heard before the House early in the new year before the bill was committed on 13 Jan. 1662. Fifteen days later James Compton, 3rd earl of Northampton, reported with amendments to the bill. PA, HL/PO/JO/10/1/309 (10 Dec. 1661). It was read for its third time on 6 Feb. and remained controversial, for the House was forced to divide. The bill barely passed by a majority of five votes. The votes of those present in the House were 40 for the bill and 32 against. The eventual total (with proxies) was 42 contents and 37 not contents. The manuscript minutes for proceedings this day suggest that all those peers present and voting against the bill then signed a protest against it. PA, BRY/27, 6 Feb. 1662; HL/PO/JO/5/1/13, 6 Feb. 1662. They professed themselves disturbed because ‘we cannot look upon this but as a breach of the Act of Judicial Proceedings’, as the conveyances of the estate had been made good by law during the Interregnum and it was ‘no less than a trenching of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion’ as it appeared that Derby was relying solely on the status of the purchasers as former Parliamentarians to win the argument in his favour. Bodl. Tanner 49, f. 138.

Despite this energetic protest from a wide spectrum of religious and political views in the House, perhaps momentarily united in a wish not to see the indemnity promised by the Restoration settlement overturned, the bill was passed and sent to the Commons where on 17 Feb. a committee was appointed to examine it. After the case had been argued, both in committee and then before the bar, on 17 Mar. the Commons passed the bill with two amendments. It was then returned to the Lords once more. Derby himself petitioned the king for his assent to the bill. He pointed out that ‘many acts more contrary to actual law have passed unopposed and no bishop and only six members of the House of Commons voted against it’. The king and his ministers, though, were also faced with counter-petitions from the likes of James Fiennes, later 2nd Viscount Saye and Sele, whose daughter was married to one of the purchasers and even had the manor of Mold as her jointure. CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 31; CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 316. On 19 May the last day of the session, Derby’s bill was put before the king for the royal assent, but it was one of only two bills to be vetoed that day. Lord Chancellor Clarendon insisted in his final speech, ‘you cannot imagine [the veto] proceeds from his Majesty’s want of care and kindness to that noble family which hath served him so faithfully and suffered so much for so doing’. Ailesbury blamed Clarendon directly for the failure of the bill. He suspected the lord chancellor of having an animus towards the whole Stanley family and of favouring the claims of men such as Glynne and Trevor, as his ‘maxim in general was, and such he gave as advice, that his Majesty must reward his enemies to sweeten them, for that his friends were so by a settled principle, and that their loyalty could not be shaken’. Certainly, Glynne owed his promotion since the Restoration to Clarendon’s patronage. Ailesbury Mems, i. 6-7; Seaward, Cavalier Parlt. 55.

The veto was a bitter blow, made worse by the failure of the king’s attempts to, as Clarendon had promised in his speech, ‘make a better end for that noble earl than he would attain if the bill had passed’. Admittedly Derby’s ensuing petition was referred in June 1662 to Clarendon, Thomas Wriothesley, 4th earl of Southampton, John Robartes, 2nd Baron Robartes, later earl of Radnor, and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Baron Ashley, later earl of Shaftesbury—all listed as opponents of the original bill—to act as arbitrators between Derby and the purchasers. In July 1663 they arranged a settlement. By this the earl was to recover Hope and Mold by paying £11,000 in one lump sum by the end of March 1664. After Derby, according to the mediators, ‘having done nothing to the performance thereof’ failed to meet this deadline, the king acceded to the purchasers’ request and agreed to discharge the reference ‘that they may hereafter quietly enjoy the lands they have purchased’. At about the same time Derby tried another tack, arguing before the courts that as the Derby estates were entailed they should have reverted to him upon his father’s death. Derby and his solicitors had already received legal advice on this point in 1657. They sought the opinion of Sir Geoffrey Palmer^‡ again in 1663, when the attorney-general opined that as more than five years had elapsed since the 7th earl’s death it was too late for Derby to make this claim, but that his own heir would be able to sue for the entailed estates on this basis (as appears later to have happened). CSP Dom., 1663-4, pp. 614-15; Lancs. RO, DDK/1602/10; DDK/1602/4, 11. Nevertheless, despite these defeats in Parliament, Privy Council and the courts, the parliamentary orders granted to Derby of 23 May, 13 June, 16 July and 14 Aug. 1660 did allow him to reclaim a significant part of the former estate which had been in the hands of regicides or whose sale he had not legally confirmed. In addition he used these orders to repossess property at Burscough and Ormskirk. Despite the frequent petitions and claims of the new owners that these lands had been legally conveyed to them, neither Parliament nor the crown took any action against Derby. He remained litigious and used the courts to try to recover other properties, particularly the lands granted to the Stanleys in the Forest of Macclesfield. He was also able to buy back some of his former property from the purchasers, including Argood Hall in the contested manor of Mold. By the end of his life he was able to lease the old Derby manors of Bury, Pilkington, Weeton, Sowerby Magna, Sowerby Parva, Skelmersdale, Thirsk and Kirkby Malzard (the latter two in Yorkshire), in order to raise a marriage portion for his daughter Charlotte: all of them were manors reported to have been sold by the commissioners at Drury House in the 1650s. HMC 7th Rep. 134, 149; Lancs. RO, DDK/1602/6; DDK/1605/1-10; 1606/1-2; 1607/1-10; DDK/12/4; DDK/13/2, 4. In the early 1660s he was still in a position to bid for a lease of 12,000 acres of reclaimed fenlands in the Isle of Ely from the land drainage scheme of William Russell, 5th earl, later duke, of Bedford, (another signatory of the protest). CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 412-13; CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 315-16.

Friction with the king, 1662-3

By July 1663 relations between Derby and the king were at breaking point: over the veto, the ineffectual attempts at outside arbitration, and over Charles II’s opposition to much of what Derby was doing in his role as local governor of the north-western counties and Isle of Man. In addition to the lieutenancies of Lancashire and Cheshire to which he had been appointed in 1660, Derby held a number of local offices traditionally held by the Stanleys, including that of chamberlain of the exchequer of the county palatine of Chester, which he held jointly with his heir, William Stanley*, styled Lord Strange, later 9th earl of Derby. Ormerod, Hist. of Cheshire (1882), i, pt. 1. 60; Duchy of Lancaster Office-holders, ed. Somerville, 135. He concentrated on using these local responsibilities to maintain, as he saw it, order and loyalty. He did this by rigidly imposing Anglican uniformity and eradicating the last vestiges of ‘Presbyterian’ and ‘republican’ disloyalty in the areas under his influence. Both as lord lieutenant and the pre-eminent noble of Lancashire he exercised a formidable electoral influence, both for the county and for numerous boroughs such as Liverpool, Preston and Wigan. The Stanley interest was evident in the election of Derby’s younger brothers Edward as knight of the shire in 1661 and William as burgess for Liverpool in both 1660 and 1661. William had also been returned to the Convention for Thirsk, in North Yorkshire, where Derby was lord of the manor, but when William chose to take his Liverpool seat Derby was able to replace him with his cousin Charles Kerr^‡, 2nd earl of Ancram [S]. Derby then oversaw the election of Ancram for the Lancashire borough of Wigan in 1661.

Throughout late 1662 and 1663 the king and secretaries of state constantly upbraided Derby for his management of the lieutenancies of Lancashire and Cheshire. As a commissioner of the Corporation Act in Lancashire Derby proposed in October 1662 sweeping purges of local corporations that went well beyond the conditions of the Act. He suggested that all those who had stood against the king, regardless of whether they were now willing to take the requisite oaths, should be turned out of office. In Cheshire, Derby refused to co-operate with William Brereton^‡, 2nd Baron Brereton [I], his co-lieutenant there from 1662. The earl was eventually summoned to London to account for his actions. Neither did the king approve of Derby’s choice of three deputies in Lancashire. He suggested others, which Derby judged to be ‘the only examples of any recommendation of persons against the inclination of the lord lieutenant’. At the same time Derby tried to effect the omission of two deputy lieutenants there who represented two of the leading county families. Derby considered Sir Roger Bradshaigh^‡ and Colonel Richard Kirkby^‡ to be too lenient towards Catholics and Protestant nonconformists respectively; certainly Kirkby opposed Derby’s uncompromising stance on the corporations. In October 1662 Derby complained to Henry Bennet, later earl of Arlington, that these two men were trying to undermine his position among the Lancashire gentry and that they had conspired in 1660 to secure the appointment of Charles Gerard, Baron Gerard of Brandon, later earl of Macclesfield, based at Halsall, as lord lieutenant of the county. Gerard, a renowned royalist general in the Civil War, was an obvious rival and Kirkby and others continued to look upon him as a competitor for Derby’s local influence. Bradshaigh’s disaffection especially galled him, as he had been a childhood friend, raised with him by the 7th earl on the Isle of Man. Derby insisted, besides, that Bradshaigh owed his selection as knight of the shire in 1660 and 1661 entirely to his interest. CSP Dom. 1661-2, pp. 463, 483, 495, 509, 517, 524, 532, 549, 553, 596; 1663-4, p. 69; CCSP, v. 260, 270.

Most serious in further souring relations between Derby and the king was the treatment meted out to William Christian by the earl in his role as Lord of Man. Christian, who had led the revolt against the countess of Derby on the island and had helped deliver it to Commonwealth forces in 1651, dared to return there in 1662, confident that he was protected by the Act of Indemnity. Derby excepted him from his own general pardon for the island, charged him with treason and had him tried and found guilty by a packed local court. The Privy Council in Westminster, in considering a petition from Christian, determined on 12 Jan. 1663 that he should be reprieved and released from prison to attend the council. They were too late. The earl had already taken decisive action and had Christian shot by firing squad on 2 Jan. before the order from the council had been received. Derby and his officers were summoned to court to explain their actions. Derby in his defence claimed that the writ of the Act of Indemnity did not extend to Man, as the island had never been ‘taken anciently as a part of England (though in homage and subjection to it)’. The king and council, intent on seeing the act implemented and wary of the regional power of over-mighty nobles with putative independent jurisdictions such as Derby, were determined to put him in his place. The council insisted that the Act of Indemnity extended to England’s dependent territories as well. To humiliate Derby further, they made public their order of July 1663. They dismissed each of Derby’s specious arguments, punished Christian’s judges and compensated his widow and children (Derby himself was left untouched). Seventeenth Century, xv. 199-216; CSP Dom. 1663-4, pp. 9, 14, 238-39; Add. 1660-70, p. 687. In 1670 the Privy Council heard further complaints of inhabitants of the Isle of Man against Derby’s administration, but on this occasion Derby too turned to the council for his defence. HMC Kenyon, 85-86.

Hearings before the council over the Christian affair took place in the summer of 1663 and Derby appears to have taken the opportunity to attend 44 per cent of the sittings of the 1663 session of Parliament, where he was named to only five select committees, a fifth of those established during his days of attendance. Here his disgruntlement with his treatment by Charles II, and more particularly by the king’s principal advisor Clarendon, came to a head. Wharton predicted (surprisingly) that Derby would oppose the attempt of George Digby, 2nd earl of Bristol, to impeach Clarendon in July, just at the time when the council was handing down its judgment in the Christian affair. Wharton’s predictions were in many cases inaccurate. Thomas Salusbury, a newsletter writer for the young Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon, who later drew up a list of opponents of Derby’s bill, more plausibly suggested that Derby, ‘now persecuted for life and estate’ was one of Clarendon’s fiercest enemies and sided with Bristol to achieve the lord chancellor’s downfall. Bodl. Carte 77, f. 524. Derby emphasized his commitment to a rigidly conformist Church of England through his protest against the resolution of 25 July to add a clause to the Act of Uniformity that limited its declarations and subscriptions ‘solely’ to outward practice and obedience to the act. He thought this a diminution of their force which was ‘destructive to the Church of England as now established’.

After the prorogation of this session, Derby effectively dropped out of national politics, embittered by the crown’s poor treatment of himself and his beloved Church. He did not appear in the House at all after 27 July 1663 until 23 Feb. 1671. Neither did he ever delegate his vote through a proxy during these long years of absence.

Absent from the House, 1663-71

Throughout his career outside of Parliament Derby showed the same zeal for the Church of England and Anglican conformity as he did in his protest of 25 July. He was patron of the high churchman Isaac Barrow, later bishop of St Asaph, and ensured he was consecrated bishop of Sodor and Man in July 1663. In April 1664 he appointed Barrow governor of the island in his absence, and the bishop energetically built up the Anglican infrastructure of well-funded rectories and schools. CSP Dom. 1661-2, p. 429; Oxford DNB, ‘Isaac Barrow’. Derby wrote works of theological polemic, one of which, first published in 1669, consisted of two separate dialogues: &lsquoA Dialogue between Orthodox, a Royalist, and Cacodaemon, one Popishly affected’; and ‘Truth Triumphant: in a Dialogue between a Papist and a Quaker: Wherein (I suppose) it is made manifest that Quaking is the offspring of Popery’. Charles, earl of Derby, The Protestant Religion is a Sure Foundation and Principle of a True Christian and a Good Subject (1669); Charles, earl of Derby, The Jesuites Policy to suppress Monarchy Historically displayed with their Special Vow made to the Pope (1669). Through these dialogues he sniped at both extremes in the English religious divide. He may have felt particularly impelled to argue against both Catholics and radical Protestants because he was lieutenant of a county fiercely divided in its religious adherence and with strong and vociferous pockets of both extremes of nonconformity.

In his absence, on 26 Feb. 1670 Derby’s agents presented to the House a case of breach of his privilege. The Lords ordered the arrest of the plaintiff and her lawyer who had ordered the arrest of one of Derby’s menial servants. Exactly a month later they were discharged upon their petition. They claimed ignorance of the earl’s privilege and submitted themselves to his and the House’s mercy. Derby himself returned to the House, for the first time in over seven years, on 23 Feb. 1671. He proceeded to attend 45 meetings during the final weeks of the long session of 1670-1. After his long absence he was appointed to 20 committees, two-thirds of those established when he was present, a higher percentage than ever before, and he subscribed his name to the draft minutes of the Journal for 31 Mar. and 11 and 15 April. It was a long-standing legal dispute which finally prompted Derby’s return to the capital and to the House. In 1665 his brother-in-law John Murray, 2nd earl (later marquess) of Atholl [S] had submitted a bill in chancery to compel Derby to pay the marriage portion of his sister Lady Amelia-Sophie Stanley, countess of Atholl, as he had agreed to do by special articles drawn up between him, his mother and Atholl in 1660. Since that time Derby had successfully escaped proceedings by claiming privilege, but during the interval of Parliament in 1671-2 the cause was heard in chancery. Atholl was awarded a decree for £6,411, for which payment a portion of Derby’s surviving estate was to be sequestered. TNA, C 10/89/6; NLS, Lauderdale ms 597, ff. 253-54. The year 1665 also saw the arrangement of another Stanley marriage alliance that would turn sour, with ramifications for the next several decades. In that year Derby negotiated with the Cheshire peer Thomas Savage, 3rd Earl Rivers, for a marriage between Rivers’ heir Thomas Savage, styled Viscount Colchester, and Derby’s eldest child, Charlotte Henrietta. After it had been agreed that Derby would pay a portion of £8,000 while Rivers would settle lands on the couple, the marriage was solemnized in February 1666. Rivers however was not able to settle the expected lands, which led Derby to withhold payment of the portion for several years. TNA, C 9/307/85; C 9/189/15.

In late November 1672 there were reports of Derby’s brief recovery from an illness, but with ‘no great confidence of the continuance’. His death, intestate, on 21 Dec., left his many legal disputes unresolved. His widow was not granted administration of his estate until 3 Oct. 1674. HMC Kenyon, 93; TNA, PROB 6/49, f. 142. It was estimated that at his death his estate had a revenue of £4,212 p.a., out of which were to be paid annuities of £600 to his widow, £140 to his second son Robert (later killed in a duel in 1686), and £100 to each of his two youngest sons; £5,150 of his daughter Charlotte’s portion was yet to be paid. Lancs. RO, DDK/13/4-7. The title and remaining Stanley lands – as well as Derby’s many outstanding legal wrangles with Atholl, Rivers and others – were passed on to his eldest surviving son, who succeeded as 9th earl of Derby, and who was still a minor at the time of his succession. Derby’s greatest legacy to his heirs may have been the legal quagmires he had entered in his attempts to recover the family’s estate after the sales of the 1650s – as well as a deep and abiding resentment and anger over Charles II’s unwillingness to restore them to what they saw as their proper standing in English society.