mail train and see his horses' gallops next morning. Still he was not unsuccessful on the turf. In the twenty-two years of his racing career, down to 1863, when he sold his stud and quitted the turf, he won in stakes alone 94,000l., and the letter which he wrote to the Jockey Club in 1857, giving notice of a resolution that a sharper named Adkins should be warned off Newmarket Heath, has always been considered a compendium of the principles that should guide the conduct of race meetings.
[Two lives of Lord Derby have appeared, by T. E. Kebbel and G. Saintsbury. Derby is also elaborately criticised in Kebbel's History of Toryism. See, too, Greville Memoirs; Malmesbury's Memoirs of an ex-Minister; Disraeli's Lord George Bentinck; Walpole's Life of Lord John Russell; Dalling and Ashley's Life of Palmerston; Martin's Life of the Prince Consort; Memoirs of J. C. Herries; McCullagh Torrens's Lord Melbourne; Roebuck's History of the Whig Ministry; Scharf's Catalogue of Pictures at Knowsley; Trevelyan's Life of Lord Macaulay; Walpole's History of England; Count Vitzthum von Eckstädt's A Residence at the Courts of St. Petersburg and London; Fitzpatrick's Correspondence of O'Connell; Hansard's Parliamentary Debates.]
STANLEY, EDWARD HENRY, fifteenth Earl of Derby (1826–1893), eldest son of Edward George Geoffrey Smith, fourteenth earl of Derby [q. v.], by his wife, Emma Caroline, second daughter of Edward, first lord Skelmersdale, was born on 21 July 1826. He was at school at Rugby, under Arnold, though not much influenced by him, and then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where, besides taking college prizes, he was tenth in the first class of the classical tripos, and fourteenth junior optime in the mathematical tripos of 1848. Down to the time of his leaving Cambridge, he was a member of the undergraduate society known as ‘The Apostles,’ most of whose members became eminent in after life (Leslie Stephen, Life of Sir James Stephen, p. 102). He graduated M.A. in 1848, and was made LL.D. on 9 June 1862, and D.C.L. of Oxford on 7 June 1853. In March 1848 he contested the borough of Lancaster as a protectionist, but was beaten by six votes, and then made a prolonged tour in the West Indies, Canada, and the United States. During his absence he was elected, on 22 Dec. 1848, to fill the vacancy at King's Lynn caused by the death of Lord George Bentinck. Often afterwards he was asked to contest other seats—for example, Edinburgh in 1868—but only once, in 1859, when he stood for Marylebone, without success, against Edwin James and Sir Benjamin Brodie, was he tempted to leave King's Lynn. He represented the constituency continuously till he succeeded his father in the earldom in October 1869.
As the result of his tour he published a pamphlet on the West Indian colonies in 1849, followed by a second in 1851, which stated the planters' case very clearly and to their entire satisfaction. His maiden speech, too, in the House of Commons, which Peel praised highly and Greville (Memoirs, 2nd ser. iii. 337) mentions as giving promise of great debating power, was made, on 31 May 1850, on Buxton's motion on the sugar duties. He took his place in the ranks of the conservatives, now led by his father; but he was not naturally a party man, and in opinion approximated to the moderate whigs. He travelled widely, and was when young an ardent mountaineer. He again visited Jamaica and Ecuador in the winter of 1849 and 1850, publishing privately on his return a book called ‘Six Weeks in America,’ and it was while absent on a tour in Bengal in March 1852 that he received the post of under-secretary for foreign affairs in his father's first administration. He held office till its fall in December, when he went with his party into opposition. In 1855, on the death of Sir William Molesworth [q. v.], Lord Palmerston, knowing him to be at heart more of a liberal than anything else, and struck by the ability displayed in his speech on the Government of India Bill in 1853, made him the offer of the colonial secretaryship. But this proposal Stanley, at his father's instance, declined. He spoke during these years principally on Indian and colonial questions, and on such social matters as education, factory legislation, and competitive examinations. In 1853 he was ‘suspected of coquetting with the Manchester party;’ and, with an antagonism to war which clung to him through life, he joined Bright and Cobden in 1854 in resisting the policy of drifting into war, and supported ‘The Press,’ a weekly journal which was energetically anti-ministerial. He served on the commission on purchase in the army, which he strongly condemned, and supported such movements as those in favour of mechanics' institutes and free libraries, the amendment of the law as to the property of married women, the removal of Jewish disabilities, the abolition of church rates, and the creation of the divorce court.
When the second Derby administration was formed in February 1858, Stanley joined it as colonial secretary, and subsequently, on the resignation of Lord Ellenborough, took his place as president of the board of control. The conduct of the India Bill
