Edward George Villiers Stanley, styled Mr Edward Stanley until 1886, then The Hon Edward Stanley and finally Lord Stanley from 1893 to 1908, was a British soldier, Conservative politician, diplomat, and racehorse owner. He was twice Secretary of State for War and also served as British Ambassador to France.
Background
Derby was born at 23 St James's Square, London, the eldest son of Frederick Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby, by his wife Lady Constance Villiers. His paternal grandfather Edward Smith-Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, was three times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom while his maternal grandfather was the Liberal statesman George Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon. He was educated at Wellington College, Berkshire.
Education
Educated at Wellington College, Lord Stanley was gazetted to the Grenadier Guards in 1885. Seven years later he was elected Conservative member to the House of Commons for West Houghton, Lancashire.
Career
He was always credited with two ambitions in life: to win the Derby and to become prime minister; twice he realized the former. In 1899 Stanley was at Cape Colony with Lord Roberts; four years later he became postmaster general and gained infamy during a postal strike by referring to his employees as "bloodsuckers" and "blackmailers." He succeeded to the earldom in 1908, in time to vote down David Lloyd George's "People's" budget the following year in the House of Lords. In 1911 he became lord mayor of Liverpool.
Derby raised five battalions of the King's Regiment on his estate at Knowsley in August 1914, and perhaps for this effort in October 1915 was appointed director of recruiting. Derby favored voluntary service and on the 500th anniversary of the battle of Agincourt, at which an earlier Lord Derby had recruited soldiers for King Henry V, he announced a system whereby all eligible single men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one were to be enrolled for possible enlistment. The so-called Derby scheme failed miserably by December 1915: only one-half of the eligible 2 million single men ever bothered to attest. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith on January 5, 1916, reluctantly agreed to enact the first Military Service Act, calling up single men under the age of forty-one. Only after the debacle at Amiens in March 1918 was the full Conscription Act passed.
In June 1916, the secretary of state for war, Lord H. H. Kitchener, whom Derby described as his "best friend," was lost in the North Sea when the cruiser Hampshire struck a mine. At first it was thought that the congenial Derby might take his place, but the Tory leader, Andrew Bonar Law, not for the first time, conspired against Asquith to appoint Lloyd George to the War Office; Derby, who was known to be favorable toward the generals, was appointed undersecretary of state for war and president of the Army Council. At the end of that year Derby greatly facilitated Lloyd George's ambitions to relieve Asquith of the land's highest office, and he was rewarded with the post of secretary of state for war in the second coalition government. Lloyd George did not, however, include Derby in the inner War Committee or in his "garden suburb" at No. 10 Downing Street. Neither did the prime minister consult the head of the War Office in February 1917 when he agreed temporarily to place Sir Douglas Haig's British armies in France under the command of the French General Robert Nivelle for a planned offensive on the western front. Derby was furious and threatened to resign; in the end, at a meeting hastily called at Calais on February 26/27, the British generals agreed for the coming operations at Arras and the Aisne to give Nivelle optimum support, and they persuaded Derby to remain at his post.
Sir William "Wully" Robertson, chief of the Imperial General Staff, in February 1918 posed an even greater problem than Haig. Wully Robertson refused to condone Lloyd George's scheme to create within the Supreme War Council an executive committee to control Allied strategic reserves. Robertson took his case to Derby and the latter, egged on by the Beaverbrook and Northcliffe press as well as by the king, once again supported the generals. The secretary of state for war resigned three times in twenty-four hours over the issue of the Allied reserve. The prime minister, in turn, accused Derby of being a diehard "Westerner" and a tool of Haig and Robertson. In fact, Lloyd George had staked his political career on Robertson's removal from office, and he did not shrink back from threatening George V, who also wished to retain the chief of the Imperial General Staff. In the end, Derby was persuaded to withdraw his resignations as well as his objections to the Allied reserve when he learned that the prime minister had actually offered the War Office to Austen Chamberlain; Sir Henry Wilson replaced Robertson on February 18, 1918, as staff chief.
Derby's days at the War Office were numbered. On April 18 Lloyd George appointed Alfred Lord Milner head of the War Office and sent Derby as ambassador to Paris where, as the prime minister put it, "it would not be obvious that his bluffness was only bluff." Derby was not accorded a vital role in the drafting of the terms of peace, but as a member of the ambassadors' conference he was involved in the execution of the provisons of the peace. He was greatly admired in Paris for his wealth, breeding, and manners as “le type accompli d'un lord fermier" ("the complete gentleman farmer").
Lord Derby returned to the War Office in 1923/1924 under Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin, but in 1924 retired from public life as lord lieutenant of Lancashire. He had not brought to the War Office a creative mind, but rather an unfortunate propensity for following the advice of whoever counseled him last. Above all, Derby was a procrastinator, a follower rather than a creator of events. The kindest thing said of him was that he was a "John Bull at the heart of things alike in peace and war." The "King of Lancashire," as his biographer called him, died at Knowsley on February 4, 1948.
Connections
Lord Derby married Lady Alice Maude Olivia Montagu, daughter of William Montagu, 7th Duke of Manchester and Louisa von Alten, and step-daughter of the leading Liberal politician Lord Hartington, at the Guards Chapel, Wellington Barracks, London, on 5 January 1889. They had three children together. Two of them, Edward, Lord Stanley and Oliver, achieved the rare distinction of sitting in the same Cabinet between May and October 1938 until Edward's death. Their daughter, Lady Victoria, married the Liberal politician Neil James Archibald Primrose and, after his death in World War I, married the Conservative politician Malcolm Bullock. Lord Derby died February 1948 at the family seat of Knowsley Hall, Lancashire, aged 82. His other country seat was Coworth Park at Sunningdale in Berkshire. He was succeeded in the earldom by his grandson, Edward. He is buried at St Mary's Church, Knowsley.
The Countess of Derby died in July 1957. Many good stories are told of Lord Derby, including the following, which is surely apocryphal not least because he was a man of utter probity. He was spotted by a steward feeding one of his horses shortly before the start of a race. When challenged, His Lordship explained the substance was sugar, and promptly ate a lump himself to show that it was innocuous. 'Keep the creature on a tight rein until a furlong out, then let him have his head, He'll do the rest'. His Lordship added, almost as an afterthought: ‘If you hear anything coming up behind you, don’t worry and don’t turn round, it will only be me’.