Edward Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby

Edward Henry Stanley, 1870

Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby KG , PC (born July 21, 1826 - April 21, 1893 in Knowsley ) was a British politician.

Life

Stanley was the eldest son of Edward Geoffrey Smith Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby and Emma Caroline Bootle-Wilbraham, daughter of Edward Bootle-Wilbraham, 1st Baron Skelmersdale , and was the elder brother of Frederick Arthur Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby . He studied at the Rugby School in Rugby , Warwickshire , and at Trinity College of Cambridge University .

He then traveled to the West Indies , Canada and the USA . Stanley was a member of the Conservative Party for the City of King's Lynn in the House of Commons . In March 1852 he became Secretary of State in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (British Foreign Office ) of his father in the first cabinet.

Although he always leaned towards the Liberals , in 1855 he turned down the offer of the Liberal Prime Minister Lord Palmerston to take over the Ministry of Colonial Affairs as Secretary of State for the Colonies . In the second reign of his father, from 1858 to 1859, he was given precisely this ministry, now combined with a seat in the cabinet . In 1859, after the end of the rule of the British East India Company over British India, he became the first Secretary of State for India in the cabinet that was transferred to the British Crown as the Crown Colony .

In the third reign of his father (1866-1868) he became foreign minister ( Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs ). He played an important role in the negotiations in the Luxembourg crisis. Stanley resigned when the newly elected Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone took office in December 1868. After the death of his father, he became a member of the House of Lords as Earl of Derby the following year .

In the cabinet of the newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli , which was formed on February 20, 1874, he took over the Foreign Ministry again, but came into conflict with the Prime Minister when Disraeli demanded vigorous action against Russia in the Russian Turkish War (see also Midlothian Campaign ) . When the government asked for a loan from Parliament on January 24, 1878, and ordered the Royal Navy to enter the Dardanelles , Stanley and Henry Herbert, 4th Earl of Carnarvon , demanded his dismissal, and Benjamin Disraeli therefore withdrew the order given to the Royal Navy . But when, after the Peace of San Stefano Benjamin Disraeli, decided to take decisive action to safeguard the position of the United Kingdom in the East , and therefore called the reservists and made other military preparations, Stanley, who did not approve of these measures, resigned on March 30th the government. He was immediately replaced by Lord Salisbury , who (together with Disraeli) negotiated a satisfactory agreement for Great Britain at the Berlin Congress .

While he was now in the House of Lords criticizing Disraeli's Oriental policy, he approached the Liberal Party more and more, in contradiction to the traditions of his family, until in April 1879 he practically broke away from the Conservative Party by writing an open letter to the Lancashire Conservatives . During the elections in the spring of 1880 he exerted his extensive influence in favor of the Liberal Party and was Colonial Secretary in the government of William Ewart Gladstone from December 1882 to June 1885 . In 1886 he joined the Liberal Unionist Party, which was newly founded in the same year .

Stanley died in Knowsley in 1893 after a severe flu that he caught in 1891 and from which he was unable to recover. Stanley was a member of the Order of the Garter and the Privy Council . His brother Frederick Arthur Stanley, 16th Earl of Derby, was also a noted politician.

Works

• Claims and resources of the West Indian colonies (London 1849).

literature

• Derby, Earls of . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 8 : Demijohn - Edward . London 1910, section Edward Henry Stanley, 15th earl of Derby (1826–1893) , p. 68 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).
• Douglas Hurd : Choose your Weapons: The British Foreign Secretary . Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2010. ISBN 978-0-297-85334-3 . (Chapter Derby and Disraeli, pp. 117–151)

predecessor	Office	successor
Edward Smith-Stanley	Earl of Derby 1869-1893	Frederick Stanley