CHARLES STANLEY, EARL OF DERBY, A PEER of whom extremely little is known. His father lost his head, and he his liberty, for Charles the second. The grateful king rewarded the son with the lord-lieutenancies of two counties'. He has written a piece of controversy, the title of which is, "The Protestant Religion is a sure Foundation of a true Christian, and a good Subject, a great Friend to human Society, and a grand Promoter of all Virtues, both Christian and moral. By Charles Earl of Derby, Lord of Man and the Isles." Lond. 1671, the second edition; a very thin quarto3. This piece contains a dedication "To all supreme powers, by what titles soever dignified or distinguished; i. e. to emperors, kings, sovereign princes, republics, &c." an epistle to the reader; another longer on the second edition; and the work itself, which is a dialogue between Orthodox, a royalist, and Cacodæmon, one po ⚫ [Lancashire and Cheshire.] ⚫ [The first edition is said to have been printed in 1669, without the author's name in the title-page.] pishly affected. His lordship is warm against the church of Rome, their casuists and the Jesuits; and seems well read in the fathers and in polemic divinity, from both which his style has adopted much acrimony. He died in 1672. His father, as has been said, was the brave James, earl of Derby +; his mother, the heroine who defended Latham-house, grand-daughter of the great prince of Orange: a compound of Protestant heroism that evaporated in controversy. [Charles, eighth earl of Derby, was successor not only to the title, but to the loyalty of his father 5. In 1659, on sir George Booth's rising in Cheshire, he put himself at the head of divers gentlemen in Lancashire, but was defeated, taken prisoner, and confined, till the following year gave freedom to the long-depressed royalists. On the restoration of their king, the lords attempted to do justice to those who had been deprived of their fortunes by the usurping powers. They formed a private bill for the purpose of restoring this loyal peer to those estates which he had lost: this was strongly opposed, and at length laid aside, without ever [See page 37 and 41, sup.] • Collins's Peerage, vol. ii. p. 40. • Whitelocke says he was taken in the habit of a servingman. Memorials, p. 184. coming to a second reading. The king was innocent of its rejection, for it never came before him for his assent; yet an ill-judged resentment of the son of this nobleman, induced him to place the following inscription on one of the doors of Knowsley: "James earl of Derby, lord of Man and the Isles, and grandson of James earl of Derby, and of Charlotte daughter of Claude duke de la Tremouille, whose husband James was beheaded at Bolton, 15th Oct. 1652, for strenuously adhering to Charles the second; who refused a bill passed unanimously by both houses of parliament, for restoring to the family the estate lost by their loyalty." We may allow the family, observes Mr. Pennant", to be a little out of humour with its misfortunes; for William earl of Derby used to say, that he never passed by any estate of his in Yorkshire, Westmorland, Cumberland, Warwickshire, Lancashire, Cheshire, or Wales, but he saw a greater near it, lost by the fidelity of his ancestor to the royal cause. His lordship's controversial pamphlet has not been met with by the editor; and if it had, would not in all probability have afforded a desirable extract.] 7 Tour to Alston Moor, p. 40. |