Page images
PDF
EPUB

replaced in their original depository, and, in all likelihood, among the dust of Kings and Queens of England now reposes that of the Lancashire linendraper's son, the first member for Manchester.

Restoration. The appearance of the body agrees, on the whole, with the description and position of Worsley. He was in high favour with Cromwell, &c., &c. Heath, in his Chronicle (p. 381), alluding to his early death, says, 'Worsley died before he could be good in his office, was buried, with the dirges of bell, book, and candle, and the peal of trumpets, in no less a repository than Henry VII.'s chapel, as became a prince of the modern creation and Oliver's great and rising favourite.'”

VII.

JAMES STANLEY SEVENTH EARL OF

DERBY.*

THE "great," the "martyr" Earl of Derby, as he is

fondly termed by his admirers, was born at Knowsley on the 31st of January 1607, on which day of the preceding year Guy Fawkes and certain of his associates were executed for their share in the Gunpowder Plot. His father, William sixth Earl, had been a great traveller, and many traditions of Earl William's continental adventures are preserved in popular song. His wife, mother of this our James Stanley seventh Earl of Derby, was the eldest daughter of Edward Vere seventeenth Earl of Oxford, and her mother was a daughter of the politic Cecil, Queen Elizabeth's and Mr Puff's Lord Burghley. Earl William was thirty-two when (in 1594) he succeeded to the title, on the death of his elder brother Ferdinando, the fifth Earl,

* Private Devotions and Miscellanies of James Seventh Earl of Derby, K.G., with a Prefatory Memoir and an Appendix of Documents, edited by the Rev. F. R. Raines, M.A., F.S.A., Honorary Canon of Manchester, Vicar of Milnrow, and Rural Dean, 3 vols. (Manchester, 1867), forming part iii. of the Stanley Papers, printed for the Chetham Society; The Lady of Latham, being the Life and Original Letters of Charlotte de la Trémoille Countess of Derby, by Madame Guizot de Witt (London, 1869); The Great Stanley: or, James Seventh Earl of Derby and his noble Countess, Charlotte de la Trimoille, in their Land of Man: a Narrative of the Seventeenth Century, by the Rev. J. G. Cumming, M.A., F.G.S., Incumbent of St John's, Bethnal Green, London, &c., &c. ; Seacome's House of Stanley; Clement R. Markham's Life of the Great Lord Fairfax; Eliot Warburton's Rupert and the Cavaliers; Halley's Lancashire Puritanism; Carlyle's Cromwell; Rushworth's Historical Collections, &c., &c.

whose surviving children were three daughters, co-heiresses. They were young when their father died, but their rights, real or alleged, were doubtless stoutly championed by their mother, the Countess Alice, a daughter of Sir John Spencer of Althorpe, ancestor of the great Duke of Marlborough. A few years after the death of her husband she made a second marriage, which secured for herself and her daughters "the best legal advice" in England. In 1600 she became the (third) wife of the famous Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, and it was probably through his efforts and influence that a long series of law-suits 'between Earl William and the fifth Earl's widow and daughters terminated in the severance from the Earldom of Derby of five ancient Baronies, when the estates attached to them were transferred to Earl Ferdinando's daughters and co-heiresses. The Stanleys Farls of Derby retained Latham and Knowsley with other ample possessions, but they lost "the Baronies of Strange, of Mohun, Barnwell, Basset, and Lacy, with all the houses, castles, manors, and lands thereto belonging, with several other manors and large estates lying in most counties of England, and many in Wales." 1 The lordship of the Isle of Man was preserved only by purchasing the claims of the Countess Alice and her daughters. Earl William was thus, and by long litigation, considerably impoverished when he came into possession of a dismembered inheritance. With his accession, Fortune seemed wearied of smiling on the Stanleys Earls of Derby, and resolved that, after a long course of prosperity, they should taste the bitters of adversity. Earl William lost only estates; Earl James was to lose his head upon the scaffold.

James Lord Strange, as he was called during his father's lifetime, was the eldest of three sons. There is a tradition that after being at school at Bolton he studied at Oxford, 1 Seacome, p. 97.

but of his education nothing is clearly ascertained beyond the names of his two domestic tutors. One of these was George Murray, a brother of the Richard Murray of the Athol family, whom, as a Scotchman, a gentleman, and (if anything) a High Churchman, King James made Warden of Manchester-a careless, easy-going ecclesiastic, of whom his royal patron had so accurately taken the measure that, it is said, once hearing him give out for his text I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ," the King made the audible comment- -"spiced with an oath”"But the Gospel may well be ashamed of thee!" Whether the Murray who was Lord Strange's tutor resembled in character his brother, the Warden of Manchester, is not known, but in all probability he was a High Churchman. The other tutor, Charles Erle, or Herle, became afterwards —if he were not already—a staunch Presbyterian, and sat in the Westminster Assembly of Divines as one of the two representatives of Lancashire. He is described as "of graceful and courteous manners." Both of them were suitably rewarded for their connection with the Stanley family. Murray became Rector of Bury, Herle, of Winwick. That may have influenced the religious opinions of his pupil. The seventh Earl of Derby seems to have been a High Churchman in his ecclesiastical politics, but with slightly Puritan tendencies in theology.

He grew up a well-read, thoughtful, serious, and it can be gathered rather an anxious and brooding man-of superior but somewhat limited intelligence. "In after life," says one of his biographers, "Lord Strange attributed some mistakes that he had committed to the want of 'good instruction' in his youth, but the remark appears rather to refer to the absence of opportunities of cultivating general society, and of acquiring worldly knowledge and an

1 Halley, i. 224.

[ocr errors]

acquaintance with matters of business than any deficiency of elementary or religious training." It is more probable that he referred to the narrowness of his education, which did not help him when he had to manage men or to lead soldiers. Certainly he enjoyed pretty early in life the "opportunities" aforesaid. According to this very biographer, he was but a minor when in 1625 he was elected Member of Parliament for Liverpool, and when he paid a visit to the Dutch Court at the Hague, then presided over by the Stadtholder-Prince of Nassau, a brother of William the Silent, the great founder of the Dutch Republic. It seems that on paying this visit to Holland Lord Strange had to borrow the money needed to enable him to make the appearance at a foreign court suitable to a young nobleman of his rank, ancestry, and connections, so considerably had litigation and the loss of a large portion of their hereditary estates crippled the resources of the Derby Earldom. It seems, too, that he went to the Hague to discover the fitness of a marriage projected for him with a wealthy damsel of high rank. "If your estate be good," he wrote long afterwards, with other advice, to his son, "match near home and at leisure; but if weak or encumbered, marry afar and quickly "-counsel doubtless suggested by his own experience.

The lady chosen for him as a wife by others and by himself was the afterwards famous Charlotte de la Trémoille, daughter of a French nobleman, a distinguished companionin-arms of Henri Quatre, by whom for his services in the field Claude de la Trémoille was created Duc de Thouars. On the mother's side the young lady, born in 1601, sprang from the princely house of Orange, since the Duchesse de la Trémoille was a daughter of William the Silent, and as became her blended lineage the Countess of Derby that 1 Raines, i. v.

« PreviousContinue »