Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 54.djvu/64

 House of Lords, and he was accordingly in October 1844 called up by the title of Lord Stanley of Bickerstaffe. He explained that he was tired of the life of the House of Commons, and was afraid that his health was breaking down; but the change was probably due to the fact that he did not get on well with Peel. At any rate dissensions between them became visible. Stanley combated the arguments in favour of immediate free trade, which Peel drew from the condition of Ireland, and though he eventually agreed to the suspension of the corn laws, still, on Peel's declaration in favour of their complete and immediate repeal, he resigned. Even if Peel's course had seemed sound to him as a stroke of policy, which it did not, it involved in his eyes an intolerable sacrifice of personal consistency and principle. When Peel resigned in December 1845 and Russell failed to form a ministry, Stanley was applied to and declined, after such a break-up of his party, to attempt the task of carrying on the government as a protectionist. As he put it himself, if he took office he would have no colleagues. To protection as an economic system he was by no means indissolubly wedded, but, as he declared in a speech, which is perhaps his best, (see, 2nd ser. ii. 395) on 25 May 1846 in the House of Lords, protection was, in his opinion, necessary for the maintenance of the landed interest and the colonial system, the two pillars on which he conceived the British empire to rest. Naturally, therefore, it was round Stanley that there gathered that body of conservatives which revolted from Peel after the fall of his administration. Lord George Bentinck was Stanley's intimate friend, and Disraeli now entered into close relations with him; but Stanley accepted the leadership of the Protectionist party with reluctance, and for a while seems to have thought now of forming a new party by a union with the Palmerstonian whigs, and now of shaking himself free of all party ties and in a great measure withdrawing from public life. He spoke frequently and brilliantly in the House of Lords, particularly on the conduct of the Spanish government in summarily directing Sir Henry Bulwer, the British ambassador, to quit Madrid in 1848; on his amendment to the address in 1849; on the Navigation Bill, on Lord Roden's removal from the commission of the peace, for his conduct in regard to the Dolly's Brae affair (18 Feb. 1850); and on the question of Don Pacifico, when he obtained a majority of 37 against the ministry on 17 June 1850.

When Russell resigned in 1851, Stanley was sent for by the queen on 22 Feb. and gave a qualified refusal to form a ministry, first recommending that Lord John Russell should again make an attempt. Russell failed, and Stanley was sent for again on the 25th; he now endeavoured to obtain the adhesion of the Peelites, but without success. He then applied to his own supporters, but eventually, according to Lord Malmesbury (Memoirs, i. 278), he was baulked by the hostility of Henley and Herries, and resigned his commission again to the queen on the 27th. He explained his position in the House of Lords on 28 Feb., not without expressing some bitterness at his followers' want of courage. As yet, however, his party had hardly a sufficiently definite policy to have justified their taking office. Stanley himself was still in favour of moderate protection, though prepared to abandon any return to it, if the next verdict of the constituencies should prove to be unmistakably against it. In June his father died, and he succeeded to the earldom. On 21 Feb. 1852 Russell again resigned, and Lord Derby formed a ministry; but it was untried, and some of the members of it were not even personally known to their chief. He made his first declaration of policy on 27 Feb., carried on the government till the beginning of July, and then dissolved. In spite of the speech when he declared in the House of Lords that the mission of a conservative government was ‘to stem the tide of democracy,’ Lord Derby was not now himself disposed to reaction, but he was compelled to come before the country as advocating protection, without the power or perhaps the wish to restore it, and in the result was outnumbered, though not very heavily, by a combination of all the parties opposed to him. The general election of July resulted in the return of 299 conservatives, 315 liberals, and 40 Peelites. Negotiations began for the admission of Palmerston and some of the Peelites to the ministry, but they came to nothing. Instead of accepting the position frankly, Derby continued in office; the inevitable defeat came on the budget on the night of 16 Dec., and next day he resigned, Lord Aberdeen forming a ministry. Whether he gained anything by not resigning upon the conclusion of the general election may well be doubted, but he was bitterly accused of having betrayed the protectionists in not attempting the impossible on their behalf during this brief prolongation of office. In opposition he continued to follow in the House of Lords the same course as in 1850 and 1851. He opposed the policy of the government with regard to the Canada