The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby, Vol. 1, Ascent, 1799–1851, and: The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby, Vol. 2, Achievement, 1851-1869 (review)

Until now, the only scholarly biography of the fourteenth Earl of Derby based firmly on a close study of Derby's voluminous papers has been that by Angus Hawkins in the 2004 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). As Hawkins there observed, "130 years after Derby's death, no full study of his complete career . . . has yet been published" (52: 186). Now Hawkins has provided that study. Offering for the first time a comprehensive "view from Knowsley," he significantly and subtly modifies our understanding of the Victorian political landscape.

Several themes appear in Hawkins's finely detailed portrait of Derby; an early one is that of the hereditary Whiggery of the young Edward Stanley, as Derby was known at the outset of his career. This legacy was strengthened by the influence upon Stanley of the third Marquess of Landsowne and his Bowood Circle. Stanley early developed a conviction of the centrality of party and parliament to what later came to be known as "parliamentary government." Before joining Sir Robert Peel's cabinet in 1841, Stanley had little exposure to or sympathy for the Pittite tradition, carried forward by the Earl of Liverpool and then Peel, of strong executive government resting upon royal authority. Hawkins's analysis of the Whig origins of Stanley's constitutionalism helps explain why he was to prove something of an odd man out in Peel's cabinet. Yet Stanley did admire George Canning's liberal Toryism, and here emerges another of Hawkins's themes, that of a reforming, religiously tolerant government conducted by statesmen unwilling to submit to popular clamor, whether in the form of Irish repealers, anti-Corn-Law Leaguers, Chartists, or Reform Leaguers in Hyde Park in 1866. Stanley may have begun his political life as a partisan, but after he broke with the Whigs in 1834 and with Peel and the Peelites after 1846, he proved ready to work with progressive reformers willing to abandon prior party alignments.

Derby ultimately failed to reconfigure party ties, whether in cooperation with the leading Peelites after 1846 or with moderate-to-conservative Whigs in the year following the 1855 break up of the Aberdeen government. Two key factors were in play: a widespread feeling among Whigs and Liberals that Derby—in the House of Lords since 1844—and his lieutenant in the Commons, Benjamin Disraeli, wore their principles lightly and, especially in Disraeli's case, were not to be trusted.

The long rivalry between Lord John Russell and Derby in Cabinet-level politics extended from the time each entered Earl Grey's Cabinet in 1831 until the two old veterans relinquished leadership of their parties in 1867 and 1868. Russell's Whiggery was of the Holland-House rather than the Bowood variety. Russell had earlier remained aloof from cooperation with Canning, and Russellite Whiggery was rather more sympathetic to popular agitation than was the Stanleyite. Russell sought, and found, accommodation with Daniel O'Connell and his Irish followers in the controversy over Irish appropriation. The subsequent Lichfield House Compact was a tactical coup that heralded the end of the "Derby Dilly" as a political third force. Stanley and O'Connell, on the other hand, had hurled invectives back and forth in the House of Commons in the early 1830s. Stanley simply could not accommodate O'Connell for it would have required him to compromise his defense of the property and privileges of the Church of Ireland. He lived unhappily to see the Church disestablished and partially disend-owed in 1868: "I have nothing left but...