LANCASHIRE WORTHIES. I. THE FIRST STANLEY EARL OF DERBY.* Two WO or three miles south-west of the busy little town of Leek, in Staffordshire, slumbers the obscure hamlet of Stanley, stony lea as it were, stan being Anglo-Saxon for stone. "The place," says Erdeswick, the old topographer of that county, seems to take its name of the nature of the soil, which though it be in the moorlands is yet a rough and stony place, and many craggy rocks are about it." The name thus derived became that of the famous family of Stanley, itself an offshoot from another of still more ancient date and note. The Stanleys were a branch of the Staffordshire Audleys, said to have been "Barons by tenure before the reign of Henry III.;" from them, through heirs female, * Dugdale's Baronage (London, 1675); Collins's Peerage (edited by Brydges, London, 1812), vol. iii. § Stanley Earl of Derby; Memoirs of the Ancient and Honorable House of Stanley (by J. Seacome, Manchester, 1783); W. Beamont's Notes on the Lancashire Stanleys (Warrington, 1869); Jesse's Memoirs of King Richard the Third and some of his Contemporaries (London, 1862); C. A. Halsted's Life of Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (London, 1845), and Richard III. as Duke of Gloucester and King of England (London, 1844); Sir Thomas More's Edward V. and Richard III. in Kennett's History of England (London, 1706), vol. i.; Ormerod's Cheshire; Whitaker's Richmondshire; Baines's Lancashire, &c., &c. A |