LANCASHIRE WORTHIES.

I.

THE FIRST STANLEY EARL OF DERBY.*

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'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.

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descend the present Touchets Barons Audley, peers of the realm at this day. Of these Audleys was the "Lord James," the valiant warrior who "broke through the French army "at Poitiers, fighting until he was "covered with blood," and of whose interview with the Black Prince, after the victory, there survives a picturesque and touching record in the chivalrous pages of Froissart.

The Audley family seems to have been founded in the reign of Henry I. One of the founder's grandsons, William, had a liking for the stony lea aforesaid, and in the reign of King John exchanged with an uncle other land for it. From this William, called as his father had been, de Stanleigh (soon converted into Stanley), descended the Stanleys of Hooton, the Stanleys of Latham and of Knowsley, and the Stanleys of Alderley, among others. With his son, also a William, the fortunes of the new family took a start through one of those matrimonial alliances to which the house of Stanley owed much of its early prosperity and prominence. He married Jane, daughter and co-heiress of Sir Philip Bamville, of Storeton, in Cheshire, a few miles south of what is now Birkenhead, and known in these days for the New Red Sandstone quarries of Storeton Hill. With this marriage (temp. Edward II.) the Stanleys migrated from Staffordshire to Cheshire. It made them owners of a share of the manor of Storeton and hereditary bailiffs of the forest which then overspread the peninsula of Wirral, between the estuaries of the Mersey and the Dee. Wirral was disforested by Edward III., but from this hereditary bailiwick, or chief rangership, of the forest come "the three bucks' heads on a bend," which, with or without additions or modifications, has ever since been the crest of all these Stanleys. A more important acquisition in Cheshire was made by the marriage of another William de Stanley, a descendant of the foregoing (he died 6 Hen. VI.), to the heiress of

Hooton, half-way or so between Chester and Birkenhead. The Stanleys of Storeton now became the Stanleys of Hooton, who centuries later, after the restoration of Charles II., were raised to the baronetage.

From Sir John Stanley, a younger brother of the first Stanley, whom marriage made owner of Hooton, have sprung the Stanleys of Knowsley in Lancashire-Earls of Derbyand the Stanleys Barons Stanley of Alderley in Cheshire. In our own day the baronetcy of Stanley of Hooton was merged in that of Errington, and strangers came into possession of Hooton and its hall, "commanding a peculiarly beautiful view of the Forest Hills, the bend of the Mersey, and the opposite shore of Hale, and shaded with venerable oaks of a growth which the Wirral breezes have elsewhere rarely suffered.” The main line of the family is now in what was originally a junior branch, the Stanleys of Knowsley, founded by that Sir John, younger brother of the first Stanley owner of Hooton, and who "flourished," in the literal sense of the word, during the reigns of the Second Richard and of the Henries Fourth and Fifth.

It is from Sir John Stanley that the greatness of the family, though in a younger branch, dates and derives its origin. His career combined all the incidents and accidents to which, aided by the energy and astuteness of its heads, the earlier growth and success of the House of Stanley are traceable. A fortunate alliance, the favour of three successive Kings of England, the imprudence and ill-luck of great noblemen, his contemporaries, contributed to the enrichment and elevation of Sir John Stanley. He married Isabel, the daughter of Sir Thomas de Latham, and in right of his wife he found himself in time owner of the domains of Latham and of Knowsley. Richard II. made him Lord Deputy of Ireland and gave him grants of land there. The favourite of Richard II. was even a greater favourite of the