formerly baronets, now Barons of Alderley in that county. Our first Lord Derby's eldest son, George Lord Strange, died in his father's life-time, and the peerage went to his eldest son, to be inherited by that son's descendants until 1736, when this line of succession expired. It and what was annexed to it then passed to Sir Edward Stanley of Bickerstaff in Lancashire, the lineal descendant of Sir James Stanley, third son of George Lord Strange, himself eldest son of the first Stanley Earl of Derby. From George Lord Strange there is an unbroken descent, in the male line, to the present, the fifteenth Earl of Derby.

Since the Stanleys became Earls of Derby nearly four centuries have elapsed. The vicissitudes of time and of succession have shorn them of many of their old posses sions. They have ceased to be Lords of the Isle of Man, and, even in their own county, Latham, long their headquarters, has gone into other hands. But, thanks to the industrial energy and development of modern Lancashire, the fifteenth Stanley Earl of Derby is, in all likelihood, and relatively as well as absolutely, a more opulent nobleman than was the first.

A

II.

THE FOUNDER OF THE MANCHESTER GRAMMAR SCHOOL.*

HUGH OLDHAM, Bishop of Exeter and founder of the

Manchester Free Grammar School, is one of those Lancashire worthies respecting whom just enough is known to excite a desire for more. In Oldham's day, as in our own, Manchester and Oxford were antipodal to each other; Manchester having already become a seat of manufacture, Oxford a seat of learning. Yet both partook of his munificence, and in a way which proved him to have been animated by something of what was best in the spirit of his time. Only a single utterance of Oldham's survives, but it is of a decidedly remarkable kind, and displays him, to a certain extent, foreseeing and predicting the great English ecclesiastical revolution of the sixteenth century. Το Lancashire men few bishops can be more interesting than the Tudor prelate who founded the Manchester Free Grammar School, with its long line of distinguished alumni, from Bradford, the martyr, to De Quincey, the opium eater. The place and date of Bishop Oldham's birth, his family, and genealogy are somewhat uncertain. Crumpsall, near

Churton's Lives of Smyth and Sutton (Oxford, 1800); Cooper's Athena Cantabrigienses (Cambridge, 1858), vol. i. § Hugh Oldham; W. R. Whatton's History of Manchester School (London and Manchester, 1834); Godwin's Catalogue of the Bishops of England (London, 1601), Holinshed's Chronicles (London, 1587), &c., &c.

Manchester, seems to have the best claim to be considered his birth-place, and in all likelihood it was that of another local benefactor, Humphrey Chetham. In Crumpsall there stands, or lately stood, an ancient house, called "Oldham's Tenement," in which, according to tradition, the bishop was born. Probably, too, Oldham's birth fell about the middle of the fifteenth century, and the time when, according to Shakespeare, Jack Cade, surrounded by his roughs, was reproaching Lord Say for having "most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar school." He is surmised to have been of good family, and "William Oldham, Abbot of St Werburgh's, Chester, and Bishop of Man, who died in 1485, is said to have been his brother." The surmise is somewhat confirmed by the tradition that he received his earlier education in the household of the first Stanley Earl of Derby. In the county of Lancaster, as in most other English counties, Jack Cade could not in those days have discovered the slightest trace of a grammar school, a deficiency, doubtless, lively in the thoughts of Hugh Oldham when, having risen to be Bishop of Exeter, he founded the Free School still extant in Manchester. For the boy of promise, whatever his birth, there existed cathedral and monastic schools, better or worse, where, with or without a subsequent resort to a University, he might obtain some sort of schooling, and possibly learn to regard the Church as his future home. To the well or better-born, on the other hand, the houses of nobles and prelates were open, where they could receive the best scholastic instruction then going, under some learned man specially appointed for the purpose, and at the same time as pages, or otherwise, be "educated" into gentlemen. This was a practice which continued in vogue until the middle of the seventeenth century, when the Earl of Derby, who suffered for his loyalty in 1651, was heard

declaring that "the best, if not all, the good famalies in Lancashire had formerly dwelt in his house." In Oldham's youth this most excellent of all boarding-school systems was in full vigour, and nowhere in Lancashire, or probably in England, more effectively than in the household of the first Stanley Earl of Derby, and his third wife, Margaret of Richmond, of whom so much has been already said in the preceding memoir of the last of her husbands. It was mentioned there that she kept in her service Maurice Westbury, a learned man of Oxford, for the express purpose of instructing "certain young gentlemen at her finding," and as is conjectured, along with her step-son, James Stanley, who was destined for the Church and became Bishop of Ely. Among her "young gentlemen" were, it is supposed, Hugh Oldham and his friend and subsequent patron and coadjutor, another Lancashire man, William Smyth of Widness, who rose to be Bishop of Lincoln. At almost every step in their career, these two men were powerfully aided by Margaret of Richmond, and it is reasonable to credit the tradition that both of them had been trained under her eye at Knowsley and Latham.

A more influen

On the 22d of

tial patroness they could not have had. August 1485, the battle of Bosworth was fought, and Margaret's son, Henry of Richmond, became King of England. Henry VII. could refuse nothing in the way of ecclesiastical preferment to the mother who had helped him to a throne.

Oldham studied at Exeter College, Oxford, and thence migrated to Queens' College, Cambridge; scarcely anything more is known of his academic life. Not a month had elapsed after the battle of Bosworth before Margaret of Richmond's two Lancashire protégés felt the benefit of her son's elevation. On the 19th of September 1485, Oldham was admitted to the Rectory of St Mildred's, Churton, p. 23.

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66

Bread street (the street in which- John Milton was born), and on the following day William Smyth was appointed Clerk of the Hanaper for life. For ten years or so after this, and thanks mainly to his gracious and steady patroness, the mother of the new King, Oldham's biography is little else than a list of preferments, until at last, in 1505, came the crowning promotion of all, and he was made Bishop of Exeter. He was, according to an old sketch of him drawn by a not very flattering hand, a man of more zeal than knowledge, and more devotion than learning, somewhat rough in speech, but in deed and action friendly. He was careful in the saving and defending of his liberties, for which continual suits were between him and the Abbot of Tavistock." In the engraved portraits of Oldham the face is a handsome and even pleasant one, but the mouth speaks of inflexible determination. He seems to have been a man resolved to insist upon his rights, and scarcely had he set foot in his diocese when there began his "continual suits with the Abbot of Tavistock." The dispute was the old one between bishop and abbot-as to the right of episcopal visitation. The monasteries had long been in the habit of claiming the right of "local self-government,” and of repudiating episcopal interference. The discipline and morals of the English monks were growing laxer and laxer, and one of the prime duties of a conscientious bishop was to bring to bear upon them an episcopal authority, which the monastic officials endeavoured to shirk by procuring exemptions from the Pope and in other ways, until, in a subsequent generation, they brought down upon themselves the heavy hand of the eighth Harry and his Malleus Monachorum. The Abbot of Tavistock appears to have had no valid excuse for disputing the authority of his "ordinary," and the determined Oldham had him excommunicated

1 Godwin, p. 336.