Lord Derby by George Romney
The Peerage website offers a detailed list of the 12th Earl of Derby’s lineage
Please click here for more images of Lord Derby
Many of the details of the life of Edward Smith-Stanley the 12th Earl of Derby incorporated into Life Mask are historically accurate. He did marry, and later separate from, Lady Charlotte Hamilton. His almost 20-year courtship with Eliza Farren exists in letters and caricatures from this time (approx 1779-1797). He was a member of the Brooks, White’s, and Jockey clubs, among others. As a member of the Whig party, he never gave up his support of Charles Fox, even as many others deserted Fox. The descriptions of cockfighting and horse racing in Life Mask reflect his lifelong dedication to these sports.
Lord Derby and Sports
While the novel does include references to Derby’s love of sport, it does not offer a full account of just how influential he was in shaping horseracing as it exists today. While his primary notoriety during his lifetime was for cockfighting, it was his influences in horseracing that still reverberate today. There are numerous “Derbys” in existence today, including the Kentucky Derby, which are named after the 12th Earl of Derby. The commonly told story claims Derby won the naming rights in a coin toss from Sir Charles Bunbury in 1779, when the first race at The Oaks occurred. Patterned after St. Leger, the race limited entrants to three-year-olds and shortened the length to one and a half miles. At the first official Derby in 1780, Bunbury’s horse Diomed won. Derby finally achieved a win at the Derby of 1787 with Sir Peter Teazle (named after the husband of Eliza Farren’s famous character, Lady Teazle in School for Scandal). Teazle went undefeated during his three-year-old season and lost only once during his four-year-old season. He later sired four future Derby winners.
Though it became illegal throughout England in 1835, in Derby’s time cockfighting was an accepted and extremely popular form of entertainment. Derby, like his father before him, raised gamecocks and even started his own strain known as Black-Breasted Reds or the Knowsley Breed. As described in Life Mask, cockfighting was popular among all social classes. Unlike horseracing, it was not unusual to see Members of Parliament alongside bakers or butchers.
When Lord Derby’s oldest son and namesake became the 13th Earl after Derby’s death in 1834, he carried on the tradition of horseracing. He did stop, however, the practice of raising birds for cockfighting. He was known as a scholar, philosopher, and zoologist with a strong love of animals (something not strongly portrayed in Life Mask).
Early Life and First Marriage of Lord Derby
There is a record of Derby studying at Eton. However, while evidence does exist that the “rebellion” told by Derby in Life Mask did happen in 1768, there is no proof that Derby was one of the students who left the school in protest. After Eton, Derby studied at Cambridge, but again, no distinguishing records exist from his time there.
While there is no account of when they first met, there is an account of a masquerade in February 1773 at which 21-year-old Edward Smith Stanley admired 20-year-old Lady Elizabeth Hamilton. It is reported that he showed far more interest in her than she reciprocated and that Lady Elizabeth’s mother was the principle architect of the match. From before the engagement, it was rumored that Lady Betty preferred the attentions of the John Frederick Sackville, the future Duke of Dorset. However, Lord Derby was too eligible of a match to ignore, and they became engaged early in 1774. Derby threw one of the largest parties ever held at Banstead Downs on June 9, 1794 in celebration of the engagement. Horace Walpole discussed the upcoming celebration in a letter to Sir Horace Mann on June 8, 1774:
This month Lord Stanley marries Lady Betty Hamilton. He gives her a most splendid entertainment tomorrow at his villa in Surrey and calls it a fête champêtre. It will cost five thousand pounds. Everybody will go in masquerade but not in mask. He has bought all the orange trees around London and the haycocks, I suppose, are to be made of straw-coloured satin.
In celebration of the birth of their first son on April 21, 1775, the Stanley’s threw a party to rival their engagement party at The Oaks. The celebration was in the theme of a regatta with a 12 boat race from Westminster Bridge to London Bridge and back. All the boats were decorated after various Doge’s from Venice and were cheered by crowds running along the riverbanks. A third large celebration was held during the summer of 1777, back at The Oaks. This time the theme was a cricket match, featuring one of the best cricket players of the day: the Duke of Dorset. While there is no direct evidence of anything specific occurring between Lady Betty and the Duke, it is true that the Duke soon after befriended Lord Derby and made a point of spending much time with the couple. Gossip immediately started linking the old sweethearts (Lady Betty and the Duke of Dorset) together.
While there is no proof of the exact particulars, the break between Lady Betty and Lord Derby did happen in late 1778. Mrs. Delany wrote to a friend on December 7, 1778, “Now for the news. I have heard that Lady Derby is to be divorced, and to marry the Duke of Dorset, but this is not probable.” She later continues the news a few weeks later, “Since I wrote the enclosed I have heard that Lord Derby announced to his Lady on Friday last that their divorce was begun in the Commons….the Duke of Dorset waited on Lady Derby and Duke Hamilton and declared to both his intentions to marry her as soon as possible…”. The divorce news was incorrect (no record of a divorce proceeding can be found), but the news of the split being connected to the Duke of Dorset was certainly true – many letters and accounts exist mentioning it. Vicary Gibbs offers an account of Lady Elizabeth Derby in The Complete Peerage: “Unfortunately in 1778 she was led into an intrigue with the vicious Duke of Dorset with whom she lived. Lord Derby…would not divorce her, being determined to prevent their marriage.” Horace Walpole wrote to Sir Horace Mann on January 29, 1779:
There is a report that poor Lord Maynard has shot himself at Naples – is it true? The Duke of Dorset is almost in as bad a scrape as if he had married Lady Maynard. He is waiting for a Duchess until Lady Derby is divorced. He would not marry her before Lord Derby did and now is forced to take her, when he himself has made a very bad match. A quarter of our peeresses will have been wives of half our peers.
Derby did force his wife into exile and kept her children away from her. They were raised at Knowley. It was rumored that the youngest, Elizabeth Henrietta, was Dorset’s child, but no proof of this exists and she is listed as the daughter of Lord Derby in Burke’s Peerage. There is evidence through letters that Lady Derby’s mother, the Duchess of Argyll, attempted to reconcile the couple, however, neither Lady Derby nor Lord Derby desired this at first. There is some evidence that Lady Derby later left the door open for either reconciliation or divorce, but neither was granted by Lord Derby. After moving to the country and then abroad for several years, Lady Derby returned to London in 1782 to live with her brother, the Duke of Hamilton. She lived there until her death from tuberculosis in 1797 as Lady Derby.
Lord Derby and Eliza Farren
Eliza Farren made her debut on the Drury Lane stage on June 10, 1777 as Lady Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer. There is no proof that Lord and Lady Derby were in the audience that night, but it is certainly probable that they saw her perform as it was an extremely popular play and Miss Farren’s reviews were generally positive. We do have proof that Miss Farren coached the private plays staged at Richmond House, of which Derby was a part. As indicated in Life Mask, no proof exists of their relationship as anything other than platonic until their marriage in 1797. This did not stop the tabloids from printed jokes about their relationship, however. Click here to see Caricatures of Derby and Eliza.
Lord Derby named at least two successful horses after characters Eliza Farren performed as or with. In addition to Sir Peter Teazle, who won the Derby in 1787, he named another Hermione after Queen Hermione in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Hermione won the Oaks in 1794.
The two were married in 1797, six weeks after Lady Derby’s death. He was forty-five and she was thirty-nine. Eliza was presented at Court to Queen Charlotte on May 11, 1797. An account in Sporting Intelligence describes the event. “It was universally allowed at the above Drawing room, that no lady at Court acted her part better than the Countess of Derby; and it is but justice to add, that she filled her new character with an ease and dignity every way becoming her rank.”
As mentioned by Emma Donoghue in her Author’s Note, of the four children Lady Eliza Derby gave birth to, only one, Mary Margaret, lived to adulthood. In addition to his own children, Lord Derby also cared for his Uncle General Burgoyne’s four children upon his death in 1792. All of the children had been born out of wedlock and were no blood relation to Derby, his Aunt Charlotte having died childless in 1776. Nevertheless, he raised them as his own and provided for their education. Their relationship had been very close. It had been Burgoyne who helped throw the famous engagement party at The Oaks. He later wrote the play Heiress, which he dedicated to Lord Derby and in which Eliza Farren played the leading female role. Burgoyne introduced Lord Derby to Benjamin Franklin, who installed a lightening rod at Knowsley Hall. By 1803, the Derby household was full with Burgoyne’s four teenagers and his own small children and grandchildren. Derby’s favorite grandchild was his eldest, Edward Geoffrey Stanley. Eliza herself coached him on how best to speak in public. He later became one of the Parliament’s best orators and Prime Minister three times as a Tory, not a Whig as Lord Derby had always been.
Eliza died in 1829, after which their daughter Lady Mary Margaret Wilton came to live as mistress of Knowsley. Lord Derby continued to support both cockfighting and horseracing until his death in October of 1834. His funeral is described as a grand affair with many in attendance. Primary Sources:
Cox, Millard. Derby: the Life and times of the 12th Earl of Derby, Edward Smith Stanley
(1752-1834) Founder of the Two World Famous Horse Races, the Derby and the Oaks. London: J.A. Allan, 1974. Print.
Simpson, Harold, and Charles Braun. A Century of Famous Actresses, 1750-1850,. London: Mills & Boon, 1913. Open Library. Open Library, 13 Apr. 2010. Web. 4 Nov. 2011.
Further Information:
Knowsley Estate Website: http://history.knowsley.gov.uk/show_photo.msql?reference=KN61
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