‘Young Stanley’, of whom it was reported in an apt but inaccurate overstatement that he was ‘the only brilliant eldest son produced by the British peerage for a hundred years’, proved himself one of the most gifted parliamentary debutants of his generation and a cabinet minister of considerable promise and distinction in this period.
Smith Stanley, who joined Brooks’s in 1819, was still just under age at the general election early the following year, when he was in Preston to assist in the return of his uncle Edmund Hornby, who thus continued to hold the family seat there as his locum.
His first known votes were given against the military and naval pensions bill, 14 Apr., and for repeal of the Foreign Enlistment Act, 16 Apr. 1823. Like his father, who presumably took him under his wing, he was in the majorities for inquiry into the legal proceedings against the Dublin Orange rioters, 22 Apr., and against another into the currency, 12 June. He divided for parliamentary reform, 24 Apr. 1823, and alteration of the representation of Edinburgh, 26 Feb. 1824, 13 Apr. 1826. He voted for inquiry prior to the introduction of the Irish insurrection bill, 12 May, and to condemn the conduct of the lord advocate in the Borthwick case, 3 June 1823, and the lord chancellor over a breach of privilege, 1 Mar. 1824. He may sometimes have been confused in the parliamentary reports with Lord Stanley, who was more assiduous on local business, but on 25 Mar. he brought up several Lancashire anti-slavery petitions and one from Preston against the combination laws; having reverted to the latter the following day, he accepted the congratulations offered afterwards by Canning, who wrote to his wife on the 28th that ‘they tell me he is by no means violently hostile’.
In what was politely considered a wild scheme, Smith Stanley and the other young ‘fashionables’ John Evelyn Denison*, Henry Labouchere* and John Stuart Wortley* left England in June 1824 for an extensive and reflective tour of the United States and Canada.
Offering in lieu of Hornby for Preston as a supporter of Catholic claims and moderate reform at the general election of 1826, he made the best of a severe contest and was returned in first place with the advanced radical Whig John Wood, against the Tory Robert Barrie, whom (in line with the collapse of Derby’s coalition with the corporation) he was obliged to disavow, and the radical William Cobbett†, who made him the butt of numerous offensive epithets (such as ‘the honourable spitting box’).
Tipped to be chancellor of the exchequer if the ailing Goderich administration gave way to a Whig one, in January 1828 Smith Stanley was witnessed by Countess Gower displaying ‘negligence and apathy’ towards the grave ministerial prospects. Lord Palmerston*, the secretary at war, reported to Lady Cowper on the 14th that ‘Stanley, they say, considers himself now as attached to Huskisson and will at all events remain’, but, Smith Stanley wrote to Lord Sandon* on the 17th that ‘I hope, but hardly expect such a mixed government as I imagine you and I would both wish to see’ and ‘am quite ready to go out or stay in as things may turn out’.
Smith Stanley voted for repeal of the Test Acts, 26 Feb., and Catholic relief, 12 May 1828. In early March he and Wood gave up their Preston poll bill, first introduced the previous year, which was opposed by the corporation.
In July 1828 the Whig stalwart Sir James Graham* of Netherby, with whom his name was so often to be linked in the coming years, wrote to Smith Stanley, who now aspired to Canning’s mantle, to urge him to hazard the leadership of a broad-based opposition, independently of Grey, Lansdowne and Henry Brougham*:
I hope you will take the field in force and I think you will find a strong and respectful body willing to act under you. Much of course must depend on the events which may occur before Parliament reassembles, but the aspect of affairs is so clouded by difficulties that the chances are some capital blunder may be committed and there will arrive the golden opportunity of forming a party in the House of Commons in some broad and intelligible principle ... You are the person on whom I raise my hopes. You contain all the great requisites. You may reunite a scattered tribe which it is the interest of the country to see consolidated.
Hawkins, Forgotten Prime Minister, i. 58-61; Sir James Graham mss (IHR microfilm XR 80), 1, bdle. 2, Graham to Smith Stanley, 15 July 1828; Parker, Graham, i. 71.
According to Lady Jersey, he was ‘very desirous of leading in the House of Commons’ and that autumn he agreed with Lord John Russell* ‘in the advantage of making the Catholic question a much more leading point of party than it has been made yet, and also of obtaining any points of union by which to consolidate a party of steady opposition’.
I never find Stanley’s name associated with the formation of a young party in the House of Commons without recollecting his move of last spring ... It is not agreeable to go into details in a matter that is so personal, but my impression is now strong that Stanley would not be a safe leader ... It may be that he has seen his error and is now inclined to a better issue, but I always recollect a golden rule that I learned from you - a man will commit a fault a second time, which he has committed once, because it is in his character. At any rate even the most charitable will agree that he should have a season of probation.
NLS mss 24770, f. 29; Add. 51834, Davenport to Holland, 18 Nov.; 51574, Abercromby to same, 19, 26 Nov. 1828; A. Mitchell, Whigs in Opposition, 211-12.
Encouraged by Lansdowne, he intended to participate in what he hoped would be a concerted and decisive onslaught on ministers at the start of the 1829 session, over the disintegrating state of Ireland and the consequent necessity of granting Catholic emancipation, though he doubted whether the attempted exploitation of other topics would yield any advantage.
In a detailed correspondence on this at the turn of the year with his Canningite friend Denison, to whom he lamented that ‘you and I have happened hitherto to find ourselves in two different parties, between which, upon my conscience, I cannot, if put to the question, find any conceivable practical difference’, he concurred that if Wellington was ‘disposed to carry this question, even to a moderate extent, even requiring unnecessary securities against imaginary dangers ... I for one say with you that he ought to be cordially supported’, but otherwise that their combined friends should unite in the middle ground, ‘supporting no government which would not carry it and supporting any government in carrying it’.
Declaring himself to be ‘very idle and very indifferent’, on 13 Jan. 1830 Smith Stanley asked Brougham if he might be allowed to stay away from the opening of the session, but he was present to vote in the minority for Knatchbull’s amendment to the address on agricultural distress, 4 Feb.
Smith Stanley, whose father would have made way for him in Lancashire if he had been forced to a poll there, was again returned with Wood for Preston at the general election of 1830, when, having vindicated his parliamentary votes on the hustings and spent heavily on drink, he defeated the popular candidate Henry Hunt* in another violent contest.
I observed to Stanley that they would be exposed to all Brougham’s attacks, but for this he did not care at all. He felt that by joining with Palmerston and the Grants he should be sufficiently covered, and Sir J. Graham had the same feeling. He did not know that Stanley wanted high office, or office at all at present, but he should say it would be wise to put him in office, as he would be most useful to Peel as an every-day man.
Parker, Peel, ii. 163-6; J. R. M. Butler, Passing of the Great Reform Bill, 96.
Yet Wellington’s declaration against reform, 2 Nov., killed the negotiation, and Smith Stanley, who early the previous month had been advocating a stronger Whig union under Grey, at once became involved in the opposition preparations for Brougham’s reform motion (on the 16th), which was expected to decide the duke’s fate.
Smith Stanley, of whom Abercromby snidely remarked to Holland that he ‘is really a poor thing, that is with reference to the higher and nobler qualities of a man’, 19 Nov. 1830, was named chief secretary to the lord lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Anglesey, on the formation of the Grey coalition ministry that month.
He was already embroiled in the affairs of Ireland, where mounting economic distress and growing calls for repeal of the Union, whipped up by O’Connell, had produced almost a state of insurrection. Writing to Holland from Dublin Castle, 2 Jan. 1831, he confided his hope that ‘with cool heads and steady hands we may be too much for him at last’, and at a shrieval dinner in the city on the 11th, when he portrayed himself as a resident Irish landlord, he expressed his ambitions for assisting in the development of the country.
It was with some surprise that the people of Dublin saw in their new chief secretary an exceedingly juvenile and boyish looking functionary, with a demeanour which his shrewdness rescued from puerility, but in which a more than ordinary carelessness and a sort of harsh levity, not quite consistent with good breeding and alien from the nature of his duties, was observed.
New Monthly Mag. xxxii (1831), 112.
Certainly O’Connell, who, nicknamed him (as he did other inexperienced chief secretaries) a ‘shave beggar’ and was at some point to provoke him into an (unanswered) challenge, found him unacceptable and, particularly after his arrest on 19 Jan. for breaching the proclamation against the holding of seditious meetings, their mutual antagonism, which was frequently evident in their bad-tempered parliamentary encounters, influenced every aspect of Smith Stanley’s tenure as Irish secretary.
Already deemed, in Holland’s words, ‘one of the main props of the government’ in the Commons that month, he was anxious about the poor performance of his colleagues and confided to Anglesey, in relation to the as yet undisclosed parliamentary reform plan, that ‘entre nous, I much doubt its success’.
Reportedly furious that the Irish law officers had ruled that the prosecution of O’Connell should lapse with the life of the Parliament, Smith Stanley was forced to bow to Grey’s decision that this was probably for the best, although bound to lead to unpleasant proceedings in the House.
at the present moment we can hear nothing but reform day and night. If this hot weather lasts we must die off fast - from 5 o’clock every night till 2 or 3 in the morning without interval, added to all the [Irish] office and government business in the day is more than flesh and blood can stand through August and September, and I see no hope of being through before Christmas. Our friends however are very staunch, and only very much annoyed when we give way on the fullest case being made out. Saltash was an instance the night before last, and they were some of them very sulky yesterday, but were reconciled by our defending strenuously a very bad case [on the partial disfranchisement of Chippenham] last night in which I believe we have done gross injustice, which was sanctioned by a large majority.
Ibid. 31D/50.
He defended schedule B and denied that the representation of agricultural areas would suffer by it, 2 Aug. 1831.
Having, on 9 Aug. met, with petulance, criticisms that he was neglecting Irish business in the Commons, Smith Stanley also came under fire from a frustrated Anglesey, who protested to Grey on the 14th:
I have urged Stanley, over and over again, to press forward all his measures for the advantage of Ireland - that, at least, he would give notice of motions and thus take the initiative away from O’Connell, and from any of the factious Irish Members, the credit of originating measures. Unhappily, little, if any, of this has been done: and, by a strange fatality, every thing that has yet been announced has had the character of coercion, or of restriction or of taxation.
Ibid. 28C, pp. 159-63; Add. 56555, f. 176.
Holland, who as a cabinet minister was privy to the lack of progress in formulating Irish policy, recorded in his diary that there was something ‘in the complaints of Mr. Stanley’s manner and the want of concert and consultation’ with the Irish Members. Ironically, when Smith Stanley and Althorp met those favourable to administration, 18 Aug., Anglesey’s plan for making the yeomanry a permanent establishment were totally rejected and the lord lieutenant was afterwards informed by his secretary, who conceded that the idea would have to be dropped, that ‘their object is not to turn us out (which they will however do) but to force us into their measures, which I cannot allow them to do’.
Early that month, when his resignation was spoken of, he aligned himself with the duke of Richmond and the moderate reformers in the cabinet against asking the king for a creation of peers in order to ensure the reform bill’s passage in the Lords.
The whole subject is fairly before us for reconsideration, and ... all we are pledged to as a government is to bring forward no measure which shall not go the full length of removing the grievances complained of, as effectually as the late bill did. I do not despair of our being able to agree on a measure ... which the peers may acquiesce in, and may satisfy our reasonable friends. But, I own, I think it would be more consistent of us to bring forward a measure even something larger than might go through both Houses, and which the peers might modify, than to run the risk of an imputation of insincerity, by so far reducing our proposals, as to leave it doubtful whether more might not have been obtained.
Sir James Graham mss 1, bdle. 7, Smith Stanley to Graham, 27 Oct. 1831; Broadlands mss PP/GC/DE/61; RI/11.
After another row that month over the suggested appointment of O’Connell as an Irish law officer, which prompted Brougham and Holland to ruminate about moving him to a safer ministerial berth, he threw himself back into the affairs of Ireland, where, damned by Lord Donoughmore as an ignorant and dangerous ‘puppy’, he continued to be extremely unpopular.
Smith Stanley was infuriated by the decisions, made at the cabinet meeting which he missed on 19 Nov. 1831, to adopt a broadly similar reform bill and to recall Parliament before Christmas, not least because he would be hard pressed to have his legislative proposals ready for the beginning of the session.
Optimistic about the prospects for reform, Smith Stanley, who was considered by Greville to hold the balance of power in the cabinet on the issue, sided with the moderates against asking the king for the immediate creation of 15 peers, 2 Jan. 1832.
Stanley, who had been writing his report on Irish tithes on his knee, as he sat, all the evening, put by his paper when Peel began, and followed him in a very clever speech, full of high tone and animation - and considerable power. Peel winced under it.
Hatherton diary.
He emphasized that his tithes policy would embrace both enforcement and redress of grievances, 14 Feb., and, amid a welter of minor Irish business, he carried his Subletting Act amendment bill through the committee, 20 Feb., and repeated the principles behind the ministerial plan of national education, 6 Mar. In March he apparently declined leaving Ireland to become chancellor and leader of the Commons, as part of the potential rearrangement whereby Althorp would have been allowed to move to the Lords to supervise the reform bill there; in any case, Ellice doubted whether even he could make a success of it, such was his unpopularity among his fellow Whigs.
Smith Stanley, who had brought up his first report from the tithes committee on 17 Feb. 1832, was prevented from introducing his resolutions on it, 8 Mar., when Charles Brownlow, Member for county Armagh, sidetracked the debate with his unsuccessful amendment (defeated by 314-31) to postpone the discussion until the completion of the committee’s deliberations. On the 13th he argued that the distress suffered by many clergymen necessitated swift action, but despite his pledge to counterbalance the initial coercive elements of his policy with future concessions, he again had to listen to the apprehensions of Irish radicals that he meant to subjugate their country. When proceedings were resumed, 27 Mar., he defeated Edward Ruthven’s amendment for appropriation of the revenues of the Irish church (by 123-27) and secured his first three resolutions: to recognize the extent of resistance to payment; to advance £60,000 to distressed clergy; and to pay such advances in proportion to the value of each living. The next day he again encountered fierce opposition, so it was not until the 30th, when Henry Lambert’s hostile amendment was rejected (by 130-25), that the final two resolutions were agreed: for enforcing the collection of the arrears (in order to repay government advances) and for the ‘extinction’ of tithes by commutation. These propositions formed the basis of his Irish tithes (arrears) bill, which he introduced, 2 Apr. He secured its second reading (by 119-21), 6 Apr., ensured its passage against further challenges in committee, 9 Apr., and had it agreed at third reading (by 52-10), 16 Apr., when, replying to a blistering attack by Richard Sheil, he reprobated the constant harassment he met with in endeavouring to ameliorate the condition of Ireland. It was enacted on 1 June. Having on 25 May complained that a draft of his second report had been printed in the Dublin Evening Mail, he on the 30th and 31st pursued the editor Thomas Sheehan, who was admonished by the Speaker, 1 June. He presented this final report, 4 June, and on its being read, 5 July, he clarified his use of the word ‘extinction’, which had raised unrealistic expectations in Ireland, by stating that he really meant compulsory and permanent commutation; in other words, that ‘the object I have in view ... is to impose the burden, not upon the miserable occupying tenant of the soil, but upon the solvent and responsible landlord’. He defeated an O’Connellite amendment to abolish tithes (by 149-25) that day, and obtained leave for the subsequent Irish tithes (composition) bill (by 124-32) on the 13th. Having secured its second reading, 18 July, he spoke at length in favour of the dual principles of enforcement and concession in order to ensure its committal, 24 July, when a radical motion to add inquiry into other aspects of the church to the committee’s brief was defeated (by 77-16), and made frequent interventions during its committee stage, 31 July-2 Aug. The third reading was uneventful, 6 Aug., and it was given royal assent, 16 Aug. 1832.
Smith Stanley, who reported to Anglesey, 10 May 1832, that ‘the king was much affected, and was in tears repeatedly’ on ministers’ resignation over the reform crisis early that month, signalled that he would also quickly relinquish his seat at Windsor.
My chief satisfaction, while you seem to think that all is so smooth before us, is that the House of Lords will never forgive us the [illegible] violence which they have compelled us to use, and will take the earliest opportunity of turning us out as soon as the reform bill shall have passed and shall have brought in, as it will, an aristocratic, agricultural House of Commons.
Arbuthnot Corresp. 166; Devon RO, Acland mss 1148M/21 (iv) 25.
Whatever his personal reservations, he spoke twice for the second reading of the Irish reform bill, 25 May, and defended the use of the royal prerogative of creating peers, 5 June. Immersed in the details of the Irish measure, he repelled O’Connell’s attempts to restore the county qualification to 40s. or at least lower it to £5 freeholders, 13, 18 June, and clashed with him over the leaseholder and freeman franchises, 25 June, 2 July. He provoked Protestant Tory opposition to his Irish party processions bill, 14, 25 June, but after announcing its postponement, 29 June, managed to carry it against last ditch resistance in the committee, 8 Aug. He expressed his sympathy for Sadler’s motion to make provision for the Irish poor by a tax on absentees, but carried the previous question against it, 19 June. He attacked Peel for introducing party political considerations into the debate on the Ascot attack on the king, 20 June. O’Connell having threatened to have him impeached in the reformed Parliament, he made a lengthy rejoinder on his conduct towards Ireland during his speech vindicating government over the Russian-Dutch loan, 20 July, and reacted angrily to the Preston anti-tithes petition, got up by Hunt and presented by Sheil, which called for his removal from office, 3 Aug. 1832.
Smith Stanley, who in June announced that he would leave Windsor to offer in place of his father, while his brother Henry came in for Preston, was returned unopposed for Lancashire North at the general election in December 1832, when he stated that the Reform Act was intended to be a final measure but advocated other liberal changes.
by his animated appeals to the liberal majority, by his readiness in answering the sophisms of his opponents, by the precision and boldness of his language, by his display of all the great qualities of a parliamentary orator and an able statesman, successfully vindicated the authority of the government and satisfied their supporters in the House of Commons.
Russell, Recollections, 91, 92.
Indeed, it was for his supreme brilliance in this respect that he later became well known as the ‘Rupert of Debate’, in the phrase from Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer’s* ‘The New Timon’ (1845). Yet Russell was also aware of how, even on his first appointment as Irish secretary, ‘his declarations in favour of the established church of Ireland, and his temper, little tolerant of opposition, gave warning of storms’.
In October 1832 the young William Gladstone† wrote, with what turned out to be a double irony, that ‘when I heard Stanley in the House of Commons, I thought him the cleverest man I had ever seen - he seemed quicker than thought itself - he is too good for them: I wish he were with us’. This sentiment was later echoed by Brougham in commenting that ‘when Stanley came out in public life, and at the age of 30, he was by far the cleverest young man of the day: and at 60 he would be the same, still by far the cleverest young man of the day’.
was greatly admired by a large party in the country - perhaps by the country generally - throughout a long life; and it was customary to call him ‘chivalrous’. I think he was not chivalrous. He was a very able and capable man; he had force, energy and vivacity, and he was an effective speaker, always clear and strong, sometimes commonplace, but not seldom brilliant. He was not a man of genius; nor could it be said that he had a great intellect. He had the gifts of a party politician, such as eminent party politicians were in the generations immediately preceding his own rather than in his own - subsisting throughout his life, so far as literature is concerned, mainly upon the scholarship and academical accomplishments with which he began it and playing the game of politics with more of party than of public spirit, and without much perhaps of personal friendliness.
Taylor Autobiog. i. 131.
On his death in October 1869 he was succeeded in his title and estates by his eldest son Edward Henry (1826-93), who served under him and Disraeli as foreign secretary, but joined the Liberals in 1879 before ending his days a Unionist.