6th Earl of Derby
Dates:
1561 - 1642
Background:
Aristocratic (his mother Margaret Clifford was a great niece of Henry VIII),
educated at Oxford, and Gray's Inn. From 1582-87 he toured the Continent,
and was resident in Rome. He is believed to have visited the Court of Czar
Ivan the Terrible in the company of Dr. John Dee, and may have joined the
1586-87 Davis expedition to the waters of Greenland. In 1600 he returned
to Rome for the Centennial Jubilee. He and his wife spent most of their
lives in the Catholic north, overseeing their vast estates. When his wife
died in 1627, Derby turned over his Earldom to his son James Stanley, dedicating
himself to building and literary pursuits.
Famous for:
Derby travelled widely, and his years abroad were not without incident.
In Madrid, for instance, he allegedly killed a man in a duel over a woman
and had to escape to France disguised as a priest. He was friendly with
both the Earls of Southampton and Rutland, and almost joined them on Essex's
expedition to Ireland in 1599. He was represented by Francis Bacon in his
protracted legal battle with his sister-in-law, Lady Strange. His marriage
to Elizabeth Vere, daughter of the 17th Earl of Oxford in January 1594/5,
is claimed by many to have been the court wedding for which Shakespeare's
A Midsummer Night's Dream was written. His wife's affair with the Earl of
Essex in 1597 caused Derby considerable torment and almost led to the breakdown
of his marriage. Though he was the hereditary “Lord of Man” (also called
Viking “King of Man”), it was his wife who was famous for her de facto governorship
of the island, where her reforms proved unpopular. Derby, his wife, and
sisters-in-law were among the courtiers listed as taking roles on the stage
in court masques written by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones.
The Case:
Derby's chief claim to literary fame is a 1599 spy's report in which he
was said to have been “penning comedies for the common players,” though
no works of his survive under his name. Several letters written by Derby
and his wife from the Earl of Oxford's residence and vice versa in the late
1590s suggest that Derby was working closely with his father-in-law on literary
projects (they were both patrons of acting companies). Derby's brother's
troupe, “Lord Strange's Men”, had been the most prominent acting company
at court and on tour in the early 1590s, teaming with the Lord Admiral's
Men, but in 1594 on his brother's death, the Derby-Strange troupe seems
to have collapsed, and most of its actors were reincorporated as “the Lord
Chamberlain's Men”. His own acting company, “Derby's Men”, was prominent
at court in the late 1590s up to about 1620. Some Shakespeare plays (e.g.
Loves Labours Lost and Measure for Measure) contain allusions to events
that Derby might have witnessed on his travels.