INTRODUCTION

The Fifteenth Earl of Derby (1826–1893) served twice as foreign secretary in Conservative governments, from 1866 to 1868 and again from 1874 to 1878. This portrait is therefore, after this introduction, divided into two parts, treating his first and second stints in office separately. To make things complicated, he has to be described as Lord Stanley in the first part – the courtesy title by which he was known until he succeeded to the title of Lord Derby on the death of his father on 23 October 1869.

The Fifteenth Earl's father was prime minister three times, albeit for a total of less than four years, and they are the only father and son to have served together in a British Cabinet. In their public manner they were opposites: the father, flamboyant and dazzling, the son, plodding and conscientious. In photographs, the younger Derby looks overweight and sedentary, but the diplomat A.B. Mitford (who served at the British Legation in Japan in the late 1860s), recorded that he regularly exercised in a gymnasium; Mitford considered that his approach at the Foreign Office was the same he showed in the gym: he had ‘the strength of a bull and the determination of a gladiator, [but] without one spark of enthusiasm’. The historian John Vincent uses the adjectives ‘punctual’, ‘exact’, ‘careful’, ‘lonely’ and ‘shy’ to describe him. He adds, ‘In most ways he was not a remarkable man. He could not speak on his feet. He had no phrases. He was overshadowed by the black genius of his father and by the arts of Disraeli. He did not represent concentrated power in any form. But he represented integrity.’

FOREIGN SECRETARY, 1866–1868 (Robert Morton)

Lord Stanley's two and a half years at the Foreign office in the late 1860s exactly coincided with the critical period in Japan that saw the fall of the Shogun and the Meiji Restoration. However, he showed relatively little interest in the country and almost never mentioned it in his diary. There were, of course, far more pressing matters for a British foreign secretary at the time – to name just two, the American Civil War had just ended and the Franco-Prussian War was about to begin.