Angus Hawkins has produced a most welcome second volume in his two-volume biography of the fourteenth earl of Derby, three times prime minister of Great Britain. Lord Stanley, as he was before his father's death in 1851, inherited one of the oldest noble titles in the land. With it came a grand old house and a large fortune. His amusements reflected his background. In battues on his estate he and his friends shot birds by the hundreds. His race horses enjoyed great success, and his stud added to his profits.

However, Derby also had an admirable component of noblesse oblige. For example, he hired a doctor to care for all the families on his estate free of charge. And in a more public endeavor during the Cotton Famine of the early 1860s, he himself contributed £12,000 and supervised the collection of £800,000 more to relieve the starving workers. His own workers were known to have had an easy camaraderie with him, and the cotton workers likewise.

Derby, then, was what used to be called an English gentleman of the very best sort, but, of course, he was more than that. He was a man of many facets. For one thing he was, when this volume starts, prime minister for the first time. When he formed his February 1852 government, one of the things he promised was that, while protecting the interests of the Established Church, he would also uphold religious liberty. Hawkins was quite right to examine with some care Derby's religiopolitical position in the first volume. Born and bred a whig, Derby was a part of the whig effort and close to its leaders, striving to bring about civil and religious liberty—the right to worship as one pleased without having to forgo any of the rights of citizenship. He voted for the measures that restored the civil rights, first of Dissenters in 1828 and then of Catholics in 1829. The convictions that led to these actions never left him, and he remained a whig in this sense all his life. As Hawkins shows, it became more difficult for Derby to practice his convictions when he became leader of the Conservative party, which tended to carry on the prejudices of its tory predecessor. Nevertheless, though often working behind the scenes, or with delicate diplomacy, he managed to do much good. He was particularly solicitous of Irish Catholics, especially those in Britain who were in danger of persecution. And by employing new rules that allowed each House of Parliament to decide whom it would seat, Derby played his part in bringing about Jewish emancipation by making it possible for the House of Commons to seat Baron Lionel de Rothschild.

But what kind of politician was Derby? Hawkins, as we know from his previous books, is the leading expert on parties and politics in the whole period covered by this biography. We are very fortunate to have him to guide us through it, which otherwise might resemble being dropped in the jungles of the Amazon without a compass. For some years before 1846 Britain had enjoyed a two-party system, but the battle over the repeal of the Corn Laws changed all that. Parties shattered. The old whig party that had loosely included Liberals and radicals broke into its three component parts. A Conservative party remained, but it was without its former leader, Sir Robert Peel, who had presided over repeal and was roundly hated by most of his former followers. Peel founded his own Peelite party. Derby, who had assumed the cloak of the duke of Wellington, was the leader of the original and larger Conservative party. It was the largest party in Parliament but without a majority.

To steer successfully through such an array was a challenge indeed. Derby, however, managed it brilliantly. Though his means seemed somewhat unorthodox to some of his contemporaries, these were times that called for unorthodox methods—and they worked. Derby put great store in what he called “masterly inactivity” (403). He held that a party out of power that remained quiet was unlikely to be troubled by the other parties who would then fight among themselves, frequently becoming so entangled that they gave the Conservatives a chance for power. There were three occasions when such a situation brought success—in 1852, 1858, and 1866. The second allowed Derby to launch his first parliamentary reform bill. The third saw the passage of the Second Reform Bill of 1867.

Finally, it might be useful to examine some of Hawkins's other discoveries that are important in themselves and also reveal the secret of the book's title. What was it that caused a man of Derby's great achievements to be “Forgotten”? Not long after the passage of the Second Reform Bill, Disraeli informed a meeting in Edinburgh that he had to prepare the mind of the country and educate the Conservative party on the question of Reform. All the credit he allowed his colleagues was their indulgence and not getting in his way. In short, it was to him and him alone that the country owed Reform. There was not a word of truth in anything he said. It was Derby who had decided that the party should take up parliamentary reform in 1859 and Derby who had made the plans and selected the basic principle of his government's bill in 1867. But Disraeli had a great talent for self-advertisement. As Derby's successor as leader of the party, whose own standing was not high, it was convenient for Disraeli to claim his predecessor's achievements for his own. He did so with great success. Angus Hawkins has written a splendid biography of Derby and in the process also added greatly to our knowledge of Disraeli and the politics of the period.