Derby Dilly

The Derby Dilly was a name given to a group of dissident Whigs who split from the main party under the leadership of Edward, Lord Stanley on the issue of the reorganisation of the Church of Ireland in 1834.

Stanley and three others resigned from the cabinet of Lord Grey on this particular issue but other factors included their fear that the Whigs were appeasing their radical and Irish allies with further reforms.

In May 1834, the pressure became too great and Stanley, with Earl of Ripon, Sir James Graham and The Duke of Richmond resigned from the cabinet on the issue of proposed changes to the structure and finances of the Church of Ireland.

Preferring to call themselves 'Moderate Whigs' or just 'Moderates', Stanley and his immediate cohorts including Graham and Francis Burdett, at first, remained on the government benches in the House of Commons.

Remembering Stanley's remark that when he had left the cabinet that it had led to an 'upsetting of the ministerial coach', the Irish nationalist leader Daniel O'Connell labelled the group the 'Derby Dilly', with a clever reference to the lines of a poem by George Canning and others, 'The Loves of the Triangles'.

'The machine must move forward for good or evil – for it cannot be stopped; like the fire it may purify, if properly kindled by a skilful hand, but if it should be impetuously and recklessly accelerated, destruction and overwhelming wreck must be the inevitable consequences'.

Peel had then issued an election address to his constituent, later dubbed the Tamworth Manifesto, which covered much of the same political and religious ground as Stanley's speech.

Though Stanley may have had in mind King George III's example of appointing William Pitt the Younger as Prime Minister in 1783, in the end, it was his 'reserve' that crumbled away, and those who were left by March 1835 (between 30 and 40) were still unable to agree even to vote the same way on a given debate.

For a brief period, as a measure of the looseness of political labels at the time, there was talk of a 'Liberal and Conservative Party' combining Stanley, Graham, Peel and even Lord Grey, but it came to nothing.

In 1836, he resigned from the Whig-supporting 'Brooks's Club', officially because his old political enemy Daniel O'Connell had become a member, and by the next elections, in 1837, the remaining Stanleyites were reliant on Conservative support to get back into parliament.