Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby

This did him no harm, however, even after Warwick was toppled from power, and in 1472, with the House of York again occupying the English throne, he married his second wife Lady Margaret Beaufort, whose son, Henry Tudor, was the leading Lancastrian claimant.

Nevertheless, in the febrile and bloodthirsty circumstances of the Wars of the Roses it was a position fraught with danger as rival claimants for the throne – successively the Houses of Lancaster and York – demanded, threatened or begged for the support of Stanley and his followers.

After some years of weak and ineffectual government led by the Lancastrian Henry VI, a challenge from the House of York broke out into open warfare in the 1450s in the War of the Roses.

In the early 1460s, he joined his brother-in-law, Warwick, in the campaigns against the Lancastrian forces and Stanley was confirmed in his fees and offices as the new King, Edward IV, needed him to secure the north-west.

His new wife, Lady Margaret Beaufort, dowager Countess of Richmond, was the mother of Henry Tudor – potential heir of the House of Lancaster.

Militarily during this period, and now a stalwart of the Yorkist regime, Stanley led several hundred men in the expedition to France in 1475 and in 1482 served with a large company in the campaign of the Duke of Gloucester (later Richard III) in Scotland, playing a key role in the capture of Berwick upon Tweed.

When Gloucester attacked this group at a council meeting in June 1483, Stanley was wounded and imprisoned but at least spared the fate of Lord Hastings – that of summary execution.

His wife, Margaret Beaufort, was a key conspirator, having brokered the marriage alliance between Edward IV's daughter Elizabeth of York and her son Henry Tudor.

Indeed, it was only by giving a solemn undertaking to Richard to keep his wife in custody and to end her intrigues that Stanley saved her from attainder and disgrace and presumably his own position at the same time.

After an unsuccessful bid to escape from court, Lord Strange confessed that he and his uncle, Sir William Stanley, had conspired with Henry Tudor.

Lord Stanley may have secretly met with Henry on the eve of the battle, but when the Stanleyites arrived south of the village of Market Bosworth on 22 August they took up a position independent of both the royal forces and the rebel army.

Lord Stanley took no direct part in the action but stood unmoving between the two armies and it was Sir William's decisive intervention that gave Henry the victory.

Throughout his career, alongside the main performance of national events, the preservation and enhancement of Stanley's own role as regional magnate was a very important sideshow.

Change of regime never really weakened his grip on the key offices of Chester and Lancaster and throughout his life, Stanley consolidated the legacy he had inherited from his father and extended his hegemony and that of his family across the north-west.

Given the range of his office-holding both regionally and at court, he did not need to draw ruinously on his own resources to dispense patronage on a grand scale and he was active in the arbitration of local disputes; even state matters were regularly referred for his personal adjudication.

He had not only escaped the bloody fate of so many of his political contemporaries, including his brother, but on top of the great patrimony he inherited from his father, he acquired huge estates and national offices, the Garter and an earldom.

These, and his closeness to successive royal families – whom he could count amongst his kith and kin by several different connections – made him a figure of great power and influence.

[1] Their patronage underpinned the careers of a number of young Lancashire men, including William Smyth, Hugh Oldham, and Christopher Urswick, who went on to become pillars of the Tudor church and state.

This was a relationship that may have been continued, as A Midsummer Night's Dream is thought to have been possibly first performed at the wedding celebrations of William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby in 1595.