[3] After the death of his father in 1593, William as the second son was bequeathed a number of Manors and Lordships including Bicester, Oxfordshire; Holborn, Middlesex; Burton in Lonsdale, Yorkshire and West Lidford in Somerset, his elder brother Ferdinando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby, inherited the Earldom and its estates, but he died a few months later in April 1594, leaving three daughters but no sons.

Ferdinando's daughters claimed their father's estates, while William inherited the titles of Earl of Derby and Baron Strange.

A further complexity was that Ferdinando's eldest daughter Anne Stanley, Countess of Castlehaven, became officially the heir presumptive to Elizabeth's throne in 1596 on the death of her grandmother.

The Stanley family, as the lawful heirs to the throne of England through Henry VIII's sister Mary Tudor, were suspected of Roman Catholic sympathies.

[4] There were many rumours surrounding the untimely death of Ferdinando Derby, who had been approached to lead an attempt to overthrow Queen Elizabeth, but had remained loyal to her.

[5] He, therefore, limited his involvement with national politics, devoting himself primarily to the management of his estates and his dominant position in local administration in Lancashire and Cheshire.

A few years after the death of his wife, when Derby was "old and infirm, and desirous of withdrawing himself from the hurry and fatigue of life" he assigned his estates to his son James, retaining an annuity of £1,000.

Derby is one of several individuals who have been claimed by proponents of the Shakespearean authorship question to be the true author of William Shakespeare's works.

Greenstreet argued that the comic scenes in Love's Labour's Lost were influenced by a pageant of the Nine Worthies only ever performed in Derby's home town of Chester.

[9] Stanley was Barnfield's patron and the subject of his homoerotic sonnet cycle The Affectionate Shepherd, which implied a romantic relationship between the pair.

[12][13] In the early years the relationship was stormy, including claims that Elizabeth had had affairs with Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and Walter Raleigh.