Edward George Villiers Stanley, seventeenth Earl of Derby, was born at Derby House in St James's Square, London, on 4 April 1865. He would not, in the normal course of events, have expected to inherit the earldom of Derby, but the failure of the marriage of his uncle, the fifteenth earl, to produce a child made him heir presumptive to a title which went back to the exploits of his ancestor at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Stanley entered the House of Commons as a Unionist member for South-East Lancashire (Westhoughton) in 1892 and was Financial Secretary to the War Office between November 1900 and October 1903, and Postmaster-General with a seat in the Cabinet from then until December 1905. In this latter post he earned notoriety by referring to his employees during a postal strike as ‘bloodsuckers’ and ‘blackmailers’. But, like many other prominent Tories, he went down to defeat in the Liberal landslide general election of January 1906. Though declaring himself a free trader, Stanley suffered from his party's association with the Chamberlainite policy of tariff reform. From this experience he learnt an important lesson about the need of the Conservative (Unionist) party to ensure that it could carry sufficient popular support for any major policy initiative.

Stanley succeeded to the earldom of Derby upon the death of his father in June 1908. Though now out of the House of Commons, it was during the Unionists’ long years of opposition after 1906 that he first came to national political prominence. His influence derived from the powers of patronage which he exercised in the party's affairs in Lancashire, in a manner, suggests Blake, ‘reminiscent of a great territorial magnate of the eighteenth century’. Whatever the problems experienced at this time by the British aristocracy as a whole, there were few signs of declining fortunes in the case of the earls of Derby. At the time of his succession the seventeenth earl owned land totalling nearly seventy thousand acres on estates which ranged from Witherslack in Westmorland to Fairhill House in Kent. According to his biographer, Derby was ‘the last of those great English territorial magnates who exercised an effective and pervasive political influence based on the ownership of land and the maintenance of an historic association with it’.