Seventh Earl of Derby and Lord of Mann, who governed the Island from the later 1620s until his execution in 1651.

He was named in the letters patent of 1610 alongside his parents, William Earl of Derby and Elizabeth his countess, in the grant of the Isle, Castle, Peel and Lordship of Mann with all its islands and lordships. The grant was to be held of the Crown by homage and allegiance and by the service of presenting two falcons, once immediately after homage and thereafter to the King's heirs on the days of their coronation, in lieu of all other services, customs and demands. That settlement, the Insular Entail Act of 1610, fixed the descent of the Lordship in the Stanley line and was still being cited against his successors a century and a half later.

He was returned to Parliament for Liverpool in 1625, and was made one of the knights of the Bath the day before the coronation of Charles I. In September 1626 Buckingham informed the attorney-general that the King had granted the lieutenancy of Cheshire and Lancashire to James Lord Strange for life, jointly with his father. He was called to Parliament by writ in his own right in 1627, and from that date until his death the government of the Isle of Man was administered by him.

His Manx legislation runs from page 84 to page 113 of Mills' Statute Book, taken from the authorised copies kept in Castle Rushen. Its most considerable moment came on 30 October 1643, when he assembled the Clergy and the twenty-four Keys, with the four men of every parish, at Castle Rushen, to hear the grievances of the Church and Commons laid out in their petitions and to devise remedies which might stand with the maintenance of his own royalties, rights and prerogatives. His handling of the charterlands and of the older tenures was the grave charge later laid against him by nineteenth-century Manx editors, who traced the uncertainty of tenure settled by the Act of Settlement of 1704 back to his dealings.

A letter signed Strange from Knowsley in October 1637 shows the same temper in estate business. Tenants who tried to rest on their contracts were to be advised what those contracts were, and if they wronged themselves they would repent. Payment would be expected at the times agreed, according to their bonds, and those who did not pay would be accounted refractory.

He left the Island for the last time in 1651 to join Charles II, leaving the insular troops under William Christian and the care of his Countess and children behind him. At his execution a trooper answered his invocation of the King and the laws by calling out that they had no King and would have no Lords. He is called the Martyr Earl throughout Lancashire, and a later Roman Catholic claim that he had converted before his death was rejected by his Chetham Society editor.

He left his son a book of advice. Two long letters of instruction from him to his heir Charles, Lord Strange, survive, one of them cast as a series of aphorisms for his observation in life, beginning with the injunction to seek above all things to know the Word of God, and to know that about God there is neither greatness, place, quality, figure nor time, for he is all, through all and about all. In the other he reflects that it was safer by much to take men's lives than their estates, since children will sooner forget the death of a father than the loss of a patrimony, which is a hard remark from a man who lost both. Lord Strange was the courtesy title borne by the eldest sons of the Earls of Derby, and it was as Lord Strange that he governed the Island from 1628 until he came to the earldom in 1642.