First Earl of Derby and Lord of Mann, known in the Manx sources chiefly through his marriage and his family's succession.

He married Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, sole heir of John, Duke of Somerset, who had first been married to Edmund, son of Owen Tudor, and was the mother of Henry VII. Her monument in Henry VII's chapel records the marriage, together with her foundation of the colleges of Christ's and St John's at Cambridge and of divinity lectures at Cambridge and Oxford, and that she lived to see her grandson Henry VIII crowned.

The Stanley succession lists place him after Sir John Stanley and his son, and before his own descendants held the Island as Earls of Derby into the seventeenth century.