437 



SHAFTESBURY, EAEL OF. 



SHAFTESBURY, EARL OF. 



439 





eager and effectual support of tho Test Act, which was passed in that 

 session. Of the Corporation Act, passed twelve years before, he had 

 been a decided opponent. 



On his dismissal from office, Shaftesbury at once openly joined the 

 ranks of opposition, and applied all his activity and talent of intrigue 

 to thwart the measures of the court.- His grandson, the third Earl of 

 Shaftesbury, says in a letter addressed to M. Le Clerc (and noticed 

 further in the next article), that his " turning short upon the court, 

 as Sir William Temple expresses it, had only this plain reason for it ; 

 that he discovered the king to be a papist, through that disguise of 

 an esprit fort, which was a character his vices and over-fondness of 

 wit made him affect and act very naturally. Whatever compliances 

 my grandfather, as a statesman, might make before this discovery, to 

 gain the king from his brother and the French party, he broke off all, 

 when by the Duke of Buckingham's means, he had gained this secret." 

 By taking up the cry of No Popery, and holding himself up as the 

 martyr of his zeal for Protestantism, he speedily regained his old popu- 

 larity ; and in the session which began in January 1674, the House of 

 Commons showed from the first day of its re-assembling what a 

 powerful party his friends constituted there. Indeed they proved to 

 be the majority of the House, the proceedings of which the ministers 

 could find no way of checking except by resorting to a prorogation, 

 which they continued from time to time till it lasted for no less than 

 fourteen months. And when the House was found to be in no better 

 humour after parliament had at length been suffered to meet again in 

 April 1675, it was prorogued again in June, and then, after another 

 short session, which began on the 13th of October, was at once pro- 

 rogued to the 15th of February 1677, or for above fifteen months. 

 When it re-assembled, Shaftesbury contended in his place that the 

 parliament had been actually dissolved by being so long kept in a state 

 of suspension ; upon which it was voted that he should acknowledge 

 his error and beg the king's pardon on his knees at the bar, and when 

 he refused to do this, he was committed to the Tower. He applied to 

 the Court of King's Bench, and repeatedly petitioned both the king 

 and the House of Lords ; but he was not released until he at length 

 consented, after an imprisonment of above a year, to make the submis- 

 sion originally required. In November 1680, the House of Lords 

 resolved that these proceedings were " unparliamentary from the 

 beginning and in the whole progress thereof," and ordered them all to 

 be obliterated from the journals of the House. The Earl of Salisbury, 

 Lord Wharton, and the Duke of Buckingham, who had committed the 

 eame offence in the debate on the prorogation, had been all sent to the 

 Tower along with Shaftesbury ; but they were liberated on petitioning 

 his majesty after a few months' detention. 



The oppressive usage he had been subjected to at once embittered 

 Shaftesbury's hostility to the court and made him more formidable 

 than ever by the accession of public favour which it procured him. 

 Soon after his release occurred the strange affair of Titus Gates and 

 the alleged Popish Plot ; when Shaftesbury took so eager a part in 

 maintaining the truth of the story, that some writers have been 

 inclined to suspect it was all a contrivance of his own. But even 

 those who acquit him of this charge are far from unanimous in 

 holding that he actually believed in the existence of the plot, although 

 he turned it much to account in the promotion of his party or per- 

 sonal objects. When the new council, consisting of thirty members 

 fifteen the existing chief officers of state and of the household, ten 

 other members of the House of Lords, and five selected from the 

 House of Commons was established in the early part of 1679, 

 Shaftesbury was made its president. It was immediately after being 

 placed in this position that he drew up and carried through par- 

 liament the famous act for the better securing the liberty of the 

 subject, now known as the Habeas Corpus Act, but in those days 

 commonly called Lord Shaftesbury's Act. In October following how- 

 ever ho was dismissed from his office of president of the council ; and 

 soon after, by his advice, Lord Russell, Lord Cavendish, and two 

 others of his friends resigned their seats at the board. Shaftesbury 

 now, on the 26th of June, 1680, took the^bold step of appearing at the 

 bar of the Court of King's Bench, and formally presenting the Duke 

 of York to the grand jury as a Popish recusant. The grand jury 

 were sent for by the court, and dismissed while they were considering 

 the indictment ; but when the king found it expedient to allow the 

 parliament to meet again in October, after having been prorogued 

 since July of the preceding year, the bill for excluding the Duke from 

 the throne, which had been brought forward in the last session, was 

 again passed by the Commons ; and a new prorogation was had 

 recourse to in January 1681. Then followed the Oxford parliament, 

 which was found equally intractable with its predecessors, and was 

 put an end to in the same manner. For some time before this, 

 Shaftesbury had been in close alliance with the Duke of Monmouth ; 

 and it is said to have been by his advice that Monmouth had recently 

 returned from Holland, in defiance of his father's injunctions. It is 

 supposed that Shaftesbury, in his hatred of the Duke of York, or his 

 conviction of the dangers to be dreaded from his accession, had made 

 up his mind to support the pretensions of Monmouth to the throne, 

 on the ground of an alleged marriage between his mother and Charles. 

 Alarmed by these designs, the court resolved to make a bold effort to 

 destroy the powerful demagogue; and on the 2nd of July, 1681, 

 Shaftesbury was seized by an order of Council at Thanet House, in 



Alderagate Street, and, being brought before tho king and council, 

 was committed to the Tower on a charge of high treason. But when 

 the bill of indictment was preferred against him at the Old Bailey, on 

 the 24th of November, the grand jury ignored it. It is said that the 

 applause in the court upon this announcement lasted a full hour. 

 Dryden, who had a short time before celebrated the union of Mon- 

 mouth and Shaftesbury, in his ' Absalom and Achitophel,' now wrote 

 hia much more acrimonious satire of ' The Medal,' in reference to a 

 medal which was struck in honour of his lordship's deliverance. 



Shaftesbury however seems now to have felt that there was no 

 safety for him under the present system of things in England that 

 he had involved himself too deeply hi the contest with the govern- 

 ment to hope that they would ever rest till they had effected his 

 destruction. In these circumstances he attempted to prevail upon his 

 friends to join him in an armed insurrection ; and upon their refusal 

 he fled to Holland, on the 18th of November 1682. Here he took up 

 his residence in Amsterdam, where an attack of the gout in his 

 stomach put an end to his life, on the 21st of June 1683. 



Lord Shaftesbury was three times married, and left a son, who suc- 

 ceeded him in his titles, by his second wife Frances, daughter of 

 David Cecil, third earl of Exeter. 



Few losses of the kind are more to be regretted than that of the Memoirs 

 of his own time, which Shaftesbury is said to have written, and Locke, 

 to whom he had committed the manuscript, to have destroyed in the 

 fright into which he was thrown by the execution of Algernon 

 Sydney. There is a short biographical account of Shaftesbury in 

 Locke's works ; but the most complete Life of him is that drawn up 

 under the direction of his great-grandson, the fourth earl, by Mr. 

 Benjamin Martin and Dr. Kippis, an impression of which was printed 

 towards the end of the last century, all the copies of which are said to 

 have been destroyed except two, from one of which the work was 

 reprinted in 1836, in 2 vols. 8vo, under the superintendence of 

 Mr. C. W. Cooke, by whose name it sometimes passes. 



SHAFTESBURY, ANTHONY COOPER, THIRD EARL OF, 

 born at Exeter House, London, in February 1671, was the son of 

 Anthony Cooper, second earl, and consequently the grandson of the 

 subject of the preceding article, whose favourite he was from child- 

 hood, and who, according to the received accounts, himself super- 

 intended hia education in his earliest years : the method he took to 

 instruct him in Greek and Latin being to place him while yet very 

 young under the charge of a female of the name of Birch, who is 

 affirmed to have had so great a knowledge of these languages that 

 she spoke both with considerable fluency, and enabled the boy to read 

 them with ease by the time he was eleven years old. His own account 

 of his education is however somewhat different, at least in so far as it 

 ascribes to the celebrated John Locke, whom he calls his " friend and 

 foster-father," the chief share in his training. In the very curious 

 letter (dated February 1705) to M. le Clerc, referred to in the pro- 

 ceeding article (which was first printed in 'Notes and Queries,' 

 vol. ,iii., p. 97, &c., from the original in the Remonstrant Library of 

 Amsterdam), Lord Shaftesbury, after mentioning how entirely his 

 grandfather was guided by the advice of Locke in all that concerned 

 the education and marriage of his son, goes on to say that to him was 

 afterwards hi like manner entrusted the direction of his grandchildren, 

 " in whose education Mr. Locke governed according to his own prin- 

 ciples (since published by him) and with such success that we all of 

 us came to full years, with strong and healthy constitutions : my own 

 the worst j though never faulty till of late. I was his more particular 

 charge : being an eldest son taken by grandfather and bred under hia 

 immediate care : Mr. Locke having the absolute direction of my 

 education." He was afterwards sent to Winchester, and then spent 

 some years in travelling on the Continent, whence he returned to 

 England in 1689. In 1693 he entered parliament as one of the 

 members for Poole, and took a considerable share in the business of 

 the house on the Whig side ; but his health suffering from his close 

 attendance, he resigned his seat in 1698, and went over to Holland, 

 where, assuming the character of a student of medicine, he made the 

 acquaintance of Bayle, Le Clerc, and other distinguished literary 

 persons. His father dying the following year, he returned home ; and 

 he made a considerable figure in the House of Lords during the short 

 remainder of the reign of King William. Soon after the accession of 

 Anne however he again retired to Holland ; and, although he came 

 back to his native country after an absence of two years, he never 

 again took any part in public life. His last years were entirely 

 dedicated to literature. In 1708 he published his ' Letter on Enthu- 

 siasm ; ' in 1709, his ' Moralists, a Philosophical Rhapsody ; ' the same 

 year his ' Sensus Communis, or Essay on Wit and Humour,' in which 

 he announced his famous doctrine of ridicule being the test of truth ; 

 in 1710, his 'Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author; ' in 1711, a collected 

 edition of all these works. The state of his health had now become 

 so alarming that he was induced once more to leave England for a 

 milder climate ; he proceeded to Naples, and was enabled for some 

 time to resume his pen, but at last sunk and died there on the 15th 

 of February 1713. A complete collection of his various pieces, which 

 he had employed his last days in preparing, appeared soon after hia 

 death, in three volumes, under tho title of ' Characteristics of Men, 

 Manners, Opinions, and Times.' 



Lord Shaftesbury's writings excited great attention and admiration 



