members upon election, in which exclusion, disbanding. the limitation of the prerogative in proroguing and dissolving parliament, and security against popery and arbitrary power were insisted on. At this parliament, which lasted but a few days, he again made a personal appeal to Charles, which was curtly rejected, to permit the legitimizing of Monmouth. The king’s advisers now urged him to arrest Shaftesbury; he was seized on the 2nd of July 1681, and committed to the Tower, the judges refusing his petition to be tried or admitted to bail. This refusal was twice repeated in September and October, the court hoping to obtain evidence sufficient to ensure his ruin. In October he wrote offering to retire to Carolina if he were released. On the 24th of November he was indicted for high treason at the Old Bailey, the chief ground being a paper of association for the defence of the Protestant religion, which, though among his papers, was not in his handwriting; but the grand jury ignored the bill. He was released on bail on the 1st of December. In 1682, however, Charles secured the appointment of Tory sheriffs for London; and, as the juries were chosen by the sheriffs, Shaftesbury felt that he was no longer safe from the vengeance of the court. Failing health and the disappointment of his political plans led him into violent courses. He appears to have entered into consultation of a treasonable kind with Monmouth and others; he himself had, he declared, ten thousand brisk boys in London ready to rise at his bidding. For some weeks he was concealed in the city and in Wapping; but, finding the schemes for a rising hang fire, he went to Harwich, disguised as a Presbyterian minister, and after a week’s delay, during which he was in imminent risk of discovery, if indeed, as is probable, his escape was not winked at by the government, he sailed to Holland on the 28th of November 1682, and reached Amsterdam in the beginning of December. Here he was welcomed with the jest, referring to his famous speech against the Dutch, “nondum deleta Carthago.” He was made a citizen of Amsterdam, but died there of gout in the stomach on the 21st of January 1683. His body was sent in February to Poole, in Dorset, and was buried at Wimborne St Giles.
Few politicians have been the mark of such abuse as Shaftesbury. Dryden, while compelled to honour him as an upright judge, overwhelmed his memory with scathing, if venal, satire; and Dryden’s satire has been accepted as truth by later historians. Macaulay in especial exerted all his art, though in contradiction of probability and fact, to deepen still further the shade which rests upon his reputation. Christie, on the other hand, in possession of later sources of information, and with more honest purpose, did much to rehabilitate him. Occasionally, however, he appears to hold a brief for the defence, and, though the picture is comparatively true, this Life (1871) should be read with caution. Finally, in his monograph (1886) in the series of “English Worthies,” H. D. Traill professes to hold the scales equally. He makes an interesting addition to our conception of Shaftesbury’s place in English politics, by insisting on his position as the first great party leader in the modern sense, and as the founder of modern parliamentary oratory. In other respects his book is derived almost entirely from Christie. See also the present writer’s article in the Dict. Nat. Biog. Much of Shaftesbury’s career, increasingly so as it came near its close, is incapable of defence; but it has escaped most of his critics that his life up to the Restoration, apparently full of inconsistencies, was evidently guided by one leading principle, the determination to uphold the supremacy of parliament, a principle which, however obscured by self-interest, appears also to have underlain his whole political career. He was, too, ever the friend of religious freedom and of an enlightened policy in all trade questions. And, above all, it should not be forgotten, in justice to Shaftesbury’s memory, that “ during his long political career, in an age of general corruption, he was ever in corrupt, and never grasped either money or land.” (O. A.)
SHAFTESBURY, ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER, 3rd Earl of (1671–1713), was born at Exeter House in London on the 26th of February 1670/1. He was grandson of the first and son of the second earl. His mother was Lady Dorothy Manners, daughter of John, earl of Rutland. According to a curious story, told by the third earl himself, the marriage between
his father and mother was negotiated by John Locke, who was
a trusted friend of the first earl. The second Lord Shaftesbury
appears to have been a poor creature, both physically and
mentally. At the age of three his son was made over to the
formal guardianship of his grandfather. Locke, who in his
capacity of medical attendant to the Ashley household had
already assisted in bringing the boy into the world, though not
his instructor, was entrusted with the superintendence of his
education. This was conducted according to the principles
enunciated in Locke’s Thoughts concerning Education, and the
method of teaching Latin and Greek conversationally was
pursued with such success by his instructress, Mrs Elizabeth
Birch, that at the age of eleven, it is said, Ashley could read
both languages with ease. In November 1683, some months
after the death of the first earl, his father entered him at
Winchester as a warden’s boarder. Being shy and constantly
taunted with the opinions and fate of his grandfather, he appears
to have been rendered miserable by his schoolfellows, and to
have left Winchester in 1686 for a course of foreign travel. He
was brought thus into contact with those artistic and classical
associations which exercised so marked an influence on his
character and opinions. On his travels he did not, we are told
by the fourth earl, “greatly seek the conversation of other
English young gentlemen on their travels,” but rather that of
their tutors, with whom he could converse on congenial topics.
In 1689, the year after the Revolution, Lord Ashley returned
to England, and for nearly five years he appears to have led a
quiet and studious life. There can be no doubt that the greater
part of his attention was directed to the perusal of classical
authors, and to the attempt to realize the true spirit of classical
antiquity. He had no intention, however, of becoming a. recluse,
or of permanently holding himself aloof from public life. Accordingly
he became a candidate for the borough of Poole, and was
returned the 21st of May 1695. He soon distinguished himself by a
speech in support of the Bill for Regulating Trials in Cases of
Treason, one provision of which was that a person indicated for
treason or misprision of treason should be allowed the assistance
of counsel. But, though a Whig, alike by descent, by education
and by conviction, Ashley could by no means be depended on to
give a party vote; he was always ready to support any propositions,
from whatever quarter they came, that appeared to him
to promote the liberty of the subject and the independence of
parliament. Unfortunately, his health was so treacherous that,
on the dissolution of July 1698, he was obliged to retire from
parliamentary life. He suffered much from asthma, a complaint
which was aggravated by the London smoke.
Lord Ashley now retired into Holland, where he became acquainted with Le Clerc, Bayle, Benjamin Furly, the English Quaker merchant, at whose house Locke had resided during his stay at Rotterdam, and probably Limborch and the rest of the literary circle of which Locke had been a cherished and honoured member nine or ten years before. To Lord Ashley this society was probably far more congenial than his surroundings in England. Unrestrained conversation on the topics which most interested him—philosophy, politics, morals, religion—was at this time to be had in Holland with less danger and in greater abundance than in any other country in the world. To the period of this sojourn in Holland must probably be referred the surreptitious impression or publication of an imperfect edition of the Inquiry concerning Virtue, from a rough draught, sketched when he was only twenty years of age. This liberty was taken, during his absence, by Toland.
After an absence of over a twelvemonth, Ashley returned to England, and soon succeeded his father as earl of Shaftesbury. He took an active part, on the Whig side, in the general election of 1700–1701, and again, with more success, in that of the autumn of 1701. It is said that William III. showed his appreciation of Shaftesbury’s services on this latter occasion by offering him a secretaryship of state, which, however, his declining health compelled him to decline. Had the king’s life continued, Shaftesbury’s influence at court would 'probably have been considerable. After the first few Weeks of Anne’s reign, Shaftesbury, who had been deprived of the vice-admiralty of Dorset, returned to his retired life, but his letters to Furly show that he retained a keen interest in politics. In August 1703 he again settled in Holland, in the air of which he seems, like Locke, to have had great faith. At Rotterdam he lived, he says in a letter to
