Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury 1621–1683

John Spurr, John Spurr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317180517
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, was a giant on the English political scene of the later seventeenth century. Despite taking up arms against the king in the Civil War, and his active participation in the republican governments of the 1650s, Shaftesbury managed to retain a leading role in public affairs following the Restoration of Charles II, being raised to the peerage and holding several major offices. Following his dismissal from government in 1673 he then became de facto leader of the opposition faction and champion of the Protestant cause, before finally fleeing the country in 1681 following charges of high treason. In order to understand fully such a complex and controversial figure, this volume draws upon the specialised knowledge of nine leading scholars to investigate Shaftesbury's life and reputation. As well as re-evaluating the well-known episodes in which he was involved - his early republican sympathies, the Cabal, the Popish Plot and the politics of party faction - other less familiar themes are also explored. These include his involvement with the expansion of England's overseas colonies, his relationship with John Locke, his connections with Scotland and Ireland and his high profile public reputation. Each chapter has been especially commissioned to give an insight into a different facet of his career, whilst simultaneously adding to an overall evaluation of the man, his actions and beliefs. As such, this book presents a unique and coherent picture of Shaftesbury that draws upon the very latest interdisciplinary research, and will no doubt stimulate further work on the most intriguing politician of his generation.

Chapter 1
Shaftesbury and the Seventeenth Century

John Spurr

Whoever considers the number and the power of the adversaries I have met with and how studiously they have, under the authority of both Church and State, dispersed the most villainous slanders of me, will think it necessary that I in this follow the French fashion, and write my own memoirs, that it may appear to the world on what ground or motives they came to be my enemies, and with what truth and justice they have prosecuted their quarrel.1

As far as we know, Anthony Ashley Cooper never fulfilled this combative promise to write his own memoirs. Only a few scraps of autobiography survive. Nor is there much biographical material from his friends and contemporary admirers.2 Thus for many years the field was left to those enemies and critics whose calumnies he had resented so deeply. Not that this most adversarial and mercurial of politicians could have expected much indulgence from commentators. Few politicians have been so reviled by contemporaries as false and self-interested, a turncoat and a ruthless troublemaker, and yet simultaneously recognised as crucially important to the age’s great struggles over religious and constitutional principles. In and out of power over more than three decades – at different times an MP, a privy councillor, a great minister of state, and yet also repeatedly in disgrace, in the Tower, and identified with the most determined of oppositional politics, rabble-rousing, and even conspiracy – Anthony Ashley Cooper embodies the political twists and turns of the seventeenth century.

The ‘villainous slanders’ against this slippery ‘Dorsetshire eel’ were legion, and were effective in creating a damning public image. A satirical ‘book catalogue’ of 1666 included ‘How to look backwards, and forwards, of this side, and that side and every, written by the Lord Ashley Cooper’.3 ‘A little bobtailed lord, urchin of state, / A Praisegod-Barebones-peer whom all men hate, / Amphibious animal, half fool, half knave’ was one satirist’s unflattering description; another called him ‘the very abridgement of villainy’: little wonder that Shaftesbury complained to John Locke of pamphlets ‘designed to throw dirt at me’.4 Well before Absalom and Achitophel, John Dryden did not mince his words:

He who has often changed his party, and always has made his interest the rule of it, gives little evidence of his sincerity for the public good: ’tis manifest he changes but for himself, and takes the people for tools to work his fortune.5

For the Shaftesbury of the satirists’ imagination, the cause did not matter so long as the politician was ‘in play’; and nothing would stand in the way of self-preservation; ‘if he get through, / Secure himself, he drowns the Ship and Crew’.6 Of course, insincerity and self-interest are not uncommon charges to be laid against politicians of any period: Shaftesbury in many ways simply fitted into a neat stereotype of the professional politician that pamphleteers, satirists and dramatists loved to belabour. In her study of the plays of the Exclusion Crisis, Susan Owen concluded that while there were clear dramatic references to Shaftesbury, there were many more generalised allusions to self-interested politicians – Metullus in Otway’s Caius Marius, the Constable in Crowne’s The Ambitious Statesman, or Creon in Dryden and Lee’s Oedipus – that are too sweeping to be anything more than incidental allusions to the Earl.7 She cited the lines in Lee’s The Princess of Cleves that undoubtedly conjure up a caricatured Shaftesbury, but in the context of a general catalogue of corrupt social types: ‘Does not your Politician, your little great Man of bus’ness, that sets the World together by the Ears, after all his Plotting, Drudging and Sweating at Lying, retire to some little Punk and untap at Night?’8

Frontal assaults on Shaftesbury, such as Marchamont Nedham’s pamphlet A Pacquet of Advices (1676), wreaked havoc on his reputation in his own lifetime and have been much quoted by historians since then. However, it was the relentless campaign waged against him in the early 1680s that most effectively demonised the Earl. Roger L’Estrange’s Observator‘does nothing but rave against Aldersgate Street’ – Shaftesbury’s London home – commented one onlooker.9 The campaign of which L’Estrange and Dryden were leading lights looks like a very conscious attempt to personalise the issues that had lain beneath the ‘Exclusion Crisis’, to cast the blame on Shaftesbury’s personal ambition, and to give a name and face to ‘the restless Malice of ill Men’, who had poisoned the people out of ‘Old Beloved Commonwealth Principles’ and anger at their thwarted ‘Ambition and Greatness’.10 In the Tory propaganda of 1679 and 1680 the Whig leadership was seen as an undifferentiated crew of ‘grey Achitophels’, and Shaftesbury was singled out principally as the orchestrator of the Popish Plot evidence, but from April 1681 he was increasingly portrayed as the Duke of Monmouth’s evil genius and in due course as the ‘fiery soul’, Achitophel, ‘restless, unfixed in principles and place’, who would lead Absalom towards ruin.11 ‘Curst Ambition has no moral Nature,’ was the Tory press’s judgement on the Earl.12

Shaftesbury’s personal reputation never recovered from this onslaught. Nor was his personal political cause sufficiently straightforward to be lauded by posterity. There were less tarnished heroes for the Whig cause to celebrate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – even if some of them, such as Edmund Ludlow, had been manufactured to serve that end – and without a set of Shaftesbury’s memoirs to weigh against those of, say, Clarendon and Burnet, there was little chance that he could shape the received version of the seventeenth century from beyond the grave.13 An occasional individual might hint at the need for a sympathetic study of Shaftesbury, but for several generations no one had the time or inclination to review his reputation and re-examine his career.14 When rescue arrived it came in the shape of William Dougal Christie, Queen Victoria’s envoy-extraordinary and minister-plenipotentiary to Brazil, a less than successful diplomat whose radical political instincts led him to the study of seventeenth-century England. Eager to make good the deficiencies in the historical record on Shaftesbury by publishing some of the papers that the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury and other aristocrats had put at his disposal, Christie produced a collection of documents in 1859 and then a substantial biography of the Earl in 1871.15 Other scholars were to build on Christie’s foundations, but none so successfully as Kenneth Haley, whose 767-page biography of Shaftesbury appeared to acclaim in 1968. ‘Haley has clearly succeeded in completing that rehabilitation of Shaftesbury begun by Christie nearly a century ago, while at the same time producing what will certainly be the definitive biography for many years to come,’ wrote one reviewer.16 R.C. Latham saw it as ‘a splendid biography in the classic tradition’, ‘a defence, but not a blind one’ of a ‘major statesman’, who even after such scrupulous attention remained ‘in some ways an unlikeable man, as he was to many of his contemporaries – too prone to vehemence and ruthlessness’.17

Haley’s book is a monument of exact academic scholarship.18 Its detail will not be replaced, and very little will be revised; some of its judgements may be open to dispute, but it is an achievement that will stand the test of time. What has changed in the four decades since Haley laboured on his biography is the understanding of the seventeenth century. So while subsequent generations have built upon Haley’s scholarship and developed his concerns with constitutional issues and the emergence of political parties, they have also widened their approach to encompass mass and popular politics, the religious, provincial and British dimensions of politics, and the broader economic, social and cultural arenas. As Chapter 9 will show, in recent years scholars have debated the nature and relevance of the seventeenth century’s radical traditions, the weight of perceptions of earlier Stuart misgovernment, the politics of religion, and even the identity of the ‘Exclusion Crisis’ itself. A series of fine studies have illuminated subjects as various as both Houses of Parliament, the crowd, public opinion, urban politics, foreign policy and the political role of the theatre in the second half of the seventeenth century. Historians and literary scholars have traded tools and approaches. Historians of print and oral culture have contributed to a new sense of political culture. A field that once sustained a handful of scholars is now trodden by scores of researchers on both sides of the Atlantic.

The resulting body of work emphasises the transformation of British society through myriad processes. It foregrounds partisan division – ‘the public partisanship that emerged during the mid-century crisis and became formalised in the later Stuart period as party politics’ – and sees polarisation as ‘an enduring feature of the crisis [of 1679–83] and of the Restoration’.19 London’s radicals pursued a consistent agenda from the 1650s to the Augustan era, according to Gary De Krey; while Halliday’s analysis of urban partisanship sees the years 1660–1730 as a distinct ‘epoch’ in which the cycle of partisan purge and counter-purge gave politics a fundamental consistency irrespective of the changing political issues.20 Mark Knights’ superb study of ‘the intersection between politics, society, ideas, and modes of communication’ from the 1670s to the 1720s refines a fashionable emphasis on the participatory nature of English politics by showing that representative institutions and practices – parliaments, elections and petitions – were significant in themselves and as major forms of participation. As voters, petitioners and readers, the English were required to assess and judge political questions. Yet, as he demonstrates, this dominant partisan political discourse was also shot through with ambiguity and tension. Inherently unstable, full of the very dangers that it preached against, the political discourse of Whig and Tory parties subverted the notion of truth as it claimed to be asserting it, corrupted voters in the very act of advising them against that danger, and made partisan use of a rhetoric of impartiality. Such insights and qualifications are the benefits of taking a longer perspective. When the magnification is increased on shorter periods of time or specific localities, clear-cut certainties become a little blurred and the messier complexities come into view. Against the suggestion of ideological or political fissures running from the mid-century to the rage of party, we must always balance our sense of the politically contingent, the constantly shifting divisions, and the multiplicity of viewpoints and interest groups.21

‘State formation’ is another prominent theme of writing on the period. The processes of political, social and geographical integration that characterised British state formation have been tracked in various ways. The acceptance of a heavier tax burden, the seizing of new bureaucratic and professional opportunities, and the willingness of the ‘middling sorts’ to take up the reins of parish government can all be taken as evidence that the population increasingly identified their own interests with tho...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Shaftesbury and the Seventeenth Century
• 2 ‘Mechanic Tyrannie’: Anthony Ashley Cooper and the English Republic
• 3 Shaftesbury and the Royal Supremacy
• 4 Annual Parliaments and Aristocratic Whiggism
• 5 Shaftesbury’s Aristocratic Empire
• 6 Shaftesbury and the Politics of Religion
• 7 The Unscholastic Statesman: Locke and the Earl of Shaftesbury
• 8 England’s ‘little sisters without breasts’: Shaftesbury and Scotland and Ireland
• 9 Shaftesbury and the Exclusion Crisis
• 10 Shaftesbury and the Rye House Plot
• Select Bibliography
• Index