Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury (22 July 1621 – 21 January 1683), was an English statesman. He held senior political office under both the Commonwealth of England and Charles II, serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1661 to 1672 and Lord Chancellor from 1672 to 1673. During the Exclusion Crisis (1679–1681), Ashley-Cooper headed the movement to bar the Catholic heir, James II, from the royal succession, which is often seen as the origin of the Whig party. He was the first patron of John Locke, who, when they met was a quiet Oxford don and practising physician; as part of Ashley-Cooper's household and retinue for 15 years, Locke became a major political philosopher.
During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Ashley-Cooper initially supported the Royalists, before joining the Parliamentarians in 1644. He served on the English Council of State under the English Commonwealth, although he opposed Oliver Cromwell's attempt to rule without Parliament during the Rule of the Major-Generals (1655–1657). He backed the Stuart Restoration in May 1660, and was raised to the peerage of England as Lord Ashley by Charles II.
Ashley-Cooper was a notable financier of the African slave trade, investing in both the Company of Royal Adventurers and the Royal African Company, and serving as the Company's Sub-Governor for its first two years. He was an investor for 14 years and across 120 slave crossings. He was also instrumental in enshrining slavery into the North American Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina.
After the political fall in 1667 of Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon, Lord Ashley became one of five members of the so-called Cabal ministry and was created Earl of Shaftesbury in 1672. In 1673, it became widely known that Charles's brother and heir James had secretly converted to Catholicism. As with many English Protestants of the period, Ashley-Cooper saw Catholicism as closely linked to "arbitrary government", and thus the prospect of a Catholic monarch as a threat to the rule of Parliament.
His sponsorship of the Exclusion Bill in 1679 led to two years of political struggle, but ultimately ended in defeat. During the subsequent Tory reaction in 1681, Ashley-Cooper was arrested for high treason, a prosecution dropped several months later. Fearing re-arrest and execution, which was the fate of other opponents of the King, in 1682 he went into exile in Amsterdam, where he died in January 1683.
Biography
Early life and first marriage, 1621–1640
Ashley-Cooper was the eldest son and successor of Sir John Cooper, 1st Baronet, of Rockbourne in Hampshire, and his mother was the former Anne Ashley, daughter and sole heiress of Sir Anthony Ashley, 1st Baronet. He was born on 22 July 1621, at the home of his maternal grandfather Sir Anthony Ashley in Wimborne St Giles, Dorset. He was named Anthony Ashley-Cooper because of a promise the couple had made to Sir Anthony.
Although Sir Anthony Ashley was of minor gentry stock, he had served as Secretary at War in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (d.1603). In 1622, two years after the death of his first wife, Sir Anthony Ashley married the 19-year-old Philippa Sheldon (51 years his junior), a relative of George Villiers, Marquess of Buckingham, thus cementing relations with the most powerful man at court.
Ashley-Cooper's father was created a baronet in 1622, and he represented Poole in the parliaments of 1625 and 1628, supporting the attack on Richard Neile, Bishop of Winchester, for his Arminian tendencies. Sir Anthony Ashley insisted that a man with Puritan leanings, Aaron Guerdon, be chosen as Ashley-Cooper's first tutor.
Ashley-Cooper's mother died in 1628. In the following year his father remarried, this time to the widowed Mary Moryson, one of the daughters of wealthy London textile merchant Baptist Hicks and co-heir of his fortune. Through his stepmother, Ashley-Cooperthus gained an important political connection in the form of her grandson, the future 1st Earl of Essex. Ashley-Cooper's father died in 1630, leaving his son (age 9) a wealthy orphan. Upon his father's death, he inherited his father's baronetcy and was now Sir Anthony Ashley-Cooper.
Ashley-Cooper's father had held his lands in knight-service, so Ashley-Cooper's inheritance now came under the authority of the Court of Wards. The trustees whom his father had appointed to administer his estate, his brother-in-law (Anthony Ashley-Cooper's uncle by marriage), Edward Tooker, and his colleague from the House of Commons, Sir Daniel Norton, purchased Ashley-Cooper's wardship from the king, but they remained unable to settle the estate and sell Ashley-Cooper's land without permission of the Court of Wards, since at his death, Sir John Cooper had left some £35,000 in gambling debts. The Court of Wards ordered the sale of the best of Sir John's lands to pay his debts, with several sales commissioners picking up choice properties at £20,000 less than their market value, a circumstance which led Ashley-Cooper to hate the Court of Wards as a corrupt institution.
Young orphaned Ashley-Cooper was sent to live with his father's trustee Sir Daniel Norton in Southwick, Hampshire (near Portsmouth). Norton had joined in Sir John Cooper's denunciation of Arminianism in the 1628–1629 parliament, and Norton chose a man with Puritan leanings named Fletcher as Ashley-Cooper's tutor.
Ashley-Cooper's trustee Sir Daniel died in 1636, and Ashley-Cooper (age 15) was sent to live with his father's other trustee, Edward Tooker, at Maddington, near Salisbury. Here his tutor was a man with an MA from Oriel College, Oxford.
Ashley-Cooper matriculated at Exeter College, Oxford, on 24 March 1637, aged 15, where he studied under its master, the Regius Professor of Divinity, John Prideaux, a Calvinist with vehemently anti-Arminian tendencies. While there, he fomented a minor riot and left without taking a degree. In February 1638, Ashley-Cooper was admitted to Lincoln's Inn, where he was exposed to the Puritan preaching of chaplains Edward Reynolds and Joseph Caryl.
On 25 February 1639, aged 19, Ashley-Cooper married Margaret Coventry, daughter of Thomas Coventry, 1st Baron Coventry, who was then serving as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal for Charles I. As Ashley-Cooper was still a minor, the young couple moved into Lord Coventry's residences of Durham House in the Strand, and at Canonbury House in Islington.
Early political career, 1640–1660
Parliament, 1640–1642
In March 1640, while still a minor, Ashley-Cooper was elected member of parliament for the borough of Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, in the Short Parliament through the influence of Lord Coventry.
In October 1640, with opinion in the country swinging against the king's supporters (including Coventry), Ashley-Cooper was not asked to stand for election for Tewkesbury in the Long Parliament. He contested, and by some accounts, won a by-election to the seat of Downton in Wiltshire, but Denzil Holles, soon to rise to prominence as a leader of the opposition to the King and a personal rival of Sir Anthony, blocked Ashley-Cooper's admission to the Parliament. It was probably feared that Sir Anthony, as a result of his recent marriage to the daughter of the king's Lord Keeper, would be too sympathetic to the king.
Royalist, 1642–1644 When the Civil War began in 1642, Ashley-Cooper initially supported the King (somewhat echoing Holles' concerns). After a period of vacillating, he, at his own expense in the summer of 1643, raised a regiment of foot and a troop of horse for the King, serving as their colonel and captain respectively. Following the Royalist victory at the Battle of Roundway Down on 13 July 1643, Ashley-Cooper was one of three commissioners appointed to negotiate the surrender of Dorchester, at which he negotiated a deal whereby the town agreed to surrender in exchange for being spared plunder and punishment. However, troops under Prince Maurice soon arrived and plundered Dorchester and Weymouth anyway, leading to heated words between Ashley-Cooper and Prince Maurice.
William Seymour, Marquess of Hertford, the commander of the Royalist forces in the west, had recommended Ashley-Cooper be appointed governor of Weymouth and Portland, but Prince Maurice intervened to block the appointment, on grounds of Ashley-Cooper's youth and alleged inexperience. Ashley-Cooper er appealed to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Edward Hyde; Hyde arranged a compromise whereby Ashley-Cooper would be appointed as governor but resign as soon as it was possible to do so without losing face. Ashley-Cooper was promised that upon resigning as governor, he would be made High Sheriff of Dorset and president of the council of war for Dorset, both of which were offices more prestigious than the governorship. Ashley-Cooper spent the remainder of 1643 as governor of Weymouth and Portland.
Parliamentarian and second marriage, 1644–1652 In early 1644, Ashley-Cooper resigned all of his posts under the king, and travelled to Hurst Castle, the headquarters of the Parliamentarians. Called before the Committee of Both Kingdoms, on 6 March 1644, he explained that he believed that Charles I was now being influenced by Roman Catholics. Catholics were increasingly prominent at Charles's court, and he had recently signed a truce with Irish Catholic rebels) and that he believed Charles had no intention of "promoting or preserving ... the Protestant religion and the liberties of the kingdom" and that he, therefore, believed the parliamentary cause was just, and he offered to take the Solemn League and Covenant.
In July 1644, the House of Commons gave Ashley-Cooper permission to leave London, and he soon joined parliamentary forces in Dorset. After he participated in a campaign in August, parliament appointed him to the committee governing the army in Dorset. Ashley-Cooper participated in fighting throughout 1644. In 1645, with the passing of the Self-denying Ordinance, Ashley-Cooper chose to resign his commissions in the parliamentary army, which was, at this point, being supplanted by the creation of the New Model Army) to preserve his claim to be the rightful member for Downton. He nevertheless continued to be active in the Dorset committee as a civil member.
In this period Ashley-Cooper made his first colonial investment, buying a 105-acre plantation in the English colony of Barbados in 1646, as the island was converting to sugar cultivation worked by enslaved Africans; he sold it in 1655 for £1,020.
Little is known of Ashley-Cooper's activities in the late 1640s. It is often assumed that he supported the Presbyterians against the Independents, and, as such, opposed the regicide of Charles I in January 1649. Nevertheless, he was willing to work with the new regime, accepting a commission as justice of the peace for Wiltshire and Dorset in February 1649 and acting as High Sheriff of Wiltshire for 1647. In February 1650, he not only took the oath of loyalty to the new regime but was a member of a commission that tendered the oath.
Ashley-Cooper's first wife, Margaret, died on 10 July 1649; the couple had had no children. Less than a year later, on 15 April 1650, Ashley-Cooper remarried at age 28, to seventeen-year-old Lady Frances Cecil (1633–1652), daughter of David Cecil, 3rd Earl of Exeter. In their brief marriage, the couple had two children, one of whom, Anthony, lived to adulthood. Lady Frances died on 31 December 1652, aged only 19.
Statesman under the Commonwealth of England and the Protectorate, 1652–1660 On 17 January 1652, the Rump Parliament appointed Ashley-Cooper to the committee on law reform chaired by Sir Matthew Hale (the so-called Hale Commission, none of whose moderate proposals were ever enacted).