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wards, that he took his seat in the Long parliament as member for Downton. In 1643, Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper declared for the king, with whom, though merely "as a spectator," we are told, he had been in the previous year at Nottingham and Derby. He raised a regiment for Charles, and was made high sheriff of Dorsetshire and governor of Weymouth. Deprived of the latter employment, he began a notable series of political tergiversations, by "ratting" to the side of the parliament before his first year of active loyalty was ended. In 1644 he took Wareham for the parliament, but the sincerity of his zeal seems to have been doubted; and from that year to 1652 his political biography is a blank. After Cromwell's dismissal of the Rump, he gave in his adhesion to the new order of things. He was summoned by Cromwell to the Little, commonly called Barebones parliament. While it sat he was one of the council of state, and when Cromwell became protector, he was appointed a member of the new council. Disappointed, and alienated from Cromwell—because he was refused, according to some, the great seal; according to others, the hand of the protector's daughter, the Lady Mary Cromwell—he ceased to attend the council, and went into opposition. Returned at the head of the poll as one of the members for Wiltshire, to Cromwell's last parliament of 1656, he was among those who, at the opening of the first session, were excluded by a refusal of the protector's certificate of approbation. Under the new instrument of government the excluded members were admitted at the opening of the second session. Shaftesbury took his seat for Wiltshire, and distinguished himself in opposition—a policy which he continued in Richard Cromwell's parliament. Such a figure had he made that, on the first restoration of the Rump, he was appointed a member of the council of state. On the second restoration of the Rump, as already mentioned, he took his seat for Downton, and was appointed one of the new council of state to carry on the government until the Convention parliament should assemble. He sat in that parliament, and was one of the chief instruments in procuring the Restoration. When it was effected he was covered with honours and rewards—among them the chancellorship of the exchequer, and elevation to the peerage as Baron Ashley. For some time he kept tolerably quiet, exerting his influence, however, against the reactionary policy of the first years of the new reign—illiberality towards dissenters, subservience to France, and hostility to Holland. After the fall of Clarendon, August, 1667, which he helped to effect, he supported the Triple alliance merely to throw it overboard when Charles became the slave of the king of France. With Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, and Lauderdale, he formed the famous "Cabal" ministry, which placed England at the feet of Louis XIV., and plunged her into a war with protestant Holland. The declaration of indulgence (March, 1672) is said to have been the work of Ashley, and he was rewarded by being in the same year created Earl of Shaftesbury and appointed lord-chancellor. In February, 1673, at the opening of parliament, he made the famous speech against Holland, in which he proclaimed "Delenda est Carthago." But another change was at hand. Shaftesbury foresaw a reaction against the policy which he had been encouraging, and resolved to bid for the leadership of the country party. Wheeling suddenly round, he opposed the declaration of indulgence and the marriage of the duke of York to Mary of Modena. Scarcely a year had elapsed since his acceptance of the seals when he was dismissed from the chancellorship by Charles, and joined the country party, never to leave it. To this party he brought great skill as a parliamentary debater and tactician, and a thorough knowledge of the designs of the connection which he had quitted. Under his guidance, and by his dexterous use of the popular feeling against Catholicism, it thwarted Charles and his ministers session after session, forcing the king to repeated prorogations. Early in 1677, after a long prorogation, Shaftesbury and his friends took the bold step of declaring that the parliament was dissolved, and for this he and they were sent to the Tower. Refusing to follow their example, he remained a prisoner for more than a year, when at last he made the required submission. Then came the Popish plot, and Shaftesbury, now at the height of his popularity, had his revenge. He encouraged the popular excitement to the utmost; and when the king in alarm sent for Temple, and accepted his scheme of government by a new council, the triumphant Shaftesbury was appointed its president, and the leaders of the country party were among its members. It was during his term of office that, enlightened by his experience as a prisoner in the Tower, he procured the enactment of the celebrated Habeas Corpus act (May, 1679). A few months afterwards, Shaftesbury and his friends ceased to be connected with the government, and he now had recourse to extreme measures. Not content with the exclusion bill, Shaftesbury, on the 26th of June, 1680, preferred an indictment against the duke of York as a popish recusant, and Scroggs (q.v.) had to appear on the scene and dismiss the grand jury before they could come to a decision. It was at Shaftesbury's invitation or instigation, it is said, that Monmouth returned to England. The violence of Shaftesbury's language had begun to alarm the leaders of the country party themselves, when Charles resolved on a decisive measure. Early in July, 1681, Shaftesbury was seized and committed to the Tower on a charge of high treason. On the 17th November following, a week before the indictment was to be considered by the grand jury, appeared Dryden's famous Absalom and Achitophel, the character of Shaftesbury in which belongs to the most striking passages in English or in any literature. On the 24th the bill was ignored by the grand jury to the delight of the people. Shaftesbury struck a medal as a memorial of his escape, and at the request of the king Dryden grasped his pen and wrote The Medal. Excited and irritated, Shaftesbury now advised an insurrection, in which Russell and Sydney refused to join, and which Monmouth himself opposed. Reports of his designs reached the court, and Shaftesbury heard rumours that he was again to be arrested. In November, 1682, he fled in disguise to Holland. The Dutch not forgetting, but generously forgiving the famous "Delenda est Carthago," gave him a hospitable shelter. He took a large house at Amsterdam, and lived there in style until his death on the 21st of June, 1683. In private, Shaftesbury was a splendid man and a delightful companion, and when his faults are remembered it should not be forgotten that he was the friend and patron of Locke. He was one of the founders of the modern school of parliamentary debaters, and the author of the Habeas Corpus act as we have it now. As a chancellor (an office for which he was obviously unqualified) he is pronounced by Lord Campbell to have been "the worst judge that had ever sat in the court," and this in spite of Dryden's praises of his judicial merits—praises, however, which appeared for the first time in the second edition of Absalom and Achitophel, and which there is still good reason to suppose were purchased by a favour which Achitophel bestowed on his satirist. Former biographies of Lord Shaftesbury will, it is likely, be effaced by his "Memoirs, Letters, and Speeches," edited by William Dougal Christie, Esq , her majesty's envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary in Brazil, of which vol. i. appeared in 1859.—F. E.

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Cooper, third earl of, author of the "Characteristics," grandson of the preceding and son of the second earl, was born in London in 1671. As the eldest son and heir to the earldom, he was taken by his grandfather and educated under the eye of the first Shaftesbury by the philosopher Locke. After spending some time at Winchester school he made the grand tour, and in his twenty-third year entered the house of commons as member for Poole. It was during the session of 1696 that he turned so happily to account his own hesitation and nervousness when addressing the house. The matter in debate was the bill for regulating trials in cases of high treason, and Shaftesbury was pleading that the accused should be allowed the assistance of counsel. With prompt ingenuity he made his own break-down an argument in favour of the concession by saying:—"If I, sir, who rise only to give my opinion on the bill now depending, am so confounded that I am unable to express the least of what I proposed to say, what must the condition of that man be who, without any assistance, is pleading for his life?" Delicate health and perhaps a wish to indulge his intellectual tastes, led him to resign his seat in 1698, and he proceeded to Holland to enjoy the advice and society of such men as Bayle and Le Clerc. On the death of his father soon afterwards, 1702, he returned to England, and actively supported the grand alliance and the general policy of William III., by whom, in the last years of his reign, he was frequently consulted. After the accession of Queen Anne, he once more quitted politics and England, visiting the latter, however, before his death, which took place in February, 1713. His writings, published separately between 1699 and 1710, were collected by himself in 1711, and with his final corrections appeared in 1713, after his death, as "Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, and Times." Shaftesbury passes as the author of the doctrine that "ridicule