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), Shaftesbury 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 Shaftesbury's household and retinue for 15 years, Locke became a major political philosopher.
During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Shaftesbury 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.
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, Shaftesbury 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, Shaftesbury 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.
Early life and first marriage, 1621–1640
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.
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 Cooper's first tutor.
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, Cooper thus gained an important political connection in the form of her grandson, the future 1st Earl of Essex. 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.
Cooper's father had held his lands in knight-service, so 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 Cooper's wardship from the king, but they remained unable to settle the estate and sell 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 Cooper to hate the Court of Wards as a corrupt institution.
Young orphaned 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 1628–29 parliament, and Norton chose a man with Puritan leanings named Fletcher as Cooper's tutor.
Cooper's trustee Sir Daniel died in 1636, and 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.
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, 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, 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 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
In March 1640, while still a minor, 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), 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 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.
When the Civil War began in 1642, 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, 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 Cooper and Prince Maurice.