Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury PC, FRS, was an English statesman and peer. 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, 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 also a patron of the political philosopher John Locke, with whom Shaftesbury collaborated with in writing the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina in 1669.
During the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Shaftesbury initially supported the Royalists, before switching to Parliamentarians in 1644. He served on the English Council of State under the Commonwealth, although he opposed Oliver Cromwell's attempt to rule without Parliament during the 1655 to 1657 Rule of the Major-Generals. 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 of Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon in 1672, he was created as the Earl of Shaftesbury and became one of five members of the so-called Cabal Ministry. In 1673, it became widely known that Charles' heir James had secretly converted to Catholicism. Like 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, in 1682 he went into exile in Amsterdam, where he died in January 1683.
Wikipedia
Gilbert Burnet, in Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Time (1823), Vol. I, p. 164
About Anthony Ashley-Cooper
