‘The little man’: Cooper before the Restoration
A man of little stature, in his youth well enough shaped, of countenance agreeable; grace he had in all his manners of application, which were to every body soft and plausible. He was very well learn’d, and particularly understood the laws; he was exceeding eloquent, a great master he was of words, and the language, and knew powerfully to apply them to every purpose. His voice was harmonious, and of the sweetness thereof he did likewise make use, in his intent to charm the auditors, when he intended to cast false colours upon any thing. But with this he was proud as Lucifer, and ambitious beyond what ever enter’d into the designs of any man; impatient of every power but his own, of any man’s reputation; false to that degree, as he did not esteem any promise, any engagement, any oath, of other use than to serve a purpose, and none of these of consequence to bind a man further than it was his interest: and for religion, of which, for a tool, he made most use, he had never any, as appear’d by the private practices of his whole life… And for his cruelty, it was never less to those he hated, than intentions of total ruin, and extirpation, in which he was inexorable; and it was never known he forgave, or was reconcil’d to any man.
R. Halstead (earl of Peterborough), Succinct Genealogies, 432. The principal biographies of Shaftesbury are B. Martyn and A. Kippis, The Life of the first Earl of Shaftesbury (1836), W.D. Christie A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper (1871), L.F. Brown The First Earl of Shaftesbury (1933), K.H.D. Haley The First Earl of Shaftesbury (1968), and J. Spurr (ed.) Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury (2011). This account is largely based on Haley’s, but is indebted to Christie, and to the essays in the volume edited by Spurr. The early biographies of Shaftesbury are described by J.R. Milton in ‘Benjamin Martyn, the Shaftesbury Family, and the reputation of the first earl of Shaftesbury’, HJ, li (2008), 315-35. This account of Shaftesbury concentrates on his activities in domestic politics and especially the House of Lords. The 2011 volume deals at length with his colonial interests.
For Tories like Henry Mordaunt, 2nd earl of Peterborough, there was something of the night about Anthony Ashley Cooper, the ‘false Achitophel... a name to all succeeding ages curst’ of Dryden’s epic poem of the 1678-83 crisis, Absalom and Achitophel. To a degree, their hatred of ‘the little man’ was formed in the years when he led the charge against James Stuart, duke of York, Peterborough’s patron, at the beginning of the 1680s, and Peterborough’s vitriol was partly inspired by the occasion when he crossed swords with him himself in 1681. But royalists had long been deeply suspicious of a man who had begun as one of them in the 1640s before swapping sides. (The Strangways family had cause for lasting enmity for his destruction of their house in Dorset in 1644.)
Ashley Cooper rose to prominence with his service on the law reform commission in 1652-4, in Barebone’s Parliament and the council of state, formative experiences which gave him a lifelong interest in the promotion of trade, the impact of law on society and the intricacies of matters as various as probate, chancery and commercial law. Sufficiently closely allied to Cromwell to be involved in the proposal to make him king in late 1654, his divergence from the Protector from 1655 onwards, as well as his marriage into the Spencer family, tying him into a series of family alliances involving the Coventrys, Wriothesleys and Saviles, made Royalists think that they might be able to reclaim him. Instead, Ashley Cooper accepted a place on the council of state established by the revived Rump Parliament in 1659 and was cleared of allegations of his involvement in Booth’s rebellion in September.
Royalists remained uncertain whose side he was on until very late in the day. John Mordaunt, later Viscount Mordaunt, the agent of Sir Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, was sceptical, believing that Ashley Cooper, together with Holles and others, had been ‘debauched’ by Algernon Percy, 4th earl of Northumberland and Edward Montagu, 2nd earl of Manchester ‘to prevent the General’s designs’ and to insist on conditions for the king’s restoration.
By then Ashley Cooper had been elected to the Convention Parliament, and on 8 May he was appointed one of the House of Commons’ twelve commissioners to the king at The Hague. On the return of the king, he was sworn a member of the Privy Council, one of those particularly recommended by Monck: a recommendation more willingly accepted, Clarendon wrote later, ‘because having lately married the niece of the earl of Southampton… it was believed that his slippery humour would be easily restrained and fixed by the uncle’.
Lord Ashley, 1661-5
Ashley’s estate was based on the amalgamation of the estates of his Ashley and Cooper grandfathers in North Dorset, around Wimborne St Giles, and West Hampshire, at Rockbourne, and in Wiltshire, around Purton, and in Holborn in London. Depleted by sales to pay his father’s debts and litigation in the court of wards, rentals in the 1670s suggest that his income from land was around £3,000 a year, augmented by his salary and fees from 1660 to his loss of office in 1674. Shaftesbury made extensive commercial investments in whaling, silk, and mining, and put money into a range of colonial projects: he owned a plantation in Barbados in the late 1640s and early 1650s and in the 1660s and 1670s his activity expanded considerably, with interests in the Bahamas and Bermudas and Carolina, and money invested in the Royal Africa and Hudson’s Bay Companies.
The new Lord Ashley was introduced into the House of Lords on 11 May between Thomas Windsor, 7th Baron Windsor, later earl of Plymouth, and Christopher Hatton, Baron Hatton, and was added to the committees for the customs and orders of the House and privileges of the peers, and to consider petitions. One of the most assiduous members of the House, he was present on almost every one of the 65 sitting days of the first session of the Cavalier Parliament up to the summer adjournment in July. He was a member of committees on most of the bills and other business which would occupy the bulk of the peers’ time, including the corporation bill (which Shaftesbury’s eighteenth century biographer suggested that he had opposed, although there is no contemporary evidence for this), and on those exempted from the Act of Indemnity.
On 28 June he was appointed to a committee following a debate on the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, to consider the laws against Roman Catholic priests. According to William Howard, Viscount Stafford, at his trial in 1680, Ashley, in his capacity of chancellor of the exchequer, had given the nod soon after the Restoration to Stafford’s proposal for the removal of the laws against Catholic worship in exchange for a levy of £100,000, although Stafford did not suggest that he had any further involvement in the discussions led by George Digby, earl of Bristol, which issued in the debates in the Lords in the summer of 1661.
After the summer adjournment, Ashley was present in the Lords for all but five sitting days and he missed (as did many others) the fast sermons on 15 Jan. and 30 Jan 1662, an attendance record of about 94 per cent. He was enormously busy with exchequer business, which accounted for many of the committees to which he was appointed, including one on collectors of taxes, which he reported on 28 Apr. 1662. He was closely involved in the bill about sheriffs’ accounts, which he reported on 28 Apr., and again on 15 May, and reported the effect of a conference on what was probably the same bill on 17 May. Beside such official activity, he was appointed to committees on most of the key issues of the session, as well as a wide range of economic issues. He reported a bill prohibiting importation of foreign bone lace; was appointed to the committee for another bill to do with repairing highways and sewers in London and Westminster, and later on helped to manage a conference about it, and he was appointed to committees concerning ten local, private or naturalization bills. He reported on the naturalization bill on 14 May, and later managed a conference with the Commons on the subject. Ashley was among the signatories of the protest against Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby’s highly controversial bill on 6 Feb. 1662, although he is not included in the list in the printed Journal.
A number of Ashley’s interventions related to the privilege of peerage, particularly when it came to the intensive inter-house conferencing in May, towards the end of the session. They included the Irish peerage, on 25 Feb. 1662, and disputes over the militia bill in May about rating peers and about the status of the lieutenancy on 14, 16 and 17 May.
Clarendon attributed to Ashley and the new secretary of state, Bennet, the initiative to produce the Declaration of Indulgence in December 1662: Ashley and Robartes were present, he wrote, when it was discussed at a meeting at Clarendon’s Worcester House.
the Lord Ashley adhered firmly to his point, spake often and with great sharpness of wit, and had a cadence in his words and pronunciation that drew attention. He said, it was the king’s misfortune that a matter of so great concernment to him, and such a prerogative as it may be would be found to be inherent in him without any declaration of Parliament, should be supported only by such weak men as himself, who served his majesty at a distance, whilst the great officers of the crown thought fit to oppose it.
Clarendon described how Ashley had provoked him into an ill-advised response, which had infuriated the king.
Apart from the controversy over the indulgence bill, Ashley’s frenetic level of activity continued, though there was less exchequer business than in the previous session. He reported on arrears in peers’ benevolence payments on 31 Mar., he served on a committee on a bill for vesting alum-making in the king, and he asked the House on 18 June for a decision on whether peers who had to account for monies to the exchequer should deliver their accounts on their honour or upon oath. He was one of the committee for the subsidy bill, and one of the commissioners appointed to assess the peers.
Other than departmental matters, he continued to be appointed to the committees dealing with the major bills of the session.
The indulgence affair was regarded as having enhanced Ashley’s standing with the king. The French ambassador wrote in April that he was ‘in my opinion the only man who can match [Clarendon] in intellect and resolve, does not refrain from freely expressing his sentiments, and contradicting him to his face’.
Ashley’s alliance with Bristol created a problem for him when the court conflict reached a crisis in late June, as Bennet abandoned the latter and accepted a working alliance with Clarendon. According to the French ambassador Ruvigny, Bristol demanded the admission of himself and his friends – Robartes and Ashley were particularly mentioned – to the king’s inner councils.
After Bristol’s hasty departure at the end of the session, the opposition to Clarendon lacked a leader, although Ashley was still routinely mentioned as among its principals.
An annotated list of the House of Commons in Ashley’s papers dating probably to before the 1664 session suggests an interest in political management, though it is far from clear what it means.
Ashley’s name was linked with those of Robartes and John Maitland, earl of Lauderdale [S], over the summer.
On 24 Dec. Ashley was appointed treasurer of prize goods, in anticipation of the forthcoming war. The position created a separate fund outside the exchequer, to which Clarendon objected, complaining to Ashley that no court of law would approve of its exemption from the normal principles of exchequer accounting.
The French ambassadors became particularly fixated with the group of Bennet (now Lord Arlington), Ashley and Lauderdale, whom they thought constituted an anti-French faction. They were reporting in May 1665 that the three were spending every evening at supper with the king’s mistress, the countess of Castlemaine.
Ashley was not present at the prorogations in June, August and early October. He missed seven days altogether of the very short Oxford session, lowering his attendance record further to 56 per cent, though he was appointed as usual to the committee of privileges and the sub-committee for the journal. He served on the committee on the five mile bill: the account written ten years later in A Letter from a Person of Quality says that Ashley opposed the bill together with Southampton and Wharton, though a contemporary account refers to opposition from Southampton, Manchester, Wharton and John Lucas, Baron Lucas of Shenfield, during the debate on the 30th, but not from Ashley – indeed, Ashley was apparently absent.
A member of the committee on the plague bill, Ashley was one of those appointed to manage a conference on it on 31 October. Sir Allan Brodrick‡, a partisan of the chancellor, blamed the Lords – especially York, Robartes, George Monck, duke of Albemarle, and Ashley – for the failure of the bill because, ‘ridiculously tender of their privileges’, they insisted on exempting the peerage.
War and Irish cattle: 1666-7
Ashley missed the first two days of the session of 1666-7, but was appointed to the committee of privileges on the first day he attended, 24 Sept. 1666. His attendance record recovered: absent on a further four days throughout the session, he was present for 95 per cent of its sittings. A major preoccupation was the prospect of the French entering the war. Ashley was one of those appointed to draw up reasons for a conference with the House of Commons concerning a vote on imports from France on 12 Oct. 1666; with Anglesey he was appointed on 29 Oct. to draw up an addition extending the bill to all of the king’s dominions, and was one of the members appointed to present the address against French imports to the king. As treasurer of prize goods, he was one of those appointed to examine the merchants following a Commons vote concerning the confiscated goods of some French merchants.
Most of Ashley’s energies were taken up, however, with the drive to ban imports of Irish cattle, the bill for which arrived in the Lords on 19 Oct. 1667. Ashley was said to be, apart from Buckingham, the bill’s most prominent advocate in the Lords.
The debates in the Lords between the report and the third reading on 23 Nov. focused on three points. One was a proviso exempting Scottish cattle, which the committee had already left out, and which Conway thought had been part of a plan to create a monopoly and share the profits with James Scott [700]*, duke of Monmouth; the second was the removal of the word ‘nuisance’, which would enable the king to dispense with the effective parts of the act; and the third was a provision to permit Irish cattle to be exported to help supply London following the fire, proposed in response to a petition from the City of London. On 17 Nov. Ashley was appointed to a committee to draft the proviso to give effect to the latter measure.
The court was equally troubled by the accounts bill. Clarendon in his memoir suggested that Ashley himself had something to fear from an inquiry into the public accounts because of the lack of accountability for the treasurership of prize goods.
In the meantime, the Irish cattle bill had returned to the Lords. On 17 Dec. the House took into consideration the rejection by the Commons of the removal of the word ‘nuisance’ from the bill. Ashley was presumably in agreement with Buckingham and Lucas, who argued for acceptance of the Commons’ line, but was (with them) appointed to the committee to prepare reasons for adhering to the removal of the word from the bill.
At the beginning of 1667 Lord Conway was pleased with his riposte to Ashley when there was a scare about the invasion of Ireland by France. Ashley asked how Ireland would defend itself: Conway responded that since Ashley was helping to render her incapable of doing so through the Irish cattle bill it was up to him to work it out. He replied ‘very superciliously’, that the blame for the problems of Ireland lay ‘upon those lords, that have driven the English out of the sea ports, and corporate towns, and filled them up with Irish’.
’Twas true they had done an unnatural Act, but the fault was in our present governors who by the settlement of Ireland, the book of rates, and other principles of government did endeavour to divide the interest of the two kingdoms, whereas he desired they should be united, and sit in one Parliament and then all these Acts would fall to the ground.
Anglesey described their subsequent conversation, in which Ashley promised to support proposals for the relief of Ireland: Anglesey referred to ‘having heard him at Oxford exclaim against granting us liberty of conscience’, and told him that ‘in my own opinion I knew nothing would do us more good than that’. Ashley said that he would ‘particularly befriend us in this, and further it to the utmost of his power’, though it is far from clear whether liberty of conscience for Catholics or for Presbyterians was meant.
Ashley and his allies followed up their success on Irish cattle with pressure on other issues. An attempt to impeach William Willoughby, 5th (CP 6th) Baron Willoughby of Parham, shortly to be appointed governor of Barbados, may have had something to do with Ashley, and a speech on the Canary patent, perhaps delivered during the debates in December and January on the monopoly, mischievously copying arguments Clarendon had used against the 1663 ecclesiastical jurisdiction bill, was probably his.
Meanwhile, exchequer business continued to occupy Ashley’s time, including a bill for encouraging coinage, on which he conveyed the king’s consent, was appointed to the committee, and reported two conferences with the Commons (3 and 10 Jan. 1667), and a bill on accounts.
Ashley also served on the committee on the bill establishing a court to deal with the Fire of London cases: a debate on 23 Jan. over whether to add a clause providing for an appeal to the king and the House of Lords from the sentence of the judges displayed Ashley’s dislike of judicial discretion. The amendment was rejected, and Ashley with many others (including the Robartes, Buckingham and Lucas) protested. He also protested against the passage of the bill – although he entered no reason himself, John Carey, 2nd earl of Dover, explained his own protest as an objection to the unlimited power it gave to the judges without an appeal.
Ashley continued to be heavily involved in private bills: he was appointed to the committees for seven estate bills including those involving Sir Charles Stanley, in which he had been concerned before, and Lord Abergavenny (he acted as chairman on this committee, and his presence on it was clearly regarded as critical to Lady Abergavenny).
The prorogation on 8 Feb. was followed a few weeks later by an order for the arrest of the duke of Buckingham. No action was taken against Ashley, but his chances of succeeding Southampton as treasurer had been entirely sunk by his actions during the session. When Southampton died on 16 May 1667, the king decided to create a treasury commission. Clarendon wrote that he had objected to the omission of Ashley from the proposals agreed by the king and duke of York for the commission. The king reluctantly agreed to include him, but with a quorum of three, Ashley would not be taking a leading role as was customary for the chancellor of the exchequer. Ashley, wrote Clarendon, ‘rather chose to be degraded than to dispute it’.
After Clarendon: 1667-9
Ashley adopted a cautious approach to the political crisis caused by the defeat of the English fleet which ended with the dismissal of Clarendon at the end of August.
Present for the opening of Parliament on 10 Oct., Ashley attended around 80 per cent of the session’s sittings. As before, he was appointed to the committee of privileges and the subcommittee on the journals, and the committee of petitions.
Ashley was also involved in the proceedings following Clarendon’s flight from London at the beginning of December. He was a manager of the conference on Clarendon’s petition on 4 Dec., was appointed to the committee on the bill for his banishment on 7 Dec., and was among those appointed to draw up reasons for dissenting from the vote of the Commons about the banishment on 14 December. He was also among those appointed to report a conference with the Commons on freedom of speech (concerning the 1630 judgment against Sir John Eliot and Denzil Holles) on 10 Dec., and reported from it the following day.
The subtleties of Ashley’s position on Clarendon may have signalled an attempt to occupy a specific place in English politics. The French ambassador Ruvigny explained on 22 Nov. that Ashley and Anglesey, and possibly Arlington as well, were trying to form an alliance, hoping to persuade Northumberland to act as its figurehead.
As previously, Ashley was involved in much other business. He was appointed to the committee to consider trade with Scotland on 14 October. On 26 Oct. he was present at one of its meetings at which a report was presented from a committee of the council and Lauderdale gave evidence. Ashley proposed that all acts (presumably impositions on Scottish commodities including the Navigation Acts) be suspended until midsummer and in the meantime a commission of both kingdoms should meet. Buckingham (perhaps another sign of distance between them) argued instead that the committee should take nothing on trust from the council but hear the whole business.
Departmental business during the session included a bill on exchequer procedure, and another on the collection of the hearth tax.
Immersed in such detail, Ashley, perhaps already affected by the illness which would take hold of him later in the year, may have conceded political leadership to Buckingham. In the high-level politics of the court he was not very visible in the first months of 1668. He was reappointed to the trade and plantations committee in the reorganization of council committees in Jan., and would become a member of the council of trade formed in Oct.
On the other hand, Ashley may have already been unwell. In late May 1668 he became seriously ill as a result of complications of the hydatid cyst that had troubled him since at least 1656, if not since 1639. An operation was performed on 12 June in order to remove a tumour, and Ashley remained in danger for at least a month; there was a serious relapse in mid-September, and the doctors kept him under close observation until early November. Ashley was left with the famous silver pipe in his side – on which he extensively canvassed medical opinion – in order to continue to drain the abscess.
The Cabal, 1669-72
By 1669, Ashley may have recovered enough to regain some ground in court politics. It was said in January that he was taking a more active role in appointments in the court of exchequer, traditionally the preserve of the lord treasurer.
Ashley attended the prorogation on 1 Mar. 1669, when Parliament was postponed to the following October. He was involved in the discussions in the foreign committee of the Privy Council (the first time he is recorded as attending such a meeting) in June 1669 over union with Scotland. A strong advocate of the scheme, he argued (unsuccessfully) that the king should nominate commissioners himself, rather than waiting for Parliament to do so.
Ashley was present on first day of the new session on 19 Oct., when he was appointed to the committees of privileges, petitions and the sub-committee for the Journal. Although absent on the following day and on 30 Oct. and 23 Nov., he attended on all other sitting days, a 94 per cent attendance rate. He was nominated to committees considering the report of the commissioners of accounts (whose investigations had proved largely inconclusive), and a bill concerning wool exports, but little business reached committee stage by the time the king prorogued Parliament on 11 December.
Following the Skinner-provoked prorogation in December, and Robartes’s resignation from the post of lord privy seal in January 1670, it was rumoured that Ashley might succeed him, though nothing came of this.
Much of his other business involved government finance. He was appointed on 18 Mar. to the committee for the bill for sale of fee farm rents, and chaired the meetings of the committee on 23 and 29 March. On 21 Mar., when the House adjourned into committee on a bill for granting an imposition on wines and vinegar, Ashley reported back to the House. With Oliver St John, 2nd earl of Bolingbroke, and Anglesey he was charged with preparing a request to the king to preserve the ancient freedom for peers from duties on wine. Ashley reported from committees for bills to enable the king to make leases in the Duchy of Cornwall and on brandy duties.
Other public business reflected his usual interests: legal procedure, benefit of clergy, arson, the reconstruction of the city of London, highways and bridges (he later reported to the House from conferences on the bill), Great Yarmouth harbour, and piracy (on which he was one of the managers on a conference).
On 22 Mar. Lauderdale wrote that the bill for a treaty of union between England and Scotland had been ‘finished’ by himself with Ashley, the lord keeper, and the secretary of state, Sir John Trevor‡.
By the time the king adjourned Parliament on 11 Apr. 1670 Ashley had established himself as one of the most significant figures in royal government – one of the ‘Cabal’. Charles II told the French ambassador two days after he did so that the only people who knew about his decision to attend the House of Lords had been York, Buckingham, Arlington, and Ashley.
A consequence of his new prominence was that he was drawn into the planning for a renewal of war against the Dutch, following the signing, behind his and other councillors’ backs, of the notorious Catholic treaty on 1 June. Ashley was said to be ‘not against’ a treaty with France, but reluctant to rush into one.
During the autumn, Ashley had been closely involved in the discussions in the Foreign Committee in the run-up to the meeting of Parliament.
The enormous amount of other public business in which he was engaged included many familiar interests and some new ones: for example he helped to manage a conference on buying and selling cattle on 18 Apr.; he later reported the effect of a conference on the wool exports bill, especially concerning the Lords amendments for leaving out Ireland on 22 Apr., before it was interrupted by the prorogation.
In the midst of the speculation about the conversion of the duke and duchess of York in the winter of 1670-71, Ashley was closely involved in discussions about the growth of popery. At the end of the debate on 1 Mar. concerning a petition on the subject brought from the Commons, Ashley was one of those appointed to consider the difficult points of the Commons draft – ambassadorial chapels, St James’s Palace, and Ireland -- and was manager of a subsequent conference on 3 Mar. with Ormond, Arthur Capell, earl of Essex, Anglesey, Henry Somerset, 3rd marquess of Worcester (later duke of Beaufort), and George Morley, bishop of Winchester.
Ashley was deeply implicated in the row that precipitated the prorogation of the session, the dispute over the Commons’ foreign commodities bill, given a second reading in the Lords on 29 March. The Commons’ bill imposed increased duties on refined sugar, making it less profitable for planters to refine their own, as well as on imported tobacco and silk, and it provoked a vigorous lobbying campaign in the Lords. Ashley chaired a series of meetings of the committee from 29 Mar. to 8 Apr., and invited the prominent Barbados planter Sir Peter Colleton‡, son of Ashley’s former partner and, like him, one of the proprietors of Carolina, to put his case against the new duties. The committee also heard from Patience Ward‡, the outspoken City sheriff, nonconformist and merchant, as well as many others. Ashley reported the bill with amendments on 8 Apr., plus a proposed resolution to ask the king to encourage the native clothing industry by wearing its products himself – compensating for the Lords’ advocacy of the interests of importers. He was manager of the conference at which the bill was (eventually) delivered to the Commons on 12 April. Sandwich took the responsibility for initiating the Lords’ evisceration of the bill, though he wrote in his journal that ‘my Lord Ashley was fully of the same mind and did a good part therein’, and that the king had also approved.
The War and the Indulgence, 1671-73
The 1670-71 session had seen Ashley becoming one of Charles II’s most important ministers, overcoming the erratic dominance previously enjoyed by Buckingham, and establishing an uneasy equilibrium with Arlington and his increasingly significant protégé, Clifford; though still not privy to the great secret of the original treaty with Louis XIV, he was fully involved in the preparations for war with the Dutch republic over the summer and autumn of 1671. He was a member of the council commission on the settlement of Ireland initially appointed in February.
Ashley, along with Clifford and Arlington, was involved in contacts with various nonconformists in the autumn of 1671, of which the only evidence is a series of poorly legible notes by Sir Joseph Williamson‡, some of them of interviews with Thomas Blood. They associate Ashley with a man named James Ennis or Innes, and reflect the belief that Ashley and Arlington were competing for the king’s attention and favour.
Ashley had attended Parliament at the prorogation on 16 April. Only on the following day were the warrants signed for his creation as earl of Shaftesbury, and it was therefore only on the day of the next prorogation, 30 Oct., that he was introduced between the earls of Bridgwater and Dover, paying fees of £15.10s.
after he was possessed of the great seal, he was, in appearance, the gloriousest man alive: and no man’s discourse, in his place, ever flew so high as his did, not only against the House of Commons, where, perhaps, he expected a party to sustain him; but against the tribe of the court of chancery, officers and counsel, and their methods of ordering the business of the court. As for the Commons, he did not scruple to declare openly, that he did not understand by what reason or right men should sit and vote themselves privileges. And for the chancery, he would teach the bar that a man of sense was above all their forms. He laboured hard and stuck at nothing to get men of his confidence into the House of Commons, and so, with all the gaiety de coeur imaginable, and a world of pleasant of wit in his conversation, as he had indeed a very great share, and shewed it upon all occasions, he composed himself to perform the duties of his place.
North, Examen, 46.
He adopted an unusually high-profile approach to the office, attempting to revive an old practice of riding to Westminster Hall on the first day of the new term, and ensuring that his speeches on the swearing-in of two lord treasurers and one of the barons of the exchequer were printed.
Discussions on preparations for the new session had begun in November 1672, when the foreign committee chewed over whom to promote to the speakership. Shaftesbury was not enthusiastic about the decision to invite Serjeant Job Charlton‡ to take up the post on account of his likely opposition to the Declaration, though he recognized that his own candidate, Sir Robert Howard‡, could not easily leave his position as secretary of the treasury.
On 28 Jan. the foreign affairs committee convened to hear the chancellor’s proposed speech, which was ‘allowed with one or two alterations’.
Shaftesbury’s election writs came under early fire in the Commons from Giles Strangways‡, Sir Thomas Meres‡, and Henry Powle‡, and were voided on 6 February.
In pursuit of the strategy to provoke a dispute between the two Houses, on 1 Mar. the king made a formal complaint to the Lords about the Commons’ addresses, and requested their advice. He was followed by Shaftesbury, who read out the exchanges with the Commons, and two days later thanked the Lords on behalf of the king for their address in response to the initiative. Shaftesbury chaired the committee appointed on 5 Mar. to draw up a ‘bill of advice’ to the king, to give effect to the Declaration. On the 6th it discussed heads of bills brought in by Clifford and by Anglesey.
The government hoped that this would produce progress on supply. Instead, on 13 Mar. the test bill arrived in the Lords. The French ambassador wrote that Shaftesbury had questioned the Commons’ messengers about the supply bill, which he had expected to arrive with it. On the 15th the bill was debated in committee, with Shaftesbury chairing a sub-committee to draw up amendments saving the privileges of the peerage, and providing for a pension enjoyed by the earl of Bristol.
An amendment to the protestant dissenters’ bill made in the Lords providing the king with a power to bring it into effect was seen in the Commons as another way of achieving the policy of the Declaration.
Given his position and the major issues that dominated the session, Shaftesbury was involved in little other business, other than formal interventions, dealing with the duel of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester and Robert Constable, 3rd Viscount Dunbar [S] on 22 Mar., and reporting the king’s signature of a general pardon on 27 March. He was, though, on 22 Mar. one of the committee on the case of Dr Salmon v. the Hamburg company ‘and to consider the relief to be given to the creditors by the judicial power of the House’. A committee to enable Robert Bellamy to sell lands was set to meet in the lord chancellor’s lodgings on 26 Feb., his only apparent involvement in any private bill activity. During the session he held the proxy of John Cecil, 4th earl of Exeter, given on 4 Feb., and vacated at the end of the session.
Following the adjournment on 29 Mar., and in the aftermath of York’s failure to take communion at Easter, French ambassador Colbert reported on 7 Apr. that Shaftesbury was one of those who had taken up the idea that the king should seek a divorce. York had told him that Shaftesbury wanted the king to marry again, to a Protestant princess, and to abandon the alliance with Louis XIV.
The king himself regarded Shaftesbury with considerable suspicion by the end of June. Colbert wrote on 30 June of the king telling him that Shaftesbury’s protestations of friendship to Colbert ‘were nothing but deceit, like all the actions of this minister, who he says is the weakest and most ill-intentioned of all men’.
Moray’s report probably originated with Shaftesbury, as Moray was said to be dining a number of times with him over summer (he died three days after writing the above letter after one such occasion). They were suspected of plotting against Lauderdale, perhaps to replace him with Monmouth as Scottish lord commissioner.
Shaftesbury and Danby, 1674-6
Despite the dismissal, Shaftesbury was in touch with both the court and the French before the resumption of Parliament in January. The French offered him £10,000, which he politely declined; according to the Venetian ambassador writing on 28 Nov., he was now offering himself to the court as the advocate of a Spanish alliance and peace, supply and the king’s remarriage to exclude the duke of York from the throne.
Present at the opening of Parliament and for every day of the short session, Shaftesbury was once more appointed to the committee of privileges and the sub-committee for petitions. He took the oath of allegiance on 14 January. He again received the proxy of the earl of Exeter on 27 Dec., vacated at the end of the session. That he was not working with Buckingham was suggested by his apparent support for the petition of Francis Brudenell, Lord Brudenell and members of the Talbot family, presented on the first day of the session, against Buckingham’s killing of Francis Talbot, 11th earl of Shrewsbury and his cohabitation with the countess.
On 8 Jan. (with the Commons adjourned until 12 Jan.) Shaftesbury made an incendiary speech in the Lords, about the presence of 16,000 Catholics around London ‘resolved to commit an atrocity’.
Shaftesbury escaped the inquisition held in the House of Commons into the actions of ministers, which resulted in addresses against Lauderdale and Buckingham: Buckingham’s attempt in his defence to associate himself with Shaftesbury suggested that the latter was seen as safe.
The brevity of the session prevented many bills reaching committee stage, though Shaftesbury was appointed to committees on bills about supplies of wood, apprentices and servants (also charged with considering how ‘non-Christian slaves may be used in England’), illegal imprisonment (the habeas corpus bill), and fraud.
The rumours after the prorogation that Shaftesbury and several others would be dismissed from the council were realized, despite a meeting between Shaftesbury and the king in late April, on 19 May.
As the question of whether Parliament should meet in May, or perhaps be dissolved, was hotly debated at court, Lord Mordaunt’s visit to Shaftesbury in January 1675 prompted much speculation. Sir Robert Southwell wondered on 16 Jan. whether Mordaunt’s mission had been at the instance of the king or the duke, either in order to gain ‘a better understanding with that little lord before the Parliament met’, or to offer him another post, either lord lieutenant of Ireland, or a ‘more extraordinary one here at home under the title of vicar general’. Another theory was that Mordaunt had been sent by ‘some other lords, with whom his Lordship did use here to consult, in order to communicate with him, to know upon what measures, and with what temper he would appear if the Parliament should meet’.
I assure your Lordship there is no place or condition will invite me to Court during this Parliament; nor until I see the king thinketh frequent new Parliaments as much his interest as they are the people’s rights, for until then I can never serve the King as well as I would, nor think a great place safe enough for a second adventure.
Warning that ‘it would not be unwise for the men in great office, that are at ease, and where they would be, to be ordinarily civil to a man in my condition’, he asked Carlisle to pass on his letter to Salisbury, Fauconberg, and Holles. When they four told him to come up to London he would do so. He finished with a sarcastic reference to the unsuccessful efforts of Halifax and Sir William Coventry to obtain office.
Shaftesbury’s letter, dated the same day as Danby’s (the former Latimer) proclamation for the enforcement of the penal laws against the Catholics and the suppression of conventicles, appears to have been common knowledge by 20 February.
Despite their determination to secure a dissolution, the group becoming known as the ‘country lords’ were keen to promote the agenda of the previous session, including the bill for securing the Protestant religion and the bill for explanation of an act for preventing dangers which may happen from popish recusants (Shaftesbury was appointed to the committee for the latter on 21 April). Their aims were overtaken, though, by Danby’s bill to prevent the dangers which may arise from persons disaffected to the government (the second test bill). The pamphlet written shortly after the session by John Locke, perhaps with input from Shaftesbury himself, A Letter from a Person of Quality, gave the resistance of Shaftesbury and his allies to the bill an epic quality, and in Shaftesbury’s own household his steward’s account of the long and desperate debates was retold well into the eighteenth century.
Any bill which imposeth an oath upon the peers with a penalty, as this doth, that, upon the refusal of that oath, they shall be made uncapable of sitting and voting in this House, as it is a thing unprecedented in former times, so is it, in our humble opinion, the highest invasion of the liberties and privileges of the peerage that possibly may be, and most destructive of the freedom which they ought to enjoy as members of Parliament, because the privilege of sitting and voting in Parliament is an honour they have by birth and a right so inherent in them, and inseparable from them, as that nothing can take it away, but what by the law of the land must withal take away their lives, and corrupt their blood.
LJ, xii. 665.
On 26 April, Shaftesbury and 11 peers protested bitterly against the bill’s committal. Three days later they were themselves attacked for their new tactic of entering protests: each of them denied that they had had any ‘intention to reflect upon any members, much less upon the whole House’, but the House voted that the reasons given in the protest reflected on the House and ‘are of dangerous consequence’. Shaftesbury and 20 others defiantly entered a third protest defending the ‘liberty of protesting’.
The account in the Letter from a Person of Quality of the ensuing debates (once the committee had ceased to report its votes individually, preventing further multiple protests) on 7, 10, 12, 14, 21, 28, and 31 May, divides the bill into a number of separate issues, attributing opposition to each to an individual peer. It singles out Shaftesbury as having the key role in arguing against the oath, particularly after it was revised to refer to the Protestant religion. In response to ridicule from the lord keeper and the bishops when he affected not to understand what was comprehended in the Protestant religion, he picked apart apparent contradictions in the Thirty-Nine Articles.
distinguished himself more in this session than ever he had done before. He spoke once a whole hour, to show the inconvenience of condemning all resistance upon any pretence whatsoever. He said it might be proper to lay such ties upon those who served in the militia, and in corporations, because there was still a superior power in the Parliament to declare the extent of the oath. But it might be of very ill consequence to lay it on a Parliament: since there might be cases, though far out of view, so that it was hard to suppose them, in which he believed no man would say it was not lawful to resist. If a king would make us a province, and tributary to France, and subdue the nation by a French army to the French or the papal authority, must we be bound in that case tamely to submit? Upon which he said many things that did cut to the quick: and yet, though his words were watched, so that it was resolved to have sent him to the Tower if any one word had fallen from him that had made him liable to such a censure, he spoke both with so much boldness and so much caution, that, though he provoked the court extremely, no advantage could be taken against him.
Burnet, History ed. Airy, ii. 83-4.
It has been argued that a document which exists in several versions, called ‘Reasons against the bill for the test’, may have been ‘based on’ the speech Burnet describes. It covers, however, ground attributed to a number of speakers in the Letter, and one copy of the ‘Reasons’ is annotated by Finch that ‘they are rather a collection of all the arguments that were used by several lords that spoke against the test, and here put together in one entire discourse’.
The slow progress of the bill in the Lords was attributable not just to the extended filibuster of Shaftesbury and his colleagues, but also to the Lords-Commons dispute over Sherley v. Fagg, preoccupying both Houses from early May. On 6 May, the Lords declared that it was the right of the Lords to determine appeals from inferior courts even if a member of either House was involved, though it decided not to incorporate the declaration into the message sent to the Commons. Shaftesbury, along with eight others, recorded a protest, arguing that the weaker message eventually sent ‘may seem in some measure to acknowledge that the House of Commons have a claim to some privilege in judicature which is a thing that we conceive belongs solely to this House’. Burnet wrote that Shaftesbury claimed that he had set up the dispute, ‘but others assured me it happened in course’.
The king abandoned the session and prorogued Parliament on 9 June. Although Shaftesbury bore a large part of the responsibility for wrecking it, he was seen at court on 13 June with the 6th marquess of Winchester and ‘attended the king to sermon and back again’.
Shaftesbury’s summer in Dorset was dominated by the preparations for the Dorset by-election necessitated by the death of Giles Strangways. In a long letter written probably to his close ally and Member of the Commons for Shaftesbury John Bennett‡ on 28 Aug., Shaftesbury laid out his own account of the affair. Initially inclined to support the candidacy of the son of the earl of Bristol, John, Lord Digby, later 3rd earl of Bristol, who had marched with the opposition in April and May, Shaftesbury had changed his mind when he heard that Digby ‘would not prove as some of us expected’. Shaftesbury had perhaps heard of Bristol’s reconciliation with the court. Shaftesbury persuaded Thomas Moore‡, a former member of the Long Parliament, to stand instead. Digby expressed his fury in a chance encounter on 27 Aug., publicly telling Shaftesbury that he was ‘against the king, and for seditions and factions, and for a Commonwealth, and I will prove it, and by God we will have your head next Parliament’. The outburst was witnessed by a large number of people, including Lord Mohun.
The new session had begun on 13 October. Shaftesbury was present on all days but one. He was, as usual, appointed on the first day to the committee for privileges and its sub-committee, and to the committee for petitions. He and his friends resumed their campaign. On 14 Oct. he was appointed to the committee for the revived bill for explanation of the act for preventing the dangers which may happen by Popish recusants. On the next sitting day, 19 Oct., Sherley’s petition for a hearing of his case was presented; a debate on 20 Oct. about whether to read it was the occasion for a major speech by Shaftesbury, circulated in manuscript and later printed along with a speech of the duke of Buckingham made on 16 November.
for let the House of Commons, and gentry of England, think what they please, there is no prince that ever govern’d without nobility or an army: if you will not have one you must have t’other, or the monarchy can no longer support, or keep itself from tumbling into a democratical republic. Your lordships and the people have the same cause, and the same enemies.
The Lords’ jurisdiction was not perfect, he conceded – committee dinners, the use of attractive young women to present petitions, had been abuses – but it had rarely been faulted. Finally he turned to an attack on the bishops, who, he suggested, did not share the view of other peers ‘that the king is king by law, and by the same law that the poor man enjoys his cottage’. Instead, the bishops were committed to a view that monarchy was by divine right. This ‘Laudian doctrine’ which lurked behind the previous session’s test bill, would mean that monarchy could not be limited by law and ‘all the properties and liberties of the people, are to give way, not only to the interest, but the will and pleasure of the crown’. He concluded by urging the appointment of a date for the hearing of Sherley’s petition, in three weeks’ time. On 4 Nov. the House finally agreed to set a date for hearing the case on the 20th.
In the period before returning to Sherley v. Fagg, Shaftesbury was appointed to three private and three public bill committees, and A Letter to a Person of Quality had appeared in print, incorporating some passages that also appeared in the circulated version of Shaftesbury’s 20 Oct. speech, and a powerful analysis of the strategy of Danby and the bishops of making a ‘distinct party from the rest of the nation of the high episcopal man, and the Old Cavalier’. The scheme, it claimed, was to make the government absolute and jure divino, and to raise a standing army.
Murray also referred to a further discussion of Sherley v. Fagg, apparently on Tuesday 9 Mar., in which the lord keeper proposed that the business be put off until the following day. Shaftesbury responded that the delay was in order to secure supply from the Commons – that the Commons ‘would buy their privileges from them this night with a sum of money’.
Though the Lords decided to go ahead as planned, the Commons’ threat to begin breach of privilege proceedings against any counsel appearing in the case forced the hearing in the end to be postponed. The only one of the counsel assigned for Sherley by the Lords who turned up, Richard Wallop, would act later for Shaftesbury and Fitzharris and may have been a kinsman of Shaftesbury.
Playing again on the technique developed in the previous session, the minority peers entered a protest in the Journal two days later, signed by Shaftesbury and 21 others, reiterating their arguments for a dissolution (‘it seems not reasonable, that any particular number of men should for many years engross so great a trust of the people, as to be their representatives in the House of Commons’).
Shaftesbury made further attempts after the end of the session to divide the court. Noting that York had voted for a dissolution on 20 Nov. he sent him a message through Lord Stafford, according to Burnet.
Shaftesbury remained, therefore, in London, occupied with his removal from Exeter House, now destined for demolition.
Francis Jenks’s bold and electrifying speech advocating an address to the king for a new Parliament, made during the proceedings on the election of the new sheriffs on 24 June was, according to the French ambassador, openly regarded by Shaftesbury as inopportune. He was annoyed with Buckingham for supporting it.
The Tower, 1677-8
Over the summer, autumn and winter, Shaftesbury made plans for the meeting of Parliament in February 1677. Despite his disapproval of Jenks’s initiative, he ‘laid hold… with great joy’ (according to Burnet) of Jenks’s argument that the fifteen months’ prorogation contravened the provisions in the statutes of Edward III’s reign stating that Parliament should be held every year.
Just before the Parliament opened both the country conspirators and the government attempted to influence opinion through a series of pamphlets. Published on behalf of Shaftesbury and his associates were Some Considerations upon the Question whether the Parliament is dissolved, The Long Parliament dissolved and The Grand Question concerning the Prorogation of this Parliament.
In the few days before Parliament sat, Shaftesbury, according to James II’s recollection, had ‘had the confidence to send to the duke to know if he had read and consider’d any of the papers about the dissolution of this present Parliament’. Shaftesbury and his allies had worried, he wrote, about a throwaway remark made in Some Considerations that Parliament had the power to alter the succession. Shaftesbury, Wharton and Buckingham all subsequently disavowed the point (Buckingham said that Shaftesbury had put it in without his consent).
Parliament was opened on 15 Feb. 1677. Shaftesbury was again appointed to the privileges committee and sub-committee and the committee for petitions. He attended on the first two days: for almost all of the remainder of a long session punctuated by a series of adjournments he was incarcerated in the Tower of London. On the 15th, immediately after the House began business following the king’s and chancellor’s speeches, Buckingham (in a move coordinated with confederates in the Commons) claimed that Parliament had been automatically dissolved by the long prorogation. A motion made by John Frescheville, Baron Freschville, to call him to the bar for the speech was seconded by Lord Arundel of Trerice. It was opposed by Salisbury, Halifax, and then Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury attacked it as an assault on freedom of speech in Parliament (expanding on the analysis in the Letter from a Person of Quality); on the issue itself he argued that Parliaments ‘were annual by common law before the statutes, that it was dangerous to remove old landmarks, & there had always been inconveniences from long Parliaments’. There were many more contributions, but support for Buckingham’s motion was generally weak, and the decision around 8 o’clock to lay the debate aside was achieved without much apparent difficulty. Danby immediately moved to consider action against the peers who had argued that Parliament be dissolved. Ormond moved that Buckingham be questioned, and Danby added Salisbury, Shaftesbury and Wharton. After two more hours’ debate, with Lord Anglesey vigorously opposing the move, the House was adjourned to the following day.
On the 16th, the motion that the four lords should withdraw was carried on a division at about 4 o’clock by 53 votes to 30. Buckingham was said to have slunk away into hiding before the vote, to the irritation of the other three, according to one observer, who also noted that ‘my Lord Salisbury had a behaviour, look, & discourse becoming a resolute person, but the other two seem’d more apprehensive of their condition’.
Buckingham gave himself up the next day and was also consigned to the Tower. On the 17th the Lords ordered that the four be kept apart, except at church, and that they be allowed no visitors (except their servants) without the express permission of the House.
At the same time the House of Lords was reviewing the evidence concerning the publication of the three pamphlets arguing that Parliament had been dissolved, looking for evidence to associate them with the four peers. They only succeeded in establishing that The Grand Question had been written by Holles.
Shaftesbury’s next move was to apply for a writ of habeas corpus.
Shaftesbury himself said he spoke only to rebut claims by the attorney and solicitor that his counsel had argued that the court was above the House of Lords. They had said only that the court was the proper place to resort to in cases where the liberty of the subject was concerned: ‘the Lords’ house is the supreme court of judicature in the kingdom; but yet there is a jurisdiction which the Lords’ House do not meddle with’. The Lords, he argued, ‘claim not to meddle’ in original cases (arguably, given that this was the point at issue in Skinner v. the East India Company), and were not themselves above the law. The court should, he suggested, judge an act of Parliament null and void if it were against Magna Carta, and should annul an order of the House to deprive any subject of his liberty.
The reckoning for Shaftesbury was to have some of his privileges removed, with the restrictions on his visitors renewed.
Shaftesbury was allowed visitors in September, October and November, including Michael Mallet ‡, the violently anti-Catholic Member, Sir Paul Neile, his business partner and most frequent visitor, Sir Peter Colleton, Thomas Duppa, Thomas Stringer, Lancelot Sedgwick, Francis Charlton (his second most frequent visitor, who would become Shaftesbury’s political factotum), and the marquess of Winchester.
Once Parliament reopened, Shaftesbury’s own submission and readmission to the House of Lords followed those of Buckingham on 28 Jan., of Salisbury on 4 Feb. and Wharton on 7 Feb. Shaftesbury’s petition was brought in by Halifax on 14 Feb. and supported by Clarendon and Essex (‘and faintly by the duke of Buckingham’) but was vigorously and successfully resisted by York, Danby and others, who argued that the habeas corpus appeal of the summer amounted to a further contempt of the House. The petition was rejected.
On the day, 25 Feb., Shaftesbury was brought to kneel at the bar. The lord chancellor demanded his response to the Lords’ resolution. Shaftesbury gave an apparently fulsome acknowledgement of his offence and error in his habeas corpus application: ‘I would have perished, rather than have brought my habeas corpus, had I then apprehended or been informed that it had been a breach of the privileges of this honourable House. It is my duty, it is my interest, to support your privileges. I shall never oppose them’.
In early April, John Hay, earl of Tweeddale [S] was told of a story ‘commonly discoursed’ (though there seems to be no other account of it) of a challenge sent by the earl of Carlisle to Shaftesbury via Sir John Fenwick‡: it was claimed that Carlisle had offered to procure Shaftesbury his freedom while in the Tower, on the condition that he would then retire into the country. Shaftesbury’s failure to leave London after his release was taken by Carlisle as breaking that commitment. Shaftesbury denied that he had made any such promise, and refused the challenge, telling Fenwick that ‘it was not unlikely but my Lord Carlisle would be pardoned if he killed him, but if it was his fortune to kill the earl of Carlisle he was sure not to receive mercy’.
The Plot: 1678-81
Having missed the first 20 sitting days since Parliament had resumed in January, Shaftesbury was present every remaining day of the session but six. Shortly after his return (on a day when he was not present) a complaint about the arrest of his servant (and probably relation) John Cooper was raised and referred to the committee of privileges.
Shaftesbury resumed some of his previous activity. He was placed on committees on bills concerning fines and recoveries, burying in wool, charitable uses, pedlars, hawkers and petty chapmen, and relief for protestant refugees.
After a break for Easter and the Pembroke trial, Parliament resumed in earnest on 29 April. The Lords on 30 Apr. attended a conference with the Commons on the growth of popery: Shaftesbury was one of the managers. He may have been ill, for he was said to be ‘recovering’ on 2 May, although he was said to have spoken in a debate on the Commons’ request for action against the growth of popery, claiming that the main threat came not from rural Catholicism, but from Catholics who lived in London, ‘and apply themselves to an arbitrary government and to introduce the Catholic religion entirely’.
In the new session that lasted until July, Shaftesbury missed only two sittings, the fast day on 29 May and the afternoon sitting on 12 July, a 95 per cent attendance rate. He was appointed to the committee of privileges, the subcommittee and the committee on petitions on the first day of the session. During late May and early June he was appointed to a number of committees including those concerning relief for protestant refugees and burying in woollen (on which he managed a conference on 11 July).
Shaftesbury seems, however, not to have been particularly visible in the debates about the peace and the army during the early summer, although he was one of the peers appointed to manage a conference with the Commons on 19 June about the international situation. He joined Winchester, Essex, Wharton and Charles Dormer, 2nd earl of Caernarvon in dissenting on 25 June from the rejection of the Commons’ proviso to the supply bill to require a speedy disbandment of the troops. He dined twice in June with the earl of Anglesey, mixing with the countess of Peterborough, Lord and Lady Arundel (though it is not clear which ones), Lady Stanhope, and Sir John Thomson, among others.
Shaftesbury was in Dorset from the end of July. He appears to have acted together with Halifax and Lord Russell as peacemaker between William Cavendish, 3rd earl of Devonshire and his son William Cavendish, Lord Cavendish, later duke of Devonshire, in July and August.
if my lord duke of Lauderdale and the treasurer should have been both disgraced on a sudden I should not have been able to have made one step towards being their successor but however it was a great comfort to me to hear that his grace the duke of Buckingham was in England and not in France; for his grace (I can assure you) would have supplied their places with the good advice of Major Wildman so that neither court nor country should find the least miss of them.
Herts ALS, DE/P/F24.
He was recovered, however, by the opening sitting of the last session of the Cavalier Parliament, on 21 Oct. 1678, following the revelations about the Popish Plot. Appointed to the committees for privileges, for the Journal, and for petitions, his presence was recorded every day except for the fast days on 5, 13 Nov., on 14 Dec., and on the last day of the session, 30 Dec., an attendance record of 93 per cent. Shaftesbury received the proxies of Ford Grey, 3rd Baron Grey of Warke, registered to him on 15 Nov. and Benjamin Mildmay, 17th Baron Fitzwalter, registered on 18 Nov. (Fitzwalter’s son seems to have attended the same dissenting academy in Clapham as Shaftesbury’s grandsons). Both were noted down in a list of proxies in the papers of Lord Wharton.
On 23 Oct. Shaftesbury was appointed to the committee to examine the papers concerning the discovery of the Popish Plot, and was one of those (with allies Winchester, Bridgwater, Halifax and Essex) appointed to draw up an address for banishing Catholics from London and Westminster. It was presumably in this debate that he moved that the regiment commanded by George Douglas, earl of Dumbarton [S], formerly in the French service, whose officers were assumed to be Catholics, should be sent well away from London: this and a reference to Wentworth Dillon, 4th earl of Roscommon [I] (master of the horse to the duchess) were perhaps intended to insult York.
Shaftesbury now entered an intense period of activity: together with Buckingham, Halifax and the bishop of London, he was seen as leading the pack against York.
The remit of the committee set up to examine Coleman was extended on 2 Nov. to interrogate the Catholic peers who had been sent to the Tower, and on the 4th to other prisoners too. Shaftesbury was also a leading member of the committee set up on 23 Oct. to examine the papers relating to the Plot, and of its sub-committee to consider the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey. The committee’s secretary was Shaftesbury’s steward Thomas Stringer. A number of allegations were made later by hostile sources of Shaftesbury’s bullying behaviour towards witnesses: Mary Gibbon in 1683 told the secretary of state, Sir Leoline Jenkins ‡, how when she gave evidence (which she did on 9 Nov.) Shaftesbury had been rude to her and threatened her ‘that if she would not confess that Sir John Banks‡, Mr Pepys and M. de Pieu contrived the matter in it, she would be thrown into prison for her life or torn to pieces by the rabble or worried as the dogs worry the cats’.
In the wake of the king’s speech of 9 Nov. offering to accept legislation guaranteeing Protestant safety in the reign of his successor, Shaftesbury’s popularity may have been increased by information about threats to his and Monmouth’s lives, and a rumour that he was to be sent to the Tower.
Two key bills occupied the House in November. Shaftesbury was appointed on 26 Nov. to the committee on the militia bill, which the king vetoed on 30 November. The test bill was received from the Commons on 28 October. Roger North, writing much later, said it was ‘promoted by’ Shaftesbury. Catholic peers were said to have pointed to the order made by the House in 1675 with Shaftesbury’s support, that no oaths should be imposed on peers which would have the effect of them losing their seats in the House: North recorded that ‘his lordship smiled, and said, the House was master of their own orders, and leges posteriores priores abrogant’.
Shaftesbury took the oaths under the new Test Act on 2 Dec., teasing Lord Wharton about his scruples about kissing the bible (‘he hoped that kissing was no idolatry for if ‘twere then they must forbear kissing their wives’ – though one report, touching on Shaftesbury’s reputation for promiscuity, suggested he should have referred to mistresses).
A letter to the duke of Ormond of 14 Dec. 1678 suggests that Shaftesbury and some others proposed an address to urge the king to become ‘the head and protector of the Protestant party in Europe’.
Following the king’s decision to prorogue Parliament on 30 Dec., and the announcement of a dissolution on 24 Jan. with a new Parliament to meet on 6 March, French ambassador Barillon reported Shaftesbury and Buckingham’s satisfaction at the final end of the Cavalier Parliament.
Although there is not much evidence of his systematic involvement in the elections, Shaftesbury paid close attention to the results as they came in, compiling an estimate of those who had sat before, and those he regarded as ‘worthy’, ‘vile’, ‘honest’ or ‘bad’.
On 20 Mar. Shaftesbury was appointed to a committee on a bill to require members of Convocation to take the oaths and declaration in the test act; the same day the report of Peter Mews, bishop of Bath and Wells, report of the examination of Miles Prance revealed allegations about plans to kill Shaftesbury by associates of Richard Arundell, 3rd Baron Arundell of Wardour. It was reported by Ossory that on the same day, at the committee of examinations, Shaftesbury ‘in his ingenuous manner shook his head’ and had remarked that he ‘did not like the management of affairs’ in Ireland. Ossory warily wrote to Ormond he would now attend the committee regularly.
On the following day Lord Cavendish brought up a reminder from the Commons of the articles of high treason against Danby and a request that he be committed to custody. Shaftesbury is reported to have rebutted Lord Arundel’s objections to Danby’s commitment, and claimed that Arundel himself had pressed in similar circumstances for Clarendon’s commitment in 1667. Shaftesbury spoke later to comment on the parallels (or lack of them) with Clarendon’s case, and moved for Danby’s immediate commitment to the custody of black rod. Eventually he and other supporters of the impeachment (Halifax and Winchester) had to settle for an adjournment to the following day.
On that day, amid the reports of the examinations of the Catholic peers in the Tower, the second reading of a bill to disable Danby, and other business, Shaftesbury delivered a ‘long speech representing the dangerous condition of the kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland’, on a motion that the state of the nation be considered (in the Journal the motion is described as for an inquiry into Ireland).
The protection of the Protestants abroad is the greatest power and security the crown of England can attain to, and which can only help us to give a check to the growing greatness of France. Scotland and Ireland are two doors, either to let in good or mischief upon us: they are much weakened by the artifice of our cunning enemies, and we ought to enclose them with boards of cedar. Popery and slavery, like two sisters, go hand-in-hand. Sometimes one goes first and sometimes the other, in a doors; but wherever the one enters, the other is always following close at hand.
There followed an attack on the Scottish government, and briefer reference to worrying developments in Ireland: the papists had had their arms restored, and the Protestants were still ‘the suspected party’.
Shaftesbury claimed afterwards that his own comments on the Irish government had not been aimed at Ormond, but at Col. John Fitzpatrick, Ormond’s Catholic brother-in-law. Indeed, the House passed a motion to address the king that Fitzpatrick leave Dublin.
This was just one of a series of attacks on Catholics in government by Shaftesbury and his allies. On 26 Mar. he was said to have raised the leniency of the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir John Robinson‡, to the Catholic peers in his custody and the presence of Catholics in the fleet and garrisons.
On the following day the Lords debated the Commons’ bill for the attainder of the earl of Danby, their alternative to the Lords’ proposal for his banishment. It may have been Shaftesbury who argued that ‘we have now shot one rook, but there are a whole flock that will still endanger devouring our corn; therefore I am for hanging them up to affright others’; Northampton’s reference to a ‘little grub that devoured more than the rooks had done’ was probably aimed at him.
Shaftesbury may have planned also to incriminate the bishops. On 5 Apr. John Sidway was heard at the committee of examinations alleging that several, including Peter Gunning, bishop of Ely, John Pritchett, bishop of Gloucester, and Peter Mews, bishop of Bath and Wells were secret Catholics. Sidway though failed to identify Ely when Shaftesbury asked him to, the bishop complained to the House, and the business was taken out of the committee’s hands. Sidway was ordered to attend the House on the following Monday, the 7th.
Following the arrival of the articles of impeachment of the Catholic peers from the Commons on 7 Apr., Shaftesbury reported from the committee of privileges on 8 Apr. concerning the arrangements for the trial. On the same day he was appointed to a committee to draw up arguments to be used at a conference with the Commons over Danby; he and others were also added to a committee for ‘clearing London from papists’. On the 7th he was also appointed to the committee for a bill making a settlement of the estates of his deceased lieutenant, Lord Mohun. On 12 Apr. Shaftesbury was one of those managing, and later reporting from, a conference on Danby, at which he asserted the Lords’ wish to banish, rather than attaint, the former treasurer.
Since the removal of Danby extensive changes in office were expected. The earl of Essex had been appointed one of the commissioners of the Treasury on 29 Mar.: on 7 Apr. he proposed ‘a self-denying motion’ that all future lord treasurers or commissioners of the treasury should not have any greater profit from their office than their salaries. Shaftesbury was said to have ‘diverted’ it by instead suggesting a bill to abolish the office of lord treasurer, ‘it being of too great an importance and influence for any one subject’. He said that when the post had commonly been expected to go to him ‘in the misjudging eye of others, tho not in his own thoughts’, he found himself treated with ‘an unexpected reverencing behaviour’ to his amazement until Lord Clifford explained.
Lord President, 1679-80
In Sir William Temple’s account of the new modelling of the Privy Council in April 1679 the choice of Shaftesbury as its lord president is its most controversial aspect. Temple described the debates among himself, the lord chancellor, Sunderland and Essex and the king on his proposal for a completely new council incorporating key government opponents. Having persuaded Temple that Halifax be included on the council, the king suggested Shaftesbury, very much to Temple’s chagrin. The king’s view was that were he to be left out, he ‘might do as much mischief as any’: the other three agreed. They also thought that he would not be content with being simply a counsellor, so it was decided, over Temple’s vigorous protests, to make him president of the council.
The new council took effect on 21 April. York wrote to William Legge‡ in early May, asking him to make a wary approach to Shaftesbury through Lord Townshend or George Pitt, the Wareham Member, since he could not bring myself to write to him himself.
The council held a long meeting on the day before the debate was due to take place. There is no substantial contemporary account of this crucial meeting, at which it seems the council decided on the king’s speech to both Houses, and its offer of limitations on the powers of a Catholic successor. The fullest is in Temple’s memoir, which claims that Shaftesbury was determined on York’s exclusion, and that ‘there could be no security against the duke, if once in possession of the crown’.
Shaftesbury was fighting other battles in the House of Lords at the same time. On 2 May he was one of those who dissented against the third reading of the bill for freeing the City of London and parts adjacent from popish inhabitants on the grounds that it targeted Protestant dissenters as well as papists, which might make the Protestants ‘think themselves in interest obliged to take the papists’ parts against us’. Shaftesbury’s appointment to a private bill committee on 2 May concerning Sir Francis Drake‡ (from which he reported on 6 May) may have been supportive of a sympathetic and prominent figure in the Commons. His appointment to the committee on 15 May for the bill vesting the lands of Henry Howard, 6th duke of Norfolk and his son Henry Howard, Baron Mowbray (later 7th duke of Norfolk) in trustees—an attempt by Mowbray to settle the estate of his Catholic father while the latter was abroad—was perhaps also related to his anti-Catholic crusade.
Meanwhile the debate about proceedings against the earl of Danby and the Catholic peers had moved on to the question of the participation of the bishops in them. When the issue was raised by Theophilus Hastings, 7th earl of Huntingdon, on 6 May, Shaftesbury, finding the bishops’ case strongly supported, moved for the debate to be adjourned.
An order to consider the state of Ireland on 6 May was probably the result of a motion from Shaftesbury (attributed by Col. Cooke to 7 May).
On the 23rd Shaftesbury was once more reporting from the morning meeting of the joint committee, at which the Commons had reiterated their previous objections. When the Lords voted to stick by their previous answers, Shaftesbury, with 23 others, dissented from the decision, and dissented as well from an affirmation that the Lords would proceed to the trial of the Catholic peers ahead of the trial of Danby. Shaftesbury reported again on Monday 26th two further meetings which had not resolved the deadlock, and later that day he reported a conference at which the Commons delivered a lengthy complaint. Two days of debate followed, with a vote on Tuesday 27th to insist on the votes of 13 and 14 May. Shaftesbury, with 27 others, protested against it. The same day, the king prorogued Parliament to 14 Aug.
Shaftesbury’s opponents saw him as one of the architects, if not the architect of the crisis into which the session had descended. Temple’s distaste was reflected on every page of his memoirs: refusing to have anything to do with the negotiations between Halifax, Sunderland and Essex on the one side and Shaftesbury and Monmouth on the other, he was unsurprised when they were abandoned. Danby wrote to the king on 21 May about efforts by Shaftesbury’s agent Francis Charlton, and Sir Thomas Player and Thomas Pilkington to promote an address from the City to Parliament praising their efforts against popery and promising to stand by them. Danby added a tart comment about ‘the villainy of my Lord Shaftesbury and the weakness of those he makes his instruments’.
By all accounts Shaftesbury was furious at the sudden prorogation, which displayed very clearly his actual lack of influence. According to Temple, he said in the Lords ‘that he would have the heads of those who were the advisers of this prorogation’.
The news of the Scottish rebellion arriving in the first two weeks of June offered an opportunity to revive a sense of crisis. Shaftesbury (as well as Halifax and Temple) argued that Lauderdale should be removed: Charles ignored them.
During the prorogation Shaftesbury continued to try to uncover further details of the Plot, though informers had possibly become more nervous: Danby was told by Thomas Culpeper that Tongue on 3 June had admitted that Shaftesbury had tried to get him to bear false witness against Danby.
Shaftesbury remained on speaking terms with other members of the council, at least until news of the defeat of the Scottish rebellion. On 25 June he was said to have made ‘great profession of kindness to my Lord Sunderland’; and on 26 June he dined with Anglesey.
Barillon’s analysis was written on the same day as Charles broached in the council the idea of a dissolution—a proposal according to Temple’s memoirs motivated largely by the concern that ‘the duke of Monmouth was greater than ever: Lord Shaftesbury reckoned upon being so too, upon the next meeting of Parliament, and at the cost of those whom he took to be the authors of the last prorogation’. Shaftesbury naturally spoke against the idea on the 3rd, along with many others; at a further meeting a week later, the king determined on the dissolution and the second set of new elections that year. Southwell wrote that Shaftesbury had told the king that it would be contrary to his declaration of April, in which he had promised to do nothing without the advice of the council.
The acquittal of Sir George Wakeman on 18 July was a blow to the credibility of the plot, and Shaftesbury at a council meeting in early August criticized the trial judge, Sir William Scroggs: Southwell thought more of the same was likely to be heard when Parliament met.
As soon as he returned to London, Shaftesbury was busy meeting Warcup, Oates and others associated with the Plot, telling Oates on the 28th that he was planning to impeach York as soon as Parliament sat.
The Second Exclusion Parliament,1679-80
On 14 Oct. Sunderland (‘extremely sorry to be obliged to write you this’) passed on the command from the king that Shaftesbury would no longer be welcome at the council.
Shaftesbury’s popularity was further enhanced by the so-called Meal-Tub plot, allegations of treason brought to the attention of the duke of York and the king in September by the earl of Peterborough and the wife of William Herbert, earl of Powis. By the beginning of November the main agent of the plot, Thomas Dangerfield, had turned round, now claiming there was a plot to kill the king and Shaftesbury hatched by Lords Arundell and Powis with the enthusiastic assistance of Lady Powis.
The subsequent contacts between the court and Shaftesbury may indicate that the king, or certainly Sunderland, was prepared to negotiate, possibly in order to keep alive the prospect of an alliance with the United Provinces, which Sidney was in the Netherlands to achieve.
Shaftesbury was seen as the impresario of a series of remarkable coups designed to maintain pressure on the government. Although the pope burning procession in London on 17 Nov. was co-ordinated by the Green Ribbon Club, of which Shaftesbury was not a member, Southwell reported the following day that meetings of the nobility and the London grand jury to plan addresses to the king had all originated with him.
The return of Monmouth to London on 27 Nov. was thought by Halifax to be ‘such a morris-dance as that none but Shaftesbury could have been adviser in it’: it was said that Monmouth left the Netherlands soon after he had received letters from Shaftesbury, and Shaftesbury visited him (along with many others, including Halifax) on the day after his return. Shaftesbury’s actual intentions were particularly difficult to penetrate at this time. Barillon discussed them in a dispatch of 3 Dec. in which he considered whether it was worth offering him money, speculating that the earl might be aiming to establish a commonwealth with himself at its head.
The presentation may have helped to kill off the limitations scheme that was being circulated in early December. In a letter of 7 Dec. James commented that Shaftesbury’s opposition to limitations did not come ‘out of good will’ (presumably to preserve the powers of the monarchy).
I never could understand his politics, and am sure they were never calculated for the meridian of a monarchy, and though he be such a hero in a House of Lords, and has a tongue which makes him considered there, he is less than other men out of his sphere, and will I doubt run the king into those inconveniences that I fear will be fatal to the crown, and even to his Lordship too.
HMC Dartmouth, i. 40-1.
Shaftesbury was said to have been having very private discussions with the king in early January 1680, in which he again pressed the idea of a divorce and remarriage. The presentation of further ‘monster’ petitions from 13 Jan. onwards may have cut off these discussions, but they were probably doomed anyway.
Two days later, on 26 Jan., Parliament was prorogued (formally to 15 Apr., but it was clear that a further prorogation to Nov. was expected) and the king announced that he was summoning James to return from Scotland. Shaftesbury, who was briefly reported as having made common cause with Lauderdale against York, discussed with his remaining allies in the council how they should react. A copy of a letter dated Jan. 30 1680 and ostensibly written to them states that he had changed his view since the previous evening and now thought they should resign. Claiming that James’s return was linked to a scheme to ‘alter the religion and government by the assistance of the French, whose forces and provisions are ready upon the coast next us’, he urged that it was necessary for ‘the weight of the nation’ to ‘compel us to take right counsels’. ‘To this end’, he went on, ‘your Lordships’ going out together at this time extremely serves; and the sense of the body of the Protestants and sober men, made known to his Majesty by their addresses and petitions through the whole nation, will not a little contribute’.
Over the next few months, however, Shaftesbury found it hard to rekindle the sense of purpose built up at the end of the previous year, with the reconstruction of a much more effective ministry around Sunderland, Hyde and Godolphin, the pursuit of a Dutch alliance, and the caution of the City of London. York was eased back into London society, and the administration was able to contemplate a session of Parliament through negotiations with the Presbyterian leader who had succeeded Holles, Lord Townshend.
Shaftesbury sought to recreate a crisis with the information he dramatically supplied to the Privy Council on 24 Mar. about an Irish plot, bringing an informer, Murphy, with him.
The king’s illness on 13 May, combined with the possibility of a meeting of Parliament on 17 May for a further prorogation created a temporary excitement. At the time, it was said that if the king had continued to be ill, members of the Commons planned to assemble anyway. The later confession of Lord Grey of Warke about an agreement among Shaftesbury, Russell, Sir Thomas Armstrong, Monmouth and Grey himself to mount an uprising against the accession of James in the case of the death of the king has been linked to this episode, though it may in fact relate to 1682.
Though the emergency was short-lived and Charles scotched the claim of Monmouth’s legitimacy with a declaration of 2 June, Shaftesbury had a new scheme up his sleeve: a presentment of York for recusancy by the grand jury of Middlesex. This was possibly why Shaftesbury was dining with Monmouth and his other associates at Essex Street, at ‘one Mr Thomson’s, a lawyer’.
The king’s decision to allow Parliament to meet on 21 Oct., announced on 26 Aug., made Shaftesbury’s stay in the country a relatively short one, and he had returned to London by 11 September. Illness may have hampered preparations for Parliament, especially meetings with Irish informers, although he was well enough to see one of them on 27 September.
On 20 Oct., the day before Parliament was finally due to sit, Shaftesbury, Monmouth and Oates dined with ‘above 100 Parliament men’ in the Sun Tavern behind the Old Exchange.
On 2 Nov. Lord Russell moved a motion to bring in an exclusion bill in the Commons. Two days later, Shaftesbury brought forward detailed information about Ireland in the Lords. He expanded on it on 6 Nov., the day the exclusion bill had its second reading in the Commons, primed by evidence about York’s involvement in the conspiracy to kill the king. On the 8th, Shaftesbury was one of the managers (with the chancellor, lord privy seal (John Robartes, now earl of Radnor), Monmouth, Salisbury, Huntingdon, Bridgwater and Clarendon) for a conference with the Commons to give them the evidence collected about the Irish plot, and was appointed to a committee to consider the recent purges of the commissions of the peace, and to prepare an address on the subject. On the 9th he was again reporting from the investigations committee, this time giving information collected by Warcupp, whom he moved should be commended to the king for a reward, and proposing a fund ‘to reward poor discoverers of the plot’.
Around 7 Nov. Shaftesbury and Monmouth rebuffed an approach from Danby via Lord Conway seeking their assistance in presenting a petition to the Lords: Conway overheard Shaftesbury telling Lord Berkeley that ‘he would not abate you [Danby] an ace’, though he supposed that ‘it was in heat, because my Lord Berkeley was stiff and tenacious against raising [erasing] the proceedings against him and the other 3 lords that were sent to the Tower.’
It was reported on 10 Nov. that Clarendon had whispered to Shaftesbury in the House of Lords a request for assistance with the removal of the duchess of Portsmouth: Shaftesbury responded that ‘we are now hunting tigers and bears and birds of prey and now you would be a cony catching.’
On the day following, the 16th, the Lords debated the alternatives for exclusion – ‘expedients’, including an association (advocated by Essex), limitations (by Halifax) and a divorce (by Shaftesbury, seconded by Salisbury, Howard of Escrick, and Essex).
Shaftesbury was a member of the committee established on the 24th to consider fines imposed on the publisher Benjamin Harris. He reported from the committee of examinations on the 25th. On 27th Nov., Shaftesbury excused himself from being appointed to the joint committee appointed to organize Lord Stafford’s trial, to begin the following week.
Shaftesbury was not closely involved in Stafford’s trial, which opened in Westminster Hall on 30 Nov. Early on he suggested to the lord high steward that Stafford might be offered a short delay, for which the lord steward, the lord chancellor, Lord Finch, received some criticism until Shaftesbury ‘owned the crime, and then it ceased to be one’.
Still fully engaged in stoking up the plot, on 25 Nov. Shaftesbury reported from the committee of examinations about the evidence concerning Mrs Cellier, and on 2 Dec. he informed the House of a titular bishop in Ireland and other Catholics ‘that would make great discoveries’: claiming to be the only one who knew who they were, he requested the leave of the House to give their names only to the earls of Salisbury and Essex, which the House agreed.
Shaftesbury was also concerned with the protection of Protestant dissenters from prosecution under the recusancy laws. On 20 Nov., he was one of those appointed to the committee to consider the issue. It is not clear whether this was the same as the committee to deal with the question of Protestant dissenters (both are referred to on 22 Nov.), but Buckingham’s report on 27 Nov. appears to cover both subjects, recommending an address to the king that Protestant dissenters should not be proceeded against under the statutes; on 9 Dec. Shaftesbury reported again from the committee ‘many difficulties’ in preparing an address to the king: it had decided instead to prepare a bill, which was produced and read a first time. He was appointed on 20 Dec. to a committee on a bill designed to encourage Protestant immigration.
Shaftesbury was appointed on 18 Nov. to the committee on a private bill, although since it concerned Catholics – Hugh Smithson and his wife, the daughter of the Catholic peer Marmaduke Langdale, 2nd Baron Langdale – it was probably related to his other campaigns. He was concerned in the bill to regulate the trial of peers, dissenting on 18 Dec. with nine others from the rejection of a Commons amendment designed to exclude impeachments from the bill. In late December, however, the main effort of Shaftesbury and his associates was directed towards exclusion, despite the king’s speech of 15 Dec. in which he reiterated his willingness to consider expedients as long as they did not affect the succession. With the Commons agreeing an address offering supply in exchange for exclusion and the absorption of York’s opponents into the administration, on 21 Dec. Shaftesbury, supported by Monmouth, Essex and Salisbury, attacked a number of York’s closest associates – Shaftesbury went particularly for Louis Duras, 2nd earl of Feversham, though other targets were George Legge, later Baron Dartmouth and Laurence Hyde, later earl of Rochester. Shaftesbury, Salisbury and Essex made a more direct attack on York on 23 Dec., in a debate on the king’s speech. Shaftesbury’s speech on the occasion appeared in print as A Speech lately made by a Noble Peer of the Realm. He demanded that ‘there must be, (in plain English) my lords, a change; we must neither have popish wife, nor popish favourite, nor popish mistress, nor popish counsellor at court, or any new convert’. Insinuating that (probably) Sunderland had indicated that the king might accept exclusion in return for supply, Shaftesbury carefully handled the difficulty of offering criticism of the king:
My lords, ’tis a very hard thing to say that we cannot trust the king; and that we have already been deceived so often, that we see plainly the apprehensions of discontent in the people, is no argument at court. And though our prince be in himself an excellent person, that the people have the greatest inclinations imaginable to love; yet we must say he is such an one as no story affords us a parallel of: how plain and how many are the proofs of the design to murther him? How little is he apprehensive of it?
With the king in the chamber, he sketched the ambition of the duke of York, a prince who ‘changes his religion to make himself a party, and such a party that his brother must be sure to die and be made away, to make room for him’. He castigated the conduct of court policy since the discovery of the plot, especially the prorogation and dissolution of Parliaments, and the efforts to tar dissenters with the brush of conspiracy.
Over Christmas negotiations between Sunderland and some of the more prominent opposition figures in the Commons are referred to in a number of sources, though Shaftesbury ‘was left out, which made him arraign and protest against the whole business’.
The Oxford Parliament of 1681 and its aftermath
Shaftesbury was one of the peers petitioning the king on 25 Jan. that the next Parliament be held at Westminster, rather than Oxford, along with fifteen of his usual allies.
Shaftesbury’s own known direct interventions in the elections of 1681 were not conspicuously successful. In Gloucestershire he was said to be rooting for Edward Smyth, described as his lawyer and a ‘mighty man with Dr Oates’.
Preparing for the Oxford Parliament, John Locke and young James Vernon,‡ the duke of Monmouth’s secretary, made arrangements for Shaftesbury to stay at the house of John Wallis, Savilian Professor of Geometry and a fellow of Balliol, with Lord Grey of Warke lodging in the same house.
Parliament was opened the same day. Shaftesbury was present. He took the oaths and declaration and was appointed to the committees for privileges and for petitions and the sub-committee for the Journal. He attended every sitting of the short Parliament. He moved on 22 Mar. for an investigation into the reasons why the bill repealing the Elizabethan conventicle act was not presented for royal assent at the end of the 1680 Parliament. Hoskins, the lawyer, who wrote to Stringer giving an account of the events of the week on 26th Mar., presumably meant Shaftesbury when he referred to ‘a lord (a friend of yours)’ who said that the previous bill had been lost ‘by a court trick, to bring in a new way of a negative’, accusing the bishops of preferring to let ‘such a weapon to fall into popish hands than the Church should lose it’.
On the same day (if the statement that ‘this was done yesterday in the House of Lords’ can be relied on) Shaftesbury had an encounter with the king, published the following day in a pamphlet dripping with sarcasm:
the great patriot, and next under God and Dr Oates, the supreme saviour and defender of the nation, the earl of Shaftesbury, received, or pretended that he received, a letter written in an unknown hand, containing an expedient for the settling and composing the differences between the king and Parliament. With this he made a great noise, and bustling about as fast as his legs, and man, and stick could carry him.
Lord Feversham offered to show him in to the king, ‘the busy earl told him, he was willing to be conducted by so honest a man as his lordship, drolling and thinking himself guilty of a very shrewd irony’. (Another version of the story has the marquess of Worcester conducting Shaftesbury to the king.) The expedient was a proposal for settling the crown on Monmouth. The result was a sharp exchange with the king, in which, if the pamphlet can be believed, the king wiped the floor with the earl.
On the 25th Shaftesbury had been appointed to the committee to investigate the plot; on the 26th he was one of the reporters for a conference requested by the Commons on the loss last session of the bill to repeal the Conventicle Act. The same day the Commons’ impeachment of Edward Fitzharris was brought up to the Lords. The Lords’ decision not to entertain an impeachment, but to leave Fitzharris to be dealt with according to the common law elicited a protest signed by Shaftesbury and nineteen others, claiming that the impeachment should not be rejected because it ‘is at the suit of the people, and they have an interest in it’: by refusing an impeachment, the House was denying justice to the people.
According to Lord Grey’s later confession, on the day before the dissolution Shaftesbury told him that the rejection of Fitzharris’s impeachment and the likelihood that the Lords would abandon the attempt to try Danby would infuriate the House of Commons. If there were a dissolution, ‘there were’, he thought, ‘enough in their House would sit, if but a small number of the lords would do the like’. Grey reported a second discussion between Monmouth, Essex, Shaftesbury and Salisbury the same afternoon on the same subject. In the end the sudden dissolution on Monday 28 Mar. defeated the plan, although, Grey claimed, several lords hung around in the House ‘under the pretence of signing’ the protestation about Fitzharris while they sent messengers to the Commons to try to get them to continue sitting, without success.
make haste every man to his own home and to acquaint all poor countrymen what a sad condition they were in, if they did not stand up for such a Parliament as this was, who had so vigorously stood up for them with their lives and fortunes, and he further said that he thought there would be something to do in England before another Parliament sat and that those members, though dissolved, should take on them the peace and government of their several counties.
It was said that he nominated Scudamore, Col. Birch‡ and Sir Edward Harley‡ as colonels and Thomas Coningsby‡, Paul Foley‡ and John Dutton Colt‡ as captains.
Shaftesbury left Oxford on 1 April. His admission as a freeman of the Skinners’ company on 4 May was connected to the contest between the Whig-backed petition to the crown from the City requesting a new Parliament and the Tory-backed address welcoming the king’s declaration of 8 Apr., culminating in the election of Whig sheriffs on 24 June.
During the early summer of 1681 Shaftesbury was offering money to some of the witnesses to the Irish plot who had come to London.
In a last-ditch attempt to seek a pardon, Fitzharris implicated Howard of Escrick, who was arrested shortly afterwards.
Shaftesbury’s and Howard of Escrick’s habeas corpus petition, presented on 6 July, was heard on 8 July, and turned down: Salisbury, Clare, Essex, Macclesfield, Grey, Lord Russell, Ralph Montagu and Sir Scrope Howe offered, equally unsuccessfully, to stand bail.
The two peers made a second habeas corpus application when the Old Bailey sessions began on 31 Aug., though they were referred back to the king’s bench, where proceedings would not begin for another two months.
There was much speculation on whether the approach was a sign of the strength or weakness of Shaftesbury’s case.
With some of the most prominent city Whigs and dissenters, including Sir Samuel Barnardiston‡, John Dubois‡ and Thomas Papillon‡, represented on the jury impanelled by the City sheriffs, the prospects for a true bill were negligible.
Shaftesbury was not released immediately. On 28 Nov. he and his fellow prisoners appeared at king’s bench – crowded as usual, the audience including Monmouth, the recent Member of the House of Commons Richard Savage, Lord Colchester (later 4th earl Rivers), and Lord O’Brien as well as the men whom he named as his sureties – demanding to be discharged from the Tower. Although he was represented by William Williams, Shaftesbury himself spoke to comment on the quality of the evidence against him, though he was cut short by the lord chief justice, who reminded him that College had been successfully prosecuted even after a London ignoramus verdict. The court agreed only to release them on bail, and Shaftesbury nominated Monmouth, Sir William Cowper, Sir John Sydenham and Francis Charlton as his sureties (some sources add Montagu as well). On his release measures were taken to prevent further demonstrations in the City. Shaftesbury left for Lord Paget’s house.
Shaftesbury was said to have entered actions of £80,000 against Richard Graham, principal of Clifford’s Inn and solicitor to the Treasury, a Mr Marriott, the queen’s solicitor, and David Fitzgerald for suborning witnesses against him.
The Rye House Plot
There is little evidence of Shaftesbury’s activities in the months after his release until his and Howard of Escrick’s formal discharge from bail on 13 Feb. 1682.
In early May, Shaftesbury was forced to withdraw his scandalum magnatum actions against Craddock, Graham, Warcup and others when Craddock persuaded the lord chief justice that the case could not be fairly heard in London. Shaftesbury seems to have cherished hopes of prosecuting Warcup in London for a while.
All this was possibly misinformation. At the same time, Monmouth was making preparations for his visit to the west Midlands, and Robert Murray was alleged to be in Paris on Shaftesbury’s business.
At the very end of September, after the new Tory sheriffs were sworn in, Shaftesbury went into hiding, amid rumours of new evidence being collected against him.
Achitophel
Shaftesbury sailed for Holland around 19 Nov., landing at Brill and moving on to Rotterdam, and then Amsterdam, where he stayed for a while with the merchant Abraham Kick. At the end of December he became ill. He died on 21/31 Jan. 1683, having made a will on the 17th, making his wife his executrix and with small bequests to Robert Ferguson and to his servants.
Well before his death Shaftesbury had become a demon of Tory mythology, ‘Achitophel’ in Dryden’s epic poem of the crisis, Absalom and Achitophel. He continued to be so after it. Effigies of Oates and him were burnt at Temple Bar on 5 Nov. 1683 in a counterpart to the usual anti-popery demonstrations.
Shaftesbury’s ambiguity, which enabled him to sail so close to the wind for so long without actually capsizing, seems to have been lost at the end. His anti-catholicism was perhaps stronger than that of any of his colleagues at court in the 1660s and 1670s, and it seems likely that he genuinely believed in the existence of the Plot which he pursued with an almost fanatical determination: Grey’s account of the conversation they had in 1681 implies not cynical manipulation but a conviction both of the reality of the Plot and of the king’s own involvement, as well as an increasing frustration with the compromising behavior of his colleagues.
Despite this, for most of his career Shaftesbury was clearly not only an eloquent and forceful speaker, particularly in the House of Lords, but also an astonishingly successful political strategist and organizer, with an exceptional talent for making the political weather. There can be little doubt that Shaftesbury orchestrated much of the business of the Plot, arranging for Oates to be supported and devoting enormous efforts to uncovering conspiracy in Ireland and elsewhere.
Shaftesbury was adept at reaching a popular audience and had a large and significant following both in the Commons and in the City, but the House of Lords was central to his politics. He spent a huge amount of time there, both in the chamber and in its committees, through which he pursued a series of interests, from the encouragement of domestic and foreign trade and barriers to foreign imports, to the wool trade (it is notable that a pamphlet on improving wool manufacture published in 1669 was published by Shaftesbury’s favourite publisher, Francis Smith), to legal reform and the registration of the gentry.
That we had committed a great error in being so long a screen between the king and the House of Commons, who once were ready and willing to have laid him open to his people, and had done it, if they had not been prevented, and that chiefly by himself (of which he heartily repented).
Grey, Secret History, 2.
Indeed, Shaftesbury’s rather surprising weakness as a leader of the movement against the duke of York may well have been a failure both to understand the House of Commons, as he confessed, and to accord it sufficient importance. Widely distrusted as a result of his changes of allegiance from the 1640s to the 1660s and beyond, believed to be a master of dissimulation, Shaftesbury was the easiest figure among the Whigs to hate; for the same reasons, he was among the men least able to lead them.