He was There is no reason for believing, with Martyn and Lord Campbell, that he had been guilty of any delinquency more recent than this (in Independent eyes) original sin in taking service with the Crown. one of ten members for the county of Wilts, in Barebones' Parliament, and his detractors take for granted that he fell in with the hucanted, and sought the Lord with the best mours of this strange assembly, prayed, shape of a letter to Lord Essex, has been | privileges as any other of the people of this naprinted from the Harleian MSS. by Mr. tion are.' Christie, and turns out to be simple, plain, and businesslike, without one boastful or turgid expression. The military commands which he subsequently held are cursorily mentioned in the Diary as unattended by results for want of men; and his military career terminated in 1645. Mr. Christie thinks that he withdrew from the army along with the rest of the Presbyterian leaders, who were driven out by the 'Self-denying Ordinance' and the New Model.' Lord Campbell says captiously: 'He was suddenly satisfied with his military glory, and after this brilliant campaign never again appeared in the field: whether he retired from some affront, or mere caprice, is not certainly known.' Dryden's sneer at his brief military career is equally gratuitous: 'A martial hero, first with early care, The winds first 'blew him' into the royal camp, and he was no longer beardless when he became a rebel. His Diary, from January 1, 1646, to April 10, 1650 (when it ends) is meagre in the extreme. It is studiously confined to domestic incidents and personal matters, and contains not a single comment on any of the great political events, including the royal martyrdom, that occurred in the interval. But we collect from it that he took an active part in country business, and cooperated with the authorities for the enforcement of the law of the land. After stating that he had been sworn a justice of the peace for the county of Wilts, and was in commission for oyer and terminer the whole circuit, he sets down: 'August 11, 1646.-Sir John Danvers came and sat with us. Seven condemned to die, four for horse stealing, two for robbery, one for killing his wife; he broke her neck with his hands; it was proved that, he touching her body the day after, her nose bled fresh; four burnt in the hand, one for felony, three for manslaughter; the same sign followed one of them, of the corpse bleeding.' This gravely set down by a man like Shaftesbury, is a remarkable proof of the strength of the popular superstition. In January, 1652, he was named one of the Parliamentary Commissioners for the reform of the law, and an entry in the Journal, dated March 17, 1653, runs thus:— 'Resolved by the Parliament that Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, baronet, be, and is hereby, pardoned of all delinquency, and be, and is hereby, made capable of all other of them: 'Next this-how wildly will ambition steer! A vermin wriggling in the usurper's ear. Bartering his venal wit for sums of gold, He cast himself into the saint-like mould: Groaned, sighed, and prayed, while godliness was gain, The loudest bag-pipe of the squeaking train.' There is not the slightest evidence that he did anything of the kind. He regularly acted and voted with the moderate party in this assembly; but the fact of his having been a member of it was remembered against him when he became a Peer:— 'A little bobtail'd lord, urchin of state, A praise-god Barebone peer, whom all men hate.' The charge of wriggling in the usurper's ear derives some semblance of plausibility from his being deputed by the House to offer Hampton Court to Cromwell, and becoming one of the fifteen members of the Council of State named in the new Constitution which established the Protectorate for life. He certainly made common cause with Cromwell against the fanatics, and, during a brief interval, had the air of trusting in and being trusted by him. If we may believe Burnett, he (Shaftesbury) pretended that Cromwell offered to make him king. He was indeed of great use to him in withstanding the enthusiasts of that time. He was one of those who pressed him most to accept of the kingdom, because, ruin him.' In the closing years of his life as he said afterwards, he was sure it would Shaftesbury was in the habit of talking loosely and boastfully of his former doings; and, not intending to be taken literally, he may have said something of the sort to intimate the high sense Cromwell entertained of his services, or by way of mystifying Burnet, whose credulity and love of gossip were well known. It is impossible to believe that Cromwell did offer to make him king, or (for it comes to this, if he in turn wished Cromwell to be king) that the throne was bandied between them, or made the subject of an interchange of compliments, like a chair or place of precedence between two courtiers, which each presses the other to accept. Early in 1655, Shaftesbury quietly withdrew from Cromwell's Privy Council, and gradually came to be regarded as a decided opponent of his views. There was no open rupture or avowed cause of dissatisfaction, and conjecture has consequently been busy in imputing motives, public and private, the least creditable the better. Some will have it that Shaftesbury aspired to the Great Seal and was refused: others that he sought the hand of the Lady Mary, the Protector's daughter; that his addresses were declined on the ground of his dissolute morals; and that the disappointment of his ambitious love was the occasion of the breach. Considering that the estrangement was gradual, and that there is no proof whatever of his having aspired to the lady's hand or (at that time) to the Great Seal, the simplest explanation is the best. He was willing to go along with Cromwell to the extent of making him Chief Magistrate, or Head of the Executive, under constitutional restrictions, but shrank from the creation of an uncontrolled despotism or dictatorship. His position in the Presbyterian party, to whom he owed his influence, was at stake; and he had obviously no alternative but to become one of the Protector's creatures or to separate from him. How matters stood between them is shown by Shaftesbury's exclusion from the second Parliament elected under the Instrument of Government; and also by the remark attributed, on respectable authority, to Cromwell, that 'there was no one he was more at a loss how to manage than that Marcus Tullius Cicero, the little man with three names.' If that little man could have been induced to name his price, the odds are that it would have been readily paid, even if he had named the Great Seal or a daughter. Lord Campbell says that upon being refused the hand of the musical, glib-tonged Lady Mary,' he (Shaftesbury) finally broke with Oliver, and became a partisan of the banished royal family. This is glaringly incorrect. He did not become a partisan of the royal family until after Oliver's death, when the people, with one accord, flew from petty tyrants to the throne, and the Restoration offered the sole protection against anarchy. His public appearances during the five or six years' interval were limited by the jealousy or hostility he had provoked. The certificate of approbation from the Council, without which no member could take his seat, was refused to more than a hundred members of the Parliament of 1656. He was one of these, and he joined with more than sixty-four others in signing a letter of complaint to the Speaker, which was followed up by a spirited Remonstrance to the People, denouncing whoever advised the exclusion, or who should sit and vote in the 'mutilated' assembly, as capital enemies of the Commonwealth. The mutilated assembly proceeded, notwithstanding, to pass the new Constitution, entitled the Humble Petition and Advice, under which Parliament was to consist of two Houses; and Cromwell forthwith proceeded to nominate his peers. We need hardly say that Shaftesbury was not one of this favoured and speedily discredited body, but he was allowed to sit in the House of Commons during the Session of 1658, and he played a conspicuous part in the opposition to the new Constitution, and the new Lords whom the Commons refused to recog nise. He was a teller on the division which led to the immediate dissolution of this Parliament, the last called by Oliver, who died in September, 1658, and was succeeded by his son Richard, whose first Parliament met in January, 1659. Shaftesbury was again a member, and an active and influential one: He delivered in it, and putlished at the time, a carefully prepared speech, which may be accepted as the best specimen extant of his oratory, and one of the best specimens of the oratory of the age. The leading speakers were then earnest, plain, and practical, rather than rhetorical or declamatory. They were rarely full and flowing, rarely what is commonly called eloquent, rarely imaginative in the highest sense of the term. Their greatest effects were produced by terse, weighty sentences, apt homely metaphors, sudden turns, quaint allusions, condensed reasoning, and bold apostrophes. They were occasionally longwinded. Hume describes Pym as opening the charge against Strafford in a longstudied discourse, divided into many heads after his manner;' and contemptuously referring to an attempt to put the Parliamentary champions in balance with the most illustrious characters of antiquity, with Cato, Brutus, Cassius-the historian exclaims: Compare only one circumstance and consider its consequences. The leizure of those noble ancients were (sic) totally employed in the study of Grecian eloquence and philosophy, in the cultivation of polite letters and civilised society. The whole discourse and language of the moderns were polluted with mysterious jargon, and full of the lowest and most vulgar hypocrisy.' This was partly true of Vane, Cromwell, and many others when the Saints were uppermost: during 'Barebones' Parliament or in the worst days of the instability. There is another point of view Rump.' But it was not true of the Parlia- in which his speeches throw light upon the mentary celebrities of the antecedent or im- inculpated and dubious passages of his mediately ensuing periods of 1628, 1640, career. Was he at any time a demagogue? or 1659; not true of Hampden, Holles, How did he wield the fierce democracy, if Digby, Capel, Hyde, Falkland, and a host of he wielded it? Was it by boldly appealing accomplished and highly-cultivated men, to popular passions or by adroitly using whose minds and memories fairly ran over them? Was he nearest to a Mirabeau or a with classical illustrations. Of the two prin- Talleyrand? Macaulay, referring to the decipal speakers, quoted by Hume, in 1628, bates on the Exclusion Bill, says: "The one, Sir Francis Seymour, refers to Herodo-power of Shaftesbury over large masses was tus, and the other, Sir Robert Philips, to Livy. The homeliness of Strafford's illustrations, in his memorable defence, is no less remarkable than their appositeness: 'Where has this species of guilt (constructive treason) been so long concealed? Where has this fire been so long buried, during so many centuries that no smoke should appear, till it burst out at once, to consume me and my children. If I sail on the Thames, and split my vessel on an anchor, in case there be no buoy to give warning, the party shall pay me damage: but if the anchor be marked out, then is the striking on it at my own peril. Where is the mark set upon this crime? Where is the token by which I should discover it? It has lain concealed under water, and no human prudence, or human innocence, could save me from the destruction with which I am at pres ent threatened.' The language of the Royal Martyr bore no trace of the ambiguity or double-dealing with which he has been charged, and may be recommended, for idiomatic simplicity and force, to premiers and cabinets for whom royal speeches are composed. 'You have taken the whole machine of government to pieces-was his warning address to the Parliament of 1640-'a practice frequent with skilful artists when they desire to clear the wheels from any rust which may have grown upon them. The engine may again be restored to its former use and motions, provided it be put up entire, so as not a pin of it be wanting.' In the short speech, which he delivered from the speaker's chair on the occasion of the ill-advised attempt to seize the five members, he said: 'Well, since the birds are flown, I do expect that you will send them to me as soon as they return.' Shaftesbury's oratory was formed in the same school, and after the best models. As he was uniformly plain-spoken, it contradicts. that theory of his character which would make him prone to dissimulation and deceit. As he left no doubt of his intentions for the time, we may conclude that he had no terest in concealing them; and he would thus present only one instance among many where honesty of purpose has coexisted with unrivalled. Halifax was disqualified by his whole character, moral and intellectual, for the part of a demagogue. It was in small circles, and, above all, in the House of Lords, that his ascendency was felt.' Dryden paints Halifax : 'Of piercing wit and pregnant thought; Endued by nature and by learning taught To move assemblies.' Such was the contemporary impression of Halifax, whose oratory is utterly lost; but we nowhere read that Shaftesbury was deemed a mob orator, and, judging from the tone and style of his speeches as well as from the recorded effects of some of them, we should infer that what the brilliant historian says of his favourite is equally true of the peculiar object of his vituperation; that it was in small circles, and above all, in the House of Lords, that Shaftesbury's ascendency was felt. He is never vehement or declamatory. He never appeals to the passions of his audience; he appeals to their reason, or to their prejudices when these have gained the strength of reason, and appeals in a manner which it requires no small degree of refinement and culture to appreciate. His sound sense, his ample stores of knowledge and observation, his dexterity, his fertility, his irony, his wit, would be lost upon a turbulent assembly as surely as his little person would be submerged in a crowd, and not a fragment of his composition has been preserved which does not bear the impress of a certain description of fastidiousness. Strange to say, these fragments manifest that very proneness to generalisation which Macaulay supposes distinctive of Halifax. The specch against Cromwell's peers abounds in maxims and theories, in fine strokes of satire, and in reasonings which are sometimes almost puzzling from their subtlety: 'One of the few requests the Portuguese made to Phillip the Second, King of Spain, when he got that kingdom, as his late Highin-ness did this, by an army, was, that he would not make nobility contemptible by advancing such to that degree whose quality or virtue could be noways thought to deserve it. have we formerly been less apprehensive of Nor such inconveniences ourselves. It was, in Richard the First's time, one of the Bishop of Ely's accusations, that castles and forts of great trust he did "obscuris et ignotis hominibus tradere "-put in the hands of obscure and unknown men. But we, Mr. Speaker, to such a kind of men are delivering up the power of our laws, and, in that, the power of all. * 'After their quality, give me leave to speak a word or two of their qualifications; which certainly ought, in reason, to carry some proportion with the employment they design themselves. The House of Lords are the King's great hereditary Council; they are the highest court of judicature; they have their part in judging and determining of the reasons for making new laws and abrogating old; from amongst them we take our great officers of State: they are commonly our generals at land, and our admirals at sea. In conclusion, they are both of the essence and constitution of our old government; and have, besides, the greatest and noblest share in the administration. Now, certainly, Sir, to judge according to the dictates of reason, one would imagine some small faculties and endowments to be neces : sary for discharging such a calling; and those such as are not usually acquired in shops and warehouses, nor found by following the plough and what other academies most of their lordships have been bred in but their shops, what other arts they have been versed in but those which more required good arms and good shoulders than good heads, I think we are yet to be informed. Sir, we commit not the education of our children' to ignorant and illiterate masters; nay, we trust not our horses to unskilful grooms. I beseech you, let us think it belongs to us to have some care into whose hands we commit the management of the commonwealth; and if we cannot have persons of birth and fortune to be our rulers, to whose quality we would willingly submit, I beseech you, Sir, for our credit and safety's sake, let us seek men at least of parts and education, to whose abilities we may have some reason to give way. If a patient dies under a physician's hand, the law esteems that not a felony, but a misfortune, in the physician: but it has been held by some, if one who is no physician undertakes the management of a cure, and the party miscarries, the law makes the empiric a felon: and sure, in all men's opinion, the patient a fool. To conclude, Sir, for great men to govern is ordinary for able men it is natural; knaves many times come to it by force and necessity, and fools sometimes by chance; but universal choice and election of fools and knaves for government was never yet made by any who were not themselves like those they chose.' honour is not purchased by the blood of an enemy and of a citizen; that for victories in civil wars, till our armies marched through the city, I have not read that the conquerors have been so void of shame as to triumph. Cæsar, not much more indulgent to his country than our late Protector, did not so much as write public letters of his victory at Pharsalia; much less had he days of thanksgiving to his gods, and anniversary feasts, for having been a prosperous rebel.' "The wit of irony (says Sydney Smith, in his Lectures) consists in the surprise excited by the discovery of that relation which exists between the apparent praise and the real blame. I shall quote a noble specimen of irony, from the "Preface" of "Killing no Murder." It would be difficult to find a better, if not nobler, specimen than a passage in the speech before us. 'But, Sir, I leave this argument; and, to be as good as my word, come to put you in mind of some of their services, and the obligations you owe them for the same. To speak nothing of one of my Lords Commissioners' valour at Bristol* nor of another noble lord's brave adventure at the Bear-garden,† I must tell you, Sir, that most of them have had the courage to do things which I may boldly say, few other Christians durst so have adventured their souls to have attempted: they have not only subdued their enemies, but their masters that raised and maintained them; they have not only conquered Scotland and Ireland, but rebellious England too, and there suppressed a malignant party of magistrates and laws; and, that nothing should be wanting to make them indeed complete conquerors, without the help of philosophy they have even conquered themselves. All shame they have subdued as perfectly as all justice; the oaths they have taken they have as easily digested as their old General ments they have trampled under foot. In concould himself; public covenants and engageclusion, so entire a victory they have had over themselves, that their consciences are as much their servants, Mr. Speaker, as we are. give me leave to conclude with that which is But more admirable than all this, and shows the confidence they have of themselves and us: after having many times trampled on the authority of the House of Commons, and no less than five times dissolved them, they hope, for those good services to the House of Commons, to be made a House of Lords.' tial part in the plots, councils, and machinaShaftesbury played an active and influentions which led to the Restoration; but there is no ground for the accusation of rashness or undue zeal levelled at him by M. Guizot, He thus disposes of their claims on the who says that, accused, with good reason, score of services: 'Mr. Speaker, I shall be as forward as any man to declare their service, and acknowledge them; though I might tell you that the same * Fiennes, condemned to death by a court-martial for cowardice. + Colonel Pride, who endeavoured to suppress bear-baiting by a wholesale slaughter of bears. of complicity in the insurrection (Booth's), Sir Anthony Cooper, on the report of Nevil, was declared innocent.' The only evidence against him was that of a boy, who stated that he had carried a letter from him to Booth. A fragment of his biography contains a detailed account of the manner in which Monk was with difficulty induced to take a decided course, principally under the persuasion or compulsion of his wife, a strong-minded and high-spirited woman, who deserves to be placed alongside of Lady Fairfax and Mrs. Hutchinson in the female Valhalla, when there is one. It is traditionally related that, as Shaftesbury was returning from the City after an attempt to bring about a concert with Monk, the mob surrounded the carriage crying out, 'Down with the Rump.' He put his head out at the window, and exclaimed: 'What, gentlemen, not one good piece in a rump!' The joke told, and he was loudly cheered as he passed on. During the next twelve or thirteen years his chosen field of ambition was the Court, and his freshly-revived loyalty seemed fixed. He was one of the twelve Commissioners deputed by the Commons to meet the restored monarch, and one of the small batch of Privy Councillors named during the two days' halt at Canterbury. He was also an acting member of the tribunal specially appointed for the trial, which meant condemnation, of the regicides; for which politic compliancy Mrs. Hutchinson brands him as a vile traitor,' on the strength of his pledge to her husband that, if the King was brought back, not a hair of any man's head or a penny of any man's estate, should be touched for what had passed." The most Mr. Christie can urge in mitigation is, that Monk gave a similar pledge to Ludlow, saying that, if he suffered such a thing, he should be the arrantest rogue alive; and that Monk was also one of the judges. Shaftesbury spoke repeatedly in the Convention Parliament, and it was he who moved the adjournment of a debate on religion, which lasted till ten at night, when the House (as recorded in the 'Parliamentary History') 'sat an hour in the dark before candles were suffered to be brought in, and they were twice blown out, but the third time they were preserved, though with great disorder.' He was raised to the Upper House in April, 1661, as Baron Ashley, of Wimborne St. Giles, by a Patent, reciting that at length by his counsels, in concert with our beloved and faithful George Monk, knight, &c. &c., he did a service worthy to be remembered, and most grateful to us, in the great business of restoring us to our kingdom, and delivering his country from the bitter servitude under which it so long groaned.' According to modern notions, his removal from the Lower House was a strange preliminary to his next appointment, that of Chancellor of the Exchequer, which he received on the 13th May, 1661, and held till November, 1672, when he was made Lord Chancellor. All contemporary accounts agree that he could be an excellent man of business when it suited him. Pepys entered in his Diary for May, 1663, 'I find my Lord, as he is reported, a very ready, quiet, and diligent person.' According to Lord Campbell, 'his conduct after the Restoration for the next seven years seems wholly inexplicable, for he remained quite regular, and seemingly contented. He had a little excitement by sitting as a judge on the trial of the regicides, and joining in the sentence on some of his old associates. These trials being over, he seemed to sink down into a Treasury drudge.' The regularity was on the surface, the contentment was in mere outward seeming, and he had as much excitement as he could reasonably desire; for he was unceasingly struggling to attain a paramount position in the royal counsels, and uniformly regarded the place he held for the nonce as a stepping-stone to a higher. The rival whom he was most anxious to supersede or distance was Clarendon. The Comte de Comminges, the French Ambassador, wrote April 9, 1663: 'Lord Ashley, Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was formerly of Cromwell's Council, and who in my opinion is the only man who can be set against Clarendon for talent and firmions of Clarendon with freedom, and contradoes not shrink from speaking his opinness, dicting him to his face.' Ruvigny, who succeeded Comminges, writes, in 1664, that Shaftesbury was united with Lauderdale and others, who spare no pains to ruin Clarendon in the free convivial entertainments, which are of daily occurrence;' adding, 'they do not scruple to speak of him with freedom in the presence of the King, who has had his own mot like the rest, in the excitement of conviviality, thus giving free scope to all his guests.' These free convivial entertainments commonly took place in Lady Castlemaine's apartments, from which Clarendon studiously absented himself, leaving (like Sir Peter Teazle) his character behind him. The circle was collected with the sole view to pleasure, and constraint of every sort was laid aside : 'The song from Italy, the step from France, The midnight orgy and the mazy dance, |