This blog accompanies Andrew Mansfield’s Historical Journal article ‘The First Earl of Shaftesbury’s Resolute Conscience and Aristocratic Constitutionalism‘

King Charles II’s lord chancellor Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first earl of Shaftesbury (1621 ― 83) has left a polarising legacy. Within his lifetime, Shaftesbury was vilified as a deceitful character with a propensity for intrigue, political machinations, and demagoguery. The Poet Laureate John Dryden compared him to ‘the Devil’, Marchamont Nedham labelled him ‘Mephistopheles’, and another Poet Laureate, Nahum Tate, alleged Shaftesbury supported the populist ‘Good Old Cause’ because he was a republican ‘traitor’ and ‘Hell’s agent’. Today, the reputational damage from his own lifetime has led to a great deal of misinterpretation regarding his political behaviour and principles, and the impact he had on England (and later Britain). Shaftesbury is chiefly considered an ambitious aristocratic politician with flexible principles, who helped to create the world’s first political party (the Whigs), and who resisted the Stuart monarchy through the advancement of popular sovereignty, republicanism, and democracy.

‘The first earl of Shaftesbury’s resolute conscience and aristocratic constitutionalism’ exposes that many of the assumptions held today about Shaftesbury are false or inaccurate. It is shown that Shaftesbury’s opposition to both Cromwell during the Protectorate and Charles II in the Restoration was guided by a resolute ‘conscience’. While there was certainly elasticity in his conduct, Shaftesbury was very much the product of a political education framed during the Civil War and Commonwealth eras. Through analysis of his activities and thought in the 1650s and 1670s, it is demonstrated that Shaftesbury consistently relied upon four guiding values: the application of the rule of law, abhorrence of political and religious tyranny, a belief in a free parliament reformed by the nobility, and pursuit of rights and freedoms.

Shaftesbury is a very significant Restoration figure for numerous reasons, but the article emphasizes two especially. Firstly, although Shaftesbury’s aristocratic principles have been recognized, it is often believed to be part of a philosophy that encouraged democracy by allying with the people to control the monarchy. This is incorrect. Shaftesbury sought to control the people’s access by limiting the electoral franchise in order that the nobility (or elite) would dominate local and central government through oligarchy. Popular protest and engagement in politics was to be harnessed to apply pressure on the monarch, but from his Civil War and Commonwealth experience, Shaftesbury believed that ordinary people were too ignorant and dangerous to be involved in government.

Secondly, unresolved religious and political issues from the Reformation continued as European monarchies struggled with their estates (parliaments) throughout the seventeenth-century. Shaftesbury and his group (which included John Locke) relied upon medieval theological and secular ideas to support the employment of the nobility as a bridle for monarchy. Shaftesbury applied a strain of aristocratic constitutionalism extant in Europe for many centuries to suggest that government would be best served in the hands of the nobility to neutralize monarchical, popular, and religious tyranny, reform parliament, and provide the nation with liberty and rights. Ideals that were central in the Glorious Revolution (1688), and for the Whig party into the eighteenth-century.

Read the full open access article

Main image: Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury.