‘False Achitophel’
Of the seventeenth-century Earl of Shaftesbury, writes K.H.D. Haley, Ranke observed that he seized upon the ideas which had the greatest future.
Of these the false Achitophel was first:
A name to all succeeding ages curst...
In these familiar lines Shaftesbury stands pilloried for all time. The couplets follow one another with a measured inevitability which gives the illusion of a carefully considered judicial sentence. As Miss Wedgwood has written, ‘Not to be familiar with Absalom and Achitophel is not to be educated’, and this passage from it is commonly regarded as the just exposure to permanent public ridicule of a noted criminal, caught in flagrante delicto. It is not easy to escape from this first view.
Yet any student of the seventeenth century knows that not everyone who was sentenced to the pillory was sentenced justly; that sometimes the rotten vegetables, brickbats and filth that were thrown were undeserved. Sharpness of characterization is not the same as accuracy; and the educative value of the poem will be greatly reduced unless the reader has a proper appreciation of the circumstances in which it was written and the polemical purposes for which it was designed.
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