The Exclusion Crisis, 1678-81, and the Earl of Shaftesbury

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, is an atypical figure in our history, and for this reason his true character, personality and motivations have eluded almost all those who have written about him. He has remained an enigma, perhaps because of that reserve and impenetrability which Richelieu describes as the most valuable gift for a politician. If he is remembered at all as an individual, it is through Dryden’s masterfully executed character assassination of him, as ‘In friendship false, implacable in hate,/ Resolved to ruin or to rule the state’. A more reasoned, though still deeply hostile, sketch was written by Lord Peterborough in Succint Genealogies: ‘he was as proud as Lucifer, and Ambitious beyond whatever entered the designs of any Man; impatient of every Power but his own, of any Man’s reputation’. Such is the typicality of this analysis, that, as Timothy Eustace has written, ‘few politicians have aroused as much venomous hatred as ... Shaftesbury’.

An Evil Reputation