Cries, "England's saved, and now let us rejoice."
A martial hero first, with early care,
Blown, like a pigmy by the winds, to war;
A beardless chief, a rebel ere a man;
So young his hatred to his prince began.—P. [432.]
Dryden does not here do justice to Shaftesbury, who certainly offered Charles I. the first fruits of his courage and address. Being heir to a plentiful fortune, a member of parliament, and high sheriff of the county of Dorset, he came to Oxford when the civil war broke out, and though then only twenty-one or twenty-two years of age, presented to the king a digested plan, for compromising matters between him and his subjects in arms against him: Charles observed, he was a very young man for so great an undertaking; to which, with the readiness which marked his character, he answered, that would not be the worse for the king's affairs, provided the business was done. He had, in consequence, a commission from the king, to promise indemnity and redress of grievances to such of the parliamentary garrisons as would lay down their arms. Accordingly, his plan seems to have taken some effect; for Weymouth actually surrendered to the king, and Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, as his stile then was, was made governor. Some delays occurred in the course of his obtaining this office; and whether disgusted with these, and giving scope to the natural instability of his temper, as is intimated by Clarendon, or offended, as Mr Locke states, at Weymouth having been plundered by Prince Maurice's forces, he made one of those sudden turns, of which his political career furnishes several instances, and went over to the other side. After this, Clarendon says, that he "gave up himself, body and soul, to the parliament, and became an implacable enemy to the royal family." He raised forces in Dorsetshire, with which he took Wareham by storm, in October 1644, and reduced the greater part of the county to the obedience of the parliament. He held various high charges under the authority of the republic. In 1645, he was sheriff of Norfolk; in 1646, sheriff of Wiltshire; and in 1651, one of that committee, which was named for the revisal and reform of the law.
A vermin wriggling in the usurer's ear.—P. [432.]
Shaftesbury was by no means in a hurry to submit to Cromwell's domination, any more than he had been to join the parliament; the uncontrouled authority of an individual, and of one too who was inaccessible to all arts of cajoling or management, and only acted upon his own opinions and impulses, presented to the art and ambition of our statesman a very unpromising field of exertion. Accordingly, he is said to have been active in opposing the dispossession of the long parliament; and, being a member of that convoked by the Protector in 1656, he signed the famous protestation against the personal usurpation of Cromwell, which occasioned a very sudden dissolution of that assembly. But notwithstanding this occasional opposition, he sat in all Cromwell's parliaments, was a member of his privy council, and was so far in his favour, that he is said by his enemies to have nourished hopes of succeeding him in his power, with which view he aimed to become his son-in-law. Hence he is called, in the "Dream of the Cabal,"