No. 3.
ANTHONY ASHLEY COOPER, FIRST EARL OF
SHAFTESBURY.
By Sir Peter Lely.
BORN 1621, DIED 1683.
In coloured Chancellor’s robes.
SON of Sir John Cooper of Rockbourne, county Hants, by Anne, daughter and sole heir of Sir Anthony Ashley, Bart., of Wimborne St. Giles, county Dorset, where the future Chancellor was born.
In his autobiography, he describes his mother of ‘low stature,’ as was also the aforesaid Sir Anthony, ‘a large mind but his person of the lowest,’ while his own father was ‘lovely and graceful in mind and person, neither too high nor too low,’ therefore the pigmy body of which Dryden speaks must have been inherited from the maternal side.