Biographical catalogue of the portraits at Longleat in the county of Wilts, the seat of the Marquis of Bath

by Mary Louisa Boyle

Sir Anthony sat for Tewkesbury in 1639, but that Parliament was hastily dissolved. He raised a regiment of horse for the king’s service, and occupied places of trust in his own county; but believing himself unjustly treated and slighted by the Court, he listened to the overtures of the Parliament, and returned to Dorsetshire as colonel of a regiment in their army.

In 1649 he lost the wife he dearly loved, to whose memory he pays a most touching tribute in his diary. But she left no living child, and before the expiration of the year the widower had espoused Lady Frances Cecil, daughter of the Earl of Exeter, a royalist.

The friendship of the Protector and Sir Anthony was of a most fitful and spasmodic nature,—now fast allies, now at daggers drawn. Some writers affirm that, on the death of his second wife, he asked the hand of one of Cromwell’s daughters; others, that he advised the Protector to assume the Crown, who offered it to him in turn!

He held many appointments under the reigning Government, and continued to sit in Parliament; but having, with many other Members, withstood the encroachments of the great man, Oliver endeavoured to prevent his return, and not being able to do so, forbade him to enter the House of Commons. (See the history of the times.) The Members, with Ashley Cooper at their head, insisted on readmittance. Again ousted, again readmitted; nothing but quarrels and reconciliations. The fact was, that Sir Anthony was too great a card to lose hold of, entirely. He had still a commission in the Parliamentary army, and a seat at the Privy Council, circumstances that in no wise prevented him carrying on a correspondence with the King ‘over the water.’ Indeed, he was accused of levying men for the Royal service; arrested, acquitted, sat again in Parliament under Richard Cromwell, joined the Presbyterian party to bring back Charles, and when the Parliament declared for the King, Sir Anthony was one of the twelve Members sent over to Breda, to invite his return. When in Holland Ashley Cooper had a fall from his carriage, and a narrow escape of being killed. Clarendon (there was no love lost between them) says it was hoped that by his alliance (as his third wife) with a daughter of Lord Spencer of Wormleighton, a niece of the Earl of Southampton, ‘his slippery humour would be restrained by his uncle.’

He now took a leading part in politics, was appointed one of the Judges of the Regicides, created Baron Ashley at the coronation, and afterwards became Chancellor of the Exchequer, Under-Treasurer, and further high offices, and in 1672 Lord Cooper of Pawlett, county Somerset, and Earl of Shaftesbury; and so quickly did honours rain on him, that the same year saw him Lord High Chancellor of England. He appears to have given great umbrage to many of the law officers, by his haughty bearing. We are told ‘he was the gloriousest man alive; he said he would teach the bar that a man of sense was above all their forms; and that he was impatient to show them he was a superior judge to all who had ever sat before on the marble chair.’

He maddened the gentlemen of the long robe by his vagaries, and innovations, and defiance of precedents. He wore an ash-coloured gown instead of the regulation black, assigning as his reason, that black was distinctive of the barrister-at-law, and he had never been called to the bar.

He went to keep Hilary term ‘on a horse richly caparisoned, his grooms walking beside him,’ all his officers ordered to ride on horseback, ‘as in the olden time.’

No doubt the good Dorsetshire country gentleman, the lover of sport and of horse-flesh, who had been accused of regaling his four-footed favourites on wine and cheese-cakes, had a mischievous pleasure in seeing the uneasy and scared looks of his worshipful brethren, some of whom perhaps had never sat on a saddle till that day.

At all events, poor Judge Twisden was laid in the dust, and he swore roundly no Lord Chancellor should ever reduce him to such a plight again. Shaftesbury lived at this time in great pomp at Exeter House, in the Strand, and was in high favour with his royal master, who visited him at Wimborne St. Giles during the Plague, when the Court was at Salisbury.

At Oxford, when Parliament sat, he made acquaintance with the celebrated John Locke, who afterwards became an inmate of his patron’s house, his tried friend, and medical adviser.