By Greenhill.
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.
Sir Anthony was delighted with his grandson; and although at the time of the infant’s birth the septuagenarian was on the point of espousing a young wife, his affection was in nowise diminished for his daughter, or her boy.
Lady Cooper and her father died within six months of each other. Sir John married again, a daughter of Sir Charles Morrison, of Cassiobury, county Herts, by whom he had several children. He died in 1631, leaving the little Anthony bereft of both parents, with large but much-encumbered estates, and lawsuits pending.
Many of his own relations being most inimical to his interests, Anthony went with his brother and sister to reside with Sir Daniel Norton, one of his trustees, who—we once more quote the Autobiography—‘took me to London, thinking my presence might work some compassion on those who ought to have been my friends.’
He refers to the suit in which they were now engaged. The boy must have had a winning way with him (as the old saying goes), for, when only thirteen, he went of his own accord to Noy, the Solicitor-General, and entreated his assistance as the friend of his grandfather. Noy was deeply touched, took up the case warmly, and gained one suit in the Court of Wards, stoutly refusing to take any fee whatever.
After Sir Daniel Norton’s death, Anthony went to live with an uncle, Mr. Tooker, near Salisbury, though it was supposed Lady Norton would gladly have kept him under her roof, with a view to a match with one of her daughters. He says himself: ‘Had it not been for the state of my litigious fortune, the young lady’s sweet disposition had made me look no farther for a wife.’
In 1637 he went to Exeter College, Oxford, where he ‘made such rapid strides in learning as to be accounted the most prodigious youth in the whole University.’ By his own showing, he was popular with his companions and well satisfied with himself,—indeed, a general spirit of self-complacency pervades these pages. In little more than a year he went to Lincoln’s Inn, where he appears to have found the theatres, fencing galleries, and the like, more to his taste than the study of the law.