An astrologer who was in old Sir Anthony’s house at the time of the grandson’s birth cast the horoscope, and to the fulfilment of these predictions may probably be attributed young Anthony’s own predilection for the study of astrology in later days. The horoscope in question foreboded feuds and trouble at an early age; and some years afterwards the same magician, foreseeing through the medium of the planets that a certain Miss Roberts (a neighbour without any apparent prospect of wealth) would become a great heiress, he endeavoured to persuade his pupil to marry her. The lady did eventually come into a considerable fortune; but Mr. Tooker, who was not over-credulous, had other views at the time for his nephew; and accordingly, at eighteen, Ashley Cooper became the husband of Margaret, the daughter of my Lord Keeper Coventry, ‘a woman of excellent beauty and incomparable gifts.’
The young couple resided with the bride’s father in London, Sir Anthony, as he now was, paying flying visits to Dorsetshire. He was subject to fits, but even this infirmity redounded to his advantage, according to his own version; how that being in Gloucestershire on one occasion, and taken suddenly ill, ‘the women admired his courage and patience under suffering,’ and he contrived to ingratiate himself with the electors of Tewkesbury to some purpose.
He gives us an amusing and characteristic description of how he won the favour of the electors and bailiffs of this town by his conduct at a public dinner, where he and a certain Sir Henry Spiller were guests, and sat opposite each other. The knight, a crafty, perverse, rich man, a Privy Councillor, had rendered himself very obnoxious in the hunting-field, and, at the banquet aforementioned, began the dinner with all the affronts and dislikes he could possibly put on the bailiffs and their entertainment, which enraged and disgusted them, and this rough raillery he continued. ‘At length I thought it my duty to defend the cause of those whose bread I was eating, which I did with so good success, sparing not the bitterest retorts, that I had a complete victory. This gained the townsmen’s hearts, and their wives’ to boot. I was made free of the town, and at the next Parliament (though absent at the time), was chosen burgess by an unanimous vote, and that without a penny charge.’
Sir Anthony had strange humours: he loved a frolic dearly. He had a confidential servant who resembled him so much that, when dressed in his master’s left-offs, the lackey was often mistaken for his better. This worthy was a clever man-milliner, and had many small accomplishments which made him popular in country houses, and his master confesses that he often listened to the valet’s gossip, and made use of it, in the exercise of palmistry and fortune-telling, which produced great jollity, and ‘of which I did not make so bad a use as many would have done.’ With this account he finishes the record of his youth. A time of business followed, ‘and the rest of my life is not without great mixture of public concerns, and intermingled with the history of the times.’
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 re-admittance. Again ousted, again admitted; 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 nowise 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. While 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.