Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of (1621-1683), English statesman, first a supporter and later an opponent of King Charles II. He was born July 22, 1621, in Wimborne St Giles in Dorset. He served in the Short Parliament in 1640, switched his political support to Charles I and the Royalists at the start of the English Civil War, and then rejoined the Parliamentarians in 1644. In 1653 he was appointed a member of the Barebones Parliament. A strong advocate of parliamentary government, he came to oppose the autocratic government of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell. After Cromwell's death in 1658, Cooper was influential in the restoration of Charles II as king of England.

Cooper subsequently became an important member of the so-called Cabal, an elite advisory group serving King Charles. In 1660 he was made privy counsellor and in 1661 was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. In these roles he made progress towards eliminating the problems of commerce and colonization. In 1672 he was created Earl of Shaftesbury. This appointment resulted mainly from his support of the king and his approval of the Crown's Declaration of Indulgence, which suspended all laws penalizing Roman Catholic recusants (those who refused to attend the Church of England) and Protestant dissenters.

In 1673, after the king's brother James, Duke of York, had publicly acknowledged his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Shaftesbury renounced his earlier religious toleration and supported the anti-Catholic Test Acts. He was dismissed from office in 1673 and in 1678 supported the anti-Catholic agitation connected with the Popish Plot. As leader of the Whig faction in Parliament, he opposed the Duke of York as heir to the throne, supporting instead the Duke of Monmouth, a Protestant. In 1681 Shaftesbury was charged with treason, but he was released and fled to Holland, where he died on January 21, 1683.