Anthony Ashley-Cooper: Victorian Social Reformer

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In his 84 years, he certainly earned the love and respect of Britain’s lower class. He also had earned the respect–if not always agreement and affection–of Parliament. Yet even with such a legacy of good works, depression plagued him to the end. Always polite in person, he railed against all his political enemies, real or perceived, in the diaries he kept throughout his life. He imagined that people hated him, plotted against him, and intentionally treated him disrespectfully. In his diaries, he alternately dreaded being appointed to high position, chafed at being offered positions he perceived as beneath him, or asserted that he would accept no appointment at all–and in fact he turned down Prime Minister Robert Peel’s offer to make him Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

Born into a Tory family of landowners, Ashley’s sympathies often lay more closely with the Whigs, so he constantly found himself torn between his personal leanings and the party of his elected position in the House of Commons and later in his inherited position in the House of Lords. Although consistently praised for his elegantly constructed speeches, he imagined them to be weak failures.

His fears and depression had some foundation; many in the Government faulted him for being rigidly religious, and sometimes his causes suffered for it. Money worried him constantly. Kept on a tight allowance until his father died, he then inherited his family’s ancestral home, St. Giles. His father had let it decline, and the financial burden of maintaining it more than offset Shaftesbury’s income from agriculture. Gifts and loans from friends and relatives helped keep his family afloat, but Ashley remained deeply in debt. He dearly loved his wife, Minny, and their ten children and often agonized over their troubles. His eldest son and heir to St. Giles, Anthony, greatly disappointed his father. Anthony seemed to lack seriousness of purpose and constantly ran up debts his father was hard-put to pay off. Another son, Maurice, suffered from epilepsy, and a daughter, Mary, struggled with severe asthma; both died of their diseases.

Despite his deep personal misgivings, Ashley opened people’s eyes to the oppression of the weakest and poorest among them, and he led the way in establishing programs and policies to ease their misery. If he was right about the Second Coming of Christ, he did all he could to help prepare the way.

This article was written by Judy P. Sopronyi and originally appeared in the August/September 1999 issue of British Heritage. For more great articles, subscribe to British Heritage magazine today!

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