At the end of his great biography of the first earl of Shaftesbury, K. H. D. Haley remarked that in the years following his death Shaftesbury's reputation found few defenders:
The Shaftesbury family itself could do little against the general trend. The Earl's widow, devoted as she might be, was little regarded in comparison with Lady Russell, and was at odds with the second Earl who was a political nonentity. The third Earl, the favourite grandson, was devoted to his grandfather's memory, but ill-health restricted his participation in politics to little more than the exercise of his influence at local elections. In the eighteenth century the Shaftesburys never occupied the same place in the Whig oligarchy as did the Russells, the Cavendishes, and other Revolution families; and the first Earl never occupied the same place in the ruling Whig tradition.Footnote 1
None of this is untrue, but it is incomplete and therefore potentially misleading. During the middle decades of the eighteenth century several members of the Shaftesbury family spent a considerable amount of time and money in an attempt to get a convincing defence of their great ancestor into print, though in the end the project was abandoned. It is a story of considerable interest that has never properly been told.
I
Anthony Ashley Cooper (1711–71), fourth earl of Shaftesbury, never achieved – and probably never sought – the fame acquired by either his father or his great-grandfather. He has no entry in either the Dictionary of national biography or the Oxford dictionary of national biography, and since he never sat in the House of Commons he has fallen outside the scope of the History of Parliament; indeed so far as can be ascertained no biography of him has ever been written. He was, nevertheless, a man of reasonable though unexceptional ability – by no means a pitiful nonentity like the second earl.
The fourth earl succeeded to his title while still an infant. He can indeed never have known his father since within five months of his son's birth the third earl had left England for Italy in a largely unsuccessful attempt to recover his health, or at least prolong his life; he died a few days before his son's second birthday. The child was brought up by his mother and a succession of tutors. In March 1725, a few weeks after his fourteenth birthday, he married Susannah Noel;Footnote 2 the marriage was without issue, and nine months after his wife died in 1758 he married Mary Bouverie, from whom the later earls of Shaftesbury are descended. The family lived at St Giles House, in Wimborne St Giles, Dorset.
One of Shaftesbury's closest friends was his cousin James (1709–80), the son of James Harris of Salisbury (1674–1731) and Lady Elizabeth Harris (1681–1744), a younger sister of the third earl. In 1745 he married Elizabeth Clarke, the grand-daughter of John Locke's friend Edward Clarke. Harris became a prolific author, writing on a variety of subjects, especially aesthetics and the nature of language; he was sometimes referred to by his contemporaries as ‘Hermes’ Harris, after his best-known work, Hermes: or, a philosophical inquiry concerning language and universal grammar (1751). He was MP for Christchurch, Dorset, from 1761 until his death.Footnote 3
A third member of the family who became involved in the project of vindicating their great-grandfather was another cousin of the fourth earl, Edward Hooper (1702–95).Footnote 4 He was MP for Christchurch from 1734 to 1748, when he resigned his seat in order to become a commissioner for the Customs. During the latter part of his life Hooper lived mostly in London. He never married, and when he died he left his estate of Hurn Court, near Christchurch, to James Harris's son, the future first earl of Malmesbury.
II
The fourth earl's first public act of family piety occurred in 1732, with the erection of a splendid tomb – now, alas, in poor repair – in the nave of the newly rebuilt parish church at Wimborne St Giles; this included an elaborate inscription based on John Locke's already published epitaph.Footnote 5 Writing a full-scale biography, however, was a very different kind of undertaking, and help was needed. In retrospect, it cannot be said that Shaftesbury made a particularly good choice.
Benjamin Martyn (1698–1763) was a playwright and man of letters who achieved a minor and unenduring fame by writing a tragedy, Timoleon, that was staged in 1730 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. For twenty years, from 1732 onwards, he was secretary to the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America;Footnote 6 one of the more active trustees was the fourth earl of Shaftesbury and it was presumably this association that led Shaftesbury to engage Martyn to write a life of his great-grandfather.Footnote 7
According to the second edition of the Biographia Britannica, Martyn began work ‘about the year 1732',Footnote 8 but there are good reasons for thinking this date is five or six years too early. There are a few mentions of Martyn in letters sent by the fourth earl to James Harris in 1736 and 1737, but none gives any indication that he was already at work on a biography of the first earl.Footnote 9 The first sign in the Shaftesbury–Harris correspondence that such a project was being undertaken occurs in a letter of 14 March 1738, when Shaftesbury asked Harris to ‘remind my Aunt Harris [Lady Elizabeth] to think about my Great Grandfather’.Footnote 10 On 8 April Shaftesbury wrote again requesting his cousin Thomas – James's younger brother – to bring with him ‘the book of my great grand fathers letters’ which he wished very much to see; he also hoped that Harris would be successful in his search among his own papers.Footnote 11 The first mention of Martyn's involvement in the project was on 31 July, when Shaftesbury told Harris that he was expected to have ‘done the Draught ready to be corrected by the end of next month’;Footnote 12 this would seem to indicate that Martyn had been working for several months at the very least. The family were also doing what they could to collect material: at the beginning of August Shaftesbury wrote again asking if Harris could locate various pamphlets relating to the first earl that had been published in the 1670s and 1680s.Footnote 13
Before long Martyn was ready to travel to Dorset to examine the family papers.Footnote 14 On Friday 22 September, the day of his departure, Shaftesbury told Harris that Martyn was expected to arrive at Salisbury on Saturday night, Shaftesbury would travel there on Monday, dine with them both at Harris's house, and then take Martyn to St Giles on Tuesday the 26th.Footnote 15
Martyn must have brought something fairly extensive with him, because less than a week later Shaftesbury told Harris: ‘I have almost gone through the Life with Mr Martyn which answers fully my expectations, but really I have no more time to say a word than barely what busyness requires.’Footnote 16 At the end of the month he had more news: Edward Hooper had paid a visit to St Giles, and he ‘as well as myself have been exceedingly busy in digesting my Great Grand fathers life. Every day almost we have made some kind or other of discovery which will be material by examining old Papers.’Footnote 17 Martyn too was hard at work, though suffering severely from headaches, as he complained to his friend Thomas Birch:Footnote 18
In the Intervals of my Pain I have been much taken up in looking with Lord Shaftesbury over a great heap of his [great] Grand Father's Papers; among which I have met with some anecdotes that I fancy will please you; and a great many rough, Indigested hints that only serve to give one an Idea of the extent of his Capacity, but are not a sufficient foundation for forming any thing on them in his Life.Footnote 19
In the New Year it was agreed that Martyn should return to London; he was to go via Salisbury, where he would leave some papers with James Harris.Footnote 20 In a covering letter Shaftesbury explained what had been happening:
By Mr Martyn I now send you the Papers about my great grand father's life. The Introduction being to be quite new drawn, is not near finished nor fit for to be seen as yet; so you will not have that at present. In this Introduction is an establishment and character of Mr Stringer, and his Testimony: The letters concerning Mr Locke's expulsion from College is [sic] mentioned there also; as well as my great grand father's three Wives and the times he married them.Footnote 21
The same letter emphasized the secrecy of the whole project:
I believe there will be little occasion to caution either yourself my Aunt or couzins to keep this performance a secret for tho' possibly some general Notion of the thing may have got air yet particulars I am certain are not known. Mr Martyn has been so private in the affair, that he never has mentioned it to his intimate friends.
Shaftesbury was in error here: Birch clearly knew something of what Martyn had been doing.
After Martyn's return to London he presumably continued working at least intermittently on the biography, but only a few short letters from him to Birch survive, and for nearly a year the subject is not mentioned either in these or in Shaftesbury's letters to Harris. In the autumn, however, Shaftesbury travelled to London for the new session of parliament, and saw Martyn again.Footnote 22 On 27 November he told Harris about recent developments:
Through the hurry I was under, when I wrote last post I forgot to say the principal thing I had to mention; which was to remind you of sending the remarks and remaining part of Mr Martyn's papers. We have made several alterations and additions which I dare say will meet with your approbation: But we want your observations to compleat the work; which will appear in public (I hope) the beginning of next Spring.Footnote 23
Harris's very detailed observations on Martyn's draft, dated 1 December 1739, have survived,Footnote 24 though his accompanying letter is now lost. On 6 December Shaftesbury wrote again to thank Harris
for the excellent remarks You have been so good [as] to make upon the Manuscript, pray accept the joint thanks of Mr Martyn and myself. Mr Martyn who has this moment left me … desires his approbation of your comments may be signified by the earliest opportunity, and says besides he wishes it had been more copious. We have spent most of this, and indeed of many other Days, in agitating the grand affair.Footnote 25
When spring arrived, however, nothing had been published, and in the autumn Martyn was back at St Giles collecting more material. One new informant was described in a letter to Birch:
I saw two days ago an old Gentleman, who was an acquaintance of the first Lord Shaftesbury. He is between 80 and 90, has a good understanding, and a surprising memory, as far as relates to stories of his youth. He says Lord Shaftesbury had to the last a prodigious Vivacity, and Cheerfullness that appeared in all he said or did. One trifling Instance he related which he was an Eye Witness of. When Lord Shaftesbury liv'd at Thanet House in Aldersgate Street a Country Clergyman inquir'd for my Lord, and being introduc'd, he fell upon his knees before his Lordship who was in a Grey silk Nightgown; My Lord I humbly ask your Blessing. Lord Shaftesbury held his hand over him, Sir I give you my Blessing as Earl of Shaftesbury, which perhaps may do you as much Good as my Lord of London's, but he lives over the way. The Clergyman who was frightend at what he had done, got up, and ran away very abruptly without taking any leave.Footnote 26
It is a pleasant anecdote, and may well be true: Shaftesbury would certainly not have been slow in having fun at the expense of the High Church clergy. The old gentleman had probably been one of the household servants, but none of the surviving papers permits a closer identification.
Martyn returned to St Giles in September–October 1744, September–November 1747, September–October 1752, and September 1753, and perhaps on other occasions that have left no record.Footnote 27 The most likely reason for his visits is that he was still working on the biography, but this is not certain: after 1740 the subject is not mentioned in any of Shaftesbury's very numerous letters to Harris.Footnote 28 Some of Martyn's friends were, however, still supplying him with material: on 22 December 1744 Birch wrote to say that he had left at Martyn's lodgings ‘some papers relating to the first Earl of Shaftesbury, which I found among the Manuscripts at Mr Yorke's Seat at Wrest in Bedfordshire’.Footnote 29 Martyn replied that he was ‘highly pleased’ with the papers, which he had read to the fourth earl: ‘I think Lord Shaftesbury's Reasons upon the Test are excellent, and shall certainly insert them. I was delighted with them the more because they gave me hopes of seeing other Papers by your kind assistance.’Footnote 30 The ‘Reasons upon the Test’ is better known as the Reasons against the Bill for the Test, a work composed by – or at least for – Shaftesbury in 1675 and widely circulated in manuscript.Footnote 31 The printed versions of Martyn's Life do not include it, but he may have planned to put it in an appendix.
During the last years of his life Martyn seems to have done little if any work on the biography, and when he died in 1763 nothing had been published. Shaftesbury, by contrast, had not lost interest. According to an account written after his death:
my Lord's secretary made a fair copy of what had then been in all respects very imperfectly drawn up. That fair copy was … in Mr B. Martyn's hands at the time of his death, and by his Representative returned to the late Lord Shaftesbury to whom it belonged.Footnote 32
III
Even today, when the Shaftesbury papers have been classified and catalogued, they are still a formidable body of material to understand and exploit; in the 1730s, when the collection was rather larger, they must have presented a daunting prospect. Martyn seems to have made some attempt to classify them,Footnote 33 and he made use of some of the documents in the collection, but for his main narrative he relied on several sets of memoirs.
First, there was an incomplete autobiography by the first earl himself, supplemented by an autobiographical sketch and a travel diary.Footnote 34 The autobiography is of great value for Shaftesbury's childhood and youth, but ends in 1639. The sketch continues to 1645, and the diary gives details of Shaftesbury's movements – though little else – between 1646 and 1650.
Secondly, there were the Memoirs relating to the life of Anthony, first earl of Shaftesbury that John Locke had written near the end of his life. These had been published in 1706, and Martyn would also have had access to Locke's autograph, which had been sent to the third earl after Locke's death and had remained among the family papers.Footnote 35 Since there is no reason to suppose that Locke had intended to publish the memoirs in anything like their present form, it would be rather harsh to complain of their inconsequentiality and disorder, but it is fair to say that there is little sign of a powerful philosophical or historical intelligence at work. Apart from one short anecdote relating to the clandestine marriage of the first duchess of York in September 1660, all the events described took place before the Restoration.
Finally, and most importantly, there was an account of the first earl's life by his steward, Thomas Stringer. A manuscript copy of part of this, covering the years 1672–3, has survived, but it is clear that Martyn had access to something much longer.Footnote 36 Internal evidence shows that Stringer wrote his memoir during his last years, and it is likely that he had only got as far as 1673 when he died in 1702.Footnote 37
In his Introduction Martyn stated that apart from the material drawn from the first earl's speeches
The other parts of this relation are taken chiefly from the loose papers of his lordship, or from a manuscript account written by a gentleman who was many years near his person. This was Thomas Stringer, Esq; of Joychurch, near Salisbury … who had an excellent understanding, great knowledge in the law, and a warm affection for the interest of his country. He had a remarkable probity and evenness of temper, and was strictly faithful to his trust. These qualifications made him worthy of the confidence of Lord Shaftesbury.Footnote 38
Martyn was not alone in his very high regard for Stringer's memoir. After Martyn's death, when work had been resumed on the project, the fourth earl expressed relief that it had not been mislaid, describing the manuscript as ‘the Foundation of our work’, and adding that this was why Stringer's character needed to be established in the Introduction.Footnote 39 James Harris also provided testimony of the esteem in which Stringer had been held:
In the days of my childhood and youth I have heard much of Mr Stringer's Reputation and weight in the Country from my Father and mother, who both knew him, and from his widow likewise, whom I have often seen; I might add from all the old Whiggs of the time, who had him in great veneration. But alas! they are all gone.Footnote 40
The main limitation of all these memoirs is obvious: none of them tells us anything about the last nine years of Shaftesbury's life. Both Locke and Stringer were closely associated with him for much of this time, and both would have known a great deal about what happened, though no one familiar with Locke's extreme caution is likely to be surprised at the absence of any disclosures about what he had himself been doing.Footnote 41
Both Locke and Stringer are well known to historians of the first earl's affairs, but there was another much less conspicuous member of the household who left an account which – unlike those just considered – does say something about Shaftesbury's last years. This was Benjamin Wyche.
IV
In the Introduction to Martyn's biography there is an autobiographical aside: ‘I have by me the manuscript of one Mr. Wyche, who had an office under Lord Shaftesbury, wherein he says that Lord Shaftesbury slighted the bishop to a very great degree.’Footnote 42 In one of the draft revisions preserved in the Shaftesbury papers there is a fuller account:
When the Bishop's History appeared, Mr Benjamin Wyche, then chief Steward to the late Earl of Shaftesbury, and who had formerly been in Employment under the Chancellor, and knew the Bishop well made some Remarks on that History and its Author. In these Remarks, which He communicated in Writing, Mr Wyche asserts, that Lord Shaftesbury slighted Doctor Burnet to a very great Degree.Footnote 43
The ‘Bishop's History’ is, of course, Gilbert Burnet's History of his own time.
Benjamin Wyche was born in 1650.Footnote 44 Several documents from the late seventeenth centuryFootnote 45 describe him as Benjamin Wyche of Whiteparish, a small village on the road from Salisbury to Romsey, but during the latter part of his life he seems to have lived in Salisbury itself.Footnote 46 He married Alice Thornycroft (1651–1728), and had one son, Richard (1692–1736), and two daughters, Abigail and Martha. His will is dated 26 December 1732, and he died on 25 April 1734.Footnote 47
An account of Wyche's involvement in the first earl's affairs is given in a footnote in Martyn's Life, said to have been taken from a document found among the Shaftesbury papers:
He was a man of the law, and clerk to Mr. Justice Sir Samuel Eyre. Mr. Justice Eyre was a standing council concerned in Lord Shaftesbury's affairs, and he recommended him to Lord Shaftesbury as a faithful amanuensis, who might be trusted upon any occasion. He was accordingly trusted by the Lord Shaftesbury in transcribing papers of the utmost consequence, from the year 1669 or 1670 to the end of Lord Shaftesbury's life. He took down thoughts as they were dictated by the great men at meetings; one in particular from Lord Holles, near the end of his life. The late Lord Chief Justice Eyre, who had such a thorough knowledge of Mr. Wyche's integrity, used to say of him, that he had, at the latter end of King Charles the Second's time, written more treason than any man in the kingdom. He was a man of slow parts, but scrupulously exact in matters of testimony, which his great length of days occasioned his being called upon sometimes to give. The truth of this is known to several people now living. He lived at Salisbury till his death.Footnote 48
Sir Samuel Eyre (1638–98) does seem to have been an associate of Shaftesbury, though the only mention of him in Haley's biography is as the countess's lawyer.Footnote 49 One letter from him to Locke survives, written in 1676, while Locke was in France, though after his death Locke also received letters from his widow and from his son Robert.Footnote 50
The earliest mention of Benjamin Wyche in the Shaftesbury papers is his signature as witness to a deed of guardianship dated 19 March 1673[/4], vesting responsibility for the education of the future third earl in his grandfather.Footnote 51 How much copying Wyche did for Shaftesbury is unclear, but on 2 June 1674 Locke recorded in his ledger payments to him of £1 10s 0d ‘for writeing Mr Wests patent and other things’ and ‘for writeing severall things for Carolina and Bahamas’.Footnote 52 On 20 June 1675 he paid Stringer some money ‘by the hand of Ben: Wyche’, and subsequently received from Wyche the interest from a loan made to Lady Wyndham.Footnote 53 Wyche continued to have connections with the Shaftesbury family after the first earl's death: letters from the dowager countess to Stringer's wife Jane mention a ‘Master Wych’ and a ‘Mr Wich’, and the context make it clear that Mrs Stringer was expected to know who was being referred to.Footnote 54
Copies of Wyche's accounts for the years 1720 to 1724, when he served as steward to the fourth earl after the death of John Wheelock, are among the Shaftesbury papers.Footnote 55
V
On 31 July 1738 the fourth earl of Shaftesbury told James Harris, ‘If Mr Cooper (as I hope he has) before this has search'd old Mr Wyche's papers the same opportunity which conveys Mr Birch's might carry the others. I am very eager to see Mr Wyche's papers soon.’Footnote 56 The most important of these papers was ‘A vindication of the character and actions of the Right Honourable Anthony late earle of Shaftesbury’, dedicated to the fourth earl in a prefatory letter signed ‘Philoicos’ – i.e. friend of the household. Three copies have survived, one in the Shaftesbury papers and two in the Malmesbury papers.Footnote 57
The identity of Philoicos is made clear in letters sent by the fourth earl in the last year of his life to Andrew Kippis, who had been engaged to revise the biography after Martyn's death. On 7 November 1770 he mentioned ‘another Manuscript written by an inferior person and Addressed to me which confirms some of the Facts mentioned by Mr Stringer and relates to me new Facts. The Manuscript is signed Philoicos. This I cannot find at present.’Footnote 58 In his next letter, written five days later, he expressed a hope that ‘Mr Wyche's Manuscript … signed Philoicos, to the dedication’ might be found: this was important to the biography because it gave evidence of facts from the writer's own knowledge.Footnote 59 It was eventually located and sent: two years later Kippis gave a list of manuscripts in his possession that included ‘Philoicos's or Mr Wyche's Vindication of Lord Shaftesbury’.Footnote 60
Philoicos's Vindication is a long and rather rambling attack on what he saw as the malevolent misrepresentations of Shaftesbury's character and actions in Burnet's History of his own time, the first part of which had been published posthumously in 1724, nine years after its author's death.Footnote 61 At the beginning of his second book, Burnet gave a series of character sketches of the leading politicians of Charles II's reign. Shaftesbury was presented as an able, shallow, and unprincipled politician. His gifts were not concealed:
He had a wonderful faculty in speaking to a popular assembly, and could mix both the facetious and the serious way of arguing very agreeably. He had a particular talent to make others trust to his judgment, and depend on it: And he brought over so many to a submission to his opinion, that I never knew any man equal to him in the art of governing parties, and of making himself the head of them.Footnote 62
His defects – as Burnet saw them – were many and various. He had little religious belief, being ‘a Deist at best’, but had more faith in astrology, believing that after death our souls lived in the stars. As a practical politician he was resourceful, devious and (in the long run) unsuccessful:
His strength lay in the knowledge of England, and of all the considerable men in it. He understood well the size of their understandings, and their tempers: And he knew how to apply himself to them so dextrously, that, tho' by his changing sides so often it was very visible how little he was to be depended on, yet he was to the last much trusted by all the discontented party. He was not ashamed to reckon up the many turns he had made: And he valued himself on the doing it at the properest season, and in the best manner. This he did with so much vanity, and so little discretion, that he lost many by it. And his reputation was at last run so low, that he could not have held much longer, had he not died in good time, either for his family or for his party: The former would have been ruined, if he had not saved it by betraying the latter.Footnote 63
This was all the more dangerous because it came from a fellow whig. That Shaftesbury was detested by tories and Jacobites was only to be expected, and could be allowed for, but a stab in the back from within his own political camp was quite another matter.
When Wyche wrote his Vindication, and whether he had plans to publish it, cannot now be ascertained. A date of composition in the early 1730s is suggested by the expression of hope at the end of the dedication, ‘That your Lordship in your private and public station may bring a further measure of honour to your Family.’Footnote 64 This seems to indicate that the fourth earl had recently reached, or was about to reach, his age of majority, which he did in 1732.Footnote 65
Martyn certainly read and made use of the Vindication. Philoicos had described how in the autumn of 1682 Shaftesbury tried to persuade his more sceptical associates that an insurrection should be set in motion:
he propos'd … makeing the first attempt himselfe notwithstanding his being so infirm and jested upon himself that they knew he could not fly, and they should see that he knew much better how to dy at the head of the People of England fighting for their Libertyes and in their Cause than on a Scaffold, and with a kind of Prophetick fire in his words when he found that they could not be brought either to fight or fly, he told them the Papists should never Triumph over him, whatever they did over them, and that he would leave them to be hal'd away in Triumph by Popish Cruelty to Goals and Gibbetts, and to dye by the Ax and halter.Footnote 66
Martyn – without indicating his source – adapted this as follows:
He said he would head the first party himself; and, jesting on his Infirmities, he told them, they knew he could not fly, and they should see that he knew better how to die at the head of the people, fighting for their liberties, than on a scaffold. When he could not prevail on them, with a kind of prophetick fire, he said the Papists should never triumph over him, whatever they did over them; and he was afraid he should leave them to be hal'd away in triumph to Goals and Gibbets, and to dye by the Ax and the Halter.Footnote 67
Martyn clearly had no intention of concealing Shaftesbury's desire to mount, and indeed participate in, an insurrection.
Whether this scheme was right or wrong, in a moral light, the reader will judge for himself. However, we cannot help observing, that in the present enlightened age the question will easily be determined. If Lord Shaftesbury was certain that the constitution was invaded, that the liberties of the people were in the utmost danger, that there was no possibility of securing them by Parliament, and that nothing could preserve them but force, he acted upon right principles, in advising the having recourse to arms. His principles have since been amply justified by the Revolution; and, indeed, they cannot be condemned, without condemning, at the same time, the foundations of British freedom, and the title on which the accession of the House of Hanover to the throne of these kingdoms has been established.Footnote 68
In other words, Shaftesbury's activities could only be consistently condemned by someone who was willing to repudiate the principles of the Glorious Revolution itself.
VI
When Martyn began work Wyche was already dead, but at least one former member of the household at Thanet House was still alive. On 5 April 1740 Shaftesbury wrote to James Harris:
Mr Martyn reminds me to desire you to remember to take an opportunity, as soon as you can conveniently, of speaking to old Mrs Hill; who by being a little drawn into conversation, may very probably let us into the knowledge of something, which may do us Service. As Mrs Hill is so far advanced in life, delays may be dangerous: And I really imagine from what she has mentioned in her memorial to my Aunt Harris, she may perhaps start some usefull discoveries.Footnote 69
‘Old Mrs Hill’ was Jane, the widow of Jonathan Hill of Cholderton, Wiltshire,Footnote 70 and before that the wife of Thomas Stringer, whom she had married as long ago as 1675. As Shaftesbury said, she was very well advanced in years and delay would indeed have been dangerous: according to the tablet erected in Alderbury parish church to commemorate her first husband, she died on 17 July 1740 at the age of eighty-nine.Footnote 71
Jane Stringer was certainly someone who might have had something interesting to say about the first earl and his affairs. Her maiden name was Barbon, and a Jane Barbon – presumably the future Mrs Stringer – had been a member of Shaftesbury's household at St Giles in July 1675.Footnote 72 After her marriage she had frequent dealings both with members of the Shaftesbury family itself and with other members of the household, notably Locke.Footnote 73
The most important document produced by Jane Stringer in her old age was a ‘memorial’ (or memoir) of the first earl. This took the form of a letter addressed to ‘Madam’, almost certainly Lady Elizabeth Harris.Footnote 74 The original is lost but a copy has survived among the Shaftesbury papers, and was printed by W. D. Christie in his biography of the first earl.Footnote 75 The surviving copy contains no indication of when the memoir had been written (or indeed of when the copy was made), but other evidence points – though not decisively – to the late 1730s. Among the Malmesbury papers there is a fair copy in an unknown hand of an account of the first earl and the Exclusion Bill, with a note in a different hand at the end: ‘25 Sept. 1736 Memorandum of what Mrs Hill told me of her former husband Mr Stringer's drawing up the Exclusion Bill etc.’Footnote 76
On 22 November 1739 Lady Elizabeth wrote to the countess of Shaftesbury – her husband was in London – to say that she had been looking for material connected with the first earl:
but on searching and Rummaging, till I was quite tir'd, could find nothing worth sending. All Mrs Hill's most valuable papers are by some ill chance long since dissipated, as for many years, as likewise now on sending to her, she with real grief comments. A few letters from my Grandfather to Mr Stringer have [been] found; but all concerning domestick matters.Footnote 77
On 13 December she wrote again to say that she had unearthed something, and was enclosing ‘an old letter of Mrs Hills which perhaps mayn't be unsatisfactory to your Ladyship or my Lord Shaftesbury to peruse’.Footnote 78 This was presumably the memoir, and it must have been passed on to the fourth earl, since on 17 April 1740 he sent James Harris a copy:
Inclosed I transmitt a copy of Mrs Hills memorial. I have not had time to examine this with the original; but as far as I can Judge from a cursory inspection, imagine 'tis pretty right. The original (you know) is full of faults, that consequently the copy will appear imperfect.Footnote 79
It seems likely that this is the copy now in the Shaftesbury papers.
VII
Another elderly survivor whose memories were being sought was Pierre Coste, Locke's translator. Coste had never known the first earl – he did not come to England until 1697 – but he spent seven years, from 1697 to 1704, as tutor in the household of Sir Francis Masham at Oates in Essex, where Locke had been living since 1691. He was also well acquainted with the third earl, at whose request he had translated Locke's Memoirs relating to the life of Anthony, first earl of Shaftesbury.Footnote 80
On 13 December 1738 Harris drafted a letter to Coste with the information that a biography of the first earl was now being prepared under the direction of his great-grandson, and asking if he could communicate ‘any Short History, or Circumstances, any remarkable Saying whether in a public way or private, which either by tradition or writing may have come to your knowledge’.Footnote 81 The draft was addressed to ‘Mr. Coste at Paris’, but it soon became apparent that he was closer at hand: among the fourth earl's letters to Harris there is an undated scrap in Harris's hand which says that ‘old Coste is in England at the Duchess of Buckinghams in St James Park I have your letter sent to him’.Footnote 82 Harris must himself have written to Coste, since on 27 December 1738 Coste sent him a long reply.Footnote 83 Unsurprisingly, it said more about Locke than the first earl, though it did contain an interesting account of how, when Shaftesbury was lord chancellor, he and Locke sought advice on technical legal matters from an eminent chancery barrister, John King. Coste ended his letter by angling quite openly for an invitation to St Giles, where he was sure that his host's genial conversation ‘would revive in my memory several of the bon-mots, the fine repartees, and the original reflections with which his [the first earl's] discourse was seasoned, and of which I heard a great number from Mr Locke and My Lord Shaftesbury his grandson’.Footnote 84 If, however, Shaftesbury preferred to supply a copy of Martyn's history Coste promised to read it with care and send back any comments that occurred to him. The letter seems to have been shown to Shaftesbury, since on 10 January he asked Harris ‘to write a short compliment to Coste in return for his letter’,Footnote 85 but as far as is known no invitation to St Giles was issued. Whether Martyn ever saw the letter is not known, but he made no use of it in his biography.
VIII
An account of the fate of Martyn's biography after its author's death was given in 1789, in the second edition of the Biographia Britannica:
Notwithstanding the pains that had been taken by Mr. Martyn, the late Earl of Shaftesbury did not think the work sufficiently finished for publication; and, therefore, somewhat more than twenty years ago, he put it into the hand of his friend, Dr. Gregory Sharpe, Master of the Temple. All, however, that Dr. Sharpe performed, was to recommend it to the care of a Gentleman still living, who is distinguished for his accurate acquaintance with the history of England. … This Gentleman examined Mr. Martyn's manuscript with attention, pointed out its errors, made references, and suggested a number of instances in which it might be improved, but did not proceed much farther in the undertaking. At length, the work was consigned to another person, who spent considerable labour upon it, enlarged it by a variety of additions, and had it in contemplation to avail himself of every degree of information which might render it a correct history of the time, as well as a narrative of the Life of Lord Shaftesbury. The reasons (not unfriendly to either side) which prevented the person now mentioned from completing his design, and occasioned him to return the papers to the noble family, are not of sufficient consequence to be here related.Footnote 86
Both these un-named gentlemen were non-conformist ministers with literary and historical interests: the first was Roger Flexman (1708–95), the second Andrew Kippis (1725–95), the editor of the Biographia Britannica and author of the account just quoted.Footnote 87
At some time in the last decades of the eighteenth century Martyn's life was printed, though not published. Copies are now very rare: there is one in the British Library, but otherwise only dismembered sheets among the Shaftesbury papers.Footnote 88 Both the British Library catalogue and the Oxford dictionary of national biography (s.v. Martyn, Benjamin) give the date of printing as ‘1790?’, but closer inquiry shows that this is twenty years too late.
On 25 June 1770 Shaftesbury informed Benjamin Martyn's heir, his brother William, that sheets of a certain work were being printed ‘in the most private manner’, and that he hoped this would be kept secret.Footnote 89 The identity of the work is confirmed by Shaftesbury's statement later in the same letter that when it was finally fit for publication he proposed putting a print – ‘a very fine one’ – of his great-grandfather in the frontispiece.
On 27 July Kippis told Shaftesbury that Richardson the printerFootnote 90 had sent ‘a number of sheets of the Opus magnum’ on ‘Saturday last’. Three days later Shaftesbury replied, saying that the printed sheets were expected at St Giles next Wednesday (1 August). On 28 August he wrote again to say that he had now read through them. On 15 September Kippis told Shaftesbury that he had ‘ordered the remaining printed sheets to be sent to your Lordship, and, likewise, a whole new set, for the Use of Mr Hooper’; a further set was being sent to Flexman. These seem to have made up only part of the work, as on 14 November Shaftesbury told Kippis that he had seen the printed sheets as far as page 296.Footnote 91 Printing seems finally to have been completed in January, when Shaftesbury wrote to Kippis:
I understand that Mr Richardson has prepared the Copies ready to be delivered where proper: But I have the merit of our work so much at Heart that I desire no Copies of it, in its present State, may be seen by any one person whatever except such as it is necessary should see it to give proper corrections to it.Footnote 92
The work printed in the autumn and winter of 1770–1 was very close to Martyn's Life in the state that he had left it, with only relatively small-scale alterations by Kippis.Footnote 93 There is no sign that Shaftesbury wished anything to be published at this stage: printing had been undertaken so that everyone involved in the project – Shaftesbury, Hooper, Flexman, and Kippis – would have a uniform and legible text on which to work. It is not surprising that so few copies have survived: only a very small number were ever printed.
Kippis's opinion of what Martyn had written was not high. In a letter sent some years later to Edward Hooper he lamented what he called ‘the original Poverty and Defectiveness of Mr Martin's Work’: Martyn was uncritical, he ran on ‘in a perpetual Strain of Panegyric, without, in all cases, producing the proper Proofs of his Assertions’, and his historical accounts were ‘shamefully incorrect and deficient’.Footnote 94 Defects as serious and pervasive as these could not be remedied by localized tinkering: as Kippis went through the printed sheets he crossed out large parts of them, replacing the deleted passages with entirely new material that he had himself composed.Footnote 95
When Shaftesbury died on 27 May 1771 his son and heir was a boy of nine; overall responsibility for the publication of Martyn's biography now rested with his widow, but the business of handling the revisions was taken over by Edward Hooper. He informed James Harris that the countess had ‘mention'd to me that it was my late Lords desire and intention that the history of his Great Grandfather's life should be now so expedited as to be publish'd next Winter’.Footnote 96 Harris had been sent part of the version that Kippis had revised, but was too busy to read it with any care, and Hooper requested its return forthwith.
Hooper was fully aware of the difficulties involved in any attempt to rehabilitate the first earl's reputation: as he remarked rather gloomily to Harris, ‘we have the Prejudices of Mankind to encounter, who have generally been taught for almost a century to consider that great Man to be as wicked as able’.Footnote 97 A new traducer of Shaftesbury's reputation had indeed recently appeared. Sir John Dalrymple (1726–1810) was a Scottish lawyer and historian who between 1771 and 1773 published his Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland from the dissolution of the last parliament of Charles II, until the sea-battle off La Hogue. The chief casualties were the whig martyrs Algernon Sydney and Lord William Russell,Footnote 98 who were both revealed as having taken money from Louis XIV, but Shaftesbury was not treated kindly: Dalrymple described him as void of all honour in politics, void of all feeling, and as watching without remorse prisoners being led to their deaths on fraudulent charges that he had himself contrived.Footnote 99 Hooper was outraged, complaining to James Harris of Dalrymple's ‘abominable treatment’ of Shaftesbury and of how he had ‘with the utmost rancour as well as invective bespatter'd the memory of our great Grandfather’.Footnote 100 When Dalrymple heard that the Shaftesbury family had been offended by his portrait of the first earl, he had the effrontery to claim that he had no wish to injure Shaftesbury's memory and was happy to hear that the family were planning to vindicate his memory.Footnote 101
By February 1773 Kippis's work was sufficiently far advanced for a new printing to be undertaken.Footnote 102 The revised text was considerably longer than its predecessor, and this time it was to be printed – and in due course published – in two volumes, as The life, political transactions and state papers of Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury: including the principal events of his time.Footnote 103 At first not much seems to have been done, and on 10 August Hooper drafted an irritated and rather peremptory letter to Flexman, complaining that ‘the year is so far spent without the Printers being in possession of the work the late Lord Shaftesbury committed to your care’.Footnote 104 By the autumn things were moving again, and Kippis told Hooper that though work had been going slowly because of the need to revise every sheet twice, nine sheets (i.e. seventy-two pages) had been struck off.Footnote 105 How far printing proceeded is unclear: in the Shaftesbury papers there are copies – often several copies – of gatherings A–R (pp. 1–136), but nothing more.Footnote 106
One reason for the dilatory execution of the project was that Kippis felt that his labours were not receiving full approval. In the autumn of 1774 he wrote a long letter to Hooper explaining that for a good while he had ‘been apprehensive that you are not satisfied with my Manner of conducting the History; and this Apprehension has dampened my Ardour in the Prosecution of it’. He therefore proposed three possible courses of action: (i) that the project should be abandoned and all the papers returned to the family; (ii) that the work should be published, but with Hooper's name on the title-page as its editor; (iii) that Kippis's name would appear as editor of the work, and that in return he would have complete control over its contents. ‘I cannot, if I continue to be employed, rest satisfied, unless it be such as I can stake my Character upon it with the Public.’ He added that he was ‘so embarrassed’ with Martyn's performance that he now regretted that the history had not been entirely recomposed.Footnote 107
Hooper replied that he would write to the countess for a final decision, but expected that she would agree to what he was proposing: ‘I flatter myself I shall then find myself authorized to remove, agreably to my own inclinations, the doubts difficulties and discontents you express, by leaving the work entirely to the discretion of yourself and your worthy co-adjutor Dr Flexman.’Footnote 108
One of Hooper's last surviving letters on the project was early in 1775, when he told Flexman that he would ‘request Dr Kippis … to proceed to the completion and publication of his work as fast as his other engagements may permit’.Footnote 109 How Kippis responded is not recorded, but it would be unwise to conclude from the absence of any further letters that he had ceased working. In June 1776 he and the countess of Shaftesbury signed and sealed articles of agreement relating to the publication of a biography of the first earl, now being treated as a work by Kippis, rather than a revision by Kippis of what Martyn had produced.Footnote 110 Unfortunately, nothing in the Shaftesbury papers gives any indication of how much work Kippis did on this, or of when the project was finally abandoned.
IX
Kippis, Flexman, and Hooper all died in 1795. On 12 December of that year one N. Payne wrote to the fifth earlFootnote 111 with a proposal to publish Martyn's biography in three volumes. On the final page of his letter there is a draft of a reply by the fifth earl indicating that he did not wish to proceed with this scheme.Footnote 112 Neither he nor his brother, the sixth earl,Footnote 113 who succeeded to the title in 1811, seem to have had any interest in bringing to completion the work that had meant so much to their father.Footnote 114
Kippis had retained a copy of the 1770 edition, and when his library was sold after his death this was bought by the duke of Grafton.Footnote 115 In June 1830 the book was sold at auction by Robert Harding Evans of Pall Mall to a Mr Singer, acting for the firm of Colburn & Bentley who had plans to publish a new edition.Footnote 116
Martyn's Life was finally published in the summer of 1836. The editor was a young man who had only recently graduated from Oxford, George Wingrove Cooke (1814–65). He was now starting a career as a barrister, and probably had quite a lot of spare time on his hands. The publisher was Richard Bentley, formerly one of the partners in Colburn & Bentley, which had ceased publishing in 1832. Cooke had no access to the sheets of Martyn's life that contained Kippis's revisions – he applied unsuccessfully to the sixth earl to consult the family papers – and he presumably obtained his text from the copy of the 1770 printing bought by Colburn & Bentley.Footnote 117 He provided a preface, a concluding chapter giving an overall verdict on Shaftesbury's career, and in between various other additions of his own, the more extensive of which were enclosed in square brackets. The work was described on its title-page as having been written by ‘Mr. B. Martyn and Dr. Kippis, edited by G. Wingrove Cooke, Esq.’ Given Kippis's unshakeable determination not to have his literary reputation damaged by appearing in public as the co-author of a work with which he was still deeply dissatisfied, it is ironic that his name was finally placed on the title-page of a version that he had only started to revise.
Cooke's own opinion of Martyn's work is indicated by a letter he subsequently wrote to his publisher, thanking him for his offer of some unsold copies: ‘I feel’, Cooke confessed, ‘so little interest in a work of which I never thought highly and with which I am only connected as Editor that you have my full consent to sell the stock.’Footnote 118
Cooke's approach to the writing of history had been expressed in a book published in the previous year: ‘While I unreservedly adopt those grand constitutional doctrines which are generally called Whig principles’, he wrote, ‘I have not hesitated to award censure because the individuals whose conduct deserved it were ranked as the adherents of a party whose general tenets I revere.’Footnote 119 His final verdict on Shaftesbury was almost wholly positive: ‘As a private gentleman Shaftesbury might challenge the severest scrutiny’, ‘for strict political honour he had no rival in that age except Lord William Russell’, and though we may choose to reprobate isolated parts of his conduct, ‘no one who values constitutional liberties can look upon the important labours which he wrought … without viewing him as a benefactor to his country’.Footnote 120
The biography received a short and uncomplimentary notice in The Times on 1 September 1836, the anonymous reviewer even going so far as to say – quite unfairly – that it contained no material additions to the life in the Biographia Britannica. More pertinently, he remarked that Cooke ‘had imbibed much of the encomiastic spirit’ of the work he had edited, describing the result as a sustained panegyric in which Shaftesbury was ‘held up as a person of undeviating rectitude and virtue’. The reviewer took a very different view: he did not deny Shaftesbury's remarkable abilities – who ever has? – but saw him as an unprincipled politician and a profligate debauchee. The chasm between Shaftesbury's admirers and his detractors seems to have been as wide as it had been when Martyn had been commissioned nearly a century before.
