One precious boon England has to be grateful for to his lordship, and that is the Habeas Corpus Act. In the days of the Stuarts there was a good deal of arbitrary commitment, and it had been ruled by the judges that when a Habeas Corpus was brought for one committed by the King, if the case were such that secrecy was required, "the Court in discretion may please to deliver the prisoner for a convenient time, to the end the Court may be advertised the truth thereof." Such was the answer of the two Chief Justices, Hyde and Richardson, to the query propounded to them by Charles I., who was anxious not only theoretically, but practically, to know how far he might stretch the royal prerogative. In the reign of Charles II. the famous act of Habeas Corpus Act was passed, and the King could no longer commit a man to gaol at his own sweet will, as he did in the case of Jenkins, a citizen of London, whom he committed for a mutinous speech in the Guildhall. The Act is said, on good authority, to have been drawn by Sir William Jones, the famous lawyer, who had been for some years Attorney-General, and resigned the office in 1679, to be free to act vigorously against Government. It was entitled "An Act for the Better Securing the Liberty of the Subject, and for Preventing Imprisonment Beyond Seas." Shaftesbury has always had the credit of carrying this Act through Parliament. Doubtless his zeal on the subject had been whetted by his own experiences. He had not forgotten his imprisonment in the Tower, in 1677, and his fruitless application to the King's Bench for release. It has been well shown by Mr. Hallam that this Act did not enlarge an Englishman's liberties. It only provided better security for their enjoyment. The best eulogium on the Act is a speech by the Duke of York to Barillon in the following year, that no Government can exist when the law prevents any man from being kept in prison without trial more than a day. There is good reason to believe that the Act was passed by a trick. "Lord Grey and Lord Norris," writes Burnet, were the tellers. Lord Norris being subject to the vapours was not at all times attentive to what he was doing; so a very fat lord coming in, Lord Grey counted him for ten, as a jest at first, but seeing Lord Norris had not observed it, he went on with his misreckoning of ten, so it was reported to the House, and declared that they who were for the Bill were a majority. From an inspection of the minutes of the Lords it appears that a greater number are recorded as having voted than were in the House at the time. It is said Shaftesbury seeing that there was a mistake, immediately rose and made a long speech on some other subject, and several peers having gone in and gone out while he was speaking, it was impossible to retell the House when he sat down.

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A few facts may be given to show the rise and progress of the Ashley Coopers. For upwards of three centuries the Shaftesburys have been a power in English political life. They come of an ancient stock. The father of the Earl of Shaftesbury was a baronet of Rockborne, in Hampshire. His mother was Anne, the only child of Sir Anthony Ashley, knight, afterwards Baronet of Wimborne St. Giles, in Dorsetshire. No one was admitted to that order who was not possessed of a thousand pounds a year, clear of encumbrances, and who could not prove descent from a grandfather, on the father's side, who had borne arms. The Coopers were a flourishing family in the West of England; at any rate, as far back as the time of Henry VIII. The Ashleys were a still older family, as they had been planted at Wimborne St. Giles since the reign of Henry VI.; and their ancestors, traced through heirs female, had been lords of that manor before the reign of Edward I. Mr. Ashley Cooper, who became the first Earl Shaftesbury, seems to have derived from his mother's side the pigmy body of Dryden's satire. His father, he tells us, was "very lovely and graceful, both in face and person, of a moderate stature, neither too high nor too low " The future earl, losing his parents young, suffered much at the hands of his guardians, and in consequence of the action of the Court of Wards-a court, the exactions and corruptions of which were shortly after ended in consequence of the Civil War. The heir had not been perhaps so unfairly fleeced as some. When he came of age his estates were worth eight thousand a year, which would be equivalent to more than twenty thousand at present. At the age of sixteen he was sent to Oxford, and when only eighteen was married to a daughter of Lord Keeper Coventry. Shortly after that was before he was nineteen-he became M.P. for Tewkesbury, and was fairly launched on the troubled waters of political life. The Parliament was dissolved in three weeks. Charles, who had tried to rule without a Parliament, found this one as untoward as the one he had dissolved in anger some eleven years before. In the busy Parlia ment which succeeded, in 1640, Cooper took his seat, after he had been kept out of it some time, as M.P. for Downton, in Wiltshire, a borough in which he had property, and which was near his country seat.

As was to be expected, originally Sir Ashley Cooper was on the King's side, as were all his wife's family. He was made Governor of Weymouth, but he did not hold the appointment long, as in 1644 he went over to the Parliament, because he was offended says Lord Clarendon, a very doubtful witness, because, as he himself writes, "he plainly saw the King's aim to be destructive to religion and the State." In this surmise nowadays every one will agree.

Not only was the aim of King Charles I. destructive to Church and State, but its result was the destruction of Church and State for a time. There is no evidence to show that Cooper was not to be believed when he stated before the committee of both kingdoms that "he came there, being fully satisfied that there was no inten tion of that side for the promoting or preserving of the Protestant religion and the liberties of the kingdom." At that time many others did the same, such as the Earl of Westmoreland and Sir William Dering, and Sir Ashley's neighbour and friend, Sir Gerard Napier. Parliament had lately concluded the Solemn League and Covenant with Scotland. The King had assembled a rival Parliament at Oxford, and there was a general feeling of disgust at the Treaty made by the King with the Irish rebels, and at the favour shown to the Roman Catholics. Up to that time the fortune of the war had been with the King, rather than his foes. Cooper had little to gain and much to lose by adhering to the Parliamentary cause. Characteristically Sir Ashley gave the Parliament his heartiest efforts; he took the command of the forces in Dorsetshire. When the army was remodelled, when Fairfax succeeded Essex in the command, Sir Ashley seems to have retired into private life. In 1647 we find him High Sheriff of Wiltshire, and active in the discharge of his duties. A little after, he loses his wife, -"a lovely, beautiful, fair woman, a religious, devout Christian, of admirable wit and wisdom beyond any I ever knew," as he writes in his diary; but in nine months after he was married to the Lady Frances Cecil, sister to the Earl of Exeter, a royalist nobleTo that marriage we owe the preservation of the family. In 1652 there was born to him a son, Anthony Ashley, who lived to inherit his father's possessions and titles, and transmitted them to a son of his own-the distinguished author of the "Characteristics." This lady did not long survive the birth of her son, and was succeeded by Margaret, daughter of the second Lord Spencer, of Wormleighton, and sister of the third lord, who was created Earl of Sunderland by Charles I., and had fallen fighting for the Royal cause at Newbury. The third wife lived to share all the honours and troubles of his future career. "She had no children," wrote Mr. Christie, " but she reared with a mother's care her husband's son by his second wife, and afterwards with the same care watched over the delicate boyhood of that son's son, the future author of the Characteristics.' She was a woman of strong religious feelings. It was her habit to rise at five in the morning, and spend two or three hours in religious devotions. Thongh Shaftesbury's character did not agree with hers in this respect, they lived on terms of the warmest affection." A letter written by Lady Shaftesbury to her nephew Sunderland, two years

man.

after her husband's death, shows how deeply she still mourned his loss. Locke, the philosopher, dedicated to her one of his works. To have been loved by such a wife is surely a proof that his lordship was something nobler than he appears in the satire of Dryden, or in the ill-natured pages of Lord Campbell.

But to return to Sir A. Cooper. He was permitted to take his seat in Parliament just as Cromwell was about to bid it vanish from the page of history. In the Barebones Parliament which succeeded, Sir Anthony was one of the home members for Wilts. That assembly spent a good deal of its time in seeking the Lord. It is to that Dryden refers when he writes in the "Medallion ":Bartering his venal wit for sums of gold,

He cast himself into the saint-like mould;

Groaned, sighed, and prayed, while godliness was gain,
The loudest bag-pipe of the squeaking train.

There is nothing to show that Cooper did anything of the kind,
and there is abundant reason to believe that he sided with Cromwell
rather than with the enthusiasts whom the Lord Protector had
ultimately to suppress.
When Cromwell's new council was framed
Cooper became one of its members. Ultimately, however, we find
Cooper one of the M.P.'s who resisted Cromwell's rather high-
handed ways. He was of the Presbyterian party, with whom
Cromwell did not very cordially act, and we find him one of the
excluded. There were at least ninety-five of them, and of these sixty-
five signed a letter to the Speaker, complaining that they had been
forcibly prevented by soldiers from taking their seats. That letter
was signed by Cooper. Cromwell found he had many men in the
State who were too independent to be ruled by him. It is said that
he found none so difficult to manage as that Marcus Tullius Cicero,
Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper-the little man with the three names
connected with the Presbyterian party. Cooper, under the weak
and impotent son, was equally unmanagable, and, like all Englaud,
he was a partaker in the negotiations which in an evil hour led to
the return of the Stuaets. For his share in this transaction he was
made Lord Ashley, and became one of the Privy Council. But in
this transaction Ashley seems to have acted honourably, much more
so than his contemporaries at any rate. Eighteen years later he wrote
in a letter to Charles II., appealing to his gratitude, and praying for
release from imprisonment :-" I had the honour to have a principal
hand in your restoration; neither did I act on it but on a principle of
piety and honour. I never betrayed, as your Majesty knows, the party
or councils I was of; I kept no correspondence with, I made no secret
address to, your Majesty; neither did I endeavour to obtain any
private terms or articles for myself or rewards for what I had done
or should do." Published letters of Royalist agents all bear this

out. He was working with the Presbyterians to bring in the King, and in a manner which did not satisfy the Royalists.

The Restoration effected-Charles once more king-how did Sir Ashley Cooper act? The answer is satisfactory; he did endeavour to get better terms for the unfortunate men who were concerned in the execution of Charles I., and he did endeavour to soften that bitterness with which Clarendon and Bishop Sheldon pursued their theological foes. In the new Parliament-elected in a fit of temporary madness-some very mischievous measures were carried-one an Act for the government of Corporations, excluding all Dissenters from municipal offices; another, the Act of Uniformity, which drove 2,000 of the salt of the earth out of the Church; and another which required all officers and soldiers to take the Sacrament as a test of loyalty. Ashley opposed all these Acts. The Corporation Act he described as the most effective method which could be devised for lodging the executive power of the Government in the hands of such persons as would make no difficulty of subjecting the whole nation to an absolute tyranny both of Church and State. The Commons, however, were deaf to the voice of reason. It was only in the Lords that a decent resistance was made. The other day Mr. Gladstone told the Lords that they lived up in a balloon. When a nation was as mad as it was when the Restoration was effected, it was quite as well that such should be the case. In the Parliament of 1663 an attempt was made to enable the King to dispense with the Act of Uniformity. The Bill was read a second time in the House of Lords, where it was zealously supported by Lord Ashley; but the High Church party in the House of Commons took alarm, and the Bill was dropped. Lord Ashley is reported to have called the attention of the House to the fatal consequences of the Act of Uniformity; that by it great numbers of ministers were reduced to beggary; that many Protestants were running into other countries, to the prejudice of trade, and to the dishonour of the kingdom; that the Reformers in King Edward the Sixth's reign had acted in a different manner, for they had, like wise and good men, contrived the doctrine and discipline of the Church so as to enlarge the terms of communion; that they had set open the doors, and by gentle means persuaded and invited all they could into the Church, thinking that the enlargement of their body would redound to the honour of their religion. At a later time Lord Ashley opposed the Five Mile Act.

The foreign policy of the time is difficult to understand. The King, it is clear, outwitted Ashley and his leading servants. No sooner had the triple alliance been formed with Holland and Sweden against France, than we see France and England bargaining for mutual aid. Secret negotiations were carried on, the negotia