In 1827, when Ashley-Cooper was appointed to the Select Committee on Pauper Lunatics in the County of Middlesex and on Lunatic Asylums, the majority of lunatics in London were kept in madhouses owned by Dr Warburton. See also: History of psychiatric institutions Lord Shaftesbury by Henry Hering Before he had completed one year in the Commons, he had been appointed to three parliamentary committees and he received his fourth such appointment in June 1827, when he was appointed to the Select Committee on Pauper Lunatics in the County of Middlesex and on Lunatic Asylums. ![]() Ashley politely declined, writing in his diary that he believed that serving under Canning would be a betrayal of his allegiance to the Duke of Wellington and that he was not qualified for office. After George Canning replaced Lord Liverpool as Prime Minister, he offered Ashley a place in the new government, despite Ashley having been in the Commons for only five months. This was to prove one of his greatest assets in Parliament." Political career Īshley was elected as the Tory Member of Parliament for Woodstock (at that time a pocket borough controlled by the Duke of Marlborough) in June 1826 and was a strong supporter of the Duke of Wellington. It was a foretaste of his skill in getting people to act decisively in face of sloth or immediate self-interest. This little triumph was a useful fillip to his self-confidence, but it was more than that. Soon afterwards the Duck Puddle was inspected, condemned and filled in. He chose it as his subject because he was urgently concerned that the school authorities should do something about it, and this appeared to be the simplest way of bringing it to their attention. In the school grounds, there was an unsavoury mosquito-breeding pond called the Duck Puddle. The second incident was his unusual choice of a subject for a Latin poem. The drunken pallbearers, stumbling along with a crudely-made coffin and shouting snatches of bawdy songs, brought home to him the existence of a whole empire of callousness which put his own childhood miseries in their context. ![]() "Once, at the foot of Harrow Hill, he was the horrified witness of a pauper's funeral. Shaftesbury himself shuddered to recall those years: "The place was bad, wicked, filthy and the treatment was starvation and cruelty." īy his teenage years Ashley had become a committed Christian, and whilst at Harrow he had two experiences which influenced his later life. She told him bible stories, she taught him a prayer." Despite this powerful reprieve, school became another source of misery for the young Ashley, whose education at Manor House from 1808 to 1813 introduced a "more disgusting range of horrors". Millis provided for Ashley a model of Christian love that would form the basis for much of his later social activism and philanthropic work, as Best explains: "What did touch him was the reality, and the homely practicality, of the love which her Christianity made her feel towards the unhappy child. This difficult childhood was softened by the affection he received from the family housekeeper Maria Millis, and his sisters. He saw little of his parents, and when duty or necessity compelled them to take notice of him they were formal and frightening." Even as an adult, he disliked his father and was known to refer to his mother as "a devil". ![]() ![]() Best, in his biography Shaftesbury, writes that "Ashley grew up without any experience of parental love. Īshley's early family life was loveless, a circumstance common among the British upper classes. Whilst at Oxford, he joined the Apollo University Lodge. Lord Ashley, as he was styled until his father's death in 1851, was educated at Manor House school in Chiswick, London (1812–1813), Harrow School (1813–1816) and Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained first-class honours in classics in 1822, took his MA in 1832 and was appointed DCL in 1841. He was also an early supporter of the Zionist movement and the YMCA and a leading figure in the evangelical movement in the Church of England. A social reformer who was called the "Poor Man's Earl", he campaigned for better working conditions, reform to lunacy laws, education and the limitation of child labour. He was the eldest son of the 6th Earl of Shaftesbury and Lady Anne Spencer (daughter of the 4th Duke of Marlborough), and elder brother of Henry Ashley, MP. The parish church on his estate at Wimborne St Giles, DorsetĬropley Ashley-Cooper, 6th Earl of ShaftesburyĪnthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury KG (28 April 1801 – 1 October 1885 ), styled Lord Ashley from 1811 to 1851, was a British Tory politician, philanthropist, and social reformer. Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury by John CollierĢ4 Grosvenor Square, Mayfair, London, Englandġ2 Clifton Gardens, Folkestone, Kent, England
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