Anthony Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury KG (28 April 1801 – 1 October 1885),[1] styled Lord Ashley from 1811 to 1851, was an English politician and philanthropist, one of the best-known of the Victorian era and one of the main proponents of Christian Zionism.[2]
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Born in London and known informally as Lord Ashley until his father's death,[3] he was educated at Harrow School and Christ Church, Oxford. Ashley's early family life was loveless, an circumstance common among the British upper classes, and resembled in that respect the fictional childhood of Esther Summerson vividly narrated in the early chapters of Charles Dickens's novel Bleak House.[4] G.F.A Best in his biography Shaftesbury writes that: "Ashley grew up without any experience of parental love. He saw little of his parents, and when duty or necessity compelled them to take notice of him they were formal and frightening."[5] This difficult childhood was softened by the affection he received from his housekeeper Maria Millis, and his sisters. 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. She told him bible stories, she taught him a prayer."[6] 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".[7] Shaftesbury himself shuddered to recall those years, "The place was bad, wicked, filthy; and the treatment was starvation and cruelty."[8]
He became a Tory MP (Member of Parliament) in 1826, and almost immediately became a leader of the movement for factory reform. He was responsible for promoting a plethora of reform causes, including the Factory Acts of 1847 and 1853, the Ten Hour Bill, as well as the Mines and Collieries Act 1842 and the Lunacy Act 1845.[9] One of his chief interests was the welfare of children, and he was chairman of the Ragged Schools Union and a keen supporter of Florence Nightingale. He was also involved as patron and president in the field of model dwellings companies, which sought to improve the housing of working classes in England.
Shaftesbury was a proponent of the Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land. Muhammad Ali’s conquest of Greater Syria (1831) changed the conditions under which European power politics operated in the Near East. As a consequence of that shift, Shaftesbury was able to help persuade Foreign Minister Palmerston to send a British consul to Jerusalem in 1838. A committed Christian and a loyal Englishman, Shaftesbury argued for a Jewish return because of what he saw as the political and economic advantages to England and because he believed that it was God's will.
In January 1839, Shaftesbury published an article in the Quarterly Review, which although initially commenting on the 1838 Letters on Egypt, Edom and the Holy Land (1838) by Lord Lindsay, provided the first proposal by a major politician to resettle Jews in Palestine:[10][11]
The soil and climate of Palestine are singularly adapted to the growth of produce required for the exigencies of Great Britain; the finest cotton may be obtained in almost unlimited abundance; silk and madder are the staple of the country, and olive oil is now, as it ever was, the very fatness of the land. Capital and skill are alone required: the presence of a British officer, and the increased security of property which his presence will confer, may invite them from these islands to the cultivation of Palestine; and the Jews', who will betake themselves to agriculture in no other land, having found, in the English consul, a mediator between their people and the Pacha, will probably return in yet greater numbers, and become once more the husbandmen of Judaea and Galilee.
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Napoleon knew well the value of an Hebrew alliance; and endeavoured to reproduce, in the capital of France, the spectacle of the ancient Sanhedrin, which, basking in the sunshine of imperial favour, might give laws to the whole body of the Jews throughout the habitable world, and aid him, no doubt, in his audacious plans against Poland and the East. His scheme, it is true, proved abortive; for the mass of the Israelites were by no means inclined to merge their hopes in the destinies of the Empire—exchange Zion for Montmartre, and Jerusalem for Paris. The few liberal unbelievers whom he attracted to his views ruined his projects with the people by their impious flattery; and averted the whole body of the nation by blending, on the 15th of August, the cipher of Napoleon and Josephine with the unutterable name of Jehovah, and elevating the imperial eagle above the representation of the Ark of the Covenant. A misconception, in fact of the character of the people has vitiated all the attempts of various Sovereigns to better their condition ; they have sought to amalgamate them with the body of their subjects, not knowing, or not regarding the temper of the Hebrews, and the plain language of Scripture, that ' the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations.' That which Napoleon designed in his violence and ambition, thinking ' to destroy nations not a few,' we may wisely and legitimately undertake for the maintenance of our Empire.
Later in 1839 he published an article in the Times under the title «The State and the rebirth of the Jews». In it he urged the Jews to return to Palestine in order, according to him, to seize the lands of Galilee and Judea.
The lead-up to the Crimean War (1854), like the military expansionism of Muhammad Ali two decades earlier, signaled an opening for realignments in the Near East. In July 1853, Shaftesbury wrote to Prime Minister Aberdeen that Greater Syria was “a country without a nation” in need of “a nation without a country... Is there such a thing? To be sure there is, the ancient and rightful lords of the soil, the Jews!"
In his diary that year he wrote “these vast and fertile regions will soon be without a ruler, without a known and acknowledged power to claim dominion. The territory must be assigned to some one or other... There is a country without a nation; and God now in his wisdom and mercy, directs us to a nation without a country."[12][13] This is commonly cited as an early use of the phrase, "A land without a people for a people without a land" by which Shaftesbury was echoing another British proponent of the restoration of the Jews to Israel, Dr Keith (Alexander Keith, D.D.)
He was President of the BFBS from 1851 until his death in 1885. He wrote of the Bible Society "Of all Societies this is nearest to my heart... Bible Society has always been a watchword in our house."
The Shaftesbury Memorial in Piccadilly Circus, London, erected in 1893, was designed to commemorate his philanthropic works. The Memorial is crowned by Alfred Gilbert's aluminium statue of Anteros as a nude, butterfly-winged archer. This is officially titled The Angel of Christian Charity, but has become popularly, if mistakenly, known as Eros. The use of a nude figure on a public monument was controversial at the time, but the statue has become a London icon and appears on the masthead of the Evening Standard.
Lord Shaftesbury is honored together with William Wilberforce on the liturgical calendar of the Episcopal Church (USA) on July 30.
Lord Shaftesbury, then Lord Ashley, married Lady Emily Caroline Catherine Frances Cowper (d. 15 October 1872), daughter of Peter Cowper, 5th Earl Cowper and more likely natural daughter of Lord Palmerston (later her official stepfather), on 10 June 1830. This marriage, which proved a happy and fruitful one, produced ten children as cited in "The Seventh Earl" by Grace Irwin. It also provided invaluable political connections for Ashley; his wife's maternal uncle was Lord Melbourne and her stepfather (and apparent father) Lord Palmerston, both Prime Ministers.
The children, who mostly suffered various degrees of ill-health, were[14]: