Even though I am a historian, genealogy is not really my thing. Don’t get me wrong, I love finding out who my ancestors were but I’ve never really gotten into the hunt, even as things have gotten so much easier with the internet, Ancestry.com, and the like. My brother Drew, though, has gotten into it and found a lot of very interesting things. So I’m quite content to let him find it all and send it to me.
Over the years, he has found a lot of eye-opening connections, such as our 26th Great Grandfather, William the Conqueror, and our connection to the current royal family. We are 27th cousins twice-removed of King Charles III. Why we didn’t get an invite to the coronation is beyond me! We are related to three Presidents (through searching just one line on my dad’s side) – Hayes, Taft, Carter; wealthy entrepreneurs – Howard Hughes, William Randolph Hearts; authors, actors, including John Wayne.
The other night, though, he shocked me by discovering that our 9th Great Grandfather was Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1stEarl of Shaftesbury. I nearly fell out of the bed. Our mother was a Cooper, from St. Tammany Parish in Louisiana, but I never thought Lord Cooper was a direct relative.
I first learned of Cooper many years ago in college, studying the formation of the American colonies. Cooper was one of eight proprietors given a new colony, Carolina, by King Charles II, a reward to those who had supported the Stuart Restoration after the English Civil War. Originally, North and South Carolina encompassed one colony. In fact, the city of Charleston sits in between two rivers, the Ashley and Cooper, both of which are named for him. I’ve had those facts in my notes for eons it seems, never realizing who he was in relation to me.
Anthony Ashley Cooper was born on July 22, 1621 in England. His father was Sir John Cooper, a member of Parliament, just like his father, also John Cooper. They were members of the landed gentry, owning around 7,000 acres. Anthony Ashley attended Exeter College in Oxford and was elected a member of Parliament in 1640, at the age of 19. When the English Civil War broke out in 1642, he raised a regiment and served as its colonel, fighting for the King.
Cooper helped restore the monarchy with the Stuart family, helping Charles II regain the throne of his father, Charles I, who had been beheaded. For years during the war, Britain was without a monarch, then under the rule of Oliver Cromwell, as First Lord Protector, who was essentially a dictator. Cooper originally supported Cromwell but later broke from him in favor of a constitutional monarchy.
King Charles II appointed Cooper to his Privy Council upon returning to the throne in 1660. He would eventually serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer (akin to our Secretary of the Treasury) and President of the Board of Trade, a committee within the Council which oversaw the American colonies. In May 1663, the King gave Cooper and seven others the colony of Carolina. One writer called him “the most versatile and brilliant of the original eight Lords Proprietors of Carolina.”
From 1660 until 1680, Cooper was considered one of the most powerful men in England. In 1672, he was named by the King as Lord Chancellor of England. He was part owner of the Hudson Bay Company and a sugar plantation on the island of Barbados.
In another fascinating tidbit about Cooper, his personal secretary, and physician, was John Locke. Yes, the John Locke. Locke lived in Cooper’s home, wrote speeches and other important documents, and even drafted The Fundamental Constitutions for the Government of Carolina in 1669. And even though he was not a trained physician, he greatly aided Cooper with a liver ailment.
In the words of one writer, Cooper “was a pronounced liberal and very much opposed to religious intolerance and persecution. The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, the laws for the new province, were the work of Shaftesbury’s friend and secretary, the philosopher John Locke, but they contain evidences of Shaftesbury’s collaboration, too. The laws he helped to write produced the greatest measure of political and religious freedom in British North America (and, indeed, in much of the world). He was the author of the Habeas Corpus Act whereby an accused man cannot be held indefinitely in prison without trial, an English law which was passed along later to the United States of America.”
In fact, Cooper founded the English Whig Party in 1678 in opposition to the King’s move toward absolute monarchy. Whig, in British political parlance, means opposition. The American Whig Party of the 1830s and 1840s, the Party of Henry Clay, took the name Whig because of their opposition to Andrew Jackson.
Having fallen out of favor with the King, who dissolved Parliament in 1681, Cooper eventually fled to Holland, to escape persecution for treason, where he died in 1683. “Aided by his wealth and an exceptional mind,” Cooper “has been called the most skillful politician of his day. Recent historians now seem to lean toward [Cooper] as the real mind behind the Fundamental Constitutions, asserting that John Locke was merely the scribe and not the real author.”
What an interesting grandfather to have!
Ryan S. Walters 
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