Ashley 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. 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. 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. 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.
Reform of the Lunacy laws 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. The committee examined many witnesses concerning one of his madhouses in
Bethnal Green, called the White House. Ashley visited this on the committee's behalf. The patients were chained up, slept naked on straw, and excreted in their beds. They were left chained from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning when they were cleared of the accumulated excrement. They were then washed down in freezing cold water and one towel was allotted to 160 people, with no soap. It was overcrowded, and the meat provided was "that nasty thick hard muscle a dog could not eat". The White House had been described as "a mere place for dying" rather than curing the insane and when the Committee asked Dr MacMichael whether he believed that "in the lunatic asylums in the neighbourhood of London any curative process is going on with regard to pauper patients", he replied: "None at all". The committee recommended that "legislative measures of a remedial character should be introduced at the earliest period at the next session", and the establishment of a board of commissioners appointed by the Home Secretary possessing extensive powers of licensing, inspection and control. When in February 1828 Robert Gordon, Liberal MP for
Cricklade, introduced a bill to put these recommendations into law, Ashley seconded this and delivered his maiden speech in support of the Bill. He wrote in his diary: "So, by God's blessing, my first effort has been for the advance of human happiness. May I improve hourly! Fright almost deprived me of recollection but again thank Heaven, I did not sit down quite a presumptuous idiot". Ashley was also involved in framing the
County Lunatic Asylums (England) Act 1828 and the
Madhouses Act 1828. Through these acts, fifteen commissioners were appointed for the London area and given extensive powers of licensing and inspection, one of the commissioners being Ashley. In July 1845, Ashley sponsored two
Lunacy Acts, 'For the Regulation of lunatic Asylums' and 'For the better Care and Treatment of Lunatics in England and Wales'. They originated in the Report of the
Commissioners in Lunacy which he had commended to Parliament the year before. These acts consolidated and amended previous lunacy laws, providing better record keeping and more strict certification regulations to ensure patients against unwarranted detention. They also ordered, instead of merely permitting, the construction of country lunatic asylums and establishing an ongoing Lunacy Commission with Ashley as its chairman. In support of these measures, Ashley gave a speech in which he claimed that although since 1828 there had been an improvement, more still needed to be done. He cited the case of a Welsh lunatic girl, Mary Jones, who had for more than a decade been locked in a tiny loft with one boarded-up window with little air and no light. The room was extremely filthy and filled with an intolerable smell. She could only
squat in a bent position in the room and this had caused her to become deformed. , 1869 In early 1858, a select committee was appointed over concerns that sane persons were detained in lunatic asylums. Lord Shaftesbury (as Ashley had become upon his father's death in 1851) was the chief witness and opposed the suggestion that the certification of insanity be made more difficult and that early treatment of insanity was essential if there was to be any prospect of a cure. He claimed that only one or two people in his time dealing with lunacy had been detained in an asylum without sufficient grounds and that commissioners should be granted more not fewer powers. The committee's report endorsed all of Shaftesbury's recommendations except for one: that a magistrate's signature on a certificate of lunacy be made compulsory. This was not put into law chiefly due to Shaftesbury's opposition to it. The report also agreed with Shaftesbury that unwarranted detentions were "extremely rare". In July 1877, Shaftesbury gave evidence before the Select Committee on the Lunacy Laws, which had been appointed in February over concerns that it was too easy for sane persons to be detained in asylums. Shaftesbury feared that because of his advanced age he would be taken over by forgetfulness whilst giving evidence and was greatly stressed in the months leading up to this: "Shall fifty years of toil, anxiety and prayer, crowned by marvellous and unlooked-for success, bring me in the end only sorrow and disgrace?" When "the hour of trial" arrived Shaftesbury defended the Lunacy Commission and claimed he was now the only person alive who could speak with personal knowledge of the state of care of lunatics before the Lunacy Commission was established in 1828. It had been "a state of things such as would pass all belief". In the committee's report, the members of the committee agreed with Shaftesbury's evidence on all points. In 1884, the husband of Mrs Georgina Weldon tried to have her detained in a lunatic asylum because she believed that her pug dog had a soul and that the spirit of her dead mother had entered into her pet rabbit. She commenced legal action against Shaftesbury and other lunacy commissioners although it failed. In May, Shaftesbury spoke in the Lords against a motion declaring the lunacy laws unsatisfactory but the motion passed Parliament. The Lord Chancellor Selborne supported a Lunacy Law Amendment Bill and Shaftesbury wanted to resign from the Lunacy Commission as he believed he was honour bound not to oppose a bill supported by the Lord Chancellor. However, Selborne implored him not to resign so Shaftesbury refrained. However, when the bill was introduced and it contained the provision which made it compulsory for a certificate of lunacy to be signed by a magistrate or a judge, he resigned. The government fell, however, and the bill was withdrawn and Shaftesbury resumed his chairmanship of the Lunacy Commission. Shaftesbury's work in improving the care of the insane remains one of his most important, though lesser known, achievements. He wrote: "Beyond the circle of my own Commissioners and the lunatics that I visit, not a soul, in great or small life, not even my associates in my works of philanthropy, has any notion of the years of toil and care that, under God, I have bestowed on this melancholy and awful question".
Child labour In March 1833, Ashley introduced the
Ten Hours Act 1833 into the Commons, which provided that children working in the cotton and woollen industries must be aged nine or above; no person under the age of eighteen was to work more than ten hours a day or eight hours on a Saturday; and no one under twenty-five was to work nights, insisted they should go to school, and appointed inspectors to enforce the law. However the Whig government, by a majority of 145, amended this to substitute "thirteen" in place of "eighteen" and the act as it passed ensured that no child under thirteen worked more than nine hours. In June 1836, another Ten Hours act was introduced into the Commons and although Ashley considered this bill ill-timed, he supported it. In July one member of the Lancashire committees set up to support the bill wrote that: "If there was one man in England more devoted to the interests of the factory people than another, it was Lord Ashley. They might always rely on him as a ready, steadfast and willing friend". In July 1837, he accused the government of ignoring the breaches of the 1833 act and moved the resolution that the House regretted the regulation of the working hours of children had been found to be unsatisfactory. It was lost by fifteen votes. The text of
A Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd a Factory Cripple was sent to Lord Ashley and with his support was published in 1840. Ashley employed
William Dodd at 45 shillings a week, and he wrote
The Factory System: Illustrated to describe the conditions of working children in textile manufacture. This was published in 1842. The
Labouring Classes Lodging Houses Act 1851 "empowered borough councils and local boards to erect lodging-houses or to purchase existing lodging-houses, and to manage them, making by-laws for charges, management, etc. Such lodging-houses were under the inspection of the local boards of health."
Animal welfare Shaftesbury advocated for animal welfare and was president of the
Victoria Street Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection. He was also a vice-president of the
Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He argued for total abolition of
vivisection, not reform. In 1879, he delivered a speech condemning the practice of vivisection and questioned why vivisectionists were subjecting "God's creatures to such unspeakable sufferings?".
Religious restoration Zionist movement Shaftesbury was a pre-millennial evangelical Anglican who believed in the imminent second coming of Christ. His belief underscored the urgency of immediate action. He strongly opposed
Roman Catholic Church ritualism among High Church Anglicans. He also disapproved of the Catholic features of the
Oxford Movement in the Church of England. He denounced the
Maynooth College Act 1845, which funded the Catholic seminary in Ireland that would train many priests. However, disagreeing with his father, he favored
Catholic Emancipation. '' (Hobart, Tasmania, Australia), in 1841 Shaftesbury was a leading figure within 19th-century
evangelical Anglicanism. Shaftesbury was President of the
British and Foreign Bible Society (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." He was also president of the
Evangelical Alliance for some time. Shaftesbury was also a student of
Edward Bickersteth and the two men became prominent advocates of
Christian Zionism in Britain. Shaftesbury was an early proponent of the
Restoration of the Jews to the Holy Land, providing the first proposal by a major politician to resettle Jews in Palestine. The conquest of the
region of Syria in 1831 by
Muhammad Ali of Egypt 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,
William Tanner Young, 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 Britain would gain from this 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: In 1848, Shaftesbury became president of the
London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews, of which Finn was a prominent member. The lead-up to the
Crimean War (1854), like the military expansionism of Muhammad Ali two decades earlier, signalled an opening for realignments in the Near East. In July 1853, Shaftesbury wrote to the Prime Minister,
Lord 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." 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
Palestine,
Dr Alexander Keith. , Dorchester
Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade Shaftesbury served as the first president of the
Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade: a lobbying group dedicated to the abolition of the
opium trade. The Society was formed by
Quaker businessmen in 1874, and Shaftesbury was president from 1880 until his death. The Society's efforts eventually led to the creation of the investigative
Royal Commission on Opium. ==Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain==