Few members of Parliament devote their whole lives to children they will never personally meet. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, spent nearly sixty years in British politics fighting to remove boys from coal mines and girls from textile factories, driven by a Christian faith that he took seriously down to the smallest details of public life.
Born in London in 1801, he had a cold childhood in a distant aristocratic family. His own parents treated him harshly, and as an adult he would write that no child should suffer from their parents what he and his siblings suffered. The housemaid Maria Millis, who had previously cared for his mother, was the one who taught him prayers and Bible stories, a rare affection he kept as decisive for the rest of his life. He studied classics at Oxford and entered Parliament at twenty five.
From 1833 he grew close to the movement for labor laws, advocating limits on the working hours of women and children in England’s textile factories. In 1842 he succeeded in passing the Mines and Collieries Act, which banned girls and boys under ten years old from working underground in British coal mines, one of the most dangerous environments of the industrial revolution.
In 1847 he saw the Ten Hours Act passed, limiting the daily working hours of women and adolescents in the factories. He presided for forty one years over the Ragged Schools Union, a network of free schools that taught tens of thousands of poor children to read and write in London and other English cities.
Shaftesbury was, however, a convinced conservative. He feared the political power of the working classes and opposed the expansion of the right to vote, even while fighting fiercely for the material well-being of the poor. He saw social reform as the duty of the Christian aristocracy, not as a path toward political equality between classes.
A fervent evangelical, he believed in the imminent return of Christ, a conviction that gave urgency to his causes. As a young man he wrote in his diary of his desire to found a politics upon the Bible, and he saw social action as a natural extension of the gospel, never as a substitute for preaching and personal conversion.
That same faith had a harsher, less remembered side. Shaftesbury vehemently opposed Catholic ritualism and the Oxford Movement within the Anglican Church itself, and publicly denounced state funding for the Catholic seminary at Maynooth, in Ireland, a religious intolerance now recognized as typical of his time, even though he had earlier supported Catholic political emancipation.
He presided over the British and Foreign Bible Society and was the first president of the newly founded YMCA, both for more than three decades, uniting social reform and Christian witness. He also financially supported missionary societies of his time, convinced that evangelizing and caring for the poor were one and the same calling.
He died in Folkestone in 1885, at the age of eighty four. Crowds of workers followed his funeral in London before his burial in the church on his country estate in Dorset. He became known as the poor man’s earl, a title still recalled today by the memorial fountain at Piccadilly Circus.
