ll. 8-12.  ’The broad and pungent wit, and the brutal bonhomie.. probably went as far as anything else in securing Charles’s favour.’  Osmund Airy, Burnet’s History, vol. i, p. 185.

68.

Burnet’s History of His Own Time.  Vol. i. (pp. 96-7.)

Page 230, l. 14.  He was chosen for Tewkesbury in March 1640, but he did not sit in the Long Parliament.

l. 18, a town, Weymouth:  see p. 70, l. 21 note.  He had been appointed governor of it in August 1643 after some dispute, but was shortly afterwards removed (Clarendon, vol. iii, pp. 163-5, 362).

Page 231, l. 2.  Shaftesbury writes about the prediction of ’Doctor Olivian, a German, a very learned physician’, in his autobiographical fragment:  see No. 14 note.

ll. 14, 15.  Compare Burnet’s first sketch of Shaftesbury, ed.  Foxcroft, p. 59:  ’he told some that Cromwell offered once to make him king, but he never offered to impose so gross a thing on me.’

ll. 17, 18.  See the Newsletter of December 28, 1654, in The Clarke Papers, ed.  C.H.  Firth, Camden Society, 1899, p. 16:  ’a few daies since when the House was in a Grand Committee of the whole House upon the Government, Mr. Garland mooved to have my Lord Protectour crowned, which mocion was seconded by Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper, Mr. Hen.  Cromwell, and others, but waved.’

l. 26.  After ‘party’ Burnet wrote (autograph, fol. 49) ’He had no sort of virtue:  for he was both a leud and corrupt man:  and had no regard either to trueth or Justice.’  But he struck out ‘no sort ... and had’.  The sentence thus read in the transcript (p. 76) ’He had no regard either to Truth or Justice’.  This in turn was struck out, either by Burnet himself or by the editor.

The following words are likewise struck out in the transcript, after ‘manner’ (l. 28):  ’and was not out of countenance in owning his unsteadiness and deceitfullness.’

69.

Absalom and Achitophel.  A Poem ...  The Second Edition; Augmented and
Revised.  London, 1681. (ll. 142-227.)

The first edition was published on November 17, 1681, a few days before Shaftesbury’s trial for high treason.  In the second, which appeared within a month, the character of Shaftesbury was ‘augmented’ by twelve lines (p. 233, ll. 17-28).

Shaftesbury had been satirized by Butler in the Third Part of Hudibras, 1678, three years before the crisis in his remarkable career, and while his schemes still prospered.  To Butler he is the unprincipled turn-coat who thinks only of his own interests: 

  So Politick, as if one eye
  Upon the other were a Spye;... 
  H’had seen three Governments Run down,
  And had a Hand in ev’ry one,
  Was for ’em, and against ’em all. 
  But Barb’rous when they came to fall:... 
  By giving aim from side, to side,
  He never fail’d to save his Tide,
  But got the start of ev’ry State,