Salisbury - St Giles House

St Giles House, the family seat of the Earls of Shaftesbury, is situated about 15mi/24km southwest of Salisbury. Anthony Ashley Cooper, first Earl of Shaftesbury, was Lord Chancellor in 1672-73, subsequently becoming Leader of the Opposition and in 1679 playing a decisive part in getting the Habeas Corpus Act passed. He was arrested in 1681 and the following year fled the country, taking refuge in Holland. His grandson, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671-1713), was an important philosopher of the Enlightenment. His doctrine that morality represented the most complete development of man's natural impulses was later to exert a considerable influence on the German poets of the Sturm und Drang movement, notably Schiller.