Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Locke was an English philosopher and physician who lived from the 29th of August 1632 to the 28th of October 1704. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers and is commonly known as the father of liberalism. His major works include A Letter Concerning Toleration, the Two Treatises of Government, and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
John Locke held that at birth the mind is a blank slate, or tabula rasa, shaped only by experience. He argued against Descartes that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge comes from sensation and reflection. This position is now known as empiricism, and it placed Locke among the first British empiricists in the tradition of Francis Bacon.
John Locke's Two Treatises of Government influenced the language Thomas Jefferson chose in drafting the July 1776 Declaration of Independence. One passage from the Second Treatise, the reference to a long train of abuses, appears verbatim in the document. Jefferson ranked Locke alongside Bacon and Newton as one of the three greatest men who ever lived.
John Locke slipped away to the Dutch Republic in 1683 as a political exile after his patron Lord Shaftesbury fell from favour and died. He spent five years moving between cities under aliases such as Dr. Van Linden, under surveillance by British authorities and fearing arrest. In 1684 Charles II had his senior studentship at Christ Church, Oxford revoked.
John Locke met Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Lord Shaftesbury, in 1666 by chance at Oxford, and in 1667 moved into his London home at Exeter House as his personal physician. Locke likely persuaded Shaftesbury to undergo surgery for a life-threatening liver infection, and Shaftesbury credited him with saving his life. Through Shaftesbury, Locke gained governmental posts as secretary to the Lords Proprietors and to the Council of Trade and Plantations.
John Locke wrote against slavery in general but was briefly an investor and beneficiary of the slave-trading Royal Africa Company. As Shaftesbury's secretary he was directed to draft the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which pledged that every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power over his slaves. The historian Holly Brewer argued his role was exaggerated and that he later worked to undermine slavery while heading a Board of Trade under William of Orange.