ABSTRACT
Henry Bennet, earl of Arlington learnt his political trade through holding government and court office: first, as a secretary of state, and then as lord chamberlain. Thereby he was able to manage his daily position towards king, court and the parliament in the early Restoration period. This chapter will investigate Arlington’s political tactics, his attitudes towards power, the coherence of his political ideas and his penchant for a repetition of political technique that marked him out as a successful politician in this era. Yet Arlington’s supposed vices, the so-called ‘terreurs de lord Arlington’, as one contemporary put it – flattery, servility, dissimulation, disloyalty, sexual irregularity, his silences, his political hesitancy and his ‘timorousness’ – will also be examined. For such presumed defects of character increasingly became part of the tensions in his career, caught, as he frequently was, between unashamed ambition and fearful hesitancy, and they also became an important part of his politics of self-presentation. Finally, the chapter will seek to illuminate Arlington’s tactics by exploring three illustrations of him in political action: his successful wooing of ‘Madame’, as what he called ‘un bon Anglais’ (1668–1670); his triumph in January 1674, when he was forced into a resolute defence of his political career, having been accused in the House of Commons of being ‘the great conduit-pipe’ of corruption; and lastly his failures in the negotiations with the prince of Orange in November 1674.
