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The Earl of Arlington and the Treaty of Dover
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 January 2017
Extract
Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington, like most other Restoration politicians, has suffered from a bad press. He has always been spoken of slightingly by what J. P. Kenyon calls the “bed-spring and chamber-pot” school of Restoration historians; and for once the serious scholars have agreed with the romancers. David Ogg, for instance, says of Arlington, “He had the gift for making the right friends and discarding them at the right moment; but as he lacked courage, he never rose to real greatness among the bad men of Charles's Court. … Always civil and obliging, his chief talent was that of anticipating and fostering what he thought to be the secret wishes of his royal master.” Arlington's biographer, Miss Violet Barbour, says nothing quite so harsh as that, but her implied opinion is clearly not very high. Of modern historians only Keith Feiling, in his work on British foreign policy from 1660 to 1672, is at all favorable. Most of Arlington's British contemporaries took an equally critical view of him. The attacks of Burnet and Clarendon are well known. Here is what the Duke of Buckingham, Arlington's great rival in the Cabal, had to say in his poem, “Advice to a Painter To Draw my L. A-----ton, Grand Minister of State”:
First draw an arrant fop, from top to toe
Whose very looks at first dash shew him so:
Two goggle-eyes, so clear, tho' very dead,
That one may see, thro' them, quite thro' his Head.
Let every nod of his, and subtle wink
Declare the fool would talk, but cannot think.
Let him all other fools so far surpasse
That fools themselves point at him for an ass.
Whether all this denigration is entirely deserved is open to serious doubt. Foreign observers had no such low opinion of Arlington. When he became secretary of state in 1662, the Venetian resident described him as "a man of wit and ability, affable and courteous, possessing several languages, . . . and competent for his position from his knowledge of the interests of foreign princes." And nine years later another Venetian resident called him "tried and prudent."
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References
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