Synod of Arles (314).—As negotiations held at Rome in October 313 had failed to settle the dispute between the Catholics and the Donatists, the emperor Constantine summoned the first general council of his western half of the empire to meet at Arles by the 1st of August following. The attempt of Seeck to date the synod 316 presupposes that the emperor was present in person, which is highly improbable. Thirty-three bishops are included in the most authentic list of signatures, among them three from Britain,—York, London and “Colonia Londinensium” (probably a corruption of Lindensium, or Lincoln, rather than of Legionensium or Caerleon-On-Usk). The twenty-two canons deal chiefly with the discipline of clergy and people. Husbands of adulterous wives are advised not to remarry during the lifetime of the guilty party. Reiteration of baptism in the name of the Trinity is forbidden. For the consecration of a bishop at least three bishops are required. It is noteworthy that British representatives assented to Canon I., providing that Easter be everywhere celebrated on the same day: the later divergence between Rome and the Celtic church is due to improvements in the supputatio Romana adopted at Rome in 343 and subsequently.
For the canons see Mansi ii. 471 ff.; Bruns ii. 107 ff.; Lauchert 26 ff. See also W. Smith and S. Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities (Boston, 1875), i. 141 ff. (contains also notices of later synods at Arles); W. Bright, Chapters of Early English Church History (2nd edition, Oxford, 1888), 9 f.; Herzog-Hauck, Realencyklopadie (3rd edition), ii. 59, x. 238 ff.; W. Moller, Kirchengeschichte (2nd edition by H. von Schubert, Tubingen, 1902), i. 417. For full titles see [Council].
(W. W. R.*)
ARLES, Kingdom of, the name given to the kingdom formed about 933 by the union of the old kingdoms of Provence (q.v.) or Cisjurane Burgundy, and Burgundy (q.v.) Transjurane, and bequeathed in 1032 by its last sovereign, Rudolph III., to the emperor Conrad II. It comprised the countship of Burgundy (Franche-Comté), part of which is now Switzerland (the dioceses of Geneva, Lausanne, Sion and part of that of Basel), the Lyonnais, and the whole of the territory bounded by the Alps, the Mediterranean and the Rhone; on the right bank of the Rhone it further included the Vivarais. It is only after the end of the 12th century that the name “kingdom of Arles” is applied to this district; formerly it was known generally as the kingdom of Burgundy, but under the Empire the name of Burgundy came to be limited more and more to the countship of Burgundy, and the districts lying beyond the Jura. The authority of Rudolph III. over the chief lords of the land, the count of Burgundy and the count of Maurienne, founder of the house of Savoy, was already merely nominal, and the Franconian emperors (1039-1125), whose visits to the country were rare and of short duration, did not establish their power any more firmly. During the first fifty years of their domination they could rely on the support of the ecclesiastical feudatories, who generally favoured their cause, but the investiture struggle, in which the prelates of the kingdom of Arles mostly sided with the pope, deprived the Germanic sovereigns even of this support. The emperors, on the other hand, realized early that their absence from the country was a grave source of weakness; in 1043 Henry III. conferred on Rudolph, count of Rheinfelden (afterwards duke of Swabia), the title of dux et rector Burgundiae, giving him authority over the barons of the northern part of the kingdom of Arles. Towards the middle of the 12th century Lothair II. revived this system, conferring the rectorate on Conrad of Zähringen, in whose family it remained hereditary up to the death of the last representative of the house, Berthold V., in 1218; and it was the lords of Zähringen who were foremost in defending the cause of the Empire against its chief adversaries, the counts of Burgundy. In the time of the Swabian emperors, the Germanic sovereignty in the kingdom of Arles was again, during almost the whole period, merely nominal, and it was only in consequence of fortuitous circumstances that certain of the heads of the Empire were able to exercise a real authority in these parts. Frederick I., by his marriage with Beatrix (1156), had become uncontested master of the countship of Burgundy; Frederick II., who was more powerful in Italy than his predecessors had been, and was extending his activities into the countries of the Levant, found Provence more accessible to his influence, thanks to the commercial relations existing between the great cities of this country and Italy and the East. Moreover, the heretics and enemies of the church, who were numerous in the south, upheld the emperor in his struggle against the pope. Henry VII. also, thanks to his good relations with the princes of Savoy, succeeded in exercising a certain influence over a part of the kingdom of Arles. The emperors further tried to make their power more effective by delegating it, first to a viceroy, William of Baux, prince of Orange (1215), then to an imperial vicar, William of Montferrat (1220), who was succeeded by Henry of Revello and William of Manupello. In spite of this, the history of the kingdom of Arles in the 13th century, and still more in the 14th, is distinguished particularly by the decline of the imperial authority and the progress of French influence in the country. In 1246 the marriage of Charles, the brother of Saint Louis, with Beatrice, the heiress to the countship of Provence, caused Provence to pass into the hands of the house of Anjou, and many plans were made to win the whole of the kingdom for a prince of this house. At the beginning of the 14th century the bishops of Lyons and Viviers recognized the suzerainty of the king of France, and in 1343 Humbert II., dauphin of Viennois, made a compact with the French king Philip VI. that on his death his inheritance should pass to a son or a grandson of the French king. Humbert, who was perhaps the most powerful noble in Arles, was induced to take this step as he had just lost his only son, and Philip had already cast covetous eyes on his lands. Then in 1349, being in want of money, he agreed to sell his possessions outright, and thus Viennois, or Dauphiné, passed into the hands of Philip’s grandson, afterwards King Charles V. The emperor Charles IV. took an active part in the affairs of the kingdom, but without any consistent policy, and in 1378 he, in turn, ceded the imperial vicariate of the kingdom to the dauphin, afterwards King Charles VI. This date may be taken as marking the end of the history of the kingdom of Arles, considered as an independent territorial area.
See the monumental work of P. Fournier, Le Royaume d’Arles et de Vienne (Paris, 1890); Leroux, Recherches critiques sur les relations politiques de la France avec l’Allemagne de 1292 à 1378 (Paris, 1882). For the early history of the kingdom, L. Jacob, Le Royaume de Bourgogne sous les empereurs franconiens (1038-1129), (Paris, 1906). The question of the nature and extent of the rights of the Empire over the kingdom of Arles has given rise, ever since the 16th century, to numerous juridical polemics; the chief dissertations published on this subject are indicated in A. Leroux, Bibliographie des conflits entre la France et l’Empire (Paris, 1902).
(R. Po.)
ARLINGTON, HENRY BENNET, Earl of (1618-1685), English statesman, son of Sir John Bennet of Dawley, Middlesex, and of Dorothy Crofts, was baptized at Little Saxham, Suffolk, in 1618, and was educated at Westminster school and Christ Church, Oxford. He gained some distinction as a scholar and a poet, and was originally destined for holy orders. In 1643 he was secretary to Lord Digby at Oxford, and was employed as a messenger between the queen and Ormonde in Ireland. Subsequently he took up arms for the king, and received a wound in the skirmish at Andover in 1644, the scar of which remained on his face through life.[1] And after the defeat of the royal cause he travelled in France and Italy, joined the exiled royal family in 1650, and in 1654 became official secretary to James on Charles’s recommendation, who had already been attracted by his “pleasant and agreeable humour.”[2] In March 1657 he was knighted, and the same year was sent as Charles’s agent to Madrid, where he remained, endeavouring to obtain assistance for the royal cause, till after the Restoration. On his return to England in 1661 he was made keeper of the privy purse, and became the prime favourite. One of his duties was the procuring and management of the royal mistresses, in which his success gained him great credit. Allying himself with Lady Castlemaine, he encouraged Charles’s increasing dislike to Clarendon; and he was made secretary of state in October 1662 in spite of the opposition of Clarendon, who had to find him a seat in parliament. He represented Callington from 1661 till 1665, but appears never to have taken part in debate. He served subsequently on the committees for explaining the Irish Act of Settlement and for Tangiers. In 1663 he obtained a peerage as Baron Arlington of Arlington, or Harlington, in Middlesex, and in 1667 was appointed one of the postmasters-general. The control of foreign affairs was entrusted to him, and he was chiefly responsible for the attack on the Smyrna fleet and for the first Dutch War. In 1665 he advised Charles to grant liberty of conscience, but this was merely a concession to gain money during the war; and he showed great activity later in oppressing the nonconformists. On the death of Southampton, whose administration he had attacked, his great ambition, the treasurership, was not satisfied; and on the fall of Clarendon, against whom he had intrigued, he did not, though becoming a member of the Cabal ministry, obtain the supreme influence which he had expected; for Buckingham first shared, and soon surpassed him, in the royal favour. With Buckingham a sharp rivalry sprang up, and they only combined forces when endeavouring to bring about some evil measure, such as the ruin of the great Ormonde, who was an opponent of their policy and their schemes. Another object of jealousy to Arlington was Sir William Temple, who achieved a great popular success in 1668 by the conclusion of the Triple Alliance; Arlington endeavoured to procure his removal to Madrid, and entered with alacrity into Charles’s plans for destroying the whole policy embodied in the treaty, and for making terms with France. He refused a bribe from Louis XIV., but allowed his wife to accept a gift of 10,000 crowns;[3] in 1670 he was the only minister besides the Roman Catholic Clifford to whom the first secret treaty of Dover (May 1670), one clause of which provided for Charles’s declaration of his conversion to Romanism, was confided (see [Charles II].); and he was the chief actor in the deception practised upon the rest of the council.[4] He supported several other pernicious measures—the scheme for rendering the king’s power absolute by force of arms; the “stop of the exchequer,” involving a repudiation of the state debt in 1672; and the declaration of indulgence the same year, “that we might keep all quiet at home whilst we are busy abroad.”[5] On the 22nd of April 1672 he was created an earl, and on the 13th of June obtained the Garter; the same month he proceeded with Buckingham on a mission, first to William at the Hague, and afterwards to Louis at Utrecht, endeavouring to force upon the Dutch terms of peace which were indignantly refused. But Arlington’s support of the court policy was entirely subordinate to personal interests; and after the appointment of Clifford in November 1672 to the treasurership, his jealousy and mortification, together with his alarm at the violent opposition aroused in parliament, caused him to veer over to the other side. He advised Charles in March 1673 to submit the legality of the declaration of indulgence to the House of Lords, and supported the Test Act of the same year, which compelled Clifford to resign. He joined the Dutch party, and in order to make his peace with his new allies, disclosed the secret treaty of Dover to the staunch Protestants Ormonde and Shaftesbury.[6] Arlington had, however, lost the confidence of all parties, and these efforts to procure support met with little success. On the 15th of January 1674 he was impeached by the Commons, the specific charges being “popery,” corruption and the betrayal of his trust—Buckingham in his own defence having accused him the day before of being the chief instigator of the French and anti-Protestant policy, of the scheme of governing by the army, of responsibility for the Dutch War, and of embezzlement. But the motion for his removal, owing chiefly to the influence of his brother-in-law, the popular Lord Ossory, was rejected by 166 votes to 127. His escape could not, however, prevent his fall, and he resigned the secretaryship on the 11th of September 1674, being appointed lord chamberlain instead. In 1675 he made another attempt to gain favour with the parliament by supporting measures against France and against the Roman Catholics, and by joining in the pressure put upon Charles to remove James from the court. In November he went on a mission to the Hague, with the popular objects of effecting a peace and of concluding an alliance with William and James’s daughter Mary. In this he entirely failed, and he returned home completely discredited. He had again been disappointed of the treasurership when Danby succeeded Clifford; Charles having declared “that he had too much kindness for him to let him have it, for he was not fit for the office.”[7] His intrigues with discontented persons in parliament to stir up an opposition to his successful rival came to nothing. From this time, though lingering on at court, he possessed no influence, and was treated with scanty respect. It was safe to ridicule his person and behaviour, and it became a common jest for “some courtier to put a black patch upon his nose and strut about with a white staff in his hand in order to make the king merry at his expense.”[8] He was appointed a commissioner of the treasury in March 1679, was included in Sir William Temple’s new modelled council the same year, and was a member of the inner cabinet which was almost immediately formed. In 1681 he was made lord lieutenant of Suffolk. He died on the 28th of July 1685, and was buried at Euston, where he had bought a large estate and had carried out extensive building operations. His residence in London was Goring House, on the site of which was built the present Arlington Street.
Arlington was a typical statesman of the Restoration, possessing outwardly an attractive personality, and according to Sir W. Temple “the greatest skill of court and the best turns of art in particular conversation,”[9] but thoroughly unscrupulous and self-seeking, without a spark of patriotism, faithless even to a bad cause, and regarding public office solely as a means of procuring pleasure and profit. His knowledge of foreign affairs and of foreign languages, gained during his residence abroad, was considerable, but long absence from England had also taught him a cosmopolitan indifference to constitutions and religions, and a careless disregard for English public opinion and the essential interests of the country. According to Clarendon, he “knew no more of the constitution and laws of England than he did of China, nor had he in truth a care or tenderness for church or state, but believed France was the best pattern in the world.”[10] He was one of the chief promoters of the attempt to reintroduce into England arbitrary government after the French model, not because he imagined an absolute monarchy essential to the well-being and security of the state, but because under such an administration the favourites of a king enjoyed far greater privileges and profits than under a constitutional government. Of the same egotistical character was his religion, towards which his attitude was similar to that of Charles II. himself. He was credited with having inclined the king towards Romanism. Before the Restoration he had attended mass with the king abroad, and in opposition to Lord Bristol had urged Charles to declare publicly his conversion in order to obtain the long-expected succour from the foreign powers. But his religion sat lightly upon him as it did upon his master, and it was often convenient to disguise it. Like the king he continued to profess and practise Protestantism, and spent large sums in restoring the church at Euston; and, unlike Clifford, he took the Test in 1673 and remained in office, successfully concealing his faith till on his deathbed, when he declared himself an adherent of Roman Catholicism.[11]