Having succeeded to his father’s lordship of Voorst in Gelderland in 1685 while still a minor, Arnold Joost van Keppel accompanied the stadtholder, William of Orange, on his invasion of England. He was made a page of honour shortly after the king’s coronation and a groom of the bedchamber in 1690. Known for his good looks, generosity, and affable and courtly manners, he quickly rose in William’s favour and became a rival of William’s older and most long-standing adviser Hans Willem Bentinck, earl of Portland. In May 1695, some months after the death of Mary, Keppel was promoted to be master of the robes, replacing William’s childhood companion and veteran Dutch follower, William Henry van Nassau van Zuylestein, who was created earl of Rochford. The king even arranged that Keppel’s suite of rooms in Kensington Palace communicated directly with his own, while leaving Portland without access to the king. There was speculation then, and has been since, that the widowed king and the young favourite had homosexual relations, facilitated by this arrangement of rooms. There is no evidence, however, outside of the libels of opponents to support this allegation, and it would appear that the two men spent the early hours of the morning closeted together on state business. What is not in doubt is the increasingly bitter and open dislike between Portland and Albemarle caused by William’s clear preference for the younger man, which almost led to a duel between the two rivals in 1696.
Keppel was naturalized by an act of Parliament in January 1697.
was raised from being a page into the highest degree of favour that any person had ever attained about the king … he disposed of every thing that was in the king’s power. He was a cheerful young man, that had the art to please, but was so much given up to his own pleasures, that he could scarce submit to the attendance and drudgery that was necessary to maintain his post. He never had yet distinguished himself in any thing, though the king did it in every thing.
In contrast to Portland, ‘the earl of Albemarle had all the arts of a court, was civil to all, and procured many favours’.
Macky described him in about 1702-3 as having ‘a great influence over the king; is beautiful in his person; open and free in his conversation; very expensive in his manner of living’. Albemarle was closely connected to some of Portland’s enemies at court: Edward Villiers, earl of Jersey, who became a close friend and colleague of the young earl, and his sister, Elizabeth Villiers, Lady Orkney, the king’s former mistress and frequent political intriguer. Macky even suggested that Albemarle’s rise at court was engineered by ‘Mrs Villiers’ and Robert Spencer, 2nd earl of Sunderland, ‘to pull down my Lord Portland’.
Albemarle first sat in the House of Lords on 18 Feb. 1697, a week after his creation as an English peer, but he only came to 12 of the remaining sittings of that session. He registered his proxy with Richard Lumley, earl of Scarbrough, on two occasions in this session during brief absences from the House of a few days – on 9 Mar. 1697 and then again on 19 Mar., which proxy he vacated three days later. He came to barely a quarter of the meetings in 1697-8 and on 4 Mar. 1698 received the proxy of Charles Beauclerk, duke of St Albans. Albemarle himself left the House on 7 Mar. and three days after that registered his own proxy with Jersey. Albemarle did not return to the House until 2 Apr., and on 20 June 1698 he received two proxies on the same day, from Jersey and Robert Sutton, 2nd Baron Lexinton. Jersey’s proxy was vacated upon his return to the House the following week but on 30 June 1698 in its stead William Maynard, 2nd Baron Maynard registered his with Albemarle.
Albemarle was most involved in the House during the 1698 Parliament. He came to about a third of the sittings in 1698-9 and only slightly more in 1699-1700. It is very likely that he was as active in the giving and receiving of proxies during these sessions as he had been in 1696-7 and 1697-8 but this cannot be positively determined as the proxy registers do not survive. On 23 Feb. 1700 he followed the preference of William III and voted against the motion to adjourn into a committee of the whole to discuss the bill to continue the old East India Company as a corporation. The principal matter with which he was concerned in the 1699-1700 session was the Irish Forfeitures Resumption bill. He was involved both as one of the principal grantees of forfeited Irish land targeted by the bill and as one of the king’s parliamentary managers entrusted with ensuring the House followed William’s own shifting views. At first William was opposed to the measure, and it was rumoured that Albemarle, with Portland and Lady Orkney (all three grantees of Irish land) were ‘supposed to have hardened the king against the bill’, for which advice John (‘Jack’) Howe‡ was threatening Albemarle with impeachment.
James Vernon‡ had a different story. He told Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, that Albemarle was a reluctant opponent of the bill and all along was trying to play a double game. Vernon thought that while Portland continued to agitate against the bill in the Lords in his speeches and votes, Albemarle desisted only in his vocal opposition, ‘as to the soliciting part’, but that his votes told a different story. He told Shrewsbury that Albemarle’s absence at the vote of 9 Apr. was intentional and that he still voted in favour of adhering to the wrecking amendments on 10 Apr., when the motion to adhere was only lost by the equality of the votes after proxies were counted. Apparently only Jersey among the king’s agents actually obeyed their master’s wishes in this very tight division. The Commons targeted Portland in a resolution of the same day for an address to the king to remove all foreigners from the Privy Council. Vernon suggested that if the Commons had known Albemarle had continued to vote in favour of the amendments, they may have also agreed to a second motion made on 10 April. This asked the king to rid himself of all foreign-born commanders of English troops – such as Albemarle, a captain in the Life Guards. Indeed, earlier that day ‘some young Member’ had moved for the impeachment of both Portland and Albemarle.
Albemarle only came to 19 meetings of the first Parliament of 1701 and had left the House for that session by the time the vote on the impeachment of Somers and the other Junto ministers came before the House. During the summer of 1701 he was in the Netherlands discussing with the States-General preparations for the impending war with France, but he probably did not regret having to miss a potentially embarrassing vote, as he had pressed for Somers’s dismissal the previous year. He may well have entrusted a proxy to a colleague, but the proxy registers for this Parliament are not extant. He was similarly absent for most of the last Parliament of William III’s reign but returned from the Netherlands in December 1701 in time to attend William at his deathbed. William entrusted to him his papers (Jacobite rumour had it that William ordered him to burn them), made him one of his executors, and further bequeathed him 200,000 guilders in his will.
At the accession of Queen Anne, Albemarle lost his place as gentleman of the bedchamber, although he did not surrender his place in the Life Guards, to Henry Bentinck, 2nd earl (later duke) of Portland, the heir of his old rival, until 1710. He retired to his home country in whose affairs he had long been involved through his military posts and his frequent sojourns as William III’s aide-de-camp during the summer campaigns in the Netherlands. In the summer of 1701, during his diplomatic mission to the States-General, he had married a Dutchwoman, the daughter of the governor of Bergen op Zoom and master of William III’s buckhounds. With the prospect of another war with France looming, he was that same year given his own regiment of infantry and promoted to lieutenant general of the Dutch horse. With these many commands he remained an important figure in the ensuing War of the Spanish Succession, during which he worked closely with his friend John Churchill, duke of Marlborough.
Occupied with the Dutch war effort on the continent he barely ever attended the House of Lords at Westminster. He only came to ten sittings in the reign of Anne, during a brief span of time between 15 Feb. and 14 Mar. 1705, when he may have been in England to join Marlborough in the victory celebrations for Blenheim. During this short visit he was also awarded with an honorary law degree by Cambridge University. He did not take part in the domestic politics of the reign of Anne and did not even register his proxy for any of the sessions; at least his name is not among the few remaining proxy registers. Nor is it possible to determine Albemarle’s position in English politics. When Charles Spencer, 3rd earl of Sunderland, was forecasting the division for the second vote on the occasional conformity bill in December 1703 he commented that Albemarle ‘probably will come, uncertain what he will be, more likely bad’, that is, he predicted he would vote with the Tories in favour of the bill. Albemarle did not come over for the division. In a printed list of the Parliament of Great Britain, published in May 1708, Albemarle is clearly marked as a Whig. It is likely that his main agenda was the defeat of France and support of Marlborough’s war effort at home and abroad. Such reasons led him to follow the duke’s own changing political alliances and positions in English domestic politics.
After the death of Anne, Albemarle was entrusted by the States-General to convey their congratulations to the Elector of Hanover on his accession to the English throne and to receive him formally at the Dutch border as he proceeded on his way to England.