A Restoration Attack on Royal Favouritism: Sir Robert Howard’s The Great Favourite, or, the Duke of Lerma (1668)

Alejandro Sell Maestro

doi:10.5209/pygm.104808

A Restoration Attack on Royal Favouritism: Sir Robert Howard’s The Great Favourite, or, the Duke of Lerma (1668)

Alejandro Sell Maestro Complutense University of Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1554-302X

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/pygm.104808

Keywords: The Great Favourite, Howard, favourite, Machiavellian, Arlington

Agencies: This article is an outcome of the project “A Polycentric Monarchy of Urban Republics before the European Rivalry in the Iberian Atlantic (1640-1713)” (ATLANREX) (PID2022-14501NB-I00) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation and The European Social Fund Plus (ESF ).

Abstract

The Great Favourite, or, the Duke of Lerma (1668), by Sir Robert Howard (1626-98), dramatises the Machiavellian strategies employed by the Duke of Lerma, favourite of the Spanish monarch Philip III, to retain royal favour. Scholars have sought to associate the topic of this play with the Earl of Clarendon’s ruling experience and banishment in 1667. However, The Great Favourite is a criticism of the whole political system Clarendon represented, that of the rule of Machiavellian favourites, which was far from disappearing in England with his fall. After a brief review of the play’s reception history, I will defend the above hypothesis by showing the different anti-Machiavellian criticisms Howard tried to stress throughout the play and both the textual and contextual reasons why The Great Favourite should be seen as an attack on the political model embodied by the Earl of Arlington, Charles II’s consolidated Machiavellian royal favourite.

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2025-12-19

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Sell Maestro, A. (2025). A Restoration Attack on Royal Favouritism: Sir Robert Howard’s The Great Favourite, or, the Duke of Lerma (1668). Pygmalion. Revista de Teatro General Y Comparado, 17, 21-30. https://doi.org/10.5209/pygm.104808

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