England, a mischievous measure promoted by the duke of Buckingham, and he opposed again the bill brought in with that object in January 1667.  This same year his naval accounts were subjected to an examination in consequence of his indignant refusal to take part in the attack upon Ormonde;[2] and he was suspended from his office in 1668, no charge, however, against him being substantiated.  He took a prominent part in the dispute in 1671 between the two Houses concerning the right of the Lords to amend money bills, and wrote a learned pamphlet on the question entitled The Privileges of the House of Lords and Commons (1702), in which the right of the Lords was asserted.  In April 1673 he was appointed lord privy seal, and was disappointed at not obtaining the great seal the same year on the removal of Shaftesbury.  In 1679 he was included in Sir W. Temple’s new-modelled council.

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In the bitter religious controversies of the time Anglesey showed great moderation and toleration.  In 1674 he is mentioned as endeavouring to prevent the justices putting into force the laws against the Roman Catholics and Nonconformists.[3] In the panic of the “Popish Plot” in 1678 he exhibited a saner judgment than most of his contemporaries and a conspicuous courage.  On the 6th of December he protested with three other peers against the measure sent up from the Commons enforcing the disarming of all convicted recusants and taking bail from them to keep the peace; he was the only peer to dissent from the motion declaring the existence of an Irish plot; and though believing in the guilt and voting for the death of Lord Stafford, he interceded, according to his own account,[4] with the king for him as well as for Langhorne and Plunket.  His independent attitude drew upon him an attack by Dangerfield, and in the Commons by the attorney-general, Sir W. Jones, who accused him of endeavouring to stifle the evidence against the Romanists.  In March 1679 he protested against the second reading of the bill for disabling Danby.  In 1681 Anglesey wrote A Letter from a Person of Honour in the Country, as a rejoinder to the earl of Castlehaven, who had published memoirs on the Irish rebellion defending the action of the Irish and the Roman Catholics.  In so doing Anglesey was held by Ormonde to have censured his conduct and that of Charles I. in concluding the “Cessation,” and the duke brought the matter before the council.  In 1682 he wrote The Account of Arthur, Earl of Anglesey ... of the true state of Your Majesty’s Government and Kingdom, which was addressed to the king in a tone of censure and remonstrance, but appears not to have been printed till 1694.[5] In consequence he was dismissed on the 9th of August 1682 from the office of lord privy seal.  In 1683 he appeared at the Old Bailey as a witness in defence of Lord Russell, and in June 1685 he protested alone against the revision of Stafford’s attainder.  He died at his home at Blechingdon in Oxfordshire on the 26th of April 1686, closing a career marked by great ability, statesmanship and business capacity, and by conspicuous courage and independence of judgment.  He amassed a large fortune in Ireland, in which country he had been allotted lands by Cromwell.