THE BENTINCKS.—SINCE THE REVOLUTION. the second Earl, was a widely
different person from jj his father. A man of so sweet a disposition that it is said all were at ease around him, he had neither his father's bad manners nor his unerring judgment. His first step was fortunate, for he married, during his father's lifetime, the Lady Elizabeth Noel, eldest daughter and coheir of Wriothesley Baptist, Earl of Gainsborough, with whom he received, besides other estates, the moiety of the lordship of Tichfield, Hampshire, and the manor- house of the Wriothesleys, Paris of Southampton. There he resided up to his father's death, effacing by a profuse hospitality the grudge felt in England against the close-fisted Dutchman.. So successful was he in society that King George, in July, 1716, created him Marquis of Tichfield and Duke of Portland. Un- fortunately, his judgment was weak, the family love of acquisition was still latent and strong, and he engaged deeply in the great South Sea bubble, to the serious injury of his fortune. On the ex- plosion, he accepted the governorship of Jamaica—a post no duke would now look at—and died at St. Jago de la Vega in July, 1726, in the forty-fifth year of his age. The family, it may be remarked, still kept up their connection with Holland, one of the first Duke's three daughters marrying a Dutch noble.
William, the second Duke, elder of Henry's two sons, was seven- teen at his father's death, and was sent to travel in France and Italy, where he acquired the passion for antiquities by which he was afterwards distinguished. He neglected polities for science and cognate pursuits, was Fellow of the Royal Society, and Trustee of the British Museum, and seems to have been considered in that day a man of singular learning for a Peer. His pursuits did not, however, prevent him from aggrandizing his House, for he married the Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley, only child of Edward, second Earl of Oxford—the title somewhat impudently taken by Harley, the statesman, after the extinction of the mighty house of De Vere—by his wife Henrietta, only daughter and heiress of John Holies, Duke of Newcastle, by the daughter and heiress of Henry Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. This lady brought to the dukedom nearly all the vast estates of the younger Caveudishes, i. e.,, Welbeck Abbey and other lands, and the property of the Lords of Ogle. Bulstrode had been sold by the first Duke to the Duke of Somerset, and Welbeck Abbey was permanently selected as the family seat. The Duchess of Portland survived her husband, who died. May 1, 1762, more than twenty years—and seems to have partaken largely of some of his favourite tastes and pursuits—for she added greatly to the celebrated Portland Museum, which had been the legacy of her own ancestors, and which she enriched by a rare. and extensive collection in vertu and natural history—especially in conchology.
The fortunes of the family as English aristocrats, i.e., as, owners of vast masses of land, may now be said to have culmi- nated, for William Henry, the third Duke, succeeded in 1762,, just one hundred and one years ago, to the united properties of the Bentinck, Harley, Holies, and younger Cavendish families— whence the names of the streets around the present Duke's house —and was on his accession to the title one of the wealthiest and best educated men in Britain. He threw himself ardently into politics, associated with Burke and Fox, and became under their- influence a very vehement Whig, and very especially obnoxious to. George III., whose single leading idea, was to emancipate himself from the control of the great Houses who had governed the country from the death of William III. When Lord Rockingham returned to power in 1782, the Duke was appointed Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, an ap- pointment for which the singular coolness of judgment characteristic up to the present generation, of all the Bentincks especially fitted him, and from his despatches to Fox it would seem that the Irish were war- ranted in their favourable impression. He was earnestly desirous that some arrangement should be come to by which the spirit of what the Irish hoped from an independent legislature should be conceded, without impairing more than was absolutely necessary the central authority of the English Government, or lowering the prestige of England. " There is still an appearance of g wern- ment," he writes confidentially to his friend at the close of April, 1782 ; " but if you delay or refuse to be liberal, Government can- not exist hero in its present form, and the sooner you recall your• Lieutenant and renounce all claim to the country the better ; but, on the contrary, if you can bring your minds to concede largely and handsomely, I am persuaded that you may make any use of; this people, and of everything they are worth that you can wish ; and in such a movement it will be happy for them that the Govern-. ment of England shall be in hands that will not take undue advantage of their intoxication." It is usual to speak of Port- land as a man of high honour and excellent intentions, but a mere political nonentity. But there is a shrewd sense in his despatches, which, though far removed from genius, is equally removed from insignificance. He had, at any rate, the sagacity to see where talent lay and to follow its guidance without jealousy, though not blindly. At this time he looked chiefly to Fox, and in the des- patch from which we have quoted are unreserved intimations that he had not the slightest confidence in Lord Shelburne and his section of the Cabinet. These were the old following of Chat- ham, whose Whig connection had always been secondary and unessential to their personal attachment to that great man.. Hence Fox and the " Whigs proper" on the death of Rock- ingham refused to accept the leadership of Shelburne, and made- it their ultimatum that the Duke of Portland should be the• head of the new Ministry. This was refused by the King. So Fox, Cavendish, and Portland resigned (followed out of office by Burke and Sheridan), and Shelburne, with his own party, a section of the Whigs, and a fraction of the former Mends of Lord North, led by Dundas (afterwards Lord Melville). To these was now added young William Pitt, at the age of twenty-three, in the important post of Chancellor of the Exchequer. The history of the short Shelburne Ministry is one of incessant intrigue and counter- intrigue, ending, as is well known, in the coalition between Fox and North, and the entrance of the two latter in conjunction into a new Cabinet, under the headship of Portland. In all these negotiations Portland stood as steadily by Fox as Fox had by him. After a ministerial interregnum of seventeen days the King sent for Lord North, and propsed a broad adminis- tration. Lord North suggested the King should see the Duke of Portland himself ; but the King refused, and told Lord North to desire the Duke to send him his arrangement in writing. This was as positively refused by the Duke, who sent word that, if his Majesty condescended to employ him it would be necessary for him to see his Majesty. The negotiations went on. At last Lord North declared he was tired of carrying messages, and the King consented to see Portland, but demanded from him a complete list of the intended administration in writing, which the Duke refused. After another interval and an appeal to Pitt, the King saw Portland again, and he brought a written list of the Cabinet ; but the King would not look at it, and said he would have one of the whole administration. This the Duke refused. He implored the King to look at his paper, and held it out ; but the King held his hands behind him and would not take it. The King sent again for Pitt and again failed. He sent for North again, who merely said, "The Duke of Portland is ready to be Minister." " Then," said the King, " I wish your Lordship good night." But on the 1st of April, the King sent again for North, and said, " Well, so the Duke of Portland is firm ?" " Yes, Sir." " Well then, if you will not do the business, I will take him." So, on the 2nd of April, 1783, the new Cabinet Ministers kissed bands—Portland as First Lord of the Treasury, Fox and North as joint Secretaries of State ; and when Mr. Fox kissed hands, the old Marquis Townshend observed King George "turn back his ears and eyes, just like the horse at Astley's," said he, " when the tailor he was determined to throw was getting on him !" And thrown, accord- ingly, the Cabinet was, on the East India Bill, the King, whose hereditary want of courtesy was always in his way, . sending for the seals at midnight, and declining an interview. The Whigs deserved their fall, for they had excluded Burke, and filled the administration entirely from the. great governing families. Then, in 1783, ensued Pitt's daring attempt to carry on the Govern- ment without a majority in the Lower House, an attempt maintained with wonderful courage and dexterity, but which must have failed had it not been for the outburst of the Demo- cratic spirit in France. This alarmed a section of the great houses, who, with Portland at their head, first supported the King's proclamation against "divers seditious writings," directed at Tom Paine,—and so successful, that to this day country people who never read a line of Paine's writings hold the poor needleman to have been a demon,—and then went over to Pitt. Portland had a bitter struggle with his personal affection for Fox ; but political conviction conquered, and he accepted the Home Office. The game was won. The immense, though indefinite influence of the King, Pitt's strange hold over the middle class, and the great Lords' control of votes in the Lower House, were at last united, and a Ministry arose almost as powerful as Parliament itself. In 1801 Portland became President of the Council under the Addington Ministry, which office he resigned in June, 1805, remaining, however, in the Cabinet till Pitt's death and the acces- sion of Fox to power. On Fox's death the Duke was again sum- moned, this time to form a kind of stately drapery for Perceval, the real Minister, which office he retained till the autumn of 1809, when he retired from active life, to die within a few weeks. He is a man whose character has been variously described, but he was in reality a cool, sagacious, determined oligarch, very anxious for England, but more anxious for his order, and so immersed in politics that he suffered his vast estates to be half ruined by mere neglect, and sudden loans raised to fight the Lowthers in the North, or carry some great political end.
This Duke had four sons, the second of whom, Lord Wil- liam Cavendish Bentinck, was by many degrees the ablest man who has appeared in the family since the founder. Born in 1774, he entered the army, rose to be major-general, and in 1803, when only twenty-nine, was appointed Governor of Madras. The sepoys of the Presidency, long manipulated for a rising in favour of the Princes of Mysore, took advantage of a depart- mental order about uniform to put forward their invariable cry of " caste in danger," and broke into the petty revolt known as the Vellore Mutiny. The Court of Directors, a body which always disliked and distrusted the Queen's officers, and, acting usually with the cold delay of an ancient mercantile firm, behaved at intervals with the unreasoning hurry of a mob, lost their senses with fright. Before theY had received a single despatch from Lord
William—whose only share in the orders was to obviate their effects—they censured and re-called him, a proceeding which he compelled them formally to condemn, in a letter in which they admitted that he had no share in the orders, but refused reparation, "because the misfortune which happened in his administration placed his fate under the government of public events and opinion. which, as the Court could not control, so it was not in their power to alter the effects of them." In 1810, he was sent as Plenipotentiary to the assistance of Ferdinand of Sicily. Here he soon divined the real character of the King, and of the unscrupulous though accomplished Queen Caroline, and so irritated her by his advocacy of reforms in the Government, and his sup- port of the Liberal party in Sicily against the traitorous conduct of the Court, that in 1811 the Queen left Sicily and repaired to Vienna, where she intrigued with Napoleon against England. During her absence, the English Plenipotentiary wrung from the Court a constitution for Sicily, drawn up by him on the most liberal basis of constitutional government. This was in 1812, and the constitution was guaranteed by Lord William as repre- sentative of the English Government. It was afterwards, as it is well known, shamefully violated, or rather altogether disre- garded, by the restored Bourbons, who have at length reaped the fruits of their traitorous folly, and by oppressing Sicily have lost both Sicily and Naples. In 1813, Lord William conducted an expedition from Sicily to Catalonia as a diversion in the rear of the French armies ; but was beaten, and forced to retire to Italy. In 1814 he was more fortunate in Italy, where he compelled the French garrison in Genoa to surrender. In the convention con- cluded by Lord William on this occasion, it was agreed that the old republic of Genoa should be reconstituted under the pro- tectorate of England. Lord Castlereagh, however, disowned Lord William's agreement, and gave Genoa up to Pied- mont—a proceeding still resentfully recollected by the in- habitants, though it has proved, by the unexpected change in the political course of Piedmont, so great an advantage both to Genoa and Italy. Lord William, incensed at this disavowal, threw up his appointment and returned to England, where he entered Parlia- ment as member for Nottingham. He was next sent on a mission to Rome, and on the formation of the Canning Ministry, in 1827— in which his brother held high office—he was appointed Governor- General of India. No man so qualified ever held that immense position. Cold, sarcastic, and sagacious, he saw that India needed peace and retrenchment, and he secured both. In his long reign he made but one expedition—to dethrone the atrocious Rajah of Coorg, the horrible being who was recently so well receivel by British society, and who was, so to say, to General Mouravieff what Mouravieff is to Howard,—defied and re-organized the Civil Service, and, in defiance of all Anglo-India, threw open the judi- cial service to the people of the country. He was contemplating much wider reforms, for which his admirable thrift gave scope, when his health failed, and he returned to England, to find, like every other Indian, that the successful government of a sixth of the human race had thrown him back in the struggle for English power. He was Hans Bentinck over again, with. a larger love for humanity and a higher education.
His elder brother, the fourth Duke of Portland, pursued his father's life, living and dying a great English Peer, loved by his tenantry, consulted by political allies, and used every now and then as keystone in some political arch. Always a foe to injustice rather than a party Liberal, he moved, in 1822, the second reading of the Bill for admitting Roman Catholic Peers into the House of Lords, in 1827 accepted the office of Privy Seal under Canning, was President of the Council under Lord Goderich—whose son is a Minister, as Earl de Grey and Ripon—voted for the Reform Bill, and died March 27th, 1854, a moderate Conservative. He had repaired by strict attention to business the family fortunes, and acquired a great Scotch property by his marriage with the heiress of General John Scott, of Balconie, Fifeshira. His second son George preceded him to the grave, having been at the age of twenty-five successively King of the Turf and leader of the Conservative party, and he was succeeded by his son William John Scott-Bentinck, fifth and present Duke of Portland. This Peer has taken no part in politics, living a life of somewhat re- markable seclusion ; but it is understood that, unlike most of his family, he remains a firm and consistent Whig.
The House of Bentinck has not yet been two hundred years among us ; but it has produced three great men, besides two Premiers, and though its younger branches have deserted the principles which made them great, it retains its full vitality. No house has benefited more by the vast rise in the value of land and of London property, and few who have courted popularity so little have ever acquired a stronger hold on the regard and respect of Englishmen. Had Lord George Bentinck lived, the House might ' even now be ruling us ; but as it is, its cadets are deeply engaged in politics, and it still ranks among the most active as well as potent of the great governing families.
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