Henry Bentinck, 1st Duke of Portland
English peer and Governor of Jamaica (1682-1726)
Henry Bentinck, 1st Duke of Portland (17 March 1682 – 4 July 1726) was a British Army officer, Whig politician and colonial administrator who served as the governor of Jamaica from 1721 to 1726. Styled Viscount Woodstock from 1689 until 1709, he sat in the English and British House of Commons from 1705 until 1709 when he succeeded to the peerage of Great Britain as Earl of Portland.
Early life
Bentinck was the second, but eldest surviving, son of William Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland, and his wife Anne née Villiers. His mother was from the Villiers family, the eldest daughter of Sir Edward Villiers and sister of Edward Villiers, 1st Earl of Jersey.
From 1702 to 1703, Bentinck did the Grand Tour around Europe, travelling through Italy and Germany with his tutor, the historian Paul de Rapin. On 9 June 1704, he married Lady Elizabeth Noel, daughter of Wriothesley Baptist Noel, 2nd Earl of Gainsborough and Catherine Greville at Chiswick, an heiress with a fortune of £60,000, who brought him the estate of Titchfield in Hampshire. Noel Street in Soho, London, is named after her.
Career
At the 1705 English general election, Bentinck was returned in a contest as Whig Member of Parliament for Southampton. Apart from carrying out minor functions, he appears to have been inactive in Parliament. At the 1708 British general election, he was returned unopposed for Southampton and in a contest at Hampshire, and opted to sit for Hampshire.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Henry Bentinck, 1st Duke of Portland” is english peer and Governor of Jamaica (1682-1726). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Henry, Bentinck and Duke, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q126107. VIAF identifies the subject as 41685164. The Library of Congress control number is nr89009700. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1682, 1726, 1721 and 1689.
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This entry incorporates text from “Henry Bentinck, 1st Duke of Portland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.