BENTINCK, LORD WILLIAM GEORGE FREDER ICK CAVENDISH, better known as LORD GEORGE BENTINCK British politician, was the second surviving son of the fourth duke of Portland, by Henrietta, sister of Viscountess Canning, and was born on Feb. 27 1802. He served in the army for some years, and entered parliament in 1828 for King's Lynn, which he represented for 20 years. Till within three years of his death he was little known out of the sporting world.
He belonged originally to the moderate Whig party, and voted in favour of Catholic emancipation, as also for the Reform bill, though he opposed some of its principal details. Soon after, how ever, he joined the ranks of the Opposition, with whom he sided up to 1846. When, in that year, Sir Robert Peel openly declared in favour of free trade, the advocates of the corn-laws, then with out a leader, discovered that Lord George Bentinck was the only man of position and family around whom the several sections of the Opposition could be brought to rally. He soon gave convincing evidence of powers so formidable that the Protectionist party under his leadership was at once stiffened into real importance. Towards Peel, in particular, his hostility was uncompromising. Believing, as he himself expressed it, that that statesman and his colleagues had "hounded to the death his illustrious relative" Canning, he combined with his political opposition a degree of personal animosity that gave additional force to his invective.
He abandoned his connection with the turf, disposed of his magnificent stud and devoted his whole energies to the laborious duties of a parliamentary leader. Apart from the question of the corn-laws, however, his politics were decidedly independent. In opposition to the rest of his party, he supported the bill for remov ing the Jewish disabilities, and was favourable to the scheme for the payment of the Roman Catholic clergy in Ireland by the land owners. The result was that on Dec. 23 1847 he wrote a letter resigning the Protectionist leadership, though he still remained active in politics.
But his positive abilities as a constructive statesman were not to be tested, for he died suddenly at Welbeck Sept. 21 1848. It was to be left to Disraeli to bring ihe Conservative Party into power, with Protection outside its programme.
See B. Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield) , Lord George Bentinck : a Political Biography (1851).