Lord George Bentinck (24 December 1715 – 1 March 1759) was a British Army officer and Member of Parliament (MP).
Bentinck was the second son of Henry Bentinck, 1st Duke of Portland and his wife Lady Elizabeth Noel, daughter of Wriothesley Noel, 2nd Earl of Gainsborough. He was educated at Eton College.
He received the appointment of ensign on 3 November 1735, and having been promoted on 12 April 1743 to the command of a company in the 1st Foot Guards, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, he served at the battle of Dettingen in June that year. He obtained the appointment of aide-de-camp to the King on 12 March 1752, and the colonelcy of the 5th Regiment of Foot on 29 August 1754. He was afterwards promoted to the rank of major-general, and at the 1754 general election he was elected as the Member of Parliament for the borough of Malmesbury in Wiltshire. He died at Bath on 2 March 1759.[1]
Bentinck was elected at by-election in 1742 as a Member of Parliament for the borough of Droitwich. At the next general election, in 1747, he was elected as an MP for the rotten borough Grampound. He held that seat until the 1754 general election, when he was elected for the borough of Malmesbury in Wiltshire. He held that seat until his death.
Lord George lived openly out of wedlock with a woman named Mary Davies of Hanwell for several years. They eventually married at the infamous Keith's Chapel in Westminster on 29 June 1753, at which time she became styled Lady George Bentinck. They were married by Rev. Alexander Keith – who performed clandestine marriages and baptisms – a few months after the passage of the Clandestine Marriages Act 1753, but before it came into force. His choice of wife was unacceptable to his family and they were scorned by his brother, William, Duke of Portland.[2] He died six years later of gout, apparently having no children. He left his widow his fortune, equivalent to .
Three weeks after his death, his aunt Lady Elizabeth Egerton wrote a derogatory note about his widow, Lady George Bentinck, in a letter to a Dutch cousin, Count Willem Bentinck van Rhoon:
Just six weeks after his death, his widow remarried to a Joseph Griffiths, Esq., on 17 April 1759, at St Clement Danes, Westminster.[3]