The Anglo-Dutch Favourite: The Career of Hans Willem Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland (1649-1709) (review)

Hans Willem Bentinck, the third son of a landed nobleman on the eastern periphery of the United Provinces, in 1664 became a page in the court of William III of Orange, one year Bentinck's junior. The contrast between the two could not have been greater: Bentinck came from a stable family, and enjoyed both a happy childhood and rude good health. Nevertheless, the two adolescents quickly established a friendship that Onnekink shows (contrary to accepted opinion) lasted until William III's death.

The author debunks any notion that the relationship between the two men was homosexual, pointing out that such rumors were exclusively English (not Dutch), dating only from 1689, and given currency in English Jacobite publications. Bentinck's rise to political prominence and later power was based exclusively on the favoritism showed to him by the man who would become Stadtholder in 1672 and King of Great Britain in 1689. Bentinck's roles were varied and overlapping: he was a political figure, a diplomat, and a soldier of high rank, although "more suited to planning than strategy or operational command" (150). After the 1688 Dutch invasion of England, successful due in large part to Bentinck's planning, he was made first Earl of Portland and showered by the new king with offices, grants, and lands of forfeited rebels, becoming "fabulously rich" (256) by his death in 1709. As a Dutchman by birth, such favoritism naturally engendered widespread English jealousy, particularly when Portland played an increasingly important role in William's administration, albeit without holding any formal office. By the mid-1690s, Portland had tightly aligned himself with the Whigs: while he was politically useful to them, he does not appear to have been personally popular with them. By 1697, a courtly rival to the favorite had appeared on the scene, Arnold Joost van Keppel, who was created Earl of Albemarle in 1697. Twenty-one years younger than Portland, Albemarle had also risen to favor as a personal attendant to William III. Onnekink demonstrates, however, that despite the king's favor for Albemarle, the personal friendship between William III and Portland may have cooled, but never disappeared. After William III's death in 1702, Portland ceased to wield any political clout, although he did make efforts when occasion required to smooth Anglo-Dutch relations during the War of the Spanish Succession.

The only previous English biography of Bentinck was by M. E. Grew (1924), which was aimed at a general audience; The Anglo-Dutch Favourite, by contrast, is a thoroughly scholarly work that will appeal to specialists in the period. Despite the author's massive research, there are a disconcerting number of minor errors scattered throughout the volume: for example, within four pages, after the battle of the Boyne, James II fled to France, not "to western Ireland" (80); the secretary-at-war, George Clarke (not Clark), was never knighted; and after the Treaty of Limerick (1691), nearly 20,000 Irish Jacobite troops (and perhaps as many as 10,000 of their dependants) were shipped to France, not 12,000. Such errors are relatively unimportant but they do give rise to questions of the reliability of information not so easily checked.

More troubling is what is missing from Onnekink's extensive bibliography. He ignores the series of articles published by the late Professor Mark Thomson on international diplomacy in the 1690s, which not only would have provided the author with a much more sophisticated view of the Treaty of Ryswick and the Partition Treaty negotiations, but might also have tempered his high estimate of Bentinck's importance in those matters.

Despite these quibbles, The Anglo-Dutch Favourite is an important book about an important man, and will be a welcome addition to our...