Ayrshire > Volume 2

THE DUKEDOM OF PORTLAND 189
and his brother, the Duke of York — probably no easy
matter, for the exchequer of these last of the Stuarts,
so far as royalty in this country was concerned, was
seldom full. While in England Bentinck received from
Oxford the degree of Doctor of Civil Law;..
In 1675 the Prince of Orange fell sick of the smallpox
at the Hague, and during the sixteen days of the illness,
he was assiduously waited upon by Bentinck, who
displayed a personal attachment to the Prince that had
its share in the grateful regard which the latter never
afterwards ceased to entertain for him. It was not
until the Prince was well on the way towards recovery
that he asked and obtained leave to go home, and there
he was attacked by the same disease and was in great
danger of his life. As soon as he recovered he hastened
to join William in the field of war which the United
Provinces were then waging against England and
France. In 1677, by which time negotiations for peace
were under weigh, the Prince sent Bentinck on a special
mission to this country to make overtures for the
marriage of his royal master with the Princess Mary,
daughter of the Duke of York, and he succeeded so well
that the wedding took place the same year. He was
again in England to offer the Prince's congratulations to
Charles II. on the failure of what was known as the Rye
House Plot, a scheme formulated by a few of the more
fiery spirits of the Whig party to assassinate the King at
a farm near Hertford, called the Rye House farm, on his
return from Newmarket to London. And again, when in
1685, the Duke of Monmouth issued a manifesto branding
King James as a murderer and a Popish usurper, and
asserting his own legitimacy — which there was good
reason to doubt — and his right to the Crown, and when
he attempted to assert his claims by force of arms,
though only to be crushed at Sedgemoor and to be
conveyed to London to die ignominiously upon the
scaffold at Tower Hill, Bentinck was the Prince's envoy
to offer service and soldiery in the event of these being
required.