Page:The Wentworth Papers 1715-1739.djvu/22

 6 THE WENTWORTH TAPERS.

tenant-general of the Dutch troops, who commanded the vanguard, told the king that there was a young cornet who did miracles, and, having ascertained his name, commended him to his majesty for promotion, as he very well deserved it." Upon which the king commanded Dompre to bring Went- worth to him, and said that the general had given him such a character that he might depend upon an early promotion in the service. In the succeeding winter William Wentworth died at Brussels of a fever contracted on night guard, and we are told that his brother at once rode to Breda after the king to beg the vacant troop, but he was too late, for it had been already given to Major Moreton, afterwards Lord Ducie. In the next campaign he was assigned a place in the king's quarters, and became aide-de-camp to his majesty, serving as such at the disastrous battle of Landen on July 19, 1693. He was one of the four officers with the king that passed the Mehaigne after the army was put to flight, and he lay all night in an orchard near the little house, where William and the Elector of Bavaria slept on straw. At a place near Louvain, where the king dined the next day, " he desired some great man to rise and make room for Mr. Wentworth, saying, ' Pray let us who continued in the battle and all night together dine together.' " In October of this year he was promoted to be a guidon or major of the first troop of guards, and the king, as a further mark of attachment, gave him more profitable employment as a groom of the bedchamber. We next hear of Wentworth in attendance on the king at the siege of Namur, through the month of July, 1695 ; his brother Paul, a lieutenant in the foot guards, was killed there in the attack on the counterscarp.

Sir William Wentworth died in July, 1692, so that, on the death of his cousin William, second Earl of Strafford, Thomas inherited the second title of Lord Raby, the earldom being extinct, and took his seat in the House of Lords in November, 1695. For some family reasons, now difficult to fathom, the earl had not thought fit to secure any portion of his estate to the future holder of his second title, and had devised nearly the whole of it to his nephew, Thomas Watson, second son

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