Royalist governor of New Hampshire, born at Portsmouth on the 24th of July 1696; graduated at Harvard in 1715. He entered upon a mercantile life, made visits to England and Spain, sat in the assembly, and in 1734 was appointed a provincial councilor. When New Hampshire was made a separate province in 1741, he was commissioned governor. Notwithstanding the intercolonial dissensions which arose during his rule, and which were not quieted until Vermont entered the Union as a state in 1790, he was said to have been of “benevolent and charitable disposition, inoffensive in life and conversation.” The Vermont region was claimed by both New Hampshire and New York. The collision between the two governors in 1763–64 finally resulted in the separate statehood of Vermont. He resigned in favor of his nephew, Sir John Wentworth (1766). He bestowed five hundred acres upon Dartmouth College. He died at Portsmouth on the 14th of October 1770.
