The contrast will perhaps seem less strange when we consider what immense sums he had accumulated at the expense of the English, and what immense sums he was laying out for the benefit of the French.

It must also be remembered that he could not confer or correspond with Englishmen in their own language, and that the French tongue was at least as familiar to him, as that of his native Holland.
He, therefore, who here was called greedy, niggardly, dull, brutal, whom one English nobleman had described as a block of wood, and another as just capable of carrying a message right, was in the brilliant circles of France considered as a model of grace, of dignity and of munificence, as a dexterous negotiator and a finished gentleman.

He was the better liked because he was a Dutchman.

For, though fortune had favoured William, though considerations of policy had induced the Court of Versailles to acknowledge him, he was still, in the estimation of that Court, an usurper; and his English councillors and captains were perjured traitors who richly deserved axes and halters, and might, perhaps, get what they deserved.

But Bentinck was not to be confounded with Leeds and Marlborough, Orford and Godolphin.