We cannot be certain this portrait is the legendary Lady Wentworth, best known from a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It is “possibly Martha Wentworth,” according to the NH Historical Society that owns the oil painting. The artist is unknown. Experts estimate it dates to 1775, five years after the death of her husband, NH governor Benning Wentworth.
READ THE POEM: Lady Wentworth
Their 1760 marriage was big news. Benning, a 64-year-old widower, was the powerful and wealthy governor of the province of New Hampshire. Martha Hilton was a 23-year-old “commoner.” The story was 100 years old when Longfellow published his ballad in 1863. With so few historical details available about Martha, the poem has become the dominant narrative.
After the death of his wife and son, according to Portsmouth historian Charles Brewster, the governor was a lonely man living in a huge mansion. He fell for a young Molly Pitman, who spurned his affections and married a mechanic. The jealous governor, according to local lore, arranged for Molly’s husband to be impressed onto a ship for seven years, after which the couple was reunited.
At Stavers Tavern, Brewster wrote, was a young woman, “a careless, laughing, barefooted girl lugging a pail of water in the street, with a dress scarcely sufficient to cover her decently.” This was Martha Hilton, who soon took on the role of housekeeper at the governor’s mansion. At his birthday celebration in 1760, the legend continues, the governor introduced Martha as his future bride and insisted that Rev. Arthur Brown, then in attendance, marry them on the spot.
Longfellow drew heavily from the Brewster account that had appeared in the Portsmouth Journal, and later in Rambles About Portsmouth. The story was included in Sarah Haven Foster’s walking guide to Portsmouth. It was widely read in a little book entitled Three Heroines of New England Romance (1894). The governor does not fare well in most versions. Here he is described as a “strange, stout, splenetic being to whom she [Martha] owed her meridian glory.” In a 1917 article in the Daughters of the American Revolution magazine, Benning Wentworth was pictured as “unpleasant and unattractive…wealthy beyond imagination.” Their marriage, according to the DAR, was “the scandal of the decade.”
Martha inherited Benning’s 45-room mansion in Little Harbor, today an historic house museum. According to family genealogy, she quickly married her husband’s cousin, Col. Michael Wentworth, of the Wakefield, Yorkshire Wentworths, England. Martha and Michael had a daughter, Martha, born around 1772. The portrait was likely created soon after, at the start of the American Revolution. Unlike many Loyalists who fled the region, Martha and Michael stayed at their lavish home. George Washington reportedly visited Martha Hilton Wentworth Wentworth when he toured Portsmouth in 1789. Having outlived two husbands, the Revolution, and President Washington, Martha died in 1805.
© 2026 J Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
Longfellow’s “Lady Wentworth” of Portsmouth, New Hampshire