TWO IRISH BEAUTIES
In the winter of 1745 the city of Dublin was thrown into a state of high
excitement by the appearance of a couple of girls from the wilds of
Connaught, whose almost unearthly beauty won the instant homage of every
man, from His Excellency the Earl of Harrington, then Lord Lieutenant,
to the sourest jarvey who cracked a whip in her streets. To quote the
pardonably extravagant language of a chronicler of the time,
"They swam into the social firmament of the Irish capital
like twin planets of dazzling splendour, eclipsing all
other constellations, as if the pall of night had been
drawn over them."
They had grown to girlhood, so the story ran from mouth to mouth, in a
ruinous thatched house, in the shadow of Castle Coote, in County
Roscommon, and were the daughters of John Gunning, a roystering,
happy-go-lucky, dram-drinking squireen, whose most serious occupation in
life was keeping the brokers' men on the right side of his door. And at
the time this story opens they were living in a cottage, rented for a
modest eight pounds a year, on the outskirts of Dublin, with their
mother, who was a daughter of Lord Mayo.
To say that all Dublin was at the feet of the Gunning sisters, at the
first sight of their lovely faces and dainty figures, is an unadorned
statement of fact. The young "bloods" of the capital were their slaves
to a man, ready to spill the last drop of blood for them; and every
gallant of the Viceregal Court drank toasts to their beauty, and vied
with his rivals to win a smile or a word from them. Peg Woffington, it
is said, threw up her arms in wonder at the sight of them, and, as she
hugged each in turn, declared that she "had never seen anything half so
sweet"; and Tom Sheridan went down on his knees in involuntary homage to
the majesty of their beauty.
It was Tom Sheridan who placed his stage wardrobe at their disposal when
they were invited to the great Viceregal ball in honour of King George's
birthday; and, attired as Lady Macbeth and Juliet respectively, they
danced the stately minuet and rollicking country dances with such grace
and abandon that lords and ladies stopped in their dances, and mounted
on chairs and tables to feast their eyes on so rare and ravishing a
sight.
"With Betty as with Maria," says Mr Frankfort Moore, "the
art of the dance had become part of her nature. Her
languorous eyes were in sympathy with the voluptuous
movements of her feet and lithe body, and the curves
made by her arms formed an invisible chain that held
everyone entranced. The caresses of her fingers, the
coyness of her curtsies, the allurements of her
movements--all the graces and charms inwoven that make up
the poem of the minuet--became visible by the art of that
exquisite girl, until all other dancers became
common-place by comparison."
Such was the fascination of their beauty that, it is said, the sisters
were one day drugged by a party of licentious admirers, whose guests
they had innocently consented to be, and were actually being carried
away by their ravishers when Sheridan, who had got wind of the plot,
appeared on the scene with a number of stout-armed friends, and effected
their rescue.
But even Dublin was no suitable market for such peerless beauties, Mrs
Gunning decided. Through her they had the blood of the Plantagenets in
their veins; and no man less than a Duke or an Earl--certainly not an
Irish squire or impoverished lord--was a fitting match for her
daughters. And so to England and London they were carried, flushed with
their conquests, leaving broken hearts behind them, and heralded across
the Channel by many a sonnet singing their beauty.
But, although each was equally fair, the sisters were by no means alike
in their charms. Maria, all gladness and mirth, was a sprightly
brunette, in whose laughing glances shone the fires of a
pleasure-seeking soul; while Elizabeth, the younger, with soft blue eyes
and dark golden hair, although infinitely more placid, was no less
radiant than her dashing sister.
"Each was," to quote another description, "divinely tall,
with a figure of perfect symmetry, and a grace of dignity
enhanced by the proud poise of the small Grecian head.
Faultless also were the rounded arms and the hands, with
their long, slender tapering fingers."
All the portraits of Elizabeth reveal the same dainty disdainful lips in
the shape of a Cupid's bow, the long, slender nose, the half-drooping
lids and lashes. In colouring there was the same delicacy. A soft, ivory
pallor shone in her face, a flush of pink warmed her cheeks, there was a
gleam of gold as the sunbeams touched her light brown hair.
Such, in the cold medium of type, were the two Irish sisters who took
London by storm, and who "made more noise than any of their predecessors
since the days of Helen," in the summer of 1751. Their conquest was
immediate, electrifying. London raved about the new beauties; they were
the theme of every tongue, from the Court to the meanest coffee-house.
Even Grub Street rubbed its eyes in amazement at the wonderful vision,
and ransacked its dictionaries for superlatives; and the poets, with one
accord, struck their lyres to a new inspiration.
Whenever the sisters took their walks abroad "they were beset by a
curious multitude, the press being once so great that one of the sisters
fainted away and had to be carried home in her chair; while on another
occasion their beaux were compelled to draw swords to rescue them from
the mob." When, too, they once went to Vauxhall Gardens, they found
themselves the centre of a mob of eight thousand spectators, struggling
to catch a glimpse of their lovely faces or to touch the "hem of their
garments."
When, in alarm, they sought refuge in a neighbouring box, the door was
at once besieged by jostling, clamorous thousands, who were only kept at
bay by the sword-points of their escort. And when, one day, they visited
Hampton Court, the housekeeper showed the company who were "lionising"
the place into the room where they were sitting, instead of into the
apartment known as the "Beauty Room," with the significant remark,
"_These_ are the beauties, gentlemen."
With such universal and embarrassing homage, it is no wonder that all
the gallants in town, from the rakish Duke of Cumberland downwards, were
at the feet of the fair sisters, or that they had the refusal of many a
coronet before they had been many weeks in London. Each sister counted
her noble lovers by the score, and each soon capitulated to a favoured
wooer.
Among Maria's most ardent suitors was the Earl of Coventry, "a grave
young lord" of handsome person and courtly graces, who had singled
himself out from them all by the ardour of his wooing; and to him Maria
gave her hand. One March day in 1752, the world of fashion was thrown
into a high state of excitement by reading the following announcement:--
"On Thursday evening the Earl of Coventry was married to
Miss Maria Gunning, a lady possessed of that exquisite
beauty and of those accomplishments which will add Grace
and Dignity to the highest station. As soon as the
ceremony was over they set out for Lord Ashburnham's seat
at Charlton, in Kent, to consummate their nuptials."
Of Lady Coventry, who seems to have been as vain and foolish as she was
beautiful, many amusing stories are told. So annoyed was her ladyship by
the crowds that still followed her when she took the air in St James's
Park that she appealed to the King for an escort of soldiers, a favour
which was readily granted to "the most beautiful woman in England,"
Thus, on one occasion, we are told,
"from eight to ten o'clock in the evening, a strange
procession paraded the crowded avenues, obliging everyone
to make way and exciting universal laughter. In front
marched two sergeants with their halberds, then tripped
the self-conscious Lady Coventry, attended by her husband
and an ardent admirer, the amorous Earl of Pembroke,
while twelve soldiers of the guard followed in the rear!"
One day, so runs another story which illustrates her ladyship's lack of
discretion, she was talking to King George II., who in spite of his age,
was a great admirer of beauty, and especially of my Lady Coventry. "Are
you not sorry," His Majesty enquired, "that there are to be no more
masquerades?" "Indeed, no," was the answer. "I am quite weary of them
and of all London sights. There is only one left that I am really
anxious to see, and that is a _coronation_!" This unflattering wish she
was not destined to realise; for King George survived the foolish
beauty by a fortnight.
Lady Coventry had no greater admirer of her own charms than herself. She
spent her days worshipping at the shrine of her loveliness, and
embellished nature with every device of art. She squandered fortunes in
adorning it with the most costly jewellery and dresses, of one of which
the following story is told. One day she exhibited to George Selwyn a
wonderful costume which she was going to wear at an approaching fête.
The dress was a miracle of blue silk, richly brocaded with silver spots
of the size of a shilling. "And how do you think I shall look in it, Mr
Selwyn?" she archly asked. "Why," he replied, "you will look like change
for a guinea."
[Illustration: MARIA, COUNTESS OF COVENTRY]
Mrs Delany draws a remarkable picture of my lady at this culminating
period of her vanity.
"Yesterday after chapel," she writes, "the Duchess
brought home Lady Coventry to feast me--and a feast she
was! She is a fine figure and vastly handsome,
notwithstanding a silly look sometimes about the month;
she has a thousand airs, but with a sort of innocence
that diverts one! Her dress was a black silk sack, made
for a large hoop, which she wore without any, and it
trailed a yard on the ground. She had on a cobweb-laced
handkerchief, a pink satin long cloak, lined with ermine
mixed with squirrel-skins. On her head a French cap that
just covered the top of her head, of blond, and stood in
the form of a butterfly with wings not quite extended;
frilled sort of lappets crossed under her chin, and tied
with pink and green ribbon--a head-dress that would have
charmed a shepherd! She had a thousand dimples and
prettinesses in her cheeks, her eyes a little drooping at
the corners, but fine for all that."
Such vanities may be pardoned in a woman so lovely and so spoiled by
Fortune, especially as her reign was fated to be as brief as it was
splendid. She was, perhaps, too fair a flower to be allowed to bloom
long in the garden of this world. Before she had been long a bride
consumption sowed its deadly seeds in her; and she drained the cup of
pleasure with the fatal sword hanging over her head. She knew she was
doomed, that all the medical skill in the world could not save her; and,
with characteristic courage, she determined to enjoy life to its last
dregs.
She saw her beauty fade daily, and pathetically tried to conceal its
decay by powders and paints. She grew daily weaker; but, with a brave
smile, held her place in the vortex of gaiety. Even when the inevitable
end was near she insisted on attending the trial of Lord Ferrers for the
murder of his steward. As Horace Walpole says,
"The seats of the Peeresses were not nearly full, and
most of the beauties were absent; but, to the amazement
of everybody, Lady Coventry was there, and, what
surprised me more, looked as well as ever. I sat next but
one to her, and should not have asked her if she had been
ill, yet they are positive she has few weeks to live. She
was observed to be 'acting over all the old comedy of
eyes' with her former flame, Lord Bolingbroke, an
unscrupulous rake, who seems to have striven for years to
make her the victim of his passion."
Her conduct, indeed, seems never to have been very discreet.
"Her levities," says a chronicler of the time, "were very
publicly talked of, and some gallantries were ascribed to
her which were greatly believed. However, they were never
brought home to her; and, if she were guilty, she escaped
with only a little private scandal, which generally falls
to the lot of every woman of uncommon beauty who is
envied by the rest of her sex."
During the summer of 1760 the unhappy lady lay at the point of death, in
her stately home at Croome Court, bravely awaiting the end.
"Until the last few days," says Mr Horace Bleackley, "the
pretty Countess lay upon a sofa, with a mirror in her
hand, gazing with yearning eyes upon the reflection of
her fading charms. To the end her ruling passion was
unchanged; for when she perceived that her beauty had
vanished she asked to be carried to bed, and called for
the room to be darkened and the curtains drawn,
permitting none to look upon her pallid face and sunken
cheeks."
Thus, robbed of all that had made life worth living, and bitterly
realising the vanity of beauty, Lady Coventry drew her last breath on
October 1st 1760. Ten days later, ten thousand persons paid their last
homage to her in Pirton churchyard.
* * * * *
Three weeks before Maria Gunning blossomed into a Countess her younger
sister Betty had been led to the altar under much more romantic
conditions, after one of the most rapid and impetuous wooings in the
annals of Love. A few weeks before she wore her wedding-ring, the man
who was to win her was not even known to her by sight; and what she had
heard of him was by no means calculated to impress her in his favour.
The Duke of Hamilton, while still young, had won for himself a very
unenviable notoriety as a debauchee in an age of profligacy. He had
drunk deep of every cup of questionable pleasure; and at an age when he
should have been in the very prime of his manhood, he was a physical
wreck, his vitality drained almost to its last drop by shameful
excesses.
Such was the man who entered the lists against a legion of formidable
rivals for the guerdon of Betty Gunning's hand. It was at a masquerade
that he first seems to have set eyes on her; and at sight of her this
jaded, worn devotee of pleasure fell headlong in love. Within an hour of
being introduced he was, Walpole says,
"making violent love to her at one end of the room, in my
Lord Chesterfield's house, while he was playing at
pharaoh at the other; that is, he neither saw the bank
nor his own cards, which were of £300 each. He soon lost
a thousand."
Such was the first meeting of the lovely Irish girl, and the man whom
she was to marry--a man who, even in the thraldom of a violent love,
could not refrain from indulging his passion for gambling. So inflamed
was he by this new beauty who had crossed his path that, to quote our
entertaining gossip again,
"two nights afterwards, being left alone with her, while
her mother and sister were at Bedford House, he found
himself so infatuated that he sent for a parson. The
doctor refused to perform the ceremony without licence or
ring--the Duke swore he would send for the Archbishop. At
last they were married with the ring of the bed-curtain,
at half an hour after twelve at night, at Mayfair Chapel.
The Scotch are enraged, the women mad that so much beauty
has had its effect."
If the wooing be happy that is not long in doing, the new Duchess should
have been a very enviable woman; as no doubt she was, for she had
achieved a splendid match; the daughter of the penniless Irish squireen
had won, in a few days, rank and riches, which many an Earl's daughter
would have been proud to capture; and, although her Ducal husband was
"debauched, and damaged in his fortune and his person," he was her very
slave, and, as far as possible to such a man, did his best to make her
happy.
Translated to a new world of splendour the Irish girl seems to have
borne herself with astonishing dignity and modesty. She might, indeed,
have been cradled in a Duke's palace, instead of in a "dilapidated
farmhouse in the wilds of Ireland," so naturally did she take to her
new _rôle_. When Her Grace, wearing her Duchess's coronet, made her
curtsy to the King one March day in 1752,
"the crowd was so great, that even the noble mob in the
drawing-room clambered upon tables and chairs to look at
her. There are mobs at the doors to see her get into her
chair; and people go early to get places at the theatre
when it is known that she will be there."
A few weeks after the marriage, the Duke of Hamilton conducted his bride
to the home of his ancestors; and never perhaps has any but a Royal
bride made such a splendid progress to her future home. Along the entire
route from London to Scotland she was greeted with cheering crowds
struggling to catch a glimpse of the famous beauty, whose romantic story
had stirred even the least sentimental to sympathy and curiosity. When
they stopped one night at a Yorkshire inn, "seven hundred people," we
are told, "sat up all night in and about the house merely to see the
Duchess get into her post-chaise the next morning."
Arrived at her husband's Highland Castle she was received with honours
that might almost have embarrassed a Queen, and which must have seemed
strange indeed to the woman whose memories of sordid life in that small
cottage on the outskirts of Dublin were still so vivid. Indeed no Queen
could have led a more stately life than was now opened to her.
"The Duke of Hamilton," says Walpole, to whom the world
is indebted for so much that it knows of the Gunning
sisters, "is the abstract of Scotch pride. He and the
Duchess, at their own house, walk into dinner before
their company, sit together at the upper end of their own
table, eat off the same plate, and drink to nobody under
the rank of an Earl. Would not indeed," the genial old
chatterbox adds, "one wonder how they could get anybody,
either above or below that rank, to dine with them at
all? It is, indeed, a marvel how such a host could find
guests of any degree sufficiently wanting in self-respect
to sit at his table and endure his pompous insolence--the
insolence of an innately vulgar mind, which, unhappily,
is sometimes to be met even in the most exalted rank of
life."
Perhaps the proudest period in Duchess Betty's romantic life was when,
with her husband, the Duke, she paid a visit, in 1755, to Dublin, the
"dear, dirty" city she had known in the days of her poverty and
obscurity, when her greatest dread was the sight of a bailiff in the
house, and her highest ambition to procure a dress to display her
budding charms at a dance. Her stay in Dublin was one long, intoxicating
triumph. "No Queen," she said, "could have been more handsomely
treated." Wherever she went she was followed by mobs, fighting to get a
glimpse of her, or to touch the hem of her gown, and blissful if they
could win a smile from the "darlint Duchess" who had brought so much
glory to old Ireland.
Her wedded life, however, was destined to be brief. Her husband had one
foot in his premature grave when he put the curtain-ring on her finger;
but, beyond all doubt, his marriage gave him a new if short lease of
life. She became a widow in 1758; and before she had worn her weeds
three months she had a swarm of suitors buzzing round her. The Duke of
Bridgewater was among the first to fall on his knees before the
fascinating widow, who, everybody now vowed, was lovelier than ever; but
he proved too exacting in his demands to please Her Grace. In fact, the
only one of all her new wooers on whom she could smile was Colonel John
Campbell, who, although a commoner, would one day blossom into a Duke of
Argyll; and she gave her hand to "handsome Jack" within twelve months of
weeping over the grave of her first husband.
"It was a match," Walpole says, "that would not disgrace
Arcadia. Her beauty had made enough sensation, and in
some people's eyes is even improved. She has a most
pleasing person, countenance and manner; and if they
could but carry to Scotland some of our sultry English
weather, they might restore the ancient pastoral life,
when fair kings and queens reigned at once over their
subjects and their sheep."
It was under such Arcadian conditions that Betty Gunning began her
second venture in matrimony, which proved as happy as its promise.
Probably the eleven years which the Dowager-Duchess had to wait for her
next coronet were the happiest of her life; and when at last Colonel
Jack became fifth Duke of Argyll she was able to resume the life of
stately splendour which had been hers with her first Duke. By this time
her beauty had begun to show signs of fading.
"As she is not quite so charming as she was," says
Walpole, "I do not know whether it is not better to
change her title than to retain that which puts one in
mind of her beauty."
But what she may have lost in physical charms she had gained in social
prestige. She was appointed Lady of the Bedchamber to Queen Charlotte;
and was one of the three ladies who acted as escort to the Princess
Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz to the arms of her reluctant husband,
George III. It is said that when the young German bride came in sight of
the palace of her future husband, she turned pale and showed such signs
of terror as to force a smile from the Duchess who sat by her side. Upon
which the frightened young Princess remarked, "My dear Duchess, you may
laugh, for you have been married twice; but it is no joke for me." Her
life as Lady of the Bedchamber appears to have been by no means a bed of
roses, for Charlotte proved so jealous of the attentions paid to the
beautiful Duchess by her husband, the King, that at one time she
contemplated resigning her post. The letter of resignation was actually
written and despatched; but Her Grace, who did not approve altogether of
its language, added this naive postscript before sending it, "Though _I_
wrote the letter, it was the Duke who dictated it."
Boswell, when describing a visit he paid to Inverary Castle, in
Johnson's company, gives us no very favourable impression of the
Duchess's courtesy as hostess. When the Duke conducted him to the
drawing-room and announced his name,
"the Duchess," he says, "who was sitting with her
daughter and some other ladies, took not the least
notice of me. I should have been mortified at being thus
coldly received by a lady of whom I, with the rest of the
world, have always entertained a very high admiration,
had I not been consoled by the obliging attention of the
Duke."
During dinner, when Boswell ventured to drink Her Grace's good health,
she seems equally to have ignored him. And while paying the utmost
deference and attention to Johnson, the only remark she deigned to make
to his fellow-guest was a contemptuous "I fancy you must be a
Methodist." In fairness to the Duchess it should be said that Boswell
had incurred her grave displeasure by taking part against her in the
famous Douglas Case in which she was deeply interested; and this was no
doubt the reason why for once she forgot the elementary demands of
hospitality as well as the courtesy due to her rank; and why, when
Johnson mentioned his companion by name, she answered coldly, "I know
nothing of Mr Boswell."
The Duchess saw her daughter, Lady Betty Hamilton, wedded to Lord
Stanley, the future Earl of Derby, a union in which she paid by a life
of misery for her mother's scheming ambition; and died in 1790, thirty
years after her sister Maria drew the last breath of her short life
behind drawn bed-curtains in her darkened room.
To Betty Gunning, the squireen's daughter, fell the unique distinction
of marrying two dukes, refusing a third, and becoming the mother of four
others, two of whom were successive Dukes of Hamilton, and two of
Argyll.