"Bellenden we needs must praise,
Who, as down the stairs she jumps,
Sings 'Over the hills and far away,'
Despising doleful dumps."
Walpole says she was never mentioned by her contemporaries but as the
_most perfect creature_ they had ever known. The present Duke wedded
that charming child, Lady Elizabeth Leveson Gower, who sits on her
mother's knee in that surpassingly fine picture by Lawrence, called
"Lady Gower and Child." And his son is allied to the Princess Louise,
the most comely of Victoria's daughters.
After her sister's death, in 1760, her Grace of Argyll suffered a
decline in health. She was ordered abroad for change. She was
appointed to accompany the Princess Sophia Charlotte on her journey to
England to be married to the King. As they neared the ceremony in
London, the Princess became nervous. Her Grace essayed to quiet her
fears. "Ah, my dear Duchess, _you_ may laugh at me, but _you_ have
been married twice," said the Princess. The Duchess became one of the
ladies of the bedchamber, and was in much favor with the Queen.
In 1767, her father died at Somerset House, and her mother, the Hon.
Mrs. Gunning, in 1770. There were three sisters in the family besides
our heroines: Sophia Gunning died, an infant, in 1737; Lissy, who died
in 1752, aged eight years; and Catherine, who was married, in 1769, to
Robert Travis an Irish squire in her own rank of life. She died, too,
at Somerset House, in 1773, where she was an upper housekeeper. A
brother entered the army, fought at Bunker Hill, and became a
major-general in 1787. He was much of a ladies' man. He married a Miss
Minfie, author of some novels, and they had a daughter who aspired to
repeat the successes of her famous aunts. She managed to marry the
Hon. Stephen Digby, who had lost his first wife, a daughter of Lord
Ilchester, in 1787. The Duchess of Argyll was created, in 1776, a
peeress of England as Baroness Hamilton of Hambledon County,
Leicester, and died in December, 1790. By her second marriage she had
two sons, successively Dukes of Argyll, and two daughters, one of
whom, Lady Charlotte Campbell, attained some fame as a novelist as
Lady Charlotte Bury, she having married Colonel John Campbell and
secondly Rev. Edward Bury.
We have no evidence of the possession of bright Irish wit by the
double-duchessed beauty. Ingenuous enthusiasm, perfect simplicity, and
unfailing good humor ever marked her manner, and were a captivating
adjunct to her great facial charm. Walpole writes of a pretty sight
when their Graces of Hamilton and of Richmond with Lady Ailesbury
sitting in a boat together, and proceeds to tell of the suspected
jealousy by she of Hamilton of the beauty of his niece, daughter of
Sir Edward Walpole, who became the bride of Earl Waldegrave, and later
married the Duke of Gloucester, the King's youngest brother. At
another time, when a lady wrote telling him of the advent of a beauty
who was expected to outvie the Gunnings, he replies: "There was to
have been a handsomer every summer these seven years, but when the
seasons come they all seem to have been addled by the winter."
One day the housekeeper of Hampton Court was showing the palace to
visitors when the sisters were there. She threw open the door where
they were sitting, saying, "This is our beauty-room." The pictures and
galleries were forgotten by the crowd, which gazed on the beauties
instead.
For a decade their beauty was regnant in London. They were not
politicians as were their Graces of Gordon and Devonshire, nor had
they the ability to become such. Neither were they the associates of
brilliant, intellectual men, but participants in the gay, vacuous,
showy society of the rapid set of the aristocracy. The elder sister
gained the coronet of Coventry, but her vanity caused her own undoing;
the younger was a part of the exhibition of "Beauty and the Beast." A
high price was paid for her position by the endurance of a period of
tyranny and terror.
Some praise must be accorded the beauties, for at a time of much
licentiousness of a profligate society and tolerated coarsenesses, the
sisters determinedly kept their names free from ignoble soil and
scandal.
[Illustration: MARIA COUNTESS OF COVENTRY by HAMILTON]