WHEN Mr. Boswell had been snubbed, and very soundly snubbed too, by a
Duchess, one might fancy that his ambition was fully satisfied. But he
was possibly the most persevering of the order of _Pachydermata_ at
that time extant; and in the matter of snubs he had the appetite of a
leviathan. He was fired with the desire to be snubbed once more by Her
Grace--and he was. Without waiting to catch her eye, he raised his glass
and, bowing in her direction, said:
“My Lady Duchess, I have the honour to drink Your Grace's good health.”
The Duchess did not allow her conversation with Dr. Johnson to be
interrupted by so flagrant a piece of politeness; she continued chatting
quite pleasantly to the great man, ignoring the little one. That was how
she had got on in life; and, indeed, a better epitome of the whole art
of getting on in life could scarcely be compiled even by the cynical
nobleman who wrote letters to his son instructing him in this and other
forms of progress--including the Rake's.
Mr. Boswell, who, as usual, is the pitiless narrator of the incident,
records his satisfaction at having attained to the distinction of a snub
from the beautiful creature at whose table he was sitting, and we are,
as usual, deeply indebted to him for giving us an illuminating glimpse
of the Duchess of whom at one time all England and the greater part of
Ireland were talking. He also mentions that Her Grace made use of an
idiom by which her Irish upbringing revealed itself. If we had not Mr.
Boswell's account of his visit to Inveraray to refer to we might be
tempted to believe that Horace Walpole deviated into accuracy when he
attributed to the Duchess of Argyll, as well as her sister, the Countess
of Coventry, the brogue of a bog-trotter. It was only by her employment
of an idiom common to the south and west of Ireland and a few other
parts of the kingdom, that Her Grace made him know that she had not been
educated in England, or for that matter in Scotland, where doubtless Mr.
Boswell fondly believed the purest English in the world was spoken.
[Illustration: 0121]
Mr. Boswell faithfully records--sometimes with glee and occasionally
with pride--many snubs which he received in the course of a lifetime of
great pertinacity, and some that he omitted to note, his contemporaries
were obliging enough to record; but on none did he reflect with more
satisfaction than that, or those, which he suffered in the presence of
the Duchess of Argyll.
It happened during that memorable tour to the Hebrides to which he lured
Johnson in order to show his countrymen how great was his intimacy with
the man who traduced them once in his Dictionary and daily in his life.
It was like Boswell to expect that he would impress the Scottish nation
by leading Johnson to view their fine prospects--he certainly was never
foolish enough to hope to impress Johnson by introducing the Scottish
nation to him. In due time, however, the exploiter and the exploited
found themselves in the neighbourhood of Inveraray, the Duke of Argyll's
Castle, and the stronghold of the Clan Campbell.
It chanced that the head of the great family was in residence at this
time, and Mr. Boswell hastened to apprise him of the fact that the great
Dr. Johnson was at hand. He called at the Castle very artfully shortly
after the dinner hour, when he believed the Duchess and her daughter
would have retired to a drawing-room. He was successful in finding the
Duke still at the dinner-table, the ladies having retired. In the course
of the interview the Duke said: “Mr. Boswell, won't you have some tea?”
and Mr. Boswell, feeling sure that the Duchess could not go very far in
insulting him when other people were present, followed his host into
the drawing-room. “The Duke,” he records, “announced my name, but the
Duchess, who was sitting with her daughter, Lady Betty Hamilton, and
some other ladies, took not the least notice of me. I should,” he
continues, “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.”
The Duke was, indeed, obliging enough to invite Johnson to dinner the
next day, and Mr. Boswell was included in the invitation. (So it is that
the nursery governess gets invited to the table in the great house
to which she is asked to bring the pretty children in her charge.) Of
course, Boswell belonged to a good family, and his father was a judge.
It was to a Duke of Argyll--not the one who was now so obliging--that
the Laird of Auchinleck brought his son, James Boswell, to be examined
in order to find out whether he should be put into the army or some
other profession. Still, he would never have been invited to Inveraray
at this time or any other unless he had had charge of Johnson. No one
was better aware of this fact than Boswell; but did he therefore decline
the invitation? Not he. Mr. Boswell saw an opportunity ahead of him. He
had more than once heard Johnson give an account of how he had behaved
when the King came upon him in the Royal Library; and probably he had
felt melancholy at the reflection that he himself had had no part or
lot in the incident. It was all Dr. Johnson and the King. But now he was
quick to perceive that when, in after years, people should speak with
bated breath of Dr. Johnson's visit to Inveraray they would be compelled
to say: “And Mr. Boswell, the son of auld Auchinleck, was there too.”
He knew very well that there were good reasons why Mr. Boswell could
not hope to be a _persona grata_ to the Duchess of Argyll. In the great
Douglas lawsuit the issue of which was of considerable importance to the
Duke of Hamilton, the son of Her Grace, the Boswells were on the side of
the opposition, and had been very active on this side into the bargain.
James Boswell himself narrowly escaped being committed for contempt
of court for publishing a novel founded on the Douglas cause and
anticipating in an impudent way the finding of the judges. Had the
difference been directly with the Duke of Argyll some years earlier, no
doubt every man in the Clan Campbell would have sharpened his skene when
it became known that a friend of an opponent of the MacCallein More
was coming, and have awaited his approach with complacency; but now the
great chief tossed Boswell his invitation when he was asking Johnson,
and Boswell jumped at it as a terrier jumps for a biscuit, and he
accompanied his friend to the Castle.
The picture which he paints of his second snubbing is done in his best
manner. “I was in fine spirits,” he wrote, “and though sensible that I
had the misfortune of not being in favour with the Duchess, I was not in
the least disconcerted, and offered Her Grace some of the dish which was
before me.” Later on he drank Her Grace's health, although, he adds, “I
knew it was the rule of modern high life not to drink to anybody.” Thus
he achieved the snub he sought; but he acknowledges that he thought
the Duchess rather too severe when she said: “I know nothing of Mr.
Boswell.” On reflection, however, he received “that kind of consolation
which a man would feel who is strangled by a silken cord.”
It seems strange that no great painter has been inspired by the theme
and the scene. The days of “subject pictures” are, we are frequently
told, gone by. This may be so, generally speaking, but every one knows
that a “subject picture,” if its “subject” lends itself in any measure
to the advertising of an article of commerce, will find a ready
purchaser, so fine a perception of the aspirations of art--practical
art--exists in England, and even in Scotland, in the present day.
Now, are not the elements of success apparent to any one of imagination
in this picture of the party sitting round the table in the great hall
of Inveraray--Dr. Johnson chatting to the beautiful Duchess and her
daughter at one side, the Duke looking uncomfortable at the other, when
he sees Mr. Boswell on his feet with his glass in his hand bowing toward
Her Grace? No doubt Her Grace had acquainted His Grace with the attitude
she meant to assume in regard to Mi. Boswell, so that he was not
astonished--only uncomfortable--when Mr. Boswell fished for his snub.
Surely arrangements could be made between the art patron and the artist
to paint a name and a certain brand upon the bottle--a bottle must, of
course, be on the table; but if this is thought too realistic the name
could easily be put on the decanter--from which Mr. Boswell has just
replenished his glass! Why, the figure of Dr. Johnson alone should
make the picture a success--i.e. susceptible of being reproduced as an
effective poster in four printings. “Sir,” said Dr. Johnson, “claret for
boys, port for men, but brandy for heroes.” Yes, but whose brandy? There
is a hint for a great modern art patron--a twentieth-century art patron
is a man who loves art for what he can make out of it.
Dr. Johnson was unmistakably the honoured guest this day at Inveraray;
and perhaps, while the lovely Duchess hung upon his words of wisdom, his
memory may have gone back to a day when he was not so well known, and
yet by some accident found himself in a room with the then Duchess of
Argyll. Upon that occasion he had thought it due to himself to be rude
to the great lady, in response to some fancied remissness on her
part. He had nothing to complain of now. The Duchess with whom he
was conversing on terms of perfect equality--if Her Grace made any
distinction between them it was, we may rest assured, only in a way that
would be flattering to his learning--was at the head of the peerage for
beauty, and there was no woman in the kingdom more honoured than she had
been. He may have been among the crowds who hung about the Mall in St.
James's Park twenty-two years before, waiting patiently until the two
lovely Miss Gunnings should come forth from their house in Westminster
to take the air. The Duchess of Argyll was the younger of the two
sisters.
The story of the capture of the town by the pair of young Irish girls
has been frequently told, and never without the word _romantic_ being
applied to it. But really there was very little that can be called
romantic in the story of their success. There is far more of this
element in many of the marriages affecting the peerage in these
unromantic days. There is real romance in the story of a young duke's
crossing the Atlantic with a single introduction, but that to the
daughter of a millionaire with whom he falls madly in love and whom he
marries as soon as the lawyers can make out the settlements. There is
real romance in the idyll of the young marquis who is fortunate
enough to win the affection of an ordinary chorus girl; and every year
witnesses such-like alliances--they used to be called _mésalliances_
long ago. There have also been instances of the daughters of English
tradesmen marrying foreign nobles, whom they sometimes divorce as
satisfactorily as if they were the daughters of wealthy swindlers on
the other side of the Atlantic. In such cases there are portraits
and paragraphs in some of the newspapers, and then people forget that
anything unusual has happened. As a matter of fact, nothing unusual has
happened.
In the romantic story of the Gunnings we have no elements of that
romance which takes the form of a _mésalliance_. Two girls, the
granddaughters of one viscount and the nieces of another, came to London
with their parents one year, and early the next married peers--the elder
an earl, the younger a duke. Like thousands of other girls, they had no
money; but, unlike hundreds of other girls who marry into the peerage,
they were exceptionally good-looking.
Where is there an element of romance in all this? The girls wedded men
in their own station in life, and, considering their good looks,
they should have done very much better for themselves. The duke was a
wretched _roué_, notable for his excesses even in the days when excess
was not usually regarded as noteworthy. He had ruined his constitution
before he was twenty, and he remained enfeebled until, in a year or
two, he made her a widow. The earl was a conceited, ill-mannered prig--a
solemn, contentious, and self-opinionated person who was deservedly
disliked in the town as well as the country.
Not a very brilliant marriage either of these. With the modern chorus
girl the earl is on his knees at one side, and the gas man on the other.
But with the Miss Gunnings it was either one peer or another. They were
connected on their mother's side with at least two families of nobility,
and on their father's side with the spiritual aristocracy of some
generations back: they were collateral descendants of the great Peter
Gunning, Chancellor of Oxford and Bishop of Ely, and he was able to
trace his lineage back to the time of Henry VIII. From a brother of this
great man was directly descended the father of the two girls and also
Sir Robert Gunning, Baronet, who held such a high post in the diplomatic
service as Minister Plenipotentiary to Berlin, and afterwards to St.
Petersburg. Members of such families might marry into the highest order
of the peerage without the alliance being criticised as “romantic.” The
girls did not do particularly well for themselves. They were by birth
entitled to the best, and by beauty to the best of the best. As it was,
the one only became the wife of a contemptible duke, the other of a
ridiculous earl. It may really be said that they threw themselves away.
Of course, it was Walpole's gossip that is accountable for much of the
false impression which prevailed in respect of the Gunnings. From the
first he did his best to disparage them. He wrote to Mann that they were
penniless, and “scarce gentlewomen.” He could not ignore the fact that
their mother was the Honourable Bridget Gunning; but, without knowing
anything of the matter, he undertook to write about the “inferior tap”
on their father's side. In every letter that he wrote at this time he
tried to throw ridicule upon them, alluding to them as if they were
nothing better than the barefooted colleens of an Irish mountain-side
who had come to London to seek their fortunes. As usual, he made all
his letters interesting to his correspondents by introducing the latest
stories respecting them; he may not have invented all of these, but
some undoubtedly bear the Strawberry Hill mark, and we know that Walpole
never suppressed a good tale simply because it possessed no grain of
truth.
Now, the true story of the Gunnings can be ascertained without
any reference to Walpole's correspondence. Both girls were born in
England--the elder, Maria, in 1731, the younger in 1732. When they were
still young their father, a member of the English Bar, inherited his
brother's Irish property. It had once been described as a “tidy estate,”
but it was now in a condition of great untidiness. In this respect it
did not differ materially from the great majority of estates in
Ireland. Ever since the last “settlement” the country had been in a
most unsettled condition, and no part of it was worse than the County
Roscommon, where Castle Coote, the residence of the Gunning family, was
situated. It might perhaps be going too far to say that the wilds of
Connaught were as bad as the wilds of Yorkshire at the same date, but
from all the information that can be gathered on the subject there does
not seem to have been very much to choose between Roscommon and the
wilder parts of Yorkshire. The peasantry were little better than
savages; the gentry were little worse. Few of the elements of civilized
life were to be found among the inhabitants. The nominal owners of the
land were content to receive tribute from their tenantry in the form of
the necessaries of life, for money as a standard of exchange was rarely
available. Even in the present day in many districts in the west
of Ireland cattle occupy the same place in the imagination of the
inhabitants as they do in Zululand. The Irish bride is bargained away
with so many cows; and for a man to say--as one did in the very county
of Roscommon the other day--that he never could see the difference of
two cows between one girl and another, may be reckoned somewhat cynical,
but it certainly is intelligible.
But if rent was owing--and it usually was--and if it was not paid in the
form of geese, or eggs, or pork, or some other products of low farming
and laziness, it remained unpaid; for the landlord had no means of
enforcing his claims by any law except the law of the jungle. He might
muster his followers and plunder his debtors, and no doubt this system
of rent-collecting prevailed for several years after one of the many
“settlements” of the country had taken place, yet by intermarriage with
the natives, and a general assimilation to their condition of life by
the newcomers, these raids for rent became unpopular and impracticable.
The consequence was that the landlords--such as remained on their
estates--were living from hand to mouth.
But if the fact that the King's writ failed to run in these parts was
of disadvantage to the landlords in one respect, it was of no
inconsiderable advantage to them in another; for it enabled them with
a light heart to contract debts in Dublin and in the chief towns. They
knew that the rascally process server, should he have the hardihood to
make any attempt to present them with the usual summons, would do so at
the risk of his life; and a knowledge of this fact made the “gentry” at
once reckless and lawless. The consequence was that Ireland was regarded
as no place for a man with any respect for his neighbours or for himself
to live in. It became the country of the agent and the squireen.
It was to one of the worst parts of this country that John Gunning
brought his wife and four children--the eldest was eight years and
the youngest three months--and here he tried to support them off the
“estate.” He might possibly have succeeded if his aspirations had been
humble and his property unencumbered. It so happened, however, that his
father had been the parent of sixteen children, and the estate was still
charged with the maintenance of ten of these. Thus hampered, Mr. Gunning
and the Honourable Bridget Gunning were compelled to adopt the mode of
life of the other gentry who were too poor to live out of Ireland,
and they allowed the education of their family to become a minor
consideration to that of feeding them.
Mr. Gunning and his wife were undoubtedly the originals of the type of
Irish lady and gentleman to be found in so many novels and plays of
the latter part of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth
centuries. He was the original “heavy father” who, with the addition
of a ridiculous nondescript brogue, was so effectively dealt with by
numerous writers until Thackeray took him in hand; and Mrs. Gunning was
the first of the tradition of Irish mothers with daughters to dispose of
by the aid of grand manners and a great deal of contriving. True to this
tradition, which originated with them, the lady was certainly the
head of the household--a sorry household it must have been at Castle
Coote--during the ten years that elapsed before the migration to
England.
Mr. Gunning was a fine figure of a gentleman, a handsome, loquacious
person with a great sense of his own dignity and an everlasting
consciousness of the necessity to maintain it at something approximate
to its proper level, and, like other persons of the same stamp, never
particularly successful in the means employed to effect this object. It
is doubtful if a loud conversational style, with repeated references to
the brilliant past of his family and predictions as to the still more
brilliant future that would have been achieved by its representative but
for the outrageous fortune that flung him into the bogs of Roscommon,
produced a more vivid impression upon his associates in Ireland than it
would be likely to do among a more credulous community. In Ireland he
resembled the young gentleman who went to educate the French, but was
discouraged at the outset when he found that even the children in the
streets spoke better French than he did. Mr. Gunning could teach the
Irish squireens nothing in the way of boasting; and he soon found that
they were capable of giving him some valuable instruction as to the
acquiring of creditors and their subsequent evasion. Whatever their
educational deficiencies may have been, it must be admitted that they
had mastered these arts. Much as he despised his ancestral home, he
found, after repeated visits to Dublin, that his heart was, after all,
in Castle Coote, and that, for avoiding arrest for debt, there was no
place like home.
The Honourable Mrs. Gunning must have become dreadfully tired of this
florid person and of the constant worry incidental to the control of
such a household as his must have been. Her life must have been spent
contriving how the recurrent crises could be averted, and so long as she
was content to remain in the seclusion of the Irish village her efforts
were successful. We do not hear that the bailiffs ever got so far as the
hall door of their ramshackle mansion; there was a bog very handy, and
the holes which served as a rudimentary system of natural drainage
were both deep and dark. The topography of the district was notoriously
puzzling to the officers from the Dublin courts.
But with all her success in this direction one maybe pretty sure that
her life must have been very burthensome to the Honourable Mrs. Gunning.
She had social ambitions, as befitted a daughter of a noble house, and
on this account she never allowed herself to sink to the level of the
wives of the squireens around her, who were quite content with the rude
jollity of an Irish household--with the “lashings and leavings” to eat,
and with the use of tumblers instead of wineglasses at table. She was
the daughter of a peer, and she never forgot this fact; and here it must
be mentioned that, however culpably she may have neglected the education
of her children in some respects, she took care that they avoided the
provincial brogue of their Irish neighbours.
Perhaps it was because Walpole knew nothing of the tradition of the
English settlers in Ireland that he referred in his letters to various
correspondents to the appalling brogue of both the Gunning girls; or
perhaps he, as usual, aimed only at making his correspondence more
amusing by this device. But every one who knows something of the
“settlements” is aware of the fact that the new-comers had such a
contempt for the native way of pronouncing English that they were most
strenuous in their efforts to hand down to their children the tradition
of pronunciation which they brought into the country. They were not
always so successful as they wished to be; but within our own times the
aspiration after a pure “English accent” is so great that even in the
National Schools the teachers, the larger number of whom bear Celtic
names, have been most industrious both in getting rid of their native
brogue and in compelling their pupils to do the same; and yet it is
certain that people have been much more tolerant in this respect in
Ireland during the past half-century than they were a hundred years
earlier.
Of course, a scientific analysis of the pronunciation of the English
language by, say, a native of the wilds of Yorkshire and by a native of
the wilds of Connemara would reveal the fact that fewer corruptions of
the speech are habitual to the latter than to the former, the “brogue”
being far less corrupt than the “burr.” It was not enough for the
settlers, however, that their children should speak English in Ireland
more correctly than their forefathers did in England; they insisted on
the maintenance of the English tradition of pronunciation, erroneous
though it might be. So that the suggestion that the daughters of the
Gunning family, who had never heard English spoken with the brogue of
the native Irish until they were eight or nine years of age, spoke the
tongue of the stage Irish peasant would seem quite ridiculous to any
one who had given even the smallest amount of study to the conditions
of speech prevailing in Ireland even in the present tolerant age,
when employment is not denied to any one speaking with the broadest of
brogues. Some years ago such an applicant would have had no chance of
a “billet”--unless, in a literal sense, to hew, with the alternative of
the drawing of water.
The truth, then, is that the Gunning girls had practically neither more
nor less of that form of education to be acquired from the study of
books or “lessons” than the average young woman of their own day who had
been “neglected.” Between the years 1750 and 1800 there were in England
hundreds of young ladies who were as highly educated as a junior-grade
lady clerk in the Post Office Department is to-day; but there were
also thousands who were as illiterate as the Gunnings without any one
thinking that it mattered much one way or another.
[Illustration: 0139]
And it really did not matter much that Maria Gunning spelt as vaguely as
did Shakespere, or Shakspere, or Shakespeare, or Shakspear, or whatever
he chose to write himself at the moment. Correctness of orthography is
absolutely necessary for any young lady who wishes to be a success in
the Postal Department, but Miss Gunning possessed some qualifications of
infinitely greater importance in the estimation of the world. She was of
good family and she was beautiful exceedingly. Moreover, she possessed
the supreme grace of naturalness--the supreme grace and that which
includes all other graces, which, like butterflies, hover over
womankind, but seldom descend in a bevy upon any one of the race. She
was as natural as a lily flower, and for the same reason. To be natural
il came to her by Nature, and that was how she won the admiration of
more people than the beauty of Helen of Troy brought to their death. She
was not wise. But had she been wise she would never have left Ireland.
She would have known that obscurity is the best friend that any young
woman so beautiful as she was could have. She would have remained in
Roscommon, and she would have been one of those women who are happy
because they have no story. But, of course, had she been wise she would
not have been natural, and so there her beauty goes by the board in a
moment.
The Honourable Mrs. Gunning could not have been startled when
the knowledge came to her that she was the mother of two girls of
exceptional beauty. The same knowledge comes to every mother of two
girls in the world, though this knowledge is sometimes withheld from
the rest of the world; but even then the mother's faith is not
shaken--except in regard to the eyesight of the rest of the world.
Doubtless Mrs. Gunning thought much better of Ireland when she found
that her judgment on the beauty of her daughters was shared by all the
people who saw the girls. From the daily exclamation of wonder--the
exaggerated expressions of appreciation uttered by a fervent
peasantry--when the girls were seen in their own kitchen or on the
roadside, the mother's ambition must have received a fresh stimulus. And
given an ambitious mother, whose life has been one of contriving to do
things that seem out of her power to accomplish, the achievement of
her object is only a matter of time--provided that the father does not
become an obstruction. Mrs. Gunning was not extravagant in her longings.
Her Delectable Mountains were those which surround the City of Dublin.
Her social ambitions did not extend beyond “The Castle.”
When the eldest of her three daughters was scarcely nineteen the
aggregation of savings and credit--the latter predominant--seemed
sufficient to justify the expedition. A house was taken in a fashionable
street, close to the most splendid Mall in Europe, and furnished by some
credulous tradesmen, and the social campaign was begun by a parade of
the two girls and their mother. Alas! the young beauties attracted
only too much attention. The inquiries as to their style and title were
unfortunately not limited. In Dublin for generations the tradespeople
have been accustomed to take an intelligent and quite intelligible
interest in the aristocracy and beauty dwelling in their midst; and it
took only a few days for the report to go round that the exquisite young
ladies were the daughters of Mr. John Gunning, of Castle Coote.
This information meant much more to some of the least desirable of
the inquirers than it did to the wealthy and well connected of the
population; and among the least desirable of all were some tradesmen who
for years had had decrees waiting to be executed against Mr. Gunning at
a more convenient place for such services than Castle Coote. The result
was that within a week the beauty of his daughters had made such a stir
in Dublin that bailiffs were in the house and Mr. Gunning was out of it.
It is at this point in the history that the Troubadour unslings his
lute, feeling the potentialities of Romance in the air; and, given the
potentialities of Romance and the wandering minstrel, one may be sure
that the atmosphere will resound with Romance. We are told on such high
authority as is regarded quite satisfactory (by the Troubadour), that
the weeping of the mother and the beautiful girls under the coarse stare
of the bailiffs attracted the attention of a charming and sympathetic
young actress who was taking the air in the street, and that, as might
only be expected, she hastened to enter the house to offer consolation
to those who were in trouble--this being unquestionably the mission
which is most congenial to the spirit of the _soubrette_. On being at
once informed of all by the communicative mother--the Troubadour is not
such a fool as to lay down his lute to inquire if it was likely that a
lady who possessed her full share of Irish pride would open her heart
to a stranger and an actress--the young visitor showed her sympathy by
laying herself open to prosecution and imprisonment through helping in
a scheme to make away with all the valuables she could lay her hands on.
But she went still further, and invited the young ladies to stay at her
house so long as it suited them to do so.
We are told that this young actress was George Ann Bellamy, but the
information comes from no better source than George Ann Bellamy herself,
and the statements of this young person, made when she was no longer
young or reputable, do not carry conviction to all hearers. Romance,
however, like youth, will not be denied, though the accuracy of an
actress may, and people have always been pleased to believe that Miss
Bellamy and Mr. Thomas Sheridan, the much-harassed lessee of the Smock
Alley Theatre in Dublin, were the means of obtaining for the Honourable
Mrs. Gunning and her daughters the invitation to the ball at the Castle
which resulted in the recognition of the girls' beauty by the great
world of fashion. The suggestion that their aunt, Miss Bourke, or
their uncle, Viscount Mayo, might have been quite as potent a factor in
solving the problem of how the invitation to a ball given by the Viceroy
to the people of Dublin came into the hands of the Miss Gunnings, may,
however, be worth a moment's consideration.
At any rate, the success made by the girls upon this occasion was
immediate. Before a day had passed all Dublin and Dublin Castle were
talking of their beauty, and the splendid Mall was crowded with people
anxious to catch a glimpse of the lovely pair when they took their walks
abroad. Lady Caroline Petersham, the charming lady whose name figures
frequently in Walpole's correspondence--it will be remembered that she
was one of that delightful little supper party at Ranelagh which he
describes--was in the entourage of the Viceroy, and quickly perceived
the possibilities of social prestige accruing to the hostess who might
be the means of introducing them to St. James's. There a new face meant
a new sensation lasting sometimes well into a second month, and Lady
Caroline had her ambitions as a hostess.
She was the Gunnings' best friend--assuming that social advancement is
an act of friendship--and it may safely be assumed that she was mainly
responsible for the extension of the area of the campaign entered on by
Mrs. Gunning, and that it was her influence which obtained for them the
passage to Chester in the Lord Lieutenant's yacht, and a bonus of £150
charged, as so many other jobs were, “upon the Irish Establishment.”
The “Irish Establishment” was the convenient Treasury out of which money
could be paid without the chance of unpleasant questions being asked in
Parliament respecting such disbursements.
Of course, it is not to be believed that such success as the young girls
encompassed in Dublin was reached without a word or two of detraction
being heard in regard to their behaviour. Mrs. Delany, amiable as
a moral gossip, or perhaps, a gossipy moralist, wrote to her sister
respecting them: “All that you have heard of the Gunnings is true,
except their having a fortune, but I am afraid they have a greater want
than that, which is discretion.” No doubt Mrs. Delany had heard certain
whispers of the girlish fun in which the elder of the sisters delighted;
but there has never been the smallest suggestion that her want of
discreetness ever approached an actual indiscretion. It may be assumed,
without doing an injustice to either of the girls, that their standard
of demeanour was not quite so elevated as that which the wife of Dean
Delany was disposed to regard as essential to be reached by any young
woman hoping to be thought well of by her pastors and masters. But the
steelyard measure was never meant to be applied to a high-spirited young
girl who has grown up among bogs and then finds herself the centre of
the most distinguished circle in the land, every person in which is
eagerly striving for the distinction of a word from her lips. Maria
Gunning may not have had much discretion, but she had enough to serve
her turn. She arrived in London with her sister, and no suggestion was
ever made--even by Walpole--that their mother had not taken enough care
of them.
In London they at once found their place in the centre of the most
fashionable--the most notorious--set; but while we hear of the many
indiscreet things that were done by certain of their associates, nothing
worse is attributed to either of the girls than an Irish brogue or an
Irish idiom--perhaps a word or two that sounded unmusical to fastidious
ears. Walpole began by ridiculing them, and, as has already been noted,
sneering at their birth; but when he found they were becoming the
greatest social success that his long day had known, he thought it
prudent to trim his sails and refer to them more reasonably: they were
acquiring too many friends for it to be discreet for him to continue
inventing gossip respecting them.
But what a triumph they achieved in town! Nothing had ever been known
like it in England, nor has anything approaching to it been known during
the century and a half that has elapsed since the beauty of these two
girls captured London. The opening of Parliament by the King in State
never attracted such crowds as thronged the Park when they walked in the
Mall. Never before had the guards to turn out at the Palace to disperse
the crowds who mobbed two young ladies who did not belong--except in a
distant way--to a Royal House. Upon one occasion the young Lord Clermont
and his friend were compelled to draw their swords to protect them from
the exuberant attentions of the crowd. “'Tis a warm day,” wrote George
Selwyn to Lord Carlisle, “and some one proposes a stroll to Betty's
fruit shop; suddenly the cry is raised, 'The Gunnings are coming,' and
we all tumble out to gaze and to criticise.”
“The famous beauties are more talked of than the change in the
Ministry,” wrote Walpole. “They make more noise than any one of their
predecessors since Helen of Troy; a crowd follows them wherever they
walk, and at Vauxhall they were driven away.”
This mobbing must have caused the girls much delightful inconvenience,
and one can see their mother acting the part--and overdoing it, after
the manner of her kind--of the distracted parent whose daughters have
just been restored to her arms. One can hear the grandiloquent thanks
of the father to the eligible young man with titles whose bravery
has protected his offspring--that would have been his word--from the
violence of the mob. The parents must have been very trying to the young
men in those days. But the mother showed herself to be rather more
than a match for one young man who hoped to win great fame as a
jocular fellow by playing a trick upon the family. Having heard of the
simplicity and credulousness of the girls, this gentleman, with another
of his kind, asked leave of Mrs. Gunning to bring to her house a certain
duke who was one of the greatest _partis_ of the day. On her complying,
he hired a common man, and, dressing him splendidly, conveyed him in
a coach to the Gunnings' house and presented him to the family as
the duke. But the man knew as little of the matter as did Walpole; he
assumed that she was nothing more than the adventurous wife of an Irish
squireen. He soon found out that he had made a mistake. Mrs. Gunning
rang the bell, and ordered the footman to turn the visitors out of
the house. But the family were soon consoled for this incident of the
impostor duke by the arrival of a real one, to say nothing of another
consolation prize in the form of an earl. In the meantime, however,
their popularity-had been increasing rather than diminishing. As a
matter of fact, although beauty may be reproached for being only skin
deep, it is very tenacious of life. A reputation for beauty is perhaps
the most enduring of all forms of notoriety. The renown that attaches to
the man who has painted a great picture, or to one who has made a great
scientific discovery, or to one who has been an eminent churchman or a
distinguished statesman, is, in point of popularity and longevity, quite
insignificant in comparison with that which is associated with the
name of a very beautiful woman. The crowds still surrounded the Miss
Gunnings, and the visit which they paid by command to King George II
gave them a position in the world of fashion that was consolidated by
the report of the charming _naivete_ of the reply made by Maria when the
King inquired if they had seen all the sights of London and if there
was any in particular which they would like to be shown. “Oh, I should
dearly like to see a coronation!” the girl is said to have cried. And as
that was just the sight for which the people of England were most eager,
she was acclaimed as their mouthpiece.
So they progressed in the career that had been laid out for them. Duels
were fought about them, and bets were made about them and their future.
For nearly a year there was no topic of the first order save only the
Progress of Beauty. The Duke had come boldly forward. He was a double
duke--his titles were Hamilton and Brandon--and he had sounded such
depths of depravity that he was possibly sincere in his desire to
convince the world that his taste in one direction had not become
depraved. Elizabeth Gunning may have accepted his service from a hope of
being the means of reforming him. But even if she were not to succeed in
doing so, her mother would have reminded her that her failure would not
make her the less a duchess. It is open, however, for one to believe
that this girl cared something for the man and was anxious to amend his
life.
Then we hear of her being with him at Lord Chesterfield's ball given
at the opening of his new mansion, her fancy dress being that of a
Quakeress. Three days later the world in which they lived awoke to learn
the astounding news that the Duke of Hamilton and Brandon had married
Elizabeth Gunning the previous night.
Here was romance beyond a precedent; and Walpole romanced about it
as usual. In his account of the nuptials he succeeds in making more
misstatements than one would believe it possible even for such a worker
in the art to encompass in half a dozen lines. “When her mother and
sister were at Bedford House,” he wrote to Mann, “a sudden ardour,
either of wine or love, seized upon him (the Duke); a parson was
promptly sent for, but on arriving, refused to officiate without the
important essentials of licence or ring. The Duke swore and talked of
calling in the Archbishop. Finally the parson's scruples gave way, the
licence was overlooked, and the lack of the traditional gold ring was
supplied by the ring of a bed curtain!”
This is very amusing, but it is not history. It is a clumsy fiction,
unworthy of the resources of the inventor. Sir Horace Mann must have
felt that his friend had a poor opinion of his intelligence if he meant
him to accept the assurance that the household of the Gunnings and the
fingers of His Grace were incapable of yielding to the fastidious parson
a better substitute for the traditional gold ring than the thing he
introduced. The facts of the incident were quite romantic enough without
the need for Walpole's embellishments. It was Valentine's Day, and what
more likely than that the suggestion should be made by the ardent
lover that so appropriate a date for a wedding would not come round for
another year! To suggest difficulties--impossibility--would only be to
spur him on to show that he was a true lover. However this may be, it
has long ago been proved that the midnight marriage took place in due
form at the Curzon Street Chapel in the presence of several witnesses.
And then Walpole went on to say that the wedding of Lord Coventry and
the elder sister took place at the same time. It so happened, however,
that a fortnight elapsed between the two ceremonies, and in the case of
the second, the ceremony took place in the full light of day.
The subsequent history of the two ladies is not without a note of
melancholy. The elder, pursued to the end by the malevolent slanders
of the man with the leer of the satyr perpetually on his face, died of
consumption after eight years of wedded life. The younger became a widow
two years earlier, and after being wooed by the Duke of Bridgewater,
whom she refused, sending him to his canal for consolation, married
Colonel Campbell, who in 1770 became the Fifth Duke of Argyll. Six
years later she was created a peeress in her own right, her title
being Baroness Hamilton of Hameldon in Leicestershire. In 1778 she
was appointed Mistress of the Robes. She attained to the additional
distinction of making the good Queen jealous, so that Her Majesty upon
one occasion overlooked her in favour of Lady Egremont. The Duchess at
once resigned, and only with difficulty was persuaded to withdraw her
resignation. She died in 1790.