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.
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.
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.
