Part 20 (1/2)
”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 pa.s.sion.”
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 s.e.x.”
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 pa.s.sion 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 pa.s.sion 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 _role_. When Her Grace, wearing her d.u.c.h.ess's coronet, made her curtsy to the King one March day in 1752,
”the crowd was so great, that even the n.o.ble 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 Yorks.h.i.+re inn, ”seven hundred people,” we are told, ”sat up all night in and about the house merely to see the d.u.c.h.ess get into her post-chaise the next morning.”
Arrived at her husband's Highland Castle she was received with honours that might almost have embarra.s.sed 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 d.u.c.h.ess, 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 n.o.body 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 d.u.c.h.ess” 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-d.u.c.h.ess 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 t.i.tle than to retain that which puts one in mind of her beauty.”