Part 8

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.

THE FÊTE-CHAMPÊTRE

NO one knows to-day with whom the idea of having an English _fête-champêtre_ at The Oaks upon the occasion of the marriage of the young Lord Stanley to Lady Betty Hamilton originated. The secret was well kept; and it can be easily understood that in case of this innovation proving a fiasco, no one would show any particular desire to accept the responsibility of having started the idea. But turning out as it did, a great success, it might have been expected that many notable persons would lay claim to be regarded as its parents. A considerable number of distinguished people had something to do with it, and any one of them had certainly sufficient imagination, backed up by an acquaintance with some of the exquisite pieces of MM. Watteau and Fragonard, to suggest the possibility of perfecting such an enterprise even in an English June. It was the most diligent letter-writer of that age of letter-writing who had referred to the “summer setting in with its customary severity,” so that the trifling of the month of June with the assumption of the poets who have rhymed of its sunshine with rapture, was not an experience that was reserved for the century that followed. But in spite of this, the idea of a _fête-champêtre_, after the most approved French traditions, in an English demesne found favour in the eyes of Lord Stanley and his advisers, and the latter were determined that, whatever price might have to be paid for it, they would not run the chance of being blamed for carrying it out in a niggardly spirit.

The young Lord Stanley had as many advisers as any young nobleman with a large immediate allowance and prospects of a splendid inheritance may hope to secure. There was his _fiancée's_ mother, now the Duchess of Argyll, who was never disposed to frown down an undertaking that would place a member of one of her families in the forefront of the battle of the beauties for the most desirable _parti_ of the year.

The Duchess had both taste and imagination, so that people called her an Irishwoman, although she was born in England. Then there was Mr. George Selwyn, who said witty things occasionally and never missed a hanging. He was fully qualified to prompt a wealthy companion as to the best means to become notorious for a day. There was also young Mr. Conway, the gentleman who originated the diverting spectacle when Mrs. Baddeley and Mrs. Abington were escorted to the Pantheon. Any one of these, to say nothing of Lady Betty herself, who had some love for display, might have been inclined to trust an English June so far as to believe an _al fresco_ entertainment on a splendid scale quite possible.

On the whole, however, one is inclined to believe that it was Colonel Burgoyne who was responsible for the whole scheme at The Oaks. In addition to having become Lord Stanley's uncle by running away with his father's sister, he was a budding dramatist, and as such must have perceived his opportunity for exploiting himself at the expense of some one else--the dream of every budding dramatist. There is every likelihood that it was this highly accomplished and successful “gentleman-adventurer” who brought Lord Stanley up to the point of embarking upon his design for an entertainment such as had never been seen in England before--an entertainment that should include the production of a masque devised by Colonel Burgoyne and entitled _The Maid of The Oaks_. The fête came off, and it was pronounced the most brilliant success of the year 1774.

Lord Stanley was a very interesting young man; that is to say, he was a young man in whom no inconsiderable number of persons--mainly of the opposite sex--were greatly interested. Of this fact he seems to have been fully aware. A good many people--mainly of the opposite sex--felt very strongly on the subject of his marrying: it was quite time that he married, they said. His grandfather, the Earl of Derby, was eighty-four years of age, and it would be absurd to believe that he could live much longer. Lord Stanley being his heir, it was agreed that it was the young man's duty not to procrastinate in the matter of marriage. It is always understood that a patriarchal nobleman sings “_Nunc dimittis_” when he holds in his arms the second in direct succession to the title, and this happy consummation could, in the case of the aged Lord Derby, only be realised by the marriage of Lord Stanley.

He was small in stature, and extremely plain of countenance; still this did not prevent his name from being coupled with that of several notable--but not too notable--young women of his acquaintance. But as it was well known that he was greatly interested in the stage, it was thought that, perhaps, he might not be so complaisant as his best friends hoped to find him in regard to marrying. An ardent interest in the progress of the drama, especially in its lighter forms, has been known to turn a young man's attention from marriage, when it does not do what is far worse--turn his attention to it with too great zest. Before long, however, it became apparent that his lordship recognised in what direction his duty lay. There was a young lady connected with the Ducal House of Bedford--a niece of that old Duchess who played so conspicuous a part in the social and political history of the middle of the eighteenth century--and to her Lord Stanley became devoted. But just when every one assumed that the matter was settled, no one thinking it possible that the young lady would be mad enough to refuse such a _parti_, the news came that she had done so; and before people had done discussing how very eccentric were the Bedford connections, the announcement was made that Lord Stanley was to marry Lady Betty Hamilton, the beautiful daughter of a beautiful mother, the Duchess of Argyll.

There is in existence a letter written by the Duchess to Sir William Hamilton, in which she hints that Lord Stanley was an old suitor for the hand of her daughter. “Lady Betty might have taken the name of Stanley long ago if she had chose it,” she wrote, adding: “A very sincere attachment on his side has at last produced the same on hers.” This being so, it would perhaps be unsafe to assume that Lord Stanley proposed to Lady Betty out of pique at having been rejected by the other lady, though one might be disposed to take this view of the engagement.

The alternative view is that Lady Betty had been advised by her accomplished mother that if she played her cards well there was no reason why she should not so attract Lord Stanley as to lead him to be a suitor for her hand, and that the girl at last came to see that the idea was worth her consideration. Her portrait, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the year of her marriage, shows her to have been a graceful, girlish young creature; but her beauty could never have been comparable with that of her mother at the same age, or with that of her aunt, Lady Coventry, whom it is certain she closely resembled in character. Her mother, in her letter to Sir William Hamilton, apologises in a way for her liveliness, assuring him that such a disposition was not incompatible with serious thought upon occasions; and this gives us a hint that the reputation for vivacity which she always enjoyed was closely akin to that which made the life of Lady Coventry so very serious.

This was the young lady in whose honour the first English _fête champêtre_ was organised. To be more exact, or to get more into touch with the view of the Derby family, perhaps one should say that the _fête_ was set on foot in consideration of the honour the young lady was doing herself in becoming a member of the great house of Stanley. Different people look at a question of honour from different standpoints. Probably Colonel Burgoyne, although a member of the Derby family by marriage, left honour out of the question altogether, and only thought of his masque being produced at his nephew's expense.

And produced the masque was, and on a scale as expensive as the most ambitious author could desire. It was described, with comments, by all the great letter-writers of the time. Walpole has his leer and his sneer at its expense (literally). It was to cost no less than £5000, he said, and he ventured to suppose that in order to account for this enormous outlay Lord Stanley had bought up all the orange trees near London--no particular extravagance one would fancy--and that the hay-cocks would be of straw-coloured riband. George Selwyn thought it far from diverting. The Dowager Lady Gower affirmed that “all the world was there,” only she makes an exception of her relations the Bedfords--she called them “the Bloomsbury lot”--and said that the Duchess would not let any of them go because Her Grace thought that Lord Stanley should have taken his recent rejection by Her Grace's niece more to heart. Lady Betty's stepfather, the Duke of Argyll, said that the whole day was so long and fatiguing that only Lady Betty could have stood it all.

But did Lady Betty stand it all? It was rumoured in the best-informed circles that she had broken off the match the next day; and when one becomes acquainted with the programme of the day's doings one cannot but acknowledge that the rumour was plausible. She probably made an attempt in this direction; but on her fiancé's promising never to repeat the offence, withdrew her resolution.

The famous brothers Adam, whose genius was equally ready to build an Adelphi or to design a fanlight, had been commissioned to plan an entertainment on the most approved French models and to carry it out on the noblest scale, taking care, of course, that the central idea should be the masque of _The Maid of The Oaks_, and these large-minded artists accepted the order without demur. The pseudo-classical feeling entered, largely through the influence of the Adams, into every form of art at this period, though the famous brothers cannot be accused of originating the movement. Sir Joshua Reynolds painted his most charming ladies in the costume of Greeks, and Angelica Kauffmann depicted many of her early English episodes with the personages clad in togas which seemed greatly beyond their control. But for that matter every battle piece up to the date of Benjamin West's “Death of Wolfe” showed the combatants in classical armour; and Dr. Johnson was more than usually loud in his protests against the suggestion that a sculptor should put his statues of modern men into modern clothing.