A Georgian Pageant

by Frank Frankfort Moore

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.