A Georgian Pageant

by Frank Frankfort Moore

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.