Countess of Waldegrave
Duchess of Gloucester
17(?)-1807
Horace Walpole was convinced that even the Gunnings envied the beauty of Maria Walpole, his niece. "Yesterday," he writes, "t'other famous Gunning dined there. She has made a friendship with my charming niece, to disguise her jealousy." To the surprise of all London, Maria, daughter of Sir Edward Walpole and Maria Clements, married the Earl of Waldegrave, "for character and credit the first match in England." At her husband's death, she refused the Duke of Portland, but secretly married the Duke of Gloucester, brother to the King. Her admirers point out the romance of her fortunes--how she was daughter of a milliner, granddaughter of a great Prime Minister, widow of an Earl, wife of a Duke, sister-in-law to the King, mother of the three ladies Waldegrave, and, in her second marriage, mother of Prince William and the Princess Sophia.
Sir Joshua Reynolds made seven portraits of the lovely "Walpole Beauty." Years afterward, when he was at work on his famous painting of her three daughters, Walpole begged him to pose them "as the three Graces, adorning a bust of the Duchess as the Magna Mater." "But," adds the veteran of Strawberry Hill, with what resignation he can muster, "my ideas were not adopted."
Maria Walpole, Countess of Waldegrave and her daughter Elizabeth Laura afterwards Countess of Waldegrave.
V
The Walpole Beauty
[From a packet of letters, written in the middle of the eighteenth century by Lady Fanny Armine to her cousin, Lady Desmond, in Ireland, I have strung together one of the strangest of true stories--the history of Maria Walpole, niece of the famous Horace Walpole and illegitimate daughter of his brother, Sir Edward Walpole. The letters are a potpourri of town and family gossip, and in gathering the references to Maria Walpole into coherence, I am compelled to omit much that is characteristic and interesting.]
May, 1754.