Lord Ashburton’s health began to fail almost as soon as he married. At the age of fifty-one his constitution was completely broken, and Lady Ashburton could look for a happy release from a very disagreeable husband in a very short time. Dunning expired at Exmouth on 18 August, 1783, after repeated attacks of paralysis, leaving one son, Richard Barré, then fifteen months old, to be second Lord Ashburton, and last of the first creation.
In spite of a coarseness, almost brutality of manner, and his unpleasant tricks of hawking and spitting, Dunning managed to make friends, and perhaps even inspire affection. Sir William Jones felt or pretended to feel deep emotion at his death. He wrote: “For some months before his death the nursery had been his chief delight, and gave him more pleasure than the Cabinet could have afforded. But his parental affection, which had been the source of so much felicity, was probably the cause of his fatal illness. He had lost one son, and expected to lose the other, when the author of this painful tribute to his memory parted from him with tears in his eyes, little hoping to see him again in a perishable state.
“As he perceives without affectation that his tears now steal from him, and begin to moisten the paper on which he writes, he reluctantly leaves a subject which he could not soon have exhausted; and when he also shall resign his life to the great Giver of it, he desires no other decoration of his humble gravestone than this honourable truth:—
With none to flatter, none to recommend,
Dunning approved and marked him as a friend.”
After the death of Dunning, his widow, Lady Ashburton, resided at Spitchwick, and on her decease it was occupied by Miss Baring.
If Dunning hoped to found a family and transmit his manors and lands and houses and wealth to a long line of descendants, his hope was frustrated. His son, Richard Barré, second Baron Ashburton, married in 1805 Anne Selby, daughter of William Cunninghame, of Lainshaw, co. Ayr, and he died in 1823 without issue, and bequeathed his estates to his wife for life, then to his wife’s nephews for life, and then to his wife’s nieces, Margaret, Elizabeth, Anna Maria Isabella Macleod, in succession for life, the survivor having the estates in fee simple. The nephew, James Edward, Baron Cranstoun, who died in 1869, and Charles his brother, who succeeded to the title and died soon after, had but a life interest in the estates. These now passed to Margaret, Baroness de Virte, daughter of Robert Macleod, of Cadboll, co. Cromarty, who had married Isabella Cunninghame, sister of Lady Ashburton. Baroness de Virte died in 1904. Her youngest sister, Anna Maria Isabella,[39] who had married John Wilson, of Seacroft, Yorkshire, had died the year before the Baroness, and left two sons; the eldest had died before her; and of those that survive, the senior inherited the Yorkshire estates, and the younger, Arthur Henry Wilson, Esq., now owns those obtained by John Dunning, and Sandridge Park by Totnes as well. John Dunning, first Lord Ashburton, was buried in Ashburton Church, where is his monument, now obscured by the organ which is planted before it.
Richard Barré, second Lord Ashburton, in bequeathing his estates to his wife’s relations, excepted Guatham, the ancestral farm and acres. These he left to any Dunning who could claim relationship, though he added that he did not know that any such existed. However, one did appear and established his connexion and obtained Guatham, and it has been sold to the Lopes family at Maristowe. The arms granted to John Dunning, first Lord Ashburton, were: Bendy, sinister of eight, or and vert, a lion rampant sable—certainly a very ugly coat and bad heraldry. The crest, an antelope’s head, couped proper, attired proper.
For much of the information contained in this article I am indebted to an admirable “Memoir of John Dunning, First Lord Ashburton,” by the late Robert Dymond, in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association for 1876. Also to a “Life of John Dunning” in the Penny Cyclopædia for 1837.