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.
But the Adams were wise enough to refrain from issuing any order as to the costume to be worn by the shepherds and shepherdesses who were to roam the mead at The Oaks, Epsom, upon the occasion of this fête champêtre; and they were also wise enough to distrust the constancy of an English June. The result was (1) a charming medley of costume, though the pseudo-pastoral peasants, farmers, gardeners, and shepherds were in the majority, and (2) the most interesting part of the entertainments took place indoors, the octagonal hall lending itself nobly—when improved by Messrs. Adam—to the show. The “transparencies” which constituted so important a part of the ordinary birthday celebrations of the time, took the form of painted windows, and, later, of a device showing two of the conventional torches of Hymen in full blaze, supporting a shield with the Oak of the Hamiltons' crest and the usual “gules.”
This design occupied the place of the “set piece” which winds up a modern display of fireworks and sets the band playing “God save the King.” It could not have been brought on until the morning sunlight was flooding the landscape outside; for supper was not served until half-past eleven, and the company had to witness the representation of an intolerably long masque—the second of the day—after supper, with a procession of Druids, fauns, cupids, and nymphs, all in suitable, but it is to be hoped not traditional, costume.
The entertainment began quite early in the afternoon, when there was a long procession of shepherds and shepherdesses through the lanes to where a pastoral play was produced and syllabub drunk under the trees. But this was only an hors d'ouvre; it was not Colonel Burgoyne's masterpiece. This was not produced in the open air. Only when further refreshments had been served and evening was closing in did the guests, who had been sauntering through the sylvan scenes, repair to the great hall, which they found superbly decorated and, in fact, remodelled, for colonnades after the type of those in the pictures of Claude had been built around the great ballroom, the shafts being festooned with roses, and the drapery of crimson satin with heavy gold fringes. There were not enough windows to make excuses for so much drapery, but this was no insuperable obstacle to the artful designers; they so disposed of the material as to make it appear that it was the legitimate hanging for six windows.
For the procession through the colonnades the young host changed his costume and his fiancée changed hers. He had appeared as Rubens and she as Rubens' wife, from the well-known picture. But now she was dressed as Iphigenia. They led the first minuet before supper, and it was thought that they looked very fine. No one who has seen the two pictures of the scene, for which Zucchi was commissioned, can question this judgment. Lady Betty's portrait in one of these panels makes her even more beautiful than she appears on Sir Joshua's canvas.
With a display of fireworks of a detonating and discomposing type—the explosion, it was said, affected the nerves of nearly all the guests—and the illumination of the “transparency” already alluded to, this memorable fête came to no premature conclusion. Every one was bored to death by so much festivity coming all at once. The idea of twelve hours of masques and minuets is enough to make one's blood run cold. Its realisation may have had this effect upon the heroine of the day, hence the rumour that she found she had had enough of the Derby family to last her for the rest of her life without marrying the young heir. Unfortunately, however, if this was the case, she failed to justify the accuracy of the report; and she was married to Lord Stanley on the 23rd of the same month.
The union of Maria Gunning with the Earl of Coventry was a miserable one, but this of her niece and Lord Stanley was infinitely worse. Lady Betty soon found out that she had made a mistake in marrying a man so incapable of appreciating her charm of manner as was Lord Stanley. The likelihood is that if she had married any other man she would have made the same discovery. The vivacity for which her mother apologised to Sir William Hamilton was, after her marriage, much more apparent than the thoughtfulness which the Duchess assured her correspondent was one of her daughter's traits. She showed herself to be appallingly vivacious upon more than one occasion. Just at that time there was a vivacious “set” in Lady Betty's world, and every member of it seemed striving for leadership. Few of the ladies knew exactly where the border line lay between vivacity and indiscretion. If Lady Betty was one of the better informed on this delicate question of delimitation, all that can be said is that she overstepped the line upon several occasions. It is not to be thought that her lightness ever bordered into actual vice, but it rarely fell short of being indiscreet.
She was always being talked about—always having curious escapades, none of them quite compromising, but all calculated to make the judicious grieve. But it is one thing to be subjected to the censure of the judicious and quite another to come before a judicial authority, and it is pretty certain that if Lady Derby—her husband succeeded to the title two years after his marriage—had incriminated herself, she would have been forced to defend a divorce suit.
It is, however, likewise certain that for some time she kept hovering like a butterfly about the portals of the Court, and a good deal of the bloom was blown off her wings by the breath of rumour. She had accepted the devotion of the Duke of Dorset, and, considering the number of eyes that were upon her and the devotion of His Grace, this was a very dangerous thing to do. They were constantly seen together and at all hours. This was in the second year of her marriage, but even in the first her desire to achieve notoriety by some means made itself apparent. But her escapade that was most talked about was really not worthy of the gossip of a Gower. She was at a ball at the house of Mrs. Onslow in St. James's Square, and her chair not arriving in good time to take her back to Grosvenor Square, it was suggested by Lord Lindsay and Mr. Storer that they should borrow Mrs. Onslow's chair and carry her between them to her home. She agreed to this gallant proposal, and off they set together. The young men bore her to her very door in spite of the fact that they had met her own chair soon after they had left Mrs. Onslow's porch.
There was surely not much of an escapade in this transaction. The truth was probably that the chair did not arrive owing to the condition of the bearers, and when the young gentlemen met it they refused to jeopardise the safety of the lady by transferring her from Mrs. Onslow's chair to her own.
Rumour, however, was only too anxious to put the worst construction upon every act of the merry Countess, and it was doubtless because of this, and of her own knowledge of her daughter's thoughtlessness, that the Duchess of Argyll appeared upon the scene and endeavoured by her presence and advice to avert the catastrophe that seemed imminent. The Duchess insisted on accompanying her to every entertainment, and succeeded in keeping a watchful eye on her, though the Duke, who was at Inveraray, and was doubtless tired of hearing of the vivacity of his stepdaughter, wrote rather peremptorily for Her Grace to return to Scotland. She did not obey the summons, the fact being that she was devoted to this daughter of hers, who must have daily reminded her of her own sister Maria, to whom she had been so deeply attached. *
Seeing, however, that she could not continue to look after this lively young matron, and being well aware of the fact that Lord Derby would never consent to live with her again, the Duchess could do no more than condone the separation which was inevitable. The deed was drawn up in 1779, five years after Lady Betty had been so inauspiciously bored by the fête champêtre.
In the meantime there was a good deal of talk about the Earl of Derby himself. A young nobleman who takes a lively, or even a grave, interest in the personnel of the theatre is occasionally made the subject of vulgar gossip. Lord Derby had a reputation as an amateur actor, and he seemed to think that it would be increased by association with professional actresses. It is doubtful if he was justified in his views on this delicate question. At any rate, rightly or wrongly, on his estrangement from his wife, but two years before the final separation, he showed a greater devotion than ever to dramatic performances and dramatic performers. His uncle by marriage, now General Burgoyne, had written a play that turned out an extraordinary success. This was The Heiress, and it had received extravagant praise in many influential quarters. It was while it was still being talked of in society that a company of distinguished amateurs undertook to produce it at Richmond House, in Whitehall Place. In order that the representation might be as perfect as possible, the Duchess of Richmond engaged the actress who had taken the chief part in the original production, to superintend the rehearsals of her amateurs. Miss Farren was a young person of considerable beauty, and more even than an actress's share of discretion. She was in George Colman's company at the Haymarket, and was rapidly taking the place of Mrs. Abington in the affections of playgoers. She was the daughter of a surgeon in a small way—he may have been one of the barber surgeons of the eighteenth century. Marrying an actress (also in a small way), he adopted the stage as a profession, and became a strolling actor-manager, whenever he got the chance, and died before his drinking habits had quite demoralised his family.
Mrs. Farren was a wise woman—wise enough to know that she was a bad actress, but that there were possibilities in her two daughters. It was after only a brief season of probation that Colman engaged one of the girls to do small parts, promoting her in an emergency to be a “principal.” Miss Farren proved herself capable of making the most of her opportunity, and the result was that within a year she was taking Mrs. Abington's parts in the best comedies.
Her mother was sensible enough to perceive that there was room in the best society for an actress of ability as well as respectability—up to that time the two qualities had seldom been found associated—and Mrs. Farren was right. No whisper had ever been heard against the young lady, and a judicious introduction or two brought her into many drawing-rooms of those leaders of society who were also respectable, and this was of advantage to her not only socially, but professionally. Horace Walpole was able to write of her: “In distinction of manner and refinement she excelled Mrs. Abington, who could never go beyond Lady Teazle, which is a second-rate character.” Again, in a letter to Lady Ossory, he ascribed the ability of Miss Farren to the fact that she was accustomed to mingle with the best society.
This theory of Walpole's has been frequently controverted since his day, and now no one will venture to assert that there is really anything in it, although it sounds plausible enough. Miss Farren had, however, ample opportunity of studying “the real thing” and of profiting by her study. She found herself on the most intimate footing with duchesses—not of the baser sort like her of Ancaster, or of the eccentric sort like her of Bedford, but of the most exalted. The Duchess of Richmond and the Duchess of Leinster were among her friends, and thus it was that her appearance at the rehearsals of The Heiress of Whitehall Place was not wholly professional. Upon this occasion she met Lord Derby and also Charles James Fox, the latter having accepted the rather onerous duties of stage manager. Before any of the performers were letter perfect in their dialogue, Miss Farren had captured the hearts of both these men. Having some of the qualities necessary to success as a statesman, including caution and an instinct as to the right moment to retire from a contest that must end in some one being made a fool of, Mr. Fox soon withdrew from a position of rivalry with Lord Derby. It was rumoured by the malicious, who had at heart the maintenance of the good name of Miss Farren, that Mr. Fox had been dismissed by the lady with great indignation on his making a proposition to her that did not quite meet her views in regard to the ceremony of marriage. Miss Farren they asserted to be a paragon of virtue, and so she undoubtedly was. Her virtue was of the most ostentatious type. She would never admit a gentleman to an audience unless some witness of her virtue was present. She accepted the devotion of Lord Derby, but gave him to understand quite plainly that so long as his wife was alive she could only agree to be his fiancée. Truly a very dragon of virtue was Miss Farren!
The Earl, previous to his meeting the actress, had been a dutiful if not a very devoted husband. But as soon as he fell in love with this paragon of virtue he became careless, and made no attempt to restrain his wife in her thoughtless behaviour. He allowed her to go her own way, and he went his way. His way led him almost every evening to the green room at the Haymarket and Drury Lane, where Miss Farren was to be found. The estrangement between himself and his wife that resulted in the final separation was the result not of his infatuation for the actress, but of her virtuous acceptance of him as her moral lover. She took care never to compromise herself with him or any one else, but she did not mind taking the man away from his wife and home in order that she might be accredited with occupying an absolutely unique position in the annals of the English stage.
If Miss Farren had been a little less virtuous and a little more human she would run a better chance of obtaining the sympathy of such people as are capable of differentiating between a woman's virtue and the virtues of womankind. She seemed to think that the sole duty of a woman is to be discreet in regard to herself—to give no one a chance of pointings finger of scorn at her; and it really seemed as if this was also the creed of the noble people with whom she associated. Every one seemed to be so paralysed by her propriety as to be incapable of perceiving how contemptible a part she was playing. An honest woman, with the instincts of goodness and with some sense of her duty, would, the moment a married man offers her his devotion, send him pretty quickly about his business. The most elementary sense of duty must suggest the adoption of such a course of treatment in regard to an illicit admirer. But Miss Farren had no such sense. She met the philandering of her lover with smiles and a virtuous handshake. She accepted his offer of an adoring friendship for the present with a reversion of the position of Countess of Derby on the death of the existing holder of the title and its appurtenances; and people held her up, and continue to hold her up, as an example of all that is virtuous and amiable in life!
She was also commended for her patience, as Lord Derby was for his constancy. They had both great need of these qualities, for the unhappy barrier to their union showed no signs of getting out of their way, either by death or divorce. She became strangely discreet, taking, in fact, a leaf out of Miss Farren's book of deportment, and never giving her husband a chance of freeing himself from the tie that bound him nominally to her. It must have been very gratifying to the actress to perceive how effective was the example she set to the Countess in regard to the adherence to the path of rectitude.
What was the exact impression produced upon Lord Derby by all this decorum it would be difficult to say. He may have been pleased to discover that he was married to a lady to whom his honour was more precious than he had any reason or any right to believe it to be. But assuredly a less placid gentleman would have found himself wishing now and again that—well, that matters had arranged themselves differently.
The years went by without bringing about a more satisfactory modus vivendi than was in existence when Lord Derby originally offered his heart and hand (the latter when it should become vacant) to the actress. Lady Derby was in wretched health, but still showed no more inclination to die than does a chronic invalid. Miss Farren continued to drive her splendid chariot, with its coachmen on the hammer-cloth and its footmen clinging on to the straps behind, down to the stage-door of the theatre, and to fill the house every night that she played. Her popularity seemed to grow with years, and she appeared in a wide range of characters, making her audiences accept as correct her reading of every part, though the best critics—Walpole was about the worst—of her art had a good deal to say that was not quite favourable to her style. Only once, however, did she make a flagrant error on the stage, and this was when she was misguided enough to put on men's garments in representing the part of Tracy Lovell in Colman's play, The Suicide.
By this unhappy exhibition which she made of herself she disillusioned those of her admirers who fancied that she was a model of grace from the sole of her feet to the crown of her head. She never repeated this performance. Had she done so in Lord Derby's presence, his constancy would have been put to a severer test than any to which he had been previously subjected. The best judges of what constitutes grace in a woman were unanimous in their advice to the lady never to forsake the friendly habiliments which she was accustomed to wear, and never to allow her emulation of the perpetually chaste goddess to lead her to adopt even for an hour the convenient garb in which she went a-hunting.
And while his fiancée was moving from triumph to triumph, putting every other actress in the shade, the Earl of Derby was putting on flesh. But as his flesh became more visible so did his faith. He was a model of fidelity. His name was never associated with the name of any other lady—not even that of his wife—during his long years of probation, and twenty years form a rather protracted period for a man to wait in order to marry an actress. It was not to be wondered if the spectacle of the devoted young peer waiting for the beautiful girl in the green room, which was allowed to the habitués of that fascinating apartment during the earlier years of this strange attachment, produced quite a different effect upon people from that which was the result of witnessing a somewhat obese, elderly gentleman panting along by the side of a chaste lady of forty. Nor was it remarkable that, on seeing one day by the side of Miss Farren, a gallant young man whose walk and bearing suggested to elderly spectators a rejuvenated Lord Stanley, they should rub their eyes and ask what miracle was this that time and true love had wrought.
The only miracle that time had wrought was to make the son of the Earl of Derby twenty-one years of age and rather interested in the personnel of green rooms. He had been introduced to Miss Farren by his father; but to his honour be it said, he made no attempt to take his father's place in regard to the lady, except as her escort to her house in Green Street. The gossip that suggested such a possibility was just what one might expect to find in one of Walpole's letters.
At last the shameful, if virtuous, devotion of twenty years was rewarded by the announcement of the death of the wretched Countess whose desertion dated from the day her husband met the actress. Miss Farren, with that extraordinary bad taste which characterised every period of her intimacy with Lord Derby, took an ostentatious farewell of the stage, and proved by the faltering of her voice, her emotion, and her final outburst in tears, that time had not diminished from the arts of her art. Of course, there was a scene of intense emotion in the theatre, which was increased when King led her forward and Wroughton spoke a rhymed and stagey farewell in her presence. Four of its lines were these:
But ah! this night adieu the joyous mien,
When Mirth's lov'd fav'rite quits the mimic scene,
Startled Thalia would th'assent refuse,
But Truth and Virtue sued and won the Muse.
Truth and Virtue—these were the patrons of the compact by which Miss Farren waited for twenty years for the death of the wife of the man whom she had promised to marry—when she could.
The scene in the green room when the actress came off the stage was an unqualified success. Tears flowed freely, making channels as they meandered down the paint; sobs came from the actresses who hoped to get a chance of doing some of her parts now that she had left the stage; and Miss Farren herself showed that she knew what were the elements of a proper climax, by fainting with a shriek, in the midst of which she made an exit supported by all the actors who were not already supporting some of the hysterical ladies in the background. They all deserved to have their salaries raised. The whole scene was a triumph—of art.
The exact chronology of the crisis is worth noting. Lady Derby died on March 4th, and was buried on April 2nd. On April 8th Miss Farren took her farewell of the stage, and on May 1st she was married to the Earl of Derby. A satisfactory explanation of the indecent delay in the celebration of the marriage was forthcoming: his lordship had been suffering from an attack of gout.
But if no one ventured to cast an aspersion upon his character or to accuse him of shilly-shallying in regard to the postponement of his nuptials until his wife had been nearly a whole month in her grave, there was a good deal of funny gossip set loose when, after a honeymoon of two days, the Earl and the Countess returned to London. This also was satisfactorily explained: the Countess was devoted to her mother!
The marriage proved a very happy one, and thirty-two years passed before the Countess died. Her husband survived her by five years. He died in 1834, fifty-seven years after his first meeting with the actress, and forty-seven since he instituted “The Derby” race meeting, winning the first cup by his horse Sir Peter Teazle.
IN the year 1790-1 there was played in real life a singularly poor adaptation of an unwritten novel by one of the Minifie sisters—those sentimental ladies who, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, provided the circulating libraries with several volumes of high-flown fiction. The adaptation of this unwritten novel possessed a good many of the most prominent features of the original, so that when it was brought to light there could be very little doubt as to the brain out of which it had been evolved. The result of the performance was so unsatisfactory as to compel one to believe that the worst possible way of producing a novel is to adapt it to suit the requirements of one's relations, forcing them to play in real life and in all earnest the parts assigned to them by the inventor of the plot.
Miss Minifie, the second of the sentimental sisters, had married in the year 1769 Colonel John Gunning, the brother of the two beautiful girls one of whom became Duchess of Hamilton, and later Duchess of Argyll, and the other Countess of Coventry. The result of the union was a daughter of considerable plainness, and people said that in this respect she resembled her mother's rather than her father's family. It seems that while the Gunning tradition was beauty, the Minifie tradition was a nose, and it soon became apparent that it was impossible to combine the two with any satisfactory artistic results. The young lady had made an honest attempt to do so, but her failure was emphatic. She had eyes that suggested in a far-off way the long-lashed orbs of her aunts, but that unlucky Minifie nose was so prominent a feature that it caused the attention of even the most indulgent critic to be riveted upon it, to the exclusion of the rest of her face. The charitably-disposed among her friends affirmed that she would be passably good-looking if it were not for her nose; the others said that she would be positively plain if it were not for her eyes.
Her father was probably that member of his family who had least brains: they made a soldier of him, and he married a lady novelist, closing an inglorious career by running off with his tailor's wife and having a writ issued against him for £5000. He took care to be at Naples, outside the jurisdiction of the English court, when it was issued, and he died before it could be served on him, which suggests that he may not have been so devoid of brains after all.
Her mother (née Minifie) seems to have entertained the idea of making the girl work out a “plot” for her when she arrived at the regulation age of the sentimental heroine of those days, and this plot she invented with all her accustomed absence of skill. Her materials were a “glorious child”—this was how she described her daughter—with a gifted mother; a young cousin, heir to a dukedom and a large estate; and, lastly, the Gunning tradition. Could any novelist ask for more? A short time afterwards she did, however, and this was just where her art failed her. She did much to discourage the writers of fiction from endeavouring to work out their plots in real life.
Catherine Gunning, the “glorious child,” being the niece of the Duchess of Argyll, her cousin was, of course, the Marquis of Lome; and as the Duchess had always kept up an intimate connection with the members of her father's family, even to the second generation, her son, Lord Lome, and Catherine Gunning had been a good deal together, not only when they were children, but also when they had reached the age when the novel-writer's hero and heroine begin to blossom. The girl's mother, doubtless having an idea that these very live young people were as plastic as the creatures of her fancy, thought to hasten on the dénouement of her story by whispering it to her friends. She whispered into more than one ear that Lord Lome and her daughter were betrothed, and such friends as received this information, strictly sub rosa, took care to spread it abroad—strictly sub rosa also. Now the aggregation of many confidential reports of this sort is what is termed “news,” so that in the course of a short time it was common property that Lord Lome was to marry his cousin, Catherine Gunning.
Congratulations reached the young lady, which she neither quite accepted nor altogether rejected. She seems to have learned from her mother's novels that in such matters it is wisest for a young woman to be silent but pensive. And on the whole her behaviour was fairly consistent with that of the heroine which her mother meant her to be. Indeed, all that was needed to enable her to take the place of the heroine of a pleasant little love story was the proposal of the hero; and unhappily this formality had still to be reckoned with. Lord Lome had so paltry an appreciation of what was due to the art of the fiction-writer that he declined to play the part of the young hero of the story, and when people approached him on the subject he said that he had heard nothing about being accepted by Miss Gunning, and that he could not possibly be accepted until he had proposed to her. He seems to have acted with the discretion one would have looked for from the son of the Duchess of Argyll, and in the course of the year the reports of the possible union dwindled away, and people began to feel that their friends were untrustworthy gossips to have circulated a report solely on the evidence of a young lady's pensiveness.
This was, however, as it turned out, but the opening chapter in the romance which the novelist-mother was working out. Indeed, it scarcely bears to be considered as a regular chapter, it was rather the prologue to the comedy which was played two years later with the same heroine, but for obvious reasons with a different hero. In the prologue there was scarcely visible any of the art of the novelist; in the comedy itself, however, her hand is constantly apparent, controlling the movements of at least one of her puppets; and very jerkily, too, that hand pulled the strings. The clumsiness in the construction of the plot prevented any one from sympathising with the authoress and stage-manager of the piece when its failure became known to the world in general, and to Horace Walpole in particular. Walpole could pretend a good deal. He pretended, for instance, that he knew at once that the Rowley poems, sent to him by Chatterton, were forgeries; and he pretended that he knew nothing of the marriage of his niece to the Duke of Gloucester until the public were apprised of the fact. He could not, however, even pretend that he sympathised with the failure of the Minifie plot. On the contrary, he gloats over the disgrace which, he declared, on this account fell upon the Gunning family. He hated the whole Gunning family, and he was plainly in ecstasies of delight when he believed that ruin had come upon them. “The two beautiful sisters were exalted almost as high as they could go,” he wrote. “Countessed and double duchessed, and now the family have dragged themselves down into the very dirt.”
The “family” had of course done nothing of the sort. One member of the family had allowed herself to be made a fool of at the suggestion of her very foolish mother; her father had also been indiscreet, but there is a wide difference between all this and the family of Gunning “dragging themselves into the very dirt.” The result of the tricks of the lady novelist to marry her daughter to the heir to a dukedom was only to make every one roar with laughter, and no doubt the fatuous ladies felt greatly annoyed. But the Marquis of Lome did not seem to take the matter greatly to heart, and he was a member of the Gunning family; nor did the Duke of Hamilton show himself to be greatly perturbed, though he must have been somewhat jealous of the honour of the family to which his mother belonged. The position that the Gunning family had taken among the greatest families in the land rested upon too solid a foundation to be shaken by the foolishness of a lady novelist, who had married a Gunning. And now people who read the story of the “dragging in the dirt” only shrug their shoulders at the ridiculous figure cut by the actors in the shallow and sordid comedy, and laugh at the spiteful gibe of the prince of gossips, who played a congenial part in damning the product of the Minifie brain.
Two years after the failure of the Lome plot startling whispers were once again heard in regard to Miss Gunning and the heir to another dukedom. This time it was the Marquis of Blandford who attracted the Minifie fancy. He was the Duke of Marlborough's heir, and was twenty-three years of age. Of course it was Mrs. Gunning (née Minifie) who was the first to make the announcement that the young people were greatly attached; and then followed—after the interval of a chapter or two—the lady novelist's declaration to her niece, a Mrs. Bowen, that Lord Blandford had proposed, and had been accepted by Miss Gunning. The date of the marriage had been fixed, and the draft deed of the settlements signed; but, as in the former “case,” the recipient of the news was told that she must regard the communication as strictly confidential, the fact being that although the arrangements for the match were so fully matured, yet General Gunning—he had recently been made a general—had not been let into the secret.
It must have seemed a little queer to Mrs. Bowen to learn that her uncle had not been made acquainted with the good luck that was in store for his daughter. The signing of marriage deeds in the absence of the bride's father must surely have struck her as being a trifle irregular. However this may be, she seems to have treated the communication as strictly confidential by at once proceeding to spread abroad the news that it contained. It reached the ears of several people of distinction before long. General Conway heard of it, and from a quarter that seemed to him absolutely trustworthy. He passed it round to Walpole and the Court circle. The Duke of Argyll, as the uncle of the young lady most interested in the match, was apprised of it in due course, and on appealing to headquarters—that is to say, to Mrs. Gunning—for confirmation or denial of the report, learned that the marriage had indeed been “arranged,” but the question of settlements remained in abeyance.
Shortly afterwards there came rumours that there were obstacles in the way of the marriage, and Miss Gunning, on being questioned by some of her friends, confessed that it was the parents of her lover who were unkind: young Lord Blandford was burning with anxiety to call her his own, but the Duke and Duchess belonged unfortunately to that type of parent to be found in so many novels in which the course of true love runs anything but smooth.
Strange to say, it was just at this point that a letter appeared in the Advertiser, signed by General Gunning, apprising the world of the fact that the Gunnings were one of the noblest families in existence, the writer actually being able to trace his ancestry up to Charlemagne.
It was while people were so laughing over this letter as to cause him to declare it to be a forgery, that the General became suspicious of the genuineness of his daughter's statements in regard to her affaire de cour. When a blunt old soldier finds a letter bearing his signature in the papers, well knowing that he never wrote such a letter, he is apt to question the good faith even of his nearest and dearest. It is certain, at any rate, that the descendant of Charlemagne had an uneasy feeling that any woman who wrote novels was not to be implicitly trusted in the affairs of daily life. His mind running on forged letters, he commanded his daughter to submit to him her correspondence with her lover.
Miss Gunning at once complied, and he sat down to read the lot. The result was not to allay his suspicions. The letters read remarkably well, and contained the conventional outpourings of an ardent lover to the object of his affections. But to the simple soldier's mind they read just too well: some of them were in the style of a novel-writer with whom he was acquainted—imperfectly, it would appear, or he would have suspected something long before. Retaining the precious “pacquet” he awaited developments.
He had not long to wait. Another contribution to the correspondence which he had in his hand came to his daughter, and was passed on to him. Noticing in it some doubtful features, he came to the conclusion that it was necessary to get to the bottom of the affair in the most straightforward way. He leapt to the bottom of it by sending the whole “pacquet” to the young Marquis of Blandford, asking him peremptorily if he had written the letters.
He got a reply to the effect that a few of the letters were his—they were the ordinary ones, courteous, but in no way effusive—but that the greater number had not come from him. His lordship did not seem to think that common politeness demanded his expressing his hearty concurrence with the tone and sentiments contained in these same letters. Now in the judgment of a novelist of the intellectual calibre of the Minifie sisters this is exactly what a young gentleman would do when playing the part of the hero of a romance, so that it would appear that General Gunning was fully justified in coming to the conclusion that the whole scheme—the whole piece of scheming—was the design of his wife—that it represented an attempt on her part to force one of her “plots” upon some real personages. Dull-minded man though he certainly was, he must have perceived that his wife's plan was to compel Lord Blandford to act the part of the hero of her sentimental imagination, and when confronted with a parcel of forged letters, in every one of which there was a confession of love for Miss Gunning, to bow his head meekly, as any gentleman (of her imagination) would, and say, “Those are my letters, and they express nothing but the most honourable sentiments of my heart.”
But as it so happened the young Lord Blandford was not a young gentleman of this particular stamp. He seems to have been almost as practical as his great ancestor, who, out of the proceeds of his first love intrigue, bought an annuity for himself. Hence the fiasco of the Minifie plot.
The Minifie plot, however, was not worked out in one act only, and an insignificant prologue. The resources of the lady's imagination were by no means exhausted by the failure of Lord Blandford to act up to the heroic part assigned to him. He seems to have talked a good deal to his friends about the forged letters, and the Duke of Argyll, the young lady's uncle, took the matter up as an important member by marriage of the family. He applied to his niece for an explanation of the whole affair; and her father seems to have agreed with him in thinking that if the girl was ever to hold up her head again it would be necessary for her to bring forward some evidence to prove what she still asserted, namely, that the letters had been written to her by Lord Blandford—this “pacquet” of letters played as important a part in the story of Miss Gunning as the “Casquet Letters” did in the history of Queen Mary—and that they were written with the concurrence and approbation of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough. The Duke and Duchess had, she affirmed, encouraged her by the most unmistakable means to believe that they were extremely anxious to see her married to their son.
It was then suggested—Horace Walpole, who gloats over the whole story in a letter to one of the Berrys, does not say by whom—that the young woman should draw up a narrative of the progress of the attachment professed for her by Lord Blandford, and of the particular acts of encouragement for which she alleged the Duke and Duchess were responsible, leading her to feel sure that she was a persona grata with them. It was hoped by the Duke of Argyll and General Gunning that the girl would be rehabilitated in the eyes of society by the production of the Duke of Marlborough's formal assent to the statements made by Miss Gunning in endeavouring to exculpate herself. Miss Gunning assenting—after a consultation with her mother, we may be sure—a “narrative” was accordingly prepared by the young lady, and in it there was the ingenuous confession that although she had been unable to resist so dazzling an offer as that of Lord Blandford, she had not wavered in her affection for her cousin, the Marquis of Lome.
Here we have the true Minifie touch of sentimentality, and we cannot doubt that the remaining portion of the plot was due to her clumsy ingenuity.
This narrative was sent to the Duke of Marlborough, with the following letter from General Gunning:
“St. James's Place,
“3 rd February, 1791.
“My Lord,—I have the honour of addressing this letter to your Grace not with the smallest wish after what has passed of having a marriage established between Lord Blandford and my daughter, or of claiming any promise or proposal to that effect, but merely to know whether your Grace or the Duchess of Marlborough have it in recollection that your Graces or Lord Blandford ever gave my daughter reason to think a marriage was once intended.
“My motive for giving this trouble arises merely from a desire of removing any imputation from my daughter's character, as if she had entertained an idea of such importance without any reasonable foundation.
“For my own satisfaction, and that of my particular friends who have been induced to believe the reports of the intended marriage, I have desired my daughter to draw up an accurate narrative of every material circumstance on which that belief was founded.
“This narrative I have the honour of transmitting to your Grace for your own perusal, and that of the Duchess of Marlborough and Lord Blandford, thinking it highly suitable that you should have an early opportunity of examining it—and I beg leave to request that your Grace will, after examination, correct or alter such passages as may appear either to your Grace, the Duchess of Marlborough, or Lord Blandford, to be erroneously stated.
“I have the honour to be,
“With the greatest respect, my Lord,
“Your Grace's most humble and
“Most obedient servant,
“John Gunning.”
This letter was dispatched by a groom to its destination at Blenheim, and within half an hour of his delivering it, His Grace, according to the groom, had handed him a reply for General Gunning. This document, which the groom said he had received from the Duke, was forwarded, with a copy of the letter to which it constituted a most satisfactory reply, to a small and very select committee that had, it would seem, been appointed to investigate and report upon the whole story. It must also be quoted in full, in order that its point may be fully appreciated by any one interested in this very remarkable story.
“Blenheim.
“Sir,—I take the earliest opportunity to acknowledge the receipt of your letter, and to answer it with that explicitness you are so much entitled to. From the first of the acquaintance of the D———s of Marlborough and myself had with Miss Gunning, we were charmed with her, and it was with infinite satisfaction we discovered Blanford's sentiments similar to our own. It had long been the wish of both to see him married to some amiable woman. Your daughter was the one we had fixed on, and we had every reason to suppose the object of his tenderest affections, and, from the conduct of both himself and his family, yourself and Miss Gunning had undoubtedly every right to look on a marriage as certain. Indeed when I left town last summer, I regarded her as my future daughter, and I must say it is with sorrow I relinquish the idea. The actions of young men are not always to be accounted for; and it is with regret that I acknowledge my son has been particularly unaccountable in his. I beg that you will do me the justice to believe that I shall ever think myself your debtor for the manner in which you have conducted yourself in this affair, and that I must always take an interest in the happiness of Miss Gunning. I beg, if she has not conceived a disgust for the whole of my family, she will accept the sincerest good wishes of the Duchess and my daughters.
“I have the honour to remain,
“Sir,
“Your much obliged and
“Most obedient, humble servant,
“Marlborough.”
Now be it remembered that both these letters were forwarded to the committee with the young lady's narrative, to be considered by them in the same connection, at Argyll House, where their sittings were to be held.
What was to be said in the face of such documentary evidence as this? Those members of the committee who hoped that the girl's statement of her case would be in some measure borne out by the Duke of Marlborough could never have hoped for so triumphant a confirmation of her story as was contained in His Grace's letter. It seemed as if the investigation of the committee would be of the simplest character; handing them such a letter, accompanying her own ingenuous narrative, it was felt that she had completely vindicated her position.
But suddenly one member of the committee—Walpole in the letter to Miss Berry affirms that he was this one—ventured to point out that in the Duke's letter the name Blandford was spelt without the middle letter d. “That was possible in the hurry of doing justice,” wrote Walpole. But the moment that this pin-puncture of suspicion appeared in the fabric of the lady's defence it was not thought any sacrilege to try to pick another hole in it. The wax with which the letter was sealed was black, and the members of the council asked one another whom the Marlborough family were in mourning for, that they should seal their letter in this fashion. No information on this point was forthcoming. (It is strange if Walpole did not suggest that they were in mourning over the defunct reputation of the young lady.) If the Duke of Argyll was present, it can well be believed that, after the members of the council had looked at each other, there should be silence in that room, on one wall of which we may believe there was hanging the splendid portrait of Elizabeth, Duchess of Argyll and Baroness Hamilton of Hameldon, in her own right, painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The lady was dying at her Scotch home when this investigation into the conduct of her niece was being conducted.
It was probably a relief to every one present when the suggestion was made that the Duke of Marlborough's second son was in town, and if sent for he might be able to throw some light upon the subject of the mourning wax or some other questionable point in the same connection. Although it was now close upon midnight a messenger was dispatched for the young man—probably his whereabouts at midnight would be known with greater certainty than at midday. At any rate he was quickly found, and repaired in all haste to Argyll House. He was brought before the committee and shown the letter with the black wax. He burst out laughing, and declared that the writing bore not the least resemblance to that of his father, the Duke of Marlborough.
There was nothing more to be said. The council adjourned sine die without drawing up any report, so far as can be ascertained.
But the full clumsiness of the Minifie “plot” was revealed the next day, for General Gunning received a letter from the Captain Bowen whose name has already entered into this narrative, telling him that his wife, the General's niece, had a short time before received from Miss Gunning a letter purporting to be a copy of one which had come to her from the Duke of Marlborough, and begging her to get her husband to make a fair copy of it, and return it by the groom. Captain Bowen added that he had complied with his wife's request to this effect, but he had written “copy” at the top and “signed M.” at the bottom, as is usual in engrossing copies of documents, to prevent the possibility of a charge of forgery being brought against the copyist.
The letter which the girl wrote to Mrs. Bowen was made the subject of an affidavit shortly afterwards, and so became public property. It is so badly composed that one cannot but believe it was dictated by her mother, though the marvellous spelling must have been Miss Gunning's own. The fact that, after making up a story of her love for Lord Lome, and of the encouragement she received from the Marlborough family in respect of Lord Blandford, she instructed Mrs. Bowen to keep the matter secret from her mother, confirms one's impression as to the part the lady must have played in the transaction. Miss Gunning wrote: “Neither papa or I have courage to tell mama, for she detests the person dearest to me on earth.”
But however deficient in courage her papa was in the matter of acquainting his wife with so ordinary an incident as was referred to in this letter, he did not shrink from what he believed to be his duty when it was made plain to him that his daughter and his wife had been working out a “plot” in real life that necessitated the forging of a letter. He promptly bundled both wife and daughter out of his house, doubtless feeling that although the other personages in the romance which his wife was hoping to weave, had by no means acted up to the parts she had meant them to play, there was no reason why he should follow their example. It must be acknowledged that as a type of the bluff old soldier, simple enough to be deceived by the inartistic machinations of a foolish wife, but inexorable when finding his credulity imposed upon, he played his part extremely well. At the same time such people as called him a ridiculous old fool for adopting so harsh a measure toward his erring child, whose tricks he had long winked at, were perhaps not to be greatly blamed.
The old Duchess of Bedford at once received the outcasts and provided them with a home; and then Mrs. Gunning had leisure to concoct a manifesto in form of an open letter to the Duke of Argyll, in which, after exhorting His Grace to devote the remainder of his life to unravelling the mystery which she affirmed (though no one else could have done so) enshrouded the whole affair of the letter, she went on to denounce the simple-hearted General for his meanness—and worse—in matters domestic. He had never been a true husband to her, she declared, and he was even more unnatural as a father. As for Captain Bowen and his wife, the writer of the manifesto showed herself to be upon the brink of delirium when she endeavoured to find words severe enough to describe their treachery. They were inhuman in their persecution of her “glorious child,” she said, and then she went on to affirm her belief that the incriminating letters had been forged by the Bowens, and the rest of the story invented by them with the aid of the General to ruin her and her “glorious child.”
Captain Bowen thought fit to reply to this amazing production. He did so through the prosaic form of a number of affidavits. The most important of these was that sworn by one William Pearce, groom to General Gunning. In this document he deposed that when he was about to start for Blenheim with the “pacquet” for the Duke of Marlborough, Miss Gunning had caught him and compelled him to hand over the “pacquet” to her, and that she had then given him another letter, sealed with black, bearing the Marlborough arms, instructing him to deliver it to her father, pretending that he had received it at Blenheim.
In spite of all this Miss Gunning continued to affirm her entire innocence, and even went the length—according to Walpole—of swearing before a London magistrate that she was innocent. “It is but a burlesque part of this wonderful tale,” adds Walpole, “that old crazy Bedford exhibits Miss every morning on the Causeway in Hyde Park and declares her protégée some time ago refused General Trevelyan.” But “crazy old Bedford” went much further in her craziness than this, for she actually wrote to the Marquis of Lome trying to patch up a match between Miss Gunning and himself. Immediately afterwards the town was startled by the report that a duel was impending between Lord Lome and Lord Blandford, the former maintaining that it was his duty to uphold the honour of his cousin, which had been somewhat shaken by the course adopted by the Marlborough heir. Of course no duel took place, and the young men simply laughed when their attention was called to the statement in print.
How much further these alarums and excursions (on the Causeway) would have proceeded it would be impossible to tell, the fact being that Captain Bowen and his wife gave notice of their intention to institute proceedings against the Gunnings, mother and daughter, for libel. This brought l'affaire Gunning to a legitimate conclusion, for the ladies thought it advisable to fly to France.
“The town is very dull without them,” wrote Walpole to one of the Berrys, enclosing a copy of a really clever skit in verse, after the style of “The House that Jack Built,” ridiculing the whole affair. When Mrs. Gunning and her daughter returned, after the lapse of several months, the old Duchess of Bedford took them up once more; but the town declined to take any further notice of them. It was not until her father and mother had been dead for some years that Miss Gunning married Major Plunkett, an Irish rebel, who fled after the rising in 1798. She lived with him happily enough for twenty years, endeavouring to atone for the indiscretion of her girlhood by writing novels. It is doubtful if many of her readers considered such expiation wholly adequate, considering how foolish she had been. One act of folly can hardly be atoned for by another. But her intention was good, and her faults, including her novels, have long ago been forgiven her by being forgotten.