Some Old Time Beauties: After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and CommentWilling, Thomson
History
Some Old Time Beauties: After Portraits by the English Masters, with Embellishment and Comment
Willing, Thomson
Great Britain -- Biography; Women -- Biography
After her sister's death, in 1760, her Grace of Argyll suffered a
decline in health. She was ordered abroad for change. She was
appointed to accompany the Princess Sophia Charlotte on her journey to
England to be married to the King. As they neared the ceremony in
London, the Princess became nervous. Her Grace essayed to quiet her
fears. "Ah, my dear Duchess, _you_ may laugh at me, but _you_ have
been married twice," said the Princess. The Duchess became one of the
ladies of the bedchamber, and was in much favor with the Queen.
In 1767, her father died at Somerset House, and her mother, the Hon.
Mrs. Gunning, in 1770. There were three sisters in the family besides
our heroines: Sophia Gunning died, an infant, in 1737; Lissy, who died
in 1752, aged eight years; and Catherine, who was married, in 1769, to
Robert Travis an Irish squire in her own rank of life. She died, too,
at Somerset House, in 1773, where she was an upper housekeeper. A
brother entered the army, fought at Bunker Hill, and became a
major-general in 1787. He was much of a ladies' man. He married a Miss
Minfie, author of some novels, and they had a daughter who aspired to
repeat the successes of her famous aunts. She managed to marry the
Hon. Stephen Digby, who had lost his first wife, a daughter of Lord
Ilchester, in 1787. The Duchess of Argyll was created, in 1776, a
peeress of England as Baroness Hamilton of Hambledon County,
Leicester, and died in December, 1790. By her second marriage she had
two sons, successively Dukes of Argyll, and two daughters, one of
whom, Lady Charlotte Campbell, attained some fame as a novelist as
Lady Charlotte Bury, she having married Colonel John Campbell and
secondly Rev. Edward Bury.
We have no evidence of the possession of bright Irish wit by the
double-duchessed beauty. Ingenuous enthusiasm, perfect simplicity, and
unfailing good humor ever marked her manner, and were a captivating
adjunct to her great facial charm. Walpole writes of a pretty sight
when their Graces of Hamilton and of Richmond with Lady Ailesbury
sitting in a boat together, and proceeds to tell of the suspected
jealousy by she of Hamilton of the beauty of his niece, daughter of
Sir Edward Walpole, who became the bride of Earl Waldegrave, and later
married the Duke of Gloucester, the King's youngest brother. At
another time, when a lady wrote telling him of the advent of a beauty
who was expected to outvie the Gunnings, he replies: "There was to
have been a handsomer every summer these seven years, but when the
seasons come they all seem to have been addled by the winter."
One day the housekeeper of Hampton Court was showing the palace to
visitors when the sisters were there. She threw open the door where
they were sitting, saying, "This is our beauty-room." The pictures and
galleries were forgotten by the crowd, which gazed on the beauties
instead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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