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.
For a decade their beauty was regnant in London. They were not
politicians as were their Graces of Gordon and Devonshire, nor had
they the ability to become such. Neither were they the associates of
brilliant, intellectual men, but participants in the gay, vacuous,
showy society of the rapid set of the aristocracy. The elder sister
gained the coronet of Coventry, but her vanity caused her own undoing;
the younger was a part of the exhibition of "Beauty and the Beast." A
high price was paid for her position by the endurance of a period of
tyranny and terror.
Some praise must be accorded the beauties, for at a time of much
licentiousness of a profligate society and tolerated coarsenesses, the
sisters determinedly kept their names free from ignoble soil and
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