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The Gunning family came from England  to Ireland early in the 17th century and settled at Castlecoote.  During the second half of the 18th century this line flowered in the daughters of an impecunious country squire. John Barnaby Gunning married in 1731 the Hon. Bridget Bourke, a daughter of Theobald Bourke, 6th Viscount Mayo. They had 4 children, of whom the only son, John, went into the Army and became a General and the youngest daughter Catherine (died 1773) married a plain Irish esquire,  Robert Travis. But the 2 elder daughters, Maria (1733-1760) and Elizabeth (1734-1790) were great beauties. They were born in Hemingford Greys, near Huntingdon in England, but brought up in Ireland.  They are said to have owed their envied complexions to the waters of  the waters of Holywell, 5 miles NE of Roscommon. They left Castlecoote in 1751 to go on the stage in London.

	Elizabeth Gunning
	Maria Gunning

The 19-year-old Elizabeth so caught the eye of James, 6th Duke of Hamilton, that after a torrid courtship he became impatient to marry her and sent for a parson during an evening assembly at Bedford House on St Valentine’s Day 1752. Walpole writes:  'The event that has made most noise since my last is the extempore wedding of the youngest of the two Gunnings, two ladies of surpassing loveliness, named respectively Mary and Elizabeth, the daughters of John Gunning, Esq., of Castle Coote, in Ireland, whom Mrs Montague calls "those goddesses the Gunnings." Lord Coventry, a grave young lord, of the remains of the patriot breed, has long dangled after the eldest, virtuously, with regard to her honour, not very honourably with regard to his own credit. About six weeks ago Duke Hamilton, the very reverse of the earl, hot, debauched, extravagant, and equally damaged in his fortune and person, fell in love with the youngest at the masquerade, and determined to marry her in the spring. About a fortnight since, at an immense assembly at my Lord Chesterfield's, made to show the house, which is really most magnificent, Duke Hamilton made violent love at one end of the room, while he was playing at Faro at the other end; that is, he saw neither the bank nor his own cards, which were of three hundred pounds each: he soon lost a thousand. I own I was so little a professor in love that I thought all this parade looked ill for the poor girl; and could not conceive, if he was so much engaged with his mistress as to disregard such sums, why he played at all. However, two nights afterwards, being left alone with her, while her mother and sister were at Bedford House, he found himself so impatient that he sent for a parson. The Doctor refused to perform the ceremony without license or ring; the duke swore he would send for the archbishop; at last they were married with a ring of the BED-CURTAIN, at half-an-hour after twelve at night, at May-fair Chapel.'  

The Mayfair chapel was a place that performed marriage ceremonies without the need for obtaining a licence or calling of banns. These were called clandestine marriages and although irregular, they were perfectly valid and binding at the time.

The Rev. Keith was appointed to officiate there and he soon began to advertise in newspapers of the advantages of marrying in his chapel. The Rector of nearby St George, Hanover Square (a proper church), took great exception to this and commenced a suit against Keith in the Doctors Commons. As a result of this Keith was excommunicated in October 1742 and thrown into the Fleet Prison in 1743.The clandestine marriages continued, however, performed by his assistants in a nearby private dwelling while Keith lay in prison, where he eventually died in 1758.

Walpole reports how people would gather outside their house in order to witness them go out in their carriage and how 700 people sat up all night in and around a Yorkshire inn to see the young Duchess of Hamilton leave in the morning.

 The Duchess was of irreproachable character and the object of lifelong admiration of the King. When she was presented at court even eminent courtiers clambered on chairs to look at her. The Duke died in 1758, aged 33 and only one year later, his Duchess married General John Campbell, late 5th Duke of Argyll.

Poor Maria Gunning came to an untimely end.  Throughout the l7th and l8th centuries ladies of fashion continued the cult of pale white skins and red rouged cheeks. The use of lead continued as the basis of make-up. The noxious effect of the lead caused skin eruptions which encouraged ladies to powder their skins more vigorously to mask these unsightly blemishes. This caused the death of several ladies of fashion, most notoriously, the death in 1760, of Maria, Lady Coventry.  She is also reported to have used arsenic as a beauty aid, which cannot have improved her health.

John Gunning, sister of Elizabeth & Maria

From

General Tilney and  the Maidens all Forlorn: typecasting in Northanger Abbey by CAROLYN D. WILLIAMS

 Women’s Writing, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1998

The story of the eighteenth century’s most outrageously scandalous general is closely bound up with the career of the novelist, Susannah Minifie (?1740-1800). Her novels have been deemed "exceedingly harmless; an absence of plot forming their most original characteristic" (DNB, sub "Gunning, Susannah"). At first, she collaborated with her sister Margaret: the word "minific" was coined in honour of their penchant for sentimental hyperbole.

The following sample is extracted from Barford Abbey (1768), whose paralysingly perfect heroine is acknowledged as the grand-daughter of a wealthy baronet and marries the handsome, virtuous Lord Darcey. In this passage, Darcey’s friend, believing that dissatisfaction with the heroine’s fortune has prevented his proposing, urges him to reconsider: "WHAT a sacrifice do you offer up to that old dog Plutus! – I have lost all patience, – all patience, I say. Such a woman! – such an angelic woman! – But what has, – what will avail my arguments? – Her peace is gone, – if you persevere in a behaviour so particular, – absolutely gone."   In 1768 Susannah married Captain, later Lieutenant-General Gunning (?1741-97), brother of the famous Gunning sisters. As Janet Todd observes, Susannah’s marriage must have seemed like an entry into her own fiction. 

Elizabeth Gunning

She bore a daughter, Elizabeth Gunning (1769-1823), later Plunkett, who indulged in complex flirtations with the Marquis of Blandford (heir to the Duke of Marlborough) and the Marquis of Lorn (heir to her uncle, the Duke of Argyll). Then disaster struck: General Gunning wrote to the Duke of Marlborough on 3 Feb. 1791 inquiring into Lord Blandford’s intentions. A reply showing that Lord Blandford had changed his mind was returned, and afterwards appeared to be a forgery, presumably by Miss Gunning. A Mrs. Bowen forwarded some letters to the general, in which his daughter declared her passion for Lord Lorne. The general, enraged at his daughter’s deceit, turned her out of doors. Mrs. Gunning followed, and both were received by the Duchess of Bedford. (DNB) Thus, Susannah found herself "beyond the protection of her spouse and thrown into a world in which only her pen could save her", caught in a battle of conflicting texts.

An article published in The Gentleman’s Magazine for February 1791, titillatingly entitled "Fashionable Mystery", begins by implying that General Gunning is innocent of the forgery, but culpable as a father: bad-tempered, proud, impulsive, and careless of the reputation and welfare of his wife and daughter: The General ... questioned Mrs. and Miss G[unning]; told them that a forgery had been practised either by or on them; and, with the authority of a husband and farther [sic], demanded the truth. He received no other answer, than that they were equally dupes of the fraud, if it was a fraud.

He flew to the servant whom he had entrusted with this letter; and, having made him properly to apprehend the effects of his fury if he deceived him, he drew from him a disclosure of the whole plot, that the D[uke of Marlborough] was utterly ignorant of the whole affair; and that the M[arquis of Blandford] had never shown any other than the attention of common politeness to the Lady. The General, on this exposure, took the measure of a man more jealous of honour, than softened by parent weakness. He gave his wife and daughter twenty-four hours to justify their conduct; at the end of which if they failed to acquit themselves, they must leave his house for ever. They immediately withdrew, and took shelter under the protecting kindness of the Duchess of B[edford]. Such is the vague story, and which we have willingly submitted to relate, absurd as it is, because the ladies are not unwilling that the gross fiction, which has produced such serious consequences to them, should go forth; its own improbability being its refutation. But now sinister new possibilities arise: although no specific charge is made, the ground is being carefully prepared for later, more definite accusations that General Gunning himself was responsible for the forgeries, aided by his associates, Captain Bowen and his wife, and motivated by the desire to avoid paying his daughter’s marriage portion. If this article is inspired by Susannah Gunning (as the increasingly lurid style suggests), she is doing a much more thorough job than Jane Austen did on General Tilney. But then, Mrs Gunning is working in the real world, where a consistent story is worth more than delicate ambiguities: The fact is, that, deep, dark, and mysterious as the plot has been, it will turn out to be an artful machine in a quarter from which the young Lady should rather have received protection than injury; practised for the purpose of drawing off the affections of a young Nobleman really enamoured of her charms, and to whose passion they were adverse. Miss G[unning] was, equally with her mother, the dupe of the contrivance; and unless gallantry shall rouse gentlemen to inquire before they decide, she may become the victim! However this article is read, General Gunning emerges as a bad father. Susannah’s most spectacular attempt to vindicate herself and her daughter was A Letter from Mrs Gunning, addressed to His Grace, the Duke of Argyll (1791). In a bid to maximise both the emotional impact and the credibility of her narrative, she claims that maternal grief has deprived her of the ability to provide the art she employed in the composition of her novels, but this very disclaimer, like the rest of the work, is written minificissime: "when fiction has guided my pen, my heart has been softened by compassion, and my tears have flowed over distresses of my own creating; but Nature has appointed me to a task which I am totally incapable of performing – as a mother I cannot hold her pencil – the colours alone blind me, to lay them on is impossible!"[46] Elizabeth emerges as "the glory of her family, beloved by her friends, adored by the children of poverty, and the sweet soother of distress, wherever or whenever it made its claim on her gentle heart".

Susannah declares that she left her husband voluntarily: "1 rather chose to follow an ANGEL than to remain with the very reverse of an ANGEL".[48] Janet Todd describes the writing as "novelettish"; much direct speech is given, gestures are described in cinematic detail, and a sense of writing to the moment often appears; like a Richardson epistolary novel, "It quotes from memoranda written at the time and mingles hindsight with partial sight, story with opposing story". There are also Gothic touches, with deep-laid plots assailing the heroine’s angelic innocence.

General Gunning came under attack again in February 1792, when he was ordered to pay £5000 damages to his former friend, Mr Duberley, for criminal conversation with his wife. The Gentleman’s Magazine gleefully revives the former scandal in order to depict the General as a monster of cruelty, hypocrisy and cold-blooded treachery. Gunning received from Duberly every indulgence consistent with the dignity of that rigid virtue he had acquired by his treatment of a wife and daughter, of whom had the reports been true, they could only have been charged with youthful levity; of such a man it was impossible to suspect that extreme of profligacy, and that he could have been capable of wounding his friend in the tenderest part by conveying his wife off to France, where he lived with her in open defiance of the laws of his country.

The Gunnings’s affairs aroused enormous public interest. As early as 27 March 1791, Horace Walpole wrote to Mary Berry, "One has heard of nothing else for these seven months! and it requires some ingenuity to keep up the attention of such a capital as London for above half a year together" (27 March 791).[51] They inspired a flood of caricatures. General Gunning appears in most of them, and never to advantage: he is either plotting with his daughter to ensnare a future duke for a son-in-law [52], plotting against his daughter for financial gain [53], or being a tyrannical father.[54] At best, he is the gullible dupe of female literary creativity: even Susannah’s sister Margaret was suspected of taking a hand in the forgeries. In "Symptoms of Affection or a Specimen of Martial Prowess" (27 March 1791), Isaac Cruikshank shows General Gunning driving his wife and daughter out of his house, saying "Now I shall save a 1000 a year in Housekeeping & keep as many [whores] as I like". Elizabeth says, "Oh thus to be persecuted and rob’d of – all for Lorn".  This pun reappears in Cruikshank’s "This is the House that Jack Built" (2 January 1792), which contains a portrait of the chief persons involved in the scandal; the culminating verse reads: "This is the General somewhat too bold – whose head is too hot, and whose heart is too cold – who made himself single before it was meet and turn’d Wife and Daughter into the street, to appease the two Dukes whose bitter rebukes made the two Marquisses shy of the horn blown by the Maiden all For Lorn all on a sudden so tattered and torn because Madam Bo[we]n to whom it was owing that Madam Gun[nin]g so very cunning betrayed the Groom that carried the Note that Nobody wrote". Susannah Gunning’s prose style is also mocked; the most outrageous parody occurs in James Gillray’s "Margaret’s Ghost" (25 March 1791), where Elizabeth Gunning is described as "my smiling-injured-innocent-Lambkin", "my amiable-gentle-dovelike Cherub", a "dear-chaste-adorable-kind-benificent [sic]-enchanting-heart-feeling-benificent [sic]-paragon of Goodness" and "my dear-divine-glorious-Arch-angelic-Angel".  Elizabeth herself is repeatedly exploited and humiliated. One print, by James Gillray, entitled "The Siege of Blenheim – or – the New System of Gunning, Discovered" (5 March 1791), depicts Elizabeth Gunning, her skirts raised to reveal inordinate amounts of thigh, sitting astride a cannon aimed at Blenheim Palace. A window of this stately home frames the posteriors of the Duke of Marlborough, emitting vast quantities of excrement, propelled towards Elizabeth by a blast of flatulence. Another caricaturist, abandoning scatology for soft pornography, depicts Elizabeth naked, but for two coronets which are falling from her hair, in "The Naked Truth, or, the Sweet Little Angel Turned Out For Lorn" (25 March, 1791).[60] Further complications developed with the publication of that scandalous, inventive but not entirely unreliable work, An Apology for the Life of Major General G[unning], Written by Himself (1792), whose true authorship is unknown. This presents the General as an unsavoury combination of literary clichés. He claims that the social opportunities provided by his sisters’ exalted marriages drew him into a "vortex of dissipation" [61], not one of Austen’s favourite expressions.[62] His role in his daughter’s troubles is depicted as that of a gullible dupe, caught up in his wife’s fictions: "it is to her happy invention and romantic enterprises that I may attribute the downfall of my family and the honour I acquired in becoming the laughing-stock of the nation".[63] He appears most anxious to clear himself of the charge of being a cruel father: he declares that his wife forged the letters with his "consent and assistance" [64]; when the forgery was discovered, he agreed with Susannah and Elizabeth to save appearances by turning them out "in a seeming rage".  His most striking role in the book, however, is not that of the almost innocent victim of circumstances, but the accomplished rake. The General Gunning of the Apology may be unable to understand or control the machinations of the women in his own family, but, once confronted with the wives and daughters of other men, he is endowed with an impressive flair for seduction. The language of military conquest celebrates his sexual prowess: "I might ten times in twelve stand over the ruins of the virtue I had destroyed, and exclaim with Cæsar, VENI, VIDI, VICI".[66] Like other publications in which he figures, the Apology depicts Gunning as "a hoary, gouty, debilitated old man", exaggerating his age and infirmities in a manner consistent with the received stereotype [67]; although little more than 50 years old at the time of publication, he is credited with over 40 years’ sexual experience.[68] Yet readers are somehow expected to believe that such a superannuated wreck could still be attractive: "even now, emaciated, crippled, and worn out as I am with length of years, debauchery, and diseases, there are women, devoid of neither youth nor beauty, who hear my voice with admiration, and behold my person with desire". We move further into the realms of masculine fantasy when Gunning’s alleged conquests are listed in order of rank:

TWO DUCHESSES – One English, and one French.

FOURTEEN COUNTESSES – Five English, two Irish, one French, and six German.

FOUR VISCOUNTESSES – All British.

SEVEN BARONESSES – Three English, two Scotch, and two Irish.

BARONETS’ LADIES, thirteen – Seven English, four Scotch, and two Irish.

LORD MAYORS’, KNIGHTS’, and ALDERMEN’S WIVES five – All British.

’SQUIRES’ LADIES, twenty – mostly British.

PEERS’ DAUGHTERS, unmarried, fourteen – English, Scotch, and Irish.

DESCENDANTS of PEERS, in the third and fourth generation, twenty-one –

YOUNG LADIES, without any pretensions to nobility, twenty-seven English, Irish, Scotch, French, Dutch, and Americans.

MAIDS of HONOUR, five – All British.

OLD MAIDS, one – Strong Spanish, with a dash of the Irish and Scotch.

UNDISTINGUISHED WIDOWS, eleven – Of all countries, and of all ages and descriptions.

Allegedly, these encounters produced over a hundred sons, including two cardinals, a bishop, a duke, three physicians, seven barristers, a rabbi, and "ELEVEN GERMAN COUNTS, every one of whom has killed his man, to prove the purity of his blood, and the antiquity of his family".[71] It is only to be expected that such a paragon of male potency should regard daughters as trivial by-products of his primary reproductive endeavour: "as I never had either any inclination or opportunity to enter into the merits of these ladies, I have by neglect entirely forgot their number, as well as their virtues".[72] General Gunning is elevated to the realms of macho myth, somewhere between DaPonte’s Don Giovanni and Rochester’s Disabled Debauchee. Nor was this the end of his (largely involuntary) contributions to literature: for the next few years, Susannah "turned these family details to good use in her fiction", and Elizabeth in her turn wrote novels about high society.[73] "He must be a very odd man" At first sight, the Gunning affair does not resemble anything in an Austen novel. It was treated with a coarseness utterly foreign to Austen. However, some interesting similarities appear in the character and conduct of the two generals when the dirt is cleared away: removing or decently veiling sexual improprieties and gross personal details was one of Austen’s specialities. Both set an excessive value on aristocratic connections: "never had the General loved his daughter so well in all her hours of companionship, utility, and patient endurance, as when he first hailed her, ‘Your Ladyship!’" (p. 251). Both suspect a young girl of deceitful manipulations in order to make an advantageous marriage. Northanger Abbey’s narrator assures us that Catherine has all the innocence which Susannah Gunning claimed for her own daughter; like General Gunning in the Letter and some of the caricatures, General Tilney is motivated chiefly by avarice: "The General had nothing to accuse her of, nothing to lay to her charge, but her being the involuntary, unconscious object of a deception which his pride could not pardon, and which a better pride would have been ashamed to own".