Odd this day
Well, if it’s 30 September, it must be 264 years since Maria Gunning, Countess of Coventry, fabled society beauty, died at just 27 of foolish vanity; hideously disfigured by the lead in her white make-up, which leached into her skin and poisoned her. Unless, of course, that isn’t what killed her at all…
Maria was the granddaughter of a viscount, but the family was not rich, so she and her sister had to get by on the looks they were noted for, which took them all the way to London, and the court of St James’s. Maria’s sister Elizabeth married a duke, Maria the Earl of Coventry.
We would call this marrying ‘well’, were it not for the fact that George, the 6th Earl of Coventry, was not a faithful man. Eighteenth century writer Giustiniana Wynne says Maria bumped into courtesan Kitty Fisher in a London park one day and asked her who had made her dress. Fisher said
she had better ask Lord Coventry as he had given her that dress as a gift. Lady Coventry called her an impertinent woman; the other one answered that her marrying a nutty lord had put enough social difference between them that she would have to withstand the insult.
Not a happy marriage, then. Frances Gerard, writing in 1895 in her work Some Celebrated Irish Beauties of the Last Century, says her husband “was probably weary of her whims and oddities”, or of her ‘hoydenish’ ways. (Yes, I had to look that up. Apparently an archaic term meaning wild, boisterous and unwomanly.)
The book also calls her “Poor, silly Maria!” and says
her foolish talk and stupidity made her the jest of the town.
Apparently, on meeting George II, when he asked if
she were not sorry there were no masquerades, she said, No, she was tired of them ; she was surfeited with most sights, there was but one she wanted to see, a coronation.
(I may not have to spell out why this was a faux pas, but just in case: as recent British history can tell you, there are certain things which necessarily have to precede a coronation…)
The old King told this himself. He was very partial to the pretty creature, and forgave her unintentional gaucherie.
Anyway, apparently Lord Coventry chased her round a table on their honeymoon, in front of people, in order to wipe the rouge (or ‘raddle’) off her face, and some accounts suggest that he was prescient to so do, given that she is ‘known’ to have died from wearing more and more white lead make-up in order to cover up the damage done to her skin by white lead make-up.
But… is this true? Celebrated Irish Beauties quotes 18th century artist Mary Delany, who thinks it is:
What a wretched end Lady Coventry makes after her short-lived reign of beauty … she presumptuously and vainly … destroyed her life, for … the white she made use of for her neck and face was rank poison.
…but ‘Lady Russell’ (which I think means Frances, Countess Russell, wife of Prime Minister John, the first Earl Russell) wrote to the author to say:
It is a popular fallacy that Lady Coventry died from the use of cosmetics. She died, as did her sister (Lizzy) and the young Duke of Hamilton, from consumption.
Apparently, TB was common in her family, and
the white and red raddle which she now used ad libitum … [was to] conceal the ravages her fatal illness had already made on her bright loveliness. She looked old, faded, a ghost of her former self.
This is, perhaps, not the most reliable of sources, though — so I was delighted to come across a research project at McMaster University in Canada examining lead make-up and poisoning.
This is fascinating for a number of reasons. Quite apart from anything else, they test the make-up on “ethically sourced pigskin”, a term which raises questions the website doesn’t answer. Perhaps more importantly, they discovered in their work that our idea of white 18th century make-up is inaccurate. It’s a result of the people who make costume dramas wanting to avoid poisoning their actors: they use titanium oxide instead of white lead, and the result is much whiter.
This isn’t directly relevant to the question of Maria’s cause of death, but it is interesting (to me, at least). Women of the time wouldn’t have looked as we imagine them. The main effect of lead is
a soft-focus look that blurs wrinkles and blemishes, or the look of a youthful, dewy complexion.
Anyway, onto CoD. The original recipes contained lead carbonate, which doesn’t pass easily through skin. It’s only toxic if you ingest or inhale it, which is not generally considered wise. So, it may be that Maria really did die of TB.
However, if the makeup formulations changed the form of the lead, or softened the outer layer of the skin, some lead could diffuse through. This would make those makeup formulations more poisonous. Our research is showing some evidence of differences in skin absorbance, meaning some recipes were more toxic than others. It is possible that some recipes could have been used with little problem. Other recipes, which made young women deathly ill, were probably so poisonous because the lead was absorbed through the skin.
So, at the very least, it may be that a combination of TB and lead poisoning did for Maria. Maybe the TB was doing her in, and the lead weakened her. But it’s not outside the bounds of possibility that the lead wasn’t involved at all. Queen Elizabeth I’s white make-up almost certainly played a role in her demise, but — while I continue to love Horrible Histories (and Simon Farnaby’s rendition of the Stupid Deaths song in particular) — perhaps we should be kinder to the memory of Maria Gunning.
Married to a man who apparently didn’t care about her, dying slowly and painfully at just 27, and leaving behind three young children, her only ‘crime’ seems to have been a slightly gauche manner. And we can speculate that it was this which coloured her posthumous reputation.
