Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/745

Rh in his politics a zealous Whig. As an orator, none ever laboured under greater disadvantages of voice and manner; but those disadvantages were most successfully retrieved by his wondrous power of reasoning, his keen invective, and his ready wit. At the trial of the Duchess of Kingston for bigamy, when he appeared as counsel against her Grace, Hannah More, who was present, thus describes him: 'His manner is insufferably bad, coughing and spitting at every word, but his sense and expression pointed to the last degree. He made her Grace shed bitter tears.’"

The case of the Duchess came on upon 17 April, 1776, in Westminster Hall, and lasted five days. As a girl she had been married in a frolic at night in a ruined church; but the Spiritual Court had decreed that this was no proper marriage.

Regarding herself as free, she had married the Duke of Kingston, who died and bequeathed his large fortune to her. At once those who had expected to obtain the inheritance began to stir, and had the unfortunate Duchess tried for bigamy. John Dunning was counsel against her. She belonged to an ancient Devonshire family, but that did not concern him; she was an unfortunate widow beset by foes—that mattered not to him, he attacked her in the grossest manner. As the judges refused to accept the sentence of the Spiritual Court, a conviction of course followed, and she fled from England secretly, to escape being branded in the hand and imprisoned. The hawking and spitting of John Dunning were not due to any complaint, but were tricks he had acquired and had not laboured to master. The herald to an approaching speech from Dunning was a series of laboured and noisy efforts to clear his throat. When speaking his head waggled as if he were afflicted with palsy, and he had the trick of raising his arms