The Duke of Richmond, who, when contemplating matrimony was inclined to be guided in the choice of a wife by following in the steps of royalty, succeeded the Duke of York as a suitor for the favour of La Belle Hamilton. This was the Duke of Richmond who was afterwards, when in quest of his third wife, so cleverly hooked by La Belle Stuart. He was now, however, in search of his second Duchess, but, though apparently greatly in love, unable to bring himself to the point of a proposal--not from any timidity, like the Duke of York, but from purely mercenary motives. This man who afterwards married Miss Stuart without a penny hesitated on the present occasion to wed the beautiful Miss Hamilton, who was equally destitute. The King, it is true, from consideration of the claims of her family upon him, offered to overcome the Duke of Richmond's objections by himself dowering the beauty. But as she resented being bargained for like an odalisque in a slave-mart, she decided that the honour it was proposed to confer on her was not worth having.
The "invincible" Jermyn was the next suitor, but as his intentions were no more honourable than the Duke of York's Miss Hamilton soon treated him with the contempt he deserved. While the Duke of Norfolk, with his twenty-five thousand a year, could not get her so much as to look at him. And it was her refusal to become the premier Duchess in the kingdom that kept Lord Falmouth, one of the most talented and ambitious as well as one of the most dissipated of the younger peers of the realm, from declaring a passion which, as he told St. Evremond, "made him regard Miss Hamilton as the only acquisition wanting to complete his happiness."
The list of her unsuccessful lovers would not be complete without mention of the Russells, uncle and nephew. And as the portrait of the elder has been drawn by La Belle Hamilton's brother with a humour that elevates caricature to a fine art, we can do no better than reproduce it from the "Mémoires de Gramont."
"He was," says Anthony Hamilton, "full seventy, and had distinguished himself by his courage and fidelity in the civil wars. His passions and intentions in regard to Miss Hamilton appeared both at once; but his magnificence only appeared by halves in those gallantries which love inspires. It was not long since the fashion of high-crowned hats had been left off, in order to fall into the other extreme. Old Russell, amazed at so terrible a change, resolved to keep a medium, which made him remarkable; he was still more so by his constancy for cut doublets, which he supported a long time after they had been universally suppressed; but, what was more surprising than all, was a certain mixture of avarice and liberality, constantly at war with each other, ever since he had entered the list of love."