George Booth, 2nd Earl of Warrington and his Daughter, Lady Mary Booth, 1695 (oil on...

The Earl is here shown with his only daughter Mary, who in 1736 married the 4th Earl of Stamford. Her presence represents her father’s hopes for the future of a house and estate he had spent a lifetime improving, while their archaic, uncomfortable poses illustrate his backward-looking nature, and the obsessive pride in his family and rank that caused one acquaintance to call him ‘the stiffest of all stiff things’. His wife, Mary Oldbury, with whom he had quarrelled early on, led an entirely separate existence at the other end of the house. His daughter holds up a sheet of music which is inscribed ‘Hear ye Gods of Britain....’ The musical score has been identified as the 12th item - a bass aria - from Purcell’s ‘Bonduca or the British Heroine’, written in 1695. Lord Warrington, however, gives no hint that he may burst into song.