Bessy Moore

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Title:     Bessy Moore
Author: Maurice Hewlett [More Titles by Hewlett]

"My best wishes and respects to Mrs. Moore; she is beautiful. I may say so even to you, for I was never more struck with a countenance." That is Byron, writing to Tom Moore in 1812, when he had been married little more than a year--and Byron's opinion of woman's beauty is worth having. In the eight volumes of Tom's memoirs, worthily collected by his friend Lord John Russell, and in all the crowded stage of it, I see no figure shining in so sweet and clear a morning light as that of his little home-keeping wife, with her "wild, poetic face," her fancy which rings always truer than Tom's own, and her mother-love, which sorrow has to sound so deeply before she can leave the scene. Her appearances are fitful; she keeps to the hearth when the grandees hold the floor. You see nothing of her at Holland House, which Tom may use as his inn, or at Bowood, if she can help herself, which in the country is his house of call. She is the Jenny Wren of this little cock-robin; she wears drab, too often mourning; but you find that she counts for very much with Tom. He loves to know her at his back, loves to remind himself of it. He is always happy to be home again in her faithful arms. Through all the sparkle and flash, under all the talk, through all the tinklings of pianos and guitars which declare Tom's whereabouts, if you listen you can hear the quiet burden of her heart-beats. I don't know what he would have done without her, nor what we should have to say to his literary remains if she were not in them to make them smell of lavender. Few men of letters, and no wits, can have left more behind, with less in them.

There is a great deal less of Bessy in the memoirs than, say, of Lady Donegal, or of Rogers, or of Lord Lansdowne, but somehow or another she makes herself felt; and though her appearances in them are of Tom's contrivance, a personality is more surely expressed than in most of his more elaborate portraits. One gets to know her as indeed the "excellent and beautiful person" of Lord John's measured approval, not so much by what she says or does as by her reactions on Tom himself. A study of her has to be made out of a number of pencil-scratches--one here, one there--put down by the diarist with unpremeditated art; for it is certain that, though Moore intended his diaries to speak for him after his death, what he had to say of his wife was the last thing in them he would have relied upon to do it. I am sure that is so; nevertheless, with the exception of Tom himself, who, of course, holds the centre of the stage, she is more surely and sensibly there than any of his thousand characters, from the Prince Regent to the poet Bowles; more surely and fragrantly there. We are the better for her presence; and so is her Tom's memory, infinitely the better.

It was a secret marriage and, except in the minds of a few good judges, an improvident.

"I breakfast with Lady Donegal on Monday," he writes to his mother in May, 1811, "and dine to meet her at Rogers' on Tuesday; and there is to be a person at both parties whom you little dream of."

This person was Bessy, to whom he had been married some two months on the day of writing, and of whom, when his family was notified, he found that it had nothing good to say. He complains of disappointment, of a "degree of coldness" in his father's comments; and neither is perhaps very wonderful. For Miss Bessy not only had nothing a year, but in the reckoning of the day, and in comparison with the young friend of Lord Moira and Lady Donegal, she herself was nothing. She was indeed a professional actress--Miss E. Dyke in the play-bills--whom Tom had first met in 1808 when the Kilkenny Theatre began a meteor-course. He had lent himself as an amateur to the enterprise, was David in The Rivals, Spado (with song) in A Castle of Andalusia. In 1809, for three weeks on end, he had been Peeping Tom of Coventry to the Lady Godiva of Miss E. Dyke. The rest is easy guessing, and so it is that Tom's parents were dismayed, and that there was a "degree of coldness." Lady Godiva, indeed!

But Bessy was not long in showing herself as good as gold, or approving herself to some of Tom's best friends. Lady Donegal and her sharp-tongued sister, Mary Godfrey, both took to her. "Give our love, honest, downright love to Bessy," they write. Rogers called her Psyche, had the pair to stay with him, stayed with them in his turn, and gave Bessy handsome sums for the charities in which she abounded all her life. Rogers knew simplicity when he saw it, and had no vitriol on hand when she was in the way. I don't think Tom ever took her to Ireland with him, or that, consequently, she ever met his parents in the flesh; but no doubt that they accepted her, and esteemed her.

Bit by bit she reveals herself in Tom's random diaries. As in the printing of a photograph the lights and darks come sparsely out, and unawares the delicate outline, so by a word here, a phrase elsewhere, we realise the presence of a sweet-natured, sound-minded girl, and more than that, of a girl with character. After a spell of Brompton lodgings Tom took her to Kegworth in Leicestershire, where he was to have the neighbourhood and countenance of his patron of the moment, Moira, the Regent's jackal, a solemn, empty-headed lord. Donington Hall and Bessy appear together in a letter to Mary Godfrey.

"... I took Bessy yesterday to Lord Moira's, and she was not half so much struck with its grandeur as I expected. She said, in coming out, 'I like Mr. Rogers's house ten times better.'"

Tom feels it necessary to explain such remarkable taste. "She loves everything by association, and she was very happy in Rogers's house." I don't know whether Tom's simplicity or Bessy's is the more remarkable in all this. Tom's, I think.

"Lady Loudoun and Lord Moira called upon us on their way to town and brought pine apples, etc." One sees them at it; and the very next letter he writes is dated "Donington Park." Tom fairly lets himself go over it.

"... I think it would have pleased you to see my wife in one of Lord Moira's carriages, with his servant riding after her, and Lady Loudoun's crimson travelling-cloak round her to keep her comfortable. It is a glorious triumph of good conduct on both sides, and makes my heart happier and prouder than all the best worldly connections could possibly have done. The dear girl and I sometimes look at each other with astonishment in our splendid room here, and she says she is quite sure it must be all a dream."

Marble halls, in fact; but let us see how it acted upon Bessy. Shortly after: "... I am just returned from a most delightful little tour with Rogers, poor Bessy being too ill and too fatigued with the ceremonies of the week to accompany us." That was to be the way of it for the rest of their lives together. She would never go to the great houses if she could by any means avoid it, but bore him no grudge for going without her, and was always open-armed for his return.

Mayfield Cottage, Ashbourne, was their next harbourage; and here is a Wheatley picture of them on their way to a dinner-party.

"We dined out to-day at the Ackroyds', neighbours of ours ... we found, in the middle of our walk, that we were near half an hour too early, so we set to practising country-dances in the middle of a retired green lane till the time was expired."

Then he takes her to the Ashbourne ball, and for once leaves himself out of the letter.

"... You cannot imagine what a sensation Bessy excited at the Ball the other night. She was prettily dressed, and certainly looked very beautiful.... She was very much frightened, but she got through it very well. She wore a turban that night to please me, and she looks better in it than anything else; for it strikes everybody almost that sees her, how like the form and expression of her face are to Catalani's, and a turban is the thing for that kind of character."

Catalani, in Caverford's portrait, has the rapt eye of the Cumæan sibyl. One of Moore's fine friends, an admirer of Bessy's, speaks to him of her "wild, poetic face," and the Duchess of Sussex thought her like "Lady Heathcote in the days of her beauty." That is putting her very high, for, according to Cosway, Lady Heathcote was a lovely young woman indeed; but the "wild, poetic face" gets us as near as need be.

In 1815 troubles began from which the poor girl was never to be free again. She lost one of her three little girls, Olivia Byron, for whom the poet had been sponsor. "... It was with difficulty I could get her away from her little dead baby," Moore tells his mother, "and then only under a promise that she should see it again last night...." In 1817, while Moore was in Paris, pursuing his pleasures, another child, Barbara, had a fall, and he came home in August to find her "very ill indeed." On September 10th she is still ill, but if she should get a little better, "I mean to go for a day or two to Lord Lansdowne's to look at a house.... He has been searching his neighbourhood for a habitation for me, in a way very flattering indeed from such a man." But he did not go. September 20th, "It's all over, my dearest Mother!"

"Poor Bessy," we read, "neither eats nor sleeps enough hardly to sustain life": nevertheless in the first week of October he is at Bowood. "I arrived here the day before yesterday, and found Rogers, Lord and Lady Kerry, etc." He saw Sloperton Cottage and stayed out his week. Bessy then had to see the cottage, and went--but not from Bowood. "Bessy, who went off the night before last to look at the cottage near Lord Lansdowne's, is returned this morning, after travelling both nights. Power went with her." In a month's time they were in possession, and Tom vastly set up by the near neighbourhood of his exalted friend. Not so, however, his Jenny Wren.

"... We are getting on here as quietly and comfortably as possible, and the only thing I regret is the want of some near and plain neighbours for Bessy to make an intimacy with, and enjoy a little tea-drinking now and then, as she used to do in Derbyshire. She contrives, however, to employ herself very well without them; and her favourite task of cutting out things for the poor people is here even in greater requisition than we bargained for, as there never was such wretchedness in any place where we have been; and the better class of people (with but one or two exceptions) seem to consider their contributions to the poor-rates as abundantly sufficient, without making any further exertion towards the relief of the poor wretches. It is a pity Bessy has not more means, for she takes the true method of charity--that of going herself into the cottages, and seeing what they are most in want of.

"Lady Lansdowne has been very kind indeed, and has a good deal won me over (as you know, kindness will do now and then). After many exertions to get Bessy to go and dine there, I have at last succeeded this week, in consequence of our being on a visit to Bowles's, and her having the shelter of the poet's old lady to protect her through the enterprise. She did not, however, at all like it, and I shall not often put her to the torture of it. In addition to her democratic pride--which I cannot blame her for--which makes her prefer the company of her equals to that of her superiors, she finds herself a perfect stranger in the midst of people who are all intimate; and this is a sort of dignified desolation which poor Bessy is not at all ambitious of. Vanity gets over all these difficulties; but pride is not so practicable."

Vanity indeed did, though Tom had a pride of his own too. But he was soothed and not offended by pomp, whereas she was bored as well as irritated. It is obvious that her wits were valid enough. She could be happy with Rogers or the Bowleses, who could allow for simplicity, and delight in it--a talent denied to the good Lansdownes. As for Bowles, Tom is shrewd enough to remark upon "the mixture of talent and simplicity in him."

"His parsonage-house at Brenthill is beautifully situated; but he has a good deal frittered away its beauty in grottos, hermitages and Shenstonian inscriptions. When company is coming he cries, 'Here, John, run with the crucifix and missal to the hermitage, and set the fountain going.' His sheep-bells are tuned in thirds and fifths."

Such was Bowles, Bessy's best friend in Wilts.

Bowood to Tom was centre of his scheme of things; he was always there on some pretext or other; or he would dine and sleep at Bowles's or at Lacock Abbey, or spend days in Bath, or a week in London. It is true that half his talent and more than half his fame were social: these things were the bread as well as the butter of life to him. But here is Bessy meantime:

"... Came home and found my dearest Bessy very tired after her walk from church. She has been receiving the Sacrament, and never did a purer heart.... In the note she wrote me to Bowles's the day before, she said, 'I am sorry I am not to see you before I go to church.'"

Tom had sensibility, not a doubt of it; but it seems to me that she had something better.

Here again, on the 16th October, "My dear Bessy planting some roots Miss Hughes has brought her, looking for a place to put a root of pink hepatica in, where (as she said) 'I might best see them in my walk.'" Yes, he had sensibility; but she had imagination. A little Tom was born a week after that. She took it badly, as she did most of her labours, and was in bed a month. On the 18th November she went out for the first time after the event--"the day delightful." She "went round to all her flower-beds to examine their state, for she has every little leaf in the garden by heart." Tom himself had been much moved by the birth of his first boy. He was called up at 11.30, sent for the midwife, was upset, walked about half the night, thanked God--"the maid, by the way, very near catching me on my knees." She might have caught Bessy on them every day, and no thought taken of so simple a thing. But Tom had sensibility.

But a man who, eight years after marriage, can make his wife an April fool, and record it, is no bad husband, and it would be a trespass on his good fame to suggest it. He loved her dearly and could never have been unkind to her. Far from that, happy domestic pictures abound in his diaries. Here is one of a time when she had joined him in London, on her way to stay with her sister in Edinburgh. They went together to Hornsey, to see Barbara's grave. "At eight o'clock she and I sauntered up and down the Burlington Arcade, then went and bought some prawns and supped most snugly together." He takes the state-rooms costing £7 apiece, for "his own pretty girl." Meantime he is preparing to shelter in France from civil process served upon him for the defalcations of his deputy in Bermuda.

I need not follow the scenes through as they come. The essence of Bessy Moore is expressed in what I have written of the first flush of her married life. There was much more to come. Moore outlived all his children, and she, poor soul, outlived her rattling, melodious Tom, having known more sorrow than falls, luckily, to the lot of most mothers. The death of her last girl, Anastasia, is beautifully told by Tom; but a worse stroke than even that was the wild career of little Tom, the son, his illness, disgrace, and death in the French Foreign Legion. That indeed went near to breaking Bessy's heart. "Why do people sigh for children? They know not what sorrow will come with them." That is her own, and only recorded, outcry.

In The Loves of the Angels, an erotic and perfervid poem, which fails, nevertheless, from want of concentration of the thought, Zeraph, the third angel, is Tom himself, and the daughter of man, Nama, with whom he consorts, is Bessy.

Humility, that low, sweet root,
From which all heavenly virtues shoot,
Was in the hearts of both--but most
In Nama's heart, by whom alone
Those charms for which a heaven was lost
Seemed all unvalued and unknown...

Certainly she had humility; but he gives her other Christian virtues--

So true she felt it that to hope,
To trust is happier than to know.

But we may doubt if Tom knew what Bessy knew and excused. Sensibility will not dig very deep.

[The end]
Maurice Hewlett's essay: Bessy Moore

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