Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Marguarite, Countess of Blessington, an Irish beauty of the Regency and Early Victorian Periods, was also a famous literary and political hostess, and the author of at least one work of permanent interest: ‘Conversations of Lord Byron’. This was written from the Journal she kept in 1823, when she met Byron in Genoa, shortly before his last journey to Greece. The lengthy and detailed ‘Conversations’ give a highly personal and vivid record of Byron’s thoughts and opinions, ranging over literary, political and social themes.

The ‘learned Dr. Parr’ described her as ‘the most gorgeous Lady Blessington’, and this ‘gorgeousness’ is attested by Sir Thomas Lawrence’s ‘speaking likeness’ in the Wallace collection in Manchester Square, London. Her dark, glossy hair is parted in the centre above an exquisitely-shaped face, brilliant eloquent eyes, nobly moulded neck, arms and bust. Her slender hands are folded gracefully on her satin lap.

The portrait was the sensation of the season, 1820-21. P.G. Patmore, the journalist and father of the poet, Coventry Patmore, saw Marguerite at the Royal Academy Exhibition as she stood in front of her likeness. He wrote:

‘Unlike all other beautiful faces that I have seen, hers was at the time of which I speak neither a history nor a prophecy, but rather a star to kneel before and worship... an end and a consummation in itself, not a promise of anything else.’ (from ‘Personal Recollections of Lamb, Hazlitt and Others’ edited by Richard H. Stoddard, New York, 1875, page 286)

She was born Sally, the daughter of hard-drinking, hard-riding Edmund Power at Knockbrit, near Clonmel, Tipperary, 1st September, 1789. Among a large family of beautiful children, she was small, puny and virtually ignored by her parents. But an educated and sensitive friend, Miss Dwyer, discovered this ‘ugly duckling’s promise, taught her to read, and awakened her life-long thirst for knowledge. Apart from this help, Sally educated herself through books, observation and the talent of absorbing knowledge from the conversation of brilliant men.

When she was fourteen, her developing mind and budding beauty aroused the interest of some army officers who were quartered near her home in Clonmel. Seeing an opportunity to profit, her father forced her to marry Captain Farmer, one of his drinking and gambling companions.

The girl spent three nightmare months of unbelievable ill-treatment, including beating and starvation. She escaped to her father’s house, but was far from welcomed. The damage to a sensitive girl had been done. Although she fascinated many men and married, she had no children, and was said to be incapable of loving. Many of the men attracted to her were effeminate.

In 1807, Sally was taken under the protection of Captain Thomas Jenkins, an English officer, for whom the enchanting Irish girl was a valuable possession. When she was twenty he took her to his Hampshire estates, and for the ensuing five years little is known of her life., except that she had leisure for study, and Captain Jenkins lavished luxuries and adornments upon her. Subsequently, she was seen and coveted by the wealthy Lord Mountjoy, who paid Jenkins 10,000 pounds for the transfer of Sally to himself. Fabulously rich, he desired her as the crown jewel of his art collection.

She was fortuitously freed from her first husband, for Captain Farmer had been killed in a fall from a window in the King’s Bench Prison where he had been drinking with cronies who were inmates.

On the 16th February, 1818, Lord Mountjoy, now the Earl of Blessington, married the beautiful Sally Farmer at the Church in Bryanston Square, London, and a coronet was placed on the head of the lady thereafter known as Marguerite, Countess of Blessington.

In various ways, her career had similarities with that of Byron. Both were born in depressing, imp6verished surroundings; both achieved fame overnight, much assisted by their personal beauty, charm and intellect, as well as wit. Both were snubbed by a society to which they wished to belong - a society dominated by the proud political hostesses, including Lady Jersey, Lady Melbourne and Lady Holland. This priggish exclusive caste condemned both Lord Byron and Marguerite Blessington for ‘immorality’; yet many of the great ladies had lovers and produced children by different fathers.

Like Byron, Marguerite was a paradoxical blend of wit, spirituality, irony, vulgarity. But her gift was talent; his genius.

Avidly, she read everything Byron wrote, and followed the ‘Childe Harold’ Swiss and Italian journies, riding in a coach fantastic as Byron’s Napoleonic one. She joined the long procession of women associated with him: Teresa Macri (the Maid of Athens); Lady Caroline Lamb; Augusta Leigh; Annabella, his wife; Claire Clairmount; Mary Shelley; Countess Teresa Guiccioli, to name the best known. But not even Teresa understood Byron as did Lady Blessington. Intelligent and shrewd though she was, Teresa loved him too much and her observations were misted by sentimentality.

In 1922, Sir John Murray wrote, ‘Of all the ladies with whom Byron associated, Lady Blessington was perhaps the one best suited by her charm, her good sense, her intelligence, and her sympathy to be a companion of Byron, if they had met in earlier days: had she been destined to be his wife, his whole career would have changed.’ (Sir John Murray, ‘Lord Byron’s Correspondence’, London, 1922, II, 248-9).

Declared a ‘bluestocking’ by her rival great ladies, Marguerite fascinated the most famous men of her time. In 1822, her circle included a number well known to Byron: George Canning, statesman and orator; George Colman the Younger, dramatist; Henry Edward Fox, son of Lord Holland, and Teresa Guiccioli’s lover in 1825; John Gait, the novelist; William Godwin, Mary Shelley’s father; John Philip Kemble, the tragedian; Thomas Moore and Samuel Rogers, the poets; as well as ‘the learned Doctor Parr’, to whom Byron had once listened ‘with admiring ignorance and respectful silence’, and the Prince Regent.

Having found her prince, this Regency Cinderella became mistress of a mansion in St. James’s Square. Wildly extravagant, her husband spent lavishly from his vast fortune, and indulged a flamboyant taste in furniture and decor; while Milady began to write books, in which she expressed moralising sentiments: ‘If we must have a ballet, and nothing short of indecent exhibition can please us, let the performers, at least the female part of them, belong to any country but our own.’

In her ‘Night Thought Book’ and ‘The Magic Lantern’ she tried to assume the role of a ‘censor of society’ in an attempt to defy or minimize the tales and rumours that had been spread about her past.

In 1821 the Count d’Orsay came to the Blessington salon. He was a dandy in the tradition of Beau Brummel, and the rest of his life and career was linked with those of the Blessingtons. He accompanied them on their journies, which were meticulously recorded by Marguerite in the still readable, vivid travel books she kept: ‘The Idler in France’, ‘The Idler in Italy’, and ‘The Journal of a Tour through the Netherlands to Paris’. She was an observant tourist with a feeling for history and a discriminating taste in the arts.

The Blessingtons, with Marguerite’s younger sister and the Count d’Orsay, travelled in a sumptuous caravan of three coaches and at least six servants, including a courier and a cook. A wit soon dubbed them ‘The Blessington Circus’. Marguerite’s great aim was to meet Lord Byron, who was already known to her husband.

The party left London on 22 August, 1822, and the seven months until she met Byron were a Byronic journey, during which they visited many of the scenes associated with him: the Jura, Lake Geneva, on which Byron sailed with Shelley in 1816; Voltaire’s house at Ferney, Gibbon’s house at Lausanne. On October 8, 1822, the party was rowed on the Lake by ‘Maurice, the boatman employed by Lord Byron ...’

The nine weeks at the Albergo della Villa, Genoa, were the high point of Marguerite’s career. The evening of her arrival on 31 March, 1823, she wrote in her Journal: ‘And am I indeed in the same town with Byron? And tomorrow I may perhaps behold him!’

At first she admitted her disappointment when she saw approaching her ‘a pale little man without a hat, and with wisps of auburn-grey hair tumbling over the back of his collar’.

His body was emaciated by illness and dieting, his face wan and marked. But even the sophisticated and critical lady, only a year younger than her hero, and still in the prime of her beauty, soon fell under the spell of a personality that alternated between the melancholy of Childe Harold and the satire of Don Juan.

Byron left only a few references to the meeting, including a mention in a letter to Thomas Moore, ‘Milady seems highly literary … she is also very pretty, even in the morning - a species of beauty on which the sun of Italy does not shine so frequently as the chandelier.’

He also wrote her a poem, but certainly not one of his best:

Lady Blessington (after Chalons)

To the Countess of Blessington

You have asked for a verse:- the request
In a rhymer ‘twere strange to deny,
But my Hippocrene was but my breast,
And my feelings (its fountain) are dry.

Were I now as I was, I had sung
What Lawrence had painted so well;
But the strain would expire on my tongue,
And the theme is too soft for my shell.

In spite of the presence at Casa Saluzzo - Byron’s residence in Genoa - of the Countess Teresa Guiccioli, Byron spent a great deal of time in the company of the Blessingtons and the Count d’Orsay. Teresa never met them.

On horseback they explored the countryside, and Marguerite was impressed with Byron’s kindness to peasants and beggars and with his great love of flowers. Frequently they dined together, and conversation ranged aver a great variety of subjects, inc1uding the English social and political scene as well as Byron’s ill-fated marriage to Annabella Milbanke. As Byron’s valet, Fletcher commented, ‘Every woman seems to know how to manage Milord better than Milady.’

Byron tried to persuade the Blessingtons to buy a villa near his own Casa Saluzzo at Albaro. He even tossed off some verses about this villa, named Il Paradiso:

Beneath Blessington’s eyes
The reclaimed Paradise
Should be as free as the former from Evil;
But if the new Eve
For an apple should grieve
What mortal would not play the devil?

There was talk of a masked ball, to which Marguerite would go as Eve, escorted by Byron as the Devil.
 
Melancholy and nostalgic are the accounts of their parting.

Marguerite wrote in the Journal:

‘I shall never cease to remember him with kindness: the very idea that I shall not see him again overpowers me with sadness and makes me forget many defects which had so often disenchanted me with him.’

When she heard of his death (April 19, 1824, at Missolonghi while he was attempting to reconcile the dissenting Greek chieftains) she wrote:

‘Alas, alas! His presentiment of dying in Greece has been
too well fulfilled, and I used to banter him on his
superstitious presentiment.’

She did not write the ‘Conversations of Lord Byron’ until 1832, at her house in Seamore Place, London. By this time Lord Blessington was dead of apoplexy. Marguerite was impoverished, and a bitter and defeated woman. Desperately needing money, she offered her manuscript to ‘The New Monthly Magazine’ founded by Colburn, who had published Medwin’s ‘Conversations of Byron’ in
1824.

Many have written critical comment of her reportage and analyses of this chameleon and paradoxical being. Notable is that by Sir Harold Nicolson in his ‘Byron, the Last Journey’:

‘The very real value of Lady Blessington’s ‘Conversations of Lord Byron’ and her ‘The Idler in Italy (1839-40)’ is to be looked for in their reflections of the subtle reactions which the Byron of 1823 stimulated and finally allayed. She passed through those several stages of preconceived admiration, of irritated disapproval, or amused understanding, or profound and poignant sympathy, which we should traverse ourselves.’

The following is an example of her style: intuitive, perspicacious, clearly expressed:

‘A nearly daily intercourse of ten weeks with Byron left the impression on my mind that if an extraordinary quickness of perception prevented his passing over the errors of those with whom he came in contact, and a natural incontinence of speech betrayed him into an exposure of them, a candour and good nature quite as remarkable often led him to enumerate their virtues, and to draw attention to them …

There was no premeditated malignity in Byron’s nature:
though constantly in the habit of exposing the follies and vanity of his friends, I never heard him blacken their reputations, and I never felt an unfavourable impression from any of the censures he bestowed because I saw they were aimed at follies and not character.’
                              (p.145 Lovell Edition, New York 1969)

After the meeting with Byron, the remainder of her travels and even of her life seemed anti-climax. ‘The Blessington Circus’ lived in grand seigneur style in Italy, then settled for about two years in Paris in the mansion once occupied by Marshall Ney. Here in 1929, Lord Blessington died.

Persuaded to return to England by her faithless and callous sister, Ellen, Marguerite soon found herself under attack from the gossips, as well as in financial straits. Perversely, her husband had left his fortune to his daughter by his first wife, on condition that the Count d’Orsay marry this child of fifteen. The marriage was a disaster, and young Harriet ran away from the Count, taking with her the income on which both d’Orsay and Marguerite depended. Though by her strenuous literary efforts, Lady Blessington managed to continue her luxurious way of life. In her unremitting labour with the pen she can be compared with Mrs. Trollope and Mrs. Gaskell, for she turned out novel after novel, but these are today virtually unknown and unread.

She remained a commandingly beautiful woman, and in 1835 Benjamin Robert Haydon, the painter, wrote, after visiting her in the house on Seamore Place that she and d’Orsay furnished magnificently - an appropriate setting for their famous salon:

‘I was with her an hour before anyone came in. She looked superb. She had on a grey satin with large black flowers, her beautiful arms and hands encircled with jewels, while a superb jewel divided her hair. She was lounging in a soft chair, her beautiful complexion engoldened by the luxurious light of an amorous sleepy lamp, her whole air melting, voluptuous, intellectual and overwhelming!’

Lord Byron After a Drawing By G. H. Harlow

In 1840 she and Count d’Orsay moved to Gore House, an impressive mansion set in a lilac garden that stood where the Albert Hall now stands. To this last of her famous salons came Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Hans Andersen, who wrote of his visit in 1847:

‘We wandered together down into the garden. She was the first English lady I understood very well, but she spoke also intentionally very slowly. Coming in at the appointed time, I found the whole house in festive splendour. Waiters in silk stockings with powdered hair stood in the corridor; Lady Blessington herself was in splendour and magnificence, but with the same mild and radiant face ... she made a very pleasant impression upon me; and in the great circles when the noble ladies asked me where I had been, I could not abstain from naming Lady Blessington. Then there was always a pause. I asked the reason why I was not to go there, or what was the matter with her, and I always got a short answer that she was not a good woman.’

Mainly because of Count d’Orsay’s incredible extravagance, her earnings did not keep up with expenses. Only a few hours ahead of the bailiffs d’Orsay escaped to France, soon to be followed by Marguerite herself.

Shortly afterwards, she suffered a heart attack, and died on 5 June, 1949, and for her grave the Count designed a picturesque and curious monument in the shape of a pyramid.

She had always dreaded the onslaught of age and death, and had written in her manuscript Notebook of 1834:

‘Middle age is the bridge of life, whence we see the
shadow of our youth, and the approach of age with all
its unloveliness.’

Thackeray described the pathetic dismantling of Gore House with a melancholy comment on the fate of a woman who had been the counterpart of Byron’s Dochess of Fitz-Fulke in ‘Don Juan’. Thackeray wrote:

‘I have just come from a dismal sight - Gore House full of snobs looking at the furniture. Foul people: odious bombazine women; brutes keeping their hats on in the kind old drawing-room. I longed to knock some of them off, and say, Sir, be civil in a lady’s room!’ Ah, it was a strange, sad picture of Vanity Fair!’

From the wreckage, her friend, Edward Bulwer, purchased for seven pounds her copy of Byron’s Works ‘with her arms on the binding, and with the landscapes painted on the edges of the 1eaves.’

This he sent to her in Paris, for he was well aware of the great attraction Lord Byron - now so long dead - still had for her.

Aside from her unique association with the poet, Marguerite Blessington was, in her own right, a great legendary figure on the Early Victorian scene.

Drawing - Ian Robinson