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Hayley\u2019s Women: Eliza Ball Hayley and Mary Cockerell<\/h3>\n
Deep within the Fitzwilliam Museum\u2019s Hayley Papers is a handful of deeply affectionate letters written to William Hayley and his son Tom. Three were attributed to Hayley\u2019s first wife Eliza, the others to a \u201cMiss Betts\u201d who, until recently was thought to be Tom\u2019s mother. In fact, they were all written by Mary Cockerell \u2013 the woman art historian Suzanne E May identified as Tom\u2019s actual mother in 2012, and who was described by the man who edited Hayley\u2019s Memoirs<\/em> as \u201cthe sourest and, I think the ugliest of all possible kept mistresses\u201d. Sour and ugly she might have been, but what\u2019s clear from these letters is that she really loved Hayley. Aside from his mother and nursemaid Sarah Betts (whose daughter many people thought was Tom\u2019s mother), she was possibly the only woman who did so unconditionally.<\/p>\n Despite authoring a bestselling and highly-influential book<\/a> advising young women on how to attract and keep a husband, William Hayley\u2019s love life was a catalogue of disasters. Between 1763 and 1814, he notched up one secret engagement, two marriages, two separations, a case for divorce or separation from bed and board, one adored illegitimate son, and a long liaison with Mary Cockerell.<\/p>\n The letters in the Fitzwilliam\u2019s collection are all unsigned. Most date from the days and weeks after Hayley\u2019s first wife Eliza died in November 1797, and were sent to him at Eliza\u2019s last address, while Hayley was sorting out Eliza\u2019s effects. The degree of affection expressed suggests that Mary may have hoped to become the second Mrs Hayley. And, had Tom (then seventeen), not become ill with the progressively debilitating condition that would, two-and-a-half years later, kill him, she might have done \u2013\u00a0despite the difference in their social status. After all, Hayley\u2019s friend and neighbour, Lord Egremont, went on to marry his long-term mistress Elizabeth Iliffe \u2013\u00a0a teacher\u2019s daughter \u2013 in 1801.<\/p>\n It might seem odd to ask why a landed gentleman in the eighteenth century had a mistress: this was hardly unusual at the time. But Hayley\u2019s circumstances were unusual. He had married his first wife Eliza on the rebound. The daughter of the Hayleys\u2019 close friend Thomas Ball, the Dean of Chichester, Hayley had been tutoring Eliza, and she had also been ferrying correspondence between him and Fanny Page, the girl with whom he had contracted a secret engagement. When Fanny broke that off, Hayley turned to Eliza, and they married within months.<\/p>\n But it transpired that Eliza couldn\u2019t bear to be touched.<\/p>\n In Hayley\u2019s words:<\/p>\n She ne\u2019er can feel what all her Sex have felt,<\/p>\n The glowing Impulse of impassion\u2019d Fire<\/p>\n Stranger to genial Warmth, she ne\u2019er can melt<\/p>\n In the sweet Trance of satisfied Desire.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (from \u201cELEGY: On a Lady who laboured under an Insanity of many years, and recovered in the close of a long life an imperfect use of her reason. 1783\u201d. This stanza, along with several others, appears in Anecdotes of the Family, Life, and Writings of William Hayley by himself<\/em> \u00ad\u2013 the manuscript version of Hayley\u2019s memoirs. But,\u00a0along with several others touching on similarly sensitive topics, it was cut from the published version).<\/p>\n After Eliza\u2019s death, the poet Anna Seward also wrote of her friend\u2019s aversion to physical contact.<\/p>\n \u201cFire in her affections, frost in her sensations, she shrunk from the caresses of even the husband she adored. Hence, while she had a morbid degree of tenaciousness respecting his esteem and attention, she was incapable of personal jealousy; and would amuse herself with the idea of those circumstances, with which she could so perfectly well dispense, being engrossed by another\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And this was what happened. At some point in the 1770s, in an Abraham-Sarah-and-Hagar-style move, the couple brought\u00a0Mary into their lives. As well as the mother of Hayley\u2019s son, Mary became their trusted maid and valet, and functioned as Hayley\u2019s secretary. When, in spring 1789, Hayley and Eliza eventually separated, Mary went with Eliza to Derby, where Hayley settled his estranged wife under the care of the widow of one of his university friends. Mary Cockerell \u2013 devoted to Eliza \u2013 stuck it out for several months, but ultimately couldn\u2019t bear to be separated from Tom. She returned to Hayley\u2019s house in Eartham the following October, where evidence suggests she stayed until Tom\u2019s death. We know she was running Hayley\u2019s household in 1792, when William Cowper and his entourage visited: that was when the Reverend John Johnson, who edited Hayley\u2019s Memoirs<\/em> wrote, in a letter to his sister, the unflattering description quoted in the opening paragraph. And we also know that Mary cared for Tom in Eartham House from early 1798 until he died in May 1800, staying on after Hayley moved to his new house in Felpham, and subsequently moving to a cottage Hayley procured for her on the edge of the Eartham estate, where she stayed until she died in November 1810.<\/p>\n You can read the first instalment in the blog series here<\/a>. Watch out for more posts on Hayley and his world as the project progresses.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A poet, his wife, and \u201cthe ugliest of all possible kept mistresses\u201d. In the second instalment of a series on the Fitzwilliam Museum’s Hayley Papers, Lisa Gee introduces an eighteenth-century love triangle. William Hayley married his first wife, Eliza, on the rebound. When it turned out that she couldn\u2019t bear to be touched, they brought another woman into their marriage…. Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":9793,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[167,156],"tags":[219,218,306],"coauthors":[317],"class_list":["post-9787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-research-practice","category-the-fitzwilliam-museum","tag-collections-engagement","tag-cultural-value","tag-research"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9787"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9796,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9787\/revisions\/9796"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9787"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=9787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/header-2-dear-despot-1024x363.jpg\")
A catalogue of disasters<\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/Thomas-Alphonso-Hayley.jpg\")
Yale Center for British Art, Yale Art Gallery Collection, Gift of Charles Rosenbloom<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nMarriage on the rebound<\/h3>\n
Eighteenth-century love triangle?<\/h3>\n