Wedlock (19 page)

Having lost her mother when she was young, Anne had helped to bring up her five younger sisters and two brothers in the family home of Ormsby Hall. Her industrious but sheltered life had scarcely prepared her to withstand the dazzling charms of the tall and genial army officer who now plied her with gifts and flattery at every opportunity. Convinced that Anne’s father would offer a substantial portion to speed his eldest daughter to the altar, Stoney worked his customary magic. Swayed by his promises of marriage, Anne was quickly infatuated, and almost certainly bedded - judging by her later remorse - by her impatient suitor in the early summer months. Anne’s poignant letters to Stoney, which have survived despite her appeals for him to return them, provide a highly revelatory picture of the irresistible allure which the Irish soldier exerted on women. In one typically desperate letter Anne proclaims, ‘to describe the feelings of my heart is impossible, & I should think the attempt unnecessary, for you have known me too long not to be assured that my Love & Regard for you is beyond any thing to me’.
³²
Yet even as he fuelled countryside chatter by appearing as Anne’s constant escort - and by the rigid rules of eighteenth-century courtship ruining her chances of forming an alternative match - Stoney realised his expectations of her fortune had been overly optimistic. With two sons and six daughters to provide for, Anne’s father was in no position to offer Stoney anything but the most meagre of marital enhancements. So as the sheriff and his eldest son, Charles, grew increasingly alarmed at reports of the Irish officer’s predilections for bad company, Stoney shrewdly gauged that it was time to move on. Employing the well-worn delaying tactic, that his father was reluctant to settle sufficient fortune on him, Captain Stoney cooled his ardour. By July he was heading for London with an altogether more promising prey in his sights.

Stoney would have heard of Lord Strathmore’s death - and the availability of his wealthy young widow - soon after the news had reached England. A death notice in the
Newcastle Chronicle
on 13 April helpfully pointed out that the deceased earl had married into ‘one of the most opulent fortunes in this Country’. Having already snared one Durham heiress, the prospect of capturing another endowed with even greater riches was too tempting to resist. Yet since coffee-house gossip asserted that the countess was already being pursued by an ardent nabob and was carefully watched by the vigilant Strathmores, Stoney knew that capturing this prize would demand all the guile and wit in his power. Courting Anne Massingberd was a useful fallback plan - and he continued to maintain her interest through wheedling letters and the occasional visit - but by early July, the gains from his first marriage were fast disappearing. Although he would later maintain that he possessed £7,500 in ready cash on top of £4,000 annual income in 1776, a more reliable source would suggest that the ‘half-pay lieutenant’ was ‘great distressed in his Circumstances, and possessed of little or no Property’.
³³
Other reports would even claim that he was bankrupt although this was almost certainly untrue. Straitened but ebullient as ever, Stoney now set out for London purely - Foot would later attest - with the aim of seducing the Countess of Strathmore. Plainly he was not the first, nor would he be the last, to make this attempt. Yet the sheer intricacy of Stoney’s scheming would mark him out as quite extraordinary.

Moving into lodgings in St James’s Coffee House, a short stroll from Mary’s home in Grosvenor Square, Stoney established himself as a well-heeled, up-and-coming man about town, charming everyone he met with his good-humoured repartee and gambling for impressive stakes at the Cocoa Tree Club. Tall, lean and impeccably presented - his valet would say he owned ninety shirts at the time - Stoney was fully conscious of his magnetic appeal to women.
³⁴
Aware that time was short, he quickly engineered an introduction into Mary’s circle, most probably through Captain Magra, who happened to be an old army friend. It was Magra, in fact, who had picked out the scarlet uniform and a frocksuit from a tailors in the Strand and had them sent up to his friend in Newcastle the previous year.
³⁵
Having gained entry into the Grosvenor Square sanctum, Stoney skilfully laid siege to its mistress. With Captain Magra already working as his undercover ally, Stoney recruited Eliza Planta, the new governess, as his spy within the household. There is little doubt that Stoney achieved this conquest with his usual oleaginous flattery, and it is likely that she became his lover too, although he could always fall back on simple bribery when required. It was Eliza’s job to report on her mistress’s activities, divulge Mary’s weaknesses and her interests, praise her secret master’s attributes and help deploy his plans. So as Stoney dined and supped with the guests in Mary’s set that July, he was well primed to fawn over her beloved cats and speak kindly of her children, especially her favoured daughters.

With her self-confessed partiality for Celtic men, her weakness for flattery and her perpetually disastrous judgement of character, Mary was intrigued by the urbane Irish officer who was only two years her senior. Although rumours alleging that Stoney had cruelly mistreated his late wife had percolated down to Grosvenor Square, Mary briskly dismissed these as ‘only county of Durham malice’ and encouraged - or at least did not discourage - the officer’s advances.
³⁶
By the end of July, Stoney was sufficiently emboldened to send Mary a daring declaration of his interest - the first surviving correspondence between the pair - which entirely dispensed with the usual formal address and obsequious homage due to a countess. Bluntly labelled ‘It is for you’, and evidently hand-delivered, the note was a masterpiece of Stoney’s art:

Whatever Mary’s reply it is likely to have been equally indiscreet, for soon afterwards Stoney was heard bragging about his conquest and sharing Mary’s letters with a gaggle of friends in a coffee-house in Bath.
³⁸

Nevertheless, Stoney’s brash confidence was premature. Although she was obviously attracted to the hot-headed ‘captain’, by the late summer - pregnant by Gray for the third time - Mary had resigned herself to marrying her Scottish suitor. Despite having previously declared that she would never again ‘engage myself indissolubly’, in August or September she became formally betrothed to Gray in St Paul’s Cathedral with Eliza Planta and Richard Penneck as witnesses.
³⁹
Although an impromptu ceremony, this was no casual undertaking since such an engagement - actually referred to by Mary as ‘marriage’ - was regarded as legally binding. Indeed, one jilted fiancée in 1747 successfully sued a vicar for ‘breach of promise’ after he reneged on his pledge to marry her, winning £7,000 damages for her pains. Now wearing Gray’s ring, Mary hastily set off for Hertfordshire to break the news to her mother. Meanwhile, she laid plans to marry Gray the following spring before leaving for the Continent - or even to marry abroad - so that she could give birth in secret if necessary and stay in Europe until all hint of a scandal had faded. She even tendered ambitions to visit France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Bohemia - in a Bohemian version of the grand tour - before returning with her new husband and child.

While most rivals would have gamely abandoned the chase at news of such an engagement, and perhaps moved on to an easier subject, this was not in the nature of Andrew Robinson Stoney. Obstacles and opposition merely sharpened his determination to succeed. As Foot shrewdly commented: ‘There was no antiquated, dissipated, impudent, and profligate nabob a match for him.’
⁴⁰
Briskly severing all ties with Anne Massingberd, who enjoyed her last liaison with her errant lover at the beginning of September, Stoney now focused all his energies, intelligence and remaining funds on ensnaring his prize quarry in a breathtakingly convoluted series of schemes. As the anti-hero of Thackeray’s
Barry Lyndon
, would argue: ‘Who can say that I had not a right to use any stratagem in this matter of love? Or, why say love? I wanted the wealth of the lady.’
⁴¹

That October, when Eliza Planta proposed a trip to visit a fortune-teller in one of the seamier parts of town, Mary responded with delight. Well-known for her love of romance as well as her susceptibility to the occult - she had visited gipsies when they encamped near St Paul’s Walden Bury - Mary formed a party of friends. After breakfast with Eliza, Penneck and Matra, the group met up with the ubiquitous Captain Magra and proceeded to walk towards the Old Bailey, close by the notorious Newgate Prison. As they neared the court, a young boy approached and offered to escort the group to see the man ‘so many people came after’. Mary eagerly agreed, following the lad through the ‘blind allies’ to a house in Pear Street. Here the little troupe waited for almost seven hours in a cold, bare room crowded with people from all walks of life seemingly intent on discovering their fortunes. Sustained only by bread and water, and warmed by a feeble fire they had concocted from a few green logs, the party passed the hours by composing poems which they inscribed on the walls with a lead pencil. While Penneck amused the group with his ditty on their adventure, Mary - despite her engagement - wrote some lines denouncing matrimony. Conversing with the assortment of characters who emerged from the cellar below, she passed herself off as a grocer’s widow with ten children, unimaginatively named Mrs Smith, who had come to divine ‘whether I should marry a Brewer, or Sugar-boiler, who proposed to me amongst others’.

When finally the party was vouchsafed an audience with the mysterious soothsayer, Captain Magra descended the stairs first, declaring himself a perfect sceptic, and returned convinced, of course, of the mystic’s astonishing skills. Plainly Mary enjoyed a similar epiphany. Although she did not record her consultation, there can be little doubt that she sought enlightenment over her future spouse and that the many merits of a tall Irish soldier featured prominently in the divinations. Needless to say, as Foot would later confirm, the entire escapade had been orchestrated by Stoney, the conjuror tutored by him and the witnesses instructed by him. Yet although he would later flourish copies of the very verses she had written on the bare walls, Mary never suspected him of involvement in the ‘silly affair’.

Now that the hand of fate had advanced his cause, the next logical step was for Stoney to discredit his rival. This he achieved with a characteristic degree of insight and subtlety. Shortly after the fortune-telling expedition, Mary received a curious letter purporting to be a copy of one sent to Stoney from a jilted lover in Durham. Distraught at news that her ‘captain’ had abandoned her for a countess, the forsaken woman urged Mary to reject Stoney and marry Gray. Cleverly, the letter recommended Gray on the basis that he had secretly reached an accommodation with the Strathmore family, thereby healing the family rift. It is quite possible that Gray had indeed negotiated a deal with Thomas Lyon, probably with financial inducements, smoothing the way for his impending marriage in return for guarantees about the future of the Bowes fortune and its young heirs. But with the Strathmore family still firmly banished from her home, nothing could have been judged more likely to set Mary against her fiancé. Of course no Durham lover existed; the letter - followed by another in a similar vein - had been forged by Stoney.

 

By November, Stoney was feeling cautiously confident. That month Charles Massingberd, in London with two of his sisters, warned the wretched Anne not to expect any further word from her former lover since, Anne wrote to Stoney, ‘he believ’d you wd. marry Lady S’. Although Charles assured his sister that she had had a ‘lucky escape’ from ‘a man of such abandon’d character’, this did nothing to console poor Anne who pledged that she would never appear in public again unless Stoney returned to her.
⁴²
Her threats and pleadings were to no avail, for by the onset of winter, Stoney was ready to spring his trap.

It was a more than usually hectic time in the Grosvenor Square household. Anticipating the departure the following spring of her botanical expedition to the Cape, in November or December Mary purchased a villa, with substantial grounds, in what was known as Little Chelsea.
⁴³
Fronting the King’s Road, and therefore convenient for Kew Gardens, Chelsea Physic Garden and James Lee’s renowned nursery, Stanley House had been built at the end of the seventeenth century on an estate originally laid out in Elizabethan times. A symmetrical two-storey house with three dormer windows in a hipped roof, it was ‘a fine old mansion with large grounds, walled in’, according to Foot. Appointing George Walker’s wife as housekeeper, Mary set about constructing hothouses and greenhouses in the grounds in readiness for the exotic plants she hoped to nurture there.