Wedlock (22 page)

 

The violence began almost immediately. If Mary said or did anything to annoy him, Stoney would respond by pinching, kicking or slapping her while warning her not to reveal the abuse to friends or servants. ‘He very soon began to beat and pinch me,’ wrote Mary, ‘threatening me at the same time to kill me if I did not tell my Maid, or any person who observed my bruises, that I had fallen down, or run my head against something’.
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Like so many victims of domestic violence before and since, Mary was reduced to blaming her cuts and bruises on walking into doors and falling down stairs. Since it was virtually impossible for masters and mistresses in wealthy Georgian households to say or do anything without the knowledge of the army of maids, footmen, butlers and valets who did their bidding, inevitably the servants witnessed the tell-tale signs of Mary’s mistreatment. But as they were all answerable to Stoney, and in his pay, there was little any of them dared do. Mary’s maid Ann was the first to spot the signs of abuse. Having helped her mistress dress to go out, she saw Mary enter Stoney’s dressing room - presumably for his perusal - but return minutes later ‘very much dejected, and biting her lips’ with her hat torn, the ribbons cut and Mary’s eye ‘swelled and red’.
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Powerless to help, Ann observed and bided her time.

Not long afterwards it was Stoney’s valet, Thomas Mahon, who witnessed his master’s conduct. Enraged because he could not find his cane for an outing, Stoney followed Mary into his dressing room from which Mahon soon heard a scream. Running to help, he was ordered away by an enraged Stoney who stood with his sword drawn. The erstwhile duelling hero who had apparently fenced so courageously in defence of his lover, now chased her around the room with his sword. Driving her into a corner, Stoney imprisoned Mary for half an hour ‘beating me incessantly all the time with the hilt of his sword, and an heavy silver candlestick over the head, arms and shoulders’.
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Although Mary was forced to keep to her bed the following day, to hide the swellings and bruises on her face and body, Mahon was quick to spot the black eye when she next appeared in company. It was not long before Mahon left, fed up with his master’s increasingly belligerent behaviour, and eloped with Mary’s maid Ann. They were the first of many to leave Stoney’s employ in disgust at his autocratic manner.

Their mistress, of course, had no choice but to stay. Yet whatever excesses of misery, cruelty and humiliation Mary might now be enduring she could expect no sympathy from her contemporaries. Her free-living lifestyle of the past year had made her fair game for every gossip, satirist and opinion-former and, without exception, they took the moral position that she had brought all her woes on herself. So the MP George Selwyn referred his friend Lord Carlisle to ‘This match of that lunatic’s, Lady Strathmore, with Mr Stoney’.
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Satirical ballads followed the same line. Addressed to her friend, the surgeon John Hunter, in a limp homage to his anatomical interest in electric eels and torpedo fish, ‘The Torpedo, a poem to the electrical eel’, ranged over the latest scandals to beset the nobility and inevitably one verse homed in on Mary’s love life:

In a similar vein, a bawdy ballad entitled ‘The Diabo-Lady’ imagined the devil’s quest for a suitable mate amongst the most notorious women of the day. Accusing Mary of breaking a ‘too fond husband’s heart’ by embarking on affairs with two suitors before his death, it lampooned her for jilting her first lover as ‘too tame’ in favour of ‘the Bully of her ticklish fame’.
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If the true character of Andrew Robinson Stoney was a revelation, however, Mary had kept back a few surprises for her new husband too. Firstly, there was the small matter of the debts she had accumulated. Stoney would later claim that these amounted to a startling £32,000.
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Given her recent purchase of Stanley House, the impending expedition to the Cape - William Paterson set sail as planned on 9 February 1777 - and her weakness for rich gowns, elaborate hats and other finery, this was not impossible. Secondly, there was the fact that she was at least two months pregnant. Stoney would later protest his ‘great astonishment and grief’ when he discovered soon after the wedding night that his new wife was ‘five months’ pregnant, exaggerating her condition in order to eliminate any suggestion that Stoney himself might have been the father. In reality, it is highly likely Stoney already knew or suspected Mary was pregnant and even possible that the baby was indeed his own. Whether two months or five months, there was no denying that Mary’s swelling belly would soon be evident to servants, visitors and the entire gossip machine of London’s high society. Keen to avoid further scandal, Stoney scouted around for a suitable hideaway for a secret birth while telling his friends the couple were going abroad for his health. This sacrifice, he no doubt reasoned, was a small price to pay for the spectacular fortune he now possessed. The third surprise was infinitely more shocking.

Strutting about as the new lord and master at 40 Grosvenor Square, Stoney was eager to lay claim to the vast wealth he had greedily anticipated during his campaign of seduction. To his horror, within one week of his triumphant marriage, he now discovered that all the property and profit he had schemed so cleverly to obtain were entirely beyond his reach. A week before the wedding, on 9 and 10 January, even as Stoney stoked his fake argument with Bate, Mary had signed a prenuptial deed which vested all the estates, assets and income in which she enjoyed a life interest under her father’s will, into the hands of two trustees: her solicitor Joshua Peele and the brother of her chaplain, Captain George Stephens. All proceeds from the Bowes fortune, the deed specified, could only be paid to Mary ‘for her separate and peculiar use and disposal, exclusive of any husband she should thereafter marry’.
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Signing such a deed was an unusual but not unprecedented step at the time. Ordinarily, of course, Georgian law stipulated that upon marriage the husband gained possession of all his wife’s property, income and belongings, as Stoney well knew. Prenuptial deeds were occasionally drawn up, however, usually at the behest of a bride’s parents keen to safeguard the family fortune from a potentially profligate or untrustworthy husband. In Mary’s case, she had asked her solicitor to prepare the deed in anticipation of her marriage to Gray, with her fiancé’s agreement and probably at the urging of the Strathmores determined to protect the children’s future inheritance. After making her last-minute switch of grooms, Mary had seen no reason to alter the document. This was not through any mistrust of Stoney, she would later insist, but that ‘it struck me, that having taken
such precautions on my children’s account
, (for whom I was answerable, though not for myself ) with a man who I knew I could trust; I ought not to be less cautious with one whom I could not be so strongly assured of.’
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Even so, she had kept the deed a secret from Stoney until several days after their wedding for fear, she later claimed, that the document suggested a distrust of him - although fear of her new spouse may very well have contributed. When she confessed the truth he was apoplectic. Not only was he personally penniless and faced with a baying horde of his own creditors, but as her husband he was now accountable for Mary’s debts too. All along, he now felt, it was he who had been the victim of a hoax.

Stoney responded with characteristic resolve. As the creditors circled, and Gray threatened to sue Mary for breach of contract for jilting him at the altar, Stoney knew he had to raise a substantial amount of money quickly. Immediately he ordered Mary to write to Peele demanding he surrender the deed and despatched Walker to deliver the letter.
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When Walker returned empty-handed, as Peele refused to comply with the request, Stoney was furious but undefeated. Little did he know that Mary retained one further secret which would ultimately prove vital. Just before her marriage she had entrusted her own copy of the deed to Walker, asking him to keep it safe. Cowed as she now was by Stoney’s bullying behaviour, she kept her head sufficiently to beg Walker to keep the deed hidden with the insightful comment that ‘I did not know whether I should be able to lead my life with Mr Stoney.’

Despite this temporary hitch to his well-laid scheme and his spending plans, Stoney entertained lavishly at Grosvenor Square and now turned his attention to promoting his own rise in public life. Less than one month after the wedding, Stoney saw the chance for advancement that he had been waiting for. After changing his name to Bowes at the beginning of February, in accordance with George Bowes’s will, he now sought to use the respected family name to change his fortunes. The death of the Newcastle MP Sir Walter Blackett on 14 February provided the opportunity.
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After representing the city unopposed as one of its two MPs for nearly half a century, Blackett had been shaken but survived when radical campaigners had opposed him at the general election in 1774. The by-election now triggered by the 69-year-old Tory MP’s demise presented the radicals with their second chance to mount a challenge. Having first marched through the city gates just ten years earlier as a lowly ensign, Andrew Robinson Bowes - as he would in future be known - now aspired to represent the people of Newcastle in Parliament by hitching his fortunes to the populist platform.

Dashing off a letter to the mayor three days later, Bowes formally presented himself as a candidate while pleading that ‘the present state of my indisposition’ sadly prevented him arriving in person.
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Although his injuries, if they ever existed, had certainly healed by this stage - a letter from his cousin Isaac to Bowes’s brother Thomas a week earlier reported that ‘Robinson is quite well of his wounds’ - the delay gave Bowes time to plot his assault and borrow the cash he needed to finance it.

George Greive, the son of a local lawyer and friend of the popular radical John Wilkes, stepped forward to spearhead Bowes’s campaign against Blackett’s nephew and heir, the Somerset country gentleman Sir John Trevelyan, who fully expected an easy ride. But while Greive mobilised support from the tradesmen and up and coming professionals who were entitled, as freemen of the city, to vote, Bowes idled in London. Although the prospective candidate was ‘hourly expected’ on 18 February, Greive assured the voters, it was eight more days before Bowes finally crossed the Tyne Bridge with Mary at his side on the day before the polls opened on 27 February.
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Having left four of the children in the dubious care of the Reverend Henry Stephens in Grosvenor Square, while the young earl remained in Neasden, the couple’s thirty-two-hour dash north was a grim counterpoint to the stately northern progress which had followed Mary’s first marriage. Charming and manipulative by turns Bowes fully expected that Mary would play a central role in his audacious campaign.

Although votes for women were not to happen for nearly 150 years, several aristocratic women helped muster votes for their menfolk during election campaigns in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In a society which placed a high value on female modesty and passivity, this was rarely without public opprobrium. Lady Spencer had decorously lent her support in Nottingham in 1774, but when her daughter, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, canvassed zealously for Fox in the controversial Westminster election ten years later, she would be roundly lambasted, with lewd caricatures in the press and snobbish retorts from society. ‘What a pity that any of our sex should ever forget what is due to female delicacy,’ lamented the blue-stocking Mary Hamilton while female solidarity similarly went out of the window with Elizabeth Montagu’s observation that the duchess had been ‘canvassing in a most masculine manner’.
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Despite standing on a populist ticket exhorting free elections and parliamentary reform for honest tradesmen and aspiring professionals in the face of the property-owning gentry, Bowes knew that Mary’s esteemed family name would give him the gravitas he needed to stand a chance in the Newcastle by-election. During the two weeks in which the polls were open daily, Mary was therefore called upon to dispense charity and woo the electors as the perfect political consort smiling benignly at her husband’s side. Accordingly, on 6 March she gave orders for an ox to be slaughtered and distributed among the poor of the city while the following day she hosted her own belated birthday party with open house at Gibside.
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On other days Elizabeth Montagu’s husband Edward, a Trevelyan supporter, was aghast to see the daughter of his old friend and partner George Bowes blatantly distributing cash handouts to passers-by in the city centre. ‘Her Ladyship sits all day in the window of a public house,’ he wrote, ‘from whence she sometimes lets fall some jewels or trinkets, which voters pick up, and then she gives them money for returning them - a new kind of offering bribes.’
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Staying at Gibside, where she was forbidden from visiting the gardens or greenhouse without her husband’s consent, and only allowed a glass of wine at dinner with his permission, Mary was now totally subject to Bowes’s commands.
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Passing the Column to Liberty her father had erected on her way to the hustings each day, it must have been with supreme irony that Mary plied voters with handbills headed ‘Bowes and Freedom!’ and poems which hailed her as the ‘Queen of Liberty!’ Meanwhile, the jibes of her husband’s opponents as they drew attention to his humble background as an ‘Irish ensign’, the allegations of cruelty to his first wife and his predilection for the gaming houses and brothels near the Keyside must have given her pause for thought.