Wedlock (30 page)

 

Bowes was not the only one with his sights on Ireland as 1780 drew to a close. Now twenty-two, and having been a captive for two-and-a-half years, Mary Stoney had become desperate to escape her brother’s tyranny. When Bowes moved the family down to London in order to assume his rightful place in Parliament soon after the election, she finally saw her chance. Having given up the lease on 40 Grosvenor Square earlier in the year, Bowes rented a suite in the Adelphi Tavern, the same building in which he had faked his duel just three years earlier, now making a name for itself as the Adelphi Hotel.
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But rather than attend to his constituents’ interests by immersing himself in parliamentary business, Bowes was busy hatching another of his moneymaking scams, this time plotting to marry his sister to a nineteen-year-old earl with a £12,000 annual income. Plainly intent on securing a sizeable portion of this fortune for himself, in early December Bowes invited the earl and his mother to the Adelphi on the pretext of arranging a match with his eldest stepdaughter, Lady Maria, now twelve. The fact that Maria was rarely allowed even to inhabit the same room as her stepfather let alone become the subject of his marriage schemes was seemingly unknown to the gullible earl and his ambitious mother. It mattered little to Bowes’s elaborate plot. Exactly as he had planned, the impressionable aristocrat fell instead for Mary Stoney and - just as Bowes had hoped - begged her to elope with him to tie the nuptial knot in Scotland.

Mary, however, had other ideas. With more than a trace of the family talent for guile, she surreptitiously packed her few belongings and in the middle of the night on 7 December, while her brother and sister-in-law slept soundly, she swapped clothes with a hotel chambermaid, crept down the stairs and fled into the London streets. When Bowes woke to discover his sister’s absence the following morning he was incandescent with rage; at the very scene of his most flamboyant deception, his younger sister had outwitted him and escaped his command. Preparing hurriedly to set off in pursuit, on the assumption that his sister would head directly for Ireland, Bowes dictated to Mary Eleanor an even more than usually vituperative letter to his father. Suppressing her grief at losing her one remaining friend and confidante, Mary was forced to upbraid George Stoney over the ‘dreadful accident’ of his daughter’s escape. Warning that the incident had caused Bowes ‘the greatest agitation I ever beheld’ she declared that she was now severing all links with the family in Ireland on the grounds that, ‘I have never met with a greater instance of Impropriety or Ingratitude’. Bowes himself would later renounce his little sister as a ‘viper’, lamenting that he had raised her from ‘obscurity’ and polished her ‘bad Education’ only for her to scupper his plans to advance her through marriage. ‘But, base and ungrateful as she has proved herself to be, why do I call her sister?’ he raged.

Seemingly he had educated young Mary only too well. For as Bowes raced towards Holyhead in the hope of overtaking his sister, she was savouring her freedom within walking distance of the Adelphi. Knowing that he would expect her to make for the coast, Mary had instead gone into hiding with some friends in London. Assuming a false name and venturing out only under cover of night, she would wait a full three months before risking the voyage to Ireland. It would be March 1781 before Mary Stoney finally arrived home in Tipperary, where her frantic parents and siblings welcomed her with heartfelt relief. ‘Had the pleasure of receiving our daughter Mary in good health and spirits,’ her father recorded in his diary that month, adding: ‘It was a serious, solemn meeting, where tears could not flow and find passage. More serious and violent agitation succeeded; demonstration of the love and affection of a Family to their restored daughter and sister.’
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All communication between the two families now strictly forbidden by Bowes, it would be five more years before the two Marys could make contact once again. By then happily married, Mary Stoney would confess that the only bar to her pleasure since the day of her escape was the knowledge that she had been forced to leave her sister-in-law behind. ‘At the time I left him I would have given the World I could have brought you out of the misery you were in,’ she wrote, adding that she had hoped her flight might act as a warning to Bowes to mend his ways.
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Instead, as she would later realise, ‘it only made him worse’.

 

Indeed, having allowed one victim to escape from under his very nose, Bowes was now doubly intent on keeping Mary Eleanor under his despotic control. With her fellow captive gone, she felt the full force of Bowes’s violent temper and draconian restrictions. And when her mother died in January 1781, at the age of sixty, Mary was more alone than ever. Having always detested his shrewd mother-in-law, who had done her best to protect her grandchildren and their inheritance from his grasping fingers, Bowes now gloated over her death and exulted in Mary’s grief. She wrote that he ‘insulted and triumphed in agonies I felt’, while his ‘cruelties and infidelities increased to an incredible degree’.
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From now on, Mary wrote, ‘scarce a day passed, in which I did not receive undeserved abuse, or blows and very often the latter during every day in a week’. Despite the fact that Mrs Bowes had cannily altered her will soon after Mary’s marriage, to replace her daughter as trustee of her estate with the sensible Joseph Planta, now joint secretary of the Royal Society, and John Ord, a lawyer and MP friendly with the Strathmore family, her annual widow’s jointure of £1,600 now descended to Bowes as legal recipient of his wife’s property.
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And even though Mrs Bowes had tied up her estate at St Paul’s Walden Bury in trust for her grandson George until he reached the age of twenty-one, it was Bowes who assumed possession by taking advantage of the will’s proviso that Mary could move there within three months of her mother’s death if she so desired.

Only thirty miles from London, the elegant Adam-style house provided a convenient base for Bowes’s occasional parliamentary business. Hastily bundling the family and servants into coaches, Bowes rattled up the snaking driveway almost the moment Mrs Bowes’s coffin departed in the opposite direction, bound for interment beside her beloved late husband at Gibside.
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Strutting from room to room as he inspected his latest acquisition, Bowes forbade Mary from walking in the beautiful formal gardens - where Bowes had seduced her only four years earlier - or from visiting the hothouses where her Cape seeds were now flourishing.

Reduced to gazing on the formal walks and hedges from the French windows, her every movement monitored by maids and footmen reporting to Bowes, Mary had only her youngest daughter, now three years old, for company. Despite, or perhaps because of, her uncertain paternity, they enjoyed a strong and loving bond; Mary Stoney would later ask about the ‘little Darling’ whom her mother took ‘so much Pleasure in’.
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No doubt Mary’s delight in her infant daughter was intensified by the fact that contact with her five older children was being increasingly rationed by Thomas Lyon. While later writers would suggest that she continued to neglect her sons after their father’s death, never paying them a visit at their boarding school in Neasden, the truth was that she was actively prevented from doing so. Having last seen her three boys in November 1780, she had since been refused permission for them to visit. A letter sent by John, now eleven, at the end of November had reported that he and his brothers, George, nine, and Thomas, seven, were ‘very well’ in Neasden but were not allowed leave to see their mother.
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As she grieved for her own mother at St Paul’s Walden Bury, Mary now begged Lyon to let her see her sons. ‘The severe affliction I have lately experienced by the loss of an affectionate and beloved parent naturally leads me to claim with more than usual earnestness the satisfaction of my Childrens Company as the greatest Consolation I can receive.’ Pointing out that the boys’ school was less than thirty miles from her new home, where previously the children had stayed with their grandmother during the holidays, she could not resist adding that the ample provision they all enjoyed was almost entirely due to her family’s fortune. Lyon was unmoved. Having always detested his sister-in-law and being understandably suspicious of Bowes, he issued strict instructions to the boys’ schoolmaster, Richard Raikes, to deny all visits to their mother. So when Mary wrote to Raikes in May 1781 requesting that her sons come to stay for the ensuing holidays she was distraught to learn that they had already set out for Uncle Thomas’s house in County Durham, passing on their journey within five miles of St Paul’s Walden.

Worse news was to come, for shortly afterwards Mary discovered by chance that John had been sent onwards from Durham to continue his education at Edinburgh High School. Denied any consultation on the decision, or even an opportunity to say goodbye to her eldest son, Mary complained bitterly that the move was ‘extraordinary and unjust’, especially since the late Lord Strathmore had declared that Scotland was ‘the last place in the world’ where he would educate his sons. Plainly Uncle Thomas had decided he could keep a closer watch on the Bowes heir in the north than if he remained a tantalisingly short drive from his stepfather. Alone in his new school, in a country he barely knew, a full three days’ journey from his mother and his siblings, the little Lord Strathmore poured his attentions into creating a garden and tending a pet tortoise, the bills meticulously sent as usual to Lyon. It would be more than two years before Mary heard from him at all, a full six before she would see him again. Her son’s silence, doubtless dictated by Uncle Thomas, wounded her deeply. Having always prided herself on the respect she had tendered her own parents, Mary was both hurt and offended that her eldest son failed to demonstrate the ‘duty’ that Georgian children were expected to show towards their parents. Yet while she would scold him for his ‘extremely unusual’ conduct, she plaintively assured him that she was ‘more warmly interested in your welfare than any other person can possibly be’.

Hoping at least to see Maria and Anna, who turned thirteen and eleven respectively in 1781, Mary was desolate when she discovered that they too had been despatched to County Durham for the spring holidays. Although she had so far been permitted more frequent visits from her daughters, who had often spent Sundays with her in London, once they returned from their little sojourn with Uncle Thomas these meetings were sharply curtailed, possibly on the basis of the girls’ depictions of life in the Bowes household. From May onwards her requests to spend time with the girls were repeatedly refused by their schoolmistresses in Queen’s Square and on the few occasions they were granted the girls were not permitted to stay overnight. Now months would go by without any contact from her girls and when they could not spend holidays in Durham they had to stay behind at school - even during Christmas - rather then be permitted to visit their mother. Growing increasingly estranged from their mother, the girls were nevertheless encouraged to visit other relatives and see playmates approved by their vigilant guardian. Progressively deprived of contact with her children and even denied news of their health, Mary became anxious and dejected. Yet her continual appeals to Lyon, by turns poignant, terse and despairing, were coolly rebuffed with the insistence that he sought only to ‘promote their happiness and welfare’.

At the very moment that the family was being splintered ever further apart, Bowes chose to commission a family portrait from one of the era’s most fashionable artists, John Downman.
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As popular as he was prolific, Welsh-born Downman was heavily in demand with the aristocracy and the gentry for his delicate portraits which were mostly executed in black and white chalk with smudges of red sometimes applied to the reverse to lend a subtle blush to lips and cheeks. Particularly noted for his charming portraits of children, Downman often scribbled unguarded comments about his sitters on his preliminary sketches. His nine portraits of Bowes, Mary and the six children (Anna being drawn twice) were made at some point in 1781, according to Downman’s inscription, in preparation for a group family picture. Since at no point that year were all eight members together in one place, Downman must have made the Strathmore children’s portraits separately, possibly at their schools before John was banished to Edinburgh.

Probably commissioned to mark Bowes’s elevation to the House of Commons to furnish the customary image of the respected politician surrounded by his cheerful family, the sketches show the 34-year-old MP dressed smartly with a white cravat wound tightly around his throat and his hair neatly curled and tied in a fashionable queue at the back. Haughty and confident, his profile displays the handsome visage which had allured so many women with its full lips and large, striking eyes framed by long lashes. By comparison, Mary’s portrait depicts a gaunt, anxious face and although her hair is powdered and piled high in contemporary fashionable style, her wide, sunken eyes look to one side in apparent fear. Of the children, the young Earl of Strathmore looks mournful and solemn, despite inheriting his father’s good looks and his mother’s curls, as if bearing the entire family’s misfortunes on his narrow shoulders. While his brother George wears an equally serious expression, young Thomas is the only one of the boys to sport an impish grin. Slightly plump, in a low-cut dress tied with bows at the back, their elder sister Maria casts her eyes demurely down, although pretty Anna smiles coquettishly at the artist. Of all six children, only three-year-old Mary appears truly childlike and carefree, with her mischievous big eyes and cheeky smile beneath thickly tousled hair, in marked contrast to her mother’s frightened face. On the mount, Downman had written: ‘Her Ladyship had only this Girl by her present Husband.’

The happy family portrait anticipated by Downman never materialised - just as the politician’s model family envisaged by Bowes would never exist - and only the individual portraits remain. But despite Downman’s presumption the family was set to expand once more. That summer, at the age of thirty-two, after four wretched years of marriage, Mary found herself pregnant again, for the first time bearing Bowes’s child. But her condition did nothing to ameliorate Bowes’s behaviour.