Wedlock (36 page)

On their first evening in Buxton, Bowes was dictating another letter to Mary while Anna occupied herself in the same room. Suddenly impatient that Mary was writing too slowly, he snatched a candlestick and - in front of Anna - brought the flame to Mary’s face, scorching her twice.
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Next he picked up Mary’s pen and thrust the nib into her tongue before punching her on the cheek with his clenched fist. When Mary undressed for bed that night in the room she shared with Anna, both Mary Morgan and Ann Parkes, a housemaid, remarked on the raw burns on her face. As she was warming the bed, Parkes noticed that her mistress’s face was ‘black in two or three places and swelled on one side with marks thereon bearing the appearance of her Ladyship’s said Face having been burned with a Candle’. At the same time Morgan observed that Mary’s face bore two or three ‘very sore’ burn marks where wax had adhered and that ‘one side of her face appeared swelled and greatly bruised’. Before Mary had a chance to explain the injuries, Anna briskly told them to ‘observe how her Mama had been burning her face’. It was not the first time that Anna would cover for her stepfather.

Unable to delay surrendering Anna any longer, after a brief detour to Streatlam Castle, Bowes turned the party towards London at the beginning of November. Before returning Anna to school, however, there was more pressing business to attend to. Conscious that his pleadings to Chancery as a responsible stepfather would appear somewhat less plausible should a teenage mistress with a story of rape and an illegitimate child surface, Bowes made arrangements for Dorothy’s lying-in. An old hand by now at organising clandestine births, Bowes called on Susannah Sunderland, a widow he knew, at her house - almost certainly a brothel - around the corner from Grosvenor Square.
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Spinning the familiar yarn that he was helping a married friend who had carelessly made his servant pregnant, Bowes promised to pay Mrs Sunderland handsomely for her discretion. That evening he returned with Dorothy, whose delivery was imminent, and assured the girl that he would provide for her and the child. Bowes then engaged a man-midwife called Richard Thompson to deliver Dorothy’s baby. She gave birth on 10 November to a daughter. True to form, Bowes would fail to return, leaving Dorothy destitute and Mrs Sunderland fuming. Informed by Dorothy, as if she had not already guessed, that Bowes himself was the father of the unfortunate infant, the doughty widow promptly strode round to his house and demanded cash. Confronted on his own doorstep, in full view of his nosy aristocratic neighbours, Bowes branded Mrs Sunderland ‘a foolish ignorant Woman’ then marched her back to her lodgings where he abused and kicked Dorothy for her indiscretion. Having no alternative for now but to remain at the brothel, Dorothy would not forget her ill-treatment.

 

Obsessively pursuing his cause through Chancery, Bowes had little time to consider the latest addition to his illegitimate brood. After delivering Anna, at last, to her school in Queen’s Square on 9 November and returning to visit her the following day Bowes began formulating plans for his next theatrical venture. Determined not to relinquish his hold over Anna, Bowes took Mary to visit her again on 11 November and on their return exclaimed: ‘By God she is gone, did you not observe how coldly she behaved to us to day.’
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Whipping himself up into an apparent frenzy, he rashly declared that he would kidnap Anna again, with an armed gang if need be, and fly to France that very night. After Mary’s protestations, and a hasty visit to his ready accomplice Davis, the French plan was abruptly dropped in favour of a new and decidedly more sinister design.

Calling once more upon Mary’s acting skills, Bowes coolly instructed her that she must take laudanum in a faked suicide attempt, supposedly in despair at being kept from Anna, in order to persuade the guardians to let her see the children. Widely prescribed by Georgian physicians to dull the pain of innumerable ailments and almost as widely enjoyed by Georgian pleasure-seekers in search of temporary amnesia, laudanum was freely available from apothecary shops. Lord Strathmore had consumed substantial quantities of the drug, essentially opium dissolved in alcohol, in the final stages of his tuberculosis; the writers Thomas de Quincy and Percy Bysshe Shelley would find inspiration in its embrace. But with pharmaceutical measurement in its infancy, overdoses of laudanum - both accidental and intentional - were commonplace and often fatal. The author Mary Wollstonecraft would attempt suicide by downing laudanum in 1795; she later wrote notes describing a similar episode for her unfinished novel,
Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman
.
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Mary herself must have gazed many times on the final scene in Hogarth’s series
Marriage A-la-Mode
, hanging on the walls at Gibside, in which the heroine consumes laudanum on hearing that her lover is condemned to die following a duel. Not surprisingly, given the general ignorance over dosage and effect, Mary expressed herself reluctant to fall in with Bowes’s latest ploy. But after the usual threats of physical injury and separation from her youngest children, she assented.

Having despatched a servant to procure the laudanum Mary took to her bed. On the following morning, 12 November, Bowes stood at her bedside and poured almost the entire contents of the phial of medicine into a large glass mixed with a tiny amount of water. Given that the maximum recommended dose was two grains - about 120 mg - of opium dissolved in alcohol to produce 40 drops - roughly 2.5 ml or half a teaspoon - of laudanum, Mary felt understandably anxious.
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‘Perhaps there is a further design in this than you have acquainted me with,’ she told him, ‘but I fear not to die, for I have long been weary of life, and if you will promise me to take care of Mary, I will drink it off.’ Assuring her that the dosage would not be fatal, Bowes lifted the glass to her lips and poured the poison down her throat.

Once Bowes had scuttled away, Mary dutifully acted out the prepared scene by calling for Mrs Reynett and announcing her suicide bid. Running shrieking from the room the clergyman’s wife fetched both Mary Morgan, who was distraught to see her mistress sinking into unconsciousness, and Bowes, who immediately affected tears. Only the swift arrival of John Hunter, her trusted surgeon, and Richard Warren, physician to the King, saved Mary from almost certain death. Even though the pair immediately administered an emetic to make her vomit, Mary languished in her drug-induced stupor for the next four days. For once allowed the luxury of drinking tea, on doctors’ orders, she was nevertheless warned by Bowes to turn down the delicacies he showily sent her from his own table; when he caught her eating a slice of bread and butter he pulled her ears.

At least the deception achieved its desired - or stated - aim, for Dr Warren now persuaded Thomas Lyon to let Mary see her young sons. Ushered into the darkened sickroom under strict escort, her son Thomas, now eleven, and George, nearly thirteen, were granted half an hour at her bedside. Having not seen their mother for a full four years, the sight of the pale, gaunt face and the frail figure prostrate in the bed must have come as a heavy shock. Their sister Maria, who had recently assumed the surname Bowes Lyon in a clear indication of her loyalties, pointedly stayed away. But on the fourth day of Mary’s recovery, Anna, the supposed target of the entire charade, was finally brought to visit by an exceedingly grudging Mrs Carlile. Understandably wary of being fooled again, the school teacher accused Mary of feigning her illness and her tears; yet inexplicably leaving Anna alone for a few minutes, she immediately found that her charge had been locked in the bedroom. Impervious to the hysterical Mrs Carlile’s protests, Bowes kept Anna captive overnight and swore that she would never return to the school again. Only the arrival the following day of Thomas Lyon, in a rare confrontation with his courtroom adversaries, restored Anna to her tutors - if not to her senses.

Curiously, since she was the least likely to comfort her mother and the most vulnerable to Bowes’s malign influence, Anna was now the only one of the Strathmore heirs with whom Mary was allowed contact. Whether Lyon was keen to present himself in a reasonable light to Chancery or had simply decided that the wilful teenager was a lost cause, he apparently sanctioned regular visits, including overnight stays, by Anna to Grosvenor Square. All four other children were effectively lost. A stranger to her two young sons, despised by their elder sister, Mary was heartbroken to discover that John, now fifteen, also refused to see her. Having completed his Scottish schooling, the tenth earl had been admitted to his father’s old college of Pembroke at the beginning of November.
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A tall and good-looking youth in his father’s image, he had decked himself out in a new velvet suit with a ‘fine Round Hat’ embellished with a silver buckle for the start of the autumn term. But when Mary journeyed to Cambridge at the end of November and sent a note asking to meet him, he returned her letter unopened. Since the young earl was not only the titular head of the family but the chief petitioner of the Chancery suit against her, she should scarcely have been surprised.

In reality, while she was forced to support Bowes’s mission to obtain custody of the children, Mary had long since concluded that it was in her children’s best interests to keep them as far as possible from his clutches. Powerless to exert her own will, however, she dutifully signed a hundred-page affidavit detailing her thwarted efforts to see the children and the distress she suffered from their loss in a poignant testimony for Chancery.
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When she ended her statement on 16 December with the assertion that unless she could see her children more often, ‘a period will soon be put to her Existance’, she genuinely believed that her death was imminent.

Having stealthily cultivated the notion that Mary was liable to die of a broken heart or kill herself in grief at being deprived of her children, Bowes had set the stage for the inevitable next act in his drama. His inducement to take laudanum and his unremitting cruelty now convinced Mary that he was bent on murdering her or confining her for life. His first wife, after all, had lasted only eight years. Bowes had threatened before in rages of passion to kill her if she failed to comply with his will but now the oaths became cold and calculating statements of intent. After warning Mary on several occasions that he planned to shut her away in an asylum, in December he handed her a letter explicitly detailing this aim.
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Mary knew it was no idle threat.

Throughout the eighteenth century husbands had successfully shut away disobedient or inconvenient wives in private asylums or country houses and often won the backing of the Georgian courts.
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One aristocrat who suspected his wife of having an affair with his brother, locked her up in 1744 in a remote Irish mansion where she died, still a captive, thirty years later. Successive court rulings made plain that husbands were entitled to confine or restrain wives who were deemed to be behaving badly through extravagance or lewdness. The only legal route for challenging such imprisonment was for family or friends to obtain a writ of
habeas corpus
from the King’s Bench court. Lady Mary Coke had been kept a prisoner by her lascivious husband for six months in 1749 before her mother secured her release by obtaining such a writ. Eight years later the notorious Earl Ferrers kept his wife, Mary Meredith, a captive in his Leicestershire mansion until her brother rescued her through the same legal process; she had a lucky escape, for three years later Ferrers was hanged for murdering his steward.

For those husbands who eschewed the role of jailor themselves, private madhouses were popular places of confinement. Until regulation in 1774 there was no requirement for potential inmates to show the slightest indication of lunacy before incarceration, possibly for life, and no inspection of the often squalid premises. Three women who had been confined at different times by their husbands in one asylum in Chelsea were all later declared to be perfectly sane. Although the 1774 Act for Regulating Private Madhouses required that inmates could only be confined on a doctor’s signature, there was no shortage of corrupt medical practitioners willing to diagnose a wife’s insanity for a generous fee. One woman who was released from a madhouse in Newcastle told the court that the asylum’s inspectors were her husband’s friends. And while the
habeas corpus
route remained the only way for confined women to secure their freedom, husbands would continue to lock away unwanted wives in asylums or country piles until the late-nineteenth century. Well aware that Bowes’s written declaration might constitute crucial evidence for the future, Mary entrusted his letter to Anna. She never saw it again.

While Mary would have been the first to point out that confinement in an asylum would make little material difference to her daily life with Bowes - ‘not having permission even to walk down stairs without asking his leave’ - she genuinely feared that he intended to murder her. Having already demonstrated his ability to achieve that end through assisted suicide if not brute force, he now had a pecuniary motive too. Calmly informing her that he had accumulated so many annuities and insurances on her life that he would be better off if she were dead, he revealed that he had yet another rich heiress in his sights.
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So when Bowes threatened to strangle Mary towards the end of 1784 she had every reason to believe he would carry out his aim. At the same time he told her that if his own life was ever in doubt, ‘he would send for me, and shoot me through the head’. Mary Morgan now became convinced that her mistress’s life was in danger. Few days passed, she would later testify, without her apprehension that Bowes would murder his wife.
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Growing reckless for her safety, submissive to her torture, as the year drew to a close Mary sank into her most dejected and desperate state yet. In a permanent condition of dread and confusion, she could barely hear from the continual beatings about her ears and scarcely walk from the recurring pains in her legs. Her face bruised, her teeth shaken, her head swollen, she rarely passed a day without pain. As Foot, with his professional if not sympathic eye, would put it: ‘Mind and body jointly submitted to receive the pressure which Bowes, like a MANGLE, daily rolled upon them, and both were grievously collapsed. ’
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Yet at the darkest point of the year, when London was cloaked in fog and snow, a tiny flicker of hope kindled into life.