Wedlock (37 page)

With no friends of her own circle or family members she could rely on, Mary freely confided her sufferings and her fears in Mary Morgan. Appalled at her employer’s conduct and grieved by her mistress’s misery, the upright and law-abiding maid had become Mary’s closest friend. Since returning from France, Mary had also taken the housemaid, Ann Parkes, into her confidence and when a new maid, Ann Dixon, joined the household that December, she too was quickly initiated into the circle of sympathisers. Blithely unaware of the groundswell of support for Mary below stairs, at the end of December Bowes appointed Susanna Church, the kitchen maid he had dismissed the previous year for smuggling chicken to Mary, back to her old job. These four women, among the least regarded and least influential members of Georgian society, would prove themselves Mary’s firmest allies and her truest friends. Offering Mary their comfort in her wretchedness, they even lent her money from their meagre wages to pay for essentials and gave her cast-off underwear and stockings when hers were in tatters. One further addition to the Grosvenor Square household that December would be critical in turning around Mary’s fortunes. George Walker, the former footman who had been sacked for ‘taking familiarities’ with his mistress in 1777, was secreted in the house by Bowes in a typically contrived scheme to prevent him from being subpoenaed to give evidence for Thomas Lyon in Chancery. Snatching a hurried moment with her erstwhile confidante, Mary asked Walker whether he still possessed her copy of the prenuptial deed that she had signed before marrying Bowes.
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When Walker assured her that he did, Mary begged him to keep it safe.

Emboldened by Walker’s revelation, encouraged by her servants’ support, as the New Year dawned Mary began to entertain an almost unconscionable idea. When Bowes glibly announced in January that he intended to take both Mary and Anna abroad if the Chancery suit floundered, Mary knew that she had to act quickly. Once abroad she was certain he would kill her while she could only speculate on Anna’s likely fate. As Bowes showed signs of growing irritation with Mary Morgan, she feared her friend would be dismissed any day and realised that time was running out. His suspicions aroused by the defiant maid who was seemingly immune to his oily charms, Bowes would later describe Morgan as ‘an Artful Intriguing Woman’.
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At the end of January, when Bowes flew into a fury because Mary had invited Mrs Reynett to visit with her dog, Mary knew there was no more time to lose. ‘He told me to kneel and I thought he was going to kill me,’ Mary later wrote, ‘but he only made me kiss a book and swear not to do the same again or he would strangle me.’ On her knees, frantic with terror, Mary made a momentous decision. Once she was alone with her most trusted aide, she implored Mary Morgan to help her escape.
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At first Morgan was aghast at Mary’s plea and urged her to reconsider. Only too accustomed to her master’s vengeance, she knew that helping her mistress could have grave consequences for both of them. But when she realised that Mary was determined on her course, and ‘knowing how very unhappy her said Ladyship was while she lived in the same House with Mr Bowes’, Morgan consented. Shrewdly, she advised Mary to find out whether the law could offer her any protection before fleeing impetuously. It was crucial advice. But since the only lawyers that Mary knew were deep in Bowes’s pocket, Morgan herself offered to consult a barrister, named Charles Shuter, who was the brother-in-law of a woman she knew. Urged on by Mary, and at immense risk to herself, on 30 January Morgan crept out of the house for a secret rendezvous with Shuter. Somewhat perturbed at this rather irregular mode of correspondence with a prospective client, the barrister duly assured Morgan that her mistress should qualify for legal protection provided she could furnish evidence of her ill-treatment. Well aware of Georgian sensibilities, he felt obliged to point out that this legal opinion should in no way be taken as ‘encouragement’ to Lady Strathmore to leave her husband. Morgan hurried back to Mary with the news. She made no attempt to persuade her mistress to escape, the maid would later insist, but accepted that ‘a great degree of Confidence was placed in her for Honesty and Integrity’.

In the genteel reception rooms above stairs at Grosvenor Square Bowes entertained his drinking companions and dinner guests as usual, happily oblivious to the whispered conversations and mounting tension below stairs.

 

 

 

 

A
s dark closed in on Grosvenor Square in the early evening of Thursday 3 February, Bowes set out to dine with his uncle, the indulgent General Armstrong, at his house in Percy Street beyond the Oxford Road. Despite having kept his sister a prisoner and severed all links with his father, Bowes retained the talent to charm his high-ranking army relations. Having left his trusted guards, Mary Reynett and Anna, to watch over Mary he anticipated a convivial evening. But no sooner did she hear the carriage clatter away than Mary and her fellow conspirators swung into action. Primed with their prepared roles, Mary Morgan struck up a conversation with Anna and Mrs Reynett about the latest fashions in millinery while the housemaid Ann Parkes picked a quarrel with the footman, Denham Dally. With her warders momentarily distracted, Mary hastened below stairs. Covering her tattered gown with a servant’s cloak and concealing her hair beneath a maid’s bonnet, she stole out of the basement door accompanied by the new maid Ann Dixon. In her second-hand clothes, with a few guineas borrowed from her maids, Mary took nothing of her own. With the family fortune in Bowes’s hands, she possessed neither money nor belongings; once the richest heiress in Britain, Mary walked out of her marital home penniless and destitute. More significantly, she was walking out on her two youngest children, William, nearly three, and Mary, now seven, with no certain hope of ever seeing them again.

Creeping through the fog in the dimly lit streets, Mary and Ann headed north towards Oxford Street where they suffered an agonisingly long wait for a hackney carriage. Shivering in their thin clothes and flimsy shoes in the chilly evening, they knew that Bowes would set off in pursuit the instant he discovered that they had gone. When at last a carriage pulled up, they urged the driver to head eastwards but had only travelled a short distance along Oxford Street when they spotted Bowes in another hackney carriage hurtling straight for them. Having been alerted to the escape in a hurried message despatched by Mrs Reynett the moment she had realised the deception, he was racing back to Grosvenor Square to intercept the fugitives. Bowling towards them with his head straining out of the window as he scoured the pavements for the escapees, his coach passed within feet of theirs but rattled on in the opposite direction. With Mary now almost hysterical with panic, Ann Dixon implored the driver to hurry. Arriving at Charles Shuter’s chambers in Cursitor Street, a popular residence for legal professionals off Chancery Lane, Mary met the lawyer for the first time. After a cursory consultation lasting less than fifteen minutes, Mary and Ann Dixon headed for Holborn. Here, at 2 Dyers Buildings, in a modest apartment secretly arranged by Morgan hidden in a narrow alley on the south side of the busy thoroughfare, they were met by Mary Morgan and Ann Parkes. Making her getaway a few days later, Susanna Church came to join them.

Free at last from Bowes’s iron grip, though not at liberty, Mary would never forget the courage and kindness of the four women who had rescued her and quite probably saved her life. Having left behind their own few belongings and unpaid wages, her maids now became valued friends who served her for no recompense; indeed she owed money to them all. Not one male servant, she would later stress, had been party to the plan. But through the selfless and audacious actions of these four, she would later say, ‘it is not only myself, but innumerable other more worthy objects, who may through them, in future be saved from oppression, seduction, indigence, and a shameful end’.
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It was the culmination of ‘the eight most memorable years of my life’, Mary would later write in a narrative describing her marriage to Bowes. At the time, she would add, she was ‘fully sensible of the hourly danger I am in from the greatest Monster that ever disgraced the human shape and at the same time, the most artful.’

For Bowes, arriving back at Grosvenor Square to find the household in uproar, with Anna screaming hysterically and Mrs Reynett in a panic, the discovery that Mary had fled with several servants was devastating news. Swearing in fury he dashed into the drawing room where Anna was wailing and seemed to be ‘in a great Flutter’, according to Mrs Reynett. For her part, Anna would proclaim herself ‘extremely hurt’ that her mother had left her behind when she quit the house, although the fact that she had been kept in complete ignorance of the plans might have had more to do with her distress. Bowes would later claim that his stepdaughter had been so distraught at her mother’s flight that he had to prevent her from throwing herself over the banisters. When his gaze fell on a note in Mary’s handwriting addressed ‘To Mr Bowes’ his worst fears were confirmed.

In the farewell letter that she left her husband, a copy of which survives today, Mary was able to put into words her true feelings about Bowes for the first time in eight years of wedlock.
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‘I think neither yourself nor the World will be surprised at the step I now take,’ she began, ‘as it is the only resource left me to secure my own Life & the Honour of my Family, which has long been tarnished by your Conduct, & the Actions you have forced me to.’ Insisting, in a feeble attempt to delude him, that she would already be far away by the time he read her words, Mary said she had long hoped that he would reform his behaviour over time or that the restoration of her older children might provide a check on ‘your Vices, Follies, & Extravagance’. But as she had learned to her horror since Anna had come to live with them, not only had Bowes’s behaviour become ‘more openly scandalous, & Indecent than ever’ but he had also even encouraged her daughter to treat her with contempt. Having decided that she no longer wished to bring up her five eldest children ‘under the Roof of Viciousness & Illnature’ she was fleeing ‘to save my two youngest from Beggary’ as well as to preserve her own life. Vowing to claim ‘My Dear Boy & Girl’ as soon as she could, she looked forward to guiding their future education as her ‘chief Delight & amusement’. Ending with a flourish she declared: ‘Farewell - I forgive, but will never see you again. I can add no more, as you have long ceased to treat me, in any respect, as a Wife, or a Friend.’

Mary’s touching faith that the Georgian world would express no surprise at her departure was only matched by her misplaced confidence that her troubles with Bowes were at an end. Utterly ignorant of her ordeal, thanks to Bowes’s efficient propaganda campaign, those in polite circles were largely mystified by her actions as chief gossipmonger Horace Walpole made plain. ‘The news of my coffee-house, since I began my letter, is, that Lady Strathmore eloped last night, taking two maids with her,’ he informed his dear friend Lady Ossory, adding ‘but no swain is talked of.’
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As Lady Ossory could have told her, having not seen her own three children from her first marriage since her divorce sixteen years previously, the road ahead was liable to be strewn with obstacles. But as Mary placed her trust in the antiquated, labyrinthine English legal system one fact was certain: she would furnish material for coffee-house gossip for many years to come.

 

Staying in her Holborn hideaway and assuming a false name - just as Bowes’s sister had done after her escape - Mary immediately initiated three separate legal causes through three distinct branches of the legal system: the King’s Bench, Chancery and the ecclesiastical courts administered by the Church of England. Pitting herself, her tiny band of supporters and her meagre resources against Bowes’s limitless guile and powerful connections, Mary hoped that simple tenets of English justice would keep her safe, restore her fortune and end her miserable marriage. While these may have seemed entirely reasonable aims, within the male-dominated, tradition-bound society of the eighteenth century they were bold ambitions indeed.

Not surprisingly, given her knowledge of Bowes’s temper, Mary’s first priority was to safeguard her life. So on 7 February, just four days after her escape, she appeared before the King’s Bench to exhibit articles of peace against Bowes. One of England’s oldest and highest ranking courts, the King’s Bench - or Queen’s Bench under a female monarch - dealt with those criminal cases that were not punishable by execution. Held in one corner of Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the Palace of Westminster, since the thirteenth century, its crowded and boisterous sessions competed with the proceedings of two other courts - Chancery and the Court of Common Pleas - as well as with the cacophony of spectators, hawkers and shopkeepers that milled around the cavernous building. Appearing before Lord Mansfield, the enlightened and hard-working Lord Chief Justice who had presided over the King’s Bench for nearly thirty years, Mary pleaded that she was in fear of death or ‘some great bodily hurt’ from Bowes and laid six charges of ‘great Cruelty and Barbarity’ as evidence of his violence.
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Relating a mere handful of Bowes’s most vicious attacks through the course of her married life, these described how he had beaten her with clenched fists, a stick, the hilt of his sword and a silver candlestick, kicked her, burned her face, stabbed her tongue, pulled her ears, threatened to strangle her and ultimately sworn to murder or confine her. Readily granting Mary’s petition, Lord Mansfield ordered that Bowes be bound over to keep the peace for the next twelve months, guaranteed by sureties provided by himself and two others. Leaping to his aid, the bail was volunteered by his drinking cronies, the lawyer John ‘Honest Jack’ Lee and Charles Howard, the future Duke of Norfolk. At Mary’s request the court provided a tipstaff, a court constable named for the staff or stave he brandished, to protect her in her temporary home. Returning to her lodgings with her court guard, as the snow which had been threatening for days now blanketed the streets, Mary remained on edge.