Wedlock (4 page)

Dynamic, tall and good-looking, George Bowes had run away from home at the age of eighteen to buy himself a commission as a captain in a cavalry regiment using money given to him by his mother for an entirely different purpose.
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Army life did nothing to cool Bowes’s intractable temper or his zest for life. At six feet tall, with expressive grey eyes in an open, oval-shaped face, Bowes presented both a formidable figure and a pleasing countenance. He was, according to his daughter Mary Eleanor, ‘uncommonly handsome’ and a ‘great rake in his youth’. Yet while he shared the fiery temper and forceful temperament of his two elder brothers, unlike them George Bowes shouldered his responsibilities as a landowner, employer and public figure. Abandoning his brief army career, he took up his seat at Gibside Hall, which he preferred to gloomy Streatlam Castle, and grasped the reins of the family’s coal business with customary zeal. His youthful reputation for aggressive business tactics earned him the nickname ‘The Count’ from one rival, while another called him ‘the Csar’. Yet Bowes also demonstrated a keen appreciation of the arts as well as a flair for romance.

Soon after inheriting his estate, at the age of twenty-three Bowes married fourteen-year-old Eleanor Verney following a passionate courtship which began when she was only ten. The posthumous daughter of Thomas Verney, Eleanor was heiress to the considerable wealth of her grandfather, the Dean of Windsor. By the age of thirteen, she was renowned for her beauty and her learning. A tiny book of her poetry, copied out in miniature copperplate handwriting, survives to this day.
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Undoubtedly, the marriage negotiations had initially been prompted by financial motives on the part of Bowes and possibly his mother, in common with the vast majority of marriages between prosperous landed families in the early eighteenth century. By the time the marriage neared settlement, however, Bowes was helplessly in love with the beguiling Eleanor.

Mostly kept apart from the object of his fascination by distance and propriety, Bowes plied her mother with letters that professed his ‘great Respect & love’ for her ‘Beautiful Daughter’.
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Eventually allowed to address the captivating Eleanor directly, Bowes gushed, ‘I conjure you thus to ease a Heart full of You, & tell you with the utmost sincerity I love you above all things’. As thirteen-year-old Eleanor responded with cool formality, describing the trivia of her daily life, Bowes could hardly restrain his impatience: ‘Dear Madam, I am not able to bear the cruel absence from my angel any longer without having recourse to Pen & Paper for relief of my tortur’d heart which can at present find no other way to ease its self.’ At last, with the cumbersome financial details settled, the wedding took place on 1 October 1724, shortly after Eleanor turned fourteen.
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Her youth itself was no bar to the marriage - twelve was the minimum marrying age for girls and fourteen for boys - but the couple had waited until Eleanor was old enough to receive her inheritance. Bowes was finally united with his adored child bride - in every sense. In one loving letter to his ‘Nelly’, when Bowes was away on business, he ended with the jaunty postscript: ‘I assure you that I found my Bed very cold last night for want of my Companion.’

Just two and a half months after the wedding, Eleanor died suddenly, probably from one of the many infectious diseases that stalked eighteenth-century Britain. Bowes was devastated. He poured out his grief in frenzied letters to Mrs Verney confessing that his loss had made him doubt his faith and lose his reason. All his future happiness, he wept, had depended on his young bride, whom he described as ‘the most accomplish’d of her Sex’. Although many promising Georgian relationships ended in premature death, Eleanor’s sudden demise was considered sufficiently tragic to merit the attentions of not one but two acclaimed literary minds. The poet and travel writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu revealed her jaundiced view of marriage in a poem written on the day of Eleanor’s death which began: ‘Hail, happy bride, for thou art truly blest!/Three months of rapture, crown’d with endless rest.’ Fellow writer Mary Astell, who is thought to have penned her response at the same social event, blamed marriage itself - or lust at least - for the young bride’s early death, with the words: ‘Lost when the fatal Nuptial Knot was tie’d,/Your Sun declin’d, when you became a Bride./A soul refin’d, like your’s soar’d above/The gross Amusements of low, Vulgar love.’
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Bereft of his love, vulgar or otherwise, George Bowes escorted his wife’s corpse to its burial at Westminster Abbey, after which he was forced to repay her dowry with interest.
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It took him a full nineteen years to recover sufficiently from his grief to consider remarriage. In the meantime, he threw himself into improving his estate at Gibside and transforming the coal industry.

With the abundant coal seams running beneath his Durham and Yorkshire estates, Bowes was literally sitting on a fortune. His marriage settlement with Eleanor Verney had named as many as forty collieries owned by the Bowes family in County Durham alone. For the men, and boys as young as seven, who hewed and hauled the coal in precarious, gas-filled tunnels and the women who sorted the coal at the surface, it was hazardous and unpleasant but - for the men at least - well-paid work. For the colliery owners like Bowes coal was big business. In eighteenth-century Britain, with industry mushrooming and urban populations burgeoning, coal was in sharp demand, with Durham coal particularly prized. By the middle of the century, almost two million tons of coal were being produced annually by north-eastern coalfields - nearly half the national output - and most of this was shipped to London, which by now was Europe’s biggest city. The process was highly convoluted. Coal-owners like Bowes, with collieries close to the Tyne and its tributary the Derwent, transported their coal in horse-drawn trucks on wooden rails - forerunners of the railways - to quays or ‘staithes’ which lined the river banks. From here, the coal was loaded on to small boats, known as ‘keels’, then rowed downriver to the mouth of the Tyne where it was hauled on to seagoing colliers for the two-week voyage down the coast to London. Once it arrived in the Thames estuary, the coal was loaded on to river-going vessels called ‘lighters’, and then transferred to members of the Woodmongers Company who enjoyed a monopoly on its sale in London. With each change of transport, the coal changed hands - going through four expensive and closely controlled transactions which hiked up its price each time.

Frustrated at the lack of control over their hard-won product, several of the powerful north-eastern coal-owners seized the initiative. Setting aside for once his disputes with his neighbours, in 1726 Bowes joined forces with four other major coal-owners from the region to forge the Grand Alliance. By co-operating in buying land, limiting supply and sharing profits, the allies formed an effective monopoly which controlled virtually all coal production in the north-east. The cartel would dominate the British coal industry for the rest of the century. When Bowes was elected MP for County Durham in 1727, a seat he would hold for the rest of his life, he used his lobbying power to promote the partners’ interests, spending the five or six months each winter when Parliament met lodging in the capital. With the immense profits his coal produced, supplemented by rents from the many farms on his Durham and Yorkshire estates, Bowes invested in stocks and shares, property, ships, racehorses and art. Any surplus was ploughed into improving his beloved rural retreat of Gibside.

It was not until 1743, at the age of forty-two, that George Bowes felt ready to form a new romantic alliance. In March, he blamed a delay in writing to a friend on a ‘Fair Lady’ whom he hoped to ‘persuade to come into the North this Summer’.
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Still a handsome man though by now somewhat corpulent, Bowes had evidently not lost his courting skills, for in June he married Mary Gilbert, sole heiress to her father Edward Gilbert’s idyllic country estate of St Paul’s Walden Bury in Hertfordshire. Some twenty years Bowes’s junior, Mary brought a sizeable dowry, or marriage ‘portion’, worth £20,000 - equivalent to more than £3m today.
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It is probable that the marriage was largely one of convenience, bringing together two ancient landed families in the hope of providing an heir for both. Although their partnership proved companionable enough, Mary would always stand in the shadow of her formidable husband and the ghost of her adored predecessor - Bowes’s ‘favourite first wife’ in the words of Mary Eleanor. If she were ever tempted to forget her forerunner, there were no less than six portraits of ‘the first Mrs Bowes’ hanging at Gibside, including one in the second Mrs Bowes’s bedroom, to remind her.

Hard-working and pious, Mary Bowes devoted herself to managing the family’s several large households, while steadfastly supporting her husband in his busy public and private life. Proving herself a capable businesswoman, she managed the family’s voluminous accounts and large domestic staff, at Gibside each summer, in London every winter, and at their rented house in Yorkshire which served as a staging point between the two. Settling the numerous bills for food, travel, clothing, medicine, servants’ wages and family entertainment with meticulous efficiency, she gave George Bowes his ‘pocket expenses’ and paid for his barbers’ fees, while dispensing generous sums to charity.

The couple had been married six years, and had doubtless given up all hope of an heir, by the time Mary Bowes gave birth to a daughter on 24 February 1749. Since it was the parliamentary season and the household was ensconced in London, the baby was born at the family’s rented home in affluent Upper Brook Street, delivered by one of society’s favourite ‘man midwives’, Dr Francis Sandys. Baptised a month later in London’s most fashionable church, St George’s in Hanover Square, the baby was named Mary Eleanor, in homage both to her dutiful mother and to her father’s beloved first wife.
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Bowes hoped that she would combine the attributes of both.

Immediately, George Bowes had grand designs for Mary Eleanor’s future. If she was not born literally with a silver spoon in her mouth, her doting father was quick to remedy that absence, purchasing a candlestick and spoon ‘for the Child’ from a London silversmith within weeks of her birth.
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After the customary four weeks’ lying-in for Mrs Bowes, during which time Mary Eleanor was breastfed by a wet-nurse, the family packed up the house in London and undertook the arduous two-day journey north by coach. Accompanied by her nurse and proud parents, baby Mary Eleanor was conveyed to her family seat with the pomp normally associated with a royal progress. When the family stopped overnight at Ledstone, their halfway home in Yorkshire, bells were rung to announce her birth. As the entourage continued on to Darlington, Durham, Gateshead and finally Gibside, villagers, servants and neighbours were left in no doubt as to the importance of the tiny girl’s arrival. Church bells pealed and coins tinkled into the hands of the poor at every stop along the route.

If anyone suspected that for all his show of celebration, Bowes might secretly have yearned for a son to continue the family’s ancient name, they could see no signs of disappointment. One friend, Captain William FitzThomas, congratulated Bowes on his daughter’s birth while bluntly expressing the prevailing misogyny of the times. ‘What tho’ it be’nt a Boy, the same materials will produce one,’ he encouraged lustily, adding by way of compensation that ‘at least your Blood, if not your name will be transmitted to Posterity’. Another well-wisher was rather more tactful, remarking that if nothing else, Mary Eleanor’s birth presented the opportunity for an advantageous marriage which might mend the wrangles which continued between coal-owners despite their compact. Such an alliance would be ‘the liklyest way to put an end to all Disputes’ he suggested, adding pointedly: ‘Never did young Lady come into this world with more good wishes from all Ranks and Conditions of Men, Women & Children’.
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Indeed, daughters blessed with large dowries were often deemed more valuable in the competitive Georgian marriage market than sons. Aristocratic mothers fell over themselves to secure a daughter from a wealthy middle-class family for their needy heirs. Describing such arranged marriages as ‘Smithfield bargains’, the writer Hester Chapone exclaimed sardonically, ‘so much ready money for so much land, and my daughter flung in into the bargain!’
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But after decades of waiting for an heir, the prospect of handing over his daughter and his hard-earned profits to another prominent family held little attraction for Bowes. He had no intention of moderating his ambitions for his long-awaited offspring, just because she happened to be the wrong sex. Adamant that his baby girl would not only perpetuate his bloodline but would also continue the family name, he made a new will just before Mary Eleanor’s first birthday. Accordingly, the document named her as the sole heir to his vast estate and stipulated that any future husband must change his name to Bowes.
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Insisting that a man should take his wife’s surname was not completely unprecedented - one of Bowes’s coal partners, Sir Sydney Montagu, had been forced to adopt his bride’s name of Wortley - but it was still highly irregular, and much resented, in Georgian Britain.

 

Learning to crawl across the thickly carpeted rooms of Gibside Hall, taking her first steps in the thousand-acre gardens, Mary Eleanor Bowes - as she would remain all her life - began to explore the glorious rural retreat she would one day inherit. It was a work still in progress. Bowes had made only cosmetic alterations to the draughty Jacobean mansion, built by his Blakiston great-great-grandfather at the beginning of the seventeenth century, with the arms of James I still emblazoned above the door. Perched on a ledge above the Derwent, the imposing three-storey seventy-roomed house turned its back to the river - the conduit of Bowes’s wealth - and instead faced south across the landscaped parkland which Bowes was slowly transforming. Within the spacious main rooms, lit by tall mullioned windows, the toddling Mary Eleanor negotiated bulky pieces of mahogany and oak furniture while Bowes’s valuable collection of silverware, china, art and books was kept carefully beyond her reach. More than 300 pictures adorned the walls of the house, with 119 lining the staircase alone, including works by Rubens, Raphael and Hogarth. Since both her mother and father were avid readers, the library held more than a thousand volumes, from seventeenth-century classics such as Dryden’s
Virgil
and Milton’s
Works
, to contemporary writings on science, law and architecture, as well as novels by Fielding and Smollett. But no sooner had Mary Eleanor learned to walk than she found her explorations thwarted. When she was sixteen months old, her mother bought a pair of ‘leading strings’ - reins - in an effort to harness her wanderings and a year later steel bars were fixed across the nursery fireplace. But if her mother sought to restrain her daughter’s free spirit indoors, outside Mary Eleanor was free to roam. That same summer, one of the estate carpenters fashioned ‘a Set of little Chaise Wheels for Miss Bowes’ - presumably a small cart to be pulled by a pony - in which she could trundle around the gardens.
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