Wedlock (43 page)

Further along the road, when the carriage pulled in that evening at the George Inn, Buckden in Cambridgeshire, Mary succeeded in snatching a few words alone with a sympathetic serving maid whom she entreated to send a message by express carrier - a messenger on horseback - to Lord Mansfield. Later the maid would testify that Mary seemed ‘in great fear trouble and distress and wept very much and appeared to be very sick and vomited’. But reassured by Bowes that Mary was merely ill through fasting, the maid never sent the message. Continuing up the dangerously rutted northern road, the dishevelled party arrived at 1 a.m. at the Bell Inn, Stilton. Raising the tavern staff from their beds, Bowes dragged Mary into a parlour, held a pistol to her head and threatened to shoot her unless she signed a paper suspending the divorce. When she adamantly refused, he clenched his fist and punched her in the head. Dragged by his ruffians towards the coach, Mary managed to wrestle free and ran screaming up the high street, but although her cries were heard in several houses nobody came to her assistance. Recaptured by Bowes’s hoodlums she was forced back into the carriage where Bowes struck her on the chest with the heavy chain and seals of his watch.

Charging on through the night, Bowes stopped at Stamford, where Mary again screamed for help, and at Grantham, where Bowes kept her locked in the coach while the horses were changed. Arriving in Newark at 7 a.m. on Saturday, Mary was allowed under tight escort to visit the garden privy, where she was recognised from past visits by an ostler who noted that, ‘she appeared to be in great agitation and distress of mind and seemed worn out and spent with fatigue’ while a chambermaid remarked that Mary seemed ‘not in her senses’. Closely guarded as the carriage dashed on through Saturday, Mary was given no further chance to seek help until Bowes stopped for fresh horses at Barnby Moor in Nottinghamshire. Complaining of sickness, probably exacerbated by the swaying motion of the speeding coach, she was allowed upstairs to a parlour. Hurriedly whispering her plight to a chambermaid while Bowes was out of sight, Mary was finally rewarded. Shocked at details of the kidnap, the maid promised to send an urgent message to Lord Mansfield in London. On her knees, Mary kissed her in gratitude.

Convinced by now that Bowes planned to continue on to Scotland and from there set sail for Ireland, where her lawyers would have little hope of retrieving her, Mary was frantic. When they reached the familiar town of Barnard Castle, close to her ancient family seat of Streatlam Castle, she screamed as loudly as she could. ‘My whole conduct from Highgate to Streatlam was alternately screaming out, where there were hopes of assistance’, she later wrote, ‘and remaining quiet where there were few.’ Three miles further on, when the carriage rattled up the sweeping drive of Streatlam Castle and pulled up in front of the stone steps at about midnight, Mary shrieked to the postboys who had driven the horses from their last staging post that she had been brought there by force. Always ready with an answer, Bowes assured them that Mary was out of her mind. Bedraggled and exhausted, at the end of a journey lasting thirty-four hours, Mary certainly must have had the appearance of a madwoman. And as Bowes dragged her into the castle, shutting the great wooden doors behind them, she had no idea whether she would ever emerge again.

Originally built to withstand attack from Scottish invaders and powerful northern barons in the fifteenth century, Streatlam Castle provided Bowes with the perfect stronghold in which to keep Mary captive.
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Sited in a deep valley, surrounded by forested hills and encircled by a broad channel, originally the moat, the castle had kept Mary’s ancestors secure for a century before Sir George Bowes had been forced to flee from advancing Catholic forces during the Northern Rebellion of 1569. Promptly captured by the rebels, the castle had been wrecked and plundered before the patriotic Sir George could return lamenting that, ‘I am utterly spoiled of all my goodes.’ It was Mary’s supercilious uncle William who had transformed the Gothic pile into a family mansion at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Never fully completed, the gloomy and forbidding house had been disliked by Mary’s father, who preferred his cherished Gibside, and it had never evoked fondness in Mary either. Comfortless and dilapidated, the power base built to protect Mary’s ancestors now served as her prison.

Met at the door by Henry Bourn, Bowes’s right-hand man, Mary was taken to the oak-panelled dining room where generations of her ancestors had lingered over lavish banquets and toasted family triumphs. Having demanded food after the arduous journey, Bowes grabbed Mary and pointed his pistol at her breast then threatened to fire unless she consented to live with him again as his wife.
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Once cowed and submissive, terrified of her husband’s violent assaults, now Mary was defiant, refusing to comply with his demands, even at gun-point. Flinging down his weapon in exasperation Bowes berated her until supper arrived but no sooner had their plates been cleared than he snatched up his pistol again. Holding the gun once more to Mary’s breast, Bowes calmly informed her that he was determined to shoot. When he ordered her to, ‘Say your prayers!’ Mary did just that. Closing her eyes, she declaimed, ‘I recommend my spirit to God, and my friends to his protection: - fire!’ Mary heard the trigger being pulled and waited for the fatal blow but the gunpowder failed to ignite, probably due to the damp conditions of the journey, causing the proverbial ‘flash in the pan’. Demented with rage, Bowes punched Mary twice so that she fell to the floor, her head pounding so much that the room seemed ‘in a blaze of fire’. Towering over her, Bowes demanded to know whether she had had enough to which Mary retorted, ‘not the thousandth part enough; you may shoot me, or beat me to a mummy: my person is in your power, but my mind is beyond your reach.’ At that Bowes threw his ineffectual pistol aside and exclaimed in evident awe, ‘By God you are a wonderful woman.’

Undeterred, nonetheless, Bowes now ordered two of his ruffians to carry Mary up the grand oak staircase to bed. Once alone with her in the bedchamber, he told Mary to undress and get into bed with him; when she refused, he began to tear at her clothing then forced her on to the bed. Well aware that if Mary consented to have intercourse he could legitimately claim that she had returned to him as his wife and thereby invalidate her divorce suit, Bowes demanded sex. Equally resolved to resist, Mary swore that she would rather die than consent. Although she was plainly no match for Bowes’s looming six-foot figure and renowned might, Mary threatened she would sue him for rape if he attempted to take her by force. No doubt aware that rape was a hanging offence, he relented and left her to sleep alone. Throughout the following day, Sunday 12 November, Bowes continued to threaten Mary with violence, harangue her with insults and cajole her with details of a fresh round of eviction notices he planned to serve on her tenants. Closely guarded by Bowes’s confederates and served by Bowes’s mistress, a maid called Mary Gowland who was pregnant with yet another of his illegitimate children, Mary remained resolute.

 

News that the Countess of Strathmore had been abducted in broad daylight from one of London’s main thoroughfares spread rapidly through the streets of the capital and ultimately travelled even as far as India. ‘The town was ringing about your old neighbour of the north Countess Strathmore and the enormous barbarities of her husband,’ gossiped Horace Walpole to his friend Lady Ossory.
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The Duchess of Brunswick, sister of George III, exclaimed to the Duchess of Argyll: ‘What a shocking story this is of Mr Bowes carrying off Ldy Strathmore. ’ Despatching for good any remnants of Bowes’s reputation, the sensational events also prompted many to reassess their assumptions about marriage. While Walpole considered that wealthy widows should in future prove ‘a little cautious of Mac-Philanderers’, the Duchess of Brunswick firmly pronounced: ‘I seldom see love matches turn out well, love dose [does] make such
havock.
’

Eager to reveal the latest remarkable twist in the Bowes divorce, the press related the story in full. Rushing into print on the day after the kidnap, the
London Evening Post
announced: ‘Yesterday, about two o’clock, Lady Strathmore was forcibly taken away from the house of Mr Forster [sic], brazier, in Oxford-street, where she had called on business, by five or six armed men, who violently seized and put her into her own carriage, which waited at the door.’
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Describing the incident as an ‘outrage’,
The Times
averred that it was Bowes’s ‘unquestionable design’ to carry the countess to Ireland. The
Gentleman’s Magazine
carried the news in florid detail, reporting eye-witness accounts of Mary’s struggles and appeals for help as her coach sped through villages ‘at a most furious rate’. And finally catching up with the drama six months later, when the London news arrived by sea in India, the
Madras Courier
would astound its readers with ‘the particulars respecting the forcibly taking away the Countess of Strathmore’.

Meanwhile Mary’s friends and supporters lost no time in rushing to her aid. Appalled at seeing her beloved mistress and closest friend snatched from her side in Oxford Street, Mary Morgan had immediately dashed across town to find Thomas Lacey. But in an era seventy years before the existence of a nationwide police force, when even the most heinous crimes had to be pursued and prosecuted by the victims and their families, Mary’s supporters were forced to rely on their own resources. Too late to seek legal redress that day, on the following day Morgan and Captain Farrer, who had trudged back to town footsore and shamefaced, swore an affidavit before Lord Mansfield to secure a writ of
habeas corpus
ordering Bowes to surrender Mary along with a ‘Rule for Informations’ demanding that he explain his actions.
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A court tipstaff, Thomas Ridgeway, set off at once to serve the legal notices taking Captain Farrer as his guide. Together the pair galloped out of town, following the unmistakeable trail of Mary’s journey northwards. Reporting the tipstaff ’s quest, the
English Chronicle
confidently predicted, ‘There is no doubt he will succeed as many accounts have arrived in town from the places they passed through, which point out and ascertain their route.’
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Left in London to rally forces, Morgan and Lacey rejoiced when they received Mary’s damp-stained note revealing that she was heading for St Paul’s Walden Bury. Relief quickly turned to anguish, however, when she and Lacey arrived at the house to find it empty. Now convinced that Mary was being taken to Ireland, the pair despatched express messengers to all the main seaports urging that Bowes be apprehended, and distributed handbills throughout the capital appealing for help in finding her. Warning of the legal measures taken, the leaflets urged, ‘It is therefore hoped that all Persons will use their utmost Endeavours to stop their Progress, wherever they go, and prevent her being conveyed out of the Kingdom, and give every possible and speedy information thereof at her Ladyship’s House in
Bloomsbury-Square
, London.’
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As predicted by the press, Ridgeway and Captain Farrer collected distressing reports of Mary’s ordeal at every coaching inn they stopped at on the Great North Road; the information they gathered from witnesses would prove crucial. It was two days later, however, a full day behind Bowes, when their trail finally culminated in County Durham and the two crusaders were reliably informed that Mary was being held captive in Streatlam Castle. Joining forces with the resourceful Thomas Colpitts, the rescue party collected at the offices of a sympathetic local lawyer, Zachary Hubbersty, to consider their next move. ‘I have to inform you by express that Capt. Farrer, Mr Colpitts & Mr Ridgeway arrived here this morning about 9 o’clock, after hearing of Mr Stoney all the way,’ Hubbersty wrote in a dashed letter to Lacey in London.
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Having likewise heard of the various weapons being brandished by Bowes and his lawless crew, Ridgeway reasonably concluded that he needed to raise reinforcements before proceeding. To that end, the tipstaff summoned help from law enforcers in the region and placed a ‘strong guard’ around the castle for, as Hubbersty presciently noted, ‘there is no doubt but Mr B. will take Ly. S. off if any opportunity is given him so to do’.

With news of the extraordinary events radiating to every town and port, friends and allies throughout the country rallied to Mary’s cause. Horrified to hear of Bowes’s latest villainy, Robert Thompson, the sacked Gibside gardener, swore that he would save his mistress or ‘dye on the spott’.
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Receiving the alarming news in Cambridge, Mary’s seventeen-year-old son John set off on horseback to rescue the mother he had not seen for six years. ‘The young Earl of Strathmore’, the
English Chronicle
told readers, ‘has set out for the north, and is determined to liberate his mother out of her present disagreeable situation at the risk of his existence.’
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Even the Duke of Norfolk, Bowes’s old drinking chum and bail guarantor, sent messengers to friends in the north urging them to join the rescue efforts. And once they learned that Bowes had barricaded himself in at Streatlam, local miners besieged the house, hollering for Mary’s release and lighting immense fires in an effort to prevent her being removed under cover of darkness. Watching the castle night and day, armed with guns, swords and bludgeons, the formidable force was variously estimated at two hundred, three hundred and even five hundred angry and determined men illuminated by ‘great blazing coal fires’ positioned in every avenue.
²⁴

While the miners were evidently prepared to risk their lives to deliver Mary from her ordeal, others were seemingly more resigned to her plight. Informed of events by Colpitts, Mary’s aged aunt, Margaret Liddell, in Durham promised to launch inquiries in the neighbourhood to ascertain her niece’s whereabouts but added lamely, ‘I dare say he will send her abroad.’
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Another correspondent, relating the news that had captivated the region, suggested, ‘she is most likely a Prisoner for Life’. And one witness, reporting details of Mary’s journey through Yorkshire, anticipated an even worse fate, writing, ‘It’s a dammed rascally affair . . . I hope he will not be vilain enough to do her away.’
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