Wedlock (52 page)

Reliving the past trials she had suffered at St Paul’s Walden Bury and elsewhere, Mary now embarked on a ‘narrative’ which described in more than three hundred pages of harrowing detail the barbarities she had suffered during her marriage and abduction. Prefaced with a warning that the events she related were ‘so uncommon as to stagger the belief of Posterity’, she may have intended the text for publication, perhaps as a counterpoint to the ‘Confessions’. Finishing her narrative in February 1795, as she packed to move one last time, Mary looked forward to ‘a period not very distant, when I have the best prospect of being able to seat myself in some pleasant and cheerful retirement for the remainder of my days, in the Enjoyment of every Comfort, and amusement, a
rational
Being can desire, and with a most consummate Contempt for all those airy, and what perhaps may be justly stiled those vicious Bubbles, which the Fools and Rogues of the present age, agree to decorate with the false name of Pleasure’. After a summer spell in seaside lodgings, Mary moved that autumn into Stourfield House, a rambling mansion on a remote country estate bordering the Hampshire coast, where she hoped she would find the peace that she craved.

 

Built in 1766 as the country seat of a wealthy barrister, Stourfield House suited Mary’s purposes perfectly. Sitting on a small rise about half a mile from the beach, with a fine view of Christchurch Harbour nearly three miles to the south-east, the house was sheltered by a plantation of trees.
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Bounded by the sea to the south, the River Stour to the east, the estate stretched twelve miles northwards across farmland and heath towards the chalk hills of Dorset and the fringes of the New Forest in the distance. An isolated and romantic spot, almost impregnable to unwelcome visitors and remote from prying neighbours, it proved ideal. Here, Mary told one friend, she could feel ‘as if she were out of the world’.

Arriving in her coach in October 1795, accompanied by her daughters Anna and Mary, her friend Mary Morgan and her establishment of servants, Mary caused something of a stir in the usually uneventful life of the quiet neighbourhood. Inevitably, her reputation had preceded her. Mary Dale, the wife of a tenant farmer, Henry Dale, was already aware that Mary had suffered ‘great trials’ on account of her ‘very cruel and unkind husband’. Cut off from friends and family in London and Durham, Mary had few visitors. Her sons came occasionally; Anna sometimes stayed with her girls. But with her beloved daughter Mary by her side, Morgan as her companion and a brood of dogs at her feet, she needed no further company. Although she remained aloof from the local gentry, Mary won hearts and minds among the country folk for her generosity, making firm friends with the Dales and distributing soup among the poor several times a week.

Yet Mary had scarcely settled into her coastal idyll before her newfound serenity was shattered. After indifferent health for several months, on 17 January 1796, Mary Morgan died, aged just forty-six. She was buried in the Lady Chapel of Christchurch Priory where Mary erected a memorial to the ‘Heroic Qualities’, the ‘Cool, deliberate Courage’ and the ‘matchless persevering Friendship’ of the faithful maid who had rescued her from the depths of misery.
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According to Mrs Dale, Mary ‘never could get over’ Morgan’s death, ‘it seemed to press so heavy on her mind’.

Further distress arrived that October when Mary heard that Bowes was launching a fresh legal assault. Living ‘out of the world’ just like Mary, though not through choice, Bowes fretted over his depleted finances and his claim to Mary’s former fortune. Changing his attorneys as often as he changed his mistresses, he now appealed to the House of Lords against the Chancery decision on the prenuptial deed. It took the peers little time to affirm the Chancery verdict at which point they made clear their disdain by charging Bowes £150 costs and issuing a vituperative indictment of his challenge. Remarking that every step he had taken to acquire his marital rights had been ‘grossly fraudulent’, the law lords asserted: ‘That if it be possible to conceive the Husband, of all others, who ought the least to be permitted to question any such Dispositions made by a Wife, the Appellant is that Husband.’
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Merely emboldened by their contempt, in December Bowes concocted a new suit to Chancery based on another supposed deed of revocation which, apparently, he had just remembered that Mary had signed in November 1781 in front of a witness who was conveniently now dead. This deed, which Bowes had subsequently lost, entitled him to a third of two farms in County Durham, or so he claimed. Ludicrous as his case might seem, inevitably the challenge involved further legal wrangling, renewed witness statements and more anxiety for Mary. Struggling to remember where she was on the days in question, Mary despaired that many of her former witnesses - including poor Morgan - were now dead. Keen to avoid a trip to London on account of ‘my deranged finances & present bad health’, she hoped the case would quickly be quashed.
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Incredibly, the arguments would rumble on for a further ten years. Hinging on a legal loophole concerning a codicil to George Bowes’s will, the case was referred in 1798 to the King’s Bench, which found in Bowes’s favour. An appeal by Mary and Lord Strathmore to the House of Lords the following year failed so that once again Bowes had his hands on a share of Mary’s fortune and a claim to unpaid rent. Ultimately, when Bowes reasserted his claim to the farms - Lord Strathmore having ignored the outcome - the case would come before the Court of Common Pleas in 1807 when the entire story of the sham duel would be thrashed out once more and Bowes’s suit finally dismissed.

Her peace of mind fractured by Bowes’s tireless legal challenges, her health still scarred by his years of abuse and her spirits sapped by the loss of her companion, Mary was becoming increasingly frail and eccentric. Lavishing attention on her many dogs, Mary ensured that each had its own bed and was treated to a hot dinner every day. When one went missing in 1798, she circulated handbills offering £10 reward. The poor animal was found dead on the heath by Farmer Dale and was tenderly carried back to the house in a basket. When Dale declined the reward - ‘because of the great kindness she had always shown his wife and himself’ - Mary insisted that he take refreshments at the house whenever he wished. From that point on she frequently ordered her servants to take a cooked dinner and beer to the farmer when she saw him working in the fields nearby. And for all her strange ways, the farmer’s son, Richard Dale, insisted, ‘no person could be more respected and beloved than Lady Strathmore’.

That same year Mary was reported to be so ill that doctors despaired of her survival; one newspaper reported that she had been ‘given over by her Physicians’.
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Although she confounded the doctors, she was becoming increasingly preoccupied with her health. Her spirits depressed, she began inviting Mary Dale to the house for frequent discussions about the arrangements for her funeral. In 1799, she asked the Dales and her gardener, George White, to witness amendments to her will. The dawn of the new century brought no improvement, and on 28 April 1800, at Stourfield House, Mary died. Her final illness unrecorded, her cause of death would remain unknown, though her weakened health would have left her easy prey to any number of the period’s lethal contagious diseases. She was just fifty-one years old. Days later Richard Dale, an observant boy of five, watched in wonder as the horse-drawn hearse bearing Mary’s body, followed by three mourning coaches containing her grieving family, clattered slowly down the winding drive to begin the long journey to London.

Mary was buried, at her own request, in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, close to the graves of Chaucer, Spenser and Dryden, on 10 May.
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If she could not achieve greatness as a poet in life, she would dwell with great poets in death. Curiously, for someone who had suffered two wretched marriages, she was buried - at her own wish - in the magnificent jewelled wedding dress she had worn for her first marriage at the age of eighteen. One further request, by far the most fitting, was never carried out. In her will Mary had asked for a statue to be erected at her grave. Although she had grown up under the gaze of Lady Liberty on top of her majestic column, it was not a statue to liberty but the blindfolded figure of Justice that Mary desired to stand guard at her tomb. Having lost and regained her freedom in the most extraordinary circumstances over the course of her remarkable lifetime, few could have set a higher price on the value of liberty. And yet, as she was well aware, it was only through the fundamental principles of justice that her liberty had finally been secured.

 

In the Age of Enlightenment, when brilliant thinkers and daring innovators, both men and women, were rightly revered, Mary Eleanor Bowes had the potential to achieve great things. Having been born into wealth, blessed with the best education of the day and, encouraged by her progressive father, grown up confident and ambitious, she could have won acclaim as a talented writer and linguist, an accomplished botanist or a prominent scientific patron. But if her personal aspirations were stifled by her first husband, they were strangled by the next.

Instead, Mary Eleanor achieved something of much more significant and far-reaching importance. After suffering eight years of barely imaginable brutality, which reduced her to a petrified and cowed spectre of her former self, Mary somehow found the strength to embark on an audacious counter-attack. Despite having once enjoyed the position of Britain’s richest heiress, for all that she had married into the aristocracy, she could rely on neither money nor connections in her struggle. And yet through sheer tenacity and courage, and the kindness of those on the bottom rungs of the Georgian social scale, Mary successfully pitted her wits not only against one of history’s vilest husbands but also the might of the entire legal and religious establishment. At a time when women enjoyed pitifully few rights in law, either in marriage or in general, Mary Eleanor Bowes won an unprecedented series of victories, amounting to a remarkable triumph, which would stand as a beacon of hope to inspire writers and encourage campaigners in the continuing battle for reform.

 

Unjustly, although she had well and truly outsmarted him, Mary was outlived by Andrew Robinson Bowes. His unpaid debts, including the alimony he never paid to Mary or her descendants, meant that he would remain under the jurisdiction of the King’s Bench, spending the last twenty-two years of his life a prisoner. But following Mary’s death he was allowed to live outside the prison walls, in the area surrounding the jail known as ‘the rules’. And so, with the long-suffering Polly, their two girls and three boys, and a straggle of mangy cats and dogs, Bowes took a house in London Road, close by the jail. Investing his remaining time in evading the lawyers and tradesmen to whom he owed money, Bowes perfected his customary deceit in feigning illness - pretending to suffer fits, loss of memory and deafness - and dressed himself and his offspring in rags. According to Foot, Bowes insisted that the children never wore shoes or stockings. As he refused even to buy a broom to keep the house clean, his daughters had to go down on their knees to collect the dust with their hands.

Despite living outside the prison walls - the family moved to a second house in Lambeth Road by 1807 - Bowes continued to treat Polly as his personal prisoner. He kept her locked in a room, denied her all visitors and allowed her only one meal a day. And so it came as a surprise to Foot, calling at the house on 10 January 1810, when Polly answered the door for the first time in her life. Inside he found Bowes in bed, for once genuinely ill. With his family crowded around him, Foot learned that Bowes’s will left all his worldly goods to William Johnstone Bowes, his only legitimate son. It was only after the pleas of his children, his attorney and Foot himself, that Bowes was finally persuaded to grant Polly a measly £100 a year.
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Six days later, on 16 January 1810, Bowes died. He was buried in the vault of the nearby St George’s Church, where he would spend eternity within the prison rules. His chief apologist during life, his chief mourner in death, Foot dolefully followed Bowes’s coffin to its resting place. Yet just two years later the surgeon published an excoriating exposé of his erstwhile patron’s life in which he cheerfully proclaimed: ‘He was a villain to the backbone!’ Relating the epic tale of his friend’s trickery, violence, sexual assaults and depravity, Foot concluded: ‘To sum up his character in a few words, he was cowardly, insidious, hypocritical, tyrannic, mean, violent, selfish, jealous, revengeful, inhuman and savage, without a countervailing quality.’

 

None of Mary’s children enjoyed particularly fulfilling lives or found lasting happiness in marriage. William, the youngest, joined the navy and survived one naval disaster, becoming icebound in the Elbe on the
Proserpine
in 1799, only to perish in another, at the age of twenty-four, when a storm wrecked the
Blenheim
off the coast of Madagascar in 1807.
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His half-sister Mary settled in Bath and though she never married, she retained her mischievous humour and happy-go-lucky nature to the last, becoming a favourite aunt to her nieces and nephew. She died in 1855, aged seventy-eight.

Maria, the giggling toddler who had once charmed Thomas Gray, lived comfortably in Gloucestershire with her family, but died in 1806 at just thirty-eight. Her brother George died the same year, aged thirty-five, after being married only eighteen months, and since he left no heirs St Paul’s Walden Bury descended to younger brother Thomas. George’s widow, Mary, and Maria’s widower, now Colonel Price, consoled each other in their grief by getting married in 1811.
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Thomas fared better, marrying three times and outliving two of his wives but also his only child. Headstrong Anna, herself a widow after her husband’s early death, lived with her two girls at Bird Hill House, a lodge on the Gibside estate. Never marrying again, she died in 1832, aged sixty-one. But, least lucky of all in marriage, the tenth earl achieved only one day of marital bliss.