Wedlock (6 page)

Just as he sought to improve his daughter’s mind, George Bowes laid as much emphasis on strengthening her body, endeavouring to ‘harden’ her constitution through field sports such as riding and hunting. It was an intense and rigorous exercise regime, producing a physical strength and resilience which would prove vital in later life. Unfortunately, George Bowes’s own health was failing as fast as he sought to improve his daughter’s. Now in his late fifties, Bowes suffered a serious illness in the winter of 1758, necessitating almost daily visits from his surgeon and physician. He survived their attentions sufficiently to recuperate at his father-in-law’s Hertfordshire estate the following spring, but as Mary Eleanor continued with her lessons, practised her dance steps and learned to play the harpsichord, her father declined.

Well aware the end was in sight, in the winter of 1759 Bowes ordered his workmen to begin quarrying stone to build his final great project: an imposing Palladian-style chapel incorporating a mausoleum which would contain his tomb. Designed by James Paine, by now a highly successful architect, the chapel was to stand at the opposite end of the Grand Walk, a sombre and mature counterbalance to the thrusting exuberance of the column. Workmen had only just begun digging the foundations when George Bowes died on 17 September 1760, aged 59.
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His chapel being far from ready, nine days later Bowes’s body was transported from Gibside Hall in a hearse pulled by six horses at the head of a long funeral procession which snaked along the drive past the chapel building site, the stables, the column and the banqueting house, and through the Gibside gates to halt outside Whickham Church just beyond the estate boundaries. The coffin was borne into church by eight of the most prominent dignitaries of the region, several of them Bowes’s coal-owning allies, and placed in the vault, where it would remain until his chapel was finally finished in the following century.
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At a stroke, eleven-year-old Mary Eleanor had been deprived of the single most influential force in her life.

 

No sooner had the mourners’ coaches clattered away, leaving the house and gardens eerily quiet, than word began to spread. As the only heir to her father’s vast estate, conservatively estimated at £600,000 (more than £80m today) and possibly as high as £1,040,000 (around £150m), Mary Eleanor had become the richest heiress in Britain, perhaps even in Europe. Reporting her father’s death, the
Annual Register
informed its readers that: ‘His immense fortune, 600,000 l. devolves on his only daughter, about 13 years of age.’ Given that the newspaper added two years to Mary’s age, the figure may have been inaccurate, although it was reported with similar authority in the
London Magazine
. A few years later, the
Complete English Peerage
would put her fortune at more than £1m.
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Whatever the true value of the collieries, lead mines, ironworks, farms, houses, fine art, jewels, stocks and racehorses that George Bowes had assiduously accumulated and maintained throughout his life, there was no doubt that Mary Eleanor was now the wealthiest eleven-year-old in the country. Well aware that this anticipated fortune would attract keen interest from far and wide, her father had shrewdly placed his estate in trust. His will named his wife, his father-in-law and two of his sisters, Jane and Elizabeth, as trustees to ensure that while Mary Eleanor could enjoy her fortune during her lifetime, it would then be handed down intact to his grandchildren.
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In this wise precaution, Bowes was following the example of many landowners, anxious to prevent profligate heirs - or in the case of daughters, their spouses - from squandering the family’s ancient possessions in the space of one short lifetime. Since Mary Eleanor was to receive a £1,000 yearly allowance until the age of fourteen, and £1,300 from then until she was twenty-one, she was unlikely to feel impoverished.

Approaching her teens, precociously intelligent and with the largest fortune in Britain held waiting for her, Mary Eleanor needed more than ever the firm, loving guidance that her father had so ably provided. Yet with her mother inconsolable in her grief, her grandfather ageing and infirm, and her elderly aunts unused to shouldering responsibility for minors, she was suddenly devoid both of sensible supervision and emotional support. Shutting herself away at Gibside for the next two years, unable to face the giddy entertainments of London or the social round of Durham, Mary Bowes virtually abandoned any interest in her daughter’s education and welfare. Her immaculately kept account books stopped abruptly with her husband’s funeral expenses; her social life ended just as suddenly with his death. After two years, still incapacitated by grief, Mrs Bowes packed the Gibside valuables, left the estate in the capable hands of an agent and took out a lease on a new house, a few yards from their previous London home, at 40 Grosvenor Square.
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But London’s diversions did no more to console her than Gibside’s tranquillity and she remained, in her daughter’s words, ‘in such affliction, as to be incapable of attending either to my education or morals’. So at a time when the thirteen-year-old daughter probably needed her mother’s support most of all, Mary Eleanor was left in London in the charge of ageing Aunt Jane, her governess Elizabeth Planta and an assortment of tutors. Her mother meanwhile retreated to her childhood home of St Paul’s Walden Bury, where her own father had recently died.

Having been dominated all her childhood by her formidable father, Mary Eleanor’s adolescence was now guided almost solely by women. Living in the sumptuous mansion in the south-west corner of Grosvenor Square, surrounded on all sides by the richest members of the aristocracy, she was introduced into London society by her aunt. A ‘celebrated beauty’ in her youth, Jane Bowes, now nearly sixty, had since become ‘extremely vain’, Mary Eleanor would write, although chiefly through ‘having a niece who was one of the greatest fortunes in England’. Although the Bowes family could not boast aristocratic roots, the teenage Mary’s opulent lifestyle afforded her easy entry into an elite circle of rich, privileged and pampered youngsters who devoted themselves to a life of hedonistic leisure. So while her mother eschewed city life, Mary threw herself into the Georgian social, intellectual and scientific scene with a passion.

Persevering with her lessons, Mary’s scholarly accomplishments brought her to the notice of Elizabeth Montagu, whose literary parties at her house in Hill Street, a few minutes’ sedan-chair ride from Grosvenor Square, had become highly celebrated. Modelled on the French conversational salons, Mrs Montagu’s large mixed-sex assemblies were known as the Blue-Stocking Club, apparently on account of the legwear sported by her flamboyant friend, the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet. Famed as much for their lavish catering as their sparkling conversation, the literary evenings attracted the brightest intellectuals of the day, including Samuel Johnson, his friend Hester Thrale, the writer Elizabeth Carter and the gossip Horace Walpole. But for all the competition to coin the wittiest quips, the parties could be staid affairs. Guests were seated in formal circles or semi-circles of twenty to twenty-five people, according to Lady Louisa Stuart, the granddaughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Having taken a chair ‘between two grave faces unknown to me’ Lady Louisa had stifled a yawn and wondered at the apparent exclusion of any male guests. At that point a door opened from the dining room and the male contingent walked in. ‘They looked wistfully over our shoulders at a good fire, which the barrier we presented left them no means of approaching; then drawing chairs from the wall, seated themselves around us in an outer crescent, silent and solemn as our own.’
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Having become acquainted with the Bowes family in the north-east, where her husband had inherited a colliery near Newcastle, Mrs Montagu became a friend and patron to the young Mary Eleanor. ‘Mrs Montague honoured me with her friendship, approbation and correspondence,’ Mary later wrote, recalling Sunday gatherings at Mrs Montagu’s house.
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Although Mary insisted that she kept ‘several of her letters’ only one example of their correspondence has survived. In a letter written by eleven-year-old Mary from her Grosvenor Square home in March 1760, she thanks Mrs Montagu for sending her a book and in the adulatory tone of the period professes that even a moment in Mrs Montagu’s thoughts must ‘make her the envy of many’.
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For her part, Mrs Montagu expressed high esteem for the young Mary Eleanor, telling a friend in 1763 that ‘she is realy [sic] a fine girl, lively, sensible, and very civil and good natured’.
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Surrounded by the exquisite gardens her father had carved out of the Derwent Valley, and encouraged in her childhood to take an interest in plants and animals by her mother, Mary Eleanor had also developed an early fascination for natural history. She already had her own small garden at Gibside, which had been laid out at some point before she reached the age of twelve. In May 1761, estate accounts record one of the workmen ‘Palissading Miss Bowes’s Garden in the Green-Close’. Her mother had frequently purchased plants and seeds, as well as exotic wild birds - including a parrot when her daughter was eight, and two swans, two guinea fowl and four wild turkeys the following year - before her withdrawal from society. Mrs Bowes’s account books record the purchase of ‘2 Chelsea Lemons’ and ‘two Auriculas in China potts for the Child’ in February 1760. In her mother’s absence, Mary’s growing interest in plants may well have been encouraged by her governess, Elizabeth Planta, and her father, Mary’s French tutor, Andreas Planta, who had now taken up his post as assistant librarian at the British Museum. Certainly she began to turn her childhood fondness for gardening into a serious study of botany. It was to become a lifelong passion.

At the same time, under the lax attentions of Aunt Jane, Mary was free to embark on more playful diversions. At thirteen years old, the age at which her father’s first wife had been engaged, Mary Eleanor was fast becoming a magnet for eligible young men. Intelligent, accomplished and self-confident, and engagingly pretty with her curling brown hair and blue-grey eyes, she quickly attracted a swarm of suitors. But while the unparalleled scale of her inheritance made her an equally attractive prospect to their parents, not all of them regarded her intellectual talents as an asset. Lord Lyttelton, who considered himself something of a scholar, remarked on George Bowes’s death that, ‘as his vanity descends with his estate to his daughter, I don’t wish to see her my daughter-in-law, though she would make my son one of the richest and consequently, in our present ideas of greatness, one of the great peers of the Realm.’ Saving Mary Eleanor from a match with his libertine son, who would acquire the sobriquet ‘the wicked Lord Lyttelton’, he added presciently: ‘But she will probably be the prize of some needy Duke, who will want her estate to repair the disasters of New-market and Arthur’s, or if she marries for love, of some ensign of the Guards, or smart Militia captain.’
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He could scarcely have expected that both predictions might almost exactly come true.

Living mainly with her aunt in leafy Grosvenor Square, apart from occasional trips to Hertfordshire or Gibside, Mary Eleanor launched herself into London society with gusto. Dressed in the tightly corseted, heavily pleated gowns and silk stockings worn by young and adolescent girls in imitation of their mothers, she would set forth in the family’s stylish coach. Accompanied by inattentive Aunt Jane, the carriage would rumble slowly along the loose-cobbled streets, impeded by the sheer press of other coaches, carts, sedan chairs, pedestrians and livestock that choked the city’s thoroughfares. Visiting in the 1760s, the French tourist Pierre Jean Grosley was shocked at the congestion both on the roads and the river which was as crammed with boats as the streets were with traffic.
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While Grosley gaped at the luxurious display of goods in the brightly lit shop windows of the Strand and Fleet Street, which were ‘greatly superior’ to anything Paris could offer, he complained that the foul mud littering the streets and the thick smog cloaking the sky meant that ‘New London is as much buried in dirt as the old’. So dense was this smog that at times walkers in St James’s Park could scarcely see four steps in front of them. That the thick pungent smog which obscured the sun was caused by the coal from her own collieries being burned in the capital’s homes and small industries made little impression on Mary Eleanor.

Heading west to parade around Hyde Park in a jam of similar coaches, or trundling south to visit the exclusive shops of The Strand, the chief purpose of these daytime ‘airings’ was to see and be seen. While the ambling progress rarely exceeded walking pace, the carriages at least afforded their privileged occupants a barrier against the stench, clamour and bustle of London’s streets. By night, when the city became even more boisterous and dangerous, the pampered members of the landed classes stuck all the more closely to their protective coaches and exclusive venues. Clothed in rich satins and silks, adorned in the jewels her father had bequeathed her, and accompanied by the ever-present Aunt Jane, Mary Eleanor turned heads at the balls, assemblies and levees which took place nightly throughout the hectic winter season. One socialite, complaining of the incessant treadmill of the social calendar in the 1760s, exclaimed: ‘The hurry of this town is inconceivable, for I declare I have been only once to the Play, Opera, & Orotorio, to very few assemblies, & yet I can’t find a moment’s time to myself’.
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Mary Eleanor had no such objections. Demonstrating the dance steps she had mastered in her lessons and practising the clever repartee for which she would become well-known, she flirted and laughed with a crush of admirers, noting rather archly that Aunt Jane was so indulgent a chaperone that, ‘I must say, if I had not been more prudent than most young girls of my age, I might have been less so.’
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Her object was plain: to capture the ideal future husband.