by Wendy Moore
Built from local stone, the column rose falteringly over the next seven years. One visitor in 1753, Edward Montagu, who had inherited a relative’s collieries near Newcastle, was suitably impressed after dining at Gibside that summer. Surveying the half-built column, rising on its square pedestal, he informed his wife, the literary hostess Elizabeth Montagu: ‘Mr Bowes is at present upon a work of great magnificence, which is the erecting a column of above 140 feet high. This, as far as I know, may be the largest that ever was erected by a subject in this Island, and may yield to nothing but the Monument in London.’18 When Daniel Garrett died that same year, work on the column halted temporarily but resumed the following June with James Paine, who took over many of Garrett’s contracts, assuming its supervision. The Swedish traveller Reinhold Angerstein, who visited Gibside in 1754 as part of a six-year fact-finding expedition around Europe, watched in awe as the great slabs of stone were winched to the top of the rising column, sheathed in its wooden scaffolding. Having toured Bowes’s mines, railways and staithes, as well as his ‘splendid park’ with its ‘magnificent buildings’, Angerstein was so inspired by the sheer human effort put into building Bowes’s monument, that he sat down to draw it.19 A little too susceptible to his host’s self-aggrandisement, Angerstein noted that the project was expected to cost £4,000. In fact, the final bill would come to an only slightly less remarkable £1,600.
It was only as the great column reached its completion that Bowes settled on the form of the statue that would grace its summit. Angerstein had recorded that the column would be dedicated to Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, medicine, commerce, soldiers, art and music - which conveniently encompassed most of Bowes’s interests. Still undecided, in 1756 Bowes visited St Paul’s Cathedral and St George’s Church in Bloomsbury looking for inspiration.20 Whether in a fit of nationalistic fervour or as an expression of his radical Whig sympathies, he settled on the figure of Liberty the following year. At a time when the words of ‘Rule Britannia’ had only recently been set to music as a patriotic anthem, the figure of Liberty was a powerful icon, celebrating as it did the traditional rights of Britons within a constitutional monarchy.
Having approved the final design, depicting Lady Liberty holding the ‘staff of maintenance’ and the ‘cap of liberty’ - traditionally also held aloft by Britannia - Bowes ordered the final stones to be hauled to the top. Labourers watched as Christopher Richardson, a sculptor from Doncaster, climbed the scaffolding to his makeshift shed at the summit, and the figure slowly began to take shape.
Growing up amid the perpetual thrill of concert parties, dinners, hunts, electioneering rallies and a stream of admiring visitors at Gibside - and in the heady social spin of London each winter - Mary Eleanor soon acquired a taste for being the centre of attention. She was already at the hub of her parents’ privileged world. When she caught measles in London just after her third birthday in 1752, both parents were understandably frantic. Measles was only one of a plethora of common childhood killers - along with mumps, scarlet fever, diphtheria, smallpox and whooping cough - which meant that more than half of babies born in London in the mid-1700s never reached their fifth birthdays.21 For nearly two weeks, as Mary feverishly battled the disease, servants took shifts sitting with her night and day while her parents consulted an apothecary and a physician for advice. Despite their attentions - the apothecary bled the three-year-old twice according to medical custom - Mary Eleanor pulled through.
Returning to the fresh country air of Gibside, Mary Bowes gave thanks for her daughter’s recovery with gifts to the poor while her husband lavished a chair, silver buckles and ‘playthings’ on his precious only child. Having nearly lost their daughter to one virulent disease, it was not surprising that they took precautions against an even more deadly one a few years later. At six, Mary Eleanor was inoculated against smallpox by a surgeon in London using the contemporary technique of jabbing her arm with some live smallpox virus taken from the pustules of an infected patient. The method had been imported to Britain in the 1720s by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu - in the face of initially strong medical opposition - after she had observed the practice in Turkey. Although still highly risky, both for the patient and for anyone they came into contact with, the inoculation did confer future immunity and had become highly popular by the mid-eighteenth century. Immediately after her inoculation, Mary Eleanor was whisked into quarantine for four weeks; there were further alms for the poor on her recovery.
Cosseted from disease, indulged with toys and treats, clothed in the finest fashions and fed on the choicest foods, it is little wonder that Mary Eleanor grew up headstrong and precocious. Waited on by a fleet of servants from the moment she awoke in her nursery bed until the second her eyelids drooped at night, she quickly learned how to attain whatever she wanted. While her mother attempted to inculcate a sense of humility and charity into her growing daughter, giving her money to distribute to the poor on their journeys north, her father would slip her a guinea pocket money - equivalent to a quarter of their kitchen maid’s annual wage. If her reserved, thrifty mother demonstrated the attributes of the ideal female in eighteenth-century Britain, this made little impact on the impulsive Mary Eleanor. Far more compelling was the example of her flamboyant and brash father with his talent for the grand gesture and determination to accomplish whatever he set his mind to. One contemporary would later insist that Mary had been ‘spoiled by overindulgence, ruined by overkindness, and corrupted by over caresses’.22 Yet her childhood was by no means a life of unending indolence. For just as much as his beloved Gibside, George Bowes regarded his daughter as a project for improvement.
From the beginning, Bowes was determined that his only daughter should receive the education normally enjoyed by the most privileged sons of the aristocracy. Mary Eleanor would later recall that ‘he brought me up with a view to my being as accomplished at thirteen, as his favourite first wife was at that age, in every kind of learning, except Latin.’23 Initially under the guiding eye of a governess, closely supervised by Bowes, Mary learned to read and write. By the age of four she could read fluently and was proudly paraded at social gatherings to recite by heart passages from the Bible, verse by Milton and elegies from Ovid. ‘At four years old I could read uncommonly well,’ Mary later wrote, ‘and was kept tight to it, made to get many things off by heart.’ With her father encouraging ‘an insatiable thirst for all kinds of knowledge’, Mary Eleanor was well on her way to becoming what she later described as ‘a prodigy of learning’.
At a time when the education of girls, even in wealthy families, was restricted to the acquisition of social graces and accomplishments such as dancing, needlework, painting and music, Bowes’s approach was a rare and enlightened one. Children’s education had become a popular topic for debate, with children being considered as individuals in their own right, with specific needs, for the first time. But discussion centred mainly on the appropriate education for boys, fuelling the growth of public boarding schools, the popularity of universities and enthusiasm for sending sons on the ‘grand tour’ of Europe.
Since no respectable profession was open to upper-class girls, and they were essentially being groomed for marriage, few parents saw any point in wasting time and money on improving their daughters’ minds. Indeed, learned women were often viewed as objects of ridicule, if not scorn, since they offended the idealised image of the acquiescent, passive female. ‘Nothing, I think, is more disagreeable than Learning in a Female,’ declared Thomas Sherlock, the Bishop of London, while Lord Bath blamed the headaches suffered by the poet and classicist Elizabeth Carter on her devotion to learning.24 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu confessed to ‘stealing’ her education, by surreptitiously studying Latin when her family believed she was reading ‘nothing but romances’. Writing to her own daughter, Lady Bute, in 1753 she urged that her granddaughter should enjoy a similarly advanced education since ‘learning (if she has a real taste for it) will not only make her contented but happy in it’.25 But, equa
lly, she took pains to urge that her granddaughter should ‘conceal whatever learning she attains, with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness’ since revealing her knowledge would engender envy and hatred. Certainly, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu suffered her fair share of contempt, for all her literary accomplishments and her vital legacy to health. Other well-educated women, such as Elizabeth Carter and Catharine Macaulay, who defied convention by producing scholarly work, did achieve some recognition for their skills. Yet even one of the most strident founding members of the intellectual blue-stocking movement, Hannah More, concurred with the popular view that women had inferior intellects and were incapable of serious study.26
George Bowes believed otherwise. Having felt the lack of education in his own youth, and admired the precocious talents of his first wife, he had read widely on the subject. As well as novels and plays by the feminist writer Aphra Behn, his library contained several books on education including Instructions for the Education of a Daughter, by François Fenélon, Archbishop of Cambray, published in English in 1713. More famous for his scathing condemnation of the French monarchy in his novel Telemachus, Fenélon adhered to the view that women had weaker minds but nonetheless urged that their education should not be neglected, nor left to ‘ignorant’ mothers. While there was no point in teaching girls language, law or science, since ‘it’s not their business to govern, make wars, sit in courts of justice, or read philosophical lectures’, he advocated that girls should learn reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic and bible studies from a ‘tender age’.27
Having launched his daughter on her programme of learning at the requisite tender age, Bowes proceeded to engage the best tutors in French, writing and dancing before she turned six, and in music by the age of eight. As she bent her head, with its thick chestnut curls, over her French verbs and English compositions, Mary Eleanor revelled in her father’s praise. Enjoying her studies, she became an expert linguist and soon aspired to literary talent in her own right. Her schoolbooks, which still survive, are crammed with neatly copied extracts of poetry and prose in English, French, Spanish and Italian.28 When she was eight, shortly after the family moved to a rented house at London’s most desirable address, Grosvenor Square, her French tutor was dismissed and his place taken by a Swiss pastor, the Reverend Andreas Planta. A brilliant linguist and scholar who had immigrated to London with his young family five years earlier, Planta would shortly take up a post as assistant librarian at the fledgling British Museum. He would later be engaged to teach Italian, his native language, to Queen Charlotte when she arrived in Britain in 1761 as George III’s bride, while two of his daughters, Frederica and Margaret, would become teachers of English to the future royal princesses. A third daughter, Elizabeth Planta, was taken into the Bowes household as a governess to eight-year-old Mary Eleanor in 1757.29 Elizabeth Planta would become her constant companion - not only supervising her lessons but also accompanying the family on outings to the opera and theatre - as well as her chaperone and confidante. The loyalty and ultimate betrayal of the Planta family would be crucial in Mary Eleanor’s future fortunes.
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 59.30 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.31 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.32 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.33 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.34 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.