Wedlock

by Wendy Moore

  For all the vast wealth generated by the Bowes coal and despite Thomas’s parsimonious management of the proceeds, the earl had chalked up a colossal backlog of bills as well as numerous bonds for cash borrowed from friends, bankers and money-lenders. Sorting through the jumble of papers, Thomas discovered the debts totalled a staggering £145,000. Even by the standards of the debt-ridden eighteenth century, when aristocrats routinely lived on credit and fortunes were lost or won at the gambling tables in a single night, this was an exorbitant sum - equivalent to roughly £17m in today’s terms. Hardened gamblers had shot themselves for significantly less. Added to this a further £50,000 had to be raised for the children’s maintenance and education, according to a legal deed drawn up by the earl, meaning nearly £200,000 - roughly £24m - had to be found. As lawyers representing Mary and the Strathmores met to assess the damage, it was plain that drastic action was required.

  Prevented from selling any of the Bowes properties or heirlooms, since these now belonged to Mary, Thomas was determined at least to save the castle which had been his family’s home for four centuries. All renovation work at Glamis was abruptly halted, leaving the demolished west wing only half rebuilt, the gardens neglected and poor Aunt Mary, now frail and aged, alone in her apartment with only occasional visits from a cleaning woman. The fine furniture and plush furnishings bought with the Bowes fortune just nine years earlier, along with livestock, farm implements and the contents of the late earl’s wine cellar, were all put up for sale. As local gentry flocked to the auction that June, Robert Graham, the Laird of Fintry who had been rejected by the Lady of Glamis, drew some small pleasure in buying the four-poster beds which had once belonged to her lord. Determined to offer the Strathmores no respite, Mary insisted that her personal breakfast table and basin stand be removed from the sale. She could do nothing, however, to prevent Thomas from selling livestock, racing horses, furniture, wine and even greenhouse plants, bought for Gibside since her marriage and therefore legally the late earl’s estate, in another sale later that year. Yet even while she gloried in Thomas Lyon’s downfall, Mary could not remove the Strathmores from her life as easily as she had changed the initials on her silver. Resolved to safeguard the Strathmore legacy for future generations, Thomas devoted his energies to protecting the rights of his young nephew - at the expense of the boy’s mother if necessary. For if Mary was now in command of her own life and income, she was not in charge of her children.

  In keeping with eighteenth-century legal attitudes towards women, mothers enjoyed no right of custody over their offspring. When parents separated the courts invariably awarded custody of the children - including breastfeeding infants - to their fathers. The Duchess of Grafton, for example, had to say goodbye to her three children on her divorce from the Duke in 1769 and would not be permitted to see them again until she was on her deathbed thirty years later.10 In a farewell letter to her eight-year-old daughter, enclosing a lock of hair, she described herself as your ‘unhappy mother who dotes on you’. Lady Elizabeth Foster, who married in the year Mary was widowed, would likewise have to give up her sons, aged four and eighteen months, on separation a few years later and would not see them again for fourteen years. Indeed, one resourceful mother, eloping with her lover in 1796, would go so far as to fake the death and funeral of her youngest daughter in a desperate attempt to keep her; after three years she gave the child up and did not see her again until the girl was an adult. Only when specified by prior legal contracts would mothers be granted guardianship - and sometimes not even then. Fortunately for Mary, Lord Strathmore had signed a deed in 1774 naming Mary as one of four guardians to his children on his death.11 Unfortunately for Mary, the other three guardians were Thomas Lyon and his Scottish allies, the agent James Menzies and the lawyer David Erskine. Acting in unison, these three would always be able to outvote Mary on any issue. For the moment, Thomas was willing to leave the children in the care of their mother; maintaining a close scrutiny on her conduct he knew he wielded a potentially powerful weapon.

  Blithely oblivious to the future threats Mary entrusted the care of her three youngest children and Maria to the talented Miss Planta; they spent most of their time at their grandmother’s Hertfordshire home, where Mary sometimes visited. Maria, who had changed from the cheerful toddler who giggled with Thomas Gray into a mature and sensible child with a keen sense of decorum, wrote from there to her great aunt Mary at Glamis in May. Plainly identifying with her aunt’s isolation in the empty castle, she confessed herself ‘quite uneasy lest you should have forgotten that there are two such little girls in the world as my Sister, and me, who love you dearly’.12 But if Maria, with her three siblings, her grandmother and her governess for company, felt abandoned this was nothing to the experience of her brother John, now boarding at the little school run by the puritanical Richard Raikes in Neasden. According to Maria, citing a letter from John to Miss Planta, he was ‘in perfect health, and says Mr Raikes commends him’. A thoughtful and diligent boy, who studied hard at his French, writing and music, he would remember the importance of strong family bonds.

  Keeping out of the public eye, as mourning etiquette conveniently dictated, his mother had more pressing problems on her mind. Mary thought she had been scrupulously careful to avoid becoming pregnant. She had begun having a sexual relationship with George Gray in mid-February, just before Lord Strathmore had left for Portugal, having succumbed to the 38-year-old Scot’s advances ‘one unfortunate evening’ when she was ‘off my guard’.13 Once the earl had left the country, she had welcomed her lover with increasing regularity to her bedchamber in Grosvenor Square. Let in discreetly late at night by her faithful footman George Walker, Gray crept up one of the back staircases unseen by the other servants and usually stayed until four or five the next morning, stealing out before the maids awoke. Naturally anxious to avoid a mishap, Mary asserted that, ‘All the time of my connection with Mr Gray, precautions were taken’. But since eighteenth-century contraception was rudimentary at best, this was far from foolproof.

  Although condoms had been invented a century earlier, apocryphally attributed to a physician to Charles II called Dr Condom, these were normally used only as prophylactics against venereal disease rather than as contraceptives. The fact that they were fashioned from sheep’s or pig’s gut and secured with a silk ribbon, and were designed to be washed and reused, did not recommend them for regular encounters. James Boswell, an inveterate brothel visitor, described donning ‘armour’ in a rare effort to prevent another bout of gonorrhoea when engaging with a seventeen-year-old prostitute in 1763. He found the experience, he confided in his diary, ‘a dull satisfaction’.14 Although condoms were on open sale in at least one London shop in 1776, they were advertised as ‘implements of safety which secure the health of my customers’. In common with most couples of the period endeavouring to avoid an unwanted pregnancy rather than an unwanted rash, therefore, Mary and Gray probably adopted the withdrawal method. Certainly her remark that ‘an instant’s neglect always destroyed’ their precautions makes this most likely. It was scarcely surprising, then, that in less than two months Mary had found herself pregnant.

  Acutely aware that Thomas Lyon, and his ever-watchful sisters, would welcome any opportunity to discredit her, Mary knew that she needed to avoid all hint of a scandal. For any woman giving birth to a child out of wedlock in Georgian Britain the prospects were bleak; the large numbers of children abandoned on the streets and surrendered to the Foundling Hospital were tragic evidence of this. For a titled, recently widowed heiress to give birth to an illegitimate child in a society obsessed with celebrity gossip would be disastrous. Not only would the newspapers report each detail with glee, she would also be shunned by polite society and almost certainly deprived of her children.

  Her options were therefore limited. She could give birth in secret and arrange for the child to be quietly adopted in the manner of several women who found themselves in similar straits. Yet such clandestine births were h
ighly risky and for Mary to disappear for any length of time soon after her husband’s death would surely have raised the Strathmores’ suspicions. Alternatively, she could marry Gray and - given general eighteenth-century ignorance about pregnancy - pretend the ensuing child was born prematurely. Yet there were several overriding objections to the marriage. To wed so soon after becoming widowed would not only offend etiquette but would also inevitably provoke unseemly gossip about her suitor. At the same time Mary knew that Thomas Lyon would do his utmost to protect the Bowes fortune - and its young heir - from the grasping hands of any prospective husband, especially one with such a colourful reputation for getting rich quick. Moreover, Mary had already warned Gray that her miserable experience of matrimony had convinced her ‘never to engage myself indissolubly’ again. The only course left was to attempt an abortion.

  There is no doubt that women have known and used a variety of methods to end unwanted pregnancies since earliest times, often with the sanction of Church and State. In early China and Egypt, ancient Greece and Rome, various herbs and plants deemed capable of bringing about a miscarriage were well-known and widely used. Aristotle actually recommended abortion for families that had reached an optimum size; Roman law allowed for abortion as long as it was authorised by the woman’s husband. Although rarely written down, folklore knowledge of natural abortifacients was discreetly passed by women from generation to generation. Plants such as rue and savin, which were known for their ability to procure abortions, were often grown by midwives and herbalists, while the fungus ergot was popularly known as ‘Kindesmord’ - child’s death - in Germany. Male medical practitioners, whose faith in the ancient doctrine of balancing bodily ‘humours’ dictated that it was harmful for women to miss menstruation, often prescribed potions to the same purpose and quite probably with the same ingredients. Although early Christians condemned attempts to end pregnancy, English common law permitted the abortion of a foetus as long as it had not been felt to move - up to about four months - and this may well have been interpreted loosely by the female midwives charged with the test. Even when later abortions were suspected, these were exceedingly difficult to distinguish from a natural miscarriage or stillborn delivery and prosecutions were few. Only in 1803 would Parliament pass a law that specifically outlawed abortion and even then only after the baby’s movements could be felt.

  Throughout the eighteenth century, therefore, when contraception was little used and unplanned pregnancies could spell disaster, methods of abortion were widely available. One woman seeking a divorce from her adulterous husband in 1774, for example, described to the ecclesiastical courts how he had made her sister pregnant then persuaded her to take some pills which he had obtained from a midwife in Fleet Street.15 Precisely because such practices were legally constrained and took place mostly within women’s circles, very few personal accounts have survived. Lady Caroline Fox, believing herself pregnant for the third time in three years in the 1750s, informed her husband, ‘I took a great deal of physic yesterday in hopes to send it away’ and later added jubilantly: ‘I am not breeding (is that not clever!)’16 Mary Eleanor Bowes’s candid description of attempting an abortion - not just once but four times - is therefore quite unique, although her frank words were never intended for public consumption.

  Immediately Mary discovered she was pregnant she asked Gray ‘to bring me a quack medicine he had heard of for miscarriage’. Gray duly obtained the potion which Mary described as a ‘black inky kind of medicine’ that looked and tasted as if it contained copper. Although Gray was reluctant to let Mary drink the substance, rightly fearing that it may have been poisonous, she insisted on knocking it back since she was ‘so frightened and unhappy’ at the prospect of being pregnant. The potion worked, or at least a miscarriage ensued; in early pregnancy it was, of course, difficult to discern which. Yet despite her scare, and the potentially devastating consequences, Mary soon found herself pregnant again - not once but three more times in rapid succession during the summer and autumn of 1776. The second time, probably in May or June, the inky medicine once more did its work but the third time, possibly in July or August, it failed. In desperation, Mary downed an emetic to make her vomit, along with a large glass of brandy and liberal quantities of pepper, which seemingly induced her third abortion or miscarriage. She would number these three abortions among her ‘crimes’ in the ‘Confessions’ which she was later forced to write. Her most damning attempt was still to come.

  The fact that Mary fell pregnant with such regularity was little wonder given that Gray had inveigled himself sufficiently to visit her bedchamber every other night. The purpose of this pattern, Mary revealed, was ‘that by the intervention of one night, we might meet the next with more pleasure, and have the less chance of being tired of each other’.17 Moreover, since Gray commonly stayed until nearly dawn and their ‘conversation’ was lasting, she found that ‘a night of sleep was absolutely necessary’. Whenever Mary visited St Paul’s Walden Bury to see the children and her mother - and presumably to enjoy a well-earned rest - she relayed messages via George Walker, or occasionally her housekeeper, arranging future rendezvous.

  Having endured her late husband’s inattention for nine years, there can be little doubt that George Gray’s interest and apparent devotion were both flattering and welcome. Whether Gray tendered any genuine affection for Mary, or simply viewed her as his latest route to easy riches, is hard to determine. In all Mary’s relationships - with lovers and friends, servants and acquaintances - money would always cloud a person’s true motives. Certainly, judging by Gray’s previous attempt to marry a wealthy widow in India, his eagerness to pocket an indecently large bribe in Bengal and his indifference to his ailing father in Scotland, he nursed few scruples about making his way in entrepreneurial Georgian Britain.

  Having made London his home since returning from Bengal, Gray had seemingly failed to endear himself either to his family or to society. The satirical ballad The Stoniad would employ typical colonial prejudice by suggesting, wrongly, that ‘half-wake orient G*y’ had not only been born in India but was actually a Hindu or ‘tout á fait GENTOO’. But his friends were no more complimentary. It was after dining with Gray and Boswell at the house of Samuel Foote in 1772 that the playwright had been inspired to pen his savage attack on imperialism, The Nabob. The satire, published in 1778, would help establish the contemporary view of East India Company employees like Gray as jumped-up, greedy, arrogant villains. ‘These new gentlemen,’ explains one character, ‘who from the caprice of Fortune, and a strange chain of events, have acquired immoderate wealth and rose to uncontroled power abroad, find it difficult to descend from their dignity, and admit of any equal at home.’18 On the other hand, Gray’s behaviour in India had been no more disreputable than that of Lord Clive who committed suicide in 1774 following sustained censure over his own approbation of significantly larger ‘presents’.

  Living in Portman Square, a popular address with overseas entrepreneurs, Nabob Gray could reach Mary’s house on the other side of Oxford Street in a few minutes. Since luxurious Grosvenor Square was as famous for its aristocratic residents as it was notorious for their scandalous lives, it was not long before his visits were noticed. Among the first to tender suspicions was Elizabeth Planta, who initially dismissed Gray’s interest as a harmless flirtation but soon realised his intentions were less than honourable. Fearful that Elizabeth would convey her information to Mrs Bowes, or worse to the Strathmore family, Mary affected a sudden and violent dislike for her former governess, who had effectively lived as a member of the Bowes family for nearly twenty years. Keeping her actions a secret from her mother, Mary borrowed money from her lawyer, Joshua Peele, when he visited St Paul’s Walden Bury soon after the late earl’s death, and offered Miss Planta an irresistible payoff totalling £2,000.19 Furnished with sufficient funds to keep her comfortable for life, that July Miss Planta, or Mrs Parish as she would become on her marriage not long after, left the children she had looked a
fter since they were babies.

  Carefully covering her tracks, Mary was at pains to denounce the governess’s behaviour as ‘the most vile, ungrateful, and pernicious that ever was heard of’, insisting that she exhibited an ‘uninterrupted series of ill-temper, deceit, self-interestedness, and ingratitude; with obstinacy, and in many respects a bad method with my children’ and that ‘in short, she was too insufferable, else I would have retained her’. It was plain that the lady did protest too much. There is little doubt that the goodbye gift was hush money to buy the governess’s silence over Mary’s adulterous relationship with Gray, and quite probably her first pregnancy and abortion too. There were generous presents too, in the shape of a watch and some old furniture, for George Walker, the discreet footman. But no amount of skulking up backstairs or offering backhanders could prevent the affair becoming public in the claustrophobic world of London society.

  It was Walker who first related the gossip circulating in the capital’s coffee-houses and taverns. Initially the couple encouraged him and laughed together at ‘all the ridiculous stories’ during their nightly encounters. ‘I was always extremely silly, in not minding reports,’ Mary wrote, ‘on the contrary, rather encouraged them; partly, that I might laugh at other people’s absurdities and credulity, and partly, because I left it to time and reason, to shew they were false.’20 Openly displaying their disdain for public opinion, the pair now ventured out together, parading in the public parks and city streets in Mary’s open carriage even though she was still in mourning. The blue-stockings Frances Boscawen and Mary Delany excitedly exchanged news of their sightings that summer: ‘Yesterday I was told by a lady that she had met Lady Strathmore with servts still in mourning, but wearing white favours in their hats (as at a wedding),’ revealed Mrs Boscawen, ‘also that in the chaise with her, sat an ill-looking man, from whence inference was made that she was marry’d to some Italian.’21 According to Jessé Foot, the surgeon, Gray’s ‘visits were constant, and their airings open’.