by Wendy Moore
Strutting about as the new lord and master at 40 Grosvenor Square, Stoney was eager to lay claim to the vast wealth he had greedily anticipated during his campaign of seduction. To his horror, within one week of his triumphant marriage, he now discovered that all the property and profit he had schemed so cleverly to obtain were entirely beyond his reach. A week before the wedding, on 9 and 10 January, even as Stoney stoked his fake argument with Bate, Mary had signed a prenuptial deed which vested all the estates, assets and income in which she enjoyed a life interest under her father’s will, into the hands of two trustees: her solicitor Joshua Peele and the brother of her chaplain, Captain George Stephens. All proceeds from the Bowes fortune, the deed specified, could only be paid to Mary ‘for her separate and peculiar use and disposal, exclusive of any husband she should thereafter marry’.29
Signing such a deed was an unusual but not unprecedented step at the time. Ordinarily, of course, Georgian law stipulated that upon marriage the husband gained possession of all his wife’s property, income and belongings, as Stoney well knew. Prenuptial deeds were occasionally drawn up, however, usually at the behest of a bride’s parents keen to safeguard the family fortune from a potentially profligate or untrustworthy husband. In Mary’s case, she had asked her solicitor to prepare the deed in anticipation of her marriage to Gray, with her fiancé’s agreement and probably at the urging of the Strathmores determined to protect the children’s future inheritance. After making her last-minute switch of grooms, Mary had seen no reason to alter the document. This was not through any mistrust of Stoney, she would later insist, but that ‘it struck me, that having taken such precautions on my children’s account, (for whom I was answerable, though not for myself ) with a man who I knew I could trust; I ought not to be less cautious with one whom I could not be so strongly assured of.’30 Even so, she had kept the deed a secret from Stoney until several days after their wedding for fear, she later claimed, that the document suggested a distrust of him - although fear of her new spouse may very well have contributed. When she confessed the truth he was apoplectic. Not only was he personally penniless and faced with a baying horde of his own creditors, but as her husband he was now accountable for Mary’s debts too. All along, he now felt, it was he who had been the victim of a hoax.
Stoney responded with characteristic resolve. As the creditors circled, and Gray threatened to sue Mary for breach of contract for jilting him at the altar, Stoney knew he had to raise a substantial amount of money quickly. Immediately he ordered Mary to write to Peele demanding he surrender the deed and despatched Walker to deliver the letter.31 When Walker returned empty-handed, as Peele refused to comply with the request, Stoney was furious but undefeated. Little did he know that Mary retained one further secret which would ultimately prove vital. Just before her marriage she had entrusted her own copy of the deed to Walker, asking him to keep it safe. Cowed as she now was by Stoney’s bullying behaviour, she kept her head sufficiently to beg Walker to keep the deed hidden with the insightful comment that ‘I did not know whether I should be able to lead my life with Mr Stoney.’
Despite this temporary hitch to his well-laid scheme and his spending plans, Stoney entertained lavishly at Grosvenor Square and now turned his attention to promoting his own rise in public life. Less than one month after the wedding, Stoney saw the chance for advancement that he had been waiting for. After changing his name to Bowes at the beginning of February, in accordance with George Bowes’s will, he now sought to use the respected family name to change his fortunes. The death of the Newcastle MP Sir Walter Blackett on 14 February provided the opportunity.32 After representing the city unopposed as one of its two MPs for nearly half a century, Blackett had been shaken but survived when radical campaigners had opposed him at the general election in 1774. The by-election now triggered by the 69-year-old Tory MP’s demise presented the radicals with their second chance to mount a challenge. Having first marched through the city gates just ten years earlier as a lowly ensign, Andrew Robinson Bowes - as he would in future be known - now aspired to represent the people of Newcastle in Parliament by hitching his fortunes to the populist platform.
Dashing off a letter to the mayor three days later, Bowes formally presented himself as a candidate while pleading that ‘the present state of my indisposition’ sadly prevented him arriving in person.33 Although his injuries, if they ever existed, had certainly healed by this stage - a letter from his cousin Isaac to Bowes’s brother Thomas a week earlier reported that ‘Robinson is quite well of his wounds’ - the delay gave Bowes time to plot his assault and borrow the cash he needed to finance it.
George Greive, the son of a local lawyer and friend of the popular radical John Wilkes, stepped forward to spearhead Bowes’s campaign against Blackett’s nephew and heir, the Somerset country gentleman Sir John Trevelyan, who fully expected an easy ride. But while Greive mobilised support from the tradesmen and up and coming professionals who were entitled, as freemen of the city, to vote, Bowes idled in London. Although the prospective candidate was ‘hourly expected’ on 18 February, Greive assured the voters, it was eight more days before Bowes finally crossed the Tyne Bridge with Mary at his side on the day before the polls opened on 27 February.34 Having left four of the children in the dubious care of the Reverend Henry Stephens in Grosvenor Square, while the young earl remained in Neasden, the couple’s thirty-two-hour dash north was a grim counterpoint to the stately northern progress which had followed Mary’s first marriage. Charming and manipulative by turns Bowes fully expected that Mary would play a central role in his audacious campaign.
Although votes for women were not to happen for nearly 150 years, several aristocratic women helped muster votes for their menfolk during election campaigns in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In a society which placed a high value on female modesty and passivity, this was rarely without public opprobrium. Lady Spencer had decorously lent her support in Nottingham in 1774, but when her daughter, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, canvassed zealously for Fox in the controversial Westminster election ten years later, she would be roundly lambasted, with lewd caricatures in the press and snobbish retorts from society. ‘What a pity that any of our sex should ever forget what is due to female delicacy,’ lamented the blue-stocking Mary Hamilton while female solidarity similarly went out of the window with Elizabeth Montagu’s observation that the duchess had been ‘canvassing in a most masculine manner’.35
Despite standing on a populist ticket exhorting free elections and parliamentary reform for honest tradesmen and aspiring professionals in the face of the property-owning gentry, Bowes knew that Mary’s esteemed family name would give him the gravitas he needed to stand a chance in the Newcastle by-election. During the two weeks in which the polls were open daily, Mary was therefore called upon to dispense charity and woo the electors as the perfect political consort smiling benignly at her husband’s side. Accordingly, on 6 March she gave orders for an ox to be slaughtered and distributed among the poor of the city while the following day she hosted her own belated birthday party with open house at Gibside.36 On other days Elizabeth Montagu’s husband Edward, a Trevelyan supporter, was aghast to see the daughter of his old friend and partner George Bowes blatantly distributing cash handouts to passers-by in the city centre. ‘Her Ladyship sits all day in the window of a public house,’ he wrote, ‘from whence she sometimes lets fall some jewels or trinkets, which voters pick up, and then she gives them money for returning them - a new kind of offering bribes.’37
Staying at Gibside, where she was forbidden from visiting the gardens or greenhouse without her husband’s consent, and only allowed a glass of wine at dinner with his permission, Mary was now totally subject to Bowes’s commands.38 Passing the Column to Liberty her father had erected on her way to the hustings each day, it must have been with supreme irony that Mary plied voters with handbills headed ‘Bowes and Freedom!’ and poems which hailed her as the ‘Queen of Liberty!’ Meanwhile, the jibes of her husband�
�s opponents as they drew attention to his humble background as an ‘Irish ensign’, the allegations of cruelty to his first wife and his predilection for the gaming houses and brothels near the Keyside must have given her pause for thought.
When Bowes lost to Trevelyan in the final count by a slim ninety-five votes, he bullishly appealed to Parliament against the result with the somewhat rich charge of bribery levelled against the opposing camp. John Scott, the 25-year-old son of a Newcastle coal agent, cut his teeth as a lawyer attempting to argue Bowes’s cause. A future Lord Chancellor, he would gain a peerage as Lord Eldon, while his elder brother William, another vocal supporter of Bowes, would go on to become Lord Stowell and a prominent divorce lawyer. Eight-year-old Maria, taking a precocious interest in current affairs back in London, relayed details of her new ‘papa’s’ parliamentary challenge to great aunt Mary at Glamis with more than a touch of her mother’s naivety. ‘It is believed Sir John Trevylian got the Election by bribery, and Papa has petioned [sic] the House of Commons,’ she wrote.39 Although the appeal was in vain, Bowes had hoodwinked Newcastle’s radicals sufficiently to promise a return match. But if Bowes’s smooth political wiles had attracted both personal and political slurs, Mary’s apparently compliant devotion brought her equal condemnation. The anonymous author of The Stoniad, published during the by-election campaign, not only accused Bowes of sending his first wife to her grave but presciently predicted that he would beat his second wife ‘black and blue’. Yet the satirist expressed no sympathy for her plight, instead proclaiming that the pair were well-matched as ‘the greatest R**** [rogue] and W**** [whore]’. Likewise Edward Montagu would grimly predict: ‘I believe this gentleman will revenge the wrongs Lord Strathmore suffered from her Ladyship.’40
Having expended colossal amounts fighting the by-election - he would later put the total at more than £15,000 - and with his creditors pressing in, Bowes set off with Mary on the return journey to London at the end of March with renewed determination to seize the fortune so long in his sights. ‘The very large sums I have been obliged to pay here, on Act. of the Election etc etc has destroyed me for the present not a little,’ he told one friend.41
Before leaving Gibside he sacked George Walker, telling servants and friends that the footman had ‘taken familiarities’ with his mistress and had boasted that he was ‘too well acquainted with her secrets ever to be dismissed’.42 Bowes would later allege that Walker had slept with Mary both before and after her second marriage, a claim backed by Eliza Stephens née Planta, who had accompanied the couple to Newcastle ostensibly as Mary’s companion but in reality as Bowes’s spy and probably his mistress; Bowes was spotted leaving Eliza’s room at five o’clock one morning while at Gibside after the election.43 Testifying that Mary had had sex with Walker even as Bowes lay wounded after the duel and that they had resumed their affair soon after the wedding, Eliza’s only evidence was having heard the pair laughing together in Mary’s locked bedchamber. In reality Bowes had obviously dismissed the footman after learning that he had been given a copy of the trust deed, as a letter which Bowes sent to the Reverend Stephens indicated. ‘I have discharged trusty George this morning in great disgrace,’ he cryptically informed Stephens, while instructing him to allow Walker to collect from Grosvenor Square ‘anything that is really his Property’.44 An accompanying letter from Mary, almost certainly dictated by Bowes, urged Stephens to search the footman’s boxes and drawers, remove any papers bearing her handwriting and fasten the locks as if nothing had been disturbed. Packing his trunk, which naturally Bowes had searched, Walker left the family - with the deed safely concealed in a false bottom.
Back in London at the beginning of April, Mary - now truly five months pregnant - was reunited with her eldest daughter who turned nine that month. While the three youngest children had been despatched for the Easter holidays to their grandmother’s, where eight-year-old John was to join them as a rare treat, Mary kept Maria close. ‘She is now so far advanced & so much improved as to be a most pleasant & entertaining companion to her mother, who could not possibly spare her,’ Bowes informed a friend.45 Dictating when Mary was allowed to see her children, Bowes was careful to portray himself the doting stepfather.
When the departure of her faithful footman was followed by that of the Reverend Stephens and his wife Eliza a few days later, Mary felt more alone than ever. Having given the couple £1,000 on the night of her wedding, most probably in the spirit of a bribe to conceal her pregnancy, Mary little suspected that Eliza’s own expected confinement was not all it seemed. After staying in France for ten days the couple headed north to Cole Pike Hill, the estate Bowes had wrested from the heirs of his first wife Hannah, whose mother had only just died there. Here Eliza gave birth to the child she had been expecting when she married her compliant chaplain. Whether Stephens initially believed the child was his is unclear; he would later admit he had married Eliza only ten days after their first meeting although she would deny having placed an advertisement seeking a husband.46 Plainly Bowes had masterminded the match - the £1,000 gift a thoughtful honeymoon present - and doubtless the child was his, judging from the later reaction of the Reverend Stephens. George Walker, who visited the couple at their hideaway that spring when Eliza was ‘big with child’, later recalled that ‘the Parson damn’d Stoney very much to me’.47 Unaware of their complicity in Bowes’s deceits, Mary grieved at losing the couple she thought were her ‘sincere and faithful friends’. Yet within a year, her views poisoned by Bowes, Mary would fume, ‘had I known her as I do now, I should not only have intreated you to turn her out of the house directly [but] have confessed, that such a wretch was not fit to live on the earth’ while of Eliza’s husband she stormed, ‘I should have thought only with horror of his ever being near my sons, or in my house.’48 How the couple had offended Bowes at that point was unclear but after a reconciliation some years later they would prove vital to his cause.
By now desperate to lay his hands on Mary’s tantalising riches, on 1 May Bowes threw a dinner party in Grosvenor Square to which he invited a few trusted friends, including Mary’s surgeon John Hunter, a cleric named the Reverend Dr John Scott, and a pliable lawyer from Newcastle called William Gibson. Retiring to the drawing room after a generous dinner, where he continued to ply his guests with copious quantities of alcohol, the genial host casually asked his fellow diners to witness himself and Mary signing a legal document. Hunter, quite probably chosen for his acknowledged distaste for reading - he was dyslexic - would later admit that he never read the document. Mary herself would swear that she had no recollection of signing her name but admitted that she frequently signed papers at Bowes’s command and often when befuddled by beatings. Signed in the dim light of candles, the five-page parchment revoked Mary’s prenuptial deed and gave Bowes control, during his lifetime at least, over all income and profits from his wife’s entire estate.49 Once again Mary found herself devoid of all possessions, income and rights. Nearly a year after Bowes had first devised his tortuous moneymaking scheme he had finally got his hands on the Bowes family fortune.
There was much call on the funds. Forcing Mary to lace her corsets tightly to conceal her blooming figure as they visited moneylenders in the City, Bowes raised £24,000 by selling annuities - a popular way for cash-poor life tenants to obtain capital - which assigned future rents from the Gibside estate to various brokers.50 With the proceeds he appeased the most urgent of his own and Mary’s creditors - Bowes always detested settling debts unless it was absolutely unavoidable - then paid a hefty £12,000 in compensation to George Gray. Seemingly satisfied with his windfall, the once ardent suitor embarked for Bengal the following year only to die there two years later.51 Having despatched Mary’s erstwhile lover, Bowes now faced the delicate problem of his illegitimate child.
Even the most constricting of corsets and generous of gowns could no longer disguise Mary’s condition to the ever-vigilant scrutiny of servants and acquaintances. So as the bon ton fled the hot and pu
ngent capital in their annual exodus for the countryside that May, Bowes and Mary packed their belongings and rattled out of Grosvenor Square on the pretext of a holiday on the Continent. Informing one of his political allies in Newcastle that he was embarking on ‘a Journey to the South of France’ on the advice of his physicians to treat a ‘cough & pain in my side’, Bowes promised he would soon be returning to ‘my friends in the north’.52 But instead of heading east towards Dover, the couple’s carriage turned west along the King’s Road towards the quiet pastoral retreat of Hammersmith.
With contraception unreliable and unpopular, and attempts at abortion both precarious and taboo, many women had no alternative but to go ahead with unexpected pregnancies. Just as Eliza had scurried into the wilds of County Durham to give birth to her illegitimate child, so women of all classes, from prostitutes to duchesses, were forced to arrange clandestine deliveries for their unplanned babies. Among the medical fraternity, several ‘man-midwives’ were well-known for their circumspection in attending secret births. William Hunter, the physician brother of the surgeon John Hunter, was as infamous for his discretion in delivering the offspring of illicit aristocratic liaisons as he was famous for supervising the births of the fifteen royal princes and princesses. So William had helped Lady Diana Spencer give birth secretly in 1767 to the daughter of her affair with Topham Beauclerk and with the couple’s collusion the following year he gave evidence of the event to enable her husband, Viscount Bolingbroke, to secure a divorce.53 A year later William similarly attended Anne, Duchess of Grafton, the daughter of Bowes’s coal-owning partner Henry Liddell, when she gave birth to the child of her affair with John Fitzpatrick, the Earl of Upper Ossory. And although he was generally the soul of discretion, at dinner parties William would boast of having once delivered twins to the daughter of a well-known peer in the basement of her family home while her parents maintained complete ignorance upstairs. He even arranged for the unwanted babes to be deposited in the Foundling Hospital. Yet such clandestine births were highly risky - not least for the medical men involved. One man-midwife who was called to a birth in Bristol in 1755, was escorted blindfolded to a luxurious mansion where he was asked to deliver a woman whose face was kept covered throughout. Three weeks later the hapless practitioner was found dead.