by Wendy Moore
Laden with their scant belongings, accompanied by a few, if any, servants, Bowes and Mary drew up outside a remote cottage on the north bank of the Thames beyond Chelsea. Bowes would later describe this simply as ‘a house in Hammersmith’ which he had rented as a secret hideaway for Mary’s expected delivery. His surgeon Jessé Foot, in his usual grandiloquent style, referred to it as ‘a house the Margravine of Ansbach had left, quite secluded from the busy prying eye of curiosity’. Here, Foot added, in a snide allusion to husbands being cuckolded, ‘Bowes might hear the cuckoo . . . without its being unwelcome to the married ear’.54 The most probable candidate for the isolated riverside abode was Craven Cottage, a simple two-storey thatched villa which had recently been built as a pastoral retreat by Lady Elizabeth Craven, the future Margavine of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Bayreuth.55 Just a year younger than Mary, Lady Craven had already established a reputation that was at least as scandalous. The daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, she had married William Craven in 1767 whereupon both indulged in flagrant extra-marital liaisons. After winning the lottery in 1776 or 1777, Lady Craven had bought or built her secluded villa with the proceeds and invited friends such as Boswell and Walpole to visit. With its six bedrooms plus servants’ quarters, and ‘fine view of the river’, it would be described by another visitor, Lady Mary Coke in 1781, as ‘pretty as everything upon the Thames must be’.
Bounded by the river to the south, meadows to the east and high walls on the remaining two sides, the riverside retreat provided the perfect location for Mary’s clandestine delivery. Concealed from inquisitive city eyes, Mary spent the summer days in her arcadian isolation awaiting her first contractions while Bowes tormented her with his petty restrictions and violent outbursts. When she went into labour in August, it was not William Hunter but his brother John who was called upon to assist the birth, along with Dr James Ford, a physician with a lucrative West End obstetrics practice.56 Both were sworn to secrecy. Unplanned and unwanted, kept hidden from society and from her siblings, the baby, Mary’s third daughter, was also named Mary and took the Bowes surname. Her only child conceived out of wedlock, this bubbly, mischievous, cheeky infant would become Mary’s most precious child as well as a favourite with her siblings.
The following month, with the newborn baby probably despatched to a well-bribed wet-nurse, the couple travelled north to Gibside where Mary pretended she was a respectable seven months pregnant. The pair attended church at Whickham two Sundays running in October, doubtless to create the impression that the birth was imminent and very likely with Mary’s gown padded to suggest a bulge, for there was nothing Bowes enjoyed better than play-acting. In a characteristically abusive letter to his father on 14 November, Bowes claimed that his physician friend John Scott was close at hand since Mary was ‘so very near her time’.57 When the supposed time arrived, Bowes despatched an urgent request to two physicians who arrived breathless at Gibside Hall - just a little too late. Assured that the baby had been born healthy and that the mother was now asleep, the medics accepted their fees and left.58 The bouncing baby, now almost three months old, was duly baptised in a private ceremony in Whickham Church on 25 November, her birthday given as 16 November 1777, and her arrival announced in the London magazines the same month.59
Mary would always vehemently deny any suggestion that her beloved third daughter was illegitimate for to make such an admission would almost certainly condemn the child to a lifetime of social stigma and tarnish her prospects of a decent marriage. With its characteristically unenlightened approach, eighteenth-century law regarded illegitimate children as nonentities, so that they were unable either to inherit or to bequeath property.60 Straitened parishes, which were obliged to support illegitimate offspring, might force their parents to marry and the father to provide maintenance, sometimes after whipping the errant couple through the village streets. Mothers, who were inevitably regarded as the chief bearers of guilt, could be sent to houses of correction to atone for their crime. Usually dismissed from their employment and unable to find further work - even when their employer was the father of the expected child - many working-class mothers were unable to support their illegitimate children and were therefore forced to surrender them to the Foundling Hospital or work-house. Children born out of wedlock to the aristocracy and gentry fared considerably better. Following the example of successive monarchs, many wealthy parents acknowledged their ‘natural’ children; some of them rose to positions of significant power. Yet as social attitudes to marital infidelity hardened towards the end of the eighteenth century, even high-born illegitimate children found themselves struggling against a tide of prejudice.
Little Mary’s birthday would therefore always be celebrated within the Bowes family in November. At one point her mother anxiously begged the Gibside agent to check the parish register and was relieved to hear that ‘Miss Bowes his [sic] properly registerd in Whickham Church Books’.61 Yet there was really no doubt that the baby had been secretly delivered that summer, as rumours were quick to suggest. The following year a typically vindictive satire detailing the latest society intrigues would accuse Mary of enduring a ‘ten months pregnancy at least’ before giving birth ‘without the Midwife’s vulgar aid’. A year later a political ballad would allege that Bowes ‘contrives also to have his children brought into the world with teeth, after the manner of Richard III’.62 Bowes himself would have none of Mary’s compunction about the child’s welfare. For all that he had accepted the baby as his daughter he would later maintain that she had been born six months into the marriage and her Gibside delivery had been a concoction. John Hunter would reluctantly admit under oath that he had delivered Mary’s child six or seven months after her marriage but refused to speculate on whether the father was Bowes, Gray or even George Walker. Her maid Isabella Fenton would likewise confirm that the child had been born in August and said it was ‘common conversation’ among the servants that the father was Gray or Walker.63
Yet as she doted on the latest addition to her family at Gibside, Mary now faced the real threat that she would lose her other five children. Evidently alarmed that Bowes had seized the family fortune and might likewise exercise control over its young heirs, the children’s uncle, Thomas Lyon, had begun court proceedings to remove the youngsters from the care of their mother and stepfather. Applying to the Court of Chancery in June, Lyon had lodged a petition demanding that custody of all five children be granted to himself and his fellow guardians David Erskine and James Menzies.64 Since the bill was put forward in the names of the eight-year-old earl, his brothers George, five, and Thomas, four, and sisters Maria, nine and Anna, seven, the children themselves were effectively asking the court to remove them from their mother’s care. With rights for children an alien concept in eighteenth-century legal circles, they were almost certainly not consulted. Tenuously arguing that Mary’s right to guardianship of the children had been rendered void by her second marriage, Lyon - as the children’s ‘next friend’ in customary court language - insisted that the children be delivered into the care of the three remaining guardians. Giving full vent to years of resentment, Lyon blustered that Mary had now married ‘improvidently and much below her dignity and fortune’ a man who possessed ‘very small and Inconsiderable Estate or fortune in his own Right’. By reason of her second marriage among ‘many other accounts’ Mary had therefore proved herself ‘improper and not fit to have the Care and Management of the persons and fortunes’ of her five children. That Lyon’s principal concern was the children’s future inheritance and the £50,000 now due for their education and maintenance was plain from his repeated references to their entitlement to the Gibside estate.
Having blithely left four of the children in the care of their grandmother and the dubious Stephenses for most of the past year, and taken little interest in her eldest son, it was only now that Mary began to realise how much she valued her young family. Perhaps softened by her recent experience of maternity, perhaps frightened at her enforced loneliness, or
simply attaining the maturity she had previously lacked, she now embarked on a desperate battle to keep them. Bowes, of course, had his own reasons for valuing the children, well aware that unless he produced his own heir to the Gibside estate his best hope of maintaining control over its profits was by controlling its present heirs. But it was already too late. Refusing Lyon’s immediate demand to deliver the youngsters into his care and relinquish all rights to them, Mary and Bowes stalled the repeated requests of Lyon’s lawyers for a response to the Chancery bill. Playing for time, which was always a generous commodity in Chancery suits, Mary could have had little doubt that ultimately the courts would tender no sympathy for a mother’s rights.
Of course, as Lyon so pertinently alleged, and Mary was acutely aware, in reality Bowes was neither a responsible steward of Gibside nor a respectable stepfather to its heirs. Virtually a captive in her own home, with only her baby daughter and watchful servants for company, she was powerless to prevent Bowes neglecting the magnificent gardens and woodland. Equally, as the rumours over the likely father of her baby swirled around the Durham countryside, Mary knew that it was Bowes who had already been unfaithful on at least two occasions - and probably more - in their first year of marriage.
Bowes’s reputation as a Lothario was already well established in the north-east, as the snide asides about his familiarity with Newcastle’s brothels demonstrated. How much Mary had gleaned of her husband’s previous dalliances is unsure. Certainly she had learned of his involvement with Anne Massingberd - if not the full extent of their relationship - soon after her marriage, since which time Mary had exchanged letters with Bowes’s former mistress. Distraught to hear of her ex-lover’s reported injuries, and even more so of his subsequent marriage, Anne had continued to bombard Bowes, and later Mary, with her pitifully tragic letters. Guilelessly revealing her infatuation, as well as her credulity, she assured Mary: ‘You are my dear Madam possess’d of a Treasure, the heart of the most amiable of Men, which may you ever retain unmolested.’65 By the summer, however, even the gullible Anne had begun to doubt Bowes’s honesty, wretchedly telling him that ‘my Eyes now begin to be opened, the dream is almost over & wth. it my sad life must end, for to outlive the idea that you have some truth & sincerity in you is impossible.’ It was not long before Anne was fully woken from her dream - or nightmare - for a friend who met her in Scarborough in August reported with satisfaction that, ‘Miss Massingberd is here, & seems to have pretty well recovered the loss of Captain Stoney.’ A few months later thirty-year-old Anne was married - to the forty-six-year-old Reverend William Maxwell, the Irish friend that Bowes had deputed to duel on his behalf that summer - and soon after she left her family home to begin married life in Ireland. If Mary’s suspicions had not been aroused by Anne’s gushing correspondence, clear evidence of her husband’s voracious sexual appetite arrived by letter that same summer.
As she had awaited the first birth pangs beside the river in Hammersmith that July, Mary had been asked by Bowes to read his post while he was temporarily absent. Eight months pregnant, Mary had accordingly opened a letter to Bowes from a young woman begging to see him. Obviously a kept mistress who had recently been abandoned by Bowes, the poorly educated woman complained that, ‘none but the Almighty can tell of my secret sufrings of hart and calamity of mind’.66 Describing Bowes as a ‘man of honour’, the writer signed herself Elizabeth Dock, with an address near the Haymarket, a short stroll from their Grosvenor Square house. Most probably desperate for money, if not for her errant lover, Elizabeth added the postscript: ‘I have been very often in the Gardens But was not so fortunate as to see the much desired object of my Desire.’ When Mary angrily confronted Bowes with the letter he fervently denied all knowledge of the writer and insisted there had been a terrible mistake. Finally alive to her husband’s trail of deceit, Mary feigned belief out of ‘delicacy and humanity’. It was the first and only time, she later said, that she ever saw contrition from him.
There was no mistake about his next indiscretion. That August Bowes had shown Mary a letter from a young woman, a certain ‘Mrs G’, whom he had entertained alone at Grosvenor Square. Now he insisted that Mary return the favour by visiting the woman who, he candidly told her, had previously been his mistress and given birth to his stillborn child. It was only the beginning of a succession of young women, most of them poor servants, destitute working girls or prostitutes, whom Mary was expected to entertain and befriend as her equals. As a respectable, wealthy married woman in the highest ranks of Georgian society, this was demeaning and distasteful. Yet in reality these vulnerable women, many just teenage girls, were her equals in misfortune. From now on, Mary decided there was no need to pretend ignorance of her husband’s philandering.
It was a cold and gloomy winter in the north. As the year drew to a close, and Bowes caroused on his bawdy nights on the town while Mary cradled her little daughter alone in Gibside Hall, she came to realise that her husband was nothing but a cheat, a fraud and a serial adulterer. Gazing from the windows at the forbidden walks and mocking column, Mary waited in fear for the crunch of gravel which signalled the return of her husband’s carriage. If Bowes had been disappointed at the betting table, thwarted in a sexual conquest or enraged by any obstacle to his schemes, Mary knew she would bear the brunt of his temper. Frequently, she later wrote, he was ‘out of humour with his Mistresses or money matters; and always on those occasions came home and beat, pinched, kicked or pulled me by the ears and nose, often thrusting his nails into my ears, which he made stream with blood; spitting also in my face, and telling me, that he only married to torment me’.67
The New Year brought no resolutions for change. On the first anniversary of their wedding, 17 January 1778, Bowes coldly informed Mary that he intended to make every day of her life more miserable than the last - a pledge which, unlike his marriage vows, he intended to keep. Yet even as Mary looked back on her first year with the man who had become her jailor, tormentor and abuser, she managed to convince herself that he might still change for the better.
7
Loathsome Weeds
Cape Town, January 1778
Returning to his lodgings in Cape Town at the end of his first expedition into the inhospitable interior of southern Africa, William Paterson was exhausted but inspired. As he unpacked the bounty of seeds, bulbs and dried plants that he had collected, along with his bulging notebook and exquisite paintings, the 22-year-old gardener could hardly wait to set off exploring again. Having arrived in Cape Town in May the previous year after a testing three-month voyage, Paterson had spent the intervening months acquainting himself with the exotic landscape.1 It was a far cry from his homeland in Scotland.
Born in August 1755, in the little village of Kinnettles near Forfar, just four miles from Glamis, William Paterson was the son of a gardener who worked on a nearby estate. Nothing about his early life is known beyond the fact that he followed in his father’s footsteps, taking a keen interest in plants, and that, judging from his later writings, he enjoyed little formal education. He may have trained as an apprentice gardener at Syon Park, home of the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland on the opposite side of the Thames from Kew, for he had certainly become friendly with William Forsyth, a fellow Scot who was head gardener there from 1763 to 1771. A letter to Forsyth written a week after his arrival in Cape Town sent compliments to ‘Mrs Forsyth and all the family and my old fellow servants’.2 Equally, he may have been apprenticed to Forsyth after the latter took charge of Chelsea Physic Garden, the Society of Apothecaries’ medicinal garden beside the Thames, in 1771.
How Paterson, a poorly educated but bright young gardener with dark hair and deep brown eyes, had come to the attention of Mary Eleanor Bowes in 1776 is a mystery. Conceivably she had met him as a youth when he lived near Glamis, or alternatively through her northern neighbour, the Duchess of Northumberland, whose balls she had enjoyed as a child. Most probably, however, Paterson had been recommended as a suitable candidate for her bota
nical mission by one of Mary’s friends within her scientific network. He had, of course, attended a Royal Society meeting with Solander in May 1776; no doubt he had read Francis Masson’s account of his Cape travels published in the society’s Philosophical Transactions later that year; and in all likelihood he would have studied Masson’s African spoils transplanted into the new hothouse at Kew. One visitor in May 1776, the Reverend Michael Tyson, had marvelled: ‘Mr Masson showed me the New World in his amazing Cape hothouse, erica 140 species, many protea, geranium and cliffortias more than 50.’3 Certainly, by the time he set sail from Plymouth on 9 February 1777, less than a month after Mary’s second marriage, young Paterson felt confident in the knowledge that his entire trip was being bankrolled by his generous patron. ‘In this undertaking, I account myself particularly fortunate in having been patronized by the Honourable Lady Strathmore,’ he would later write, ‘whose zeal for botanical researches induced her readily to accede to the proposal of exploring an unknown country in search of new plants, and to honour me with her protection and support.’4