by Wendy Moore
Indeed, having allowed one victim to escape from under his very nose, Bowes was now doubly intent on keeping Mary Eleanor under his despotic control. With her fellow captive gone, she felt the full force of Bowes’s violent temper and draconian restrictions. And when her mother died in January 1781, at the age of sixty, Mary was more alone than ever. Having always detested his shrewd mother-in-law, who had done her best to protect her grandchildren and their inheritance from his grasping fingers, Bowes now gloated over her death and exulted in Mary’s grief. She wrote that he ‘insulted and triumphed in agonies I felt’, while his ‘cruelties and infidelities increased to an incredible degree’.13 From now on, Mary wrote, ‘scarce a day passed, in which I did not receive undeserved abuse, or blows and very often the latter during every day in a week’. Despite the fact that Mrs Bowes had cannily altered her will soon after Mary’s marriage, to replace her daughter as trustee of her estate with the sensible Joseph Planta, now joint secretary of the Royal Society, and John Ord, a lawyer and MP friendly with the Strathmore family, her annual widow’s jointure of £1,600 now descended to Bowes as legal recipient of his wife’s property. 14 And even though Mrs Bowes had tied up her estate at St Paul’s Walden Bury in trust for her grandson George until he reached the age of twenty-one, it was Bowes who assumed possession by taking advantage of the will’s proviso that Mary could move there within three months of her mother’s death if she so desired.
Only thirty miles from London, the elegant Adam-style house provided a convenient base for Bowes’s occasional parliamentary business. Hastily bundling the family and servants into coaches, Bowes rattled up the snaking driveway almost the moment Mrs Bowes’s coffin departed in the opposite direction, bound for interment beside her beloved late husband at Gibside.15 Strutting from room to room as he inspected his latest acquisition, Bowes forbade Mary from walking in the beautiful formal gardens - where Bowes had seduced her only four years earlier - or from visiting the hothouses where her Cape seeds were now flourishing.
Reduced to gazing on the formal walks and hedges from the French windows, her every movement monitored by maids and footmen reporting to Bowes, Mary had only her youngest daughter, now three years old, for company. Despite, or perhaps because of, her uncertain paternity, they enjoyed a strong and loving bond; Mary Stoney would later ask about the ‘little Darling’ whom her mother took ‘so much Pleasure in’.16 No doubt Mary’s delight in her infant daughter was intensified by the fact that contact with her five older children was being increasingly rationed by Thomas Lyon. While later writers would suggest that she continued to neglect her sons after their father’s death, never paying them a visit at their boarding school in Neasden, the truth was that she was actively prevented from doing so. Having last seen her three boys in November 1780, she had since been refused permission for them to visit. A letter sent by John, now eleven, at the end of November had reported that he and his brothers, George, nine, and Thomas, seven, were ‘very well’ in Neasden but were not allowed leave to see their mother.17
As she grieved for her own mother at St Paul’s Walden Bury, Mary now begged Lyon to let her see her sons. ‘The severe affliction I have lately experienced by the loss of an affectionate and beloved parent naturally leads me to claim with more than usual earnestness the satisfaction of my Childrens Company as the greatest Consolation I can receive.’ Pointing out that the boys’ school was less than thirty miles from her new home, where previously the children had stayed with their grandmother during the holidays, she could not resist adding that the ample provision they all enjoyed was almost entirely due to her family’s fortune. Lyon was unmoved. Having always detested his sister-in-law and being understandably suspicious of Bowes, he issued strict instructions to the boys’ schoolmaster, Richard Raikes, to deny all visits to their mother. So when Mary wrote to Raikes in May 1781 requesting that her sons come to stay for the ensuing holidays she was distraught to learn that they had already set out for Uncle Thomas’s house in County Durham, passing on their journey within five miles of St Paul’s Walden.
Worse news was to come, for shortly afterwards Mary discovered by chance that John had been sent onwards from Durham to continue his education at Edinburgh High School. Denied any consultation on the decision, or even an opportunity to say goodbye to her eldest son, Mary complained bitterly that the move was ‘extraordinary and unjust’, especially since the late Lord Strathmore had declared that Scotland was ‘the last place in the world’ where he would educate his sons. Plainly Uncle Thomas had decided he could keep a closer watch on the Bowes heir in the north than if he remained a tantalisingly short drive from his stepfather. Alone in his new school, in a country he barely knew, a full three days’ journey from his mother and his siblings, the little Lord Strathmore poured his attentions into creating a garden and tending a pet tortoise, the bills meticulously sent as usual to Lyon. It would be more than two years before Mary heard from him at all, a full six before she would see him again. Her son’s silence, doubtless dictated by Uncle Thomas, wounded her deeply. Having always prided herself on the respect she had tendered her own parents, Mary was both hurt and offended that her eldest son failed to demonstrate the ‘duty’ that Georgian children were expected to show towards their parents. Yet while she would scold him for his ‘extremely unusual’ conduct, she plaintively assured him that she was ‘more warmly interested in your welfare than any other person can possibly be’.
Hoping at least to see Maria and Anna, who turned thirteen and eleven respectively in 1781, Mary was desolate when she discovered that they too had been despatched to County Durham for the spring holidays. Although she had so far been permitted more frequent visits from her daughters, who had often spent Sundays with her in London, once they returned from their little sojourn with Uncle Thomas these meetings were sharply curtailed, possibly on the basis of the girls’ depictions of life in the Bowes household. From May onwards her requests to spend time with the girls were repeatedly refused by their schoolmistresses in Queen’s Square and on the few occasions they were granted the girls were not permitted to stay overnight. Now months would go by without any contact from her girls and when they could not spend holidays in Durham they had to stay behind at school - even during Christmas - rather then be permitted to visit their mother. Growing increasingly estranged from their mother, the girls were nevertheless encouraged to visit other relatives and see playmates approved by their vigilant guardian. Progressively deprived of contact with her children and even denied news of their health, Mary became anxious and dejected. Yet her continual appeals to Lyon, by turns poignant, terse and despairing, were coolly rebuffed with the insistence that he sought only to ‘promote their happiness and welfare’.
At the very moment that the family was being splintered ever further apart, Bowes chose to commission a family portrait from one of the era’s most fashionable artists, John Downman.18 As popular as he was prolific, Welsh-born Downman was heavily in demand with the aristocracy and the gentry for his delicate portraits which were mostly executed in black and white chalk with smudges of red sometimes applied to the reverse to lend a subtle blush to lips and cheeks. Particularly noted for his charming portraits of children, Downman often scribbled unguarded comments about his sitters on his preliminary sketches. His nine portraits of Bowes, Mary and the six children (Anna being drawn twice) were made at some point in 1781, according to Downman’s inscription, in preparation for a group family picture. Since at no point that year were all eight members together in one place, Downman must have made the Strathmore children’s portraits separately, possibly at their schools before John was banished to Edinburgh.
Probably commissioned to mark Bowes’s elevation to the House of Commons to furnish the customary image of the respected politician surrounded by his cheerful family, the sketches show the 34-year-old MP dressed smartly with a white cravat wound tightly around his throat and his hair neatly curled and tied in a fashionable queue at the back. Haughty and confident, his profile disp
lays the handsome visage which had allured so many women with its full lips and large, striking eyes framed by long lashes. By comparison, Mary’s portrait depicts a gaunt, anxious face and although her hair is powdered and piled high in contemporary fashionable style, her wide, sunken eyes look to one side in apparent fear. Of the children, the young Earl of Strathmore looks mournful and solemn, despite inheriting his father’s good looks and his mother’s curls, as if bearing the entire family’s misfortunes on his narrow shoulders. While his brother George wears an equally serious expression, young Thomas is the only one of the boys to sport an impish grin. Slightly plump, in a low-cut dress tied with bows at the back, their elder sister Maria casts her eyes demurely down, although pretty Anna smiles coquettishly at the artist. Of all six children, only three-year-old Mary appears truly childlike and carefree, with her mischievous big eyes and cheeky smile beneath thickly tousled hair, in marked contrast to her mother’s frightened face. On the mount, Downman had written: ‘Her Ladyship had only this Girl by her present Husband.’
The happy family portrait anticipated by Downman never materialised - just as the politician’s model family envisaged by Bowes would never exist - and only the individual portraits remain. But despite Downman’s presumption the family was set to expand once more. That summer, at the age of thirty-two, after four wretched years of marriage, Mary found herself pregnant again, for the first time bearing Bowes’s child. But her condition did nothing to ameliorate Bowes’s behaviour.
After spending the long summer recess in County Durham, Bowes seemed in no particular hurry to return to London to pursue his constituents’ interests. That October he organised a shooting party to Wemmergill, the remote grouse moor in the North Pennines which had belonged to the Bowes family since the sixteenth century.19 Among the party, joining himself and Mary at Wemmergill Hall, were Bowes’s long-suffering financial advisor William Davis and his spinster sister Ann, along with another sister Sarah and her husband General Frederick, who had all been spending the greater part of the summer with the family in the north. Experiencing the cravings common to early pregnancy, Mary looked forward to eating the plentiful grouse being shot on her ancestors’ moorland. But when the men and dogs returned that evening with their bags full, Bowes laid out the plump birds in front of her then promptly packaged them up to send to a mistress in Durham. Sick with hunger and disappointment Mary spent the next day in bed.
Normally so careful to present himself as the tender and attentive husband, catering to his fickle wife’s every need, Bowes’s behaviour had now degenerated to the point that even his guests were struck by it. Ann Davis would later describe his conduct towards his wife as ‘very austere and overbearing’ while her sister, Mrs Frederick, noted that Mary had been ‘exceedingly disappointed’ over the anticipated game. A little later, having returned with their hosts to stay at Streatlam Castle, Mrs Frederick was woken in the night by the sound of Mary screaming but when she enquired at breakfast as to the cause of the sudden alarm, Mary insisted that all was well. Despite the denial, the guests were beginning to suspect that their generous host, the esteemed MP for Newcastle, was perhaps not the upstanding member of society he had led them to believe. On another occasion, Bowes forced Mary to go riding with the two sisters on the most uncomfortable mount the Streatlam stables could provide, a ‘hard trotting Scotch Galloway’ - a pony traditionally renowned for its stamina in the lead mines. After four miles over the potholed country roads, Mary was suffering such violent pains that she had to lie in a ditch while Ann Davis sent ahead to alert Bowes and request a carriage. Returning home, her agony was ‘so great’, Mary would later write, that she suffered ‘convulsively hysterical fits for most of the day’. Undeterred by her protests, Bowes insisted that Mary continue to ride daily along the rough, rutted roads to pay formal visits to their neighbours. At the same time he forced her to drink milk, which she loathed, and banned her from drinking tea, which she loved.
Yet even as he persecuted and beat Mary, Bowes fretted over her health. ‘He was tremblingly alive for the fate of the Countess,’ his surgeon Foot would recall, ‘and watched all her movements like ARGUS.’20 While he may have been as vigilant as the hundred-eyed giant of Greek myth, Bowes’s anxiety had little to do with Mary’s own welfare. Terrified that if she died in childbirth or from its after-effects - the common fate of countless Georgian women - and left him without an heir he would lose all rights to the Bowes fortune, he hedged his bets by insuring her life. Plying his agent in London with repeated requests to take out new insurance policies, while instructing him not to mention Mary’s pregnancy, Bowes explained, ‘for though Lady Strathmore is in Perfect Health, yet as she is with child, I am determined to insure her life deeply’.
Much to Bowes’s relief, on 8 March 1782, Mary gave birth in London to a healthy son, and soon recovered from her ordeal.21 A legitimate heir for Bowes at last, the boy was named William Johnstone Bowes, in honour of Mary’s grandfather and Bowes’s maternal ancestors. When news reached Newcastle three days later, the city’s church bells were rung into the night in celebration of the absent MP’s happy event. But far from mending divisions between his parents, the new infant would only provide further opportunities for Bowes to humiliate and torment his wife.
As Mary regained her strength during the traditional lying-in period in the new lodgings Bowes had rented in St James’s Place near Green Park, William was handed to a wet-nurse hired for the purpose. His father had taken particular care in choosing the woman for the job - Bowes always handpicked the servants without consulting his wife - but his close attention to the task had little to do with the dietary needs of his son. Although he was no book lover, conceivably Bowes had read contemporary advice on choosing a wet-nurse which described the ideal candidate as between twenty and thirty-five years old, clean and neat, with sound teeth and no signs of ‘distemper’.22 If so, he would no doubt have lingered on the recommendation that her breasts should be large, full and soft and the nipples ‘rather long and slender, of a moderate size and firmness’ and quite possibly even tested the suggestion that ‘by gentle pressure’ the milk should easily flow. The woman he duly appointed, Mrs Houghton, was grubby, illiterate and totally unsuited to looking after a young infant - at least in Mary’s eyes. ‘She hurt my son much by bad milk, dirt, and every species of neglect,’ she would complain.23 Bowes, by contrast, found her highly desirable.
For all his political friends’ assurances that he was a reformed character, the public focus on Bowes’s private foibles had done nothing to curb his voracious sexual appetite. No longer attempting to maintain the charade of the faithful husband and devoted family man, Bowes now openly cavorted with the female servants, brought his mistresses and prostitutes into the house and exultantly informed Mary of his sexual exploits.
While many Georgian husbands indulged in extramarital affairs and fathered children out of wedlock few were quite as brazen, or quite as prolific, as Bowes. Although Mary had long been aware, through the letters she intercepted and remarks she overheard, that Bowes had frequented brothels, maintained mistresses and spawned illegitimate offspring, until now he had always attempted to deny or conceal his intrigues. Now that he had an heir, he dropped all efforts at subterfuge and flaunted his affairs before Mary, the servants, his friends and even his children. Having already made a point of sending a present of game to one lover in Durham, Bowes fawned in public over a wealthy Newcastle woman, a certain ‘Miss W-’, for whom he even contemplated that well-worn ruse of fighting a duel. But never content with only one object of sexual desire, he informed Mary in 1782 that he intended to seduce the beautiful daughter of a farmer living near St Paul’s Walden and install her in the house as a companion for Mary. In the event, his lustful ambitions went comically awry. Spying on the daughter through the farmhouse window one night as she undressed for bed, Bowes was attacked by her father’s dog which savaged his leg. Frustrated by this unfortunate escapade, Bowes now threatened to dismiss Mary’s maid, I
sabella Fenton, and replace her with another of his mistresses. When Mary insisted that this was ‘a dignity not to be endured’ he flung wine in her face then emptied a decanter of water over her head. While Mary kept her maid, Bowes was undeterred.
That December he arranged another shooting party, this time inviting some of his male cronies to join the family at Cole Pike Hill. Cramped as it was with the additional guests, Mary and Bowes had to share their bedroom with nine-month-old William and his nurse, Mrs Houghton, put up on camp beds. On the second night Mary woke with a start to find the bed empty beside her. Upon drawing back the bed curtains she saw Bowes suddenly leap from the nurse’s bed and pretend to stoke the fire. Asked what he was doing, Bowes claimed he had got up because he had heard the baby cry. When one of the guests departed the following day, Mary instructed Mrs Houghton to move into the vacated room only to receive a severe reprimand from Bowes.
Back at Gibside, Bowes abandoned any last effort to hide his lust for the obliging wet-nurse, insisting that she eat at a side-table in the dining room each evening then sending Mary to her room so that he could entertain Mrs Houghton alone into the early hours. Gossip over the unseemly familiarity between master and servant spread quickly through the household; one maid was shocked to find Bowes and Mrs Houghton deep in private conversation late one evening in the nursery as young William tottered unheeded around them.24 Poorly educated, ill-groomed and down at heel, Mrs Houghton was typical of the women Bowes preyed upon. Lured by the heady mixture of power, money and good looks, such women were eager to advance their fortunes by tending to the well-connected MP’s predilections. For his part Bowes could indulge his prodigious sexual needs without fear of being intellectually outsmarted.