Wedlock

by Wendy Moore

  Staying north throughout the winter of 1782 to 1783, Bowes informed the new premier, Lord Shelburne, that ‘a severe indisposition’ had prevented him from attending to his parliamentary duties.25 Yet there was nothing wrong with the MP’s health as Bowes explained to a friend - ‘A want of money, not a want of health, has detained me here so long.’ Not long after William turned one that spring it became apparent that his negligent wet-nurse was steadily gaining weight. ‘I soon perceived the Nurse’s situation,’ Mary wrote, ‘and when appearances began to be apprehended, the Husband was written to, unknown to me, acquainting him she was ill, and the poor Man was actually so complaisant as to come from London to Gibside, seven miles beyond Newcastle upon Tyne, merely to answer Mr Bowes’s purpose’.26 Having tricked the cuckolded husband into hastening to Gibside with reports that his wife was sick, Bowes ensured he stayed long enough to enjoy his conjugal rights in order to justify her burgeoning figure. A week later, Mrs Houghton had miraculously regained her health and her gullible spouse was packed off back to the capital.

  As Mrs Houghton bloomed, rather precipitously after her husband’s hurried visit, news of her circumstances spread so that, according to Mary, Bowes’s conduct became ‘either the scandal or the jest of the Country’. His sexual indiscretions and his political negligence now well known, Bowes’s popularity was rapidly waning. At Durham races in July, Bowes was furious to find himself ‘pretty unanimously sent to Coventry’, in the words of one spectator.27 ‘His friend Lord Darlington was not here, nor would he come tho’ Bowes went over Post to Raby to entreat him to appear for one day, but his Lordship had not courage to do it.’ Shunned by his aristocratic friends and mocked by his affluent neighbours, Bowes was fast becoming a pariah. And as details of his debauchery, political apathy and tyrannical behaviour percolated upstairs and downstairs within the county’s stately homes, the erstwhile people’s MP had fallen from grace as the working man’s hero too. Treating his servants and estate staff with arrogance and contempt, Bowes refused to pay the workmen at Gibside, raised rents on the farms and sacked loyal workers in his increasingly frequent fits of passion.28 Having clashed with Bowes the previous year, Thomas Joplin, the Gibside gardener, swore that Nature had been determined to insult mankind when she made ‘such a monster wear the Human forme’.

  Humiliated by the spiralling rumours and the expanding Mrs Houghton as she staggered around Gibside with little William and six-year-old Mary in tow, Mary decided she had had enough. Finally she confronted Bowes, ‘telling him it was high time to part with so useless a servant, who cut so indecent a figure when she brought in the children after Dinner’. But instead of discreetly sending Mrs Houghton away, in August Bowes hired a new maid, a local tenant’s daughter called Dorothy Stephenson, to wait upon the wet-nurse.

  A simple country girl of seventeen who had grown up on the Bowes family estate, Dorothy was somewhat surprised to discover the state of affairs at Gibside Hall.29 Taking her orders from the heavily pregnant Mrs Houghton, Dorothy watched in astonishment as the master of the house fussed over the nurse’s well-being yet raged at his meek and dutiful wife. While Bowes plied the smug Mrs Houghton with presents, Dorothy heard him refuse his wife’s requests for money to buy clothes and shoes for herself or the children. On only her second night in the house, an even more shocking surprise was in store for Dorothy. Sleeping in the nursery with Mrs Houghton and little Mary - William being then elsewhere - Dorothy had locked the door upon retiring to bed. Just after midnight she heard the handle rattle and then, when the door refused to yield, a man’s voice calling urgently to Mrs Houghton to open the door. Feigning sleep, Dorothy peeked from under the bedclothes to see the nurse tiptoeing over in her shift and opening the door to the master of the house dressed only in his night cap and dressing gown. Next she saw Bowes climb into the nurse’s bed and minutes later heard the unmistakeable sound of springs being pounded. Innocent but not naive, Dorothy had no doubt that the noise was due to ‘two Persons in the act of carnally knowing each other’. The following day Bowes made a point of handing the nursery door key to Mrs Houghton with instructions to her and Dorothy that it must never be locked again. A fortnight later, Mrs Houghton, now seven months pregnant, left the household. Tenderly escorting her to his carriage, Bowes accompanied her to London where she would begin her lying-in.

  If Bowes treated Mrs Houghton with significantly more kindness than he usually reserved for his mistresses, her absence did not cause him to pine for long. Moving the household down to London that autumn, Bowes leased a new house in the West End; only a few doors from the family’s former home, in the south-east corner of Grosvenor Square, number 48 was even more spacious and came fully furnished.30 For young Dorothy, seeing London for the first time, the square’s spacious garden, crowned by its statue of George I and surrounded by opulent mansion houses, was a stirring sight. But even more startling than her new home was the role she was now expected to adopt within the household. Sleeping in the nursery with eighteen-month-old William, with the door unlocked as her employer had dictated, Dorothy awoke one night in alarm to discover somebody climbing into her bed.31 Screaming in terror, she immediately recognised the voice of her master who brusquely warned her to hold her tongue then crammed a handkerchief into her mouth. Gagged and pinned to her bed, Dorothy, a virgin, was powerless to resist as Bowes brutally raped her. Deflowered and degraded, Dorothy knew she could neither denounce Bowes nor rebuff further assaults; as his employee and, moreover, the daughter of his tenants, any defiance would mean disaster both for her and for her family. From now on, whenever she heard Bowes steal into the nursery at night - whether in Grosvenor Square, Gibside or St Paul’s Walden Bury - she had no alternative but to submit to his violations while the children slept innocently in their beds. Nevertheless, unlike the willing Mrs Houghton, Dorothy succumbed to Bowes’s advances with disgust while carefully storing up details of the abuse she suffered and the scenes she witnessed for future use.

  With his political ambitions frustrated - as Shelburne steadfastly resisted Bowes’s cringing appeals for an Irish peerage - and his society pretensions thwarted, Bowes’s behaviour was becoming even more irrational, and his violence more sadistic. Possessed by a compulsive, quite probably psychotic, urge to control everyone and everything around him, he could never feel at ease. No matter how much wealth or privilege he accrued he would never be content, as his father perceptively remarked: ‘Notwithstanding Mr Bowes’s great Fortune, I am persuaded there is not one of his family who is not happyer than he is.’32

  Unable to bear his aspirations being obstructed, Bowes increasingly visited his rage on Mary. Soon after Dorothy’s arrival in the household, when the family was staying at St Paul’s Walden Bury, she rushed to her mistress’s aid when Mary left the dining room saying she felt ill.33 Upstairs Mary began to have one of the fits to which she was increasingly susceptible and sent Dorothy to seek help from an apothecary who, by chance, was dining with the family that evening. Bowes, however, refused to permit the apothecary to tend to his wife and instead stormed upstairs to her room, slamming the door behind him. Immediately, Dorothy heard Mary scream ‘as if beat or pinched violently’. The following day she noticed her mistress’s face ‘much discoloured’ and heard Mary complain that she could barely lift her arms from pain. On other occasions, when Bowes thought he was unobserved, Dorothy witnessed him pinch, punch and kick his wife, raining blows on her face, head and body, for the most trivial of reasons, such as making too much noise when playing with their son. ‘The life of the Countess’, Dorothy would later attest, ‘was, by the cruelty of Mr Bowes, made one continual scene of distress and misery.’

  Mary Eleanor would later date Bowes’s worst abuses from the birth of their son. From that point on, she would say, ‘he used me with more cruelty and indignity than ever, and seized the most frivolous pretences, such as merely walking from one room to another’.34 At one point, he beat her around her eyes so badly as to make the ‘whole room appear in
a Blaze’. At other times he would amuse himself by striking her repeatedly on the back of her head in the knowledge that her ‘treacherous’ thick hair would obscure all signs of injury. ‘I was constantly in such terror and confusion’, Mary would recall, ‘from the Blows, threats, curses and ill language I had recently received (frequently only the very instant before) that I was, for some time rendered incapable of hearing or replying to what people said even in common conversation; and upon these occasions Mr Bowes used to intimidate me still more by saying “are you deaf ?” ’

  While his assaults were calculated and sustained, Bowes maintained constant control over Mary’s life with elaborate rules and rigid constraints. Refused money for clothes, shoes and undergarments, Mary’s gowns became so ragged that she looked, according to Dorothy, ‘worse cloathed than any of the Servants’ and ‘frequently had scarcely a shift or Pair of Stockings fit to put on’.35 At times she was forced to borrow underwear or stockings from her maids; on other occasions she borrowed money from them to pay for minor expenses. Permitted only to eat or drink according to Bowes’s orders to the kitchen staff, Mary was frequently weak or ill. One kitchen maid, Susanna Church, who cooked and smuggled some chicken to Mary during one of her bouts of sickness, was immediately reported by the cook and promptly sacked by Bowes.36 And at all times, whether on her rare walks in the gardens or simply walking from one room to another, Mary was accompanied by a servant or companion who reported all her movements to Bowes.

  Forbidden sight of her children by Thomas Lyon, Bowes ensured that Mary was denied any consolation in her chief interest: botany. Since Paterson’s return from the Cape, Mary had continued to write to Thomas Joplin, the long-suffering gardener at Gibside, with instructions on tending the shrubs and beds, nurturing her plants in the greenhouse and hothouse, and preserving a collection of feathers, skins and other curiosities which she kept in a ‘museum’ at Gibside Hall.37 Yet she was rarely allowed sight of any of these treasures. When Joplin left or was dismissed in late 1782 or early 1783, Bowes issued strict orders to the new gardener, Robert Thompson, to ignore all his mistress’s instructions, to bar her entry to the walled garden or greenhouse on pain of being sacked and to refuse her any fruits or flowers that grew within. At one point Bowes ordered Thompson to release hares in the garden deliberately to destroy Mary’s flowers. A dedicated gardener and a kindly man, though he suffered poor health, was riddled with lice and was clothed in rags, Thompson obeyed his orders reluctantly and keenly felt his mistress’s disappointment. On one occasion he gave in to her plea to visit the garden for a moment in order to see a single flower but instantly regretted his lapse when Bowes suddenly appeared and began abusing her ‘in the most ridiculous manner’. Once when Mary walked to the greenhouse without permission, Thompson saw Bowes rush from the house and was shocked when he ‘struck and beat her Ladyship’s Backside’. Ordinarily, he would later affirm, Mary was escorted on her brief garden visits by a servant or female companion chosen by Bowes as her guard ‘as if she was a prisoner for life’.

  Pale from being confined indoors, gaunt from lack of food, dressed in tatters and cowed by perpetual abuse, Mary could easily have been mistaken by guests for the household’s lowliest scullery maid. Even Jessé Foot, visiting St Paul’s Walden Bury at some point in 1783 to inoculate young William against smallpox, noticed the change. ‘The Countess, whom I had not seen for sometime before this visit, was wonderfully ALTERED and DEJECTED,’ he recorded. ‘She was pale and nervous, and her under jaw constantly moved from side to side. If she said any thing, she looked at him first. If she was asked to drink a glass of wine, she took his intelligence before she answered.’ During a brief walk through the sadly overgrown gardens one morning, Mary wanly showed the surgeon the ruined beds, shrubs and lawns. ‘She even pointed out the assistance her own hand had lent to individual articles,’ added Foot. ‘In observing her during her conversation, the agitation of her mind was apparent by this action of her mouth. She would look for some time, hesitate, and then her under jaw would act in that convulsive manner, which absolutely explained her state of melancholy remembrance beyond all other proofs abstracted knowledge could confirm, or technical teachers could demonstrate.’38

  At heart an intellectual snob - as a young apprentice to his apothecary uncle he had insisted on replying to any criticisms in Latin - Foot had always felt somewhat in awe of Mary’s education and intelligence. But fundamentally a money-grasping social climber - he pompously appointed himself ‘voluntary watchman’ over his older and superior rival John Hunter - he would remain fawningly faithful to Bowes.39 Ignoring, therefore, any duty to medical ethics, in November 1783 Foot delivered Mrs Houghton of a baby girl at her London lodgings, assured her husband it was not unusual to give birth at six months and was paid generously by Bowes for his troubles.40

  As the country lurched into constitutional crisis at the end of 1783, when George III summarily deposed the short-lived Fox-North coalition by appointing 24-year-old William Pitt as premier, Bowes’s conduct was becoming dangerously volatile. His political intuition had plainly deserted him, for this time Bowes backed the wrong horse, voting with the debauched Fox just as the clean-living Pitt began dispensing peerages to bolster his minority government’s chances. All hope of an Irish peerage now evaporated for good. While Pitt soldiered relentlessly on after the Christmas recess, braving his repeated defeats with a cool and calculating head, Bowes floundered in fits of inebriated rage as he saw his ambitions flouted. Just as the country yearned for an honest, dedicated and incorruptible leader, in contrast to the hard-gambling, extravagant, licentious Fox, so Bowes misjudged the mood of the electorate and the patience of his long-suffering supporters. If Pitt was the man of the moment, so Bowes was fast becoming a figure of the past, unable to hide his greed, his lasciviousness or his brutality even in front of his close friends or his children.

  That January, Dorothy was playing with William, nearly two, in the dining room while Mary wrote to Bowes’s dictation.41 Abruptly accusing her of misunderstanding his meaning, Bowes snatched a knife from a side table and threatened to cut her throat. Only the intervention of William Davis, Bowes’s financial advisor, who walked into the room at that point, defused the situation. Quickly replacing the knife, Bowes switched his grimace to a smile and purred, ‘go up stairs my Dear, & finish your letters’. The following month, Bowes brought Mrs Houghton to Grosvenor Square to show off her baby daughter. When Mary asked to be excused, humiliated by this latest indignity, he kicked her and flung an inkstand at her head, which only just missed its mark. Ushering in Mrs Houghton, Bowes cooed over her infant, while his son William ran in fear from the nurse he had not seen for four months. Sternly Bowes informed him he would have to get used to the nurse since she would shortly be taking charge of him again. He then turned to Mary and brazenly asked her to agree that the baby was ‘a very fine Girl’, to which she responded with rare spirit, that ‘it was the largest I had ever seen, considering it came at seven Months’. For all her sudden defiance, Mary was forced to vacate her bedroom so that Mrs Houghton could spend the remainder of the day there being waited upon by the servants. Ultimately, it was only the objections of the family’s latest chaplain, Reverend Henry Reynett, that dissuaded Bowes from moving Mrs Houghton and her baby into the house.

  By spring 1784, as a new general election loomed, poor Dorothy was herself pregnant with Bowes’s child and knew her working days were numbered. Already Bowes had attempted to recruit a sixteen-year-old prostitute, Elizabeth Jackson, as a replacement for Mary’s maid, who was finally leaving. Only the protestations of the wealthy lawyer who normally ‘kept’ the girl as a mistress and threatened to expose Bowes, forced him to let her go. Now Bowes set about appointing a new nursemaid to replace Dorothy, with his usual close attention to the task. Arriving at Grosvenor Square for an interview in February, eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Waite soon realised the broad remit of the job in question when her prospective employer lunged at her and took, what she la
ter termed, ‘improper liberties’.42 Despite this unorthodox interviewing technique, being out of work, desperately poor and with her father in debtors’ prison, Elizabeth returned one evening a few days later on the understanding that she would meet her future mistress. Escorted upstairs to the dining room by Bowes, Elizabeth waited patiently to meet the children’s mother while their father pawed and kissed her. When finally she objected to his ‘indecent familiarities’ in the realisation that the anticipated meeting was not going to happen, Bowes threw her onto a sofa and raped her. The promised job never materialised; a few weeks later the wretched Elizabeth made a pathetic effort to blackmail Bowes in a letter intercepted by Mary which warned, ‘you told me that I was bad but I never was bad but to you and i am very sorry to think i was so easily taken by you as i was for you took me in a very undesent manner’. When the blackmailing attempt proved fruitless, Elizabeth had little alternative but to turn to prostitution. For the moment Dorothy’s position was secure. Yet well aware that her condition would soon become obvious, and that her presence in the household would then be an embarrassment to her master, Dorothy was becoming increasingly anxious over her own and her mistress’s safety.

  When the general election was finally declared at the end of March, Bowes was summoned north to justify his woeful parliamentary record to the disgruntled voters in Newcastle with Mary his stalwart consort as usual. Having expended vast sums securing his parliamentary seat only to have his aspirations to the peerage repeatedly stalled, Bowes was in no mood for a third expensive contest to woo the Newcastle freemen. Having placed their trust in the radical campaigner only to see him flagrantly ignore their interests in Parliament, the city’s electors were equally in no mood to squander their vote on Bowes a second time. Not surprisingly, therefore, many of the radicals were eager to switch their support to an alternative candidate, Charles Brandling, an independent thinker from a long-established local coal-owning family. So as the three prospective candidates - Ridley standing on a certainty again - set out their policies in the Guildhall, the gathered freemen anticipated a vigorous meeting. Bowes did not disappoint them. After Ridley gave a ‘short, though sensible’ speech, Bowes launched into a belligerent, menacing and, quite probably, drunken tirade which lasted nearly two hours. Dismissing well-founded rumours that he had been seeking a seat in Durham, he tersely informed the voters that it was their fault if he had not followed their desires in Parliament as they had not given him adequate instruction. He then levelled a personal attack on Brandling with such ferocity that he would later be forced to quash suggestions that this amounted to a challenge to a duel.43