by Wendy Moore
As popular support for Pitt swelled across the country, it was little wonder that the tide of feeling ran strongly against Bowes in the weeks leading to the opening of the poll on 26 April. One anonymous voter summarised the mood in the local newspaper: ‘Can the Free Burgesses of Newcastle stoop to support a man who intended to have deserted them? Will they suffer themselves to be made a mere step ladder to Mr Bowes’s ambition to be kicked down when he has attained the summit of his views? Have we not seen, whilst he was in Parliament, that his duty to the public, and to his private debts have been discharged with equal punctuality?’44 Reminding the electors that Bowes’s fortune would be entirely lost on Lady Strathmore’s death - which those with memories extending back to his first marriage may have thought relatively imminent - the anonymous correspondent asked: ‘And is there any one action of his life which an honest man can imitate, or a good man applaud ?’ As Ridley and Brandling marched eagerly to the hustings at the start of the poll the crowds waited in vain for Bowes to appear. When finally he arrived it was to announce his resignation from the contest. It was a ‘handsome farewell speech’, Ridley’s brother, Nicholas, remarked with some relief, adding: ‘Mr B’s leavetaking seemed to be for ever.’45 As Ridley and Brandling were chaired through the narrow streets by their jubilant supporters, Bowes walked away from the hustings a defeated and a dangerous man.
Stopping at St Paul’s Walden Bury on the family’s return to London, Bowes looked for an excuse to vent his fury on Mary. It was not long before an opportunity arose. As the family sat down to dinner that evening, with Dorothy sitting at a side table helping two-year-old William with his food, a male servant slyly informed Bowes that he had seen Mary walking in the gardens earlier in the day without permission.46
Immediately spiralling into a rage, Bowes flung a dish of hot potatoes in Mary’s face, swiftly followed by a glass of wine then coldly instructed her to eat the spilled potatoes. Humiliated and terrified in front of the watching servants and her young son, Mary swallowed the potatoes while Bowes stood over her until she was physically sick. At that point, Bowes snatched a large knife from the table, grabbed Mary by the hair and threatened to cut her throat. Visibly shaken at what she had witnessed, Dorothy hurried young William from the room. When Mary later appeared upstairs, her face covered in bruises and one of her ears bleeding, Dorothy gently asked how she had attained her injuries. Mary replied that ‘she durst not tell’.
Having twice been threatened with a knife in a matter of months and knowing that Bowes had accumulated a stack of insurance policies on her life, Mary now genuinely feared for her own safety. Only her concern for her two youngest children, toddling William and six-year-old Mary, deterred her from fleeing, or worse. ‘The only thing that kept me alive was that my younger children’s future interest depended on my existence,’ she would write.47 If she tried to leave, she knew she would almost certainly never be allowed to see her children again; equally she could be forced back to her marital home by law only to face even worse retribution. Petrified, distraught and friendless she saw no prospect of escape.
And then into her life walked Mary Morgan.
9
An Artful Intriguing Woman
London, May 1784
Since the moment she was born, servants had played a vital and pervasive role in Mary Eleanor’s life. As a baby she had been handed to a wet-nurse to be breastfed, as an infant she had been washed, dressed, fed and entertained by servants. Growing up she had her own maid who tended to her every need and her own footman who stood behind her chair at meals. And when she married at eighteen she had taken command of a taskforce of housekeepers, butlers, footmen, cooks, maids, gardeners and grooms who supplied the family’s every whim with military-like efficiency. Omnipresent from first light to lights out, Mary’s welfare and happiness had always been dependent on servants. Yet from the moment that she had married Andrew Robinson Stoney, she had learned not to place her trust in any of them. All hired and paid by Bowes, all subject to his orders, they had little alternative but to conform to his totalitarian regime. So the male servants acted as Bowes’s pimps and spies, while the women servants had either been coerced into becoming his concubines or were terrified of suffering his wrath. Although they were all well aware of the abuse and deprivations their mistress suffered - they heard her screams from behind locked doors, saw her black eyes and cut lips, served up her meagre portions at meal-times - they were powerless to help. While some - like Susanna Church, the maid who smuggled chicken to Mary when she was ill, and Dorothy Stephenson, who comforted Mary when she had been beaten - were sympathetic to her plight, they were simply too young, too poor and too ill-educated to offer any practical aid. Mary Morgan was different.
After the fiasco of his efforts to find a new maid for Mary among London’s plentiful prostitute community and his own sizeable coterie of mistresses, Bowes had departed from his usual rigorous control over the appointment of household staff. Distracted by his risible campaign to retain his Newcastle seat, he had instead ordered his chaplain, the Reverend Henry Reynett, to procure a suitable new maid. It was a decision Bowes would deeply regret. With due concern for his master’s soul as well as for his own reputation, Reynett had succeeded in locating a mature and experienced maid who came with impeccable references from a string of respectable families. Interviewed in April by the chaplain’s wife, Mary Reynett, in a more conventional manner than most previous applicants, Mary Morgan was duly appointed, worked her notice and arrived at 48 Grosvenor Square on 18 May.
Aged thirty-three, just two years younger than Mary, Morgan was an educated, intelligent and conscientious woman who prided herself on the responsible positions she had held within influential families in Georgian high society. A widow with her own small private income, Morgan had entered service four years previously, probably from necessity after her husband’s death. No stranger to the political arena, she had initially worked as a lady’s maid to one of the five daughters of Sir John Wrottesley, the respected MP for Staffordshire, at his house in Bloomsbury Square. Equally at home in the field of finance, two years later she had obtained work with the eminent banker Henry Hoare, owner of Hoare’s Bank in Fleet Street. There she had remained for a year, before lastly obtaining a post with the elderly Frances Sackville, or Lady Sackville as she styled herself, the sister of the Duchess of Bedford, at her home in George Street, just a few minutes’ walk from her new position in Grosvenor Square. Calm, practical, devoutly religious and with a strong sense of propriety, Morgan arrived to meet her new mistress for the first time on that May morning as the spring flowers bloomed in the verdant square. Shrewdly weighing up the situation in the Bowes household, she formed an immediate affinity with her nervous and downtrodden namesake. For her part, Mary Eleanor was surprised and relieved to discover that her husband had appointed, albeit inadvertently, ‘a proper person’ with an ‘excellent character’.1 But Morgan had scarcely time to unpack her bags before she was thrown headlong into the family’s latest drama.
Having squandered his chances for political preferment, lost his opportunity for a peerage and bungled his plot to marry off his sister, Bowes was casting around for a fresh scheme in his perpetual quest to augment his fortune and his status. Pestered on the one hand by his numerous creditors, and on the other by his many mistresses who demanded financial aid to maintain his various illegitimate children, Bowes felt besieged on all sides. His gaze soon fell on Mary’s teenage daughters, sixteen-year-old Lady Maria Jane and thirteen-year-old Lady Anna Maria. Plump, pretty, accomplished and, most importantly, soon to command generous fortunes, the girls were rapidly approaching marriageable age. Calculating that he might secure a share of this potential wealth by engineering useful matches, Bowes laid plans to lure the girls within his control. But with an uncanny ability to predict the wily workings of Bowes’s ever-active mind, Uncle Thomas was already one step ahead.
Having ensured that the Strathmore heir, the fifteen-year-old earl, was safe in Edinburg
h, at arm’s length from Bowes and Mary both in terms of distance and affections, Thomas Lyon had maintained a close watch over George and Thomas at their school in Neasden. Earlier in May, at Gibside after the election charade, Mary had begged Lyon to let her visit John in Edinburgh and see the younger boys who were staying with their uncle for the coming Whitsun holidays.2 Airily, Lyon had informed her that since John had already begun his vacation it was ‘impossible to say’ where he was, while George and Thomas had no free time to see her since they had to be ‘in readiness’ to return to London any day. Growing increasingly depressed by her isolation from her children, Mary retorted: ‘It must seem incredible to the World in General that one who is himself a father and whose own interest should teach him to promote the duty and affection of children towards Parents endeavours on the contrary to estrange their hearts from a Mother after having for years been deprived of the happiness of seeing my Sons.’ Quite confident that the Georgian world would see nothing in the least out of the ordinary in denying a mother access to her children, Lyon knew that the safety of his two nieces was rather trickier to guarantee.
Having long insisted that the girls were not permitted to stay with their mother overnight, Lyon had recently added the stipulation that Mary could only see Maria with a trusted third party present. Inhibited from a normal fond relationship with her daughter by the constant surveillance of a hawk-eyed aunt or governess, Mary had protested at ‘too severe a restraint upon the affections of a Mother’. In truth, it was already too late; seven years of such restrictions had had their desired effect. Having spent scant time with her mother since early childhood and with any lingering affections poisoned by the Strathmore clan, Maria already felt a stronger bond with her socially acceptable and morally upright Lyon kin than with her troublesome mother and disreputable stepfather. Nevertheless, Lyon had remained apprehensive over Maria’s safety and so as she neared sixteen in December 1783 he had moved her from her boarding school in Queen’s Square to live with her aunt, Lady Anne Simpson, in Harley Street. Anxious to find her niche in Georgian society, Maria had immediately felt at ease with her charming and clever aunt whose home was a favourite refuge for the rebellious sons of George III.3 Meanwhile, Anna Maria - as high-spirited and precocious as her sister was conformist and compliant - had remained under the watchful eyes of her teachers, Mrs Carlile and Mrs Este, at the Queen’s Square school where she had recently been joined by her half-sister Mary.
Devoted to her lively youngest daughter, who was now six, Mary Eleanor had endeavoured to provide little Mary with the privileged education she herself had enjoyed. Snatching as much time with her as her husband’s demands and restrictions would allow, she had set Mary to work at her lessons from an early age, her unruly curls falling over her books just like the young Mary Eleanor’s. In the opinion of the chaplain’s wife, Mrs Reynett, which seemingly carried some weight with her employer, this was far too demanding for a child of six and she had accordingly advised Bowes to send his young daughter away to school.4 Ignoring his wife’s tearful protests, Bowes had despatched little Mary to Queen’s Square at some point before the April election, quite probably surmising that her presence in the school would also provide him with convenient excuses to visit. A few weeks later, a homesick Mary had written a poignant letter to her mother imploring to be allowed home for the coming Whitsun holidays. ‘My Dear Mama,’ she began, ‘I hope this will find you quite recoverd and my dear Papa and Brother very well and as I wish much to see all my friends I hope my dear Papa and Mama will not disapprove of my spending the Whitsuntide Holidays with them.’5 Dutifully conveying her sister Anna’s respects, Mary entreated: ‘We break up the 27 of this month and as almost all the Ladies are to go Home I think Papa and you will not object to my having the same pleasure.’ But ‘Papa’ was entirely indifferent to the child’s pleasures for it was not little Mary’s holiday arrangements but those of her two sisters that were uppermost in his mind. And so on 21 May, a full six days before the school holidays began and only three days after the arrival of Mary Morgan, Bowes moved to unroll his latest scheme.
Forcing Mary Eleanor to play her allotted role in his intrigue, Bowes demanded that she write two letters - one to Mrs Carlile and Mrs Este in Queen’s Square, the other to Lady Anne Simpson in Harley Street - asking to say farewell to her daughters the following day in Grosvenor Square on the pretext that the family was leaving to spend the holiday in Bath.6 Early the next day, on 22 May, the Reverend and Mrs Reynett set off from the house and returned with Anna, gleeful at an early escape from her lessons while her half-sister Mary was kept hard at her studies. A short while later Maria arrived in the company of Eleanor Ord, Lady Anne’s sister-in-law, who had been carefully briefed to maintain a close guard on her charge. Arriving in Grosvenor Square, a cautious Maria spotted her sister at an upstairs window and immediately warned Mrs Ord of her misgivings. Shown into the drawing room, Maria and Mrs Ord were met by Mary Eleanor who, after a few pleasantries, casually invited her daughter into her dressing room to read a letter from the young Lord Strathmore. Patiently waiting for Maria to return, Mrs Ord became agitated when she failed to reappear and the servants declined to find her. As she realised the folly of letting Maria out of her sight - and no doubt fearing the rancour of Thomas Lyon should her precious charge disappear - Mrs Ord insisted on being shown to the dressing room. Finding the door locked, the frantic Mrs Ord became thoroughly alarmed when she was handed a letter, in Mary’s handwriting, which coolly explained that she and Bowes had decided to detain Maria until they could put their case for increased access to the children to the Lord Chancellor. Well aware of the plodding pace at which Chancery generally moved, since her husband was a Master, or official, of that court, the doughty Mrs Ord demanded a chair and insisted on sitting outside the dressing-room door until the hostage was returned. And when she heard Maria yell from within, she called back: ‘Maria! I shall not quit the house till you come to me.’
Mrs Ord’s admirable perseverance paid off, or at least Bowes soon tired of his eldest stepdaughter’s truculence. Although he had probably viewed Maria, being the elder and therefore more eligible daughter, as his main quarry he had doubtless already surmised that she would present him with far more trouble than her pliable younger sister, who was evidently more susceptible to his charms. Obviously viewing the whole escapade as a welcome reprieve from the tedium of boarding school, Anna proved a distinctly more willing captive. It was not long, therefore, before the door opened and a fraught Maria emerged in the company of William Davis, the financial go-between who was never far from Bowes’s moneymaking scams.
Discovering that their coach had been sent away, Maria and Mrs Ord fled the house on foot, hurrying through the congested West End streets to take refuge with nearby friends. As Maria revealed that Bowes and her mother had attempted to persuade the two sisters to quit their guardians and live with them instead, Mrs Ord despatched an urgent message to her husband to summon help. Despite Mrs Ord’s quick-thinking it was too late for Anna. By the time the guardians gained leave to petition Chancery to return the girl five days later she was already far away.7 For no sooner had Mrs Ord and Maria departed than Bowes had bundled Anna, Mary and a handful of servants into a hackney carriage and hurtled east out of London on the road towards Dover bound for France.
A perilous 22-mile journey in a wooden boat at the mercy of winds and tides did little to deter innumerable British travellers from crossing the English Channel to France every year, whether embarking on the grand tour, pursuing business on the Continent or simply beginning a family holiday.8 The voyage from Dover to Calais, usually in the regular ‘packet’ which transported the mail, could take as little as three hours in a calm sea with benevolent winds or as many as twelve if the boat was becalmed or carried off course. Lady Harriet Spencer, the future Lady Bessborough, betrayed an eleven-year-old’s excitement at the anticipation of her family’s jaunt to Europe when she made the crossing with her sister and brother in 1772. ‘We w
ere all wrap’d up in blankets and put into the little boat which rowed out to sea to the ship at one o’clock in the morning,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘We got to Calais before nine.’ Older but no less enthusiastic, the Devon-based traveller Jane Parminter boasted a ‘charming passage’ of three hours during which she was ‘sick twice but [it] did not spoil my enjoyment’ when she made the voyage in 1784. Landing, eventually, in Calais many British tourists were disgruntled at their gruff reception by French customs officials who peremptorily seized and searched their bags for contraband before they were free to seek accommodation at one of the town’s two inns. Most, like the novelist Laurence Sterne, arriving in 1762, opted for the Hôtel d’Angleterre, run by the obliging Pierre Quillacq, who had gained riches and minor celebrity status since featuring as Monsieur Dessein in Sterne’s comical A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, published six years later.9 After a night’s rest and a breakfast of coffee and rolls, the majority of cross-Channel travellers set out early the following morning, either paying for a seat in the stage coach or hiring a chaise from the hotel coach yard, on the long straight road for Paris.