by Wendy Moore
While Bowes, of course, had the entire income generated by Mary’s family estate at his disposal to fight the various law suits now stacking up against him, Mary had no source of funds to support herself or to finance her litigation. Throughout the drawn-out legal process she would remain reliant on the generosity of friends and sympathisers. While her maids stayed with her without wages, her lawyers pursued her various suits without fee in the hope that they would be paid if she were successful. ‘My Lawyers act most zealously for me,’ she told one correspondent, ‘without Fees, the 4 Maid Servants who attended me in my flight, serve me without Wages, & two of them even left behind a great deal of Money which Mr Bowes owes them.’24 The majority of her aid came from those at the poorest levels of Georgian society, principally the servants, estate staff and tenants who had served her family for generations. Gardeners on her estates sent her fruit and vegetables at the risk of losing their jobs, while tenants forwarded their rent at the risk of losing their farms. Even so, according to Foot, she was ‘reduced very low indeed’.25
More significantly, and more dangerously for those involved, Mary needed witnesses who were prepared to testify to Bowes’s years of violence and sexual philandering. While Bowes was prepared to bribe, harass or kidnap servants, friends and assorted disreputable characters to lie on his behalf, Mary could only appeal to her witnesses’ basic honesty to speak out in her support. Confined in her lodgings she devoted her days to writing scores of letters in her looped neat handwriting, or dictating them to her closest ally - ‘my female Secretary Morgan, who takes all the Business of Routine off my Hands’26 - in a stream of correspondence to relatives, friends and acquaintances from the past. Free to reveal her genuine emotions for the first time in years, often to people she had previously been compelled to treat with rudeness, Mary rapidly regained her old confidence and determination. She now discovered who her true friends were, for in this dispute it was impossible not to take sides. Indeed, for those who were swept up in the Bowes divorce case, this was not a simple break-up between two married people so much as a brutally fought civil war which divided whole communities and even split families.
Among the first people Mary turned to were Bowes’s family in Ireland. After hearing nothing from Mary for nearly five years, her sister-in-law rejoiced to learn that she had finally escaped her brother’s tyranny. Now happily married, Mary Lawrenson, as she had become, enthused ‘it is not in words to express my feelings’ and urged Mary to stay safe. Having just lost her first son at only three months old, she wrote that news of Mary’s release had helped assauge her grief and added bitterly: ‘What a Blessing it would be had Bowes been taken off at that Age.’27 Her father, George Stoney, declared himself ‘deeply afflicted’ to learn of his eldest son’s conduct. Now seventy-two and increasingly infirm, he wrote an emotional apology to Mary for the ‘base unnatural Treatment’ she had suffered at the hands of ‘the most wretched man I ever knew’. Yet although he told Bowes’s uncle, General Armstrong, that it would have been a blessing had his son ‘never been Born’, the Stoney patriarch adamantly forbade his daughter Mary from testifying to her brother’s villainy in court on the grounds that: ‘Tho’ we abhor Bowes and his proceedings, yet to join in prosecuting him would be unpardonable in a Sister.’
There was scarcely more support from Mary’s own family. In a stiff and formal letter sent after two entreaties from Mary, Thomas Lyon icily responded: ‘I have the pleasure to acquaint your Ladyship that Lady Maria is perfectly well. She rejoices with me in hearing of your Success & desires her due respects.’28 And while he maintained a close watch on how the legal disputes might affect his wards’ prospects, even a year later he would brush off her appeals for help with the excuse that ‘my name could not be of the smallest use’. Meanwhile Lyon took steps to rein in his wilful niece Anna by placing her in the care of Elizabeth Parish, née Planta, the pious governess Mary had dismissed so acrimoniously while in the throes of her affair with George Gray nine years earlier. With memories of her former mistress’s past excesses evidently not forgotten, Mrs Parish, elder sister of Eliza Stephens, promised that she would try to curb Anna’s newly acquired extravagance but warned: ‘It will give me some trouble to conquer the habits of inattention and disorder which she has contracted’.29 Not long afterwards, reporting a conciliatory letter received from Mary Eleanor, Mrs Parish gleefully informed Lyon: ‘I do not perceive in Lady A- M- the least desire either of seeing her or of hearing from her.’
Much to Mary’s sorrow, Mrs Parish was right. Although Anna would grudgingly sign a deposition testifying that she had heard her mother scream and seen her cry from the abuse meted out by Bowes, she was still sufficiently under her stepfather’s spell to conspire with his pretence that Mary was accident-prone, slovenly and quarrelsome. The only family members who tendered Mary any significant aid were William Lyon, a distant relation of the ninth Earl, who agreed to support her petition to Chancery, and General John Lambton, widower of the late earl’s sister Susan, who called once and ‘made her a present’.30 Likewise Mary enjoyed scant support from the former friends and acquaintances with whom she had rubbed shoulders at masked balls and select salons. Anxious to distance themselves from the vulgar stain of divorce, the pillars of respectable society stayed away from her door.
Turning to the various medical men whose casebooks contained ample details of the fruits of Bowes’s sexual voracity, Mary encountered sharply divided loyalties. The surgeon Jessé Foot would later proclaim that Bowes ‘considered all females as natural game, and hunted them down as so many FERAE NATURAE’.31 The legions of illegitimate children Bowes had spawned, Foot added, were ‘vastly more, perhaps, than the granary of any other man has been found to produce’. But asked by Mary to give evidence to this effect he refused to testify unless subpoenaed ‘for my own Reputation as well as for the Honour of my Profession’. Duly summoned, in his subsequent deposition Foot admitted that Bowes had paid him to deliver the wet-nurse Mrs Houghton’s baby and then dupe her husband into believing it was not uncommon for babies to be born at six months. With little regard to professional honour, he would remain firm friends with Bowes, pandering to his contrived ailments and enjoying the spoils of his table.
Foot’s sworn rival John Hunter, by contrast, congratulated Mary on her escape and pledged his full support to her cause.32 In a frank depiction of Bowes’s austerity towards his wife, his testimony declared that Bowes always exhibited ‘a very strict and severe Disposition’ and refused to indulge Mary with ‘such Trifles’ as tea and coffee. Later writing from Bath, where the surgeon was recovering from a heart attack, Hunter assured her: ‘I hope to see the Day when Your Ladyship’s person will be safe when you can enjoy your Children and your lands again’. Likewise the male midwife Richard Thompson would freely testify to his role in delivering Bowes’s illegitimate child with Dorothy Stephenson.
Yet it was those who had most to lose who showed Mary the greatest loyalty. All four maids who had helped Mary escape - Mary Morgan, Ann Dixon, Ann Parkes and Susanna Church - willingly jeopardised their livelihoods and risked their lives by testifying to their former master’s violent behaviour and sexual outrages. Their courageous descriptions of the bruises, burns and weals which Mary had suffered at Bowes’s hands coupled with his oppressive curtailment of her movements, diet and dress furnished a resounding indictment of his cruelty. Other servants, who had worked in the Bowes household in years past, similarly came forward to describe the despotic regime that they had witnessed stretching back to the days immediately following the couple’s marriage. Even one of Bowes’s current servants, his footman Robert Crundall, made a statement detailing his master’s brutality. He was inevitably sacked for his betrayal and promptly offered his services to Mary with whom he would remain for the rest of her life. Further down the slippery Georgian social ladder, denizens of London’s sexual underworld willingly gave evidence on Mary’s behalf. Nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Waite, who had been reduced to living in the Magdale
n Hospital for ‘penitent prostitutes’, told how Bowes had raped her when she applied to work as a nursery maid, while the brothel keeper Susannah Sunderland related how Bowes had brought Dorothy to her house for the delivery of her illegitimate baby. Yet there was still one crucial witness whose testimony, Mary knew, could prove vital to the success of her suit.
Nothing had been seen of nineteen-year-old Dorothy or her baby daughter since Bowes had abducted them from Mrs Sunderland’s brothel in February. When Mary had sent friends to call on Dorothy shortly after her escape they found no sign either of her or the baby. Knowing Dorothy’s dread of Bowes, Mary feared the worst. Meanwhile, her parents, William and Mary Stephenson, who had been loyal tenants of the Bowes family all their lives, were blithely unaware of their daughter’s pregnancy and subsequent disappearance. So when they received an urgent message from Bowes announcing that their daughter was dangerously ill, they set off immediately from their farm in Whickham to bring her home. Arriving in Durham, to catch the first stage coach to London, the couple were shocked to hear not only that the mistress of Gibside had left her husband but also that Dorothy had given birth to a child fathered by its master. Fearful for their daughter’s safety, the Stephensons managed to contact Mary at her secret hideout in London and at the end of April they joined with her in obtaining a writ of habeas corpus demanding that Bowes produce Dorothy. One of the earliest editions of The Times, founded at the beginning of 1785 under the title the Daily Universal Register, reported Lord Mansfield’s order that Dorothy be surrendered.33
It would be nearly two more weeks before a terrified Dorothy was brought before the King’s Bench. Having been kept captive at a house in Kensington, where her six-month-old daughter was still being held, Dorothy had been forced by Bowes to put her cross to an affidavit swearing that she had suffered no violence or restraint. Unable to read or write she had plainly no understanding of the document’s content. Taking a dim view of the abduction of potential court witnesses, Lord Mansfield reunited Dorothy with her relieved parents at which, The Times related, her mother ‘stretched out her arms to receive her and kissed her with great rapture’. Charging her parents to treat Dorothy ‘gently and indulgently’, Lord Mansfield told them to accompany her to Kensington to retrieve her child. As Dorothy now joined Mary in Holborn, her parents carried their granddaughter back to County Durham where they gamely hosted a christening party. Reporting the revels to Mary in London, one loyal worker could not resist observing that, ‘I think that the Child [is] very much like Mr Bowes’.34
Restored to safety, Dorothy lost no time in agreeing a lengthy and incriminating testimony which described how Bowes had repeatedly raped her and made her pregnant, committed adultery with Mrs Houghton who had subseqently given birth to his baby, as well as his catalogue of assaults on Mary with fists, knives and sticks. Declaring Bowes to be ‘a Man of a very cruel savage and abandoned Disposition and also of a loose wicked and lustful Disposition’,35 Dorothy’s statement would prove critical to the outcome of the Bowes divorce.
As news of Dorothy’s ordeal spread among staff and tenants at Gibside, bolstered by many families’ own experiences of Bowes’s bullying and vindictive behaviour, so support for Mary’s cause gathered force. In a groundswell of resistance, estate workers, farmers and their families at last found the courage to oppose Bowes’s worst excesses and they reported their little triumphs in regular despatches to London. For Mary, cut off from her childhood home, the letters which shuttled almost daily between London and County Durham were a lifeline.
Plagued by rheumatism and worn down by poverty, the Gibside gardener Robert Thompson had no doubt where his loyalties lay. Expressing ‘great joy’ at the news of Mary’s escape, he wrote to assure her that ‘the Hot house and Greanhouse’ were in good order although the garden had become overgrown through lack of help. When he was sacked by Bowes in April for refusing to surrender his correspondence with Mary, he continued to tend her plants regardless. Despatching a box of fruit from the hothouse, he described in his semi-literate scrawl how Bowes had ordered his agent ‘to settle with me & to begon out of the place’ but assured Mary that ‘I will not be turnd out of the Garden for none of Mr bowes partey’. Saddened at the neglect the garden was suffering, Thompson dutifully worked without pay to weed the beds and pick insects from the flowers saying it ‘greaves me very sor to see them spoild at this time’.36
Likewise Francis Bennett, once a footman to the late Lord Strathmore, who had stayed on as gamekeeper at Gibside, assured Mary of his continuing devotion and vowed ‘I never intend to serve Mr Bowes any longer’.37 Sending Mary regular bulletins on the fortunes of her beloved plants he also kept her abreast of Bowes’s trail of destruction and terror in the neighbourhood. So the revelation that ‘there is 4 Cape plants come up from the seed’ in the greenhouse was somewhat outweighed by news of Bowes’s relentless felling of ancient trees in the woods and his plans to sell off the livestock. As Bowes and his henchmen stormed about the estate threatening staff with dismissal and tenants with eviction, Bennett told Mary ‘I think that Mr B. wants to do all the mischeif he possible can about this place’. He added: ‘I can safely say that your Ladyship has more friends in this part of the Whorld than ever you had, there is hardly a person but what takes your part and wishes that your Ladyship may get the better of Mr B.’ Sending Mary two pineapples by stagecoach to the Blue Boar at Holborn he warned her to avoid replying to Newcastle since Bowes was intercepting their post. But standing up to the renowned might and guile of the master of the manor was no easy undertaking. As Bennett attempted in vain to collect rents for Mary from the terrified tenants in late spring, he was forced to concede ‘at present things goes on very Bad at Gibside all want to be masters’. Finding a hare caught by its neck in the woods, he confided to Mary, ‘I could a wist it had been something eals.’
With tenants divided by their instinctive loyalty to Mary and their understandable terror of Bowes, it was a relief when Thomas Colpitts, Mary’s agent before her marriage to Bowes when he had summarily been replaced by Henry Bourn, volunteered to collect their rents on Mary’s behalf. Thanking him for forwarding a much-needed £100 at the end of May, Mary wrote: ‘I am greatly obliged by the unabated Regard you express for my Family, & by your very friendly attention to my own Interest’.38
By early summer of 1785, with avowals of support and money from tenants arriving regularly at her lodgings in Dyers Buildings, while testimonies from her witnesses mounted at her lawyer’s office in nearby Cursitor Street, Mary had good cause for optimism. So when Bowes made a formal application to the Lord Chancellor in July proposing arbitration to settle the couple’s land dispute if Mary would halt her suit for divorce, and offered the lawyer John Scott as referee, Mary felt she had little to lose by giving conciliation a trial. Assured that all due rents and profits would in the meantime be deposited with Chancery and that Bowes was willing to negotiate an amicable legal separation, she reluctantly suspended her divorce case just as the law courts began their long summer holiday.39
Well aware that Mary enjoyed no redress to the courts during their traditional three-month break Bowes, of course, had no intention of seeking an amicable resolution, nor of allowing the tenants to pay their rents into Chancery. Instead he redoubled his efforts to track down her sanctuary, wreaked havoc on her estates and stepped up his campaign of intimidation. Variously informing the staff and tenants that Mary and he were reconciled, or that her case was lost, he offered generous incitements to any who would swear false testimonies against her and threatened them with eviction or dismissal when they refused. Many, like William and Mary Stephenson, valiantly rejected his advances. Offered substantial rewards to deliver up Dorothy or betray Mary’s whereabouts, William Stephenson wanted Mary to be informed of ‘my unalterable resolution to withstand all his Vile Temptations & that I would rather starve than betray her in any respect’.40 Others, distressed by poverty and petrified by his threats, were eventually seduced. Ann and George Arthu
r, the housekeeper and gardener at St Paul’s Walden Bury, had sent Mary hampers of garden produce ever since her escape, but by May their fidelity had begun to falter. ‘Now my Lady I am at a loss again how to obey with safty,’ George Arthur confessed, ‘as your Ladyship gives me Orders & likewise Mr Bowes.’41 In July, when Bowes sent his footman to intercept the weekly food parcel, the Arthurs meekly surrendered the hamper, complete with Mary’s address.
It was a close shave. Alerted just in time that Bowes had discovered her lodgings, Mary fled to a country retreat with Morgan and three of her trusted servants. Warning Thomas Colpitts to communicate only through Charles Shuter, she begged him: ‘For Godsake don’t tell any body that I am in Staffordshire, or that you have the least Idea, or guess as to the place of my Retirement, for it is of the utmost consequence to keep it secret, lest Mr B. shd. pursue me’.42 When she returned to London in November, for the start of the new law term, it was little surprise to hear that Bowes now adamantly refused to consider any negotiated settlement.
Moving into more salubrious lodgings in Bloomsbury Square in December, at which point she also hired a coach, Mary was now resolved to press ahead with her divorce suit at all costs. Anxious to make public her determination to sever all links with Bowes, on Christmas Eve she issued a handbill which declared, ‘my immutable resolution to endure persecutions, sufferings, and dangers, still greater, if possible, than those to which I have hitherto been exposed’ and ‘even to starve in the most miserable manner’ rather than endure any further communication with Bowes.43 Packed into the stagecoach bound for Newcastle, the posters were eagerly seized on by her friends in County Durham where they were distributed to tenants. The following day, Christmas Day, Mary travelled to Neasden to see her sons, George and Thomas, in their boarding school. Although snow enveloped the countryside, the visit marked the beginning of a slow thaw in relations with her children. Two weeks later the boys were permitted to dine at her house. And as the new year of 1786 began, with her resolution firmer than ever, Mary handed supervision of her various legal cases to a new attorney.