Wedlock

by Wendy Moore

  News that the Countess of Strathmore had been abducted in broad daylight from one of London’s main thoroughfares spread rapidly through the streets of the capital and ultimately travelled even as far as India. ‘The town was ringing about your old neighbour of the north Countess Strathmore and the enormous barbarities of her husband,’ gossiped Horace Walpole to his friend Lady Ossory.16 The Duchess of Brunswick, sister of George III, exclaimed to the Duchess of Argyll: ‘What a shocking story this is of Mr Bowes carrying off Ldy Strathmore. ’ Despatching for good any remnants of Bowes’s reputation, the sensational events also prompted many to reassess their assumptions about marriage. While Walpole considered that wealthy widows should in future prove ‘a little cautious of Mac-Philanderers’, the Duchess of Brunswick firmly pronounced: ‘I seldom see love matches turn out well, love dose [does] make such havock.’

  Eager to reveal the latest remarkable twist in the Bowes divorce, the press related the story in full. Rushing into print on the day after the kidnap, the London Evening Post announced: ‘Yesterday, about two o’clock, Lady Strathmore was forcibly taken away from the house of Mr Forster [sic], brazier, in Oxford-street, where she had called on business, by five or six armed men, who violently seized and put her into her own carriage, which waited at the door.’17 Describing the incident as an ‘outrage’, The Times averred that it was Bowes’s ‘unquestionable design’ to carry the countess to Ireland. The Gentleman’s Magazine carried the news in florid detail, reporting eye-witness accounts of Mary’s struggles and appeals for help as her coach sped through villages ‘at a most furious rate’. And finally catching up with the drama six months later, when the London news arrived by sea in India, the Madras Courier would astound its readers with ‘the particulars respecting the forcibly taking away the Countess of Strathmore’.

  Meanwhile Mary’s friends and supporters lost no time in rushing to her aid. Appalled at seeing her beloved mistress and closest friend snatched from her side in Oxford Street, Mary Morgan had immediately dashed across town to find Thomas Lacey. But in an era seventy years before the existence of a nationwide police force, when even the most heinous crimes had to be pursued and prosecuted by the victims and their families, Mary’s supporters were forced to rely on their own resources. Too late to seek legal redress that day, on the following day Morgan and Captain Farrer, who had trudged back to town footsore and shamefaced, swore an affidavit before Lord Mansfield to secure a writ of habeas corpus ordering Bowes to surrender Mary along with a ‘Rule for Informations’ demanding that he explain his actions.18 A court tipstaff, Thomas Ridgeway, set off at once to serve the legal notices taking Captain Farrer as his guide. Together the pair galloped out of town, following the unmistakeable trail of Mary’s journey northwards. Reporting the tipstaff ’s quest, the English Chronicle confidently predicted, ‘There is no doubt he will succeed as many accounts have arrived in town from the places they passed through, which point out and ascertain their route.’19

  Left in London to rally forces, Morgan and Lacey rejoiced when they received Mary’s damp-stained note revealing that she was heading for St Paul’s Walden Bury. Relief quickly turned to anguish, however, when she and Lacey arrived at the house to find it empty. Now convinced that Mary was being taken to Ireland, the pair despatched express messengers to all the main seaports urging that Bowes be apprehended, and distributed handbills throughout the capital appealing for help in finding her. Warning of the legal measures taken, the leaflets urged, ‘It is therefore hoped that all Persons will use their utmost Endeavours to stop their Progress, wherever they go, and prevent her being conveyed out of the Kingdom, and give every possible and speedy information thereof at her Ladyship’s House in Bloomsbury-Square, London.’20

  As predicted by the press, Ridgeway and Captain Farrer collected distressing reports of Mary’s ordeal at every coaching inn they stopped at on the Great North Road; the information they gathered from witnesses would prove crucial. It was two days later, however, a full day behind Bowes, when their trail finally culminated in County Durham and the two crusaders were reliably informed that Mary was being held captive in Streatlam Castle. Joining forces with the resourceful Thomas Colpitts, the rescue party collected at the offices of a sympathetic local lawyer, Zachary Hubbersty, to consider their next move. ‘I have to inform you by express that Capt. Farrer, Mr Colpitts & Mr Ridgeway arrived here this morning about 9 o’clock, after hearing of Mr Stoney all the way,’ Hubbersty wrote in a dashed letter to Lacey in London.21 Having likewise heard of the various weapons being brandished by Bowes and his lawless crew, Ridgeway reasonably concluded that he needed to raise reinforcements before proceeding. To that end, the tipstaff summoned help from law enforcers in the region and placed a ‘strong guard’ around the castle for, as Hubbersty presciently noted, ‘there is no doubt but Mr B. will take Ly. S. off if any opportunity is given him so to do’.

  With news of the extraordinary events radiating to every town and port, friends and allies throughout the country rallied to Mary’s cause. Horrified to hear of Bowes’s latest villainy, Robert Thompson, the sacked Gibside gardener, swore that he would save his mistress or ‘dye on the spott’.22 Receiving the alarming news in Cambridge, Mary’s seventeen-year-old son John set off on horseback to rescue the mother he had not seen for six years. ‘The young Earl of Strathmore’, the English Chronicle told readers, ‘has set out for the north, and is determined to liberate his mother out of her present disagreeable situation at the risk of his existence.’23 Even the Duke of Norfolk, Bowes’s old drinking chum and bail guarantor, sent messengers to friends in the north urging them to join the rescue efforts. And once they learned that Bowes had barricaded himself in at Streatlam, local miners besieged the house, hollering for Mary’s release and lighting immense fires in an effort to prevent her being removed under cover of darkness. Watching the castle night and day, armed with guns, swords and bludgeons, the formidable force was variously estimated at two hundred, three hundred and even five hundred angry and determined men illuminated by ‘great blazing coal fires’ positioned in every avenue.24

  While the miners were evidently prepared to risk their lives to deliver Mary from her ordeal, others were seemingly more resigned to her plight. Informed of events by Colpitts, Mary’s aged aunt, Margaret Liddell, in Durham promised to launch inquiries in the neighbourhood to ascertain her niece’s whereabouts but added lamely, ‘I dare say he will send her abroad.’25 Another correspondent, relating the news that had captivated the region, suggested, ‘she is most likely a Prisoner for Life’. And one witness, reporting details of Mary’s journey through Yorkshire, anticipated an even worse fate, writing, ‘It’s a dammed rascally affair . . . I hope he will not be vilain enough to do her away.’26

  Although temperatures hovered close to freezing, the unyielding pitworkers gave a warm reception to Thomas Ridgeway when at last he approached Streatlam Castle with his documents in hand on 13 November. To nobody’s surprise the tipstaff was gruffly refused entry by one of Bowes’s hoodlums but when Ridgeway noticed a smartly dressed figure answering to Bowes’s description at one of the windows, he pushed the writs underneath the castle door by way of serving them.27 Powerless to take further action within the confines of the law but certain that his quarry was well and truly cornered, Ridgeway confidently awaited Mary’s release.

  With the castle surrounded by pitworkers, law officers and neighbours, its walls illuminated by giant bonfires, supplies of food stopped and even the water pipes cut, it seemed only a matter of time before the prison would be breached. Yet with no sighting of Mary for two days, her putative rescuers were growing apprehensive. Confirmation that the habeas corpus had been served took an inevitable two days to reach London, whereupon Mary’s lawyers immediately requested that the King’s Bench send an ‘attachment’, or posse of officers, to take Bowes into custody for failing to comply. It took a further frustrating day for the court to agree, on 16 November, to the plea. Accordingly a band of armed officers then set
off from Bow Street, the pioneering police station founded in the 1750s by the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding, with a warrant to arrest Bowes and rescue Mary. With the whole country now agog at the scandal, one newspaper duly reported, ‘a party of peace officers, armed, in post chaises, went off with all expedition to Streatlam Castle’, while the Gentleman’s Magazine ruefully noted that fulfilling their task ‘will prove a dangerous attempt to execute’.28

  Meanwhile James Farrer, arriving hotfoot from Carlisle, had decided to take the law into his own hands - or at least those of local magistrates. Impatient at the interminable delays, he obtained a warrant from a local justice and with the aid of several sturdy supporters determined to force open the castle gates. As the assembled crowd watched with bated breath, on 16 November Farrer, Hubbersty and Colpitts burst through the doors, tripped over the habeas corpus writ lying unread on the floor and commenced a search of the building. 29 To their astonishment, and the subsequent amazement of the gathered assembly, there was no sign either of Bowes or Mary. Closely questioned by the lawyers, the handful of ruffians left behind refused to yield a single clue to their whereabouts. Since no carriages were missing the bewildered rescuers were stumped as to the means of Bowes’s vanishing act and as there had been no sign of him since, they were equally flummoxed over his destination. Seriously alarmed that Mary might be irretrievably lost, it seemed, as one correspondent poignantly remarked, that Bowes had ‘Arts & Contrivance enough to accomplish any thing he undertakes’.30

  One step ahead, as ever, Bowes was long gone. For on the evening of Sunday 12 November, the day after arriving at Streatlam and a full four days before James Farrer broke in with his search warrant, Bowes had fled the castle under the very noses of the vigilantes. Having forced Mary to dress in a man’s greatcoat and a maid’s bonnet he had smuggled her out of a back door and, with Mary riding pillion, accompanied by his pregnant mistress and several armed accomplices, ridden stealthily away across the moors.31 The next eight days would test Mary’s powers of endurance to the limits. Suffering barely credible extremes of deprivation and brutality, exposed to intolerable conditions during the coldest autumn of the century, Mary would draw on a remarkable inner resilience and the long-buried physical strength which her father had instilled in her as a child.

  Heading due west across the boggy moorland, aiming for Carlisle and probably Ireland, Bowes first halted at a rough cottage belonging to his mistress’s father in a remote spot known as Roger Moor where the party laid low for the next two days. Here Bowes crammed Mary into a ‘press bed’ - a type of bed concealed in a cupboard commonly stored in eighteenth-century kitchens. When she still refused to sleep with him, he threatened her with his pistol, beat her about the head and shut her in. Enclosed in the darkness for most of the first day, she heard Bowes calling for padlocks and a hot poker but defiantly shouted that she was ready for whatever cruelty he might attempt. When finally the doors were opened Bowes laid her on her side then beat her severely with a rod.

  Leaving the cottage once darkness fell the following evening, 15 November, Mary was placed on a horse behind Charles Chapman, a miner recruited as one of Bowes’s heavies, and headed west again across the moors. ‘It was a very windy, cold, dark night, when we left Roger Moor’, Mary would remember, ‘and travelled thro’ part of the Yorkshire Highlands, scattered with occasional villages.’ With sleet and snow beginning to fall, Mary’s flimsy clothing and thin slippers rapidly became sodden, so that she felt so ‘overpowered with the various fatigues, cruelties, want of sleep and the very wet condition I was in’ that several times she almost fell from Chapman’s horse. Breaking the ice on frozen rivers and trudging through deep snow drifts, the bedraggled party arrived in the early hours at the ramshackle cottage of Matthew Shields, a gamekeeper, in the hamlet of Arngill at the eastern foot of the North Pennine hills. That night Mary slept in a draughty loft with Mary Gowland while a fierce storm raged outside.

  The following day, as James Farrer stormed Streatlam Castle, Mary was sitting on a wooden bench in Shields’s hovel only fourteen miles away. Warmed by a feeble peat fire and sustained only by hot milk and water with a little bread, she met another of her husband’s mistresses, Isabella Dixon, who was nursing the latest of his illegitimate children. Marooned in the cottage for a second night by the drifting snow, on 17 November Mary was encouraged when Henry Bourn arrived to inform Bowes that Captain Farrer and Thomas Colpitts junior, her agent’s son, were now scouring the countryside for her. Fearful of being discovered, Bowes insisted that they set out again soon after dark.

  With Mary mounted behind Chapman once more, the party was guided by Shields over the North Pennine hills. Known even now as ‘England’s last wilderness’, the North Pennines form the highest points in the range which divides England down the centre, from Derbyshire in the south to the Scottish border in the north. As they rose forbiddingly before her now, capped with snow, Mary may well have echoed the judgement of the author Daniel Defoe that: ‘This, perhaps, is the most desolate, wild, and abandoned Country in all England.’

  Keeping to lonely country roads and treacherous moorland paths, the horses stumbled over the fells as sleet blinded their way. When they stopped briefly at a turnpike cottage near Brough, Shields told the tollkeepers that Mary was being taken to visit her daughter who was in labour. Arriving in the early hours at Appleby, a little medieval town on the road to Carlisle, Bowes installed Mary in one inn and sent his hoodlums to another in order to avoid suspicion. Again he tried to force her to have sex with him; again she swore she would prosecute him for rape if he persevered.

  Anxious that Captain Farrer and young Colpitts might overtake them, Bowes forced the party to leave hurriedly the following morning, 18 November, so that in the rush Mary left behind her stockings. Bundling Mary into a chaise which Bowes had hired to reach Carlisle, they were stopped after only three miles by a man on horseback who warned them that they were being followed. Mary sank to her knees in gratitude that she was about to be rescued, but Bowes dragged her into the road, sent the carriage on towards Carlisle as a decoy and took off across the fields with the pregnant Mary Gowland riding pillion on his horse, Mary Eleanor mounted behind Chapman. When the determined Captain Farrer and his fellow pursuer hurtled past in their chaise in pursuit of the empty carriage only minutes later, Mary was being hidden in a cowshed a few hundred yards away.

  Doubling back, Bowes now trekked east towards the steeply rising western escarpment of the Pennines, stopping only to find guides at remote cottages along the route. Never short of a ready fiction, Bowes told the country folk he encountered that he was a doctor and Mary a demented patient. Clinging to Chapman as their horse stumbled along the narrow passes, her bare legs numb from the cold, Mary gazed with awe on the ‘stupendous rocks and mountains deeply covered with snow’ and ‘tremendous precipices’ as they negotiated a route over the 2,454-foot peak of Burton Fell. So bleak was the terrain that even one of their guides lost his way. Weak from fatigue and cold, Mary fell from her horse when it plunged into a snowdrift but was promptly reseated by Bowes’s henchmen. As they crossed a plain so immense and white that it ‘perfectly resembled the wide Ocean’, Mary recognised some rare alpine plants peeping out from the snow. Pointing them out to Bowes she shouted, ‘that as I now saw them against my inclination, I would when released from him come there some future summer for my own pleasure and to indulge my Botanical passion’.

  As the day darkened, Mary found that they had returned to Matthew Shields’s house at Arngill where Isabella Dixon confessed herself astounded that they had survived the mountain crossing in such foul conditions. Yet before she had time even to dry her wet clothes by the fire, Mary was forced outside again, this time mounted behind Bowes, to press on towards Darlington. Creeping along the back roads through the night, the bedraggled group passed within three miles of Streatlam Castle where Bowes even had the gall to send one of his gang to glean news of the rescue efforts. The resulting information did not
bring him comfort.

  Having passed within yards of Mary’s hideaway in the cowshed near Appleby, Captain Farrer and Colpitts junior had continued to Penrith, just as Bowes had hoped, but finding no trace of their quarry retraced their route with growing anguish.32 Gathering jumbled reports of the fugitives as they went, they called at Arngill - missing Mary’s second visit by hours - but were met with contemptuous silence from its inhabitants. In bewilderment they returned west as far as Carlisle, but discovering no sign of Bowes, doubled back again, their efforts now focused on County Durham. With armed officers arriving from London, every village watchman and country constable on the alert and sightings of the conspicuous group circulating widely, it seemed only a matter of time before Bowes would be cornered. ‘Various & many are the reports of the Fugitives,’ reported one correspondent following developments, ‘& a whole Country upon the Watch.’33

  At last rising to the seriousness of the situation, Mary’s aunt, Margaret Liddell, sent instructions to every coaching inn in the region to refuse fresh horses to Bowes’s men. Conveying news to Colpitts, she lamented, ‘This most melancholy afair has effected my nerves so much, that really I can hardly hold my Pen.’34 At the same time James Farrer issued posters offering a £50 reward for any information leading to the arrest of Bowes and the rescue of Mary.35 Pasted on tavern walls and turnpike gates throughout the north, the posters gave descriptions of Bowes, his accomplices and Mary herself in less than flattering terms. Bowes, one poster asserted, was ‘above the middle size, sallow complexion, large Nose which stands rather one side, and lisps in his speech’, while Mary was described as ‘a little woman, a longish Face, with fine dark brown Hair, rather Bulky over the Chest’.