by Wendy Moore
Bolstered by the kindness of friends and family, Mary Eleanor moved into a rented house in Holles Street, just off Oxford Street, with Morgan and a few trusted servants in January 1787. A small terraced house, with just one spare room, it was a far cry from the opulence of her former homes, which now lay abandoned and neglected, yet it was ‘very neatly furnished’ and she could now manage the stairs without a stick. With her strength steadily returning, her determination to sever all links with Bowes remained undiminished. ‘I am resolved at all events’, she told Colpitts, ‘to trust alone to a legal & Public Decision, & that I would beg my bread or earn it by sweeping the Crossings of a street, sooner than enter into any amicable Terms with Mr Stoney & I feel that the Resolution wch. supported me in the Highlands wd not desert me upon the Occasion.’ As the appeal against her divorce suit approached, she would need every ounce of her willpower.
Bowes had filed his formal response to Mary’s divorce victory to the Court of Arches, the ecclesiastical appeal court for the province of Canterbury, on 30 November, just two days after his enfeebled appearance in Westminster Hall. But there was nothing feeble about its contents. He had already given a broad hint that he was preparing a robust case in a testimony signed on the day of his capture which referred to certain ‘papers’ with which Mary had presented him soon after their marriage ‘containing such a scene of iniquity as this deponent believes is not to be paralleled in any history on life’.12 Having purchased an interest in The Times, or Daily Universal Register as it was still known, that same month, Bowes made it plain he intended to fight his corner in the full glare of publicity.13 Orchestrating his campaign from his roomy prison quarters, he fed titillating clues about the revelations his forthcoming appeal would furnish to an eager press.
In January, therefore, The World promised its readers that Bowes’s expected allegations against Mary were ‘perhaps, the most extraordinary and unprecedented ever exhibited before a Court of Judicature’. 14 Shortly afterwards The Times tamely observed that although popular prejudice had ‘never run with greater rapidity against any individual’ than it had against Bowes, there was now reason to believe that ‘the stream will turn with the tide, and public opinion change its colour, on the full disclosure of every circumstance under which that Gentleman has acted’. And so when the appeal finally came up for its hearing, on 20 January 1787, the great hall at Doctors’ Commons, where the Court of Arches also met, was packed with excitable journalists and shorthand writers. As the hacks listened, their quills poised, the court deliberations hinged on precisely how much of Bowes’s explosive case could be aired in public.
His own reputation irreparably ruined, having been denounced as an adulterer, rapist and bully, Bowes had determined that his best line of defence lay in traducing Mary’s name to an equal degree. If he could prove that Mary had committed vulgar and unnatural acts at least as shocking as the charges laid against him, then he was convinced her case would founder. And to achieve that end, he knew he possessed the ultimate secret weapon.
First he set the scene, lodging with the court a series of remarkable ‘allegations’ that accused Mary of brazen and repeated adultery with a succession of male acquaintances.15 Deviously entwining fact with fiction, this document described her adulterous affair with George Gray, subsequent abortions and concealed pregnancy in salacious detail. That these events all predated her marriage to Bowes, and that Gray’s death six years previously prevented any effective challenge, made little difference to their deleterious effect. What followed was a bizarre confection of outrageous claims culled from the furthest reaches of Bowes’s degenerate imagination which would have been comical were they not so destructive to Mary and several of her friends. Of the nine allegations filed by Bowes, the presiding judge Sir Peter Calvert rejected four outright but the five that he allowed to be read in court were more than sufficient to satisfy the appetites of the gathered journalists. Peddling Bowes’s familiar image as the indulgent husband, his allegations asserted that ‘Lady Strathmore is a woman of the most extravagant, lustful, wicked, and abandoned temper, and disposition’ who had treated Bowes with ‘the most insolent contempt and disobedience’. It was this ‘impropriety and indecency’ which had forced Bowes to lay ‘restraints’ upon her behaviour and ‘by argument and gentle remonstrances’ attempt to ‘give her a proper sense and abhorrence of those vices’. Yet despite his heroic efforts to reform his wife’s character, she had embarked on three successive affairs.
Her first lover, Bowes alleged, had been her footman George Walker with whom she had ‘very frequently’ committed adultery during the summer of 1777. Discovering this liaison at the end of the year, Bowes had instantly dismissed the servant, he claimed. The fact that Mary had been on the point of giving birth, by his own contention, that summer and that Walker had actually been dismissed at the end of March, had seemingly escaped his memory. His only evidence for the supposed affair was the testimony of another servant, Eliza Stephens, the former Eliza Planta who had probably been his own mistress at the time. She claimed she had found Walker alone with Mary in her bedchamber. The entire allegation, of course, was pure revenge for Walker’s role in safeguarding Mary’s prenuptial deed. In a vehement denial of any improper relationship, Walker would reveal that Bowes had tried to bribe him to support his cause but declared, ‘I despised his offers! as I despised the Man!’16
Mary’s second lover, the fiction continued, was a house guest named Edward Llewellin who had apparently stayed with the family at St Paul’s Walden Bury in August 1783. The pair had been discovered ‘in the very act of carnal copulation’ on a bench in the garden, Bowes claimed, although he had only learned this shocking revelation after Mary had left him. Scarcely bothering to substantiate this charge, Bowes produced no evidence and no witness. And, of course, there were none since in August 1783, when Bowes was conducting an affair with his son’s wet-nurse Mrs Houghton, Mary was not permitted so much as to walk alone in the garden to view her flowers, let alone cavort there with a lover. In all probability, since nobody in Mary’s acquaintance had any recollection of the name, Llewellin did not exist. But of all the allegations, the most ludicrous, and the most cruel, was the claim that Mary had enjoyed an intrigue with the Gibside gardener Robert Thompson.
According to the charges, Mary had conducted a tempestuous affair with her gardener during the spring of 1784 such that ‘many great and indecent familiarities were seen to pass’ between the pair and they were spotted by two witnesses ‘in the very act of carnal copulation’ in the greenhouse, the garden house and various parts of the garden. Describing this improbable coupling, Joseph Hill, an ostler to the pit ponies, attested that he and his fellow colliery worker, Charles Chapman, had spied on Thompson through a window of the garden house ‘lying upon the body of the said Mary Eleanor Bowes’.
It would have been hard to find a more doting or devoted admirer of Mary than Robert Thompson. Since his appointment in 1782, he had loyally tended her rare botanical specimens, once risking Bowes’s wrath by allowing her to pick a single bloom, and ultimately defying his orders by continuing to nurture her gardens after his dismissal. Equally, it would have been hard to imagine a less likely lover. Wretched with poverty and sickness, infested with lice and racked with rheumatism, Thompson could barely manage to tend the plants let alone engage in athletic couplings between chores. According to fellow servants, Thompson was so unwell in 1784 that he ‘walked almost double’ and was frequently seen to ‘pick the Lice from off his Body and his Cloaths’.17 Utterly in awe of Mary, and having sworn that he would ‘dye on the spott’ in his desperation to rescue her when abducted, Thompson’s highest ambition was simply to serve her by cherishing her garden. Mortified by the accusation, Thompson would attest that he had never once been alone with Mary or even touched her garments except, he poignantly admitted, ‘when her Ladyship might Hand me a pott of Flowers out of her hand which by Chance I might touch her Fingers but never otherwise’.
Transparently
, Bowes’s outrageous slander was punishment for Thompson’s unbending loyalty. The conniving Hill had plainly been bribed to make his testimony while Chapman had only recently been captured for his part in Mary’s abduction. Yet unbelievable as the claim was, the humiliation may well have been the last straw for the poor gardener. Thompson died less than two months after the allegations were broadcast and on his deathbed told a fellow ex-servant, James Smith, that the charge ‘had almost broken his Heart’. So impoverished that he left not even enough money for a funeral, the last rites were paid for by Smith.
Notwithstanding this lurid catalogue of vice, Bowes still maintained his insistence that he wished to stay wedded to his errant spouse. Even more staggering, given the criminal trial hanging over him for abduction, he contended that since their separation - during the very ten days of the countrywide hunt to rescue Mary - they had ‘lived and cohabited together’, sharing bed and board, ‘with mutual consent and forgiveness towards each other’.
Yet if Bowes’s allegations seemed incredible, not to mention his undiminished zeal for the institution of matrimony, his lawyers now produced shocking evidence to support their case: Mary’s own ‘Confessions’. Extorted under threat of violence nine years earlier and jealously guarded by Bowes ever since, Mary’s frank account of her youthful flirtations and adulterous affair with Gray, her several abortions and her secret pregnancy, was ample ammunition to condemn her by her own pen. And it was not only Mary Eleanor whom the revelations could harm, for by exposing the illegitimacy of little Mary in public, the document effectively tainted her reputation too. Previously lodged with the court, it was this extraordinary hundred-page testament that Bowes wished to be read verbatim and had primed the assembled hacks to expect. Unparalleled in their honesty, unprecedented in their first-hand description of attempted and successful abortions, the confessions could easily sway public opinion in Bowes’s favour, as Mary and her followers were only too well aware.
Since the confessions were irrefutably in Mary’s handwriting, there was no question but that they were genuine. Precisely how they had come to be written, however, was the question that exercised the court. Mary Eleanor had already dismissed the document as ‘spurious, most false and scandalous’, while Mary Morgan called it ‘that vile paper extracted from her Ladyship by force & partly dictated by his [Bowes’s] own malicious invention’.18 Mary’s steadfast attorney, James Farrer, had no less hesitation in disregarding the document. In an impassioned defence, sent to his partner Thomas Lacey, Farrer argued: ‘The narrative ascribed to be writ by Lady S. is certainly in her own Hand Writing, which was procured from her Ladyship by threats and menaces, and the fear of Death, at a time her Ladyship was regardless of any thing but quietude, and the wish to avoid that severity of treatment she almost daily experienced, or at least to have it mitigated in some measure, when she was worn down in her spirits, depressed in the extreme, and in a state of despondency from an ill state of Health and a succession of cruelty, which occasioned.’19 Most of the paper had been dictated by Bowes, or at least instructions given as to what it must include, Farrer wrote. And its purpose, he said, was plain. It was a ‘pocket pistol’ kept by Bowes ‘to destroy her Ladyship’s fame, and to harden and steel the Hearts of every one against her Ladyship’.
For the moment, at least, that pistol had misfired. For no sooner had the clerk to the court solemnly read aloud a few pages than the presiding judge ordered him to halt. Decreeing that the document had been obtained under duress and was furthermore unrelated to the facts of the case, Calvert banned any further reporting of its contents. At that point, as the Newcastle Journal related: ‘A little murmur ensued, and three or four short-hand writers, who had seated themselves to take the contents of this choice MS. put up their papers, and marched out of the hall.’20
Yet the bullet still managed to reach its mark. For even the limited details which had emerged and which were greedily repeated in the media were sufficiently scandalous to divide public opinion. ‘A few pages of this extraordinary performance were read in Court,’ the Journal reported, ‘in which her Ladyship confesses she had been guilty of five mortal crimes.’ Leaving its readers to speculate on the precise nature of her sins, the newspaper added: ‘However foreign to the present contest between the Countess and Mr Bowes . . . that part of her narrative, which was recited on Saturday, appeared to be written with a peculiar degree of candour and correctness, and those who have perused it, in general agree, that it is by no means a partial apology for her conduct; but a sincere penitential confession of her transgressions.’ Other newspapers spared their readers no blushes in relating the ‘crimes’ to which Mary had confessed. Inevitably these included The Times which proclaimed: ‘The confession drawn up and signed by Lady Strathmore . . . was perhaps the most extraordinary that ever came before a court of justice.’21 And even though Mary inserted a letter in several newspapers condemning the ‘scandalous paragraphs which have, for a considerable time, daily appeared against me’, the damage was done. The Rover’s Magazine, which published Bowes’s steamy allegations in full, along with a saucy cartoon depicting said countess and gardener in flagrante in the conservatory, sneeringly remarked that Mary had endeavoured to ‘exculpate herself and to intimate that she is almost immaculate’.
Just as Farrer had predicted, airing the confessions succeeded in hardening the hearts of some of Mary’s erstwhile sympathisers. Learning of the latest revelation in his estranged son’s colourful life, George Stoney told a relation that, ‘Lady S. is exerting every possible means to acquit herself of severe charges made against her’ while adding, ‘there certainly has been many faults on both sides’.22 Growing increasingly pious in his advancing infirmity, he argued that divorce was ‘a dangerous Precedent’. Yet when he died the following month, George Stoney’s will divided his sizeable estate among his large family and bequeathed Bowes, his eldest son, a derisory one-ninth share of only £2.
Growing increasingly frustrated by his containment, as he awaited the decision of the Court of Arches, Bowes directed his energies to raising bail. Trying to tap his usually amenable source, he wrote an unctuous letter to the Duke of Norfolk in March. In a cringing attempt to justify his abduction of Mary, he explained: ‘I adopted it, with all the Inconvenience it threatened to myself, merely to remove an Infatuated Woman from the Public Infamy which I knew she must finally suffer, if I did not snatch her from it.’23 Although the scheme had been ‘abhorrent’ to him, he had been persuaded to carry it out by the ‘ardent, persuasive zeal’ of certain friends, he wheedled. Insisting that all Mary’s allegations against him were completely false - ‘sportive dalliance excepted’ he added with an obvious wink to the philandering duke - Bowes implored him to guarantee the necessary sum for his bail. For although he was impatient to prove his innocence at the forthcoming trial, his presence in the north was ‘most essentially necessary in matters of the utmost Importance to my concerns’. Evidently not persuaded by Bowes’s raving protestations of innocence - nor probably by his assurances of a timely return - the duke declined to stump up the cash.
Yet Bowes could still muster wealthy friends with even fewer scruples than the debauched duke. By the end of March he had procured two financiers who were willing to pledge the funds needed to secure his release and, just as he had so ominously declared, he immediately sped north. News that Bowes was once more at liberty came as a severe blow to Mary, already demoralised by her degrading treatment at the hands of the press. ‘The present agitated state of my Mind upon hearing that Mr Stoney has procured Bail, renders me scarce capable of writing coherently,’ she told Colpitts, while Morgan gravely warned him that, ‘you may expect him as soon as horses can bring him to the North’.24
Sure enough, within days Bowes and his cronies had unleashed a new wave of intimidation among Mary’s allies in the north-east, offering bribes to persuade vital witnesses to change their evidence and, if these failed, indicting them for perjury. Thomas Ridgeway, the redoubtable tipstaff, an
d Gabriel Thornton, the valiant ploughman, were among those Bowes charged with perjury; both held firm. Susannah Church, Mary’s former maid, was less resilient; she swore a testimony that Mary lived in fear of Mary Morgan who had organised Mary’s escape for her own pecuniary ends.25 Bowes even pressed perjury charges against Mary Eleanor herself. She only narrowly escaped being arrested to face this allegation by the quick-thinking of James Farrer who hared into court just in time to secure her bail. While the perjury charge further undermined Mary’s credibility in the eyes of the general public, in reality Bowes’s case hinged on the most laughably trivial errors in her testimony. She had accused him of locking her in a ‘dark room’ when Bowes claimed it was a ‘passage’, and of keeping her in a ‘pig sty’ which Bowes insisted was a ‘stable yard’. Ultimately, he would quietly drop the charge.
Swaggering around the north-east flanked by his gang, Bowes convened a bizarre series of hearings - a kind of show trial - which opened on 13 April at the Wheatsheaf Inn in Durham. Over the next ten days he paraded his usual accomplices to swear testimonies invoking his virtues - and Mary’s vices - as evidence both for the divorce case and the abduction trial. Yet the image he strived to create of a loving and faithful husband was somewhat undermined by the fact that his mistress, Mary Gowland, went into labour in the middle of the sessions.26