Wedlock
Page 37
There was fresh anxiety in the New Year but from an unexpected quarter. Despite the waspish vigilance of Elizabeth Parish, her seventeen-year-old charge Anna had been secretly exchanging love letters for almost a year with a debt-ridden young lawyer called Henry Jessop who lived opposite their house in Fludyer Street, a narrow thoroughfare parallel to Downing Street.36 Growing impatient to consummate her clandestine passion, at the end of January 1788 resourceful Anna placed a plank from her bedroom window to that of Jessop’s and crawled across to his waiting arms. Heading straight for Gretna Green the couple married on 28 January.
News of the daring elopement reverberated around the capital. A few days later Mrs Parish’s embarrassment was compounded when the gossip reached the north and the Newcastle Journal revealed: ‘It appears that a correspondence has been carried on for near a twelvemonth past, by means of the servants in each family, yet not the least suspicion was ever entertained by Mrs P.’ With Anna still a ward of Chancery due to inherit a substantial fortune when she came of age - put at £13,000 by one newspaper and £20,000 by another - the scandal brought renewed frustration for Thomas Lyon which for once he could not lay at the feet of his sister-in-law. Forced to make the best of a bad match, he negotiated a generous marriage settlement to help clear young Jessop’s debts.
As Anna rushed blindly into wedlock with a man she scarcely knew, her mother was still struggling to undo the damage wreaked by her own impetuous marriage. It was 8 March, as the spring bulbs pushed defiantly through the overgrown lawns at Gibside and Streatlam, when the fate of the Bowes estate finally came up in Chancery. No stranger to the family’s wrangles, Lord Chancellor Thurlow had previously ordered the couple to return Anna from France; four years later he was faced with their competing claims to the Bowes fortune. Unable to launch a petition in her own name, since wives of course were not normally entitled to own property, Mary had lodged a bill in the name of her trustee, George Stephens, seeking to restore her prenuptial deed of 9 and 10 January 1777. Countering this, Bowes had filed a cross bill claiming that the document was fraudulent since it had been kept secret from him before their marriage and instead asked to confirm the deed of 1 May. Evidently eager to evade the thorny problem, Thurlow referred the case to the Court of Common Pleas for a jury decision - a not uncommon move - on whether the later deed had been extracted under duress.
Two months later, on 19 May, the dispute came before a jury in Westminster Hall. Providing further entertainment for the assembled journalists, Mary’s lawyers rehearsed the sorry story of her marriage and its immediate aftermath. As the hacks scribbled furiously, a succession of witnesses described how Bowes had tricked Mary down the aisle by pretending he was mortally wounded in a ‘sham duel’ then as soon as they were married had subjected her to brutal abuse, forced her to endure the company of prostitutes and curtailed her freedom with tyrannical control.37 Bowes’s former valet, Thomas Mahon, revealed how his erstwhile master had faked his wounds while past servants from the Bowes household described the tell-tale signs of domestic abuse that they had witnessed from the earliest days of the marriage.
By comparison, Bowes’s case was flimsy. Scarcely bothering even to sustain the pretence that the duel had been genuine, Bowes’s lawyer shrugged that since he had been competing for Mary’s hand with his rival Gray then ‘stratagem was fair in love, as well as in war’. Effectively admitting the marital brutality, he argued that even if ‘one or two blows had been given’ that did not prove the deed had been obtained under duress. And resorting again to the medieval principle of the husband’s exclusive power over his wife’s property the lawyer insisted that by Mary’s prenuptial deed Bowes had been ‘defrauded of that absolute power which the law gives the husband over the personal estate of his wife’. But the argument was wearing thin. Any sympathy Bowes might once have evoked for his patriarchal privileges from the all-male jury had long since evaporated in the black cloud of infamy over his well-publicised conduct. His downfall was plainly cast when Lord Loughborough, the Lord Chief Justice, weighed up the two sides united on the fateful day of the marriage: ‘On one side, was a lady, family, and great estates; on the other, a half-pay lieutenant, without fame or fortune.’ He left the jurors in little doubt of the verdict they should bring in when he added: ‘It was a marriage brought about by a fraud; a fraud of such a kind, that had it been practised to obtain a hundred pounds from Lady Strathmore, Mr Bowes must have answered for it criminally.’ Sure enough, without pausing to retire, the jury delivered its verdict that Bowes’s deed of 1 May had been obtained under duress. At that point, the Gentleman’s Magazine related, the entire court erupted in cheers.38 It only remained for Chancery to receive and confirm the verdict, which it did on 19 June, with the ubiquitous Buller standing in for Lord Thurlow. Bowes’s case was dismissed and costs were levied against him.
For married women everywhere, the Chancery decision marked a significant victory in the lengthy progress towards wives’ rights to retain their own property, although it would take almost another century before they could automatically keep any money they had earned during marriage, when the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act was passed, amended twelve years later to encompass all property. 39 For Mary, of course, the verdict was monumental, restoring to her and her heirs the vast and valuable estate which she had inherited from her father at the age of eleven. Finally able to begin paying the substantial accumulated debt due to her lawyers and friends, Mary now enjoyed an independent income for the first time since her widowhood - although naturally Bowes would fight over every penny he owed. And for the tenants, pitworkers and other families so long dependent on the Bowes estate, the outcome was equally vital, bringing security of employment and tenure as well as freedom from intimidation for generations to come. It was little wonder that the verdict was greeted in County Durham with ‘great Rejoycing’, as one of Mary’s supporters, William Watson, gleefully reported.40 No sooner had they heard the news than Watson and his friends marched up to Gibside Hall and threw Joseph Hill out of the house. Taking possession of the mansion in Mary’s name, Watson wrote, ‘we clapd on 15 or 16 Locks’. Turning next to the unpaid pitworkers at the abandoned collieries, Watson set the wagons rolling to transport coal towards the Tyne once again.
Her fortune restored, her safety assured, if not altogether certain, Mary was still legally tethered to Bowes. As the final appeal in the divorce suit loomed, Bowes summoned his usual talents for media manipulation by luring into his power Mary Farrer, the estranged wife of Mary’s sea captain. Having been forced to fend for herself during the captain’s two-year sojourn at sea, Mary Farrer had scarcely seen more of her husband since his return in October 1785. Just as he had spent much of his time with the new object of his affections, Mary Eleanor, so Mrs Farrer had apparently filled her days with admirers of her own. In November 1787, possibly encouraged by Mary Eleanor’s recent legal successes, the captain had persuaded his inconvenient wife to sign a private separation arranged by Thomas Lacey which guaranteed her £100 a year provided she kept at least a hundred miles from London. Realising belatedly that she had been paid off rather too easily, Mrs Farrer had now thrown in her lot with Bowes.
Tirelessly marshalling his affairs from his prison suite, in October 1788 Bowes helped Mrs Farrer publish a pamphlet entitled, with breathtaking irony, The Appeal of an Injured Wife against a Cruel Husband.41 Bearing every hallmark of Bowes’s shameless hand and dedicated ‘To the right Honourable the Countess Dowager of Strathmore’, the sixty-six-page tract spins the story of an innocent wife made wretched by her penny-pinching, violent and philandering husband. Clearly drawing heavily on Bowes’s considerable experience, the pamphlet described the cold-hearted captain striking his wife, threatening her with his pistol and attempting to rape her three sisters while gaily conducting a rapturous affair with his countess. Laughably, at one point, the document even related that Captain Farrer had wished his wife married to Bowes, ‘that I might know the difference between the good treatment I
received from him, and the cruel usage, the poor dear woman, meaning Lady Strathmore, had experienced from Captain Stoney’. Blaming Mary as the ‘principal cause’ of all her anguish, Mrs Farrer ended by swearing that she would prevent any union between the couple. Two months later, on 22 December 1788, Bowes staged a benefit performance for his protégée at the Theatre Royal in Haymarket of Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane in which Mrs Farrer herself played the leading role of the stoical heroine Arpasia who chooses death rather than yield to the tyrannical Turkish emperor Bajazet.42 No doubt audiences relished the unintended farcical elements of Rowe’s tragedy as the captive Arpasia addresses her jailor as ‘brutal ravisher’ and the ‘king of terrors’. Fittingly, the evening concluded with the comedy Who’s the Dupe?
While Bowes championed Mrs Farrer’s cause against her supposedly cruel and adulterous husband, he was also busy limbering up for his last stand against Mary’s case for divorce on grounds of his cruelty and adultery in the Court of Delegates. Established in the aftermath of Henry VIII’s marriage annulments to provide a final point of appeal for ecclesiastical cases once the route to Rome had been severed, the Court of Delegates was an ad-hoc system usually consisting of six judges from both common law and ecclesiastical courts who were appointed to hear each specific case.43 Expensive and rarely used, the delegates court heard only eleven divorce appeals during a thirty-year period in the mid-eighteenth century and few more in later years. Inevitably, Bowes had determined to avail himself of this last-chance opportunity to contest his divorce and, accordingly, six judges had been appointed soon after he had lodged his appeal in 1787. But since the delegates’ system was at least as labyrinthine and laborious as the ecclesiastical courts, it took more than a year for the various witnesses on each side to be interviewed and cross-questioned before finally the case came up for its hearing before the chosen justices on 13 February 1789.
For all Bowes’s excuse that he had previously been denied sufficient time to produce all his witnesses, it was, of course, the familiar line-up of bribed and degenerate characters spouting the usual litany of half-baked claims and outrageous smears that appeared before the judges on the appointed day. Making no attempt to defend himself against the charges of serial adultery and life-threatening abuse, Bowes focused his attack on undermining Mary’s witnesses by branding them prostitutes or alleging that they had been bribed. At the same time he produced the weary round of allegations of extravagance and promiscuity levelled against Mary. In the face of an even longer queue of witnesses for Mary, including servants, estate staff, rape victims as well as several of Bowes’s former friends, such as William Davis, who had grown understandably tired of his incessant cheating and debts, Bowes’s case looked feeble. If even Mary’s own lawyer remarked that ‘broken heads and bloody noses are rather the common consequences of the marriage state’,44 it was no longer deemed reasonable for women to live in a state of abject terror of their husbands. When they reconvened on 2 March, it took the six judges only half an hour to agree that Bowes had committed ‘several acts of cruelty’ as well as ‘the heinous crime of adultery’. And the court duly issued the now incontestable decree that, ‘Andrew Robinson Bowes and Lady Strathmore be divorced, and live separate from each other: but that neither of the parties marry during the natural life of the other of them.’
Still Bowes clung to the last straw of hope having demanded that his Chancery case be reheard under his statutory right of appeal. But the very next day, 3 March, the decision to reinstate the prenuptial deed was confirmed by Lord Chancellor Thurlow. ‘Thus,’ reported the Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘is Lady Strathmore, at length, fully restored to the large possessions of her family, and divorced from a marriage contracted in an evil hour’.45 Blankly refusing to pay the accumulated alimony, legal costs and backdated rents that he now owed, Bowes clung grimly to the Bowes family plate as he sank into a slough of drink and depression. With his debts steadily mounting, he was finally forced to exchange his comfortable and spacious rented house for a room inside the King’s Bench prison.
As news of the double victory reached the village of St Paul’s Walden, the scene of some of Mary’s worst abuses, villagers rang the church bells and struck up music.46 Released at last from the bonds of wedlock, Mary sent an epitaph to Bowes in prison. ‘He was the very enemy of Mankind;/Deceitful to his friends, ungrateful to his benefactors,/ Cringing to his superiors and tyrannical to his dependents.’47 Twelve years after she had been hoodwinked into marrying her charming captain, four years after fleeing her marital home and just a week after her fortieth birthday, Mary was finally free to live as she pleased. Only one challenge remained.
13
Out of the World
Southwark, London, 5 March 1790
Denied all contact with her mother for the past five years, twelve-year-old Mary could hardly believe the news. All her life she had been hidden away. Born in secrecy, a source of bitterness to her bullying father as she grew up, she had borne silent witness to her mother’s cries when she was beaten and to her father’s grunts as he seduced or raped the maids in the nursery where she slept. At six she had been despatched to boarding school and left there while Bowes took her stepsister Anna to France. When her mother fled a year later Mary had been seized by Bowes and removed to a secret location in the care of his stooge Eliza Stephens. And even after Bowes had disowned her as his daughter and exposed her illegitimacy to the world by publicising her mother’s ‘Confessions’, he had kept her close. Now her life was about to change.
Ever since Mary Eleanor had escaped in February 1785, Bowes had bluntly refused her any access to or news of her two youngest children. While he publicly bemoaned the fact that Mary had left him with ‘two poor little helpless Children’ he vindictively deprived them of any communication with their mother. In this, of course, he was entirely within his rights since eighteenth-century law gave fathers absolute control over their children up to the age of twenty-one. Unless separating couples signed a private agreement which specified a right to custody or access, mothers had no recourse in law to see their children - and even then such clauses were sometimes overruled by the courts. So although Bowes was serving a three-year sentence for abduction and had been found guilty of cruelty and adultery, he was acting in full accordance with the law when keeping young William incarcerated in his prison quarters and little Mary under careful guard. Naturally he had no particular interest in William or Mary themselves - any more than he cared about the ever-growing brood of illegitimate children he continued to father. Their value was simply as a bargaining tool with their mother; they were, quite literally, hostages to fortune.
Nevertheless, despite the centuries of legal precedent and the sorry experiences of countless grieving mothers, Mary Eleanor was now resolved to win back her children. Approaches by her lawyers during the several stages of the divorce had come to nothing; Bowes had adamantly refused to relinquish any hold on his charges. But gradually, after her legal victories in 1789, Mary had begun to win a number of important figures to her cause.
First and foremost, her eldest son, the twenty-year-old Lord Strathmore, had pledged to reunite the family. A sensible and sensitive young man, who had spent several years abroad with his regiment, the earl had grown increasingly close to his mother; after a visit from the Continent in early 1789, she had noted plaintively in her scrapbook, ‘my son did come over for 10 days, just to see me.’1 No doubt remembering his own lonely childhood, when he returned to England on army leave that summer, John lent his weight to his mother’s battle to regain William and Mary. As well as the stoical James Farrer, championing her legal business as ever, Mary had won the support of the influential magistrate Sir Sampson Wright. Having succeeded his former boss, Sir John Fielding, as magistrate of the famous Bow Street police office, Wright was a justice of the peace for Middlesex, Essex and Surrey. Even Thomas Lyon, her oldest adversary, now condescended to help her claim. And crucially, that autumn, Mary had secured the help of one of Bowes’s most
loyal collaborators.
Once Mary’s closest confidante, later her fiercest critic, the treacherous Eliza Stephens had not hesitated to testify to the illegitimacy and secret birth of the little girl with whose welfare she had been entrusted from the age of seven. In the wake of Bowes’s court defeats, however, which jeopardised the £200 annuity she had received since leaving the family in 1778, she had evidently surmised that her best interests lay elsewhere. Secretly meeting with Mary and Lord Strathmore at her home in Plympton, Devon, Eliza had been persuaded with the help of a generous donation to divulge vital information about little Mary and her whereabouts. So Mary gleaned that her daughter was being held in a private school, run by a certain Mrs Gilbert, in the hamlet of Newington, just a stone’s throw from Bowes’s prison quarters in Southwark. Since the neighbourhood boasted four prisons, whose inmates were commonly given leave to frequent the abundant local taverns, as well as the Magdalen Hospital for prostitutes, Bowes had evidently not chosen the school for its salubrious surroundings. Rather it allowed him to maintain a rigorous watch on his daughter and her visitors. Vigilantly guarded, Mary was permitted to see only Bowes, her little brother William on occasional excursions from his prison home, and an older sister of Eliza’s referred to as Mrs Baddiley. Her holidays were spent with Eliza in more peaceful environs, if no less degenerate company, in Devon. But now that Bowes no longer received sufficient income to pay her school fees, little Mary’s future seemed uncertain.