by Wendy Moore
Having ardently maintained his attentions throughout Mary’s kidnap ordeal and subsequent courtroom dramas, Captain Farrer had faded from the scene. Whether the revelations about his marriage had tarnished Mary’s interest or the adventurer had simply decided to seek his fortune elsewhere, in December 1790 the captain resumed his position at the helm of the True Briton and set sail for Madras.19 On his return, in 1792, he paused in Britain long enough to sue his wife successfully in the ecclesiastical court for separation on the grounds of her adultery; after a further two-year absence at sea he would win a full divorce in the House of Lords in 1796. In any case, even if the captain would eventually free himself from his marital ties sufficiently to marry again, Mary Eleanor would never be granted that privilege; while Bowes was alive, she was not permitted to remarry. Her captain having disappeared over the horizon, there would be nobody to replace him. Instead, Mary relished the quiet triumph of her newfound independence in the carefree company of her two youngest children, her indispensable companion Mary Morgan, a small band of faithful servants and an assortment of pets. In her last portrait, painted by an unknown artist in the grounds of St Paul’s Walden Bury in 1791, she stands relaxed and smiling wearing an elaborate gown and sporting an improbably tall hairstyle, with a favourite dog at her feet and a flowering sprig in her hand.20 Yet if Mary hoped to fade quietly from public scrutiny, Bowes would make sure that she did not.
Losing his liberty, his income and his children had done nothing to improve Bowes’s temper. Since losing his claim to Mary’s fortune, he had sunk into a ‘complete state of despondency’, according to Foot, still pandering to his patient’s pretended ailments.21 The final divorce decision had been ‘another deadly blow’ and he had then been ‘stunned with the thunder of excommunication’, the surgeon recorded. Yet for all his genuine or feigned melancholy, Bowes still commanded the best room in the prison where he divided his time between corrupting vulnerable young women and enticing gullible young attorneys into continuing his legal battles.
Having abandoned Mary Gowland shortly after she had given birth to his latest offspring, Bowes had soon found a new target for his lust. The teenage daughter of a fellow prisoner, who happened to own a considerable estate, Mary or ‘Polly’ Sutton had caught Bowes’s eye when she visited her father. Applying his customary seduction technique, he charmed his prey with flattery and presents. When Polly fell ill with a fever, he sent Foot to tend her; the surgeon found her ‘feeding a pigeon with split peas out of her mouth’ and described her as ‘a girl of perfect symmetry, fair, lively, and innocent’. Making no attempt to preserve Polly’s innocence by warning her of her admirer’s depravity, Foot observed silently as Bowes duly seduced the girl and brought her to live with him in jail. If his treatment of Mary had made Bowes notorious, his most pitiful victim must surely have been young Polly whose voice would never be heard. Hiring a room for her, to which Bowes alone had a key, he kept Polly confined day and night; she was, effectively, the prisoner of a prisoner. In her lonely cell, she bore Bowes five children, all of whom shared her confinement. Never permitted to attend the dinners Bowes threw for fellow inmates, she lived the life of a recluse. Occasionally Foot caught a glimpse of her, when Bowes called him to treat one of the children, but found it impossible to speak to her since ‘Bowes was always present, hurried the visit as much as possible, locked the door, and took the key in his pocket’. Polly, who would remain with Bowes for the rest of his life, effectively became his third wife and was treated accordingly - subject to extreme domestic violence and blatant infidelity. But Bowes had not yet forgotten his second wife.
Sustained only by his army half-pay and a paltry income from his Irish property but with mounting debts and more mouths to feed, Bowes was desperate to raise funds. With his usual flair for media exploitation, in April 1793 he published in full Mary’s ‘Confessions’. Reproduced from the original lodged at Doctors’ Commons six years earlier, The Confessions of the Countess of Strathmore sold for 2s 6d. Parading Mary’s ‘crimes’ and ‘imprudencies’ for public titillation once again, Bowes’s marketing campaign dug up the names of a host of other characters who would no doubt have preferred their roles in the Bowes drama to have been forgotten. An advertisement in The Star announced that the book promised ‘many curious Particulars’ on a cast of notables including the Duke of Buccleuch, Charles Fox, Joseph Planta and Thomas Lyon.22
Refusing to rise to the bait, Mary inserted notices in London and regional newspapers attempting to draw a line under the entire sorrowful episode. ‘Having too long trespassed on the Public relative to matters in which I reluctantly intrude myself upon them,’ she wrote, ‘I shall take leave of Mr Bowes and his productions for ever; not thinking it necessary, in future, to take the least notice of any subject which may be introduced into print, either by himself, or through any other channel he may think proper to employ.’23 She stayed true to her word. But although Mary tried her utmost to ignore the fresh reminder of her past indiscretions, publication of the unexpurgated ‘Confessions’ fostered an image of her as a licentious, extravagant and flighty fool with which she would be branded for posterity.
For her daughter Mary, who reached sixteen in 1793, the timing could not have been worse. Her illegitimacy and clandestine birth exposed again at the very moment that she was ready to make her debut on the London scene most probably scuppered her chances in the marriage market for good. Young Mary had gone to stay with a family friend, called Mrs Ogilvy, in fashionable Chelsea for the winter season of 1793-4; although her mother eschewed the gossip-driven metropolitan social life, she evidently did not want to deprive her daughter of her introduction into society. The artist Joseph Farington bumped into the debutante at a dance in April 1794 and recorded in his diary: ‘Miss Bowes, a daughter of Lady Strathmore by Mr Bowes, came with Mrs Ogleby [sic] of Chelsea, with whom she resides.’24 Yet while she would continue to enjoy a party well into her old age, Mary would never marry.
Studiously avoiding city revels and society gossip as incredulous readers pored over her past, Mary Eleanor absorbed her days with her pets and her poems at Purbrook Park. Her eclectic collection of animals included numerous cats and dogs, a donkey, a talking parrot and a tame robin named ‘Bob’ that lived uncaged in her bedroom. With Morgan as her amanuensis, she composed poetry on mundane domestic issues and topical current affairs, ranging from a ditty on Mrs Ogilvy’s four kittens to a translation into poetry of Thomas Erskine’s speech defending Thomas Paine.25 In early 1794 she struck up a poetical correspondence with Katherine Bentley, whose daughter shared lodgings with young Mary in town, which continued in verse for the next eighteen months. While Mary regaled her new literary friend with news of her family, her animals and her health, Mrs Bentley responded with titbits on their daughters and city affairs - all in light-hearted doggerel. Detached from society, Mary acknowledged her increasing estrangement from contemporary life. Confessing that she no longer took any interest in fashion, she declared: ‘How eccentric I am you can’t think,/(How wide from the Bulk of Mankind,)/At many Great faults you must wink,/And some virtues I trust you will find.’ Instead of binding curls, Mary revealed, her maid was now kept busy binding manuscripts.
Evidently the strain of her past torments was still being felt, exacerbated by a serious coach accident the previous year in which Mary had lost three teeth, Morgan had been badly hurt and a fellow passenger had been killed.26 Apologising to Mrs Bentley for her indisposition, Mary revealed in April 1794 that her legs were so painful that, ‘I seldom can Walk’. And in an affecting description of the long-term consequences of her abuse, she wrote: ‘I fear you would shrink/Could you only once think/What Object you’ll meet with in me;/Who, tho’ not very old,/Am by Blows & by Cold,/More batter’d than Ships come from Sea./Some years ‘twas my potion/to sail on an Ocean/Of Horrors, of Tears, & of Grief,/When I lost my Main-mast/But was landed at last/Too late, though, I found for relief.’
That summer, as Europe was engulfed in war and her so
ns George and Thomas both enlisted in the army, Mary moved temporarily back to St Paul’s Walden Bury where she was joined by ‘my Girls’ - most probably Mary and Anna. In September Mrs Bentley came to stay, although their lyrical exchange continued throughout the visit and carried on after Mrs Bentley returned to London. When the whole household was stricken by sickness in December, Mary’s physicians feared she would not recover but by Christmas she was sufficiently restored to embrace the New Year with a cheery: ‘Let gay ninety-five with fresh garlands be crown’d.’
Reliving the past trials she had suffered at St Paul’s Walden Bury and elsewhere, Mary now embarked on a ‘narrative’ which described in more than three hundred pages of harrowing detail the barbarities she had suffered during her marriage and abduction. Prefaced with a warning that the events she related were ‘so uncommon as to stagger the belief of Posterity’, she may have intended the text for publication, perhaps as a counterpoint to the ‘Confessions’. Finishing her narrative in February 1795, as she packed to move one last time, Mary looked forward to ‘a period not very distant, when I have the best prospect of being able to seat myself in some pleasant and cheerful retirement for the remainder of my days, in the Enjoyment of every Comfort, and amusement, a rational Being can desire, and with a most consummate Contempt for all those airy, and what perhaps may be justly stiled those vicious Bubbles, which the Fools and Rogues of the present age, agree to decorate with the false name of Pleasure’. After a summer spell in seaside lodgings, Mary moved that autumn into Stourfield House, a rambling mansion on a remote country estate bordering the Hampshire coast, where she hoped she would find the peace that she craved.
Built in 1766 as the country seat of a wealthy barrister, Stourfield House suited Mary’s purposes perfectly. Sitting on a small rise about half a mile from the beach, with a fine view of Christchurch Harbour nearly three miles to the south-east, the house was sheltered by a plantation of trees.27 Bounded by the sea to the south, the River Stour to the east, the estate stretched twelve miles northwards across farmland and heath towards the chalk hills of Dorset and the fringes of the New Forest in the distance. An isolated and romantic spot, almost impregnable to unwelcome visitors and remote from prying neighbours, it proved ideal. Here, Mary told one friend, she could feel ‘as if she were out of the world’.
Arriving in her coach in October 1795, accompanied by her daughters Anna and Mary, her friend Mary Morgan and her establishment of servants, Mary caused something of a stir in the usually uneventful life of the quiet neighbourhood. Inevitably, her reputation had preceded her. Mary Dale, the wife of a tenant farmer, Henry Dale, was already aware that Mary had suffered ‘great trials’ on account of her ‘very cruel and unkind husband’. Cut off from friends and family in London and Durham, Mary had few visitors. Her sons came occasionally; Anna sometimes stayed with her girls. But with her beloved daughter Mary by her side, Morgan as her companion and a brood of dogs at her feet, she needed no further company. Although she remained aloof from the local gentry, Mary won hearts and minds among the country folk for her generosity, making firm friends with the Dales and distributing soup among the poor several times a week.
Yet Mary had scarcely settled into her coastal idyll before her newfound serenity was shattered. After indifferent health for several months, on 17 January 1796, Mary Morgan died, aged just forty-six. She was buried in the Lady Chapel of Christchurch Priory where Mary erected a memorial to the ‘Heroic Qualities’, the ‘Cool, deliberate Courage’ and the ‘matchless persevering Friendship’ of the faithful maid who had rescued her from the depths of misery.28 According to Mrs Dale, Mary ‘never could get over’ Morgan’s death, ‘it seemed to press so heavy on her mind’.
Further distress arrived that October when Mary heard that Bowes was launching a fresh legal assault. Living ‘out of the world’ just like Mary, though not through choice, Bowes fretted over his depleted finances and his claim to Mary’s former fortune. Changing his attorneys as often as he changed his mistresses, he now appealed to the House of Lords against the Chancery decision on the prenuptial deed. It took the peers little time to affirm the Chancery verdict at which point they made clear their disdain by charging Bowes £150 costs and issuing a vituperative indictment of his challenge. Remarking that every step he had taken to acquire his marital rights had been ‘grossly fraudulent’, the law lords asserted: ‘That if it be possible to conceive the Husband, of all others, who ought the least to be permitted to question any such Dispositions made by a Wife, the Appellant is that Husband.’29
Merely emboldened by their contempt, in December Bowes concocted a new suit to Chancery based on another supposed deed of revocation which, apparently, he had just remembered that Mary had signed in November 1781 in front of a witness who was conveniently now dead. This deed, which Bowes had subsequently lost, entitled him to a third of two farms in County Durham, or so he claimed. Ludicrous as his case might seem, inevitably the challenge involved further legal wrangling, renewed witness statements and more anxiety for Mary. Struggling to remember where she was on the days in question, Mary despaired that many of her former witnesses - including poor Morgan - were now dead. Keen to avoid a trip to London on account of ‘my deranged finances & present bad health’, she hoped the case would quickly be quashed.30 Incredibly, the arguments would rumble on for a further ten years. Hinging on a legal loophole concerning a codicil to George Bowes’s will, the case was referred in 1798 to the King’s Bench, which found in Bowes’s favour. An appeal by Mary and Lord Strathmore to the House of Lords the following year failed so that once again Bowes had his hands on a share of Mary’s fortune and a claim to unpaid rent. Ultimately, when Bowes reasserted his claim to the farms - Lord Strathmore having ignored the outcome - the case would come before the Court of Common Pleas in 1807 when the entire story of the sham duel would be thrashed out once more and Bowes’s suit finally dismissed.
Her peace of mind fractured by Bowes’s tireless legal challenges, her health still scarred by his years of abuse and her spirits sapped by the loss of her companion, Mary was becoming increasingly frail and eccentric. Lavishing attention on her many dogs, Mary ensured that each had its own bed and was treated to a hot dinner every day. When one went missing in 1798, she circulated handbills offering £10 reward. The poor animal was found dead on the heath by Farmer Dale and was tenderly carried back to the house in a basket. When Dale declined the reward - ‘because of the great kindness she had always shown his wife and himself’ - Mary insisted that he take refreshments at the house whenever he wished. From that point on she frequently ordered her servants to take a cooked dinner and beer to the farmer when she saw him working in the fields nearby. And for all her strange ways, the farmer’s son, Richard Dale, insisted, ‘no person could be more respected and beloved than Lady Strathmore’.
That same year Mary was reported to be so ill that doctors despaired of her survival; one newspaper reported that she had been ‘given over by her Physicians’.31 Although she confounded the doctors, she was becoming increasingly preoccupied with her health. Her spirits depressed, she began inviting Mary Dale to the house for frequent discussions about the arrangements for her funeral. In 1799, she asked the Dales and her gardener, George White, to witness amendments to her will. The dawn of the new century brought no improvement, and on 28 April 1800, at Stourfield House, Mary died. Her final illness unrecorded, her cause of death would remain unknown, though her weakened health would have left her easy prey to any number of the period’s lethal contagious diseases. She was just fifty-one years old. Days later Richard Dale, an observant boy of five, watched in wonder as the horse-drawn hearse bearing Mary’s body, followed by three mourning coaches containing her grieving family, clattered slowly down the winding drive to begin the long journey to London.
Mary was buried, at her own request, in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, close to the graves of Chaucer, Spenser and Dryden, on 10 May.32 If she could not achieve greatness as a poet in life, she would dwell
with great poets in death. Curiously, for someone who had suffered two wretched marriages, she was buried - at her own wish - in the magnificent jewelled wedding dress she had worn for her first marriage at the age of eighteen. One further request, by far the most fitting, was never carried out. In her will Mary had asked for a statue to be erected at her grave. Although she had grown up under the gaze of Lady Liberty on top of her majestic column, it was not a statue to liberty but the blindfolded figure of Justice that Mary desired to stand guard at her tomb. Having lost and regained her freedom in the most extraordinary circumstances over the course of her remarkable lifetime, few could have set a higher price on the value of liberty. And yet, as she was well aware, it was only through the fundamental principles of justice that her liberty had finally been secured.
In the Age of Enlightenment, when brilliant thinkers and daring innovators, both men and women, were rightly revered, Mary Eleanor Bowes had the potential to achieve great things. Having been born into wealth, blessed with the best education of the day and, encouraged by her progressive father, grown up confident and ambitious, she could have won acclaim as a talented writer and linguist, an accomplished botanist or a prominent scientific patron. But if her personal aspirations were stifled by her first husband, they were strangled by the next.