Wedlock (10 page)

If Stoney’s fiery temper and reputation for debauchery were well known within his regiment, in polite company he took pains to present himself as well-mannered, attentive and generous - in short, the perfect officer and gentleman. Escorting Hannah to social occasions throughout the autumn and winter, Stoney flattered her incessantly, showered her with gifts and gave ostentatiously large tips to servants in a determined effort to inflate his family’s perceived wealth and his own expectations of fortune. Running up even higher debts than usual, which he had no means of paying on his scant ensign’s pay, Stoney had to beg his father for handouts which were forwarded from Ireland with reluctance. By the beginning of 1768, Hannah was besotted with her passionate and well-connected Irish gentleman whom she was determined to marry at the earliest opportunity. But the course of true love - as it certainly seemed to be for Hannah if not for her intended bridegroom - did not run smooth and the couple had to cool their ardour as their desired union encountered a series of obstacles.

Both aged twenty in early 1768, Hannah and Stoney still required parental consent in order to marry. This was no problem for Stoney, whose father was understandably keen to see his errant son settled. Hannah’s mother, Catherine Newton, proved equally easy to handle. Convinced by Stoney’s conveniently distant claims to fortune, the widow had no suspicions about the charismatic officer her plain daughter introduced as her suitor. More troublesome, Hannah’s inheritance was overseen by guardians who were bound by a clause in her father’s will which stipulated that her future husband must own property providing an income of at least £50 a year to inherit the Newton fortune.
¹⁸
Just like George Bowes, William Newton had been determined to manipulate his only daughter’s future from beyond the grave. Although Stoney pressed Hannah to elope with him to Gretna Green - only a tantalising day’s journey from Newcastle - he was soon deterred from this plan by the realisation that she would thereby forfeit her inheritance. Further difficulties arose in the shape of Hannah’s uncle, Samuel Newton, who held a half-share in parts of the Burnopfield estate, and who was not so easy to convince. Angling to marry Hannah to his own son, Matthew, and thereby keep his brother’s fortune entirely within the family, he vowed to do all in his power to prevent the match to ‘that damned Irishman’.
¹⁹

Exhibiting the typical anti-Irish prejudice of the day, Uncle Sam was not alone in branding Irishmen as fortune hunters. A satirical pamphlet published in Dublin in the 1740s went so far as to list the various landed heiresses available for pursuit in England, under the title
The Irish Register: or a list of the Duchess Dowagers, Countesses, Widow Ladies, Maiden Ladies, Widows, and Misses of large fortunes in England
.
²⁰
And the stereotype was not without some foundation, since several Irish landowners and their heirs did cross to Britain in a bid to secure an English heiress as a route to money, power and influence on the mainland. What Uncle Sam could not have predicted was that Andrew Robinson Stoney, fictionalised as
Barry Lyndon
, would come to epitomise the type.

By March, Stoney was desperate to capture his quarry. Knowing his regiment was shortly due to march northwards to Scotland, he was horrified at the prospect of the Newton riches slipping through his hands. In a series of alternately wheedling and vituperative letters to Tipperary, Stoney begged his father to settle sufficient of the family property on him to satisfy the terms of William Newton’s will.
²¹
When his father declined - well aware of his son’s aversion to maintaining an Irish estate - Stoney staged a revealing piece of play-acting which he gleefully related in his next letter home. Brandishing his father’s refusal to a distressed Hannah and her mother, he made a show of resigning himself to his sorry fate like a true gentleman, releasing Hannah from all obligations to him, then ‘took my Hatt, & wished her a good Morning’. It was all a cunning performance, for as Stoney explained: ‘You may be assured I had no intention of going, for I well knew I would not be permitted. However, with the help of a few Tears, I was prevailed on to remain with her.’ Now he piled the pressure on his father to comply with his request, pleading that only the transfer of the desired property stood between him and ‘a woman I love & regard’ who would, furthermore, ‘be a credit to our family, as well for her accomplishments as, without doubt, a fortune as large - above twenty thousand pounds - as I cou’d ever expect to get.’ Warning that, rather like a livestock investment, ‘so good an opportunity may never happen to any of our family again’, Stoney appealed simultaneously to his father’s romantic instincts and his avarice, arguing that, ‘I love the lady sufficiently well (was I independant) to marry her without any fortune; therefore how much more happy must I be when I can get her with so good a one’.

Further letters followed in rapid succession, as the regiment prepared to march and Stoney grew increasingly fraught. By May George Stoney had relented and was drawing up title deeds for his son, although Hannah’s guardians still needed to be satisfied that the promised property would provide the requisite £50 annual income. As he celebrated his twenty-first birthday in June, being now able to marry as he wished, Stoney secured three months’ leave to stay behind in Newcastle and clinch the deal. Urging his father to hurry with the necessary legal requirements, he pointedly reminded him that ‘a woman a man loves with a fortune of at least Twenty Thousand Pounds should not be trifled with’. If any doubt remained, the capital letters made plain his true interest. On tenterhooks, Stoney continued the expensive business of wooing Hannah and was livid in July when his father’s bankers in Edinburgh refused to honour a bill he had submitted. Protesting to his father, he insisted that his expenses were ‘absolutely necessary for a young man paying his addresses to a Lady with Twenty Thousand Pounds fortune’. Itemising costs which must have horrified the penny-pinching farmer, Stoney explained: ‘I have attended with this lady at all Publick divertions within fifty miles of Newcastle, I have had two Horses, it has cost about Fifty Pounds for different presents, besides at first Fees to servants, & many other expenses attending such a scheme.’ With an agent now despatched to Ireland by Hannah’s guardians to check out her suitor’s supposed means, Stoney was more anxious than ever to secure his father’s compliance, assuring him that once married his only wish was ‘to be settled near my parents’.

By now Stoney’s mask was beginning to fall. Having written what even he admitted was an ‘extremely rude’ letter to the bank, he was forced to eat humble pie and write them an apology in September. The pain this afforded him says much about his uncompromising self-belief. ‘I do assure you it hurts my spirit not a little,’ he told his father, ‘as I believe it to be the first acknowledgement I ever made in my life, except to a Parent; which, perhaps, you will say I am nothing the better for.’ But he could not contain his fury at such indignity since, as he complained to his father, if news that he had had a bill refused had become known in Newcastle ‘many people here would have been happy at the account’ which would have lent credence to their ‘unjust Reports’. Evidently Stoney’s high-handed conduct and transparent aims had generated unsavoury rumours and spawned enemies in the city which had so recently welcomed him. He dealt with them in the manner which would become customary to him: brutally. ‘I think they are now at an end,’ he informed his father, ‘though I believe it to be more owing to fear than regard to me, as I have brought every person that I could find out that mentioned my name to a severe account, & obliged them to beg my Pardon in the most penitent manner.’

Hints were emerging that even Hannah herself now harboured doubts about her impetuous beau for she had expressed a desire to settle near Greyfort after the marriage, Stoney wrote, ‘in order to have my Father to govern me’. There was little danger that George Stoney would ever govern his eldest son, but then neither did Stoney have any intention of moving back to Ireland. However, as Hannah’s guardians had finally declared themselves satisfied with the young ensign’s credentials, there was no going back. Indeed, as Stoney had skilfully made certain, the young lovers had been so much in each other’s company that - according to Georgian society’s strict codes of conduct - their marriage was ‘looked upon as impossible to be avoided with propriety on either side’. Ordered to rejoin his regiment by mid-October, Stoney begged his obliging uncle, Colonel Robinson, to secure him a few more crucial weeks’ leave, ‘for it is impossible I can think of going before I

am marry’d’. With his paralysed prey just within his grasp, Stoney was even prepared to resign from the regiment rather than leave Newcastle a bachelor.

At last, on 5 November 1768, Stoney hurried Hannah down the aisle of St Andrew’s Church in Newcastle to sign the marriage register and seal her destiny. Just eighteen months after he had breached the city walls, the young soldier had captured one of the town’s richest heiresses and claimed his fortune - for under Georgian law, as Stoney well knew, every last item of Hannah’s property now belonged entirely to him, at least during her lifetime. The local newspapers reported the match, with full details of the prize, almost with incredulity. ‘Saturday was married in this town, Mr And. Robison [sic] Stoney, an ensign in the fourth regiment of foot, to Miss Newton, daughter of the late Mr Will. Newton; a young lady possessed of a very large fortune,’ announced the
Newcastle Journal
, while the
Newcastle Chronicle
referred to the bridegroom as ‘Capt. Stoney’, a title which the ensign found he rather liked.
²²
Writing to his father on his wedding day, Stoney announced: ‘I have the pleasure to inform my dear Father that my long-wished-for Happiness was this morning compleated by adding to our Family a woman whom I have reason to think will in every particular be agreeable.’
²³
Obsequiously respectful for the most part - for he was still drawing bills on his father’s account - Stoney let his guard drop momentarily in declaring that the estate his father had dutifully bought for the newly weds was ‘not worth sixpence’. Confident that his father would ‘find some more advantageous Purchase for us’, Stoney enclosed a promissory note for £500, to cover the large amounts he owed his father, which he hoped to be in a position to honour shortly. It was never drawn.

There was scarcely time to move his few belongings into his new family seat at Cole Pike Hill in County Durham, and survey the surrounding farms and valuable woodland he now owned, before Stoney had to kiss his bride goodbye and dash north to rejoin his regiment in Scotland.
²⁴
At just twenty-one, the ensign had become a wealthy landowner and a member of the gentry with farms and mines guaranteed to provide a handsome quarterly income. By Christmas he was celebrating his newfound riches and status with his army fellows in Edinburgh.

Money opened many doors. Marching across the Scottish lowlands, quartered in taverns during the harsh winter, under canvas in summer, Stoney could afford to employ a valet, one John Smith, to assume the laborious tasks of looking after his uniform and tending to his horses. But riches did nothing to smooth his temper. Setting out from Perth to Stirling at one point in 1769, Stoney horsewhipped Smith because - Stoney claimed - he was too drunk to continue the march. When the valet threatened to bring the law on him, Stoney was so incensed that he gave him a ‘few more lashes with his whip’ for insolence. Smith’s complaint - it is not clear to which court or what the outcome was - did nothing to hinder his master’s advancement. At the end of the year, Stoney was promoted to lieutenant and shortly afterwards transferred to the 30th Regiment of Foot.
²⁵

For all his preferment, Stoney saw little of military life during his army career. By dint of his fortune and his influence with his high-ranking military relatives, he was frequently granted leave from his regiment to tend to his business matters in England and Ireland. So while the regiment built roads and aided civil forces in Scotland in 1769 and 1770, Stoney visited Ireland, presumably to introduce his ‘agreeable’ wife to the Stoney clan, although needless to say, the newly weds did not settle near Greyfort.
²⁶
Dividing the remainder of his time between Newcastle and Bath - where Hannah frequently repaired for her health - he left his Durham estates in the hands of agents. The first agent, who managed the farms and mines from the manor hall at Cole Pike Hill - commonly described as Cold Pig Hill - happened to be Rowland Stephenson, whose two brothers both worked at Gibside only eight miles away.

Squandering the income collected from his farms and mines, Stoney dealt meanly with his agents and dodged demands from his creditors. While Stoney enjoyed elegant lodgings and fine food in Bath, Rowland Stephenson grumbled into his accounts over the £5 - a huge sum to a poor family - his master had refused to pay him for accommodation.
²⁷
Stephenson did not live to grumble much longer; he died in 1770 and was succeeded by another unfortunate agent, Robert Morrow. When storms prevented the coal-carrying ships from leaving the Tyne for longer than normal one bleak winter - spreading destitution throughout the region - Stoney pressed his agent to harass the starving tenants for their rents. Morrow, who was faring little better than the desperate tenants, pledged to try his best but warned that ‘a general poverty reigns amongst us’.
²⁸
And while Stoney ran up hefty bills for new items of uniform and other luxuries he led his creditors a merry chase for payment. One poor trader pursued him for a bill of £100 over several years.
²⁹
While running up large amounts of credit was commonplace and widely accepted in the eighteenth century, especially among the land-rich, cash-poor aristocracy, Stoney saw it as a matter of principle never to settle a debt until creditors either gave up or threatened him with imprisonment. Often, it was later said, he would jingle loose change in his pockets when making a purchase to hoodwink traders into believing he was flush with cash.
³⁰
But if Stoney’s tenants, servants and creditors suffered under his severe regime, they would count themselves lucky compared to his wife.