Wedlock (14 page)

When Mary went into labour towards the end of April, probably at Grosvenor Square, her mother was at her side. It was an agonising, long and, consequently, dangerous labour lasting almost twenty-four hours. Finally, on the evening of 21 April, a weary Mrs Bowes scrawled a note to staff at Streatlam Castle: ‘I have the happiness to inform you that this Evening, at half an hour after six, my dear child was deliver’d of a Daughter, after a most painful, & tedious Labour. She & the child are as well as can be expected. I can say no more having been up all last night, & my spirits quite exhausted.’
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The baby was named Maria Jane and baptised in St George’s in Hanover Square, where her parents had married and Mary herself had been christened.

Pregnant again within three months, Mary sought diversion in a trip to Paris that winter with Lord Strathmore’s sister, Lady Susan Lambton. Just a year after her daughter’s birth, on 13 April 1769, she gave birth in London to her first son, heir to both his parents’ estates, after a considerably easier delivery. Named John, after his father - his surname Bowes according to his late grandfather’s will - the new Lord Glamis was pronounced ‘a strong, healthy child’ by his relieved grandmother, who informed staff at Streatlam that her daughter was ‘Thank God, perfectly recover’d’.
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According to the housekeeper at Grosvenor Square, relaying the news to Gibside, the little boy was ‘a most delightful sweet Babe’ who had ‘made all our hearts over flow with joy’. Both the heir and his sister were inoculated for smallpox later that year when Lady Maria, who was also teething, ‘had the worst of it’. She was happy enough the following spring, when Gray called on the family in London. ‘I saw my Ld & Tom the other day at breakfast in good health,’ he told Brown, ‘& Lady Maria did not beat me, but giggled a little.’
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Mary Eleanor would pride herself on the fact that all five of her children during her marriage to Lord Strathmore were his.
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A second daughter, named Anna Maria, was born on 3 June 1770, followed by two more boys, George on 17 November 1771, and Thomas on 3 May 1773. The legitimacy of her children was no modest claim. It was not uncommon for aristocratic couples in Georgian times to condone infidelity rather than suffer the unspeakable scandal of a divorce, usually after a legitimate heir - and preferably one or two spares - had been produced. Some husbands, and many more wives, allowed their partners freedom to take lovers as long as any illegitimate children were delivered discreetly and kept out of sight. Lord and Lady Melbourne, who married in 1769, were a typical example. After their son was born a year after the marriage, Lord Melbourne took a well-known courtesan as his lover while his ambitious wife began affairs with several powerful figures, including the Prince of Wales.
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At least three of her five children were believed to have been fathered by her lovers. Other husbands were less forgiving. While Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, welcomed her husband’s illegitimate offspring into the nursery, when she became pregnant by her lover she was forced to give birth abroad and have her daughter adopted. Lady Sarah Bunbury was notable for bucking the trend. Childless by her husband after many years, she became pregnant by her lover and in 1769 eloped with him rather than pass the child off as the legitimate heir, prompting Princess Amelia, George III’s aunt, to remark that the idea of not imposing an illegitimate son on a husband was ‘quite new’.
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Yet despite Mary’s unfashionable fidelity early in the marriage, the swift arrival of her young family failed to cement her relationship with the earl or to inspire maternal fulfilment. Of their five children, she took an inexplicable dislike to her three sons - especially the eldest - giving obvious preference to her daughters. Lord Strathmore would later condemn her for ‘that most unnatural prejudice you have against your eldest innocent son’ while accusing her of ‘foolish partiality for your daughters’. Reasonably enough he would argue: ‘All children should rank equally in a parent’s mind, at least untill they have forfeited that regard which was due to them from their Birth, favour is commonly more hurtful to the child than the contrary, but either without reason, is an infallible mark of the badness of the Parents heart.’
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Far from denying any bias, Mary would admit that she harboured an ‘unnatural dislike to my eldest son, for faults which, at most, he could only be the innocent cause and not the author of’.
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Enemies would later suggest she preferred her pet cats and dogs - on which she lavished attention - to her children and claim she had described her eldest son as ‘that odious & detested little Lord’.

In fact, in line with typical parenting practices among the landed classes in eighteenth-century Britain, Mary probably spent more time and enjoyed a more physical relationship with her pets than with her children, especially her sons. From birth, her children would have been nursed, petted, dressed and groomed by all manner of different hands except those of their parents. Like Mary herself, her babies were undoubtedly handed to a wet-nurse to be breastfed from the moment they were born. Although wet-nursing had been criticised by a few enlightened voices, it was still routine among upper- and middle-class families in the 1770s. A decade later, when Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, would defiantly breastfeed her daughter, the decision was still so remarkable that the
Rambler’s Magazine
commented: ‘Her grace deserves commendation for this, but it is rather a reflection on the sex, that females in high life, should generally be such strangers to the duty of a mother, as to render one instance to the contrary so singular a phenomenon.’
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Having lost the opportunity to bond with her babies during feeding, there would be little chance for Mary to grow close to them later on. As they grew up, the children would be cared for by nursemaids and a battalion of other servants - little Maria had her own footman by the age of three - and taught by governesses and private tutors. The children had their own nurseries at Gibside, Grosvenor Square and - after further renovations began in 1773 - at Glamis, where the wet-nurses and nursery maids slept alongside their charges. From the age of seven the boys would be sent to private boarding school and the girls would follow soon after. It was little wonder, therefore, that many parents felt remote from their children and that some actively disliked their offspring. Indeed, both George II and George III, along with Queen Charlotte, expressed extreme distaste for their eldest sons.

Yet despite such obstacles, many Georgian parents still enjoyed fond relationships with their children. Indeed Mary would later sincerely repent her aversion to her son John, describing it as the first of her ‘crimes’.
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And there may well have been other reasons for her difficulties. It is possible that, in favouring her daughters, Mary was attempting to compensate for their second-class status in Georgian society just as her own father had done. For all that Lord Strathmore had urged that children should ‘rank equally’ with their parents, there is no doubt that his sons - the natural heirs - were held in higher esteem than his daughters. When Georgiana gave birth to her first daughter, the
Morning Herald
reflected contemporary reactions by reporting that the ‘happy occasion’ was ‘perhaps a little impaired by the sex of the infant’.
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Celebrations to mark the birth of Lord Glamis, the heir, included extravagant revels at Glamis - when nineteen bottles of port, eight bottles of rum and copious other beverages were consumed and several ‘Brocken Glasses’ ensued - as well as a poem commissioned by Uncle Thomas.
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Nothing comparable had marked the birth of the first-born Maria. To make matters worse, Mary was ill soon after her second or third pregnancy - later she could not remember which - with what she described as ‘convulsions’. These attacks, which she would suffer all her life, may have been epileptic fits although - given the inexact science of contemporary medical diagnosis - they could equally have been any number of complaints. It is quite conceivable too that she suffered from postnatal depression. She was, after all, just twenty-four by the time she had had five children, having been pregnant almost continually since she was eighteen.

Spending little time with her infants, Mary threw herself into her twin passions of writing and botany, despite her husband’s disparagement. Lord Strathmore would later criticise her ‘extreme rage for litrary fame’ in the hope of convincing her of the ‘futility of the pursuit’.
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Soon after her marriage, the scholarly earl forbade her from attending Elizabeth Montagu’s blue-stocking gatherings, making her break with her friend in what Mary described as ‘a very rude and abrupt manner’.
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Although Mrs Montagu’s company was plainly good enough for Samuel Johnson, Horace Walpole and David Garrick, the earl branded her ‘a wild, light, silly woman, of bad character’ who was ‘not fit’ for his wife’s acquaintance. ‘Sadly against my inclination,’ she said, ‘I was forced to comply, and give her up, with many others’.

Compelled to abandon her literary mentor, Mary refused to abandon her literary ambitions and in 1771, while pregnant with George, she put the finishing touches to a five-act poetical drama entitled
The Siege of Jerusalem
.
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Having been started in 1769, only two years after her wedding, its subject was unlikely to have proved popular with her husband. A tragedy in blank verse, it laments its heroine’s unrequited love and arranged marriage. The drama is set at the time of the actual siege of Jerusalem in 1187 when the Muslim warrior Saladin captured the city and triggered the third Crusade. Mary’s poem tells the fictional story of a Muslim princess, Erminia, who is betrothed to Saladin but loves the Crusader Tancred, who in turn is in love with an Amazon-like warrior princess called Clorinda. Disguised as a soldier in armour Clorinda is killed by Tancred, who then dies in a duel with Erminia’s brother, Argantes, whereupon Erminia converts to Christianity and consigns herself to a nunnery. At one point bemoaning her noble birth and the ‘detested nuptials’ set to go ahead, the heroine longs for a simple pastoral life where true love is allowed free rein.

Although not a literary masterpiece, the narrative is moving and the poetry accomplished. It certainly drew enthusiasm from friends who later persuaded her to publish it privately. Hearing that Mary had completed the work in May 1771, her former governess Elizabeth Planta, now living with Mrs Bowes in Hertfordshire, wrote to congratulate her. The following month, having read the drama, she wrote to praise her efforts and suggest a few amendments, declaring the first speech by Saladin ‘very fine’ but the words of Argantes to his sister ‘too warm for a brother’. Locked in her own loveless marriage, Mary would continue to write poetry - in tragic, comic and satirical veins - throughout her life although no more would be published.

If Lord Strathmore took no interest in his wife’s literary talents, Elizabeth Planta and her clever family continued to encourage Mary’s intellectual pursuits. Andreas Planta, Elizabeth’s father, still corresponded with his former pupil in French and Italian. Having been elected to the Royal Society in 1770, he wrote the following year asking Mary to use her influence to help further his prospects at the British Museum, where he had been assistant librarian since 1758. Elizabeth, who also wrote to Mary in Italian and French - not least to conceal their gossip from Mrs Bowes’s prying eyes - was approached in 1771 to become English teacher to the royal princesses. Well aware that her financial interests were better served by remaining with Mary, for whom she hoped to become the children’s governess, Elizabeth diplomatically declined. The royal family had to settle for her sister Frederica, reportedly fluent in seven languages, who was recruited to teach the little princesses at a salary - scornfully dismissed by Elizabeth as ‘mediocre’ - of £100 a year (£13,000 today). Meanwhile Elizabeth and Mary exchanged news about Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, who had just returned from their three-year expedition to the southern hemisphere with James Cook laden with new flora and fauna.

Inspired by the exquisite surroundings of Gibside where she had cultivated her own garden since the age of twelve, and encouraged by Elizabeth Planta, who tended her plants at St Paul’s Walden Bury, Mary had become a serious student of botany. Naturally, Lord Strathmore had nothing but disdain for this enlightened spirit of enquiry. Yet since he was increasingly absorbed by his own consuming interests of drinking, gambling, cock-fighting and horse-racing, the earl appeared willing to tolerate his wife’s botanical fascination.

Botany had developed a wide and enthusiastic following in Britain in the mid-1700s, especially among intelligent, educated and wealthy women. George III’s mother, Princess Augusta, had established Kew Gardens in 1759 and his wife, Queen Charlotte, had continued her patronage. Several aristocratic women devoted their spare time and riches to amassing impressive stocks of plants - most notably the Duchess of Portland who established a collection to rival Kew at her seat of Bulstrode Park. The introduction into Britain in the 1760s of the binomial classification of species, created by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, helped popularise botanical studies. Consequently, increasing numbers of women collected and studied, cultivated and painted domestic and exotic flora - despite concerns in some quarters over the sexual connotations of the Linnaean system based, as it was, on the male and female reproductive organs. Charles Alston, professor of medicine and botany in Edinburgh, for example, thought Linnaean classifications ‘too smutty for
British
ears’ while even towards the end of the century the Cornish poet, Richard Polwhele, would voice alarm at the prospect of ‘girls and boys botanizing together’. But although women were excluded from formal scientific study - banned from universities and all-male organisations such as the Royal Society - botany became regarded as a socially acceptable and largely harmless female pastime.