Wedlock (16 page)

Initially the pair had to be satisfied with snatched conversations at ‘chance’ meetings in Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, with all the eyes of the promenading
bon ton
alert for any hint of scandal. But as they became more daring - and Gray more insistent - the couple met surreptitiously at her house when her faithful footman let Gray in by a back door. When the earl returned to London in November, Mary persuaded Gray to repair to Bath - out of harm’s way - but agreed to meet him before he left early one frosty morning in St James’s Park. Slipping on the ice in the freezing conditions, Mary returned home with her shoes and skirts soaked but being unable to change them immediately without causing suspicion she caught a fever. Indeed, most of the household, including the footman George Walker and Elizabeth Planta, succumbed to fever that December.
⁶⁰
As the New Year began there were few celebrations in Grosvenor Square since the house had become a sick ward, with physicians and apothecaries arriving daily with their meddling advice and ineffectual potions. Mary’s indeterminate fever had turned into the same complaint she had suffered after her wedding, which she described as ‘an ague, in my face’ - perhaps migraine - complaining that ‘my head swelled so, yet without easing my pain that I was blind’. For Mary, the laudanum prescribed may at least have provided some relief. For Lord Strathmore, in the final stages of tuberculosis, there was no hope. At the end of January 1776, accompanied by his physician, the earl set sail for Lisbon in one last desperate effort to overcome his illness - and perhaps one last attempt to recall his carefree youth.

As Mary languished in her darkened chamber, Gray saw his chance. Scurrying back from Bath, he visited her daily, wrote her long, flattering letters and sat at her bedside every evening. Candidly, Mary told him that she had been ‘so unhappy in matrimony’ that she was determined never to marry again and that her heart belonged to another but that Gray had won her ‘friendship and esteem’ and if Lord Strathmore should die she promised to give herself fully to him. Seizing his opportunity, the moment Mary was recovered, he seduced her one evening in mid-February and from that point on they lived as lovers. She would later count this infidelity as her second ‘crime’.

Lord Strathmore never reached Lisbon. On 7 March, within sight of the Portuguese coast, he died, aged thirty-eight, in the arms of his physician.
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It would be another month before news of his death reached Mary in London. By that time she was pregnant with Gray’s child.

 

 

 

 

R
eading her late husband’s last letter, dressed in her widow’s mourning gown, Mary knew that the tell-tale signs of her latest ‘imprudency’ would soon be all too apparent. Lord Strathmore’s savage words, written on his deathbed beneath the rocking deck, were coolly calculated to prompt remorse in all but the most unfeeling of widows. ‘As this is not intended for your perusal till I am dead,’ he began, ‘I hope you will pay a little more attention to it than you ever did to any thing I said to you while alive.’
¹
In the stern tone of a disappointed father rather than the emotional farewell of a husband and lover, the earl declared, ‘I freely forgive you, all your liberties and follies (however fatal they have been to me) as being thoroughly persuaded they were not the produce of your own mind, but the suggestions of some vile interested monster.’ Continuing in the same cold paternalistic manner, he requested Mary to lay aside her ‘prejudices’ against his family, convinced that these were ‘entirely without foundation’. Urging her to treat their five children fairly, he warned her to avoid indulging in malicious gossip and - perhaps having suffered himself at the expense of her sharp wit - not to be ‘tempted to say an ill natured thing for the sake of sporting a Bon Mot’. Even as he dismissed the ‘futility’ of her literary ambitions, the earl insisted that, ‘no one ever studied with more attention to promote the Happiness of an other, than I have constantly done to promote yours’. Yet his concluding advice - to safeguard her fortune by vesting control of her estate in the hands of a trustworthy agent - was eminently sensible and well-meaning, if chiefly prompted by concern for the future welfare of his young heir rather than for his wife. The earl’s parting words - ‘a dead man can have no interest to mislead, a living man may’ - would surely haunt his widow in years to come.

Finally released from a passionless marriage after nine years of discontent, Mary Eleanor shed few tears over the loss of Lord Strathmore. As soon as she received news of the earl’s death on 6 April, Mary acted with due decorum, immediately ordering mourning suits for the servants in Grosvenor Square and at Glamis with the instruction that ‘all possible respect should be paid to the memory of her deceas’d Lord’, and exchanging her richly adorned gowns and elaborate hairstyles for sombre black dresses and plain accessories.
²
A portrait, which is thought to be of Mary, painted by an unknown artist at about this time, depicts her with an appropriately sorrowful expression and downcast eyes in a pale face under grey powdered hair, wearing the traditional black ruff and cap of the later stage of mourning.
³
The children likewise, Maria and Anna, aged seven and five, their brothers John, George and Thomas, aged six, four and two, would have been made to wear black clothes. Young John, who was now formally the tenth Earl of Strathmore, reached his seventh birthday just a week after hearing news of his father’s death. Having been sent to boarding school in Neasden - then a small village a few miles north of the capital - shortly before his father had set sail, he had little cause for celebration. While the three youngest children were despatched to their grandmother’s at St Paul’s Walden Bury in the capable care of their governess, Elizabeth Planta, Maria, who turned eight a week after her brother’s birthday, remained with her mother at Grosvenor Square, ostensibly to provide support in her bereavement. Yet while Mary outwardly adopted the sober demeanour and costume of grief, inwardly she was jubilant. Free at last from her husband’s restrictive demands and her brother-in-law’s penny-pinching controls, Mary was finally in command of the immense fortune her father had left her and - more importantly - in charge of her own life.

At a time when divorce was both rare and difficult, and separation spelled social exile, the death of a spouse was frequently the only means of escape from an unhappy marriage. Denied any legal status or ownership of property in marriage, in widowhood many women found a comfortable and rewarding existence. Most eighteenth-century marriage settlements for the wealthy and middle classes made provision for a guaranteed pension or ‘jointure’ - generally between a fifth and a quarter of the husband’s wealth - should the wife survive her husband. Since widows were also legally entitled to own property, even working-class women could earn a decent living - and respect within the community - by taking over a late husband’s business. Furthermore, for most women, under the supervision of a father from birth and a husband during marriage, becoming a widow provided a first taste of independence. The playwright John Gay underlined the attractions of widowhood in his comedy,
The Beggar’s Opera
, first staged in 1728. ‘The comfortable Estate of Widow-hood, is the only Hope that keeps up a Wife’s Spirits,’ exclaims the villain Peachum, adding: ‘Where is the Woman who would scruple to be a Wife, if she had it in her Power to be a Widow, whenever she pleas’d ?’
⁴
And while audiences guffawed at Gay’s drama throughout the century, many women truly did enjoy the last laugh. Lady Mary Coke suffered two years of brutality and humiliation at the hands of her husband, Edward, Viscount Coke, before he died suddenly in 1753 leaving her, at twenty-six, a merry widow with a handsome jointure of £2,500 a year.

Widowed at twenty-seven, Mary Eleanor was even more comfortable and decidedly more merry. On her husband’s death, she not only became entitled to the independent jointure stipulated in her marriage settlement but also regained her life interest in her father’s estate, including Gibside, Streatlam and the coalmines, farms and other properties attached. Although the Bowes fortune remained in trust, supervised by named trustees who were charged with keeping it intact for her eldest son, during her lifetime at least the profits of the farms and mines now accrued to Mary. Precisely how much this fortune was worth is unclear, although one estimate put Mary’s income after Lord Strathmore’s death at up to £20,000 a year - easily one of the top twenty annual incomes in the country.
⁵
Certainly, she was one of the richest widows in Britain. And in the year that America would sign its declaration of independence, Mary could look up to the statue of Liberty her father had erected as a free woman for the first time in her life. Wealthy and attractive, intelligent and accomplished, she was finally able to pursue her literary and botanical interests without constraint, associate with her intellectual friends at will and spend time with her children. She lost no time in exerting this newfound independence.

Within days of receiving news of the earl’s death, Mary dismissed all his former servants in Grosvenor Square and turned away friends of the Strathmore family when they called.
⁶
There was good sense in this seemingly vindictive move beyond a pent-up desire for liberation. Secretly entertaining her lover by night, she was anxious to conceal his visits - and the growing evidence of their liaison - from the prying eyes of the Strathmores and their allies. In coming months she would dispense with the Strathmore livery and send away the silver plate to have the initial ‘S’ replaced with a ‘B’.
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Having regained the Bowes fortune and retained the Bowes name, she plainly wanted to erase all trace of the Strathmores from her life. Cosseted by her eldest daughter, surrounded by her beloved cats and dogs, surreptitiously visited by her lover, Mary could not help exulting in the Lyon family’s misfortunes. For the tables certainly had turned.

Ensconced at Streatlam Castle, which he knew he would soon have to vacate, Thomas Lyon viewed Mary’s actions as open declarations of war. ‘We need expect nothing from my Lady but all the opposition in her power & every thing that can distress us,’ he warned James Menzies, the steward at Glamis, and added: ‘She has thus soon declared herself as inveterate against every Person that was kind by my Brother.’
⁸
Devastated by his brother’s death, Thomas frantically attempted to put the earl’s papers in order and make the funeral arrangements. As the earl’s body was conveyed slowly by sea from Lisbon to London, where it was loaded on to another ship headed for Dundee, Thomas sent instructions to Glamis for a sober and austere funeral. Urging strict limits on numbers and on alcohol he ordered ‘for Gods sake take care that not a mortal is in liquor for at such a time I should detest the very thoughts of it’.

As the earl’s body was interred in the family vault at Glamis, Thomas searched desperately for the will he assumed his brother must have made before embarking on what was almost certain to be his final voyage. When nothing was found in the earl’s belongings in London, Thomas wrote to Glamis with mounting alarm demanding: ‘Do you know of no papers he has left, have you the key of his draw in the Library or his glass bureau in his dressing room.’ But no will surfaced at Glamis, Gibside or Grosvenor Square making Mary, as his widow, the lawful executor of the earl’s estate. Relishing the confusion this would inevitably cause, Mary could not resist pointing out that ‘the difficulties will be endless’. She had no intention of making them any easier. Only after several meetings with her lawyer, Joshua Peele, and under sustained pressure from Thomas Lyon, did Mary agree to renounce her role as executor in favour of Thomas.
⁹
In truth this was no sacrifice, since she was scarcely more adept at managing money than had been the late earl. Untangling his brother’s financial affairs, Thomas had worse shocks in store.

For all the vast wealth generated by the Bowes coal and despite Thomas’s parsimonious management of the proceeds, the earl had chalked up a colossal backlog of bills as well as numerous bonds for cash borrowed from friends, bankers and money-lenders. Sorting through the jumble of papers, Thomas discovered the debts totalled a staggering £145,000. Even by the standards of the debt-ridden eighteenth century, when aristocrats routinely lived on credit and fortunes were lost or won at the gambling tables in a single night, this was an exorbitant sum - equivalent to roughly £17m in today’s terms. Hardened gamblers had shot themselves for significantly less. Added to this a further £50,000 had to be raised for the children’s maintenance and education, according to a legal deed drawn up by the earl, meaning nearly £200,000 - roughly £24m - had to be found. As lawyers representing Mary and the Strathmores met to assess the damage, it was plain that drastic action was required.