Wedlock (21 page)

 

Questions about the veracity of the duel began to circulate within days of the encounter in the Adelphi Tavern as George Gray, furiously discovering that he had been tricked out of both bride and fortune, and the Strathmore family, horrified to hear of the surprise match, raised understandable doubts. As suspicions mounted, Foot and his fellow medic John Scott, and the supposed eyewitness John Hull, had to insert statements in the press attesting to the wounds that they had seen.
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Foot would insist all his life that the duel had been genuine and the injuries he treated life-threatening. Yet the pompous young surgeon, who was ambitious to make his mark on the London medical scene, would later recount numerous deceptions which he had helped Stoney to perpetrate. Ultimately the cringing Foot would describe his lifelong friend and benefactor as ‘an accomplished villain’ possessed of ‘the most savage, contemptable and low mind’ - but only after he was safely dead.
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Scott, the physician who put his name to the testimony describing his patient’s injuries, would likewise prove himself an adept liar on Stoney’s behalf, at one point informing Mrs Bowes that her daughter was dangerously ill in order to lure her into town.
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The so-called ‘fighting parson’ Henry Bate would later maintain under oath that the duel had been genuine, insisting that Stoney had ‘bled like a pig’ - although his graphic description might equally be taken to infer that the pair had faked their wounds with pig’s blood.

In fact Bate and Stoney were already well acquainted before their skirmish in the Adelphi Tavern, having met the previous summer in Bath. It was probably there that the two army veterans had hatched the elaborate scheme to publish the sparring letters in Bate’s journal and stage the sham duel. Certainly the flamboyant journalist was not above a bribe: he was already in the pay of the government to the tune of £200 a year in return for publishing reports in his newspaper favourable to George III.
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A satirical cartoon published two years after the duel,
A Baite for the Devil
, would describe the preacher as ‘A Canonical Buck, Vociferous Bully/ A Duellist, Boxer, Gambler’ and, significantly, a ‘Cully’ or, in plain words, a dupe.
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As news of Stoney’s seemingly miraculous recovery and surprisingly advantageous marriage gathered pace, so rumours of his skulduggery spread like a nasty rash. The satirical ballad,
The Stoniad
, published just two months after events in the Adelphi, would make plain its scepticism about the reported details. Employing the customary brand of heavy irony to infer that Bate had helped Stoney stage a mock fight, and that Hull had been bamboozled by the darkness, the anonymous author concluded that the only casualty had been a broken mirror. ‘Furious and wild, as savage beasts for gore, They fight - as HEROES
never fought before
! Fight and make many a FEINT and many a PASS! Now
wound themselves
, now
kill
- A LOOKING GLASS!’ Not long afterwards, doubts about the so-called ‘affair of honour’ in the Adelphi were aired in a quintessentially Georgian arena: on the stage.

When the curtains opened at the Theatre Royal on 8 May, audiences excitedly anticipated the new comedy by Irish theatrical entrepreneur Richard Brinsley Sheridan.
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Having taken over management of the theatre in Drury Lane from David Garrick the previous year, Sheridan had written his play,
The School for Scandal
, expressly for the new venue. Ironically following hard on the heels of
A Trip to Scarborough
, which told the tale of a penniless adventurer’s seduction of a wealthy heiress, Sheridan’s latest satire mocked the contemporary obsession with celebrity and gossip. The comedy opens with the journalist Snake assuring his aristocratic patron Lady Sneerwell that her ‘paragraphs’ relating malicious gossip about leading members of London society had been ‘all inserted’ into his newspaper. Lady Sneerwell is thought to have been based on Sheridan’s friend, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. But dressed in clerical black and described as the ‘editor of a morning paper’, Snake was readily identified as the preaching journalist Henry Bate, reinforced by later references to ‘bate’ - meaning to slacken - and ‘be baited’ - or harassed - and, most pointedly, the invocation: ‘May your love for each other never know abatement’. Tellingly, Bate had met with Garrick, Sheridan’s mentor, only a day or two after his encounter with Stoney and may well have been the unwitting source for the laughter later directed against him. Trampling the familiar territory of a loveless marriage, the drama unfolds to describe a duel which is rumoured to have been fought between two love rivals. Himself the combatant in two duels in 1772 over a popular singer whom he later married, Sheridan was well supplied with knowledge of such events. But the confused details which the characters relate - the duellists first said to have fought with pistols then with swords, a stray bullet striking the bust of Pliny on the mantelpiece and, especially, the remark: ‘You seem to differ strangely in your accounts’, would have been well understood in 1777 as lightly veiled references to the recent duel between Bate and Stoney.

Naturally enough Stoney would always profess his innocence of all subterfuge, in public at least. Yet evidence of the fabricated letters and faked fight would accumulate to the point that it was incontrovertible. Stoney’s valet, Thomas Mahon, who had been sent on the fateful day to purchase duelling pistols from Wogdon’s renowned gun shop, would later testify twice, under oath, that the whole escapade had been contrived.
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Having returned from a fruitless quest to fetch Stoney’s second, Captain Magra, to find his master being tended by Scott and Foot, Mahon was adamant that he saw no blood except where the surgeon was bleeding his patient. Later he noticed several tears in Bate’s breeches which appeared to have been made with a hot poker, and two or three holes in Stoney’s waistcoat but he swore there were neither holes nor bloodstains on his master’s shirt. Plainly Mahon was in a good position to testify since not only was he responsible as Stoney’s valet for his wardrobe but the shirt Stoney wore that day had actually belonged to Mahon and the waistcoat was later given to him. Other witnesses would later reveal that Stoney had painted his face white to provoke a deathly pallor and had been bled by Foot to hoodwink the elderly surgeon Hawkins into believing him faint from his injuries.
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Certainly successive judges in ensuing court contests would have no difficulty in dismissing the Adelphi duel as yet another of Stoney’s twisted stratagems. Weighing up all the evidence, the most likely sequence of events was that Stoney had concocted his plot with Bate in Bath, and that together they had faked the letters published in the
Morning Post
then bribed Foot and Scott, and possibly Hull, to play supporting roles in their drama. While some manner of skirmish almost certainly took place in the parlour of the Adelphi, the supposed injuries were either superficial cuts which the duellists inflicted on each other or entirely fictitious. But if the truth about the sham duel emerged only slowly to public view, it was only days before Mary herself suspected that she had been the victim of an intricately plotted hoax.

While her doubts must certainly have been aroused by the rapidity of her champion’s return to health, it was not long before Mary uncovered solid evidence of the conspiracy in overheard conversations and glimpsed correspondence. Eventually a letter which Stoney had carelessly left open on a table convinced her that the daring duel that had won her heart and her hand had been nothing more than ‘an amicable transaction between the
soi-disant
Heroes’.
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Sent by Bate, within a month or so of the Adelphi encounter, the letter threatened Stoney with ‘a
real
Duel’ or with exposure unless he stumped up a promised annuity, which had plainly been Bate’s reward for his part in the plot. And as the quarrel between the so-called heroes now intensified in earnest, one of Stoney’s friends reported him to be exercising with pistols every morning. ‘I expect almost certainly to hear of a Duel that will be serious,’ the friend wrote while shrewdly adding, ‘the former, I suspect, was not so’.
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Indeed, as Stoney grew increasingly belligerent, Bate warned him not to attack the man ‘to whom you owe every thing you now possess’. In the event, Stoney deputed another in his legion of willing clerics, the Reverend William Maxwell, to fight Bate - there was no chance that he would seriously put his own life at risk for as Foot astutely noted, ‘he was by nature a coward’. The dispute was finally settled that spring in arbitration arranged by friends with Stoney being forced to make an apology.

That Mary, highly intelligent and well educated, should have been so easily fooled by the charade has in itself raised eyebrows. Indeed, one writer has postulated that smitten by Stoney she was a willing accomplice in a scheme designed to extricate her from marriage to Gray.
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If true - and there is no direct evidence to support this, but much to contradict it - then she was as much a victim of Stoney’s cunning and manipulation as she would have been if she had known nothing in advance. In her own testament she would answer such suggestions with the apt observation that Stoney was ‘master of the most consummate arts that can be displayed’. She added: ‘I am not therefore, ashamed to confess myself amongst the large number of those whom his Cunning, and unparalleled Villanies have deceived. How should an unsuspicious young Woman, accustomed to study Books more than the World; whose knowledge of it was partially collected from living with the most Worthy, and whose sex did not permit her those opportunities for experience, which are beyond all Theory; expect to escape the snares of a Wretch, who suffered neither truth, nor even common Honesty, to interfere with his Interest, and whose consummate art has deceived Men long conversant with public life and of acknowledged abilities?’
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And in that she was, of course, only one in a long line of people - men and women, of all ages, ranks and stations in life - who had been and would be duped by Stoney’s unparalleled talent for invention and subterfuge. From army generals to journalists, barristers to maidservants, aristocrats to prostitutes, few would be immune to the compelling charms of this master of deception. But long before her realisation about the duel, on the very day that she brought her new spouse back to her home in Grosvenor Square and heard the front door shut behind them, Mary discovered that her husband was anything but the charming, gallant and mortally wounded champion she had supposed.

 

Inviting his great-uncles to his splendid new abode to dine that evening, Stoney no doubt hoped to impress. When he called for champagne and discovered there was none in the house, he flew into a rage and angrily despatched servants to a nearby tavern.
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It was only the beginning. No sooner had the wedding guests disappeared than the fond, attentive and generous lover Mary had known for the past six months changed before her eyes into a sneering, rude, aggressive bully who ‘began to treat me with the utmost indignity’.
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Just three days after the wedding, when some trimming Mary had ordered for a dress arrived, Stoney erupted in fury. Without offering any explanation, he immediately countermanded her order and sent the adornment back. Later that week, when an Irish friend joined them for dinner and Mary indulged in the chance to converse in French and Italian, Stoney sent Walker to the other end of the table with a terse note ordering her to speak only English. A short while later Stoney took a dislike to a bonnet Mary had donned in readiness for going out. With his strength now obviously restored, he ripped it from her head, cut off the ribbons and forbade her from leaving the house.

After these initial outbursts, which Mary tried to dismiss as uncharacteristic lapses, Stoney began to set rigid curbs on her activities and her freedom. At first he ordered his valet, Mahon, to follow Mary’s carriage whenever she went out and report back on her outings but before long he told the servants that her coach could only be used with his express consent. Having initially instructed Mary’s footman, Walker, to bring him all the letters that his mistress sent or received, after a short while Stoney himself dictated all her correspondence to family and friends, forcing Mary to sound cold and high-handed. In one typical letter, sent to her new father-in-law George Stoney a few days after the wedding, Mary was made to adopt a hectoring tone. Writing at Stoney’s command, ostensibly because his arm was still wounded from his fracas, she added a secret postscript: ‘Tho’ I am conscious of the ill-usage Mr Stoney has received, I must confess I should have wish’d to address you in a different stile. I am writing by Mr Stoney’s Bedside, and add this without his Knowledge.’
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There was very little Mary could now accomplish without her husband’s knowledge and consent.

Watching her every movement, Stoney exerted control over the clothes Mary wore, the visitors she received, the conversations she held, the food that she ate, the journeys she undertook and every aspect of her daily life from morning until night with a pathological eye for detail. Planned outings were cancelled at the last minute if Stoney disliked Mary’s costume; visitors to the house were turned away unless he approved. She was forbidden from visiting her gardens and hothouses in Chelsea except on rare occasions when accompanied by Stoney and was prevented from enjoying the company of her scientific friends. For all the feigned interest he had professed in Mary’s literary and botanical pursuits, she now discovered: ‘He had an invincible aversion to every species of rational, scientific, or elegant conversation by which knowledge is mutually communicated and acquired.’
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If Mary had strained at the strictures on her favourite pastimes and her friendships imposed by Lord Strathmore, they now seemed like an indulgence. Although her three youngest children and Maria were staying with the newly weds in Grosvenor Square, while the young earl remained at boarding school in Neasden, Mary was forbidden from visiting her mother and was forced to refuse her mother’s anxious appeal for a private conversation. Angered by Mary’s last-minute switch of suitor and hurt by her subsequent refusals to visit, an aggrieved Mrs Bowes wrote, ‘it is rather extraordinary that in such early days, you have not influence enough to prevail, nor power sufficient to put that desire in execution, & at the same time comply with a mother’s request.’
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Deterred by pride from confiding in her mother over her disappointment in her first marriage, Mary was now prevented by force from revealing her misery in the second. According to Foot, who only a few days earlier had helped coax Mary into his friend’s trap, her house had now undergone a transformation from ‘folly to tyranny’ and Mary herself, the surgeon blithely declared, ‘may truly be pronounced to be DEAD ALIVE’.
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