Wedlock (25 page)

How Paterson, a poorly educated but bright young gardener with dark hair and deep brown eyes, had come to the attention of Mary Eleanor Bowes in 1776 is a mystery. Conceivably she had met him as a youth when he lived near Glamis, or alternatively through her northern neighbour, the Duchess of Northumberland, whose balls she had enjoyed as a child. Most probably, however, Paterson had been recommended as a suitable candidate for her botanical mission by one of Mary’s friends within her scientific network. He had, of course, attended a Royal Society meeting with Solander in May 1776; no doubt he had read Francis Masson’s account of his Cape travels published in the society’s
Philosophical Transactions
later that year; and in all likelihood he would have studied Masson’s African spoils transplanted into the new hothouse at Kew. One visitor in May 1776, the Reverend Michael Tyson, had marvelled: ‘Mr Masson showed me the New World in his amazing Cape hothouse, erica 140 species, many protea, geranium and cliffortias more than 50.’
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Certainly, by the time he set sail from Plymouth on 9 February 1777, less than a month after Mary’s second marriage, young Paterson felt confident in the knowledge that his entire trip was being bankrolled by his generous patron. ‘In this undertaking, I account myself particularly fortunate in having been patronized by the Honourable Lady Strathmore,’ he would later write, ‘whose zeal for botanical researches induced her readily to accede to the proposal of exploring an unknown country in search of new plants, and to honour me with her protection and support.’
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Having disembarked in Cape Town at the start of the southern African winter, Paterson had delayed any serious exploration until travelling conditions improved. In the meantime, for all his lack of education, he had successfully insinuated himself into the elite social circle of the settlement’s white colonialists and undertook some minor excursions to accustom himself to the habitat. One of these entailed an arduous climb up Table Mountain in the company of Captain Robert Gordon, a highly intelligent and urbane army officer who had been born in Holland to a family of Scottish descent. Having previously visited the Cape in 1773, Gordon had returned in 1777 as second-in-command of the Dutch garrison that controlled the region. Immediately forming a strong bond with the Scottish gardener, with whom he shared a passion for natural history, Gordon would later say that Paterson’s ‘pleasant personality gave me very much companionship’.
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Also joining the merry climbing party was William Hickey, the rakish lawyer who had arrived at the Cape
en route
for Calcutta. In Hickey’s naive estimation, Paterson was ‘a great botanist’ who had been employed to collect rare plants and natural curiosities ‘by that strange and eccentric woman, Lady Strathmore’.
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Recounting the little expedition with pleasure, Hickey wrote that Gordon and Paterson had called on him at 4 a.m. to begin the ascent. Although Hickey would describe the climb as ‘dreadfully steep and rugged’, in truth it was far more onerous for the servants burdened with the travellers’ baggage and refreshments. After a few hours’ climb, the party stopped for breakfast in a large cave where Hickey discovered ‘a table spread with tea, coffee, cold ham, fowls, with other articles of food, all of the best kind’. While the party ate and enjoyed the stunning view of Cape Town, they were serenaded by two servants on flutes. It was, Hickey concluded, the ‘pleasantest breakfast I ever made’. It took two more hours to reach the summit, where further nourishment awaited the climbers in a previously erected tent, along with chilled wine and two French horn players. When Hickey said goodbye to Paterson a few weeks later to continue his journey to India, he declared his newfound friend ‘an ingenious young man’. It would be under quite different circumstances that they would meet again.

After his easy introduction to the region, Paterson had embarked on his first lengthy expedition as soon as weather conditions improved in October, heading due east from Cape Town in pursuit of the promised plants and seeds for his patron. He had not been disappointed. Although pioneer botanists had first explored the immediate vicinity of the Cape in the seventeenth century, the wider region had remained largely untouched by Europeans - and its floral treasures undiscovered - until the 1770s. In 1772, not one but three professional plant collectors had landed at the Cape in search of botanical enlightenment: Carl Peter Thunberg and Anders Sparrman, both Swedes, followed six months later by Masson on his royal quest. Companionably, Masson and Thunberg had teamed up for two expeditions, joined briefly by the capable Captain Gordon on his first Cape visit. Gordon’s linguistic skills - he spoke Dutch, English, French, German and Gaelic and quickly mastered several native languages - no doubt aided communications. Although Sparrman had left just as Masson arrived, taking Masson’s berth on Cook’s
Resolution
, he had returned to the Cape in 1775 for a further two years’ botanical study. Beginning his explorations just five years after these pioneers, in October 1777, young Paterson was still one of the first Europeans - and only the second British traveller - to penetrate the enticing Cape interior.

Travelling on horseback with his good friend Gordon, their baggage and provisions sent ahead in carts pulled by oxen, Paterson had followed the coastline before striking out over mountain terrain and grasslands as far as Beervlei at the confluence of the Kariega and Sout Rivers. On the way he discovered an abundance of strange and wonderful flora of varieties he had never seen before. ‘Here I found a species of Erica, which was quite new,’ he recorded excitedly, ‘with a spike of long tubelar yellow flowers, the most beautiful I had ever seen.’
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Meticulously collecting and describing the specimens he found, Paterson produced exquisite pictures - or had an accompanying draughtsman execute them for him; the identity of the artist remains uncertain.
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Dogged and resourceful, Paterson spared no pains in his mission, at one time almost drowning when attempting to swim across a swollen river at night, and on another occasion nearly plunging to his death when his horse stumbled on a steep precipice. Braving lions and hippopotami, foraging for food and water, the two explorers enjoyed the hospitality of the ‘Hottentot’ or Khoikhoi people and excitedly gave their names to natural features including Gordon’s and Paterson’s Bays.
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Reluctantly bidding the captain to continue without him when he fell ill, Paterson turned back in December. In poor health, but ‘with my collection much increased’ he arrived back in Cape Town on 13 January 1778.
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It was the first of four expeditions Paterson would undertake over the next two years. Eagerly planning his next trip, he was blissfully unaware that the financial patronage that he relied on to foot the bill had abruptly come to an end.

 

Seated at her desk in her dressing room at Gibside, filling page after page with her neat script, Mary could only dream of the convivial feasts, thrilling adventures and heady freedom being enjoyed by her roving gardener. Barred from walking her gardens and denied the company of her friends, 28-year-old Mary had become subdued and submissive. After a full year of Bowes’s beatings she had come to believe - like so many women in the same situation - that her own faults and failings were somehow responsible for the miseries she now endured. Accordingly, she had agreed to write for Bowes’s eyes alone a full and frank catalogue of her past ‘crimes’ and ‘imprudencies’ in an effort to make amends and start anew. Later she would claim that the account which Bowes would maliciously publish as
The Confessions of the Countess of Strathmore
, was completely false, composed at his dictation and extracted under the threat that she would never see her children again; on occasions she would even deny that she had written it at all.
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Yet there is no doubt that the hundred-page tract was written by Mary and that much of it is accurate and corroborated by other sources. Foot would agree that the text was ‘evidently extorted from her, under the tyranny of BOWES’and that it contained ‘many falsehoods’ but also, he averred, ‘some truths’. While its verisimilitude would remain in question, Mary’s candid description of her flirtations, love affairs and abortions would make it one of the most explosive documents to be published in the eighteenth century.

‘I have been guilty’, she began, ‘of five crimes.’
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First among these she numbered her ‘unnatural dislike’ of her eldest son, of which she had already long repented, followed by her affair with George Gray while Lord Strathmore was alive, her one attempted and three successful abortions, her broken pledge to marry Gray and - lastly and most poignantly - her subsequent marriage to Bowes, ‘which together with my previous connection with you, I reckon amongst my crimes’. Her ‘imprudencies’ took a good deal longer to relate, beginning with her innocent teenage romances, her extramarital dalliance with James Graham, her encouragement of a string of male admirers after Lord Strathmore’s death, her gullibility in visiting fortune-tellers, and a series of ill-judged but essentially harmless social errors in trusting too freely or acting too familiarly with servants and acquaintances. Her folly, she now decided, in trusting Eliza Planta, the Stephens brothers, Captain Magra and Mr Matra, had been ‘unpardonable’. ‘I was more than imprudent in encouraging and keeping company with people of such execrable and infamous principles,’ she submitted, ‘though, indeed, I did not think them such then; but that is no excuse for me, as I ought not to have trusted or allowed any body to have frequented my house, without a previous long acquaintance.’ Her greater folly in trusting the person with the most execrable and infamous principles of all, of equally short acquaintance, naturally passed unremarked. Above all she regretted entrusting her secrets to her disgraced footman George Walker, although whether she truly believed that he had since burnt his copy of her prenuptial deed, as she claimed, remained to be seen.

Looking back on her carefree childhood, to the tender upbringing and diligent education, she now blamed her father for a failure to instil ‘a proper sense of religion’ that might have prevented her later faults. Yet for all the snatched kisses and frothy letters she had exchanged with forward boys and rakish men since her father’s death, and despite her media-generated reputation for licentiousness, in reality her love-life had been relatively chaste - certainly in comparison to many of Georgian society’s more notorious characters. ‘I do assure you,’ she pleaded, ‘that no man ever took the smallest liberty with me (Lord S. yourself, and Mr G. excepted) except three or four times that Mr Stephens kissed me, under one pretence or other; and once or twice that Mr G. S. as we were standing by the fire-side, put his arm around my waist.’

But if the description of Mary’s indiscretions showed her in a poor light, the document which Bowes would later have no qualms about publishing revealed him in a far blacker guise. Laying before her husband a ‘full account of every thing I ever did, said, or thought, that was wrong’, Mary revealed that in return he had made her a promise never to ‘repeat past grievances’; whether this referred to his brutality or his philandering was unspecified. That she had already suffered repeatedly from his violent outbursts was evident from her comment, ‘I fear you are of an unforgiving, and in this respect, unforgetting temper; else you could not, for so many months together, have behaved so uniformly cruel to one whose wish and study was to please you.’ With her spirit almost broken by her twelve months under Bowes’s autocratic rule, she declared: ‘I am already so loaded with misery that there is only one curse which is not mine already.’ That one curse - to die - she now called upon herself should her confessions prove untrue. Seemingly bewildered at her husband’s ‘more than usual share of dislike to me’, she plaintively promised ‘if it please God to give me strength and resolution to trail out my existence till even you are convinced, by my example, that a person who has once been vicious, may repent and become good’.

Well aware that by her candid admissions she had provided Bowes with a fresh crop of excuses to ill-treat her, she submitted, ‘but you are my husband - I obey you, and if you continue to distrust, abuse, and think of me as you have hitherto done, Providence must and will decide which of us two is most to blame’. Begging her husband to burn her confessions, or otherwise destroy them, when she died, ‘that I may not stand condemned and disgraced, under my own hand, to posterity’, she pleaded with him to forgive ‘all my sins and faults’. Yet even as Mary wrote the final words to her own denunciation on 2 February, Bowes was far from satisfied. Bursting into her dressing room that evening, he snatched up the sheets of writing and berated her for including trivial events in minute detail. At the same time he demanded that she admit to faking the ‘fits’ that she had suffered since childhood. A master of pretended illness and injury himself, Bowes refused to accept that the mysterious attacks which had occurred several times in their first year of marriage - quite possibly brought on by anxiety - were genuine; naturally, his physician friend, Dr Scott, had readily concurred. Keeping a tiny flicker of her old independence alive, Mary refused to submit to this diagnosis, insisting that her fits were authentic. Finally, swearing the truth of her testament on the Bible, Mary added the date, 3 February 1778, to the last page and hoped that her months of torture were at an end.

Far from honouring his side of the bargain, Bowes was emboldened by Mary’s surrender to his will, pocketing her ‘confessions’ with unconcealed pleasure. Furnished with this unremitting account of dissipation, sexual precocity and unnatural maternal feelings, he knew that she was more in his power than ever. It was only upon reading this testament, he would later claim, that his eyes had been opened to his wife’s true nature. From this point on, he would argue, he was forced to watch her conduct closely and control her actions accordingly. Indeed, just as Mary had feared, her self-confessed ‘sins’ would provide not only Bowes, but his apologists down the years, with justification for the most outrageous extremes of brutality.