Wedlock (26 page)

True to his word, Bowes redoubled his campaign of repression. Squandering Mary’s fortune on gambling, presents for his mistresses and lavish entertainments for his Newcastle cronies, Bowes kept Mary impoverished and virtually imprisoned at Gibside. Deprived of money, prevented from buying new clothes and frequently half starved - the cook and kitchen maids were instructed only to take orders from Bowes - Mary’s once plump face now looked gaunt, her formerly opulent gowns shabby. Skilfully disguising his neglect and abuse, Bowes hoodwinked the servants and guests into believing the Gibside mistress was eccentric, slovenly and accident-prone. Mary’s genuine short-sightedness was conveniently blamed for the numerous occasions on which she supposedly bumped into doors, fell down stairs or singed her hair in the fire; her dishevelled appearance was ascribed to her lack of interest in clothes; her apparent loss of appetite on her faddy tastes. Schooled by Bowes, Mary frequently appeared impolite or deranged in company. On occasions he would warn her only to reply yes or no to any question, at other times only to say that the weather was hot or cold, and sometimes to refuse to speak at all, so that guests presumed her to be mad, rude or stupid. If she deviated at all from this prearranged behaviour, Bowes would briskly administer ‘a threatening frown, a sly pinch, or a kick with his foot’ out of sight of his guests.
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Just as he had done with his first wife, Bowes cleverly sculpted a public image of Mary as truculent, difficult and disordered. Meanwhile, he presented himself as the aggrieved husband, tenderly attempting to guide his awkward wife. Feigning concern for her wellbeing whenever he was away from home, he would frequently despatch messages enquiring after her health and her appetite. As contrived as his sham duel, the performance was a meticulously planned fiction which Mary would find difficult to shake.

Behind closed doors, his brutality intensified. ‘In 1778 he beat me several times,’ wrote Mary, ‘particularly once with a thick stick, the head of which was heavy with lead; and with the handle of a horsewhip, which he had then in his hand, being just come in from hunting’.
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Now drinking heavily, Bowes would return from his nights on the town inebriated and enraged. One Newcastle friend, who found it hard to keep pace, complained that Bowes’s carousing often lasted into the early hours, after which ‘one is sure to be in a Condition in which no Man would wish to be in the Streets’.
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Inevitably Mary bore the brunt of his drunken rages, submitting to his violence in private just as she colluded with his charade in public. By now the servants had learned to turn a blind eye to their mistress’s cuts and bruises, accepting the tales of her clumsiness without question rather than risking their master’s wrath themselves. Nevertheless they observed the change in Mary’s demeanour. One maid who worked for Mary before and after her marriage to Bowes noted the ‘great alteration in her deportment’ and remarked: ‘Her Ladyship appeared dejected, and to have no will of her own.’ Another, who had stayed on after the marriage, overheard Bowes order Mary to tell the servants she had received a black eye by accident and stated: ‘His whole behaviour was cruel and ill-natured in general, and not confined to particular instances.’
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Living in fear of the violence her husband meted out, Mary knew that there was little she could do in her defence. Marital violence is as old as marriage itself; during the eighteenth century wife-beating was not only common and widely tolerated but even supported by law. One legal manual, first published in 1736, explained that husbands could lawfully beat their wives to keep them to their duties, although it cautioned that such chastisement should not be ‘violent or cruel’. Another popular legal writer described a husband’s right to ‘give his wife moderate correction’, since by law he was liable for her conduct, but argued that this should be kept ‘within reasonable bounds’.
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One well-known judge, Francis Buller, would even proclaim that a husband could lawfully chastise his wife as long as he used a stick no bigger than his thumb, earning himself the nickname ‘Judge Thumb’ in the process. Yet even when wives suffered sustained and severe violence, they had little recourse in law. Although a wife could swear ‘articles of peace’ against her husband if she feared life-threatening injury, the Church courts could still compel her to return to the marital home for ‘restitution of conjugal rights’. And while the same Church courts could grant a separation on grounds of cruelty, this was allowed only rarely, in cases of extreme and repeated violence deemed unjustifiable by the all-male judges. Virtually powerless to curb his conduct, Mary simply endured her husband’s rages in silence. But content no longer to abuse only his wife, Bowes now endeavoured to lure others into his control.

 

In May 1778, Bowes recruited a chaplain, the Reverend Samuel Markham, who joined the Gibside household along with his wife Jane. That month - just as William Paterson set out on his second expedition at the Cape - Bowes embarked for Ireland, taking ship from Port-patrick in Scotland, with Mary and the Markhams in tow. Whether he took the infant Mary, now nine months old, to present to his family as his first-born is unknown; a good three months chubbier than her pretended age, she may well have remained with a nursemaid at Gibside.

The purpose of the visit was most probably a desire by Bowes to capitalise on the lands he still owned in Ireland; exacting an advantageous price for them from his relatives had plagued him for several years. It was nevertheless a first opportunity for Mary Eleanor to meet her in-laws and their ever-expanding family in Tipperary. Elizabeth Stoney, her mother-in-law, had given birth to her eleventh child, George Stoney junior, just four years earlier. Despite the haughty letters that Mary had been forced by Bowes to write to his father, she made a favourable impression on the family - an affection which proved mutual, especially between Mary and her namesake, Bowes’s twenty-year-old sister. When the Bowes retinue returned to England the following month, Mary Stoney accompanied them, encouraged by her ambitious mother in the face of heartfelt objections from her father. The chance to enjoy the English social scene, under the escort of her handsome big brother and his well-connected wife, seemed too tempting an opportunity for a lively young woman of marriageable age. Before leaving Ireland Bowes promised his father that he would send his sister home within six months. He had no such intention.

Back at Gibside in time for the Newcastle races in June, Bowes introduced his sister into polite northern society, taking pains as always to present himself to his potential electorate as the courteous husband, brother and benefactor. One society belle, Judith Milbanke, delightedly reported partnering Bowes at the city’s splendid new assembly rooms. ‘I . . . had the honour to open the Ball with a double Minuet, Lady Strathmore & Lord Fielding at Top, your humble servant & Mr Bowes at bottom.’
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Cutting a commanding figure on the dance floor, Bowes never lost his touch with the ladies; a generous subscriber to the new assembly rooms, he knew just as effectively how to charm the city’s dignitaries.
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Yet the seemingly cosy family scenario belied the bleak truth. Well aware that his play-acting would not pass muster with the shrewd Mrs Bowes, Bowes forbade Mary from any private conversation with her mother and scrutinised their correspondence. Nevertheless, rumours of his ill-treatment and scandalous conduct had already reached Mrs Bowes’s ears and she now urged Mary to leave him - despite the inevitable social outcry this would generate - even if she refused to believe the tales of physical violence. Knowing the grief it would cause her mother to hear the truth and hopeful she could still reform her abuser, Mary denied that Bowes mistreated her.
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But just as Bowes curtailed her connections with her immediate family, so the law now conspired to sever all links with her children.

 

That June, just after her return from Ireland, Mary was forced to surrender her five children by Lord Strathmore to their three other guardians, as Chancery made them wards of court.
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Not bothering even to consult their mother, Thomas Lyon immediately removed six-year-old George and five-year-old Thomas from their grandmother’s home and sent them to join their brother John, now nine, at his school in Neasden. The two girls, Maria, now ten, and Anna, just turned eight, were summarily packed off to a girls’ boarding school in Queen’s Square, London. Distraught at being forced to give up all rights to her children, Mary consoled herself with the belief that the other guardians would grant her reasonable access; in reality, she hoped, she would see them scarcely less than she already did. Her optimism was sorely misguided. From the moment that Lyon gained charge of his nephews and nieces - and the funds set aside to maintain them - he enacted a vice-like control over their daily lives. Dictating every aspect of their education and their leisure time, austere Uncle Thomas moulded the children to his demanding ideals, while poisoning their minds against their mother. And not only would they rarely be granted visits to their mother, separated by their schooling they would hardly see each other. When Lyon, at the family home in County Durham he had now inherited from his late mother, was unable to oversee their activities, he dragooned his sister, Lady Anne Simpson, to supervise the youngsters in London. As parsimonious as his brother had been profligate, Lyon maintained meticulous accounts of the children’s expenses which survive even now: their bills for shoes, clothes, medicine, haircuts, books and lessons, their accounts for tuition, board and pocket money, all folded and bound in tiny bundles as sad mementoes of their carefully monitored and catalogued young lives.

So the girls’ first outings to the opulent West End shops to choose the colourful silks and satins for their first grown-up gowns, to be fitted for their first stays, to buy dancing pumps, gloves and fans for their first balls and theatre trips, were supervised not by their mother but by Aunt Anne with the bills forwarded to Uncle Thomas.
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When George, always a sickly child, fell ill that autumn, his tutors sent for the apothecary to bring his ineffectual potions to the boy’s bedside in Neasden - and forwarded the medical bill to Lyon - rather than let his mother mop his fevered forehead. When Maria visited the dentist four times within twelve months, always an excruciating experience before the advent of anaesthesia, it was without her mother’s hand to squeeze. And as all five children progressed at their lessons in reading, writing, French, drawing, music and history, their mother - who placed such importance on her own education - was denied any opportunity to encourage, praise or take pride in their achievements. Each of the children would cope in their own way. Maria, the eldest and most conscious of social correctness, readily conformed to her uncle’s exacting regime and grew close to her socially adept aunt, while wayward Anna remained alert for opportunities to rebel. For the two youngest boys, having scarcely seen their mother since infancy, there would be little lasting memory of her. And John, the quiet and thoughtful head of the little family, simply tried his best to appease both sides.

As appeals and counter-appeals against the Chancery decision lumbered on over the ensuing years, Mary’s efforts to see her children would become more and more desperate. In all her attempts to gain access, Bowes would be solidly supportive; naturally it suited his purposes to exert control over the young Gibside heirs. That December, therefore, Bowes wrote to Lyon on Mary’s behalf asking that the children be allowed to stay with them over the Christmas holidays.
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Offering no reason, for he saw no cause to explain his actions to the children’s mother, Lyon bluntly replied that he and his fellow guardians ‘cannot agree to your Ladyship’s request’. Knowing that the children were still allowed visits to their grandmother, who would at least ensure that they remembered their mother, Mary reluctantly accepted the decision.

It was another lonely Christmas at Gibside. As William Paterson set out on his third expedition at the height of the Cape summer that December, Mary watched helplessly from her windows as Bowes destroyed swathes of winter woodland in an effort to raise funds from the valuable timber. Once more beset by debts, Bowes insisted that they stay in the north to avoid his creditors and save money. ‘I have given up all idea of going this winter to London,’ he told his financial agent, William Davis, ‘as I can live here for half the expence; beside I can never be happy TILL I GET OUT OF DEBT, and have money, if possible, to the good’.
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Besieging Davis with instructions to take out insurance policies on Mary’s life, in order to guarantee the numerous annuities he was arranging to raise extra funds, Bowes drove a hard bargain over interest rates.

Perpetually irritated over money matters, Bowes vented his frustrations on the captive little group within the Gibside walls. Markham’s religious cloth afforded him no protection from his employer’s wrath, for later he would testify that Bowes worked himself into ‘the most violent passions upon the most frivolous occasions’ and often behaved ‘in a very cross savage manner without any Provocations’.
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On one occasion, towards the end of January 1779, as the elderly chaplain dutifully said grace before dinner, Bowes retorted: ‘Damn your Mercies. I want none of mercy.’ A few evenings later, Bowes walked into the parlour to find the parson engrossed in conversation - probably with Mary and her sister-in-law - and lunged at the poor man with a barrage of blows for the simple reason that he had remained chatting too long after dinner. The Markhams promptly packed their bags and left. For the two Marys there was no such hope of escape.

 

No sooner had Mary Stoney passed through the gates of the Gibside estate than she realised her error in leaving her happy Irish home. From the moment that she set foot in Gibside Hall, she became subject to the obsessive rule with which her brother governed the entire household. When her approved six months’ leave expired in December, Mary was forbidden from returning home and prevented from writing to her parents while any letters her parents sent to her were immediately intercepted by her brother.
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When Mary came of age a few days before Christmas, there had been few celebrations and little prospect of liberty. Indeed, now that Mary no longer required her parents’ consent for marriage, it soon became plain that Bowes was concocting a plan to engage her to a wealthy suitor in return for rich pickings for himself. Yet despite her youth and familial allegiance, Mary Stoney’s free spirit could not be so easily crushed.