Wedlock (27 page)

Confined together for hours during the northern winter, effectively prisoners in the Gibside mansion, the two Marys grew close. Mary Eleanor confided in her young sister-in-law, whom she described as ‘gentle, compassionate and generous’ in complete contrast to her sadistic brother. Appalled by the stories of her brother’s abuse as well as by the indubitable evidence in the marks on Mary Eleanor’s face, Mary Stoney boldly attempted to stand up to her brother. On one occasion in 1779, when he spotted his wife leaving his sister’s bedchamber, Bowes grabbed his horsewhip and lashed Mary Eleanor on the arms and legs on the grounds that she was not permitted to leave her sister-in-law alone. Fearful that his sister might try to escape, he had ordered Mary Eleanor to watch her at all times - a prisoner guarding another prisoner. When she heard about the attack, young Mary declared that she ‘wished his hands would rot off’. She was soon to experience her brother’s violence for herself.

Preparing for an outing to the theatre in Newcastle, the two women were dressing together when Bowes stormed in, found his sister not yet ready and viciously set about her with his ever-handy whip. When Mary Eleanor shrieked at him to stop, he thrashed her too. The wheals that he caused on young Mary’s neck were so swollen and painful that the theatre excursion had to be cancelled and she spent the ensuing day in bed. Forced the following evening to get up, under the threat that Bowes would beat her again, she was made to attend the postponed theatre trip with her neck chastely muffled to hide the raw wounds. It was no isolated incident. Now that he had two victims under his command, Bowes abused both his wife and his sister mercilessly; according to Mary Eleanor her sister-in-law was ‘beaten & used by him almost as dreadfully as myself’. With no prospect of her brother’s ill-treatment relenting and no way of alerting her parents to her plight, 21-year-old Mary was desperate to return home. It would be another eighteen months before she saw her chance.

Financially, at least, circumstances were looking up. In May, Bowes’s humour improved when he found a buyer for Mary’s beloved Stanley House in Chelsea. Just as William Paterson was preparing to set off on his fourth and final expedition at the Cape, in search of fresh novelties to boost his patron’s prized collection, Bowes callously sold the villa complete with its extensive gardens, conservatories and hothouses. Writing to a friend, Bowes announced: ‘I HAVE SOLD CHELSEA HOUSE, but have not got the money; which, however, when I do, must go to—, the banker.’
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Only the conservatory and hothouse at Gibside remained, their exotic blooms and tropical fruits a tantalisingly short stroll away. Even though Bowes frequently sent the produce, including pineapples and melons, to the influential neighbours and city dignitaries he sought to cultivate, the greenhouse had begun to suffer from the neglect that he inflicted on the entire estate. Rather than ploughing his windfall into much-needed maintenance, Bowes paid off his most urgent creditors and in June sank the remainder into a racehorse.

Just like Mary’s father and her first husband, Bowes had been bitten by the eighteenth-century obsession for the Turf. Horse racing had long been enjoyed as a popular British entertainment whether on designated race courses or village greens but, as skills in selective breeding advanced, so the competing steeds became bigger, stronger and faster and interest in the sport flourished.
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Some of the most famous races, including the Epsom Derby and the St Leger at Doncaster, were run for the first time and the Jockey Club was founded to set rules and govern practices by a band of aristocratic fanatics in 1752. As the racing calendar expanded and the value of prizes soared, so meetings became magnets for all manner of side-shows including cock-fights and freak shows as well as their corollaries of ruinous betting and drinking. Naturally, Bowes could not resist the thunder of the horses’ hooves nor the attendant charms.

With the race weeks at Durham and Newcastle essential fixtures in the northern social diary, Bowes regarded the meetings as ideal opportunities to flaunt his civic benevolence to the gathered crowds. Shortly after marrying Mary, in July 1777 he had sponsored a £50 prize for one of the events at Durham races in an act of clearly calculated philanthropy.
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Now he laid out £750 to buy a six-year-old racehorse, named Icelander, so that he could compete on equal terms with the aristocratic owners of the day. Making her first appearance at Hexham races that June she did not disappoint him. ‘My mare walked over,’ he gloated to a friend, reporting her victory by half a neck over the favourite in ‘the finest race I ever saw’.
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To Bowes’s delight, Icelander went on to win major prizes that summer at Durham, Nottingham and Morpeth. Evincing more pride in his mare than he would ever bestow on his wife - and doubtless treating her with greater kindness - Bowes would hang on to Icelander until the end of her days.

Swaggering around the race courses with his rakish friends, Bowes was soon in financial strife again. As he rebuffed one of his weary creditors with a characteristically off-hand response that July, Bowes pleaded temporary poverty while asserting that, ‘At this moment, I declare, I am worth, were all effects sold, above £50,000’.
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It was little wonder that his chief legacy to posterity would be the term ‘stoney broke’.

Among the friends who shared his taste for the licentious lifestyle of the Turf was Charles Howard, the Earl of Surrey, who would later succeed as the eleventh Duke of Norfolk but was better known to his contemporaries as ‘the Jockey of Norfolk’.
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An active supporter of Fox’s Whigs, Howard championed reforms to end electoral corruption but was more than happy to dispense the boroughs in his patronage for exorbitant sums. A huge, shambling, whiskered oaf who was famed for his vulgar habits and unkempt dress, it was said that his servants waited until he was unconscious after one of his regular drinking bouts to plunge him into a bathtub. His rowdy dinners, at which he consumed quantities of beer and claret sufficient to astound even Georgian imbibers, were legendary and his notorious contempt for hygiene did nothing to deter several mistresses. His first wife having died giving birth to their stillborn child exactly nine months after their marriage, Howard had married a wealthy heiress but quickly had her certified mad and confined for life in a private asylum. Hard-drinking and hypocritical, he was, in short, a perfect companion for Bowes.

For all that Bowes could still charm his high-ranking friends and influential acquaintances on the social scene, his behaviour at home was becoming ever more irrational. One morning that same summer, Bowes sauntered into Mary’s dressing room to find her eating breakfast with her long, thick chestnut hair falling over her shoulders. After observing her coldly for a few minutes he flew into a temper then snatched up a pair of scissors yelling, Mary later recorded, that he ‘would spoil my locks, and teach me to dress my head lower than I did’ before hacking off great chunks with the shears.
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Such minute attention to Mary’s hair, her clothes and her accessories, and the recurrent accusations that she was too familiar with her male servants, suggest that Bowes had a powerful sexual obsession with Mary or at least a compulsion to control her sexually. After all, even though Bowes claimed to despise her, the couple were still sharing a bed and he was eager to father an heir.

Yet for all his slurs on her virtue, and despite the pledges Bowes had made in order to extort her confessions, Mary remained suspicious that her husband was still finding sexual pleasure outside wedlock. Three letters that she discovered by chance, all sent to Bowes from the surgeon John Hunter at some point between 1778 and 1780, confirmed her doubts.
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Carefully copying their contents before returning them to their place, Mary preserved the texts for future use. Beginning with his customary professional discretion, in the first letter Hunter refers to a ‘friend’ of Bowes for whom he has apparently been treating a woman in lodgings in Fleet Street, London. Complaining mildly that he has called on Bowes several times without success, Hunter states: ‘I am teased & therefore I tease you; I think every Man should know what is going on concerning himself. I therefore apply to you, that you may acquaint your friend how he stands with the Lady in Fleet Street. If something was done in a more frugal way it would be better for all friends.’ The second letter is more persistent, as Bowes had evidently evaded his responsibilities, as well as more revealing while maintaining the fiction of the mutual ‘friend’. Now despairing that Bowes will return to London, Hunter implores him to decide on the future of the woman in his care and - it transpires - her child. ‘My opinion is that she should go to service,’ the surgeon suggests, ‘for keeping her in the idle life, is doing her more hurt, than all that has been done.’ Remembering to send his respects to ‘Lady Strathmore and Miss Stoney’, Hunter gives the game away with his postscript: ‘The small pox was in the house, where the little thing is, should it be innoculated ?’ Reaching the end of his patience in the third and final letter, Hunter exasperatedly urges Bowes to respond. At last dispensing with the pretence of a ‘friend’, the surgeon writes: ‘I have spent all your money, of which I will give you an account of when I have the pleasure of seeing you, or sooner if you would chuse to have the account.’ Having ascertained that the woman in question would be happy to find employment - and save them both running up further bills - Hunter adds: ‘There are some Suspicions that the little thing has got the measles. Should he not be inoculated?’ Enclosed with one of the letters, Mary found a receipt for £113 ‘from Mr B’ and a bill for a further £45 15s and 4d still owing.

Providing an illuminating insight into the arrangements for illegitimate offspring, the letters clearly indicate that Hunter had delivered the baby born of Bowes’s extra-marital affair in an arrangement similar to that involving Mary just two years earlier. The ‘Lady in Fleet Street’ was obviously one ‘M. Armstrong’ from whom Mary intercepted a letter to Bowes at about the same time.
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Written in the poor grammar characteristic of Bowes’s impoverished mistresses, the letter pleads: ‘I am extremley unhappy that I have not received an answer to my Last letter, you told me that you would leave orders with Mr Hunter wether I was to come to my last place or what I was to do.’ Continuing without pause, she adds: ‘I am with out Money and Cloase and that makes me very unhappy, I hope you will be kind enuf to send me answer what I am to doo and what sittiuation you would wish to place me.’ M. Armstrong may also have been the ‘Mary (with Red Hair)’ who, George Walker would later declare, had given birth to two illegitimate children by Bowes. Whatever her identity, like all of the poor working girls Bowes would lure into relationships, she would find that the attentions of her generous lover disappeared as quickly as his money once too many inconvenient offspring appeared.

Studiously keeping his vices private, Bowes maintained the image of public virtue. The ostentatious displays of civic generosity and exotic gifts to powerful neighbours proved fruitful. Early in 1780 Bowes succeeded in getting himself elected High Sheriff of Northumberland, one of the most prestigious posts in the country, which brought with it important judicial responsibilities as well as further expenses.
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Heavily in debt, holding his sister prisoner, regularly abusing his wife and fathering illegitimate children, the new High Sheriff was expected to work with local judges and justices of the peace, organise hue-and-cry chases and attend executions as a pillar of legal rectitude. With his eye firmly on his main goal, a seat in the House of Commons, Bowes threw lavish entertainments at Gibside where Mary was required to act her wifely part. Household accounts reveal the scale of their catering with one bill for the period listing ‘Turkeys, Chickens, Butter, Cream, Salmon, Eggs, Pidgeons, Oranges, Apples and Letters [lettuce] for Mr Bowes and the Countess’ while another for 1780 records the purchase of turkeys, chickens and seventy eggs.
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According to Foot, ‘his dinners were good, and his table enriched by massive plate’ and yet, the surgeon added, ‘there was always a smack of mean splendour about him, as he did not purchase one single new carriage, and his coach horses, originally of high value, were never seen in good condition’. Though he pressed his guests with fine wines and rich foods, Bowes’s meanness of spirit was apparent too, for he invariably entertained the company by making one of his subordinates the butt of his jokes. To the tenants, villagers and miners who had long enjoyed the philanthropy of the Gibside owners, Bowes was infinitely more miserly. Previously permitted to roam the Gibside woods and lawns at will, now the locals found the walks barred by notices forbidding entry.
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In truth, the splendour they had previously savoured was already tarnished, for Bowes had not only decimated the woods but had let the lawns become overgrown, the walks neglected and the Gothic architectural projects so proudly created by George Bowes to fall into disrepair. While Lady Liberty still gazed over the verdant valley, the former Eden was now tainted and sullied.

 

For William Paterson, back in Cape Town in early 1780 after returning from his fourth and final expedition into the south African interior, prospects had taken a severe turn for the worse. His mounting bills for provisions, lodgings, guides, oxen and other necessities having been returned from England unpaid, under Bowes’s instructions, he was now seriously in debt, unable even to buy a passage home or pay his daily expenses. Entirely dependent on the ‘protection and support’ he had trustingly expected from his benefactor he was now destitute and abandoned in a foreign land.

The humble gardener from a remote Scottish hamlet had penetrated further into the Cape interior than any British traveller, collected a treasure trove of botanic marvels and discovered several new species. Still only twenty-four, Paterson had witnessed scenes that fellow Europeans would struggle to believe. Travelling on foot or on horseback, he had crossed mountains and forded rivers, observed zebras, monkeys and elephants in their natural habitats, and made contact with the Khoikhoi and Xhosa peoples, then known as Hottentots and Caffres. While he was not, as he would claim, the first European to visit what was then termed Caffraria - modern-day Eastern Cape - for Thunberg had beaten him to that accolade, he was certainly among the most enlightened. While Thunberg had sworn that a lion would ‘much rather eat a Hottentot than a Christian’ and had claimed that the ‘Caffres’ were so greedy for iron they would murder for it, Paterson had admired the Khoikhoi dance rituals and praised the Xhosa tribe’s farming skills.
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Determinedly pursuing his mission to discover new plant life, Paterson had endured all manner of adversity, travelling for days without food or water, and surviving on ostrich eggs, the ‘rusty flesh’ of hippos and broiled termites - which he pronounced ‘far from disagreeable’. Twice he had undertaken expeditions in winter when heavy rainfall and swollen rivers made travelling treacherous, for the simple reason that: ‘I was in hopes of discovering many plants which might endure our climate, and be rendered useful.’
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In all, he had covered a greater distance - some 5,600 miles - than any of his botanical predecessors.