Wedlock (31 page)

After spending the long summer recess in County Durham, Bowes seemed in no particular hurry to return to London to pursue his constituents’ interests. That October he organised a shooting party to Wemmergill, the remote grouse moor in the North Pennines which had belonged to the Bowes family since the sixteenth century.
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Among the party, joining himself and Mary at Wemmergill Hall, were Bowes’s long-suffering financial advisor William Davis and his spinster sister Ann, along with another sister Sarah and her husband General Frederick, who had all been spending the greater part of the summer with the family in the north. Experiencing the cravings common to early pregnancy, Mary looked forward to eating the plentiful grouse being shot on her ancestors’ moorland. But when the men and dogs returned that evening with their bags full, Bowes laid out the plump birds in front of her then promptly packaged them up to send to a mistress in Durham. Sick with hunger and disappointment Mary spent the next day in bed.

Normally so careful to present himself as the tender and attentive husband, catering to his fickle wife’s every need, Bowes’s behaviour had now degenerated to the point that even his guests were struck by it. Ann Davis would later describe his conduct towards his wife as ‘very austere and overbearing’ while her sister, Mrs Frederick, noted that Mary had been ‘exceedingly disappointed’ over the anticipated game. A little later, having returned with their hosts to stay at Streatlam Castle, Mrs Frederick was woken in the night by the sound of Mary screaming but when she enquired at breakfast as to the cause of the sudden alarm, Mary insisted that all was well. Despite the denial, the guests were beginning to suspect that their generous host, the esteemed MP for Newcastle, was perhaps not the upstanding member of society he had led them to believe. On another occasion, Bowes forced Mary to go riding with the two sisters on the most uncomfortable mount the Streatlam stables could provide, a ‘hard trotting Scotch Galloway’ - a pony traditionally renowned for its stamina in the lead mines. After four miles over the potholed country roads, Mary was suffering such violent pains that she had to lie in a ditch while Ann Davis sent ahead to alert Bowes and request a carriage. Returning home, her agony was ‘so great’, Mary would later write, that she suffered ‘convulsively hysterical fits for most of the day’. Undeterred by her protests, Bowes insisted that Mary continue to ride daily along the rough, rutted roads to pay formal visits to their neighbours. At the same time he forced her to drink milk, which she loathed, and banned her from drinking tea, which she loved.

Yet even as he persecuted and beat Mary, Bowes fretted over her health. ‘He was tremblingly alive for the fate of the Countess,’ his surgeon Foot would recall, ‘and watched all her movements like ARGUS.’
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While he may have been as vigilant as the hundred-eyed giant of Greek myth, Bowes’s anxiety had little to do with Mary’s own welfare. Terrified that if she died in childbirth or from its after-effects - the common fate of countless Georgian women - and left him without an heir he would lose all rights to the Bowes fortune, he hedged his bets by insuring her life. Plying his agent in London with repeated requests to take out new insurance policies, while instructing him not to mention Mary’s pregnancy, Bowes explained, ‘for though Lady Strathmore is in
Perfect Health,
yet as she is with child, I am determined to insure her life deeply’.

Much to Bowes’s relief, on 8 March 1782, Mary gave birth in London to a healthy son, and soon recovered from her ordeal.
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A legitimate heir for Bowes at last, the boy was named William Johnstone Bowes, in honour of Mary’s grandfather and Bowes’s maternal ancestors. When news reached Newcastle three days later, the city’s church bells were rung into the night in celebration of the absent MP’s happy event. But far from mending divisions between his parents, the new infant would only provide further opportunities for Bowes to humiliate and torment his wife.

As Mary regained her strength during the traditional lying-in period in the new lodgings Bowes had rented in St James’s Place near Green Park, William was handed to a wet-nurse hired for the purpose. His father had taken particular care in choosing the woman for the job - Bowes always handpicked the servants without consulting his wife - but his close attention to the task had little to do with the dietary needs of his son. Although he was no book lover, conceivably Bowes had read contemporary advice on choosing a wet-nurse which described the ideal candidate as between twenty and thirty-five years old, clean and neat, with sound teeth and no signs of ‘distemper’.
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If so, he would no doubt have lingered on the recommendation that her breasts should be large, full and soft and the nipples ‘rather long and slender, of a moderate size and firmness’ and quite possibly even tested the suggestion that ‘by gentle pressure’ the milk should easily flow. The woman he duly appointed, Mrs Houghton, was grubby, illiterate and totally unsuited to looking after a young infant - at least in Mary’s eyes. ‘She hurt my son much by bad milk, dirt, and every species of neglect,’ she would complain.
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Bowes, by contrast, found her highly desirable.

For all his political friends’ assurances that he was a reformed character, the public focus on Bowes’s private foibles had done nothing to curb his voracious sexual appetite. No longer attempting to maintain the charade of the faithful husband and devoted family man, Bowes now openly cavorted with the female servants, brought his mistresses and prostitutes into the house and exultantly informed Mary of his sexual exploits.

While many Georgian husbands indulged in extramarital affairs and fathered children out of wedlock few were quite as brazen, or quite as prolific, as Bowes. Although Mary had long been aware, through the letters she intercepted and remarks she overheard, that Bowes had frequented brothels, maintained mistresses and spawned illegitimate offspring, until now he had always attempted to deny or conceal his intrigues. Now that he had an heir, he dropped all efforts at subterfuge and flaunted his affairs before Mary, the servants, his friends and even his children. Having already made a point of sending a present of game to one lover in Durham, Bowes fawned in public over a wealthy Newcastle woman, a certain ‘Miss W-’, for whom he even contemplated that well-worn ruse of fighting a duel. But never content with only one object of sexual desire, he informed Mary in 1782 that he intended to seduce the beautiful daughter of a farmer living near St Paul’s Walden and install her in the house as a companion for Mary. In the event, his lustful ambitions went comically awry. Spying on the daughter through the farmhouse window one night as she undressed for bed, Bowes was attacked by her father’s dog which savaged his leg. Frustrated by this unfortunate escapade, Bowes now threatened to dismiss Mary’s maid, Isabella Fenton, and replace her with another of his mistresses. When Mary insisted that this was ‘a dignity not to be endured’ he flung wine in her face then emptied a decanter of water over her head. While Mary kept her maid, Bowes was undeterred.

That December he arranged another shooting party, this time inviting some of his male cronies to join the family at Cole Pike Hill. Cramped as it was with the additional guests, Mary and Bowes had to share their bedroom with nine-month-old William and his nurse, Mrs Houghton, put up on camp beds. On the second night Mary woke with a start to find the bed empty beside her. Upon drawing back the bed curtains she saw Bowes suddenly leap from the nurse’s bed and pretend to stoke the fire. Asked what he was doing, Bowes claimed he had got up because he had heard the baby cry. When one of the guests departed the following day, Mary instructed Mrs Houghton to move into the vacated room only to receive a severe reprimand from Bowes.

Back at Gibside, Bowes abandoned any last effort to hide his lust for the obliging wet-nurse, insisting that she eat at a side-table in the dining room each evening then sending Mary to her room so that he could entertain Mrs Houghton alone into the early hours. Gossip over the unseemly familiarity between master and servant spread quickly through the household; one maid was shocked to find Bowes and Mrs Houghton deep in private conversation late one evening in the nursery as young William tottered unheeded around them.
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Poorly educated, ill-groomed and down at heel, Mrs Houghton was typical of the women Bowes preyed upon. Lured by the heady mixture of power, money and good looks, such women were eager to advance their fortunes by tending to the well-connected MP’s predilections. For his part Bowes could indulge his prodigious sexual needs without fear of being intellectually outsmarted.

Staying north throughout the winter of 1782 to 1783, Bowes informed the new premier, Lord Shelburne, that ‘a severe indisposition’ had prevented him from attending to his parliamentary duties.
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Yet there was nothing wrong with the MP’s health as Bowes explained to a friend - ‘A want of money, not a want of health, has detained me here so long.’ Not long after William turned one that spring it became apparent that his negligent wet-nurse was steadily gaining weight. ‘I soon perceived the Nurse’s situation,’ Mary wrote, ‘and when
appearances
began to be apprehended, the Husband was written to, unknown to me, acquainting him she was ill, and the poor Man was actually so complaisant as to come from London to Gibside, seven miles beyond Newcastle upon Tyne, merely to answer Mr Bowes’s purpose’.
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Having tricked the cuckolded husband into hastening to Gibside with reports that his wife was sick, Bowes ensured he stayed long enough to enjoy his conjugal rights in order to justify her burgeoning figure. A week later, Mrs Houghton had miraculously regained her health and her gullible spouse was packed off back to the capital.

As Mrs Houghton bloomed, rather precipitously after her husband’s hurried visit, news of her circumstances spread so that, according to Mary, Bowes’s conduct became ‘either the scandal or the jest of the Country’. His sexual indiscretions and his political negligence now well known, Bowes’s popularity was rapidly waning. At Durham races in July, Bowes was furious to find himself ‘pretty unanimously sent to Coventry’, in the words of one spectator.
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‘His friend Lord Darlington was not here, nor would he come tho’ Bowes went over Post to Raby to entreat him to appear for one day, but his Lordship had not courage to do it.’ Shunned by his aristocratic friends and mocked by his affluent neighbours, Bowes was fast becoming a pariah. And as details of his debauchery, political apathy and tyrannical behaviour percolated upstairs and downstairs within the county’s stately homes, the erstwhile people’s MP had fallen from grace as the working man’s hero too. Treating his servants and estate staff with arrogance and contempt, Bowes refused to pay the workmen at Gibside, raised rents on the farms and sacked loyal workers in his increasingly frequent fits of passion.
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Having clashed with Bowes the previous year, Thomas Joplin, the Gibside gardener, swore that Nature had been determined to insult mankind when she made ‘such a monster wear the Human forme’.

Humiliated by the spiralling rumours and the expanding Mrs Houghton as she staggered around Gibside with little William and six-year-old Mary in tow, Mary decided she had had enough. Finally she confronted Bowes, ‘telling him it was high time to part with so useless a servant, who cut so
indecent
a figure when she brought in the children after Dinner’. But instead of discreetly sending Mrs Houghton away, in August Bowes hired a new maid, a local tenant’s daughter called Dorothy Stephenson, to wait upon the wet-nurse.

A simple country girl of seventeen who had grown up on the Bowes family estate, Dorothy was somewhat surprised to discover the state of affairs at Gibside Hall.
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Taking her orders from the heavily pregnant Mrs Houghton, Dorothy watched in astonishment as the master of the house fussed over the nurse’s well-being yet raged at his meek and dutiful wife. While Bowes plied the smug Mrs Houghton with presents, Dorothy heard him refuse his wife’s requests for money to buy clothes and shoes for herself or the children. On only her second night in the house, an even more shocking surprise was in store for Dorothy. Sleeping in the nursery with Mrs Houghton and little Mary - William being then elsewhere - Dorothy had locked the door upon retiring to bed. Just after midnight she heard the handle rattle and then, when the door refused to yield, a man’s voice calling urgently to Mrs Houghton to open the door. Feigning sleep, Dorothy peeked from under the bedclothes to see the nurse tiptoeing over in her shift and opening the door to the master of the house dressed only in his night cap and dressing gown. Next she saw Bowes climb into the nurse’s bed and minutes later heard the unmistakeable sound of springs being pounded. Innocent but not naive, Dorothy had no doubt that the noise was due to ‘two Persons in the act of carnally knowing each other’. The following day Bowes made a point of handing the nursery door key to Mrs Houghton with instructions to her and Dorothy that it must never be locked again. A fortnight later, Mrs Houghton, now seven months pregnant, left the household. Tenderly escorting her to his carriage, Bowes accompanied her to London where she would begin her lying-in.

If Bowes treated Mrs Houghton with significantly more kindness than he usually reserved for his mistresses, her absence did not cause him to pine for long. Moving the household down to London that autumn, Bowes leased a new house in the West End; only a few doors from the family’s former home, in the south-east corner of Grosvenor Square, number 48 was even more spacious and came fully furnished.
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For young Dorothy, seeing London for the first time, the square’s spacious garden, crowned by its statue of George I and surrounded by opulent mansion houses, was a stirring sight. But even more startling than her new home was the role she was now expected to adopt within the household. Sleeping in the nursery with eighteen-month-old William, with the door unlocked as her employer had dictated, Dorothy awoke one night in alarm to discover somebody climbing into her bed.
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Screaming in terror, she immediately recognised the voice of her master who brusquely warned her to hold her tongue then crammed a handkerchief into her mouth. Gagged and pinned to her bed, Dorothy, a virgin, was powerless to resist as Bowes brutally raped her. Deflowered and degraded, Dorothy knew she could neither denounce Bowes nor rebuff further assaults; as his employee and, moreover, the daughter of his tenants, any defiance would mean disaster both for her and for her family. From now on, whenever she heard Bowes steal into the nursery at night - whether in Grosvenor Square, Gibside or St Paul’s Walden Bury - she had no alternative but to submit to his violations while the children slept innocently in their beds. Nevertheless, unlike the willing Mrs Houghton, Dorothy succumbed to Bowes’s advances with disgust while carefully storing up details of the abuse she suffered and the scenes she witnessed for future use.