Wedlock (35 page)

Having embroiled his friends as accessories to his misdeeds while he remained at a safe distance in Paris, Bowes pronounced himself ‘very satisfied’ with the outcome of the preliminary hearing.
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Studiously maintaining the myth that he was a mere bystander in Mary’s bid to regain her children, his next letter assured Davis that he was determined to return to England but issued the proviso that, ‘I am equally resolved to permit Lady S- and her daughter to do exactly as their own wishes may happen to dictate.’ He added: ‘They wish, I believe, to remain in their present asylum.’

For Mary, if not for Anna, remaining in Paris certainly resembled life in an asylum, although not the tranquil sanctuary that Bowes had invoked. Even as Bowes forced her to write letters pleading his concern for her wellbeing, he subjected her to ‘unequalled’ cruelty.
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Anxious to avoid being recognised, he beat her several times for failing to pull her bonnet far forward enough to conceal her face and on one occasion he pinched her for not standing behind Anna when watching a public firework display. When visiting their friends, the physician John Scott and his wife, whom Bowes had summoned to keep them company in Paris, Mary unthinkingly removed her cloak, revealing her tattered gown with gaping holes beneath the arms. Marching her to a quiet spot in the Luxembourg gardens, Bowes scolded and pinched her for half an hour before almost tearing one of her diamond earrings out of her ear.

Equally determined that Mary should enjoy none of the cultural or intellectual treats that Paris had to offer, Bowes forbade her from visiting any of the famous sights, conversing in French or studying the native botany. ‘Having incautiously mentioned that one of my chief delights in France would be picking up any curious plants which might fall my way, Mr Bowes gave me the strictest orders never to pull them,’ she would write. ‘[B]ut as we were walking through a Vineyard at l’Etoile, near Paris, I perceived so very curious a flower within my reach, that as I thought he was too earnest in discourse to observe me, I snatched at, and slipped it into my pocket, however not unnoticed for Mr Bowes instantly said “What is that you have got, shew me.” I did, upon which he flung it away, and whispering some abusive language, gave me a sly pinch on my arm.’

While Mary Morgan quietly observed each fresh assault and noted the marks on her mistress’s flesh each night, Mary Eleanor contrived to suffer Bowes’s brutality in silence. But towards the end of June, his abuse reached extremes that would have far-reaching consequences.

Alone in her hotel room, Mary was drawing back the curtains to look down on the coach yard below when Bowes walked in.
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Enraged that she should expose herself to view, he flew at her with his fists, punching, kicking and pushing her around the bedroom. He then seized her ear and wrung it so hard, with his nails digging into the flesh of her neck, that blood started pouring from the wound. As blood soaked into Mary’s neckerchief and gown, Bowes attempted to staunch the flow with his own handkerchief. It took two handkerchiefs and a towel to stop the bleeding. Sick with pain and sobbing, Mary leaned against a chest of drawers as Bowes opened the door and yelled for Morgan. Summoned from the adjoining room, Morgan was horrified as she took in her mistress sobbing uncontrollably, the blood-soaked handkerchiefs and the bloody towel strewn on the floor. But far from suggesting she offer solace to her mistress, Bowes angrily instructed Morgan always to place a chair against the door because ‘that woman’ - pointing at Mary - ‘can take no care of herself’. Mary, he declared, had let the wind slam the door causing her to run a pin through her ear. Well accustomed by now to Bowes’s violence and Mary’s lame excuses, Morgan was incredulous. Observing the torn flesh behind Mary’s ear, which looked ‘very unlike any Wound made with a Pin’, she was convinced that Bowes had clawed at the skin with his own nails.

This time, when Morgan later pressed her about the incident, Mary Eleanor finally confessed the truth: it was Bowes who had caused all her bruises, black eyes, scratches and cuts with his sustained campaign of violence. Swearing Morgan to secrecy, Mary had taken what was probably the most crucial step of her life. Although the ill-treatment continued, she finally had an ally.

 

If Mary’s maid now fully appreciated her misery, her own daughter was seemingly indifferent. Sharing a room with her mother in the close confines of the hotel suite, Anna frequently heard and on occasions witnessed her stepfather beating her mother. When Bowes abused Mary at length in the Luxembourg gardens, Anna had watched the entire performance; she would later admit that she frequently heard her mother scream and saw her cry during her time in Paris.
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And yet, having just turned fourteen, a naive and impressionable adolescent, Anna had plainly fallen for the Bowes magic. Relishing her role at the centre of the family drama, flattered by the attentions of the stepfather who had whisked her away from the dullness of boarding school life, she was in thrall to Bowes. Still handsome at thirty-seven, impeccably dressed and as silkily manipulative as ever, Bowes filled the vacuum left by the father she barely remembered and presented a welcome antidote to her severe and puritanical uncle. While in Paris, she would later say, her stepfather bought her expensive gowns, engaged the best tutors for her lessons and in short ‘did all in his power’ to make her happy. So when Bowes scolded her mother for wearing tattered clothing, complained of her clumsiness or admonished her for being too familiar with the servants, Anna placidly swallowed the charade. Indeed, she would later argue, if her mother had only followed her husband’s instructions more carefully ‘they might all have lived more happily than they did’. But not only did Anna condone Bowes’s cruelty, she was even emboldened to emulate him, treating her mother with contempt and callousness. The friction led to fierce arguments, which Bowes eagerly fanned by supporting Anna and admonishing Mary for treating her daughter too harshly. Mary herself would later accuse Bowes of prevailing upon Anna to ‘treat me almost as ill as you did’.
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Precisely how far the alliance between Bowes and Anna extended is unclear. Although Bowes had evidently plotted to marry Anna to a wealthy suitor in France, it is plausible that his thoughts may even have turned to acquiring a second Bowes heiress for himself. After all, his own claim to fortune lasted only for the duration of Mary’s lifetime which - under his bullying regime - might not be overlong. Certainly Anna’s school teachers would later refer obliquely to her having ‘erred’ during her time in France, while her mother would express a desire to ‘avoid exposing my Daughter’ to unwelcome scandal. Most tellingly, Bowes’s own sister would write to Mary with the words: ‘Your account of your unnatural Daughter (as you justly stile her) indeed strikes us all with horror. Can they be so base? God Almighty reform them.’
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And while her uncle harried his lawyers to secure her rescue, Anna seemed in no particular hurry to return.

By early August, when Bowes still defied the Lord Chancellor’s order to surrender Anna, the guardians had applied to the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carmarthen, to help procure Anna’s release through the French courts. Determined to thwart this fresh assault, Bowes tellingly complained that the guardians had ‘represented the child as taken off under thirteen years of age, for the purpose of getting her married to some improper person, UNKNOWN TO THEM.’
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While this was undoubtedly Bowes’s plan, he knew he could count on his friends in England loyally fulfilling their roles when the case came up for its full hearing in Chancery. On the day Scott and Lee turned in bravura performances, insisting that Mary Eleanor was the chief instigator of the plot and Bowes merely her assistant, pleading the case with, in Foot’s words, ‘their eyes brimful of tears’. Their lachrymose appeal was lost on Tiger Thurlow, who summarily rejected their case, censured the spineless Davis and charged him with bringing Anna back from France within six weeks.

Receiving news of the outcome in Paris, Bowes submissively vowed that he was ‘ready to attend the wishes of the Chancellor’ and even, magnanimously, to ‘confess I assisted Lady S—in the execution of this affair’. Promising to meet Davis in Calais, he apologised for having been ‘the involuntary cause of the troubles you have lately experienced’. But he continued: ‘As to our immediate return, no man ever took greater pains than I have done to convince Lady S—and her daughter of the propriety of that step. But it is not in my power to succeed, without extracting from their minds their dread of what may follow, by the death of my wife, and equally her daughter, their affections are so much interwoven.’

Throughout August and early September Bowes dangled his friend on a string, promising to meet him in Calais, then in Lille and then, after Davis had wearily trekked from one French city to the next, pleading that illness had prevented him leaving Paris after all. While Davis traversed northern France on his friend’s wild goose chase, Bowes idled his days away by sampling the pleasures of the French metropolis - in Mary’s words he ‘satiated all vices (beyond all bounds)’.
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Doubtless this entailed excursions to Paris’s saucy boulevard shows and its numerous brothels although Bowes now set his sights on a more intense relationship with a certain fashionable woman about town. Since Bowes could not speak French, he instructed Mary to translate a letter of seduction he had drafted. When she refused, on the grounds this constituted ‘such an indignity as I believe never any wife was exposed to’, he not only beat her but threatened to place her youngest daughter Mary ‘where I should never see her again’. Grossly humiliated, she copied the letter into French including Bowes’s supplication that ‘my fortune, which is more than ample, and every thing honourable which I can confer, shall be for ever devoted to your service and happiness’.

With time running out, as Bowes knew he must return to face his accusers and his creditors, in early September he ordered Mary to begin writing a ‘Book of Errors’. In the same literary mould as the ‘Confessions’ which he had wrung out of Mary six years earlier, the Book of Errors was intended as a catalogue of Mary’s daily offences. It began:

For this gross infringement of Bowes’s rules, as well as for feeding some bread to a donkey, Mary was ‘severely beaten about the head and lower part of the face’. Her litany of supposed misconduct continued in a similar vein. On 5 September, when Bowes entertained guests to dinner in their hotel suite, Mary committed the sin of eating some chicken instead of waiting for the vegetables which Bowes had earlier insisted were all his fickle wife would eat. For this she was beaten and confined to her room for several days.

It was a heartfelt relief for Mary when at last the party packed their bags on 13 September and departed Paris. Downtrodden and oppressed like the ragged paupers that she passed in the Parisian streets, she was as much a victim of absolute rule as they were. Arriving in Lille, Bowes was maddened to find that his friend Davis had given up his vigil and had left for England. Insisting that Davis return to meet them in Calais, Bowes urged him to bring clear legal instructions to persuade Mary to give up Anna, otherwise, he warned sinisterly, ‘I may as well put a dagger in their breasts’.
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But even when Davis scurried back across the Channel to find the family holed up in the
Hôtel d’Angleterre
, Bowes kept Mary confined for two further days while dolefully informing Davis that she refused to see him. Although she was now desperate to return to England, Mary was still forced to act out her part in Bowes’s French farce by pretending to faint in terror when Davis was finally granted an interview. At that point, Davis would later recall, Bowes climbed on to the bed beside Mary and wept floods of tears as he attempted to persuade her to relinquish her daughter. The performance so affected Davis that he postponed the home voyage - retrieving the family’s baggage from the boat hired for their return - and even offered to remain in France with them for years if necessary, to allow a resolution to be negotiated with the guardians.
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Finally on 30 September, more than four months after absconding with Anna, the group embarked for Dover.

 

If the guardians heaved a sigh of relief at the imminent reunion with their fourteen-year-old ward, they were sadly optimistic. Arriving back in London on 2 October, Bowes installed the party in the Royal Hotel in Pall Mall rather than return to Grosvenor Square where he knew he would be expected. Determined to evade both his legal and financial pursuers, after a single night in London Bowes took the family on the run again, this time heading north. On a fleeting visit to Grosvenor Square the evening before their departure, Mary barely had time to collect a few clothes and embrace her young son, now an energetic two-and-a-half year-old handful for the weary Dorothy who was eight months pregnant. Having been left without money or credit, and frightened that Bowes might harm her or her child, Dorothy begged Mary to lend her sufficient money to return home to her parents. But as she had been refused so much as a shilling by Bowes since the beginning of the year, Mary sorrowfully confessed that she could offer no help. Dorothy’s fears for her own safety were not assuaged when Bowes stormed into the bedroom, shouted at Mary for wasting time, and - unaware that he was being observed - attempted to cram her into a closet while punching, kicking and cursing her. Finally noticing Dorothy, he executed a brisk about-turn and began yelling at Mary: ‘God damn you, you bitch! Why don’t you come out of the Closet.’
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Leaving an anxious Dorothy and the compliant Reynetts in charge of Grosvenor Square, Bowes laid low with Mary and Anna at St Paul’s Walden Bury for a few days before continuing north to the fashionable spa town of Buxton where they arrived on 9 October. Although he had no compunction in dragging Mary away from her two youngest children, and was apparently indifferent to seeing them, Bowes remained determined to win the battle for Mary to regain access to her five eldest children. So although he was already in contempt of court for refusing to surrender Anna - and his lawless escapades had effectively estranged Mary from Anna’s siblings - he ordered his legal team to continue the custody battle. Meanwhile, he lured the pliable Anna deeper into his web, to the point of encouraging her to collude with his cruelty to her mother.