Wedlock (39 page)

Since the proceedings were fully reported, the Church authorities’ efforts to preserve the holy sanctity of marriage ironically supplied Georgian society’s most salacious publications with sufficient titillating material to keep the printing presses busy. A veritable industry of magazines, books and pamphlets sprang up in the latter half of the eighteenth century, devoted to reporting these ecclesiastical divorce cases. One such publication,
Trials for Adultery or the History of Divorces
, ran to seven volumes when printed in 1780. Naturally, while they related the sordid details verbatim, such publications adopted a high moral tone. Reminding its readers that adulterers were stoned or thrashed by ancient civilisations, one collection argued that lax contemporary standards meant that reporting such cases ‘may, therefore, be found the most effectual Means at present of preserving
Religion
and
Morality
’.
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All the same, the publisher betrayed his pecuniary motives with the aside that: ‘The rapid sale of our former Volumes has induced us to add to the present.’ As if public exposure were not sufficient, Church divorce cases were invariably convoluted, drawn out and expensive with exorbitant fees for lawyers and payments to court clerics. Applicants therefore needed both a thick skin and a deep pocket to embark on the ecclesiastical route. Nevertheless, as expectations of marital bliss rose just as perceived standards of marital fidelity declined, so the ecclesiastical courts saw a rise in divorce trials, particularly after 1780.
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The vast majority of the plaintiffs were wealthy members of the aristocracy or gentry and - not surprisingly - two-thirds were male.

Yet while these various avenues allowed disgruntled husbands, and occasionally wives, to cast off an unwanted partner, none permitted them to do what so many wanted most - and Henry VIII had so flagrantly achieved - to marry someone else. Although it took them more than a century, eventually English nobles did succeed in finding a way to follow the royal lead. In 1670 Lord Roos secured a private act of parliament which both dissolved his marriage to his wife, Anne, and allowed him to remarry. His argument that his wife’s adultery and subsequent illegitimate child deprived him of his right to a legitimate heir won support from Charles II - with an eye to his own marital disaffection - who declared the debate ‘better than a play’.
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With the precedent set, an act of parliament became the only route to a full divorce which allowed the partners to remarry, although solely on grounds of adultery, until the mid-nineteenth century.

The procedure usually began with the aggrieved husband suing his wife’s lover, or alleged lover, for ‘criminal conversation’ - essentially seeking damages for trespassing on his property - in the civil courts. He would then obtain a separation through the ecclesiastical courts before finally moving a bill for divorce through the House of Lords. Although used only rarely at first, during the late 1700s private divorce acts increased in popularity both with the landed classes, who could free themselves from unsavoury marriages, and the general public, who could salivate over their sexual exploits as each suit dragged through its three legal stages. Lady Diana Spencer, later Lady Beauclerk, endured public scorn when divorced from her first husband, Viscount Bolingbroke, by act of parliament in 1768, as the steamy details of her adultery were paraded in court while her husband’s serial philandering went unmentioned. The following year the Duchess of Grafton, later Lady Ossory, suffered a similar trial by humiliation. Yet while some wives, Lady Ossory and Lady Beauclerk among them, connived with the unseemly procedure in exchange for their freedom and the opportunity to remarry, initiating a parliamentary divorce would remain the preserve of a very rich, well-connected and exclusively male elite. Only 132 such divorces were granted before 1800; none were to women plaintiffs.
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Indeed, there were several attempts from 1771 onwards to prevent wives implicated in such cases from themselves remarrying. When finally the first parliamentary divorce sought by a woman was granted in 1801, she would have to prove her husband had committed not only adultery but incest - with her sister - and even then it took an impassioned argument by Lord Thurlow to persuade such diehards as Lord Eldon to support her cause.
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Ultimately it would require a sustained campaign led by enraged women in the early nineteenth century to end the shambolic system and introduce the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which established the divorce court in which both sexes enjoyed the right to seek a full divorce. Even then the only grounds were adultery and women still had to prove further indignity, such as cruelty, desertion or sodomy. It would be 1923 before women were awarded equal rights in seeking divorce and only as recent as 1969 before the principle of divorce for incompatibility - breakdown of marriage - was at last recognised.

In 1785, therefore, the only way for Mary to sever her chains from Bowes was to seek a separation from bed and board through the ecclesiastical courts. Almost penniless and virtually friendless, she knew that her chances of success were slight while the process would inevitably expose her past indiscretions to public scrutiny. Nevertheless, on 28 February 1785, Mary Eleanor launched her suit for divorce from Andrew Robinson Bowes on grounds of adultery and cruelty with the London Consistory Court, the biggest and busiest of the bishops’ courts dealing with marital disputes.

Based at Doctors’ Commons, a muddle of seventeenth-century courtyards and quadrangles between St Paul’s Cathedral and the Thames, the LCC had become renowned as the country’s chief divorce court. Running in parallel to the common law system, the Church courts had a separate hierarchy of lawyers known as proctors and advocates, equivalent to solicitors and barristers, along with their own distinctive procedures and jargon. Accordingly, anyone initiating a suit had first to engage a proctor - ‘a kind of monkish attorney’ in Dickens’s words - to register a citation which effectively launched the suit.
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Providing a comprehensive litany of Bowes’s outrages, Mary’s citation accused him of ‘beating, scratching, biting, pinching, whipping, kicking, imprisoning, insulting, provoking, tormenting, mortifying, degrading, tyrannizing, cajoling, deceiving, lying, starving, forcing, compelling, and wringing of the heart’.
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Having instructed her proctor to prepare a ‘libel’, which outlined Bowes’s atrocities in detail, Mary now needed sufficient sworn testimonies, known as ‘depositions’, to prove her case. With Bowes determined to thwart her suit, she was going to need all the support that she could muster.

 

While Bowes, of course, had the entire income generated by Mary’s family estate at his disposal to fight the various law suits now stacking up against him, Mary had no source of funds to support herself or to finance her litigation. Throughout the drawn-out legal process she would remain reliant on the generosity of friends and sympathisers. While her maids stayed with her without wages, her lawyers pursued her various suits without fee in the hope that they would be paid if she were successful. ‘My Lawyers act most zealously for me,’ she told one correspondent, ‘without Fees, the 4 Maid Servants who attended me in my flight, serve me without Wages, & two of them even left behind a great deal of Money which Mr Bowes owes them.’
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The majority of her aid came from those at the poorest levels of Georgian society, principally the servants, estate staff and tenants who had served her family for generations. Gardeners on her estates sent her fruit and vegetables at the risk of losing their jobs, while tenants forwarded their rent at the risk of losing their farms. Even so, according to Foot, she was ‘reduced very low indeed’.
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More significantly, and more dangerously for those involved, Mary needed witnesses who were prepared to testify to Bowes’s years of violence and sexual philandering. While Bowes was prepared to bribe, harass or kidnap servants, friends and assorted disreputable characters to lie on his behalf, Mary could only appeal to her witnesses’ basic honesty to speak out in her support. Confined in her lodgings she devoted her days to writing scores of letters in her looped neat handwriting, or dictating them to her closest ally - ‘my female Secretary Morgan, who takes all the Business of Routine off my Hands’
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- in a stream of correspondence to relatives, friends and acquaintances from the past. Free to reveal her genuine emotions for the first time in years, often to people she had previously been compelled to treat with rudeness, Mary rapidly regained her old confidence and determination. She now discovered who her true friends were, for in this dispute it was impossible not to take sides. Indeed, for those who were swept up in the Bowes divorce case, this was not a simple break-up between two married people so much as a brutally fought civil war which divided whole communities and even split families.

Among the first people Mary turned to were Bowes’s family in Ireland. After hearing nothing from Mary for nearly five years, her sister-in-law rejoiced to learn that she had finally escaped her brother’s tyranny. Now happily married, Mary Lawrenson, as she had become, enthused ‘it is not in words to express my feelings’ and urged Mary to stay safe. Having just lost her first son at only three months old, she wrote that news of Mary’s release had helped assauge her grief and added bitterly: ‘What a Blessing it would be had Bowes been taken off at that Age.’
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Her father, George Stoney, declared himself ‘deeply afflicted’ to learn of his eldest son’s conduct. Now seventy-two and increasingly infirm, he wrote an emotional apology to Mary for the ‘base unnatural Treatment’ she had suffered at the hands of ‘the most wretched man I ever knew’. Yet although he told Bowes’s uncle, General Armstrong, that it would have been a blessing had his son ‘never been Born’, the Stoney patriarch adamantly forbade his daughter Mary from testifying to her brother’s villainy in court on the grounds that: ‘Tho’ we abhor Bowes and his proceedings, yet to join in prosecuting him would be unpardonable in a Sister.’

There was scarcely more support from Mary’s own family. In a stiff and formal letter sent after two entreaties from Mary, Thomas Lyon icily responded: ‘I have the pleasure to acquaint your Ladyship that Lady Maria is perfectly well. She rejoices with me in hearing of your Success & desires her due respects.’
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And while he maintained a close watch on how the legal disputes might affect his wards’ prospects, even a year later he would brush off her appeals for help with the excuse that ‘my name could not be of the smallest use’. Meanwhile Lyon took steps to rein in his wilful niece Anna by placing her in the care of Elizabeth Parish, née Planta, the pious governess Mary had dismissed so acrimoniously while in the throes of her affair with George Gray nine years earlier. With memories of her former mistress’s past excesses evidently not forgotten, Mrs Parish, elder sister of Eliza Stephens, promised that she would try to curb Anna’s newly acquired extravagance but warned: ‘It will give me some trouble to conquer the habits of inattention and disorder which she has contracted’.
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Not long afterwards, reporting a conciliatory letter received from Mary Eleanor, Mrs Parish gleefully informed Lyon: ‘I do not perceive in Lady A- M- the least desire either of seeing her or of hearing from her.’

Much to Mary’s sorrow, Mrs Parish was right. Although Anna would grudgingly sign a deposition testifying that she had heard her mother scream and seen her cry from the abuse meted out by Bowes, she was still sufficiently under her stepfather’s spell to conspire with his pretence that Mary was accident-prone, slovenly and quarrelsome. The only family members who tendered Mary any significant aid were William Lyon, a distant relation of the ninth Earl, who agreed to support her petition to Chancery, and General John Lambton, widower of the late earl’s sister Susan, who called once and ‘made her a present’.
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Likewise Mary enjoyed scant support from the former friends and acquaintances with whom she had rubbed shoulders at masked balls and select salons. Anxious to distance themselves from the vulgar stain of divorce, the pillars of respectable society stayed away from her door.

Turning to the various medical men whose casebooks contained ample details of the fruits of Bowes’s sexual voracity, Mary encountered sharply divided loyalties. The surgeon Jessé Foot would later proclaim that Bowes ‘considered all females as natural game, and hunted them down as so many FERAE NATURAE’.
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The legions of illegitimate children Bowes had spawned, Foot added, were ‘vastly more, perhaps, than the granary of any other man has been found to produce’. But asked by Mary to give evidence to this effect he refused to testify unless subpoenaed ‘for my own Reputation as well as for the Honour of my Profession’. Duly summoned, in his subsequent deposition Foot admitted that Bowes had paid him to deliver the wet-nurse Mrs Houghton’s baby and then dupe her husband into believing it was not uncommon for babies to be born at six months. With little regard to professional honour, he would remain firm friends with Bowes, pandering to his contrived ailments and enjoying the spoils of his table.

Foot’s sworn rival John Hunter, by contrast, congratulated Mary on her escape and pledged his full support to her cause.
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In a frank depiction of Bowes’s austerity towards his wife, his testimony declared that Bowes always exhibited ‘a very strict and severe Disposition’ and refused to indulge Mary with ‘such Trifles’ as tea and coffee. Later writing from Bath, where the surgeon was recovering from a heart attack, Hunter assured her: ‘I hope to see the Day when Your Ladyship’s person will be safe when you can enjoy your Children and your lands again’. Likewise the male midwife Richard Thompson would freely testify to his role in delivering Bowes’s illegitimate child with Dorothy Stephenson.