Wedlock (40 page)

Yet it was those who had most to lose who showed Mary the greatest loyalty. All four maids who had helped Mary escape - Mary Morgan, Ann Dixon, Ann Parkes and Susanna Church - willingly jeopardised their livelihoods and risked their lives by testifying to their former master’s violent behaviour and sexual outrages. Their courageous descriptions of the bruises, burns and weals which Mary had suffered at Bowes’s hands coupled with his oppressive curtailment of her movements, diet and dress furnished a resounding indictment of his cruelty. Other servants, who had worked in the Bowes household in years past, similarly came forward to describe the despotic regime that they had witnessed stretching back to the days immediately following the couple’s marriage. Even one of Bowes’s current servants, his footman Robert Crundall, made a statement detailing his master’s brutality. He was inevitably sacked for his betrayal and promptly offered his services to Mary with whom he would remain for the rest of her life. Further down the slippery Georgian social ladder, denizens of London’s sexual underworld willingly gave evidence on Mary’s behalf. Nineteen-year-old Elizabeth Waite, who had been reduced to living in the Magdalen Hospital for ‘penitent prostitutes’, told how Bowes had raped her when she applied to work as a nursery maid, while the brothel keeper Susannah Sunderland related how Bowes had brought Dorothy to her house for the delivery of her illegitimate baby. Yet there was still one crucial witness whose testimony, Mary knew, could prove vital to the success of her suit.

Nothing had been seen of nineteen-year-old Dorothy or her baby daughter since Bowes had abducted them from Mrs Sunderland’s brothel in February. When Mary had sent friends to call on Dorothy shortly after her escape they found no sign either of her or the baby. Knowing Dorothy’s dread of Bowes, Mary feared the worst. Meanwhile, her parents, William and Mary Stephenson, who had been loyal tenants of the Bowes family all their lives, were blithely unaware of their daughter’s pregnancy and subsequent disappearance. So when they received an urgent message from Bowes announcing that their daughter was dangerously ill, they set off immediately from their farm in Whickham to bring her home. Arriving in Durham, to catch the first stage coach to London, the couple were shocked to hear not only that the mistress of Gibside had left her husband but also that Dorothy had given birth to a child fathered by its master. Fearful for their daughter’s safety, the Stephensons managed to contact Mary at her secret hideout in London and at the end of April they joined with her in obtaining a writ of
habeas corpus
demanding that Bowes produce Dorothy. One of the earliest editions of
The Times
, founded at the beginning of 1785 under the title the
Daily Universal Register
, reported Lord Mansfield’s order that Dorothy be surrendered.
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It would be nearly two more weeks before a terrified Dorothy was brought before the King’s Bench. Having been kept captive at a house in Kensington, where her six-month-old daughter was still being held, Dorothy had been forced by Bowes to put her cross to an affidavit swearing that she had suffered no violence or restraint. Unable to read or write she had plainly no understanding of the document’s content. Taking a dim view of the abduction of potential court witnesses, Lord Mansfield reunited Dorothy with her relieved parents at which,
The Times
related, her mother ‘stretched out her arms to receive her and kissed her with great rapture’. Charging her parents to treat Dorothy ‘gently and indulgently’, Lord Mansfield told them to accompany her to Kensington to retrieve her child. As Dorothy now joined Mary in Holborn, her parents carried their granddaughter back to County Durham where they gamely hosted a christening party. Reporting the revels to Mary in London, one loyal worker could not resist observing that, ‘I think that the Child [is] very much like Mr Bowes’.
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Restored to safety, Dorothy lost no time in agreeing a lengthy and incriminating testimony which described how Bowes had repeatedly raped her and made her pregnant, committed adultery with Mrs Houghton who had subseqently given birth to his baby, as well as his catalogue of assaults on Mary with fists, knives and sticks. Declaring Bowes to be ‘a Man of a very cruel savage and abandoned Disposition and also of a loose wicked and lustful Disposition’,
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Dorothy’s statement would prove critical to the outcome of the Bowes divorce.

As news of Dorothy’s ordeal spread among staff and tenants at Gibside, bolstered by many families’ own experiences of Bowes’s bullying and vindictive behaviour, so support for Mary’s cause gathered force. In a groundswell of resistance, estate workers, farmers and their families at last found the courage to oppose Bowes’s worst excesses and they reported their little triumphs in regular despatches to London. For Mary, cut off from her childhood home, the letters which shuttled almost daily between London and County Durham were a lifeline.

 

Plagued by rheumatism and worn down by poverty, the Gibside gardener Robert Thompson had no doubt where his loyalties lay. Expressing ‘great joy’ at the news of Mary’s escape, he wrote to assure her that ‘the Hot house and Greanhouse’ were in good order although the garden had become overgrown through lack of help. When he was sacked by Bowes in April for refusing to surrender his correspondence with Mary, he continued to tend her plants regardless. Despatching a box of fruit from the hothouse, he described in his semi-literate scrawl how Bowes had ordered his agent ‘to settle with me & to begon out of the place’ but assured Mary that ‘I will not be turnd out of the Garden for none of Mr bowes partey’. Saddened at the neglect the garden was suffering, Thompson dutifully worked without pay to weed the beds and pick insects from the flowers saying it ‘greaves me very sor to see them spoild at this time’.
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Likewise Francis Bennett, once a footman to the late Lord Strathmore, who had stayed on as gamekeeper at Gibside, assured Mary of his continuing devotion and vowed ‘I never intend to serve Mr Bowes any longer’.
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Sending Mary regular bulletins on the fortunes of her beloved plants he also kept her abreast of Bowes’s trail of destruction and terror in the neighbourhood. So the revelation that ‘there is 4 Cape plants come up from the seed’ in the greenhouse was somewhat outweighed by news of Bowes’s relentless felling of ancient trees in the woods and his plans to sell off the livestock. As Bowes and his henchmen stormed about the estate threatening staff with dismissal and tenants with eviction, Bennett told Mary ‘I think that Mr B. wants to do all the mischeif he possible can about this place’. He added: ‘I can safely say that your Ladyship has more friends in this part of the Whorld than ever you had, there is hardly a person but what takes your part and wishes that your Ladyship may get the better of Mr B.’ Sending Mary two pineapples by stagecoach to the Blue Boar at Holborn he warned her to avoid replying to Newcastle since Bowes was intercepting their post. But standing up to the renowned might and guile of the master of the manor was no easy undertaking. As Bennett attempted in vain to collect rents for Mary from the terrified tenants in late spring, he was forced to concede ‘at present things goes on very Bad at Gibside all want to be masters’. Finding a hare caught by its neck in the woods, he confided to Mary, ‘I could a wist it had been something eals.’

With tenants divided by their instinctive loyalty to Mary and their understandable terror of Bowes, it was a relief when Thomas Colpitts, Mary’s agent before her marriage to Bowes when he had summarily been replaced by Henry Bourn, volunteered to collect their rents on Mary’s behalf. Thanking him for forwarding a much-needed £100 at the end of May, Mary wrote: ‘I am greatly obliged by the unabated Regard you express for my Family, & by your very friendly attention to my own Interest’.
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By early summer of 1785, with avowals of support and money from tenants arriving regularly at her lodgings in Dyers Buildings, while testimonies from her witnesses mounted at her lawyer’s office in nearby Cursitor Street, Mary had good cause for optimism. So when Bowes made a formal application to the Lord Chancellor in July proposing arbitration to settle the couple’s land dispute if Mary would halt her suit for divorce, and offered the lawyer John Scott as referee, Mary felt she had little to lose by giving conciliation a trial. Assured that all due rents and profits would in the meantime be deposited with Chancery and that Bowes was willing to negotiate an amicable legal separation, she reluctantly suspended her divorce case just as the law courts began their long summer holiday.
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Well aware that Mary enjoyed no redress to the courts during their traditional three-month break Bowes, of course, had no intention of seeking an amicable resolution, nor of allowing the tenants to pay their rents into Chancery. Instead he redoubled his efforts to track down her sanctuary, wreaked havoc on her estates and stepped up his campaign of intimidation. Variously informing the staff and tenants that Mary and he were reconciled, or that her case was lost, he offered generous incitements to any who would swear false testimonies against her and threatened them with eviction or dismissal when they refused. Many, like William and Mary Stephenson, valiantly rejected his advances. Offered substantial rewards to deliver up Dorothy or betray Mary’s whereabouts, William Stephenson wanted Mary to be informed of ‘my unalterable resolution to withstand all his Vile Temptations & that I would rather starve than betray her in any respect’.
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Others, distressed by poverty and petrified by his threats, were eventually seduced. Ann and George Arthur, the housekeeper and gardener at St Paul’s Walden Bury, had sent Mary hampers of garden produce ever since her escape, but by May their fidelity had begun to falter. ‘Now my Lady I am at a loss again how to obey with safty,’ George Arthur confessed, ‘as your Ladyship gives me Orders & likewise Mr Bowes.’
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In July, when Bowes sent his footman to intercept the weekly food parcel, the Arthurs meekly surrendered the hamper, complete with Mary’s address.

It was a close shave. Alerted just in time that Bowes had discovered her lodgings, Mary fled to a country retreat with Morgan and three of her trusted servants. Warning Thomas Colpitts to communicate only through Charles Shuter, she begged him: ‘For Godsake don’t tell any body that I am in Staffordshire, or that you have the least Idea, or guess as to the place of my Retirement, for it is of the utmost consequence to keep it secret, lest Mr B. shd. pursue me’.
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When she returned to London in November, for the start of the new law term, it was little surprise to hear that Bowes now adamantly refused to consider any negotiated settlement.

Moving into more salubrious lodgings in Bloomsbury Square in December, at which point she also hired a coach, Mary was now resolved to press ahead with her divorce suit at all costs. Anxious to make public her determination to sever all links with Bowes, on Christmas Eve she issued a handbill which declared, ‘my
immutable
resolution to endure persecutions, sufferings, and dangers, still greater, if possible, than those to which I have hitherto been exposed’ and ‘even to starve in the most miserable manner’ rather than endure any further communication with Bowes.
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Packed into the stagecoach bound for Newcastle, the posters were eagerly seized on by her friends in County Durham where they were distributed to tenants. The following day, Christmas Day, Mary travelled to Neasden to see her sons, George and Thomas, in their boarding school. Although snow enveloped the countryside, the visit marked the beginning of a slow thaw in relations with her children. Two weeks later the boys were permitted to dine at her house. And as the new year of 1786 began, with her resolution firmer than ever, Mary handed supervision of her various legal cases to a new attorney.

 

Sharing premises with his partner Thomas Lacey in Bread Street Hill, Cheapside, James Farrer dealt principally with criminal cases before the King’s Bench.
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Often confused with his namesake, another James Farrer who worked with his brother Oliver at the law firm Farrer and Co in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, relatively little is known about Mary’s attorney. Indeed, the two legal families may have been related since both hailed from Yorkshire. Yet while the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Farrers were well known for their dealings in celebrated divorce cases of the time, Mary’s lawyer had seemingly little experience in this arena. But for all his obscurity, James Farrer was to prove invaluable to Mary. An enthusiastic Mary Morgan was certainly cheered, informing Colpitts that Farrer had ‘taken up the Business with so much spirit that every Circumstance weares a so much better Appearance, & rejoices every individual concern’d with this affair’.
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Immediately grappling with the thorny issue of money, Farrer paid Mary’s current lawyers the several hundred pounds they were owed and insisted on working for no fee. At the same time he succeeded in winning an order that the estate’s rents and mining profits should all be paid to receivers in Chancery. With prospects looking brighter by the day, Mary rejoiced: ‘He is indeed a man amongst ten thousand, nor can any words express my obligations to him sufficiently.’ Utterly reliable and resolutely practical, James Farrer would more than prove his determination to pursue Mary’s case to victory, at one point proclaiming that ‘the effectually settling my Lady S’s concerns, is the most anxious moment of my Life’.

Meanwhile Bowes was equally adamant that he would win the courtroom battles and was prepared to go to any extremes to succeed. Exacting vengeance on Mary’s supporters, he had sacked Francis Bennett in October - ordering three of his hoodlums to kick the loyal retainer out of his sickbed and turf him out of his tied house - then in December he demanded Robert Thompson surrender the keys to the greenhouse, hothouse and banqueting house.
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When Bowes’s dog was killed after falling down a mineshaft, Thompson could not help remarking, ‘i wish it had benn him self’. Blaming the severe winter for his inability to leave the north throughout January and February, Bowes delayed the divorce hearing before the ecclesiastical court. In March he finally filed his counter petition in Chancery, urging the court to declare Mary’s prenuptial deed ‘fraudulent’ since it had been drawn up without his knowledge and ‘in derogation of his marital rights’.
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