Wedlock (41 page)

Ignoring the Chancery order that tenants pay their rents into court, Bowes issued threatening letters to any farmers still withholding their rent ‘at the instigation of a Banditti of Villainous Conspirators and Imposters’.
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Attempting to persuade the tenants to keep their nerve, Colpitts confessed to Farrer: ‘I shall rejoice to hear that any thing can be done this Term for the poor injured Lady, and her Tenants. What a being must that be, that seeks for revenge in punishing every individual who has lent the least assistance in time of her Ladys. greatest distress.’ Up to his usual tricks, Bowes procrastinated further by feigning illness in April and at the end of the month locals were astonished to hear that he had shot himself.
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It seemed, to Mary and her tenants, that their problems were at an end when they read in the
English Chronicle
: ‘Yesterday advice was received of the death of Andrew Robinson Bowes, Esq. formerly Member for Newcastle.’ Inevitably, it transpired that the report was premature, having been placed in the newspaper by Bowes himself to spread further confusion.

At last, on 6 May 1786, when Bowes could prevaricate no longer, the divorce suit came up for its hearing at the London Consistorial Court at Doctors’ Commons. Described by
The Times
as ‘the great cause depending between the Countess of Strathmore and Mr Bowes’, its outcome was awaited with trepidation not only by the two combatants but by tenants, servants, estate workers, family and friends throughout the country.
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After more than a year of lawyers taking depositions from witnesses on both sides, who had subsequently been examined and cross-examined in private by the court’s officials, the presiding judge, William Wynne, wasted no time in finding the case in favour of Mary Eleanor Bowes. Declaring the couple ‘divorced from bed, board and mutual cohabitation’ on the abundant evidence of Bowes’s adultery and cruelty, the court ordered him to pay Mary £300 a year in alimony. A staggering triumph, one of only sixteen cases seeking divorce on grounds of both adultery and cruelty in that decade, the result sent a clear signal to abusive husbands and a message of hope to abused wives everywhere.

But the victory was short-lived. Bowes immediately gave notice of his appeal to the next level of the Church courts, the Court of Arches, and readied himself for a ferocious war of propaganda.

 

 

 

 

S
topping to ogle the pornographic literature in the window of the popular little print shop at 66 Drury Lane, passers-by were drawn to the latest addition to the erotic display. Prominent among the pictures of prostitutes in lewd poses and women wielding instruments of discipline was a new print by the aspiring caricaturist James Gillray. Having so far failed to distinguish himself as a conventional artist and engraver, Gillray had recently decided to devote his talents to the burgeoning cartoon industry in league with William Holland, who sold topical prints from the Drury Lane shop he shared with the pornographer George Peacock. Ultimately, Gillray would produce more than a thousand satirical works lampooning every quarter of Georgian society, from politicians to princes, courtiers to courtesans, in flamboyant and frequently obscene detail.

Unusually large, at 16 by 21 inches, and exquisitely executed in delicate lines and rich colour, the caricature was indecorously entitled, ‘LADY TERMAGANT FLAYBUM going to give her STEP SON a taste of her DESERT after Dinner, a Scene performed every day near Grosvenor Square, to the annoyance of the neighbourhood’. Although Lady Termagant Flaybum was a reference to a well-known comic character in a book on flagellation previously published by Peacock, customers would have been in no doubt that the real target of Gillray’s ridicule was Mary Eleanor Bowes. A statuesque figure lounging provocatively with her breasts bared and her plump legs indecently crossed, she holds a bundle of birch twigs with which she is evidently about to beat a protesting boy whose breeches are being unfastened by a maid. The wine bottle and glass on a nearby table suggest a life of debauchery, the character’s elaborately piled hairstyle and voluminous clothing evoke vanity and extravagance, while her exposed flesh and the anticipated act of flagellation are a blatant slur on her morality as well as a titillating morsel with which to tempt customers. While no evidence of correspondence survives, it is highly probable that Gillray was commissioned to produce the print by Bowes.

Having just lost his case against divorce in the first level of the ecclesiastical courts, Bowes was making it clear, in commissioning such a brazen and offensive cartoon, that he intended to play dirty in his forthcoming appeal. No matter that Mary had left Grosvenor Square more than a year earlier, nor that the scene was meant to portray her eldest son, rather than a stepson, the message in the print was plain. For all Mary’s allegations of savagery and infidelity recently founded against Bowes, it was in fact she who was promiscuous, degenerate, cruel and an unnatural mother to boot. The print was one of two, possibly three, produced by Gillray lampooning Mary in 1786. The second, and even more outrageous picture, entitled ‘The Injured COUNT..S’, depicts her carousing with servants as she suckles two cats from huge exposed breasts while a small boy at her side cries: ‘I wish I was a cat my mama would love me then.’ Recalling an anecdote from
The Ton Gazette
in 1777, which attributed the same words to the little Lord Strathmore, the grotesque scene furnished more ammunition for Bowes’s campaign. Behind Mary the print shows her footman, possibly George Walker, inviting her to bed, while on her right sits an emaciated maid, apparently Mary Morgan, with her waist reduced to a slender line and a pock-marked face. The same bizarre figure features in a third Gillray caricature, ‘The Miser’s Feast’, which had been published two months earlier. In this a similarly wasp-waisted character, this time with bare breasts, opens the door for a sumptuously dressed woman on to a scene of bleak poverty. The fashionable woman carries a book entitled ‘Woman of Pleasure’, better known as the erotic novel
Fanny Hill
, an obvious slight on her virtue. Although the identity of the wealthy female character is unclear, the print was later assumed to refer to Mary.

Expensively priced, at 7s 6d, the Lady Termagant print was aimed at an affluent market, effectively Mary’s peers. For the radical politician John Wilkes, writing to his daughter in Paris, it was ‘too extravagant’ to buy. Yet the high cost apparently did not deter a regular stream of customers, for the cartoon was still on sale three years later. And for those who could not afford to purchase their own copy, there was always the opportunity to press their noses against the window of Holland’s shop where best-selling prints were generally displayed.

It was the beginning of a paper war. Dangling the lure of seamy revelations to come, Bowes was ensuring a ready audience eager to follow each twist and turn of the couple’s high-profile divorce. As the Gillray caricature signalled, he would be willing to unearth all Mary’s past indiscretions as well as pedal monstrous lies in his campaign to sully her reputation and damage her support. The fact that Bowes was plainly projecting his own lasciviousness and debauched lifestyle on to Mary, not to mention his perversity in debasing the wife he avowedly wished to win back, did nothing to deter him. Over the ensuing months he would use every possible medium - from false reports and vexatious advertisements in newspapers to spiteful cartoons and mendacious handbills - in his effort to achieve his goal. The threat to Mary was clear: Bowes would stop at nothing to prevent their divorce.

 

Determined not to be cowed by media ridicule, Mary steadied her nerve for the next round of legal wrangles as she kept close to her Bloomsbury Square house and her loyal coterie of servants. While letters from the north-east brought almost daily reports of Bowes’s antics there, at least she knew that he remained at a safe distance.

Denied the usual punchbag for his temper, Bowes stormed about the Gibside and Streatlam estates with his hired henchmen laying waste the land and venting his fury on the defenceless country folk. Alerted by the tenants who stayed faithful to her, Mary attempted to prevent Bowes hacking down more trees by applying for an injunction in Chancery in June.
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With Bowes having already felled timber worth more than £20,000, including many young and ornamental trees, Mary complained that he had declared he would ‘not leave a single tree standing’. On the very day that she filed her bill, Bowes advertised 908 oak trees for sale in the
Newcastle Courant
. Just as with his previous battle with the Newton heirs over the woods at Cole Pike Hill, the advertisement appeared alongside a counter order from Mary declaring that the sale was unlawful. Gaining her injunction in July, Mary now circulated handbills warning potential buyers not to purchase the felled trees, while Bowes responded with his own handbills claiming the injunction had been dissolved. More damagingly, Bowes also set forth rumours that Mary had been reconciled to him and had dropped her divorce suit, which Mary then had to contradict with a further announcement in the
Courant
.
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Robert Thompson, the ever-loyal gardener, displayed one of the handbills forbidding the sale of wood prominently in the window of his house. When Bowes threatened him, Thompson promptly rode into Newcastle and handed the bills out in every tavern in town.
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Yet Thompson was concerned at the rumours that Mary had returned to Bowes, which he told her ‘most people here believe true’, begging her to deny the reports ‘or eals we are broken harted’.

As Bowes persecuted all who supported Mary, the fearful tenants put their faith, as she had, in common justice. ‘He says that he will starves us out if possabill & that we shall have no farem under him . . . and he says that all of the old tennents shall quit ther farems,’ Thompson informed Mary. True to his word, that summer Bowes served a raft of eviction notices on farms and smallholdings throughout the region regardless of the desperate circumstances of their occupants. ‘The poor man who has sent you the notice, which he recd. from Mr Bowes, is in great distress for fear of being turn’d out of his farm on acct. of his large family,’ Mary Morgan reported to James Farrer. One woman appealed to Mary for help five days after she had lost her husband - Bowes had seized the family’s entire possessions. ‘The reason Mr Bowes destraind [distrained] upon us was for my late husband keeping up the name and dignity of the Honble. Countess,’ she explained, ‘which Mr Bowes got intelligence and being so revengefull as to take the bread from us, and destrain also upon our goods.’

Furious at Robert Thompson’s efforts to preserve Mary’s plants from neglect, despite having already been sacked, Bowes now ordered the gardener to be thrown off the estate. Aged and infirm, Thompson was forced to flee his home when Bowes threatened to burn it down. Having failed to tempt William and Mary Stephenson to hand over Dorothy, Bowes now rained threats and writs on them and encouraged his annuitants, to whom Bowes had guaranteed Gibside farms in return for ready cash, to order them to quit their farm. Writing to Mary, Mrs Stephenson pleaded, ‘We hath nothing left save just our familey which is all gon but onley one that canst work & if my husband be to go to gayle [jail] it will be berri hard.’ As Bowes turned his anger on Mrs Stephenson’s brother, who had agreed to swear an affidavit against Bowes, the couple wrote in desperation, ‘We have Mr bows amongst us like a roring lion threatnin that he will punish my brother aboot the writ.’ After months of such intimidation, the brother finally confessed himself too petrified to testify. Reduced to poverty, turned out of their farms and sacked from their jobs, the majority of tenants and workers still pledged their allegiance to Mary and supported each other in their adversity.

The old Bowes charm appeared to be growing tarnished. When Bowes sued poor Robert Thompson for the theft of a saddle at the Durham assizes in July, the grand jury threw the case out of court telling Bowes’s witnesses - in Thompson’s words - that ‘thare was no more such villins to be found in the county as them & thare master’.
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In another vengeful lawsuit in the same court that month, however, Bowes successfully sued Thomas Colpitts for receiving rents in Mary’s name, asserting his right to the profits of the estate on the basis of the questionable revocation deed. Sending her regrets to Colpitts, Mary hoped he would have more success on appeal. But when Chancery overturned Mary’s injunction against felling the woods later that summer, having been convinced by Bowes’s counsel that the young Lord Strathmore’s guardians would have intervened if serious damage had occurred, it seemed that the Gibside master’s fortunes had turned. Evidently Thomas Lyon preferred to stand by and watch his ward’s fortune be ruined than lend his voice to Mary’s cause. Vowing that ‘there is no condescension wch I wd. not make even to my worst Enemies, to get the better of that Villain’, Mary appealed again to Lyon for help in defeating Bowes.
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