Wedlock (47 page)

For the moment, at least, that pistol had misfired. For no sooner had the clerk to the court solemnly read aloud a few pages than the presiding judge ordered him to halt. Decreeing that the document had been obtained under duress and was furthermore unrelated to the facts of the case, Calvert banned any further reporting of its contents. At that point, as the
Newcastle Journal
related: ‘A little murmur ensued, and three or four short-hand writers, who had seated themselves to take the contents of this choice MS. put up their papers, and marched out of the hall.’
²⁰

Yet the bullet still managed to reach its mark. For even the limited details which had emerged and which were greedily repeated in the media were sufficiently scandalous to divide public opinion. ‘A few pages of this extraordinary performance were read in Court,’ the
Journal
reported, ‘in which her Ladyship confesses she had been guilty of
five
mortal crimes.’ Leaving its readers to speculate on the precise nature of her sins, the newspaper added: ‘However foreign to the present contest between the Countess and Mr Bowes . . . that part of her narrative, which was recited on Saturday, appeared to be written with a peculiar degree of candour and correctness, and those who have perused it, in general agree, that it is by no means a partial
apology
for her conduct; but a sincere penitential confession of her transgressions.’ Other newspapers spared their readers no blushes in relating the ‘crimes’ to which Mary had confessed. Inevitably these included
The Times
which proclaimed: ‘The confession drawn up and signed by Lady Strathmore . . . was perhaps the most extraordinary that ever came before a court of justice.’
²¹
And even though Mary inserted a letter in several newspapers condemning the ‘scandalous paragraphs which have, for a considerable time, daily appeared against me’, the damage was done. The
Rover’s Magazine
, which published Bowes’s steamy allegations in full, along with a saucy cartoon depicting said countess and gardener
in flagrante
in the conservatory, sneeringly remarked that Mary had endeavoured to ‘exculpate herself and to intimate that she is almost immaculate’.

Just as Farrer had predicted, airing the confessions succeeded in hardening the hearts of some of Mary’s erstwhile sympathisers. Learning of the latest revelation in his estranged son’s colourful life, George Stoney told a relation that, ‘Lady S. is exerting every possible means to acquit herself of severe charges made against her’ while adding, ‘there certainly has been many faults on both sides’.
²²
Growing increasingly pious in his advancing infirmity, he argued that divorce was ‘a dangerous Precedent’. Yet when he died the following month, George Stoney’s will divided his sizeable estate among his large family and bequeathed Bowes, his eldest son, a derisory one-ninth share of only £2.

 

Growing increasingly frustrated by his containment, as he awaited the decision of the Court of Arches, Bowes directed his energies to raising bail. Trying to tap his usually amenable source, he wrote an unctuous letter to the Duke of Norfolk in March. In a cringing attempt to justify his abduction of Mary, he explained: ‘I adopted it, with all the Inconvenience it threatened to myself, merely to remove an Infatuated Woman from the Public Infamy which I knew she must finally suffer, if I did not snatch her from it.’
²³
Although the scheme had been ‘abhorrent’ to him, he had been persuaded to carry it out by the ‘ardent, persuasive zeal’ of certain friends, he wheedled. Insisting that all Mary’s allegations against him were completely false - ‘sportive dalliance excepted’ he added with an obvious wink to the philandering duke - Bowes implored him to guarantee the necessary sum for his bail. For although he was impatient to prove his innocence at the forthcoming trial, his presence in the north was ‘most essentially necessary in matters of the utmost Importance to my concerns’. Evidently not persuaded by Bowes’s raving protestations of innocence - nor probably by his assurances of a timely return - the duke declined to stump up the cash.

Yet Bowes could still muster wealthy friends with even fewer scruples than the debauched duke. By the end of March he had procured two financiers who were willing to pledge the funds needed to secure his release and, just as he had so ominously declared, he immediately sped north. News that Bowes was once more at liberty came as a severe blow to Mary, already demoralised by her degrading treatment at the hands of the press. ‘The present agitated state of my Mind upon hearing that Mr Stoney has procured Bail, renders me scarce capable of writing coherently,’ she told Colpitts, while Morgan gravely warned him that, ‘you may expect him as soon as horses can bring him to the North’.
²⁴

Sure enough, within days Bowes and his cronies had unleashed a new wave of intimidation among Mary’s allies in the north-east, offering bribes to persuade vital witnesses to change their evidence and, if these failed, indicting them for perjury. Thomas Ridgeway, the redoubtable tipstaff, and Gabriel Thornton, the valiant ploughman, were among those Bowes charged with perjury; both held firm. Susannah Church, Mary’s former maid, was less resilient; she swore a testimony that Mary lived in fear of Mary Morgan who had organised Mary’s escape for her own pecuniary ends.
²⁵
Bowes even pressed perjury charges against Mary Eleanor herself. She only narrowly escaped being arrested to face this allegation by the quick-thinking of James Farrer who hared into court just in time to secure her bail. While the perjury charge further undermined Mary’s credibility in the eyes of the general public, in reality Bowes’s case hinged on the most laughably trivial errors in her testimony. She had accused him of locking her in a ‘dark room’ when Bowes claimed it was a ‘passage’, and of keeping her in a ‘pig sty’ which Bowes insisted was a ‘stable yard’. Ultimately, he would quietly drop the charge.

Swaggering around the north-east flanked by his gang, Bowes convened a bizarre series of hearings - a kind of show trial - which opened on 13 April at the Wheatsheaf Inn in Durham. Over the next ten days he paraded his usual accomplices to swear testimonies invoking his virtues - and Mary’s vices - as evidence both for the divorce case and the abduction trial. Yet the image he strived to create of a loving and faithful husband was somewhat undermined by the fact that his mistress, Mary Gowland, went into labour in the middle of the sessions.
²⁶

When Bowes’s legal team won a reduction of his bail term from fourteen years to two in early May it seemed as if the tide had turned his way. Certainly
The Times
thought so, unable to resist the comment that ‘it appears, that, in spite of public prejudice, the cause of her Ladyship is not so immaculate, as the world at large have been taught to believe’.
²⁷
Even when the Court of Arches found in Mary’s favour on 7 May, confirming her divorce and alimony payments, he was undaunted. Determined never to release Mary from her marital shackles if he could possibly avoid it, nor pay her a penny, he immediately launched a further appeal, this time to the High Court of Delegates, the ultimate place of appeal from the ecclesiastical judicial system, on the spurious ground that he had not been allowed time to produce all his witnesses.
²⁸
As he headed back to London to face his trial for abduction with bullish self-confidence, Bowes inserted a notice in
The Times
announcing that a ‘certain society of married Gentlemen’ planned to celebrate his expected victory by erecting a memorial to Bowes ‘in honour of his meritorious services to the enemies of
petticoat government
, and the friends of matrimonial subordination’.
²⁹
Referring to the social reformer John Howard, who had just begun his final tour of the foul conditions endured by the majority of England’s prison population, if not Bowes himself, the article added: ‘It is thought that this subscription will be much larger than that which was made to give a statue to Mr Howard; as the taming of bad wives is a matter of infinitely greater importance to society than a casual improvement in the police [government] of a prison.’ So, by the time Bowes appeared before Judge Buller and a special jury at the King’s Bench on 30 May 1787, he cut a far more jaunty figure than the reviled character of six months earlier.

 

Charged with five counts of conspiracy that essentially accused him of seizing, assaulting and imprisoning Mary in order to compel her to drop her divorce suit, Bowes appeared with eight of his partners in crime.
³⁰
These were the corrupt constable Edward Lucas, the hackney coach driver John Bickley, the pitworkers Charles Chapman and William Pigg, the coal merchant Francis Peacock, Bowes’s valet Mark Prevot, his steward Henry Bourn and his attorney Thomas Bowes. Doubtless feeling secure in the knowledge that numerous husbands had previously stood on that very same spot and successfully defended their ancient right to chastise and confine their wayward wives, Bowes listened impassively as the charges were read. And since he had engaged probably the best criminal defence barrister of the Georgian era, Bowes had every reason to feel confident.

At thirty-seven, Thomas Erskine was a rapidly rising star in the legal profession whose services were heavily in demand among those unfortunate or uncouth enough to find themselves before the King’s Bench.
³¹
The youngest son of a straitened Scottish earl, Erskine had joined the navy and then the army before trying his hand at the law at which point he had enrolled as a pupil with Francis Buller. Having finally found his metier, he immediately proved himself an audacious advocate and sparkling orator by winning a string of acclaimed legal victories. A lifelong radical and fervent advocate of free speech, Erskine was briefly elected an MP during the Fox-North coalition in 1783-4; in future years he would defend Thomas Paine, unsuccessfully, in the state trial over publication of
The Rights of Man
and secure the acquittal of the radicals Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke and John Thelwall in their dramatic trial for high treason in 1794. Ultimately, in 1806, he would become Lord Chancellor. Defending political agitators from charges of treason notwithstanding, his brief to defend Bowes would prove one of the toughest challenges of his career.

Faced with the bar’s most popular and esteemed advocate, Mary’s barrister James Mingay had every excuse to feel apprehensive as he rose to open the case for the prosecution. The son of a country surgeon from Norfolk, raised in ‘the most humble obscurity’ as one contemporary would term it, Mingay had lost his right hand in an accident in his youth and subsequently sported an iron hook. Stymied from following his father’s profession, the young Mingay was given financial help by the Duke of Grafton to enter Cambridge and subsequently join the bar. Rising rapidly, Mingay had soon found himself pitched against Erskine in the King’s Bench where their fiery sparring matches provided entertainment for law students comparing their oratory styles. Concise, bold and forceful where his adversary was polished, flowery and verbose, 35-year-old Mingay was widely regarded as ‘the
second
person in professional estimation’ to Erskine himself. Strident rivals in court, the two had become firm friends at leisure.

In a court packed with students, journalists and spectators, as eager to hear the expected duel of words between the two advocates as to witness the long-awaited battle between Mary and Bowes, Mingay began by addressing the jury. Adopting the grave tone which the alleged crimes certainly merited, he solemnly warned the jurors that it ‘will be necessary for me to state to you a transaction that I hope never, or any thing like it, existed before in a Christian country’. And as he proceeded to outline the details of Mary’s kidnap and subsequent ordeal with the clarity and verve for which he was renowned, he did not disappoint them.

With studied restraint, Mingay described how Mary had fled her marital home and instituted divorce proceedings after ‘eight long and miserable years’ following ‘treatment that I should have thought no man could possibly have adopted against any woman, and that no woman, thank God, is bound to bear in this country from any man’. Fully cognisant that Bowes was likely to argue his right reasonably to chastise and confine his wife, Mingay concentrated on demonstrating that Bowes’s conduct had been neither reasonable nor justifiable. Having seized Mary from a public street in the middle of the day, Bowes had dragged her ‘near three hundred miles, through the heart of this kingdom’ and attempted to force her to drop her divorce ‘by means as savage as they were uncommon and unheard of’. Met at Streatlam Castle by her husband’s pregnant mistress, who had since ‘been brought to bed of a bastard child by the husband’, Mary had been ordered to sign a paper revoking her divorce suit with a pistol at her head. Yet still she had refused to drop her case and even ordered Bowes to fire with, Mingay proclaimed, ‘a courage that to me is astonishing!’ Subsequently bundled up the stairs by Chapman and Pigg - ‘people that were accustomed to deeds of darkness by living in a mine’ - Mary had resisted Bowes’s attempts to rape her. At this point Mingay felt compelled to advise the jurors, no doubt to their incredulity, that there were indeed cases where ‘a husband is liable to be tried for a rape even on his own wife’ - although in this respect his legal history was optimistic at best, since rape within marriage would not finally be recognised as a crime until 1991.

Detailing Mary’s torment over the next eight days as she was compelled to trek over mountains covered in snow, Mingay told the jury ‘she was very near dead, she was very near frozen’. Yet far from hanging his head in shame at the treatment he had meted out to his own wife, Bowes had since had the audacity to accuse her of perjury by disputing whether she had been kept captive in a dark room or a dark passage. Rising now to a crescendo, Mingay asked the jury: ‘I will, for a moment, suppose her the most abandoned prostitute that the earth ever produced, but for a man to treat a woman thus, what must be every honest man’s sensations?’ Leaving unsaid the obvious fact that the victim of this crime was not a resident of a brothel, but rather the only daughter of an ancient landed family, Mingay left the jurors in no doubt as to what he considered should be the response of an ‘honest man’ with his simple question: ‘Gentlemen, I ask whether she is not the most persecuted woman that ever was?’ Finally inviting the jury to identify with the simple but courageous country folk who had rescued Mary from such abominable maltreatment, Mingay concluded with a virtuoso flourish, declaring that, ‘a straw in the hands of an honest countryman is equal to all the fire arms in the hands of Bowes’.