Wedlock (50 page)

In a series of fawning letters sent covertly to Mary Eleanor from October 1789, Eliza voiced her dread that Bowes might discover her betrayal and then remove Mary to ‘where perhaps neither of us might be able to discover her’. Agreeing nonetheless to act as go-between, Eliza hoped that ‘Happier Prospects’ were in store for her former charge. Writing again two months later, Eliza reported that Mary was well and declared, ‘our wishes for your getting Possession of both your Children, are more earnest than I can express.’ A few weeks later, having ominously heard no further news from young Mary, Eliza hoped that she would stay safe at her school in Newington ‘till the happy Period which will I trust restore her to her Mother’. The New Year brought new information as Eliza forwarded several letters from little Mary which revealed that she had spent the Christmas holidays at school, ‘& not in Scenes of Wretchedness & Impropriety’, by which Eliza apparently referred to Bowes’s prison rather than her own pastoral abode. But with the half-year’s school bill expected imminently, the child’s prospects were in the balance.

By the end of January 1790, Bowes was decidedly feeling the pinch. Saddled with costs from his various lawsuits, alimony payments due to Mary and claims for backdated rents and profits from her estate, he appeared before the Court of Delegates pleading his inability to pay the divorce suit costs due to his responsibilities to his two children. If forced to pay, he argued, not only would he remain ‘a Prisoner for Life’ but his children would ‘with himself be reduced to very great distress if not absolute Want’.
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There was an obvious solution to this predicament, as Mary was quick to point out, assuring the court in person that she was ‘now willing to receive the said two Children and will at all times hereafter be ready to receive, maintain, Cloathe and Educate the said two Children in a suitable and proper manner’. With no jurisdiction over child custody, the judges simply confirmed that Bowes must pay. When he still refused, with more than £500 outstanding, on 5 February 1790 he was excommunicated for contempt of court.
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On news of the order reaching Newcastle, the city’s former MP was solemnly denounced from the pulpit of St Nicholas’s Church by the curate John Ellison, son of the Reverend Nathaniel Ellison who had married Bowes to Hannah Newton twenty-two years earlier.

Unable to pay for the children’s upkeep or settle his debts, and therefore condemned to remain in prison, Bowes’s grip on William and Mary seemed increasingly weak, as Eliza noted. ‘I should imagine that the last decision relative to the Costs of Suit must produce such consequences as must remove every fear of a party being ever at liberty to again give us any cause of apprehension,’ she wrote to Mary Eleanor in February, adding, ‘His Declaration of inability to maintain them must surely accelerate the restoration of both your Children to you.’ By early March, Mary had secured the consent of Sir Sampson Wright and Thomas Lyon to stand as trustees with Lord Strathmore in settling £5,000 each on William and Mary if they could be made wards of Chancery. Unable to finalise the agreement until the earl’s twenty-first birthday, just a month away, she remained on tenterhooks. As James Farrer briefed counsel for a hearing to determine wardship with Lord Chancellor Kenyon - no friend to separated women - Mary urged him to cite Bowes’s lifestyle and stress that ‘he is not only a Prisoner for Cruell & illegal Acts, but is living in public Infamy continually Inebriated, surrounded with prostituted Women, which in its best representation must be a horrid Scene for an Innocent Mind’.
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Yet since such considerations had rarely given the courts pause for thought in previous cases, Mary decided to take the law into her own hands. Playing Bowes at his own game, she had resolved to seize her daughter from her hiding place in south London. With the city’s leading magistrate on her side, and the child’s keeper, Mrs Gilbert, won over to her mission, Mary laid plans to bring her daughter home.

Told on 5 March, at her school in Newington, that she was to be reunited with her mother the very next day, young Mary was ecstatic. The touching letter that she wrote, the first communication with her mother for more than five years, survives to this day. ‘My Dear Mama’, she began, ‘It is with the greatest satisfaction I understand that you will be glad to hear from me. It is so long a Time since I have had the Happiness of either seeing or hearing from you, that I cannot express the Joy it was to me to be informed by my Lady Wright of my turn of Fortune in being now I hope under your Protection. When I parted from you I was much too young to know the loss of a Mother. I am sensible of the duty and affection I owe to you and my Brother.’
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With no hint of resentment at her mother having left her behind, Mary added: ‘I long very much to see you and hope there is nothing now more wanting to complete my happiness.’ Loyally she did not forget to mention: ‘I am sure you will be very glad to see my dear little Brother William indeed he is a very fine Boy.’ And despite the five years’ absence, she assured her mother, ‘I have not forgot any place where I spent my Infancy and I believe I could find my way over one half of Paulswalden and Gibside Houses &c.’

It was an emotional reunion. So flustered that she could barely manage the usual pleasantries with Thomas Lacey, Mary later apologised that her ‘flurry’ was ‘nothing but the circumstance of being restored to the sight of a long lost Child could excuse’.
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But it was still a highly risky manoeuvre. Immediately discovering the breach in his security, Bowes obtained a
habeas corpus
writ demanding Mary surrender her daughter. She in turn urged her lawyers to press Lord Kenyon to ‘grant a protection for the child, on acct. of her age, & sex, till proper Trustees can be appointed’.
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All depended on the anticipated hearing in Chancery.

By 13 April, when Lord Strathmore celebrated his twenty-first birthday and inherited his late father’s estate, the younger children’s futures remained unclear. With snow heavy on the ground at Gibside, tenants and staff caroused in the great hall into the night, consuming vast quantities of rum, port, ale and punch as they toasted the young earl’s health. Celebrating more soberly at her recovered home of St Paul’s Walden Bury, Mary set in motion a legal settlement under the terms of her re-established prenuptial deed to hand the remaining estate to her eldest son. Having regained control of her fortune less than a year earlier, she planned to give it up in order to place it out of Bowes’s reach for good. Hurrying Farrer to conclude the agreement she hoped that, ‘afterwards you & my Son will have leisure to consult together upon the steps to be taken by the latter to
finally
crush all Mr Stoney’s Hopes’.
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Five months later the settlement was finalised and ‘in Consideration of the Love and Affection which the said Countess beareth to her Son’ Mary transferred the Gibside and Streatlam estate to the earl in return for a £2,000 pension and future allowances totalling £10,000 for William and Mary.
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His hopes duly ‘crushed’, Bowes had no alternative but to relinquish his claim to the children and they were finally free to live with their mother. For William, now eight, it was literally the end of a prison sentence since he had spent most of the past three years in jail with his father. In this he was not alone; numerous children were brought up in the King’s Bench or Fleet prisons in desperate conditions during the eighteenth century. His education directed by the prostitutes, mistresses and debtors of Bowes’s acquaintance, the move to his mother’s instructive care and spacious home would require some adjustment. For Mary, now thirteen, the ordeal she had endured had apparently left no deleterious effects. The sunny, curly-haired infant on whom her mother had doted had grown into a sensible and dutiful young girl but her cheerful good nature and lively spirits remained as buoyant as ever.

Her last major legal victory, and in some ways the most significant, Mary’s triumph in regaining her children, albeit through male trustees, was remarkable for its time. Only in the most extreme circumstances, when deemed to have exceptionally depraved morals or irreligious views, did fathers ever lose custody of their children. In 1765, for example, Chancery had enforced a private settlement awarding Lady Anne Boteler custody of her daughter Elizabeth following extreme abuse against both of them; at one point Sir Oliver had threatened to drop his daughter down a stairwell.
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Likewise, in 1817, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley would be denied custody of his children - by Bowes’s former crony Lord Eldon - after their mother’s death for fear that his atheism would lead to ‘immoral and vicious’ conduct.

These remained isolated examples, however, and Mary’s success did not prove a turning point. While mothers had enjoyed limited progress in asserting their right to access to their children under the liberal regime of Lord Mansfield, the next fifty years would see a crackdown led by the arch conservative forces of Lords Eldon, Kenyon and Ellenborough. Only a sustained campaign by the author Caroline Norton, herself denied access to her three children by their abusive father, would ultimately lead to reform. In 1839 the Infant Custody Act gave courts discretion for the first time to award custody of children under seven to their mothers, although this was still denied to wives found guilty of adultery. In 1873 this discretion was extended to children up to sixteen and the adultery rule abolished. But it would be 1925 before mothers and fathers were viewed equally in custody battles. It was little wonder, therefore, that at the end of the eighteenth century, when pregnant with her first child, Mary Wollstonecraft would write to her lover: ‘Considering the care and anxiety a woman must have about a child before it comes into the world, it seems to me, by a natural right, to belong to her . . . but it is sufficient for man to condescend to get a child, in order to claim it. - A man is a tyrant!’

 

Finally free to govern her own life with a modest but independent income, Mary now devoted herself to the seven children she had variously neglected or been separated from in their early years. The suffering she had endured had evidently given her the maturity and compassion to value her children in a way she had not as a young mother. In some ways it was too late for the five children of her first marriage. Effectively they had been failed by Mary in their infancy when she had ignored her sons and favoured her daughters; after they had come under the harsh rule of their guardians and were denied all but the briefest of interludes with their mother, they had been failed by the prevailing legal and social mores. But although she could never replace those lost years, Mary did now try her best to mend the fractured bonds.

Rebellious Anna would remain the most distant. Having failed to learn from her mother’s mistakes, her hasty Gretna Green marriage soon proved unhappy. Her debt-ridden lawyer would die young and leave her with two small daughters, Anna Maria and Susan, to bring up alone. Although she patched up her past differences with Mary their relationship would always be fraught; at one point a friend would report that, ‘Lady Anne Jessup [sic] & her family have been staying some time with her mother, but they have had a fall out, so Lord Strathmore has taken them all to him.’
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Her elder sister Maria, having adhered closely to the rules of social etiquette as defined by the Lyons, had married rather more conventionally shortly after her twenty-first birthday in May 1789 to a well-heeled army officer, Captain Barrington Price.
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She too would have two daughters named, with customary Georgian lack of imagination, Maria and Anne.

With both her eldest girls now married and starting their own families, Mary lavished her maternal pride on her three Strathmore boys. Making up for her lack of interest when they were little, she fondly followed their various careers by pasting news cuttings into her album. Finally released from the stranglehold of frugal Uncle Thomas, and now a wealthy aristocrat in his own right, the tenth earl rose to his new responsibilities. A kindly and generous head of the family, John welcomed his two half-siblings into the fold and applied himself to healing old rifts and circumventing new ones, as his intervention in the tiff between Mary and Anna would reveal. A diligent landlord, he took possession of Gibside and threw himself into restoring the buildings and grounds which his grandfather had so lovingly crafted. The woods having been devastated by Bowes, the earl immediately began replanting. One bill for 1790 reveals an order for 1,000 young oaks, 16,500 oak saplings and 5,000 elm seedlings.
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The Gothic buildings and glasshouses having been neglected or vandalised by Bowes, the earl initiated renovations. Shutters were replaced in Mary’s greenhouse, frames fixed in her hothouse, the banqueting house was whitewashed and the time-worn figure of Lady Liberty on top of the great column was restored once more to her gilded glory. The earl would even complete the chapel which had been abandoned at George Bowes’s death thirty years previously and re-establish the stud his grandfather had once maintained at Streatlam. At Glamis, he was no less active. All work at the castle having been halted on the death of the ninth earl in 1776, the planned new west wing remained half-built and the grounds overgrown. Immediately, John drew up plans for renovations and embarked on a lengthy programme of rebuilding and repairs. Yet he would visit his Scottish seat only rarely - for the earl’s thoughts were soon preoccupied by events closer to home.

If he had inherited the good looks of his father and the good taste of his grandfather, the tenth earl also possessed the impulsiveness and passion of his mother in her youth. Invited in early 1791 to a theatrical evening at Seaton Delaval, the magnificent home of Lord Delaval on a wild stretch of the Northumberland coast, 21-year-old John fell in love with the earl’s youngest and favourite daughter, Sarah.
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Six years his senior, golden-haired Sarah Hussey Delaval had married her father’s friend, the second Earl of Tyrconnel, when she was just sixteen and the earl, recently divorced from his first wife, twenty-nine. Having provided the earl with two children, the young Countess of Tyrconnel had been indulged by her accommodating husband and encouraged by her doting father to conduct an affair with Frederick, Duke of York. Lord Delaval had even bought his daughter Claremont House near the duke’s home at Weybridge so that the Tyrconnels could live hand in glove with the prince’s household.