Wedlock (8 page)

Plainly enjoying the excitement of finding herself at the centre of such intense competition, Mary deliberately encouraged Stuart’s mother, Lady Bute, to believe that her son was in favour by extending ‘great civility’ towards her and her daughters on an ensuing Almack’s evening. Taking the bait, Lady Bute rushed round confidently the following morning to press her son’s suit, only for Mary glibly to refuse the offer she had never contemplated accepting. With hindsight, she would later admit, this was ‘downright girlishness, mischievousness, and vanity’.
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Poor Lady Bute was mortified by the rebuff while her son was so distraught he took to bed for a week before pursuing another heiress, described by Walpole as the ‘rich ugly’ Charlotte Windsor, whom he married later the same year.
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There was no shortage of suitors waiting to take his place in the scrum for the hand of Britain’s wealthiest heiress. Mary referred each of the many offers she received to her mother, who by now had sufficiently recovered her composure at least to reject her daughter’s marriage proposals. Gleefully totting up the score, Mary revelled in the satisfaction of refusing ‘a great many people of rank’. In truth, she knew that none of the young rakes she partnered on Almack’s dance floor or flirted with at Vauxhall’s concerts could measure up to the dynamic father she had lost. Looking back in later years she would admit quite candidly: ‘I had no partiality for any man in the world.’ And yet at the age of sixteen, even while she encouraged Lord Mountstuart, cousin Chaloner and a host of other unfortunate hopefuls, Mary had already decided on her future husband.

 

Beside the scrapping and jostling young bucks who were vying for Mary’s attention at Almack’s assemblies, John Lyon, the 28-year-old ninth Earl of Strathmore, presented a mature and sophisticated contrast. Reserved and taciturn, Lord Strathmore had little patience for the flattery and witticisms which peppered conversation in the salons of Georgian London. More comfortable with his hard-drinking, hard-gambling male chums at the club he had helped to set up in the original Almack’s than among the giggling dance-floor debutantes, he cut an aloof and proud figure. Having grown up as neighbours, since the Strathmore clan preferred their hospitable Durham estate to their dilapidated Glamis Castle near Dundee, Mary and John had rubbed shoulders at social engagements since her childhood. Her father, significantly, had high regard for the personable young earl, who succeeded to his title at sixteen, before distinguishing himself at Cambridge where he became a favourite of his tutor, the poet Thomas Gray. Now that the tall, elegant and good-looking peer - who would become known as ‘the beautiful Lord Strathmore’ - had returned from the customary grand tour of Europe, he graced London’s entertainment venues with a dignified disdain.
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Mary was intrigued. Renewing their youthful acquaintance, she subtly encouraged the earl’s interest to the point where at last he sent her a proposal of marriage, conveyed by a mutual family friend. Insisting, as with all her suitors, that he approach her mother first, sixteen-year-old Mary waited patiently.

When Mrs Bowes instantly dismissed the earl’s declaration, pointing to his large family’s sizeable financial problems, their meddlesome reputation and - not least - the fact that they were Scottish, Mary’s keenness was only heightened. She would always, she later confessed, have a soft spot for Celtic men. Knowing that she needed her mother’s consent for marriage until the age of twenty-one, Mary declared that she would make Lord Strathmore her husband or nobody. Already captivated by ‘Lord Strathmore’s beauty, which was then very great’, she was further convinced he was her destined life partner by a dream or ‘vision’ in which he appeared to her. Her mother, never a forceful influence or a reliable guide, relented and in autumn 1765 the engagement was agreed.

It took a full eighteen months of legal negotiations to finalise the marriage contract, partly due to the complexity of transferring Mary’s vast fortune into the Strathmore family’s waiting hands, partly to guarantee some future financial security for herself and any children, and partly to confirm the stipulation that her prospective husband, and their children, must adopt the Bowes name. For all the protestations of the Lyons, forced to surrender a name they had honoured since at least the Norman conquest, the Bowes dynasty would continue. As the lawyers haggled, the forthcoming wedding became the topic of the season. The ever-vigilant Sarah Osborn observed the lean Lord Strathmore towering over his petite fiancée at Almack’s, along with two more betrothed couples, in March 1766. ‘These three Weddings are to be celebrated as soon as the Lawyers can finish,’ she wrote. But two months later the lawyers were still wrangling and Thomas Gray informed his friend James Brown: ‘The great match will not be till after Christmas.’
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Throughout the wet summer of 1766, as the lawyers scratched the draft settlement, crowds were thronging to the latest comedy by David Garrick and George Colman,
The Clandestine Marriage
, with its well-timed swipe at mercenary matches and their legal machinations. ‘Here we are - hard at it - paving the road to matrimony, ’ declares the wealthy patriarch Sterling, whose daughter was to bring a handsome dowry to her debt-ridden aristocratic bridegroom, before adding, ‘First the lawyers, then comes the doctor.’
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At last, in September, the ink was dry on the twenty massive pages of parchment and the wedding preparations could begin.

Dressmakers set to work on the gowns, nightgowns, petticoats and cloaks which would make up Mary Eleanor’s extravagant trousseau. As well as six dresses, in assorted combinations of silver, white and gold decorated with silver or blond lace, which were designed to be worn over hoops according to the latest fashion, there were six satin petticoats and eight quilted calico petticoats. In all, her wardrobe was valued at £3,000. In addition, Mary’s mother gave her a diamondstudded stomacher - a stiffened bodice to fit over the front of a dress - worth £10,000, along with further diamonds to the tune of £7,000. Finally, to complete the ensemble for the wedding of the year, Mrs Bowes donated three carriages - a green landau, a blue post coach and a stone-coloured post chaise - which were brought down from Gibside to London.

It should have proved a memorable occasion, summoning up reminiscences of the royal wedding just six years earlier. Yet by the time that Mary walked down the aisle of St George’s Church in Hanover Square, splendidly robed in her silver and white wedding dress glinting with diamonds, on her eighteenth birthday on 24 February 1767, her teenage infatuation was over.
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She knew she was marrying the wrong man.

 

 

 

 

L
iving in her late father’s house in Westgate Street, one of Newcastle’s most affluent addresses, Hannah Newton could not help but be aware of the society wedding of the year between two of her close neighbours. Just eighteen months older than Mary Eleanor, nineteen-year-old Hannah would have brushed skirts with Mary at the concerts, plays and assemblies which entertained the city’s polite society. Having grown up in the same region, Hannah and Mary Eleanor would have moved in the same elite social circles for Hannah’s father, William Newton, had also accumulated a fortune from coal in the mineral-rich lands of County Durham. The owner of two collieries near the Derwent, Newton had acquired large estates at Burnopfield, less than two miles from Gibside, and Cole Pike Hill, eight miles to the south near Lanchester. Although not in the league of the Grand Allies, Newton had been presented by the city with the ‘great seal’ in 1749 for inventing a new method to extract coal from deeper pits.
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When William Newton died in 1762, about the time of Hannah’s fifteenth birthday, he left his daughter and sole heiress with a sizeable fortune in collieries and farmland valued at between £20,000 and £30,000 - more than £3m in modern terms.
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It was little wonder, therefore, that just like Mary Eleanor, Hannah had attracted the attentions of a number of suitors.

Baptised on 11 November 1747 - her date of birth went unrecorded but was probably a few days or weeks beforehand - Hannah was not considered a great beauty by eighteenth-century standards.
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‘She was not at all handsome; short, and very dark’, one acquaintance later recalled.
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Yet the size of her fortune more than made up for her lack of physical attributes in the eyes of certain suitors. Indeed, it was perfectly possible for the only daughter of a middle-ranking or nouveau riche family to marry well above her perceived station in life and even into the aristocracy - as had Mary Eleanor - given sufficient capital to her name. So Hannah, for all her plain appearance, might easily expect to walk up the aisle with the eldest son of one of the powerful local coal-owning families or at least with an up-and-coming professional man. Why she had therefore set her heart on a young Irish soldier, who marched into Newcastle the most junior and poorly paid officer in his regiment, remains something of a mystery.

 

Andrew Robinson Stoney had enlisted with the Fourth or King’s Own Regiment of Foot as an ensign - the lowliest rank of officer - in November 1764 at the age of seventeen and first met up with his regiment the following spring.
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It was a good time to join the army - for anyone keen to avoid the perils of battle. Although William Makepeace Thackeray would place the anti-hero of his novel,
The Luck of Barry Lyndon
, who was modelled on Stoney, in the brutal pandemonium of the Seven Years’ War, the real Stoney never once faced enemy fire. In fact, the global conflict which had raged across Europe, India, North America and the Caribbean since 1756 had ended a full year before Stoney signed the commission book. And since Britain had lost its appetite for further bloodshed or military expense, there was little immediate risk in wearing the scarlet coat. At the same time, with the King’s Own freshly returned from a string of conquests in the West Indies, the new recruit would be sure to share in some of his fellow officers’ reflected glory. So as the regiment marched across the medieval stone Tyne Bridge into the walled city of Newcastle in early 1767, the young ensign who carried the regimental colours could be assured of a hero’s welcome. Certainly, there would be no shortage of admiring women eager to partner the regiment’s officers at the various entertainments to which the city had invited its visiting troops. An army officer with a good family background was considered a fairly desirable beau for a younger daughter in a middling family of the gentry. But for a humble ensign to pitch his interest at one of the city’s richest heiresses would have required a great deal of charm, imagination and bravado. Unluckily for Hannah, these were attributes Stoney possessed in large measure.

Born on 19 June 1747 in County Tipperary, Stoney was the eldest son of a well-to-do Protestant family which had prospered since emigrating from Yorkshire at the end of the seventeenth century. His great-grandfather, George Stoney, had moved his young family to Ireland under the handsome inducements offered to emigrating Protestant families at some point after 1692 and had established a family estate named Greyfort near the little village of Borrisokane. Eldest son Thomas, Stoney’s grandfather, married Sarah Robinson - at nineteen nearly half his age - the daughter of a prominent Protestant family whose ancestors, the Robinsons and the Armstrongs, had fought on opposite sides in the English Civil War. Still a powerfully ambitious military family, Sarah’s numerous male relatives were highly placed in the British army. An uncle, General John Armstrong, who was more than six feet tall, was a skilled engineer who had fought at Blenheim and helped found the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1741.
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Sarah’s brother, Captain Andrew Robinson, would ultimately rise to the rank of Major-General, while her cousin, Bigoe Armstrong, and nephew, Robert Robinson, would both become regimental colonels who would take a kindly interest in their nephew. Fiercely independent and staunchly religious - her family bible still survives - Sarah was only thirty-three when her husband died leaving her with three young sons and the family farms to manage in a hostile country. Aged thirteen at the time of his father’s death, eldest son George, Stoney’s father, studied hard and laboured long under his mother’s watchful eye.

Assuming control of the family estate once he came of age, George Stoney worked industriously to nurture the farm before feeling sufficiently comfortable to marry at the age of thirty-three. When he did, in 1746, it was scarcely surprising that he married into another local Protestant military family. Elizabeth Johnston’s father, James Johnston, had been one of the defenders of Derry against Catholic forces in 1689, while her brother Robert was even now rising up army ranks. It was, as one of George’s relatives commented in the most complimentary terms of the age, a ‘prudent choice’.
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When the couple’s first child was born a year later he was named Andrew Robinson after his great-uncle, grandmother Sarah’s brother, who would be promoted six years later to the role of equerry to Princess Augusta, mother of the future George III. The family bible, in which Sarah inscribed significant domestic events, records that baby Andrew was immediately sent to a wet-nurse - it even gives her name, Honory MacGilton - in keeping with upper- and middle-class custom. When Sarah died, still only fifty-five, a year after the birth of her first grandchild, she went to her rest in Ballingarry churchyard in the happy confidence that the family’s proud army traditions would continue in the infant who bore her surname.