Wedlock (23 page)

When Bowes lost to Trevelyan in the final count by a slim ninety-five votes, he bullishly appealed to Parliament against the result with the somewhat rich charge of bribery levelled against the opposing camp. John Scott, the 25-year-old son of a Newcastle coal agent, cut his teeth as a lawyer attempting to argue Bowes’s cause. A future Lord Chancellor, he would gain a peerage as Lord Eldon, while his elder brother William, another vocal supporter of Bowes, would go on to become Lord Stowell and a prominent divorce lawyer. Eight-year-old Maria, taking a precocious interest in current affairs back in London, relayed details of her new ‘papa’s’ parliamentary challenge to great aunt Mary at Glamis with more than a touch of her mother’s naivety. ‘It is believed Sir John Trevylian got the Election by bribery, and Papa has petioned [sic] the House of Commons,’ she wrote.
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Although the appeal was in vain, Bowes had hoodwinked Newcastle’s radicals sufficiently to promise a return match. But if Bowes’s smooth political wiles had attracted both personal and political slurs, Mary’s apparently compliant devotion brought her equal condemnation. The anonymous author of
The Stoniad
, published during the by-election campaign, not only accused Bowes of sending his first wife to her grave but presciently predicted that he would beat his second wife ‘
black and blue
’. Yet the satirist expressed no sympathy for her plight, instead proclaiming that the pair were well-matched as ‘the greatest R**** [rogue] and W**** [whore]’. Likewise Edward Montagu would grimly predict: ‘I believe this gentleman will revenge the wrongs Lord Strathmore suffered from her Ladyship.’
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Having expended colossal amounts fighting the by-election - he would later put the total at more than £15,000 - and with his creditors pressing in, Bowes set off with Mary on the return journey to London at the end of March with renewed determination to seize the fortune so long in his sights. ‘The very large sums I have been obliged to pay here, on Act. of the Election etc etc has destroyed me for the present not a little,’ he told one friend.
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Before leaving Gibside he sacked George Walker, telling servants and friends that the footman had ‘taken familiarities’ with his mistress and had boasted that he was ‘too well acquainted with her secrets ever to be dismissed’.
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Bowes would later allege that Walker had slept with Mary both before and after her second marriage, a claim backed by Eliza Stephens née Planta, who had accompanied the couple to Newcastle ostensibly as Mary’s companion but in reality as Bowes’s spy and probably his mistress; Bowes was spotted leaving Eliza’s room at five o’clock one morning while at Gibside after the election.
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Testifying that Mary had had sex with Walker even as Bowes lay wounded after the duel and that they had resumed their affair soon after the wedding, Eliza’s only evidence was having heard the pair laughing together in Mary’s locked bedchamber. In reality Bowes had obviously dismissed the footman after learning that he had been given a copy of the trust deed, as a letter which Bowes sent to the Reverend Stephens indicated. ‘I have discharged
trusty
George this morning in great disgrace,’ he cryptically informed Stephens, while instructing him to allow Walker to collect from Grosvenor Square ‘anything that is
really
his Property’.
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An accompanying letter from Mary, almost certainly dictated by Bowes, urged Stephens to search the footman’s boxes and drawers, remove any papers bearing her handwriting and fasten the locks as if nothing had been disturbed. Packing his trunk, which naturally Bowes had searched, Walker left the family - with the deed safely concealed in a false bottom.

Back in London at the beginning of April, Mary - now truly five months pregnant - was reunited with her eldest daughter who turned nine that month. While the three youngest children had been despatched for the Easter holidays to their grandmother’s, where eight-year-old John was to join them as a rare treat, Mary kept Maria close. ‘She is now so far advanced & so much improved as to be a most pleasant & entertaining companion to her mother, who could not possibly spare her,’ Bowes informed a friend.
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Dictating when Mary was allowed to see her children, Bowes was careful to portray himself the doting stepfather.

When the departure of her faithful footman was followed by that of the Reverend Stephens and his wife Eliza a few days later, Mary felt more alone than ever. Having given the couple £1,000 on the night of her wedding, most probably in the spirit of a bribe to conceal her pregnancy, Mary little suspected that Eliza’s own expected confinement was not all it seemed. After staying in France for ten days the couple headed north to Cole Pike Hill, the estate Bowes had wrested from the heirs of his first wife Hannah, whose mother had only just died there. Here Eliza gave birth to the child she had been expecting when she married her compliant chaplain. Whether Stephens initially believed the child was his is unclear; he would later admit he had married Eliza only ten days after their first meeting although she would deny having placed an advertisement seeking a husband.
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Plainly Bowes had masterminded the match - the £1,000 gift a thoughtful honeymoon present - and doubtless the child was his, judging from the later reaction of the Reverend Stephens. George Walker, who visited the couple at their hideaway that spring when Eliza was ‘big with child’, later recalled that ‘the Parson damn’d Stoney very much to me’.
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Unaware of their complicity in Bowes’s deceits, Mary grieved at losing the couple she thought were her ‘sincere and faithful friends’. Yet within a year, her views poisoned by Bowes, Mary would fume, ‘had I known her as I do now, I should not only have intreated you to turn her out of the house directly [but] have confessed, that such a wretch was not fit to live on the earth’ while of Eliza’s husband she stormed, ‘I should have thought only with horror of his ever being near my sons, or in my house.’
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How the couple had offended Bowes at that point was unclear but after a reconciliation some years later they would prove vital to his cause.

By now desperate to lay his hands on Mary’s tantalising riches, on 1 May Bowes threw a dinner party in Grosvenor Square to which he invited a few trusted friends, including Mary’s surgeon John Hunter, a cleric named the Reverend Dr John Scott, and a pliable lawyer from Newcastle called William Gibson. Retiring to the drawing room after a generous dinner, where he continued to ply his guests with copious quantities of alcohol, the genial host casually asked his fellow diners to witness himself and Mary signing a legal document. Hunter, quite probably chosen for his acknowledged distaste for reading - he was dyslexic - would later admit that he never read the document. Mary herself would swear that she had no recollection of signing her name but admitted that she frequently signed papers at Bowes’s command and often when befuddled by beatings. Signed in the dim light of candles, the five-page parchment revoked Mary’s prenuptial deed and gave Bowes control, during his lifetime at least, over all income and profits from his wife’s entire estate.
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Once again Mary found herself devoid of all possessions, income and rights. Nearly a year after Bowes had first devised his tortuous moneymaking scheme he had finally got his hands on the Bowes family fortune.

There was much call on the funds. Forcing Mary to lace her corsets tightly to conceal her blooming figure as they visited moneylenders in the City, Bowes raised £24,000 by selling annuities - a popular way for cash-poor life tenants to obtain capital - which assigned future rents from the Gibside estate to various brokers.
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With the proceeds he appeased the most urgent of his own and Mary’s creditors - Bowes always detested settling debts unless it was absolutely unavoidable - then paid a hefty £12,000 in compensation to George Gray. Seemingly satisfied with his windfall, the once ardent suitor embarked for Bengal the following year only to die there two years later.
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Having despatched Mary’s erstwhile lover, Bowes now faced the delicate problem of his illegitimate child.

 

Even the most constricting of corsets and generous of gowns could no longer disguise Mary’s condition to the ever-vigilant scrutiny of servants and acquaintances. So as the
bon ton
fled the hot and pungent capital in their annual exodus for the countryside that May, Bowes and Mary packed their belongings and rattled out of Grosvenor Square on the pretext of a holiday on the Continent. Informing one of his political allies in Newcastle that he was embarking on ‘a Journey to the South of France’ on the advice of his physicians to treat a ‘cough & pain in my side’, Bowes promised he would soon be returning to ‘my friends in the north’.
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But instead of heading east towards Dover, the couple’s carriage turned west along the King’s Road towards the quiet pastoral retreat of Hammersmith.

With contraception unreliable and unpopular, and attempts at abortion both precarious and taboo, many women had no alternative but to go ahead with unexpected pregnancies. Just as Eliza had scurried into the wilds of County Durham to give birth to her illegitimate child, so women of all classes, from prostitutes to duchesses, were forced to arrange clandestine deliveries for their unplanned babies. Among the medical fraternity, several ‘man-midwives’ were well-known for their circumspection in attending secret births. William Hunter, the physician brother of the surgeon John Hunter, was as infamous for his discretion in delivering the offspring of illicit aristocratic liaisons as he was famous for supervising the births of the fifteen royal princes and princesses. So William had helped Lady Diana Spencer give birth secretly in 1767 to the daughter of her affair with Topham Beauclerk and with the couple’s collusion the following year he gave evidence of the event to enable her husband, Viscount Bolingbroke, to secure a divorce.
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A year later William similarly attended Anne, Duchess of Grafton, the daughter of Bowes’s coal-owning partner Henry Liddell, when she gave birth to the child of her affair with John Fitzpatrick, the Earl of Upper Ossory. And although he was generally the soul of discretion, at dinner parties William would boast of having once delivered twins to the daughter of a well-known peer in the basement of her family home while her parents maintained complete ignorance upstairs. He even arranged for the unwanted babes to be deposited in the Foundling Hospital. Yet such clandestine births were highly risky - not least for the medical men involved. One man-midwife who was called to a birth in Bristol in 1755, was escorted blindfolded to a luxurious mansion where he was asked to deliver a woman whose face was kept covered throughout. Three weeks later the hapless practitioner was found dead.

Laden with their scant belongings, accompanied by a few, if any, servants, Bowes and Mary drew up outside a remote cottage on the north bank of the Thames beyond Chelsea. Bowes would later describe this simply as ‘a house in Hammersmith’ which he had rented as a secret hideaway for Mary’s expected delivery. His surgeon Jessé Foot, in his usual grandiloquent style, referred to it as ‘a house the Margravine of Ansbach had left, quite secluded from the busy prying eye of curiosity’. Here, Foot added, in a snide allusion to husbands being cuckolded, ‘Bowes might hear the cuckoo . . . without its being unwelcome to the married ear’.
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The most probable candidate for the isolated riverside abode was Craven Cottage, a simple two-storey thatched villa which had recently been built as a pastoral retreat by Lady Elizabeth Craven, the future Margavine of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Bayreuth.
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Just a year younger than Mary, Lady Craven had already established a reputation that was at least as scandalous. The daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, she had married William Craven in 1767 whereupon both indulged in flagrant extra-marital liaisons. After winning the lottery in 1776 or 1777, Lady Craven had bought or built her secluded villa with the proceeds and invited friends such as Boswell and Walpole to visit. With its six bedrooms plus servants’ quarters, and ‘fine view of the river’, it would be described by another visitor, Lady Mary Coke in 1781, as ‘pretty as everything upon the Thames must be’.

Bounded by the river to the south, meadows to the east and high walls on the remaining two sides, the riverside retreat provided the perfect location for Mary’s clandestine delivery. Concealed from inquisitive city eyes, Mary spent the summer days in her arcadian isolation awaiting her first contractions while Bowes tormented her with his petty restrictions and violent outbursts. When she went into labour in August, it was not William Hunter but his brother John who was called upon to assist the birth, along with Dr James Ford, a physician with a lucrative West End obstetrics practice.
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Both were sworn to secrecy. Unplanned and unwanted, kept hidden from society and from her siblings, the baby, Mary’s third daughter, was also named Mary and took the Bowes surname. Her only child conceived out of wedlock, this bubbly, mischievous, cheeky infant would become Mary’s most precious child as well as a favourite with her siblings.

The following month, with the newborn baby probably despatched to a well-bribed wet-nurse, the couple travelled north to Gibside where Mary pretended she was a respectable seven months pregnant. The pair attended church at Whickham two Sundays running in October, doubtless to create the impression that the birth was imminent and very likely with Mary’s gown padded to suggest a bulge, for there was nothing Bowes enjoyed better than play-acting. In a characteristically abusive letter to his father on 14 November, Bowes claimed that his physician friend John Scott was close at hand since Mary was ‘so very near her time’.
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When the supposed time arrived, Bowes despatched an urgent request to two physicians who arrived breathless at Gibside Hall - just a little too late. Assured that the baby had been born healthy and that the mother was now asleep, the medics accepted their fees and left.
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The bouncing baby, now almost three months old, was duly baptised in a private ceremony in Whickham Church on 25 November, her birthday given as 16 November 1777, and her arrival announced in the London magazines the same month.
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