Wedlock (42 page)

 

Remaining steadfast and optimistic despite the setbacks, Mary was slowly attempting to rebuild her life, spending part of the long summer break with friends in the countryside and even embarking on a new romance. Having spent a week with one set of friends at their ‘charming & extensive seat’ at Bury Hill, in West Sussex, Mary had stayed for ten days with other friends at Leybourne in Kent. In a newsy letter to Colpitts that July, she enthused, ‘Their little neat Box is surrounded with fine prospects, beautiful gentlemens seats, & places to see all within a small distance’.
⁶
With Morgan her constant companion, Mary enjoyed an excursion to fashionable Tunbridge Wells and outings to tea with neighbouring gentry. After years of being forced to appear rude or deranged in company, her conversation schooled by Bowes, she seemed almost surprised to find that those she met were ‘extremely civil to me’. And now at liberty to follow her own desires for the first time in a decade, at the age of thirty-seven she had discovered a new admirer who was rather more than civil.

Indebted to the support of James Farrer since he had taken charge of her legal business at the beginning of 1786, Mary had forged a firm friendship with the attorney and his family. Farrer and his wife had been invited to dine in Bloomsbury Square and Mary grew fond of the couple’s young daughters, but it was Farrer’s brother, a 41-year-old ship’s captain named Henry Farrer, who brought spice to her summer days. Having returned from India and China at the helm of the East Indiaman
True Briton
after a two-year round voyage the previous October, Captain Farrer quickly inveigled himself into Mary’s affections.
⁷
By the summer, the dashing captain was rarely away from her side, and seldom absent from her letters, joining Mary and her friends at their Kent retreat and accompanying them on their jaunt to Tunbridge Wells. Still plainly unable to resist a man in uniform, Mary was reassured by the courteous captain’s presence, telling Colpitts that ‘Captain Farrer . . . came down to protect us here’. When Mary returned to London in August, he remained her escort.

The fact that the gallant captain was already married and had previously, if not still, kept a mistress in town, suggested that Mary’s judgement of character was as flawed as ever. Having married Mary Goldsmith in 1781, Captain Farrer had kept his wife a secret from his family - possibly because it was not the most advantageous of matches - and on his return from his travels he evidently wished that his wife would remain conveniently out of sight. Mrs Farrer would later claim that her husband had left her destitute, forcing her to wash laundry to make ends meet, though in reality it seems that she had resorted to a rather less salubrious method of earning her keep. Certainly the pair had endured a strained and largely estranged relationship since the captain’s return; indeed, it is possible that Mary had no idea that Mrs Farrer existed.

Staying in London, where she felt safer than in the country, Mary tentatively dipped her toe into the city’s social life, although always remaining on guard for Bowes’s next move. In September, when Captain Farrer departed to spend three weeks at Cheltenham, Mary visited friends in Chelsea and dined with the artist George Engleheart at his home in Kew. Whether it was at this point that Engleheart painted Mary’s portrait is unknown; a prolific artist who portrayed many of the Georgian nobility, Engleheart did not list Mary in his fee-book but a miniature later painted by his nephew, John Cox Dillman Engleheart, which shows Mary at about this time, is said to have been copied from an earlier portrait made by his uncle.
⁸
There was time too for her sons, George and Thomas, who had recently enrolled - at Uncle Thomas’s behest - at Eton. Enjoying the company of her teenage boys, now fourteen and thirteen, Mary promised George a puppy. Relations with her older children remained difficult, while her two youngest, of course, were still in Bowes’s custody. That same month she rejoiced with Colpitts at the success in Lancaster of his appeal against Bowes’s vexatious lawsuit over Colpitts receiving her rents and hoped the decision boded well for her ongoing Chancery plea to reinstate her premarital deed. While she confided to Colpitts that James Farrer was far from confident that her deed might be restored, understandably given the prevailing legal climate against women’s rights to property, she remained convinced that ultimately she would succeed.

By October, as the metropolis swelled with the return of the usual well-heeled pleasure-seekers for the start of the winter season, Mary had almost regained her zest for society life. ‘There has been a vast deal of mirth & elegant entertainment going forwards amongst us for this last fortnight,’ Mary reported in a chatty letter to the faithful Colpitts.
⁹
Relating details of her visits to the theatre, concerts and parties, she confessed, ‘I have been an incessant Rake during the time I mention; every Night (except one that I was at the Play) has been spent either at a Rout or a Concert; besides wch. I frequently both dined & supped out; so that I was rarely longer in the House than was necessary to dress myself for going out again.’ With Captain Farrer returned from Cheltenham apparently reinvigorated by its restorative waters, Mary seemed as skittish as a teenage debutante. At least now she had a little more regard to society gossip - fully aware that Bowes would use any scandal to oppose their divorce - and told Colpitts that her devoted captain was ‘skipping about the town, & is to be seen in all places,
except
Bloomsbury Sq. & Bread St’.

For all her newfound liberty and re-entry into society, as the autumn law term neared, Mary remained wary. Even as she enjoyed games of quadrille in elegant salons and attended routs in opulent ballrooms, she told everyone she met that she lived in constant terror of Bowes seizing her. Accustomed to the fabricated image of Mary’s eccentricity, most dismissed her anxiety as fanciful. When Mary told friends that strange men claiming to be law officers, or women feigning madness, had attempted to force their way into her home, they assumed she was being over-imaginative. When she claimed that her coach was being followed whenever she ventured out, they put it down to the inevitable congestion of city streets. And when she complained that her post was being intercepted, she was dismissed as overwrought. Only Mary Morgan, and the other servants who had experienced the extent of Bowes’s guile and vengeance for themselves, shared her fears.

At the end of October, Morgan informed Colpitts that a chaise with its blinds shut and a hackney carriage had been spotted loitering in the square before following Mary’s coach when she went out. Only the quick-thinking of Ann Parkes, who spotted the chaise setting off in pursuit of her mistress’s carriage and sent a footman to overtake Mary, had averted possible danger. Seeing the chaise and hackney carriage stop, Morgan was certain she spotted Bowes leaning out of the window. ‘The watchers are grown desperate & I am afraid some dreadful disaster will Terminate in this business,’ she warned. But three days later, when Bowes was discovered by Colpitts’s son, lying in the road near Barnard Castle after apparently falling from his horse, the suspicions were assumed to be groundless. With Bowes reported to be confined to his bed by life-threatening injuries, a condition verified by the lawyer John Lee who circulated the news in London, it appeared that Mary Eleanor had nothing to worry about. Nevertheless, on 2 November, when Morgan noticed two coaches following Mary’s, then stopping at either end of a lonely section of the King’s Road, she feared the worst. This time Robert Crundall, Bowes’s former footman who was now in Mary’s service, swore he saw Bowes - despite the reports that he was still lying injured in Streatlam Castle - but the pursuers made no attempt to stop them and Crundall returned home relieved.

Growing increasingly alarmed, Mary now insisted that no strangers be granted entry to her house and declared that she would remain locked inside until the conclusion of the divorce appeal expected imminently. ‘Our House is all over Bolts, Bars, Bells, Alarms, Swords, Pistols, Hangers, Guns, & Clubs,’ she informed Colpitts, ‘& we have borrowed a House Dog that wd seize any Man by the Throat, so I trust that through the Blessing & Justice of God we shall escape all dangers. All the Garret windows are barricaded with Iron.’
¹⁰
Her house locked and barred, her servants armed and alert, and with her ferocious guard dog by her side, even then Mary did not feel secure. And so when an earnest and bespectacled young constable named Edward Lucas called at the house that same week and offered to provide protection against dubious characters he had spotted lurking near her stables, Mary gratefully engaged him as a bodyguard for the princely sum of 12 shillings a week. Informing Colpitts a few days later that ‘we have got a trusty additionall Watchman, a Constable in the House’, Mary Morgan put her faith in God and the law to preserve her mistress ‘from the murderous hands of this Wretch’.

 

At midday on Friday 10 November 1786, Mary set off in her carriage from Bloomsbury Square with Captain Farrer and Mary Morgan on a social visit to the owner of an ironmonger’s shop, Edward Foster, in nearby Oxford Street.
¹¹
Although still apprehensive, Mary had felt faint from being confined in the house and longed for an ‘airing’. Assured by her new bodyguard Lucas that all was quiet in the neighbourhood and secure in the knowledge that her staunch protector, Captain Farrer, was armed with a pistol, she had decided to venture outdoors. Enjoying her first excursion for days, Mary was taking refreshments with Mr Foster when she heard a sudden commotion in the street outside. Rushing upstairs in alarm, Mary and Morgan locked themselves in a garret room. To their relief, moments later, they heard the calm voice of Lucas at the door assuring them that it was safe to descend.

Emerging into Oxford Street, however, Mary realised that her carriage was surrounded by men armed with pistols, blunderbusses and swords and that her own footman and driver had been replaced with strangers. Now Lucas announced that she was his prisoner, informed her that he had a warrant for her arrest and demanded that she accompany him to appear before Lord Mansfield at his home, Kenwood House, near Highgate. Confused and frightened, Mary was bundled into her carriage but managed to drag Captain Farrer with her as Morgan slipped away to raise the alarm. Knowing that James Farrer was away on business in Carlisle, Morgan rushed to alert his partner, Thomas Lacey, to summon help. With a crowd of curious onlookers gathering, the carriage sped off east along Oxford Street towards the Tottenham Court Road turnpike where it was joined by a hackney coach. As Mary alternately screamed for help from the windows and begged Lucas on her knees to save her, the two carriages hared northwards out of town. When the coach pulled up at the Red Lion tavern in Highgate Mary was horrified as, standing in the yard of the inn, she saw Bowes. Now frantic with terror, Mary implored the tavern keepers to help her escape but bribed with a guinea by Bowes they ignored her pleas. Leaping into the carriage beside her, his pistol at the ready, Bowes maintained the notion that they were headed for Kenwood but when the coach continued up the Great North Road beyond Highgate it was clear, as Mary had suspected, that the story was a concoction. When Captain Farrer protested, Bowes simply stopped the coach, shoved the hapless defender into the road and left him to trudge meekly back to town as the carriage disappeared in a flurry of mud.

Alone now with Bowes and his armed ruffians, hurtling north through the rapidly darkening day, Mary faced the horror she had long been dreading. Just as she had feared, it transpired that Bowes had been plotting her abduction for weeks.
¹²
Anxious that his appeal against the divorce was likely to be lost, but determined to cling on to the Bowes fortune at all cost, he had resolved to coerce Mary into relinquishing her suit or, failing that, force her to cohabit with him again, thereby invalidating her case. Having waited until his bail had expired at the end of July so as not to forfeit his friends’ sureties, Bowes had recruited a gang of lawless hoodlums culled from the dregs of the Durham criminal underground. After following Mary’s coach on several occasions in London he had scurried back north to fake the fall from his horse and while supposedly fighting for his life at Streatlam Castle had secretly returned to the capital and rented a house in Norfolk Street near the Strand.

Adopting a variety of false names and disguises, masquerading as a sailor, a judge and a crippled old man, Bowes had bribed the constable Edward Lucas to infiltrate Mary’s household. Typical of the feckless wastrels appointed by London parishes as constables and watchmen, Lucas had duly reported to Bowes on Mary’s daily activities. Acting well beyond the call of duty, on 8 November Lucas had helped obtain warrants for the arrest of Mary’s coachman and footman, Daniel Lee and Robert Crundall, on the trumped-up grounds that they had threatened the lives of two of Bowes’s hirelings. And when Lucas had relayed word that Mary intended to venture out on 10 November, Bowes had immediately swung into action. As his armed vagabonds seized Mary’s coach, despatching Lee and Crundall to swear their innocence before a bewildered magistrate, Bowes waited eagerly in a hired carriage for his reunion with the wife he had not seen for nearly two years. The period of separation, Mary discovered, had not improved his behaviour.

Petrified for her safety but utterly determined never to return to Bowes’s violent regime, nothing would now induce Mary to bow to his bullying tactics. So as Bowes urged the coach onwards at reckless speed, stopping only to change horses or snatch refreshments at inns, Mary attempted every possible means of escape.

At the first halt to change horses, at Barnet, Mary smashed the carriage window with her bare hands and yelled, ‘Murder for God’s sake help me’, but she was immediately gagged by Bowes and held fast by Lucas. Halting shortly afterwards at the Brick Wall turnpike, she begged to be allowed out for a call of nature. Trembling so much that she could hardly hold the chamber pot, she persuaded the tollbooth keepers to fetch her a pen and paper. But having been told by Bowes that they were headed for St Paul’s Walden Bury, on the pretext that one of her children was seriously ill, she scribbled a note to Morgan urging her to hurry there. Incredibly, the hastily scrawled note found its way back to London; even more incredibly, torn and stained with damp, it still survives. ‘My Dear Morgan,’ she pleaded, ‘Let me beg that you and Mr Lacey will come to me immediately upon the receipt of this to Pauls Walden, & bring any other of our Friends with you, & for Heaven’s sake don’t lose a Moment.’
¹³