Wedlock (45 page)

 

Seated on his farm horse in his grubby workclothes, Gabriel Thornton, a ploughman who worked for Thomas Colpitts’s son-in-law, bore little resemblance to a knight on a white charger. Yet from the moment he spotted the suspicious-looking couple riding through Neasham, he acted with chivalric courage and determination.
³⁷
Although the woman riding pillion was unkempt, mired in dirt and dressed in a man’s greatcoat with no stockings and only one slipper, he had no doubt that he had discovered the Countess of Strathmore. Well aware of the nationwide hunt to rescue the countess he initially followed at some distance. But knowing that Bowes was reported to be heavily armed and observing that the man who rode with him carried an unsheathed sword, he thought it prudent to summon assistance from the parish constable, one Christopher Smith. Together Thornton and Smith advanced towards their target and as they closed the gap, they were gradually joined by a growing number of farmhands and villagers. At last, as Bowes turned into a field, the little group of about a dozen men had him surrounded. Surprised at the ambush, Bowes immediately flourished one of his pistols and threatened to shoot out the brains of any man who tried to seize him. Although they were unarmed apart from a few sticks and farm implements, the villagers stood their ground. As Thornton stepped forward to challenge Bowes, an elderly man grabbed the bridle of his horse and Mary saw her chance. She slid to the ground and begged the gathered crowd for assistance. Staggering towards Thornton, she was grabbed by Prevot with his sword drawn but with her last ounce of strength she pinched his arm so severely that he dropped the weapon. Wrenching herself free, she was lifted by one of the farmhands on to Thornton’s horse. In the confusion, Constable Smith seized Bowes’s pistols and with the butt end of one of them gave Bowes a blow to the head that knocked him off his horse. Seeing her captor sprawled on the ground, disarmed and almost senseless, Mary now exclaimed with a flourish, ‘Farewell, learn to amend your life’, and with her gallant ploughman bearing her away she headed straight for London.

 

Safely back, at Farrer and Lacey’s house in Bread Street Hill by the following evening, Mary was in little condition to celebrate. While Lacey scrawled a hurried letter informing Colpitts that Mary was ‘just arrived safe at our House’, Mary Morgan rejoiced ‘at the blessed Restoration of my Dear & suffering Lady’.
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Covered in bruises, severely affected by exposure and unable to walk, Mary Eleanor had to be carried into the court of King’s Bench on 23 November to swear articles of peace against Bowes. A crowd gathered to watch her being lifted from her carriage and carried into the courtroom, limp, pained and exhausted. Spectators and reporters alike were then stunned to hear both the details of her suffering and her fortitude in surviving them. ‘Lady Strathmore, from the extreme ill-treatment she has received since forced from this metropolis, is become an object of the most extreme pity, and compassion to every beholder,’ pronounced the
English Chronicle
while the
Public Advertiser
reported that she had ‘experienced the greatest hardships and distress, too tedious, and almost too dreadful to relate’.
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Determined, nonetheless, to regale their readers with the details, newspapers from London to Madras devoted copious columns to the story while Grub Street publishers rushed into print with illustrated pamphlets and jaunty poems describing Mary’s villainous abduction by her scoundrel husband and heroic rescue by a hardy band of country folk. In the meantime, Bowes had evaded his pursuers and taken refuge once more in his lawyer’s house in Darlington where he was finally apprehended by the dogged Thomas Ridgeway. Now held firmly in the custody of the tipstaff, Bowes was conducted to London to face judgement. Naturally he still had a few tricks up his sleeve.

 

 

 

 

D
ishevelled and pale, with a scarlet handkerchief bandaging the head wounds he had supposedly received at his capture, Andrew Robinson Bowes staggered into Westminster Hall just after 1 p.m. Limping through the cavernous medieval building, where William Wallace, Guy Fawkes and Charles I had once stood to hear their death sentences pronounced, Bowes was supported under each arm by the two tipstaffs who had finally put an end to his flight. The clamour in the noisy hall rose even louder as journalists, law students and spectators jostled for a view. ‘Mr Bowes was dressed in a drab-coloured great coat, a red silk handkerchief about his head,’ the reporter from
The Times
noted, while the correspondent for the
Gentleman’s Magazine
observed that, ‘he frequently appeared on the point of fainting, and his appearance on the whole was the most squalid and emaciated that could possibly be imagined.’
¹
Depicted by James Gillray as stooping and dejected amid a sea of gawping faces in the caricaturist’s last - and most truthful - contribution to the Bowes divorce saga, he cut a pitiful figure.

But if Bowes hoped to win public sympathy by his usual play-acting, this time he was gravely mistaken. Finally wise to his tricks and disguises, the crowds squashed into the courtroom hissed and jeered as he stumbled towards the bench and the newspaper writers cynically dismissed his sickly pallor. ‘Mr Bowes had dressed his person to draw pity from the multitude,’ the
Morning Chronicle
wryly informed its readers and added: ‘It is said by some of the persons who attended Mr Bowes into town, that he did not appear to be much in pain from the ill-treatment complained of in his affidavit, till he came into town, and then he began to rehearse his part.’ Indeed, as Jessé Foot would later reveal, Bowes had manufactured his deathly countenance by taking an emetic. Having vomited twice as he was conveyed to Westminster Hall, he had persuaded the ever-willing surgeon to plead that he was unfit to attend. Only the dissent of a second, less corruptible, doctor had prevented Bowes from evading his appointment with justice.

Held firm by the two tipstaffs, Bowes was brought before the notorious Judge Francis Buller. Presiding over the King’s Bench in place of the ailing Lord Mansfield, Justice Buller had made himself as unpopular with the lawyers who argued their cases under his withering gaze as with the cowering defendants who stood before him. Having scaled the legal ladder with unprecedented agility, Buller was the youngest judge ever to be appointed to the King’s Bench at the tender age of thirty-two.
²
Arrogant and brash in his manner, stubborn and impetuous in his judgements, at fifty he was now tipped to succeed the mentor he idolised yet made seemingly little attempt to emulate. Where Mansfield had been acclaimed for his liberal stance, Buller had become a laughing stock by suggesting that a husband could lawfully beat his wife as long as he used a stick no thicker than his thumb. Yet even ‘Judge Thumb’ was scandalised at the depraved extremes of Bowes’s conduct which now unfolded before the court.

In an era of public hangings, child labour and routine domestic violence, there was little that shocked Georgian sensibilities. But the extent of Bowes’s sadistic ill-treatment of his own wife, described in the articles of peace read by Mary’s lawyers, appalled reporters and spectators alike. Recording the beatings, floggings, murder threats, attempted murder, attempted rapes and unspeakable deprivations Mary had suffered during her abduction and confinement, the charges were described by
The Times
as containing ‘a detail of barbarity that shocks humanity and outrages civilisation’, while the
Morning Chronicle
referred to ‘a scene of the utmost inhumanity and brutality’.

As Bowes swooned from his pretended injuries, his lawyers made a pathetic effort to present him as a wronged man who had only abducted Mary to rescue her from her manipulative servants. Having left Streatlam Castle before the
habeas corpus
had been served, Bowes had been oblivious to the nationwide quest to rescue her until several days later, they claimed, at which point he had dutifully headed south to deliver her in person. It was while endeavouring to return her to London, his lawyers insisted, that Bowes had been apprehended by a rough band of labourers who had mercilessly bludgeoned him over the head. Producing a sworn statement from a surgeon in Darlington who asserted that Bowes had sustained a serious head wound, his lawyers feared that even now his injuries might prove fatal.

Bowes’s version of events received short shrift from the formidable Buller. Briskly dismissing the concoction of excuses over the
habeas corpus
, the judge remanded Bowes in custody until a full hearing, with bail set at the colossal sum of £20,000, possibly the largest bail figure to date in such a case.
³
When Bowes’s counsel pleaded that a spell in jail might endanger his life, the judge promptly retorted that there were apartments in prison ‘sufficiently commodious’ for Bowes to receive medical treatment, at which point the marshal of the prison confirmed - to uproarious laughter - that he ‘could accommodate him very properly’.

As Bowes was conveyed out of court by the tipstaffs, a vast mob surged forwards, hissing, howling and shouting abuse, while the tipstaffs forced a path to the waiting hackney carriage.
⁴
Bundled inside the waiting coach, Bowes was driven the short distance to the King’s Bench prison in Southwark where he arrived at 3 p.m. At last the captor was captive. The man who had variously imprisoned his wife, his sister, his stepdaughter, his mistress and her child, was himself finally under lock and key. And as
The Times
drily remarked: ‘It is an uncomfortable reverse of situation, to be forced from the elegant apartments of a noble house in Grosvenor-square, to a room twelve feet by eight in a prison.’

For satirists and cartoonists ever on the lookout for a fresh victim to lampoon, Bowes’s dramatic plunge from preening country gentleman to lowly prison inmate was a gift. Seizing the opportunity to rake over Bowes’s chequered past while milking popular prejudice against the Irish, one anonymous writer turned the drama into a short play, entitled ‘The Irishman in Limbo, or, Stony Batter’s Lamentation for the loss of his Liberty’.
⁵
In an imagined dialogue between Bowes and an Irish jailor, Bowes declares: ‘One wife I ingeniously tormented out of her life, and the other I would have done the same by, but she, with her sage advisers, has proved too many for me, and prevented my scheme from taking.’ Another attack, under the title ‘Who Cries Andrew now?’ recalled Bowes’s horse-racing and political heyday in nine jaunty verses, including the lines: ‘No more at ELECTIONS his Name we repeat,/Like his Galloper jaded, he’s down at each heat;/Tho’ this bold Irish Hero, this Bruiser of Wives,/the Gallows Escapes, like a Cat with Nine Lives.’ A third, called ‘Paddy’s Progress’, described Bowes’s dazzling ascent from army ensign to popular MP and his equally spectacular descent in a rollicking ballad spanning twenty-four pages. Its final verse concluded: ‘Doom’d to a room, twelve feet by eight!/Who could but say - they serv’d him right?/Thus he who cry’d up Freedom’s laws,/His freedom lost in Freedom’s cause!’

In reality, however, Bowes’s new life in captivity brought little hardship. Far from being incarcerated in a tiny cell, Bowes ranged around a comfortable house adjacent to the prison which he rented from the obliging marshal. Here he lived in comparative luxury with four-year-old William, the pregnant Mary Gowland and several of his stooges, dining on the Bowes silver plate and entertaining friends. Attended daily for his feigned injuries by Foot, Bowes feverishly attempted to raise the bail necessary to secure his release while masterminding his legal defence. With the abduction case, divorce suit and deeds challenge simultaneously lumbering to their conclusions through the tortuous Georgian legal system he had plenty to keep him busy.

In the meantime, it was Mary who was confined to a single room, forced to remain upstairs in Farrer and Lacey’s house in Bread Street Hill through the ill effects of her ordeal. According to the apothecary who examined her after her rescue, Mary had sustained a ‘great pain’ in her right shoulder from her fall from the horse during her trans-Pennine trek, as well as bruises to her neck, chest and feet, and a severe cough.
⁶
‘From the severity of the weather and the ill-treatment she had suffered,’ he reported, ‘I thought her life in great danger.’ It would be a full month before she could stand up and six weeks before she could walk across the room with the aid of a stick. On Christmas Day she was carried downstairs for the first time to enjoy Christmas dinner with friends.
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While her physical symptoms slowly improved, her emotional state took longer to recover. Relating to Colpitts the after-effects of the ordeal - in a far-sighted description of post-traumatic stress disorder - Mary explained: ‘I know by experience, that . . . one begins to feel the Effects of Terror, etc, in a manner that the false spirits & activity necessary whilst our exertions were required prevented our being sensible of ’till the storm has subsided.’ Those symptoms might well continue, she speculated, confessing to Colpitts that, ‘I shall not be very willing, I think, ever to go out of Doors again, as I have experienced that there is no personal security in this Kingdom even at noon.’ Since Bowes’s hoodlums remained at large she had every reason to fear for her safety.