Wedlock (48 page)

Having brilliantly set the scene of Bowes’s outrage, Mingay produced a succession of turnpike keepers, tavern landlords and servants who testified to Mary’s suffering at every stage of her journey north and subsequent cross-country expedition. They included the innkeeper of the Red Lion at Barnet who thought that Mary looked such a ‘subject of pity’ on her return homewards that she reminded him of ‘a woman that was sifting cinders in Gray’s Inn Lane’. None of them could have been more stolid in their support than Mary Morgan who said when she was reunited with Mary Eleanor: ‘I can scarcely describe her condition, she was so altered, so full of mud, and dressed in an old bed gown.’ Producing in court those very clothes - a red petticoat, bed gown and old bonnet - Morgan described the bruises Mary had revealed on her breast and at her temples. Asked whether her mistress had full command of her reason, in anticipation of Bowes’s defence, Morgan retorted adamantly: ‘I do not know any Lady that has so much possession of her mind.’

Given the enormity of the allegations so fluently described by his old adversary, even the renowned Thomas Erskine faced an uphill struggle to defend his client’s actions. Just four years earlier in a libel case, Erskine had famously upstaged Judge Buller, his former teacher, when he had refused to concede that Buller could overrule the jury. Now, it appeared, positions were reversed as the renegade pupil rose before his erstwhile master to plead a virtually impossible case. Indeed, it almost seemed that Erskine had concluded that the allegations were indefensible when he began by admitting that, ‘a man must be lost, not only to all Christians, but, I should apprehend, to all human feelings, who does not feel infinitely hurt by everything that has been stated this day.’

Having effectively confirmed his client’s guilt - and quite possibly betraying his true feelings - Erskine made no attempt to deny the acts alleged beyond suggesting that many statements were ‘fabrications of Lady Strathmore’. Neither did he endeavour to argue the usual abusive husband’s justification, despite the fact that it would remain a stock defence for a further century, when he gamely asserted that a ‘wife has a right to the protection of the law to keep herself from violence even against her husband’ and that although the husband enjoyed the right to the ‘possession of her body’ this did not permit him to seize or detain her by force. In an uncharacteristically lacklustre oration, Erskine merely claimed that Bowes’s actions stemmed from ‘just and pure motives’ in his determination to remove Mary from the hands of people ‘conspiring to ruin her with fortune-tellers, to widen the breach with her husband’. Instead, with Bowes seemingly a lost cause, Erskine concentrated his legal aplomb on attempting to exculpate his fellow accused by insisting that they were innocent of conspiracy since they had had no knowledge of Bowes’s aims. Channelling his energies in particular into absolving his colleague, Thomas ‘Hungry’ Bowes, Erskine called as a character witness the former attorney general ‘Honest’ Jack Lee who earnestly swore that: ‘I never did know a man of his profession, bear a fairer or more honourable character in my life.’ As Erskine sat down after one of the least inspiring speeches of his career there was little doubt that Bowes’s fate had been sealed.

Summing up the case for the jury, Judge Buller made no effort to disguise his disgust for the nine defendants or their misdemeanours. Taking particular exception to their exploitation of fundamental planks of the law for their criminal ends, by trumping up a charge against Mary’s servants, pretending to carry her to Lord Mansfield and even abusing the role of a constable, Buller had no hesitation in declaring that all nine had ‘knowingly engaged in criminal acts’. After seven hours of testimony, it took the all-male jury just minutes to decide that Bowes and his entire gang were guilty of every charge.

 

With sentencing deferred to a future date Bowes and his confederates remained on bail and at liberty. Inevitably, the entire pack absconded so that two weeks later writs had to be issued to bring them back for sentencing. When Bowes was seized, on 16 June, he claimed, of course, that he was on his way to court. All charges having been dropped against Thomas Bowes - there being as much honour among lawyers as thieves - and with Chapman, Pigg and Bickley still on the run, only Bowes and four of his accomplices now appeared at the King’s Bench on 26 June 1787 for judgement before Buller, Sir William Ashhurst and Sir Nash Grose.
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Although nearly two hundred crimes, from stealing a handkerchief to cold-blooded murder, carried the death penalty in eighteenth-century Britain, conspiracy was not among them. Nonetheless, while Bowes might escape the rope for his various acts of attempted murder, attempted rape and repeated assaults, he finally had to face the very real prospect of a lengthy imprisonment. Desperate to retain the liberty he had denied so many others, he now pulled out all the stops in his bid to mitigate his sentence. Maintaining the tired fiction of the tender husband trying to rein in his sinful wife, he had collected stacks of affidavits from the usual dubious suspects to justify his actions. Several of the testimonies even claimed that Mary had enjoyed boisterous sexual relations with Bowes throughout her abduction. So Bowes’s mistress Mary Gowland swore that she had heard them ‘whispering and laughing’ in bed, while the gamekeeper Matthew Shields attested that Mary ‘went to bed very willingly’. Yet even as he portrayed Mary as his devoted bed-mate, Bowes continued to accuse her of wanton and lewd behaviour. The judges were having none of it. Tersely, Grose remarked that rather than explain why Bowes wished to halt his divorce his evidence ‘would seem to make it rather a desirable thing’. His key evidence rejected, Thomas Erskine was forced to fall back on the argument that Bowes had been exercising his power, indeed his duty, as a husband to protect his wife when she was incapable of governing herself.

Fully prepared for this age-old defence, James Mingay called on the justices to make an example of Bowes in order to deter similarly abusive husbands by issuing a ‘heavy sentence’. Finally losing his temper with his legal colleagues, he exploded: ‘How the Gentlemen can reconcile the evidence of the trial with the duties of a husband, seems to me to be a paradox!’ And in a bravura performance which went to the heart of the debate on husband’s rights, Mingay asked: ‘Are the powers of a husband in this country such, that women that are ill-used are not to complain?’ Women who had left their husbands to pursue divorce suits through the ecclesiastical courts required the protection of the law from such men who tried to seize them, not its connivance, he insisted. And in a clear swipe at the stereotype of the Irish fortune hunter, he added: ‘Is this the way Mr Bowes thinks English husbands are to protect their wives?’

Certainly the judges thought not. In a stinging indictment, Justice Ashhurst branded Bowes’s crimes ‘as atrocious and daring a nature as ever appeared in a Court of Justice’. Had not the facts been incontestably proven it would scarcely have seemed credible that ‘in a civilized country, governed by such laws, any set of men would have been found hardy enough to take away a Lady of rank and fortune, from one of the most publick streets of this great town, at mid-day, in defiance of all law, order, and government, and to drag her through the heart of the kingdom 240 miles’. What was worse, the judge added, was that Bowes’s intent had been to pervert the course of justice by preventing the progress of a properly instituted lawsuit. Bowes was fined £300 and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, at the end of which he would be required to find securities totalling £20,000 for the ensuing fourteen years. His fellow conspirators were likewise sentenced to prison with heavy fines.

Widely reported in the press, the Bowes trial was a landmark case which signalled a warning to violent husbands everywhere that the powers they might have assumed were absolute over their wives were actually curtailed by law. It gave hope to abused wives throughout the country that they could expect the protection of the courts when pursuing divorce claims. At the same time, Bowes’s conviction and sentence were symbolic of a subtle shift in society’s perceptions of the balance of marital power and represented another step in the slow march towards the outlawing of domestic abuse and wrongful confinement. Sadly, however, it would be more than a century before the defence of reasonable confinement was finally declared obsolete. In a case remarkably similar to Mary’s, Emily Jackson was kidnapped in 1891 by the fortune-hunter husband she had fled yet her family’s application for a writ of
habeas corpus
was refused by the High Court on the usual basis of the husband’s right to detain his wife. The Court of Appeal, however, firmly rejected this defence as stemming from ‘quaint and absurd dicta’ which no longer applied in a civilised country.

 

Incarcerated but unrepentant, Bowes pursued his remaining legal challenges with undiminished zeal, determined at all costs to hang on to his fortune whether by scuppering the divorce or affirming his deed. Still a wealthy man, by virtue of the income from Mary’s estate, he continued to live in the marshal’s best apartments where he entertained his friends and mistresses. His decadent lifestyle prompted the
Morning Post
to observe: ‘To some people . . . a commitment to BANCO REGIS [the King’s Bench] is no great punishment. A certain delinquent daily eats, drinks, and gets merry, and though surrounded by as many wives and children as MACHEATH, keeps them all in good order.’
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In the meantime, Mary remained penniless, dependent on the goodwill of friends and powerless to prevent the once grand homes of her childhood from sliding into decay. At Streatlam, Colpitts’s son reported that October, the meadows were overgrown, the deer had not been culled and ‘the Castle is uninhabited except by pigeons and jackdaws’.
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At Gibside, where the snooping ostler Joseph Hill had set up quarters, James Smith lamented that ‘the Chapell, Greenhouse, Banquiting House, Bath, Gardens, and Walks, [and] pleasure Grounds are all gone to Ruin’.

Pressing on resolutely with her legal cases from her house in Holles Street, Mary was distraught in December when Morgan fell sick with a fever. Afraid the illness might carry off her friend, she told Colpitts: ‘You will easily imagine what I must have suffered; indeed it has cast a desponding Languor upon my spirits & a tremor upon my nerves.’
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As Morgan recovered, Mary’s nerves remained on edge. Still watched and harassed by Bowes’s hoodlums, who had recently tried to abduct two of her servants, she wrote: ‘I believe really that, instead of being tamed, Stoney will grow more & more desperate, I am therefore doubly cautious.’

There was fresh anxiety in the New Year but from an unexpected quarter. Despite the waspish vigilance of Elizabeth Parish, her seventeen-year-old charge Anna had been secretly exchanging love letters for almost a year with a debt-ridden young lawyer called Henry Jessop who lived opposite their house in Fludyer Street, a narrow thoroughfare parallel to Downing Street.
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Growing impatient to consummate her clandestine passion, at the end of January 1788 resourceful Anna placed a plank from her bedroom window to that of Jessop’s and crawled across to his waiting arms. Heading straight for Gretna Green the couple married on 28 January.

News of the daring elopement reverberated around the capital. A few days later Mrs Parish’s embarrassment was compounded when the gossip reached the north and the
Newcastle Journal
revealed: ‘It appears that a correspondence has been carried on for near a twelvemonth past, by means of the servants in each family, yet not the least suspicion was ever entertained by Mrs P.’ With Anna still a ward of Chancery due to inherit a substantial fortune when she came of age - put at £13,000 by one newspaper and £20,000 by another - the scandal brought renewed frustration for Thomas Lyon which for once he could not lay at the feet of his sister-in-law. Forced to make the best of a bad match, he negotiated a generous marriage settlement to help clear young Jessop’s debts.

As Anna rushed blindly into wedlock with a man she scarcely knew, her mother was still struggling to undo the damage wreaked by her own impetuous marriage. It was 8 March, as the spring bulbs pushed defiantly through the overgrown lawns at Gibside and Streatlam, when the fate of the Bowes estate finally came up in Chancery. No stranger to the family’s wrangles, Lord Chancellor Thurlow had previously ordered the couple to return Anna from France; four years later he was faced with their competing claims to the Bowes fortune. Unable to launch a petition in her own name, since wives of course were not normally entitled to own property, Mary had lodged a bill in the name of her trustee, George Stephens, seeking to restore her prenuptial deed of 9 and 10 January 1777. Countering this, Bowes had filed a cross bill claiming that the document was fraudulent since it had been kept secret from him before their marriage and instead asked to confirm the deed of 1 May. Evidently eager to evade the thorny problem, Thurlow referred the case to the Court of Common Pleas for a jury decision - a not uncommon move - on whether the later deed had been extracted under duress.

Two months later, on 19 May, the dispute came before a jury in Westminster Hall. Providing further entertainment for the assembled journalists, Mary’s lawyers rehearsed the sorry story of her marriage and its immediate aftermath. As the hacks scribbled furiously, a succession of witnesses described how Bowes had tricked Mary down the aisle by pretending he was mortally wounded in a ‘sham duel’ then as soon as they were married had subjected her to brutal abuse, forced her to endure the company of prostitutes and curtailed her freedom with tyrannical control.
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Bowes’s former valet, Thomas Mahon, revealed how his erstwhile master had faked his wounds while past servants from the Bowes household described the tell-tale signs of domestic abuse that they had witnessed from the earliest days of the marriage.

By comparison, Bowes’s case was flimsy. Scarcely bothering even to sustain the pretence that the duel had been genuine, Bowes’s lawyer shrugged that since he had been competing for Mary’s hand with his rival Gray then ‘stratagem was fair in love, as well as in war’. Effectively admitting the marital brutality, he argued that even if ‘one or two blows had been given’ that did not prove the deed had been obtained under duress. And resorting again to the medieval principle of the husband’s exclusive power over his wife’s property the lawyer insisted that by Mary’s prenuptial deed Bowes had been ‘defrauded of that absolute power which the law gives the husband over the personal estate of his wife’. But the argument was wearing thin. Any sympathy Bowes might once have evoked for his patriarchal privileges from the all-male jury had long since evaporated in the black cloud of infamy over his well-publicised conduct. His downfall was plainly cast when Lord Loughborough, the Lord Chief Justice, weighed up the two sides united on the fateful day of the marriage: ‘On one side, was a lady, family, and great estates; on the other, a half-pay lieutenant, without fame or fortune.’ He left the jurors in little doubt of the verdict they should bring in when he added: ‘It was a marriage brought about by a fraud; a fraud of such a kind, that had it been practised to obtain a hundred pounds from Lady Strathmore, Mr Bowes must have answered for it criminally.’ Sure enough, without pausing to retire, the jury delivered its verdict that Bowes’s deed of 1 May had been obtained under duress. At that point, the
Gentleman’s Magazine
related, the entire court erupted in cheers.
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It only remained for Chancery to receive and confirm the verdict, which it did on 19 June, with the ubiquitous Buller standing in for Lord Thurlow. Bowes’s case was dismissed and costs were levied against him.