Book review: Wedlock

Published on Thursday 22 January 2009 08:14

WHEN MARY ELEANOR BOWES, the 37-year-old Countess of Strathmore, set off in her carriage from her London home at noon on 10 November 1786, she was looking forward to a rare visit with a friend. Having fled her bullying second husband, Andrew Robinson Bowes, less than two years earlier, she still relished her hard-won freedom.

But as she emerged from her visit into bustling Oxford Street, Mary was horrified to find her carriage surrounded by men brandishing pistols and her loyal servants replaced by strangers. Screaming for help, she was bundled into her coach as her captors whipped the horses into a gallop and hurtled out of town. Mary's dramatic kidnap, masterminded by her estranged husband in a last-ditch effort to prevent a divorce, sparked a nationwide hunt which captivated the Georgian public and media alike.

Today when celebrities get married, divorce, wrangle over the money and the children, then marry someone else, we can rest assured that modern news machines will bring us every detail of their respective revelations with lightning speed. While news travelled decidedly more slowly in 18th- century Britain, journalists of the day worked just as frantically to broadcast the latest twists in celebrity life.

So the news that the Countess of Strathmore had been abducted in broad daylight by her villainous husband made headlines in the next morning's London newspapers, reached the regional papers a few days later and ultimately – after a six-month journey to India by sea – filled the columns of the Madras Courier. As journalists reported sightings of the countess being transported kicking and yelling on her hair-raising journey northwards, their readers devoured every detail of the latest turn in a story which had fed gossip columnists for years.

Ever since childhood, Mary Eleanor Bowes had found herself the centre of media attention. Born in 1749, the only child of a fabulously wealthy coal magnate in County Durham, Mary became the richest heiress in Britain on her father's death, when she was only 11. Enjoying the finest education that money could buy, she won acclaim as an accomplished linguist, talented writer and keen botanist. But her vast wealth was also her downfall.

A magnet for fortune-hunters, the teenage Mary flirted with a succession of suitors before falling in love with John Lyon, the handsome but aloof ninth Earl of Strathmore. Their alliance forged the Bowes Lyon name – Mary's great-great-great-great-granddaughter is the current Queen – and Mary's riches refurbished the Strathmore family's Glamis Castle near Dundee.

But by the time she married – on her 18th birthday in 1767 – Mary knew she had chosen the wrong man. While lively Mary favoured literary and scientific diversions, the dour earl indulged in heavy drinking and gambling. At a time when separation spelled social disaster and divorce was virtually impossible, Mary knew that she had made her marital bed and had no choice but to lie in it. The marriage duly produced five children.

When the earl died nine years later of tuberculosis, aged 38, Mary shed few tears. Having taken a lover, a rakish entrepreneur called George Gray, shortly before the earl's death, she was already pregnant with his child. Now mistress of her own fortune again, free to pursue her scholarly and social pursuits, Mary laid plans to marry Gray and to give birth secretly, abroad.

But when a charming Irish soldier arrived in town that summer, Mary soon fell under his spell. Cutting a dashing figure in his scarlet uniform, Captain Andrew Robinson Stoney flattered Mary with expensive presents and inveigled himself into her elite social circle at her home in affluent Grosvenor Square. And when Stoney insisted on fighting a duel to defend Mary's honour with the editor of a newspaper that had published vindictive reports of her liberal lifestyle, Mary was entranced.

The resulting fracas, in the Adelphi Tavern just off the Strand, was reported fully in the press. One eyewitness, who helped staff break down the door to part the fencing duellists, expressed surprise that "one of the combatants was not absolutely killed on the spot".

And indeed, as Stoney was declared by doctors to be fatally wounded, Mary rushed to her champion's bedside. Pale, faint and moaning with pain, Stoney begged Mary to fulfil his dying wish. Three days later, on 17 January 1777, the stricken soldier was carried on a stretcher down the aisle of St James's Church, Piccadilly, where he and the countess pledged their marriage vows.

Sadly, the debonair Irish "captain" was not all he seemed. In reality a debt-ridden lieutenant, who had tormented and possibly killed his first wife, Stoney had faked the duel to dupe Mary into marriage. From the moment that he moved his belongings into Mary's home and laid claim to her vast fortune – changing his name to Bowes in the process – he staged a seemingly miraculous recovery.

For the succeeding eight years, Andrew Robinson Bowes squandered Mary's riches, beat her mercilessly, kept her a prisoner in her own home and controlled every aspect of her daily life from what she ate and drank to how she dressed and spoke. The erstwhile romantic hero of the duel now threatened his wife with his sword, tore out her hair, burnt her face with candles and held a knife to her throat. Meanwhile, he seduced or raped the maids, sired countless illegitimate children and invited prostitutes to the house.

Finally, terrified for her life and fearful for her two youngest children – her seven-year-old daughter by her former lover and two-year-old son by Bowes – Mary fled her marital home. Forbidden contact with her own family and friends, she relied on faithful servants to aid her escape. And with help from lawyers who argued her case without fee, and growing support from the tenants and miners of her County Durham estate, Mary embarked on an audacious courtroom battle to sever her marriage bonds, reclaim her fortune and regain custody of her children.

Living in hiding, terrified of discovery, Mary steered her case for legal separation – regarded to all intents and purposes as a divorce – through the ecclesiastical courts. As servants courageously volunteered details of their master's brutality and lewdness – and Bowes countered with trumped-up charges alleging Mary's infidelity – shorthand writers scribbled furiously for the scandal sheets which thrived on divorce cases.

When the court declared her case successful, and the couple "divorced from bed, board and mutual cohabitation", Mary and her supporters celebrated a remarkable victory and looked forward to further triumphs in her battles to regain her fortune and her children. But the revels were short-lived.

For as his outrageous kidnapping now proved, Bowes was prepared to stop at nothing to hang onto his marriage and his money. With armed court officials heading north in hot pursuit and watchmen scouring the countryside for sightings of the countess, everything now hinged on the rescue efforts.

A wily and manipulative villain, who was always one step ahead of the game, Bowes would eventually provide the model for William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Barry Lyndon with its seemingly far-fetched tale of an Irish fortune-hunter who tricked an heiress into wedlock. But with its harrowing details of a violent marriage, scandalous sexual intrigue and daring heroism, the true story of Mary Eleanor Bowes is even more astonishing.

&#149 Wedlock, by Wendy Moore, is published this month by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, priced 18.99.