How the Georgian era’s worst husband met his match

AT THE age of 11, Mary Eleanor Bowes, from Gibside, in County Durham was the richest girl in Georgian England.

Her parents doted on her. She had enjoyed a happy, cosseted childhood in her family’s various palatial homes and – unusually for the time – a high standard of education. She was privileged, healthy, pretty, intelligent and accomplished.

What could possibly go wrong?

Twenty years later, Mary Eleanor, estranged from her children, ignored by society, dressed in rags, physically wrecked and mentally almost deranged would be staggering through the snow on top of Stainmore, desperate for shelter in the most basic hovel, having been kidnapped in broad daylight from a London street on the orders of her brutal husband.

Not what would you expect from the woman who was Queen Elizabeth II’s great-great-great-great granny.

But she was made of stern stuff.

She fought back. And eventually, she won.

It was the great scandal of the time. It kept the 18th Century equivalent of the celebrity magazines in stories for years – scandalous stories, lewd cartoons, rude songs. Mary Eleanor gave them plenty to write about.

Her father, George Bowes, died when Mary was 11 years old, leaving her very rich indeed. As well as Gibside, there was Streatlam Castle, estates, farms and lots of coal mines.

She was very much indulged, was the belle of many balls and eventually married Lord Strathmore, of Glamis and Hetton-le-Hole. It was not a happy marriage, but they had five children. However, when Lord Strathmore died of TB en route to Lisbon, Mary Eleanor, Countess of Strathmore, was pregnant by her lover George Gray. Tricky.

She was also alleged to be having an affair with her footman. She had an abortion – and two more – before she finally decided that it might be better to marry Gray.

But then, just when the wedding was planned, she met an Irish soldier, Andrew Stoney. It was the most disastrous encounter of her life.

Stoney was a penniless chancer.

He was handsome, quick-witted and incredibly charming and many sensible, educated and influential people came under the spell of his magnetic, charismatic personality.

He was also controlling, manipulative and incredibly cruel. He tricked the countess into marrying him by staging a duel. Her loose-living behaviour, her apparent indifference to the death of her husband and to the welfare of her children, and even the gossip about the footman, regularly appeared in the papers.

Stoney staged a duel, it seems, in defence of the lady’s honour.

And when he was apparently mortally wounded, his life hanging by the thinnest thread, she naturally agreed to marry him...

At which point he staged a miraculous recovery. Surprise, surprise.

Within days of the “deathbed”

wedding, his true colours began to emerge. He ripped a bonnet off her head, cut off the ribbons and forbade her to leave the house, he banned her from seeing her mother, he beat her with his sword and with a candlestick so severely that Stoney’s valet was so disgusted he left his employment.

The one clever thing that the countess had done was to write a prenuptial agreement, when she was planning to marry Gray, stipulating that all the Bowes fortune should be put in trust for her children.

Being deprived of the great riches he had anticipated did nothing for Stoney’s temper. And over the next years he controlled every moment of Mary Eleanor’s day – the clothes she wore, the food she ate (of which she was allowed very little). She was a keen amateur botanist, had even sponsored plant-finding exhibitions across the world, but he wouldn’t even let her into her garden. She was constantly supervised.

Luckily, in a way, the Strathmore family had taken charge of her five children and she rarely saw them. It kept them safe from Stoney – who might have seduced his 16-year-old stepdaughter – but it broke Mary Eleanor’s heart.

‘SHE was absolutely powerless to do anything,” says writer Wendy Moore who has spent two and a half years researching and writing the story of Mary Eleanor. “Any money and property that wasn’t held for the children automatically became her husband’s when they married. She had nothing and nowhere to go. That was what it was like for women at that time.”

Wendy came across the Countess of Strathmore while researching the story of John Hunter, the 18th Century surgeon.

“She cropped up as a bit player, having given him a giraffe skin. I read more about her and her story seemed incredible. You couldn’t put it in a novel as people would think it was too much.”

At first, she admits, she was slow to warm to her subject. “There were aspects of her I didn’t like. She was very indulged and vain, brought up to expect everything she wanted. But then I completely sympathised with the dreadful situation she found herself in.”

She was regularly beaten, deaf because of the blows, skeletally thin and had compulsive grinding jaw movement. She was not allowed new clothes and was forced to borrow stockings from the servants. She was also forced to write a “confession” of all her past deeds. She was completely under her husband’s control.

Meanwhile, he, now known as Andrew Robinson Bowes, used as much of her money as he could get his hands on to get himself elected as MP for Newcastle. He also seduced the nursemaids, raped a young girl who came for a job interview and fathered numerous illegitimate children, many of whom he paraded in front of his wife.

It was the servants who eventually helped the countess escape. While most of the servants were also completely under Stoney’ control, he inadvertently employed an older, more sensible woman who refused to be cowed. Mary Eleanor escaped with the help of four servants and started divorce proceedings.

The chances of these succeeding in Georgian England were remote.

Wives, even intelligent, well-educated wives, were the property of their husbands.

To be on the safe side, Stoney had the countess kidnapped. In the centre of Oxford Street in broad daylight, her carriage was surrounded by men armed with pistols and blunderbusses.

Mary Eleanor was taken on a nightmare journey to the North.

She managed to get a note to her protectors in London, but with no easy communications, everyone was in a mad chase between London, Scotland and Ireland.

At Streatlam Castle, Stoney held a pistol to Mary’s head and told her to say her prayers. When the pistol failed to go off, he beat here senseless.

Soon they were off again in wild November weather – over to Appleby and Burton Fell, back again to Arngill, to Darlington and up to Newcastle. Constantly on the move, they travelled 180 miles in eight days by coach, on horseback and on foot in freezing conditions with virtually no food. Mary was demented with fear and exhaustion.

It was Gabriel Thornton, a ploughman at Neasham, near Darlington who saved the day. Aware of the nationwide hue and cry for the countess, he was sure that the bedraggled creature was Mary Eleanor, even though she was covered in dirt, wearing a man’s greatcoat, no stockings and only one slipper.

He gathered a posse of farm hands and villagers and they managed to overthrow Stoney, and free the countess.

“That’s one of the reasons I warmed to her because in the end it was the servants, the farm workers, tenants and miners who supported her. There was something about her that made these people want to help,” says Moore.

THERE were still the divorce proceedings to endure but Mary Eleanor triumphed.

Amazingly for the time, she won her divorce. She eventually recovered from her ordeal and was reconciled with the children she had hardly seen for years.

“Her divorce did inspire other women, but it didn’t set a precedent,”

says Moore. “In fact, the pendulum swung right back and became even more repressive. It wasn’t until the mid-19th Century that women began to have some chance of divorce.”

Stoney spent the rest of his life in prison or in a house under prison rules. He lived with his mistress by whom he had five children. He kept her prisoner and fed her once day. He even refused to buy a broom for the house so the children had to collect the dust in their hands.

“In his way, he was an equally fascinating character,” says Moore. “He was clearly suffering from some psychotic disorder. His own father said he could never be happy, yet he charmed and fooled many very intelligent, influential people.”

When he died he was described as “cowardly, insidious, hypocritical, tyrannic, mean, violent, selfish, jealous, revengeful, inhuman without a countervailing quality” – and those were the words of his only friend.

Mary’s son John, Lord Strathmore, married on his deathbed a maid who worked on his Wemmergill estate and who had given birth to his son, John Bowes. Because of the circumstances of his birth, John Bowes did not inherit the title, but he eventually built the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle.

The title, Earl of Strathmore went to Mary Eleanor’s youngest son, Thomas, the great-great grandfather of Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the late Queen Mother.

If nothing else, they were an interesting family...

■ Wedlock by Wendy Moore (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, £18.99) ■ On September 10, Wendy Moore will be giving a talk about the Countess at the Bowes Museum, 2.30pm.