Britain's worst husband: How 18th century's Andrew Robinson Bowes will make your spouse look a saint



Bedraggled and exhausted, her body still bruised from the latest of many beatings, Mary Eleanor Bowes felt the pistol pressing into her temple.



Summoning what little remained of her strength, she whispered a few heartfelt prayers, looked her brute of a husband in the eye and cried in defiance: ‘Fire!’

The gunpowder was damp and failed to ignite, but such was the depth of Mary’s misery that she would rather have died than return to the bullying husband she had fled months earlier.

All's fair in love and war: Mary Eleanor Bowes and her husband Andrew Robinson Bowes



Mary was one of the wealthiest women in Britain: an heiress worth £1 million (£150 million in today’s money) and raised in a life of privilege.



Yet in the late 1700s, no amount of money or status could save her from the man described as Georgian Britain’s worst husband.

At a time when women had no legal rights and were not even recognised as separate beings in marriage, divorce was taboo.

When a woman married, she surrendered her wealth to her husband. And such were the legal system and social mores that a man could verbally and physically abuse his wife with

impunity. For eight years, Mary endured just such a humiliating fate at the hands of her second husband, the vicious adulterer Andrew Robinson Stoney-Bowes.

Fearing for her life, she finally managed to escape in February 1785 with the help of four loyal servants, only to be recaptured several months later by her furious husband.

Little wonder, then, that she was prepared to die rather than submit to another day of torture.

Nothings in her early life could have prepared Mary for such a disastrous marriage. The only daughter of wealthy mine-owner George Bowes and his second wife Mary, the doted-upon child had every luxury money could buy.

Not only that but, unusually for the time, her father encouraged female education and so

Mary was tutored to the highest standard. She loved poetry and botany, a rare accomplishment for a woman.

When her father died suddenly in 1760, Mary, then just 11, became the richest child in Britain.

Though her father’s will stipulated that any future husband should take the family surname, there was nothing to prevent him also assuming control of Mary’s wealth.

An early marriage to John Lyon - the 9th Earl of Strathmore - when Mary was 18 produced five children, but was far from happy.



The earl, though a striking looking man, did not share Mary’s interests and the pair had little in common. Mary enjoyed several flirtations and threw herself into the social melee.

When the earl died at sea in 1776, nine years after their wedding, Mary was more relieved than bereft.

A widow with a young family (third-born son Thomas was the great-great-grandfather of the late Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon), she hoped to make a more fortuitous second match. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Pregnant with her lover George Gray’s child when her husband died, Mary hastily

arranged a marriage before her pregnancy became obvious.

Before she could finalise the union (though she had taken legal steps to pass on her fortune to her children, instead of her soon-to-be second husband), a rival for her affections appeared.

Widowed sea captain Andrew Robinson Stoney - who, unbeknown to Mary, had abused his wealthy first wife, locking her in cupboards and forcing her to subsist on just an egg a day — had ingratiated himself with her circle.

Charming and handsome, he seduced her but failed to convince her to break off her engagement to Gray in favour of him. So he launched an audacious plan to win her hand.

With shameless cunning, he planted anonymous and derogatory stories about Mary’s lack of morals in the gossip column of the popular The Morning Post.

Then, in a double-bluff, he challenged the editor of the paper to a duel to defend Mary’s honour.

When she found Stoney, apparently wounded, bleeding and close to death, Mary was understandably flattered by his devotion.

When he told her his dying wish was to be her husband, she reluctantly agreed, expecting he would be dead within days.

Mary had no idea that Stoney had staged the duel, having bribed the newspaper editor and a doctor, who daubed him with animal blood and declared he was nearly dead.

However, by the time they had taken their wedding vows - with Stoney rallying from his deathbed to invite his family to drink from Mary’s ample cellar - she may have been beginning to regret her hasty decision.

Yet not even this underhand behaviour could not have prepared Mary for the horrors to come - eight years of a violent marriage during which Stoney endeavoured to make every year of his wife’s life more miserable than the last.

From the outset, he set rigid curbs on Mary’s activities and freedom. He censored her outgoing mail, opened all her correspondence, chose her clothes and dictated whom she could receive as visitors and what conversation they could enjoy.

He banned her mother from the house, along with the scientific friends who shared Mary’s interest in botany, and ordered the servants to accompany her at all times and report back on her movements.

And then the violence began. If Mary did anything to annoy her husband, he would punch, kick or slap her, beating her with the hilt of his sword or a silver candlestick.

Though the servants were aware of this abuse, they were in Stoney’s pay. He ordered Mary to explain away any bruises and swellings as evidence of her own clumsiness.

When he discovered that she had signed a legal document passing on all her wealth to her children, the violence intensified.

After one particularly ferocious beating, he forced her to sign a paper revoking the earlier document and transferring control of all income and profits from her estate to Stoney during his lifetime.



When her first husband’s brother, Thomas Lyon, heard of these changes, he feared Stoney would try to take charge of the children’s lives as well as their fortunes.



He successfully appealed to the courts to have the children removed from their mother’s care.

It was a bitter blow for Mary, already suffering from her husband’s brutality and flagrant affairs, which not even the birth of her illegitimate daughter, also called Mary (and passed off by Stoney as his own), could soften.

Subdued and submissive, she began to believe the beatings were her own fault. Her plump face became gaunt, her fine clothes shabby and she lost her appetite and sparkle.

Cruelly, Stoney insisted that Mary be curt and often downright rude in company, to perpetuate a myth he had circulated that she was a truculent wife.

Behind closed doors, the opposite was true. By then drinking heavily, Stoney’s brutality intensified.

In 1778, Mary wrote: ‘He beat me several times, particularly once with a thick stick, the head of which was heavy with lead, and with the handle of a horsewhip.’

Living in fear of the violence, Mary knew there was little she could do in her defence. Not only was marital violence common and tolerated, it was supported by law. A legal manual published in 1736 permitted husbands to beat their wives lawfully to ‘keep them to their duties’.

Mary’s predicament soon became even worse. When she fell pregnant with Stoney’s child, he continued to beat her and denied her the food she craved. When their son, William, was born, the abuse intensified.

Stoney bedded and impregnated the wet nurse - once even sleeping with her in the same bedroom as his wife.

Mary would later write of the time that Stoney ‘used me with more cruelty and indignity than ever’.

At one point he beat her so viciously around the eyes that ‘the whole room appeared in a blaze’.

On another she was left temporarily deaf by blows to the head.

As the assaults increased - often with the use of a knife - Mary discovered that Stoney had taken out a slew of life insurance policies on her.

Refused money for clothes, shoes and undergarments, Mary’s dishevelled appearance began to resemble that of the lowliest servant - but it was to prove her salvation. When a new maid arrived at the couple’s London home on Grosvenor Square - appointed by the family chaplain and not Stoney, who usually employed prostitutes as servants - Mary found an ally.

Educated, devoutly religious and with a strong sense of propriety, Mary Morgan was appalled by the abuse she witnessed.

Though understandably fearful for her own safety, she agreed to help Mary escape, and enlisted the help of three women servants.

On the evening of Thursday, February 3, 1785, Stoney left their Grosvenor Square home to dine with a relation - and Mary instigated her daring plan.

While Mary Morgan and a fellow maid feigned a quarrel to distract the guards, the lady of the house rushed below stairs, covered her tattered gown with a servant’s cloak and tucked her hair under a maid’s bonnet before scurrying into the night.

The richest heiress in Britain made her way through the foggy streets to hail a hackney carriage.

Stoney, who had been alerted to her escape, unwittingly hurtled past in another coach, his head hanging out of the window as he scoured the streets for his wife.

When she reached her hideaway in the City, Mary was joined by the four servants who had helped her.

She immediately launched legal proceedings to divorce Stoney - citing cruelty and barbarity, and producing witnesses, as the law demanded - and reclaim all her children.

Relying on handouts from friends and servants (Stoney controlled her fortune and had custody of her two youngest children), Mary set about reclaiming her inheritance, with the help of a former footman who had retained a copy of the deed in which she had signed over the money to her children.

For a few months, using an assumed name, Mary enjoyed freedom at her hideaway, until one fateful day when Stoney intercepted a food parcel from one of her farmer tenants and learned of her address.

Realising his only hope of maintaining Mary’s fortune was to persuade her to return to him, he hired a group of hoodlums to kidnap her in broad daylight.

They fled to the North, with the police and Mary’s supporters in hot pursuit. For ten days of unimaginable hardship, Stoney and his cohorts tried to persuade Mary to surrender her body and mind.

She was gagged and beaten, threatened with rape, starved and forced to ride bareback and barely clothed across the Pennines during the coldest winter of the century.

Finally, the prisoner and her captor were spotted by a ploughman and Mary was freed. Stoney was found guilty of assault and jailed for three years.

Mary had been so weakened by her ordeal that she could not stand for a month or walk across a room for six weeks. When her strength began to return, she continued divorce proceedings.

It would take four years - due in part to Stoney’s cunning and prevarication - before she divorced him on the grounds of cruelty.

Even from his cell, Stoney waged a dirty war against his estranged wife, accusing her of infidelity and bad behaviour, as he fought to hang on to her fortune and her two youngest children.

Finally, the deed in which Mary had signed over her wealth to her husband was overturned. Her fortune and beloved children were returned to her, and Stoney was imprisoned for life.

The various trials were reported in detail by the Press and Mary’s name was sullied. It was only the sheer volume of witnesses attesting to Stoney’s ill treatment which eventually saw her win a landmark case.

Indeed, one judge described her as ‘the most persecuted woman that ever was’.

Mary spent the remainder of her life living quietly in the country, where her obsession with animals (she insisted her cook prepare hot meals for them) meant she was regarded as an eccentric.

She never remarried, her reputation and social standing having been damaged permanently by Stoney’s libellous slanders.

When her loyal maid Mary Morgan died in 1796, Mary was bereft. She followed her to the grave in 1800. Buried by her own demand in the dress she had worn to marry the Earl of Strathmore, she was laid to rest in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey.

Born into wealth, blessed with the best education of the day and encouraged by a progressive father, Mary could have achieved greatness as a writer, linguist or botanist, had not her ambitions been stifled by her first husband and strangled by the next.

Instead, she achieved something of much more significance and farreaching importance.

By pitting her wits against one of history’s vilest husbands and the legal and religious establishment - at a time when women enjoyed little protection - she won an historic divorce case which would stand as a beacon of hope to inspire campaigners in the battle for women’s rights.

ADAPTED from Wedlock by Wendy Moore (Orion, £18.99). © 2009, Wendy Moore.

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