Gibside ~ November 2021 ~ part 2

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Gibside is the childhood home of Mary Eleanor Bowes and I figured it would be nice to do her history. You may need a ☕️ and 🍪 if you’re going to wade through it!

The History Bit

Mary was born in Mayfair, London on 24 February 1749, the daughter and heiress of Sir George Bowes and and his second wife, Mary Gilbert. She spent her childhood at Gibside and at the age of 11 her father died, leaving her a vast fortune from his mining cartel. Mary became the wealthiest heiress in Britain. Taken to live in London by her Mum Mary became a bit of a flighty girl, batting her eyelashes at a fair few Dukes and Marquesses before getting engaged to an Earl at the age of 16, John Lyon the 9th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne.

A Scottish nobleman and peer famous for his appearance and known as “the beautiful Lord Strathmore”. He was described thusly by his friend the surgeon Jesse Foote ~ “The late Earl of Strathmore was not calculated to make even a good learned woman a pleasing husband. His Lordship’s pursuits were always innocent and without the smallest guile, but they were not those of science or any other splendid quality. A sincere friend, a hearty Scotchman and a good bottle companion were points of his character.”

As was stipulated in George’s will, Lyon had to get his surname changed to Bowes, which further down the line became Bowes-Lyon. They married on her 18th birthday in 1767. They had 5 children, the oldest son being John Bowes who became the 10th Earl and has his own history which you can read about in my post The Bowes Museum. Thanks to Mary Eleanor’s fortune, she and her hubby lived high on the hog. Hubby spent a lot of time and money restoring his family seat – Glamis Castle in Scotland, whilst Mary wrote a poetical drama entitled The Siege of Jerusalem in 1769 and got interested in botany, financing an expedition by explorer William Paterson to collect plants in the Cape of Good Hope. It wasn’t the happiest of marriages, they didn’t have much in common, and his family didn’t care much for her, John’s brother often insulted her in public. John got sick with tuberculosis and his Doctors advised him to go for treatment in Bath and Bristol, which he did for long periods of time. Mary stayed in London partying and having dalliances with young men of her aquaintance. On 7 March 1776, Lord Strathmore died at sea on his way to Portugal.

As a widow Mary regained control of her vast fortune, and paid off John’s debts of £145,000 without blinking an eye. Mary’s lover at the time was a chap called George Gray, a Scotsman but born in Calcutta in 1737 where his Dad worked as a surgeon for the East India Company, and Mary was pregnant by him. She didn’t want to get hitched as he’d proven a bit of a numpty by making and squandering a small fortune for the company as well as the considerable inheritance of his first Missis, resulting in him returning to England under a cloud in 1766. Really Mary, what were you thinking?? Anyway Mary induced an abortion by drinking some sort of “black, inky kind of medicine” according to her diary, (her candid account of these abortions is one of very few available first-person descriptions of secret abortions in the era before legalised abortion) but had to do the same again when she got pregnant again, and yet again. I can only eye roll.

On her 4th pregancy she decided she really should just marry the guy, and they got engaged in 1777.

But in that same summer of ’77, along came the charming and suave Anglo~Irish adventurer Andrew Robinson-Stoney, who seduced our lady and manipulated himself into her home and bed. The cad! He’d been a Lieutenant in the British Army but called himself ‘Captain’ Stoney. Stoney was a serial gold digger, and had started that career when he married Hannah Newton, a twenty-year-old heiress from County Durham. He married her, returned to the army, and convinced her to settle £5000 on him if perchance she died childless, and then proceeded to mistreat her, beating her up and starving her. She finally croaked during childbirth after several still-births, as did the baby.

He tricked our Mary good and proper by arranging a fake duel with the editor of a newspaper The Morning Post, the Reverend Sir Henry Bate Dudley, who had published scurrilous articles about Mary’s private life. But it was Stoney himself who wrote the articles both criticising and defending the countess. The duel was supposed to appeal to Mary’s romantic nature, and when he pretended to be mortally wounded, Stoney begged her to grant his dying wish – to marry her. Taken in by the ruse, she agreed.

I am quite staggered at Mary’s stupidity really, she had been well educated as a child, was reasonably intelligent and richer than God, but a complete nincompoop when it came to blokes. Anyway, I digress, and she suffered for her stupidity.

Of course, after marrying Mary in church, on a stretcher, mortally wounded, he made a fast and complete recovery. Attempting to take control of his wife’s fortune he discovered Mary had made a secret pre-nuptual agreement safeguarding the profits of her estate for her own use, but he forced her to sign a revocation handing control to him. He then went on to subject Mary to eight years of physical and mental abuse including confining her to her own house. He later took Mary and her daughter Anna Maria (the Earl’s daughter) off to Paris, whence they returned only after a writ had been served on him. He is also said to have raped the maids, invited prostitutes into the home and fathered numerous illegitimate children. A real nice guy.

In 1785 her loyal maids helped her escape Stoney’s custody and Mary filed for divorce through the ecclesiastical courts. But it didn’t end there, Stoney abducted Mary with the help of some accomplices and carried her off to the North Country. She later alleged that he threatened to rape and kill her, that he gagged and beat her and carried her around the countryside on horseback in one of the coldest spells of an unusually cold winter. The country was alerted; Stoney Bowes was eventually arrested, and Mary rescued.

The divorce trials were sensational and the talk of London. Although Mary initially won public sympathy, she didn’t do herself any favours by having an affair with the brother of one of her lawyers, which became public knowledge. Stoney made known other ‘salacious details’ of Mary’s past excesses and ensured the publication of the ‘confessions’ that she had earlier made in writing to him – he even purchased shares in a newspaper to publish these memoirs. There was also a general feeling that Mary had behaved badly in attempting to prevent her husband’s access to her fortune. Pfui!

Thankfully Stoney and his accomplices were found guilty of abduction and banged up for 3 years, should have been much longer IMHO! The divorce case continued and Stoney lost the battle to retain control of the Bowes fortune whilst the case was still ongoing, which was a nice interim judgement as the case was still not resolved by the time Mary died in 1800 when it became pointless for it to be continued. He was let out of prison on her death and had the effrontery to attempt to have her will invalidated. He lost that case (yay!) and was then sued by his own lawyers for their expenses. Unable to pay these debts, he came under prison jurisdiction (in that era, bankruptcy was punished with prison), although he lived outside the prison walls with his mistress, Mary ‘Polly’ Sutton. He died on 16 June 1810. And good riddance.

After 1792 Mary lived quietly in Hampshire, Purbrook Park firstly, and then Stourfield House, an isolated mansion on the edge of the village of Pokesdown, Christchurch. She took with her a full set of maids and servants including the maid who helped her escape from Stoney, Mary Morgan. When Morgan died in 1796 Mary gave up socialising all together and spent her time looking after her pets, which included a large number of dogs who had hot dinners cooked for them daily. The locals thought she was a bit bonkers, but she did reach out to them now and again, sending dinners and beers to the men working in the fields. Her three sons visited occasionally, not stopping long, but two of her daughters lived with her. In her will she left presents of dresses and other items to the community and an annuity for the widow Lockyer of Pokesdown Farm.

Mary died on 28 April 1800. Undertakers came from London with a hearse and three mourning carriages and transported her body to London. She can be found in Westminster Abbey, and her tombstone is in Poet’s Corner there.

Well done if you read this far, you are my favourite visitor! 😊

The mansion built by Sir William Blakiston in the 1600’s, became vacant in the 1920s after death duties forced the Bowes-Lyon family to scale back its lavish lifestyle and give up some of its great houses. The building was stripped of its fixtures and fittings, with many of the fireplaces and other items being transferred to Glamis Castle. 

Mary’s childhood home. Sadly not restored and cordoned off.

The orangery is Mary’s only original contribution to the buildings of Gibside. When she commissioned plant collector William Paterson to explore South Africa in search of rare and new species, the orangery – or green house – would have been home to this brilliant and diverse collection of unusual plants.

the orangery.
inside the orangery

The original layout of this space was into three rooms to the north, known as ’garden rooms’. There was also one large room to the south, purely for the display of plants. Especially in winter when the more exotic species were kept heated throughout the colder months.

The large south-west facing windows provided a huge amount of light and a heating system would have kept plants warm during the winter.

Mary requested that she be buried wearing her first wedding dress, and it has been painstakingly recreated and stands in the chapel at Gibside.

I do
I did

And that’s the end of Mary’s story. Gibside is a lovely place to walk around, especially in autumn, so I’ll finish with a couple of random pictures!

in the walled garden
all done.
hanging on

That’s all folks! Stay tooned for next week and a visit to someotherwhere.

all pictures clickable to embiggen.

refs:-
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/gibside
https://professorhedgehogsjournal.uk/2020/08/07/the-unhappy-countess/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Bowes,_Countess_of_Strathmore_and_Kinghorne
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibside

Full album HERE

57 thoughts on “Gibside ~ November 2021 ~ part 2”

  1. You’d think the richest woman in the country might think about the possibility that a man was after her only for her money. They all sound a bit unsavoury really, but I suppose that having money and wanting that money made people do strange things. I wonder if any of them were ever happy.

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    1. I think Mary was happy as a child, her dad doted on her and made sure she had a good education which was usually for boy children. I think his death when she was 11 had a big effect. She seems to have gone off the rails then.

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  2. What a fascinating story, and lovely pictures….of course we have mega rich people in the here and now, it will be interesting to read some of their stories in a couple of hundred years, and to visit the ruins of their great mansions. That is if they do not destroy the planet on us first 😉

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          3. I keep all my bookmarks. I actually collect bookmarks so I buy them wherever I go. It’s a cheap hobby and fun. Seeing as this was forty years ago I have over a thousand now. Some of them are really neat!

            When I actually need a bookmark to mark a place in a book I just use an old envelope. I don’t use the bookmarks I collect.

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  9. Okay, so I read the lot. The story of Captain Stoney would make a great BBC1 drama serial to rivlal ‘Poldark’! They could show it on Sunday nights. (Drama night) Talking of which, series two of ‘Gentleman Jack’ starts tonight. I really enjoyed the first series.
    Best wishes, Pete.

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  10. It does look like an interesting place to visit and explore. The pictures are lovely.

    Mary was quite the character, wasn’t she? Definitely not the brightest bulb either. I actually found all that history and those shenanigans fascinating. Stoney was a wretch, but Mary was far from pristine. Lots of color (or off color LOL) in her past!

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  12. This was awesome Fraggle! What an incredible life Mary lived. She was awfully daring and promiscuous for her time (even our time) and the scoundrels after her money were ridiculously determined and ruthless. Loved all the pics! Thanks for sharing! 💕

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  14. Great pictures, Fraggle! And thanks for the interesting historical background.
    Btw, I can really recommend Glamis Castle. Mary and I enjoyed it a lot when we were there years ago.

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  15. Yay, I’m your favorite visitor. 😉 What a horrible history for Mary! Too bad her big nosed husband didn’t die of cholera sooner. Great post and lovely pictures. The afternoon sun does love things to the old stone walls.

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  17. I feel to have read a 18th century edition of The Sun or The Mirror, with gossip about the famous, “Lady Mary is seen with a Spaniard businessmen in a pub in Magaluf,” that Stoney seems like quite a devilish scoundrel.
    It would be wonderful if the orangery would get rebuild. Thank you, fragglerocking.

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  18. I, too, read every word (Beam!)

    I am always amazed by the history just lying around jolly old England. Houses, gardens, romance, villains. Your posts are always fascinating and fun – a little snark adds to the history. I really wonder what she used as an abortifacient that was black and inky . . .

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  19. some lovely golden light there to view the ruins in

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