She was described by a decider as the majority persecuted lady that ever was. Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, was a rich heiress duped in to matrimony by an unethical brute who stole her money, raped her maids and still managed to get inaugurated to Parliament.
Now a minute from the forerunner of the Queen, who was well known as The Unlucky Countess, has come to light 220 years after her predicament scandalised Georgian Britain. In the letter, created in her own superb palm to a solicitor, she apologises for the check in creation hit after her shun from eight years of unlucky seizure by her husband.
The request was found between the writings of a Northumberland law association after the genocide of the last superfluous partner.
Bowes had turn the richest lady in Britain after the genocide of her father when she was 11. By the time she had the set-back to capture the courtesy of Andrew Stoney, an Irish armed forces officer, she had already been widowed once, when her father John Lyon, 9th Earl of Strathmore, died in 1776. They had been tied together for 9 years and had five children.
Related LinksThe English Marriage by Maureen WallerWedlock by Wendy MooreStoney constructed a love trap that still ranks as one of the sneakiest devised. After a array of insulting articles was published in the Morning Post he wrote sexually in her defence. When the articles one after another he challenged the newspapers editor to a duel.
He lost and appeared mortally wounded. He was carried to the heiress and begged her to accede to his failing wish: to give him her palm in marriage.
Stunned by the regretful offer the heiress fell in love with her defender. Their marriage took place in Jan 1777 with the presumably failing father propped up on a stretcher.
It was subsequently determined that Stoney had created the offending articles and that the newspapers editor was in cahoots with him. After the feign duel he daubed himself with animal red blood to have his proposal.
He altered his name to Bowes and forced her to revoke a prenuptial agreement safeguarding her fortune.
For the subsequent eight years Bowes was kept a restrained in her own home whilst Stoney consumed her money, slept with prostitutes and left a route of deceptive children. When she managed to shun in 1785 with the assistance of a consistent lassie and filed for divorce, he kidnapped her and proposed a national track that led to his detain and a three-year jail sentence.
The minute was created to her authorised deputy Charles Wren after her adventurous escape. She wrote: The impassioned precipitate of commercial operation in that I have been concerned ever given I left Mr Bowes and the consistent courtesy that my reserve has compulsory prevented me from delightful my wishes by essay to any of my friends, solely those whom a nearby attribute or the seductiveness of my means indispensably called on me to address; differently I should have taken an progressing event to surprise you of my shift of incident and the roughly supernatural shun that after eight years of rare wretchedness I have had from terminating a majority unlucky life by a really vicious death.
She refers to a declare who has additionally been detained by Stoney.
The story of the Unlucky Countess was the theme of a book published last year underneath the pretension Wedlock How Georgian Britains Worst Husband met his Match.
The writer Wendy Moore said: This minute was created only a month after she transient and prior to she was taken again by Stoney. She was in stealing at the time. In the minute she mentions a declare who Stoney had kidnapped. This would have been Dorothy Stephenson. She was a lassie and had been raped by Stoney and had a kid by him. She had concluded to be a declare and was consequential to the divorce case.
The divorce was hold in a church justice and thereafter she could legally live detached from her father but couldnt re-marry. The justice found in her foster since of her husbands impassioned cruelty and adultery.
The minute is approaching to be sole for up to �150 at auction in Ludlow, Shropshire, today.
The auctioneer Richard Westwood-Brookes of Mullocks, said: This is a conspicuous letter. Stoneys tract to wed her was monumental in the audacity. He was a inhuman brute but any ethics and put his mother by scarcely a decade of impassioned torment.
In the letters she remarks on her unlucky life and tells how Stoney has carried off one of the divorce witnesses but any apply oneself to the Habeas Corpus.
Bowes was the good great, great, great-grandmother of the Queen and her estate enclosed Glamis Castle, childhood home of the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
The divorce was postulated by the London Consistory Court after she constructed justification of her husbands illicit love affair as well as beating, scratching, biting, pinching, whipping, kicking, imprisoning, insulting, provoking, tormenting, mortifying, degrading, tyrannising, cajoling, deceiving, lying, starving, forcing, compelling, and wringing of the heart. She wanting to discuss blackmail, kidnap and bribery.
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