The Plot to Undo Mary Eleanor Bowes, Part 2

women in Britain, had disappeared. She had always been a little bit eccentric, but in the years after marrying Irish soldier Andrew Robinson Stoney, things had gotten well stranger. Bows was known for being well spoken, elegant and poised, but recently she had been appearing at dinners in tattered clothes with cuts and bruises, sometimes barely saying a word, and then one day she was gone. The most plausible hypothesis was that she had eloped with some other man, but

even that was far fetched. No one had even heard a rumor about another swain or suitor. The truth was something no one could have guessed Mary Eleanor Bow's wealthy heiress was hiding out using a fake name with no money, in a small apartment off an alleyway. At the time of her disappearance, Mary Eleanor Bows had been married to

Andrew Robinson Stoney for eight years. As she discovered soon after their shotgun wedding, he had wooed her under false pretenses orchis an elaborate scheme including a fake psychic reading and a fake duel to marry her and arrest control of her vast coal fortune. Stony then made Mary Eleanor's life a living hell, starving her, isolating her, and beating her, which brings us to her disappearance in early seventeen eighty five. Fearing for her life, Mary Eleanor escaped with the help

of a few of her maids. She fled to a little apartment off an alleyway in Holborn, with no possessions, no money, and using a false name. Soon the public would learn what had happened. As Mary Eleanor made initial steps to secure her independence, she set in motion three separate legal proceedings to try to get her freedom. The first was to protect her life, getting physical protection from Stony.

The second motion was to protect her fortune, trying to ensure a prenup that she had managed to secretly smuggle away from under Stoney's nose would be honored. But it would be the third motion that would prove most difficult

of all. Mary Eleanor Bowes was seeking a divorce from Stony, the man she accused of quote beating, scratching, biting, pinching, whipping, kicking, imprisoning, insulting, provoking, tormenting, mortifying, degrading, tyrannizing, cajoling, deceiving, lying, starving, forcing, compelling, and ringing of the heart. Under British law, that was technically grounds for divorce, but in practice divorces were expensive and extremely uncommon. Most of the plaintiffs in divorce cases

were men. Women rarely filed for divorce and rarely won. Mary Eleanor must have been daunted by the legal battles She knew she faced ahead, but achieving her freedom would turn out to be more lengthy, expensive, and emotionally taxing than she could have ever imagined, and it would put her fortune, her reputation, and her life at risk. I'm

Danish Schwartz, and this is noble blood. Back at Gibbside Castle, Stony was already enraged at Mary Eleanor's disappearance, so we can only imagine his anger when he heard of the three motions she was filing. He set his sights on tracking his wife down, bribing servants to find and reveal her address, and even paying off shop owners to keep them from giving her food, hoping that if she's starved, she might be more likely to return to him and

reconsider divorce. Stony also began in timid and paying off witnesses, threatening to fire maids and valets to prevent them from testifying against him. While he was stalking Mary Eleanor and bullying potential witnesses in private. He took great pains to appear in public as a long suffering, compassionate husband whose mercurial wife had suddenly up and left, deserting him and two young children. This made it all the harder for Mary Eleanor, who was trying to find support for her

legal cases while still in hiding. Unlike Stony, who had unfettered access to her family's estate, Mary Eleanor had no money. She reached out to her own family for financial, legal, or even emotional support. But they politely declined they saw her divorce as an embarrassment. Surprisingly, it was actually Stoney's family who was far more sympathetic to Mary Eleanor's plight.

Stoney's sister, who was grieving the death of her first child, wrote a letter to Mary Eleanor saying, quote what a blessing it would be if my brother had been taken off at that age, while Stoney's father told Mary Eleanor that Stoney was quote the most wretched man I ever knew, But family loyalty prevented them from publicly supporting Mary Eleanor.

They refused to appear in court. While the Georgian elite was more than willing to cast Mary Eleanor aside, as scholar Wendy Moore put it, quote, those who had the most to lose showed her the greatest loyalty. Mary Eleanor's maid supported her without wages and were willing to appear in court to speak about Stoney's abuse, putting their careers and even their lives at risk. When shopkeepers were forbidden from providing Mary Eleanor with food, gardeners sent her fruit

and vegetables to eat. Mary Eleanor's lawyers worked on her case pro bono, assuming they would be paid if she won. Needing a panoply of witnesses to provide proof of Stoney's mistreatment, Mary Eleanor spent her days writing and responding to letters trying to drum up support for her case. As her maid and close confidant, Mary Morgan, ran the letters to the post office. Being granted a divorce by a British

court required a high burden of proof. A separation would only be granted if the offending party perpetuated life threatening, unprovoked acts of violence and cheated habitually. Mary Eleanor had a few witnesses testifying to Stoney's violence, but she needed to prove his adultery to shore her case. Dorothy Stevens, a wet nurse in the Beau's household, not only witnessed Stoney's abuse but suffered it herself. Stoney had raped her and gotten her pregnant before depositing her in a brothel

and leaving her and her newborn child destitute. When Mary Eleanor tried to get in contact with sex workers that lived with Dorothy, no one had seen any sign of her. Four weeks it wasn't until Dorothy's parents reached out to Mary Eleanor in April seventeen eighty five that Mary Eleanor figured out what had happened. In order to prevent Dorothy from testifying against him, Stoney had kidnapped her and their three month old daughter and imprisoned them in a house

in Kensington. Mary Eleanor and Dorothy's parents obtained a writ of habeas corpus to free her from Stoney's grasp. Dorothy appeared in court two weeks later, calling Stoney quote a man of very cruel, savage and abandoned disposition. Dorothy's testimony opened the floodgates. From then, many of Stoney's tenants and staff came forward with their own first hand experiences of

his violence toward his wife. Perhaps sensing that the tide was turning against him, Andrew Stoney proposed an arbitration to divide up the estate between him and Mary Eleanor in exchange for Mary Eleanor suspending her divorce case. She agreed, but we should know by now that peace seeking was not in Stoney's nature. What would have normally been a conciliatory move masked Stoney's plan to crush Mary Eleanor into submission, Stoney used the guise of reconciliation to try and track

Mary Eleanor down. He told his staff, who he knew were providing Mary Eleanor with provisions and support, that they had reconciled and that there was no more need to hide her location. Finally, Stoney managed to find his wife by seizing a weekly delivery of garden produce from one of the groundskeepers, which contained her address. But Mary Eleanor was tipped off to Stoney's attempt to find her, and she managed to flee her apartment with no time to spare.

She rejected Stoney's settlement and pressed forward with her trials. Back when Stoney had been trying to woo Mary Eleanor, he had staged a duel. Now in an effort to push back their divorce, he told the press that he had shot himself. He hadn't, but he thought the confusion might delay things. But on May sixth, seventeen eighty six,

the divorce suit finally came up for hearing. According to the court conventions at the time, lawyers had been hearing depositions from witnesses on both sides for over a year, cross examining them in private. The court convened just so that the judge could make his decision. Astonishingly, he sided with Mary Eleanor. The judge mandated that the couple be divorced from bed bored and mutual cohabitation, and allotted Mary Eleanor three hundred pounds a year in alimony on the

grounds of both adultery and cruelty. Mary Eleanor must have been relieved to see her hard work pay off. She had only sex workers and servants on her side, no money to pay her lawyers, and struggled against a patriarchal society that demonized divorce. But after an unless win, Mary Eleanor perhaps could exhale. But this was only the beginning

of the legal battle ahead. Mary Eleanor's prenuptial agreement was still up for debate, which would either give her access to the fortune she had lost or condemn her to a life of poverty. Moreover, Andrew Stony, a man who had faked his own death two weeks earlier to avoid appearing in court, was not going to let go so easily. He immediately appealed the divorce decision, sending the couple back to court once again, and this time he was going

to play dirty to win. Even with another divorce trial on the horizon and her prenup still up for debate, Mary Eleanor was free, at least for a moment. At social events, she appeared happy and relf. She visited friends in the countryside and played quadrille at opulent parties awaiting the new legal term in the fall. But when the conversation veered toward her ex husband, Mary Eleanor's fear and

anxiety emerged. She spoke to friends about strange men pretending to be law officers appearing at her doorstep, of deranged women trying to break into her house, of carriages following her down city streets, her male getting intercepted. Polite society dismissed her concerns, calling her paranoid. Behind her back, even Mary Eleanor was questioning her own sanity. One night in October seventeen eighty six, one of her maids told her

that a Hackney carriage had been following their coach. The maid could have sworn that she saw Stony leaning out of the window of the carriage, but it turned doubt that she was mistaken. He had been convalescing in bed after falling off his horse a few days prior. Even so, Mary barred any strangers from entering her house, and she vowed to stay inside until her divorce appeal was over. She hired a bodyguard to keep an eye out for

any suspicious carriages or onlookers lingering outside her home. After a few days, on November tenth, seventeen eighty six, Mary Eleanor felt sick of being cooped up and decided to visit a friend on Oxford Street, not far from the house on Bloomsbury Square where she was staying. Her bodyguard told her that she had nothing to worry about, but

Mary Eleanor had trouble relaxing. She had barely sat down for tea when she heard some commotion outside, and, fearing the worst, she locked herself in a garret room before her bodyguard appeared and told her it was safe to leave. As Mary Eleanor walked out the door onto Oxford Street, she was greeted with a crowd of armed men pointing their pistols right at her. Her bodyguard told her that she was being arrested, and he led her into her

carriage at gunpoint. Mary Eleanor screamed for help, begging to be let go, but the gathering crowd simply watched as the carriage sped away. She wasn't being arrested. It was a kidnapping. On the carriage ride. Mary Elinor must have wondered whether this was Stoney's doing or whether she just happened to be the unlucky victim of an extortion or crime. But as the carriage arrived at the Red Lion Tavern, she had her answer. Stoney was waiting for her outside

the front door. It turned out that all of Mary Eleanor's paranoia was warranted. Stoney had been planning this kidnap for almost a month. Fearing that he would lose his divorce appeal, Stoney came up with yet another scheme. If he couldn't threaten Mary Eleanor into dropping the suit, he would force her to live with him, which would undermine her case, because the thinking went, why would he file a divorce against someone you were quote unquote willingly living with.

He had bribed the man that became Mary Eleanor's bodyguard to insinuate himself into her life when she hired him. He reported to Stoney daily update about what she was up to. The bodyguard told Stony that Mary Eleanor planned to leave the house on November tenth, and so Stoney set the last steps of his plan into motion. He gathered together a group of cronies with guns to surround

her and force her into a carriage. Immediately upon returning to Gibside Castle, Stoney and Mary Eleanor sat beside each other at the long dinner table in the dining room. He held a pistol to her breast, threatening to shoot her if she didn't drop the lawsuit. She refused. He told her to pray, and she did, saying I recommend my spirit to God and my friend to his protection. Fire and Stony did, but when he pulled the trigger,

the gunpowder failed to ignite. Enraged, he punched her twice and asked her if that made her change her mind. She said, you may shoot me or beat me to a mummy. My person is in your power, but my mind is beyond your reach. Perhaps a little in awe of her determination, he said, by God, you are a wonderful woman. He had two of his cronies drag her up to their bedroom and he ordered her to sleep with him, knowing that if they had sex, he could claim that she wanted to remain his wife, which would

render the divorce suit invalid. But Mary refused to consent, saying that she would accuse him of rape if he laid a hand on her. Stoney relented, letting her sleep alone. The next day, he fled the castle and went into hiding, taking Mary Eleanor with him. Mary Eleanor's supporters produced a writ of habeas corpus ordering Stony to bring Mary Eleanor back, but that wouldn't be enough without a nationwide police force to help her. Supporters hired a court tipstaff, which is

basically an armed bailiff, to track her down. Stoney and Mary Eleanor moved throughout the English countryside, where he told villagers that he was a doctor and she was his delusional patient, which meant that the villagers could ignore her cries for help. In the days after her kidnapping, the astonishing story spread throughout England as multiple newspapers reproduced the

sordid details. A plowman who had heard about the case spotted a mysterious couple riding in Tunetia and ambushed them with that Mary Eleanor hopped on the generous plowman's horse and they rode away back to London. Mary Eleanor appeared in court a few days later, on November twenty third, to call for Stoney's arrest. She was clearly disheveled, covered with bruises and welts, and was in so much pain she could barely walk as she spoke of her kidnapping

and mistreatment. The journalists and spectators in the crowd were shocked and moved. One wrote, quote, Lady Strathmore, from the extreme ill treatment she has perceived since forced from the metropolis, is become an object of the most extreme pity and compassion to every beholder. Stoney tried to make a play for the audience's sympathy using his favorite trick, faking his

own death. He gave himself an emetic and made a show out of vomiting on the street, bribing a doctor to tell the court that he was too sick to come in, But the judge dismissed his claims, and the audience booed and heckled him as he limped into the courtroom. The judge ordered Stony to jail until the divorce case was heard setting his bail at twenty thousand pounds, which was likely the largest bail figure to date in a

case of domestic abuse. According to Wendy Moore, Stoney's lawyers begged the judge to let him free, as a stint in jail might make his injuries and illness worse. The crowd laughed, tipstaffs carried Stoney out of court, and a huge mob of onlookers crowded him, hurling insults and jeers. Even on the way to jail. Stoney still had tricks up his sleeve. The incredible story of Mary Eleanor's kidnapping had made the trial a media circus, with onlookers and

journalists filling the courtroom. Stoney planned to exploit the gossip hungry press to turn the tide against Mary Eleanor and perhaps rest control over her and her fortune once and for all. Stoney had already made modest attempts to undermine Mary Eleanor's reputation in the press even before his arrest. Less than a month after Mary Eleanor won her first divorced tree, while he commissioned a pornographic cartoon of her,

which appeared in the window of a print shop. The caption proclaimed that Mary Eleanor was going to give her stepson a taste of her dessert after dinner. A scene performed every day near Grosvenor Square to the annoyance of the neighborhood, and she was pictured drunk and bearing her breasts as she beat an afraid looking boy. Other cartoons would follow. A particularly salacious one was her breastfeeding her cats as her son cried, I wish I was a cat.

My mama would love me. Then, now, with Stony's reputation in shambles, he had to bring out the big guns. One off cartoons in random print shops weren't going to cut it. It helped that he had purchased an interest in The Times, which was more than willing to give air time to his side of the story. From his prison cell, Stoney promised the press that Mary Eleanor's sympathetic story was not what it seemed, and that he would

reveal her equally scandalous misdeeds in court. On January twentieth, seventeen eighty seven, when Mary Eleanor's second divorce hearing began, onlookers and reporters filed into the court room Stoney began the hearing with a bombshell allegation that Mary Eleanor had been brazenly and repeatedly cheating on him with any male acquaintance that would give her the time of day. While most of these made up encounters were dismissed by the court,

one made a particular splash. Stony accused Mary Eleanor of an affair with George Walker, the executor of her prenup. Stony was probably trying to kill two birds with one stone here, both smearing Mary Eleanor's image and introducing evidence that could get the prenup annulled. The problem was there

was no evidence for this alleged affair. Later, Walker told the press that Stoney had approached him with a bribe to lie on the stand, but Walker responded, I despised his offers, as I despised the man, even though his claims she committed adultery strained credulity. Stoney's lawyers brought out a document that would shock the court and the public alike. During their marriage, Stoney had forced Mary Eleanor to write a list of her sins to prove that she deserved

his abuse. Stoney's lawyers brought this one hundred page document to court titled The Confessions of the Countess of Strathmore. In the document, Mary Eleanor revealed various flirtations, the affe she had had well married to her first husband, multiple abortions, and her pregnancy out of wedlock, and all of it was unmistakably in her handwriting. At first, it seemed like Stoney might have made a mistake in introducing the document to the court. Mary's lawyer dismissed it since it had

clearly been written at Stoney's insistence. Even if the scandals it contained were true. The lawyer called it a pocket pistol meant to destroy her ladyship's fame and to harden and steel the hearts of everyone against her. The judge agreed. The courtroom clerk read only a few pages before the judge told him that this document was irrelevant to the case at hand and should be thrown out of court.

They were right. Even if Stony had not forced Mary Eleanor to create the document, and even if we agreed that having an abortion or cheating on your cold, indifferent first husband were unpardonable sins, Mary Eleanor's misdeeds would have no bearing on whether or not Stoney had abused her.

The judge granted Mary a divorce yet again on May seventh, seventeen eighty seven, but the court of public opinion began to see things differently the times which Stony had a staken wrote quote, the cause of her ladyship is not so immaculate as the world at large have been taught

to believe. Even Stoney's father, who had called his son quote the most wretched man he knew, was now saying that quote, there has certainly been many faults on both sides, and that the divorce would set quote a dangerous precedent. That said, he didn't totally take the side of his son when when he died the following month, he left Stoney only two pounds as an inheritance. Even though Mary Eleanor's quote confessions were thrown out of court, Stoney's more

sympathetic framing in the press did have legal implications. His jail time was reduced from fourteen years to two, and, feeling optimistic about the turning tide of public opinion, he appealed the divorce decision yet again at the High Court of Delegates, which is the highest court of appeals the

case could go. Mary Eleanor struck back with another lawsuit, charging Stoney with quote five counts of conspiracy that accused him of imprisoning Mary in order to compel her to drop her divorce suit, which brought the total lawsuits in process to three, the prenup lawsuit, a divorce and a criminal trial. The criminals suit was heard first, and the trial more closely resembled what we picture in a modern courtroom, with a jury, a judge, and two lawyers cross examining

witnesses and giving impassioned arguments. Mary Eleanor's lawyer spoke in front of the crowd as he described her kidnapping and imprisonment in lurid detail. While kidnapping one's wife at gunpoint in broad daylight was considered uncouth, it wasn't technically illegal at the time. A husband had the legal right to confine and reprimand an unruly wife, but Mary Eleanor's lawyer

pushed against the legal limits of the time. He described how Stony forced himself on Mary Eleanor as she fought him off, telling the likely skeptical all male jury that a husband is liable to be tried for a rape, even on his own wife, even though marital rape would not considered a crime for another two hundred years. The strategy worked. It took only a few minutes for the jury to unanimously declare Stony guilty, and the judge sentenced him to three years in prison. On June twenty sixth,

seventeen eighty seven. The next trial was for reinstating Mary Eleanor's pre nup. This case, hinging on the validity of a decade's old document might seem tangential, but this was as important as the divorce trial itself, because even if Mary Eleanor was granted her divorce, she would not be entitled to any financial remittance outside of the poulsterry monthly alimony payments. Meanwhile, Stoney was flush with money that, lest

we forget, was originally Mary Eleanor's inheritance. While Mary Eleanor had no money to speak of, relying on her friend's charity, Stoney was i enjoying a rich man's life on her dime, even while ostensibly in prison. He lived in a lavish apartment in the Marshall, where he threw parties, eight decade in food and had affairs with mistresses, in addition to hiring various cronies to abduct friends and servants of Mary Eleanor's. Mary Eleanor wrote quote, I believe that, instead of being tamed,

Stoney will grow more and more desperate. I am therefore doubly cautious. On May nineteenth, seventeen eighty eight, the jury convened for the prenup trial in Westminster Hall. The trial began with another bombshell, giving spectators and journalists even more fodder for gossip. Mary Eleanor's council revealed that Stoney had courted her under false pretenses, faking the duel that duped her into an abusive marriage, with witnesses testifying to his

faked battle scars. Stoney's lawyers didn't even try to prove that the duel was real. Instead, he essentially shrugged and said quote strategem was fair in love as well as in war. He tried his best to appeal to the patriarchal sensibilities of the all male jury, maintaining that Mary Eleanor's prenup quote defrauded Stony of that absolute power which the law gives the husband over the personal estate of his wife. But After hearing the details of Stoney's scheme,

it was hard to have any sympathy for him. The Lord Chief Justice said, quote, it was a marriage brought about by a fraud, a fraud of such a kind that, had it been practiced to obtain a hundred pounds from Lady Strathmore, mister Bows must have answered for it Criminally. Mary Eleanor won the suit and her vast estate was finally hers once more. When the decision was announced, the crowd erupted into cheers. Only one lawsuit remained, the final

divorce appeal, the last hindrance to Mary Eleanor's independence. The court convened on February thirteenth, seventeen eighty nine, and after so many years of retrying the same case and hearing constant updates in the press, spectators, jurors, journalists, and judges alike were more than familiar with the story. A parade of servants and sex workers testified to Stoney's abuse, while

Stoney tried again to undermine Mary Eleanor's character. After reconvening on March second, the six judges took just thirty minutes to make their decision, and through Robinson, Stoney and Mary Eleanor bows were officially divorced with no possibility of appeal. It would take hundreds of years for the legal freedoms Mary Eleanor achieved to be codified into law in the UK. It wasn't until eighteen seventy, a century later, that women were able to retain control over their estates after marriage

without a prenup. In the United States, starting in eighteen thirty nine, women gained the right to have their own property, to inherit independently of their husbands, to work for a salary, right wills, and file lawsuits. Except for divorces. Women in the United States would not be able to file for divorce until nineteen thirty five, and even then they had to prove adultery, cruelty, or desertion, nearly the same standards

as in Mary Eleanor's time. In England, women with Mary Eleanor's means and tenacity could file for divorce, but it wasn't until nineteen twenty three that the burden of proof was lowered. The relentless physical abuse Mary Eleanor suffered would not be illegal in the United States until nineteen twenty and marital rape, which Mary Eleanor's lawyer, tentatively raised in court in seventeen eighty seven, would not be a crime until nineteen ninety one in the UK and nineteen ninety

three in the US. After her divorce trial, Mary Eleanor shied away from the public eye and resigned herself to a quiet life. She prioritized rebuilding her relationships with her children, who she had been barred from seeing throughout her marriage. She also lavished attention on her he many pets. She had many cats and dogs, a donkey, a parrot, and a robin named Bob. She insisted that each of her dogs have a bed of its own and a hot

meal every day. Although Mary Eleanor set her literary and botanical ambitions aside, she wrote a poem to Stony in prison, quote, he was the very enemy of mankind, deceitful to his friends, ungrateful to his benefactors, cringing to his superiors, and tyrannical to his dependence. She died at age forty six. In her will, she made two requests for her burial. The first was that she wanted to be buried in her wedding dress from her first marriage to the Earl of

Strathmore back when she was eighteen. Even though it seems a little weird for someone who had such agonizing, miserable marriages, it speaks to a romantic sensibility that survived even an unspeakable violence. Her second request was for a statue of the blindfolded Figure of Justice to be placed on her tomb. That request was unfortunately ignored, but even without the statue,

her life was a testament to justice. Mary Eleanor Bows fought for it in the face of a cruel system and a pathologically abusive husband, and despite the odds, she won. That's the story of Mary Eleanor Bow's but keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear a little bit

more about one of her descendants. It was a divorce trial that catapulted Mary Eleanor Bows into the spotlight, and almost two hundred years later, the lives of one of her direct descendants would also be changed forever because of a divorce, or rather because of a divorcee. In nineteen thirty six, King Edward the Eighth abdicated the throne in order to marry the woman he loved, an American named Wallace Simpson, who was twice divorced with her previous husband

still alive. Seeing as the King of England was also the head of the Church of England, that simply could not be abided, and so Edward the eighth stepped aside and his younger brother rose to the throne as George the sixth. And at George's side was his wife, Elizabeth Bow's Lion, a woman who never would have imagined that she might become queen now. The late Queen Elizabeth is more frequently known as the Queen Mother because she was the dowager Queen for decades and mother to the Queen

Elizabeth who reigned for much of the twentieth century. But Elizabeth Bow's Lion Queen Mother was also the great great great granddaughter of Mary Eleanor Bows. Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me Dana Schwort, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick,

Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rema Ill Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.