Wedlock (11 page)

How soon Hannah Newton discovered the true nature of the adoring officer she believed she was marrying is unknown. None of her correspondence has survived; her voice is unheard. But certainly she was unwell within three years of her marriage and when not accompanying her husband to Ireland or sharing lodgings in Newcastle, she spent much of her time at Bath, presumably to take the health-giving waters. The nature of her illness, mentioned in letters between Stoney and his family, was never revealed. Young as she was, there were any number of lingering infectious diseases or chronic conditions to which she may have fallen victim, tuberculosis being among the most common, although equally she may have suffered complications from pregnancy and miscarriage. Without a doubt her husband exacerbated, if not physically caused, her long-running sickness.

Rumours about Stoney’s mistreatment of his wife abounded. One anonymous pamphlet entitled
The Stoniad
, which would be published in Newcastle in 1777, accused him of ruthlessly beating and abusing Hannah while squandering her fortune. Having hoodwinked her into marriage by feigned declarations of love and false claims to wealth and ancestry, Stoney had made Hannah’s life wretched, the poem declared. Rhetorically, it enquired: ‘What had she done such violence to cause?/Was she not
faithful
as REBECCA was?/Did she not give thee all that mortal cou’d,/Bear thee to
bruise her head
and shed her blood.’ While
The Stoniad
was doubtless motivated by political ends - published as it was when Stoney was seeking electoral support - Jessé Foot, writing some years later, cited two letters from correspondents living in Newcastle in the 1770s who testified to Stoney’s brutality towards Hannah.
³¹
One of them recorded that he ‘treated her in a most cruel manner’ to the extent that he ‘shortened her days’. ‘She bore the character of being a very good woman,’ said Foot’s informant, ‘which in all probability increased her sensibility, upon feeling her melancholy lot from the choice she had made.’ Foot’s second letter writer remembered that Stoney ‘behaved like a brute and a savage to his wife, and in a short time, broke her heart’. On one occasion he locked Hannah in a cupboard in just her underwear and kept her there for three days, allowing her only an egg a day for sustenance. Another time, attending a public meeting together in Newcastle, he threw Hannah down a flight of stairs ‘in a violent fit of rage’. Generally more discreet in company, Stoney usually made a show of treating his wife with studied kindness but ‘knew secret ways of provoking her’ so that when she complained he would appeal to his guests as if to say she was impossible to please. His second wife would become well accustomed to such tricks. ‘He made a very bad husband,’ said Foot’s informant, ‘and she was a most wretched wife, and brought no children alive into the world; which he much desired for his own sake.’

Providing Stoney with an heir was of crucial importance. During Hannah’s lifetime, the law gave him complete control over his wife and all her belongings but should she die, all her property would pass to her nearest male heir - currently her Uncle Samuel or his descendants. Since the terms of her father’s will gave Hannah only a life interest in the estate, supervised by trustees, Stoney was unable to sell any of the property and realise his capital in that way. The only route by which Stoney could be certain of retaining future control over the Newton fortune was by fathering an heir to inherit the estate; this would entitle him to maintain his right to the property throughout his own lifetime. So for all his apparent distaste for his sensitive young wife, Stoney made sure to exact his conjugal rights.

It seems Hannah became pregnant at least once, and possibly several times, during their marriage but no child was born alive. On one occasion, according to the second of Foot’s correspondents, Stoney paid the bellringers of St Nicholas’s Church in Newcastle in an effort to proclaim that a stillborn baby had initially survived. Quite possibly Hannah’s frequent visits to Bath were to seek treatment for her failed pregnancies or even to boost her fertility; Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire, would stay there in 1782 in the hope that the waters would help her to fall pregnant.
³²
Quite probably Stoney’s brutality contributed to Hannah’s difficulties; it is common for abusive men to mistreat their partners more severely than usual during pregnancy.

When Stoney finally retired from the army in 1771, gaining himself half-pay for life while ensuring he would miss out on the next military conflict - the American War of Independence - the violence at home continued unabated. That summer his decadent lifestyle and unbridled temper caused even his normally indulgent relatives some alarm. Writing from his regimental quarters in Scotland, Captain Robert Johnston, his mother’s brother, meekly encouraged Stoney: ‘If you should alter your way of life, it will require all your resolution, as nothing is so difficult as to get the better of any habit.’
³³
Good-naturedly confessing to his own less than spotless past, Uncle Robert added: ‘I have gone through many scenes of debauchery and yet I always had the greatest faith and trust in the Almighty God at intervals.’ Evidently, Hannah was at that point recovering either from another bout of illness or a failed pregnancy, for Uncle Robert was ‘very happy to hear Mrs Stoney is better’. Chillingly, he added, ‘be assured its your interest she should continue to get so’. But Uncle Robert was equally conscious of the desire for an heir, pointing out that if Stoney decided to live alone at Cole Pike Hill - as he had seemingly suggested - he would need to bear the expense of ‘going backwards and forwards continually at Bath until that event happens’. The following spring, in March 1772, Stoney was with Hannah in Bath - perhaps on one of his conjugal visits - for Uncle Robert had heard that his expenses there were ‘great’. A year later, in May 1773, Uncle Robert tentatively enquired: ‘Let me know how you and Mrs Stoney are, and particularly what state of health the worthy little woman is in’. Stoney was only too well aware of his wife’s worth. Having now settled at Cole Pike Hill, as debts mounted and the Newton fortune drained away, Stoney was casting around for a new way to raise funds. He did not need to look far for inspiration.

Only a few months earlier, in December 1772, Hannah had made a will which bequeathed land worth £5,000 to her husband if no children were born of their marriage before her death. Evidently Stoney had thought it prudent to make contingency measures in case Hannah died without providing the requisite heir.
³⁴
But with the sickly Hannah confounding fate by lingering on in the spring of 1773, Stoney desperately needed an alternative source of income. Striding about his estate at Cole Pike Hill his eyes fell on the surrounding ancient wood-lands. Sold for timber, the splendid oak trees could fetch a handsome sum. Stoney lost no time in advertising this prize asset, placing a notice on the front page of the
Newcastle Chronicle
seeking offers for ‘about fifteen Hundred Old OAK TREES, now standing and growing at Coldpighill’. There was just one problem: Uncle Sam. Furious at the interloper who had not only seduced his niece but now planned to lay waste the lands which he still hoped might descend to his son, Samuel Newton leapt into action. The following week - and for the week after that - Stoney’s advertisement appeared again but this time with a notice underneath it in which Newton warned that he would prosecute any bidder. Determined to safeguard the cherished property of his ancestors, Newton sought an injunction from the Court of Chancery in London to prevent Stoney selling any timber.
³⁵
The bill of complaint affords a revealing insight into Stoney’s bag of tricks, for Newton complained that both Stoney and Hannah had by turns claimed that her father had died without leaving a will or had owned his property ‘in fee simple’, meaning without restriction, allowing it be sold. The outcome of the case went unrecorded - as did many Chancery suits - although the fact that Samuel and Matthew Newton were declared bankrupt later that year doubtless invalidated their claim. It was the first, but by no means the last, of Stoney’s brushes with the lumbering Chancery system.

In debt once more and increasingly desperate for both immediate money and long-term security, in 1775 Stoney demanded his father buy back the Irish land George Stoney had been inveigled to give the couple before their marriage. In a demonically abusive letter, which may well have been written when drunk, Stoney thanked his father for his ‘flattering epistle’ which ‘contained more Blasphemy under the cloak of enthusiastick Religion than I ever before observe in the compass of one sheet of paper’ and which Stoney could only attribute to the ‘Idea that Reason and you are for ever parted’.
³⁶
Rambling incoherently in places, he speculated that his father might live ten more years then added: ‘I had like to forget that I myself am mortal. Apropros, pray how old am I?’ Branding his father ‘an Object of Pity’ and one of his uncles ‘the Lordling’, he urged that the desired purchase be quickly concluded as he was never ‘happy when in Debt’. Writing from Bath, he concluded with the ominous news that Hannah had been sent to Bristol - presumably on doctors’ orders to try the Hotwell waters there - ‘and is now there - I fear for ever.’

Stoney had been prematurely pessimistic, however, for a month later he was back in Newcastle sporting a brand new regimental coat sent up from one of the best tailors in London in time for the Durham Races.
³⁷
He was in celebratory mood, for whether the waters of Bristol or Bath had taken effect, Hannah was pregnant again. Finally the prospect of handing down an English country estate to generations of little Stoneys - and in the meantime taking full control of those assets himself - seemed within his grasp. It was not to be. On 11 March 1776, giving birth at Cole Pike Hill, Hannah died. Anxiously awaiting the cry of a baby, his heir and passport to fortune, Stoney heard only silence - the baby had died alongside her. There were few mourners as Hannah was buried three days later in the graveyard of the little parish church where she had been baptised only twenty-eight years earlier. Her grieving mother, still surviving on a widow’s pension, would follow her to the grave less than a year later. Two days after the burial, the
Newcastle Journal
published Stoney’s notice announcing that his ‘lady’ had died ‘in child bed’.
³⁸
That much the newspaper’s readers, perusing the columns in the city’s taverns and coffee-houses, might believe. But they knew it was stretching credulity when he went on to claim that she was ‘much lamented’. For the rumours which had already swirled around the town’s narrow streets and market stalls, accusing Stoney of making Hannah’s life a misery, now blamed him squarely for her death. Before long
The Stoniad
would even allege he should have been tried for her murder. ‘Did she not die and leave thee UNARRAIGN’D?’ the satirical verse accused before adding: ‘Behold poor N*wt** stretch’d upon her Bier!’

It mattered little to her widower. He stayed in the north-east only long enough to prove Hannah’s will, by which he lawfully received a lump sum of £5,000 and unlawfully claimed possession of Cole Pike Hill. Handsomely sporting a brand new suit of scarlet regimentals, his sword swinging by his side, ‘Captain’ Stoney - as he now described himself - was gaily heading south, on the lookout for a suitable second wife.

 

 

 

 

T
he honeymoon was over. After the lavish wedding ceremony in London in February, followed by two weeks of celebrations at her mother’s home in Hertfordshire, Mary Eleanor set off north beside her new husband for the three-day journey to Gibside. The couple made their first public appearance in County Durham on 29 March at the Sunday service in the parish church of Whickham, where Mary’s father had been buried seven years earlier. As they descended from their coach at the church gates, accompanied by a ‘grand retinue’ of relatives and local worthies, the pair were surrounded by villagers eager to catch a first glimpse of their new master and mistress. ‘The people thronged from the adjacent places on the occasion, so that the church is not remembered to have been so crowded, by the oldest person living,’ reported the
Newcastle Chronicle
.
¹
After a busy round of socialising with the neighbourhood gentry over the following two months, Mary took a last look at the figure of Lady Liberty still presiding over her childhood home, before continuing north. Rumbling over the Tyne Bridge on 7 June, less than a month after the King’s Own Regiment had marched across, Mary began the arduous two-hundred-mile journey to Glamis Castle to assume her new role as the Countess of Strathmore.

Nobody set out for Scotland without apprehension. Taking the same route northwards just a year later, the agricultural writer Arthur Young would warn: ‘I would advise all travellers to consider this country as sea, and as soon think of driving into the ocean as venturing into such detestable roads.’
²
For Mary, the rigours of the road were the least of her troubles. She had been ill at least twice since her wedding - initially during the honeymoon festivities at St Paul’s Walden Bury when several guests had suffered upsets that were blamed on her mother’s wine, and a second time shortly after when she was thought - wrongly or temporarily - to be pregnant.
³
More frustratingly, she had already grown weary of the assorted members of the Strathmore clan who clamoured around the newly married couple wherever they went. Her husband’s younger brother, Thomas, even now accompanied them north, while the brothers’ mother, the dowager countess, was following in hot pursuit. But most worrying of all, she deeply regretted ever marrying Lord Strathmore.