The trampled wife : the scandalous life of Mary Eleanor Bowes
"Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Queen's great-great-great-great-grandmother, was known as the heiress of 'all the wealth of the north' and it was perhaps inevitable that she became prey to fortune hunters. The Trampled Wife is the first biography for many years to tell the full and extraordinary story of love, pathos, greed, kidnapping and adultery that was Mary Eleanor's life." "Her first marriage, to John Lyon, 9th Earl of Strathmore, was both conventional and appropriate. But it was not a happy one. He was a gambler with no interest in her love of culture, and she was a natural flirt. By the time the Earl died, nine years later, Mary had begun an affair with the mysterious George Gray and was pregnant with his child." "Already the subject of gossip, Mary Eleanor was to become part of one of the biggest scandals of the eighteenth century when, about to marry Gray, she was seduced by Irish adventurer Andrew Robinson Stoney. Having married her for her money, Stoney was furious to discover that it was protected by a trust. His attempts to break this were extreme, ranging from beating and kidnapping his wife to forcing her to publish her Confessions - an expose of her past misdemeanours. Stoney's trial for kidnapping and the subsequent divorce was the talk of London; commented on by Horace Walpole, caricatured by James Gillray, and used by William Thackeray as the basis for his novel Barry Lyndon."--BOOK JACKET
Print Book, English, 2006
Sutton, Stroud, 2006