Letter surfaces telling how Queens ancestor escaped the marriage from hell

By Stephen Adams, Arts Correspondent Published: 1:05PM GMT 01 Mar 2010

Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne Photo: ALAMY

Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, became well known as the "Unhappy Countess" after being fooled in to matrimony by the contentious "Captain" Andrew Robinson Stoney in the late 18th century.

Bowes, who was pronounced to be the richest heiress in Britain, was an tasteful 37-year-old widow with five young kids when Stony hatched his plan to win her affection.

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He organised to have smutty stories about her published in the Morning Post newspaper, and afterwards contacted his lady charity to plea the editor to a duel.

But different to Bowes, who was the Queen"s great-great-great-great-grandmother, the dual men were in cahoots.

He calculated the duel, sanctimonious to be mortally bleeding with the assist of lashings of animal blood, and asked her to wed him as a failing wish. The countess who appeared disposed to bizarre affairs, and was at the time profound by an additional man fell in love and agreed.

But prior to the hastily-arranged matrimony Stony underwent a clearly supernatural recovery.

After the rite he proceeded to overturn a prenuptial agreement safeguarding her immeasurable happening that enclosed Glamis Castle in Scotland, the childhood home of the late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, whose lass name was Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons.

Stony, who had no legitimate explain to a troops title, detained the countess in her home, consumed her wealth, raped the maids and fathered majority deceptive children.

She usually transient after a little of the maids helped her, and in 1785 filed for divorce in a London justice on the drift of adultery, "beating, scratching, biting, pinching, whipping, kicking, imprisoning, insulting, provoking, tormenting, mortifying, degrading, tyrannising, cajoling, deceiving, lying, starving, forcing, compelling, and … wringing of the heart".

Stony, who by afterwards had turn an MP, did not give up easily: he kidnapped her and carried her around the nation on horseback, melancholy to rape and kill her to keep her compliant.

He was in the future restrained after broadside about the snub swept the country.

The minute that has only come to light was created on twenty-six Mar 1785 to her counsel Charles Wren, after her primary escape.

In it, she wrote of her "almost supernatural shun that after eight years of rare wretchedness I have had from terminating a majority unlucky life by a really vicious death."

She additionally apologised for not essay to Wren earlier due to the "extreme precipitate of commercial operation in that I have been concerned ever given I left Mr Bowes."

It is being sole at Mullocks auctioneers in Ludlow, Shropshire, on Tuesday, where it is approaching to fetch �150.

Richard Westwood-Brookes, from Mullocks, detected the minute whilst clearing out the bureau of a Northumberland authorised organisation that had been run by Wren.

He said: "It is created in a pleasing palm notwithstanding the countess carrying been a restrained of her father for eight years.

"Stoney"s tract to wed her was monumental in the audacity, but it worked and he tied together her to benefit entrance to her fortune.

"He was a inhuman brute but any ethics and put his mother by scarcely a decade of impassioned torment."

Bowes died in 1800, vital her last years in removed houses in Hampshire and Dorset where she pronounced she could feel "out of the world".

Stony Bowes, as he became after the marriage, was locked up for 3 years for abducting her. He died in 1810.