Barry Lyndon's true story: Thackeray got it from a friend in Paris whose grandmother had lived it
The novel behind Kubrick's film began as family gossip, handed to Thackeray in 1841 by a friend whose grandmother had been at the centre of it. Here's the real marriage it came out of and how much of it he kept.
The Irish adventurer, the enormous fortune, the marriage that turns into a captivity — Thackeray invented almost none of the architecture. He was handed it in 1841, by a man whose own grandmother had been the one married.
The friend was John Bowes, born in 1811, the illegitimate son of the 10th Earl of Strathmore. Illegitimacy cost him the Scottish earldom and, in practice, polite Victorian society, so he built his life in France instead: a career in Paris, a marriage in 1852 to the actress Joséphine Benoîte Coffin-Chevallier, a house at the Château du Barry in Louveciennes, and eventually the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle, which the two of them filled. He also owned an annotated copy of a 1810 pamphlet by Jesse Foot — the surgeon who had attended the man at the centre of the scandal — about the marriage of his grandmother.
The heiress
Mary Eleanor Bowes was born in Mayfair on 24 February 1749, the only child of the coal magnate Sir George Bowes. He died when she was eleven and left her everything.
Contemporary estimates put the inheritance somewhere between £600,000 and £1.04 million, which made her the wealthiest heiress in Britain and possibly in Europe.
She married John Lyon, 9th Earl of Strathmore, on her eighteenth birthday in 1767; under her father's will he took the Bowes name. Five children arrived in six years. She was a serious botanist, and in 1777 financed William Paterson's plant-collecting expedition to the Cape. Her husband developed tuberculosis and died at sea in 1776, leaving £145,000 of debts her fortune absorbed without difficulty.
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The courtship, staged
Andrew Robinson Stoney was born in 1747 at Greyfort House in County Tipperary, and came to England as an officer. His first wife, Hannah Newton, died young, and it was widely assumed he had helped that along in order to take her money.
He met the widowed countess while she was already pregnant by another man, and won her with a piece of theatre. Newspaper attacks on her honour appeared in the Morning Post; Stoney fought a duel with its editor, the Reverend Henry Bate, over them; and Stoney appeared to be dying of his wounds.
He had written the articles himself. He was carried into St James's Church, Piccadilly, on a stretcher for the wedding in January 1777, and made a full recovery shortly afterwards.
He took the Bowes name as her first husband had. Then he had her revoke the prenuptial settlement that protected her property, and spent eight years abusing her. He sat as MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne from 1780 to 1784 and served as High Sheriff of Northumberland.
She escaped in 1785 with help from her servants and began divorce proceedings. He abducted her the following winter and rode her around the countryside during one of the coldest spells on record before she was recovered and he was arrested. He was convicted of conspiracy and imprisoned for three years, and published her private Confessions to turn opinion against her, which worked. The courts found for her in 1789 and the litigation ran on afterwards. She died on 28 April 1800 and is buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. Stoney died in the King's Bench Prison, Southwark, on 16 January 1810.
What Thackeray moved
He began writing in October 1843 and Fraser's Magazine serialised the result from January 1844. He found it miserable going — by that August he was calling the thing a nightmare in his letters — and finished the last instalment on 3 November 1844, writing the final chapter in quarantine at Malta.
What he changed: the nationality stays Irish, but Barry gets a Seven Years' War, a career as a card sharp with the Chevalier de Balibari, and a German principality lifted from Lamothe-Langon's scandalous 1836 memoirs of Napoleon's empire. A dash of the highwayman James Freney goes in, and Beau Brummell's exile in France supplies the ending. Above all, Barry narrates, which is the one thing Kubrick refused to reproduce.
For the record: Mary Eleanor Bowes was the great-great-great-grandmother of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
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