8. No Love? No Problem
Mary Bowes finally resigned herself to marry George Gray after the fourth pregnancy. Then she met and was seduced by Andrew Robinson Stoney, a British Army lieutenant who styled himself a “Captain”. Stoney wanted to get Mary to fall in love and agree to marry him, but although she liked him, she never fell in love with him. So Stoney concocted a fiendish plan to get her to marry him, love or no love.
In 1777, Stoney wrote scurrilous articles about Mary, and arranged to have them published in a newspaper. He then feigned outrage over the insult to Mary’s honor, and challenged the newspaper’s editor, who was in on the scam, to a duel. In the ensuing fake fight, Stoney pretended to have been “mortally injured”. Then he sprang his trap, by appealing to Mary’s romantic side, and begging her to grant him his dying wish: her hand in marriage.