Monsters
’Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange
Lord Byron, Don Juan (1818–24)
Maria’s story remains an enigma. What did happen to her in the summer of 1817? Did she take part in a plot to fake her own abduction and then lie about it? Or was she the victim of a grasping and desperate family? And who was the real Maria – the paragon of Georgian modesty and decorum who earned Leigh’s epithet ‘angel’ or the brazen hussy who left home without her bonnet and shawl and kissed men at a christening party?
When I read the first reports of the case in the Taunton Courier, I thought of Maria as a naive teenager who had probably had an ill-advised summer romance and had come to regret it. As the Bowditches had alleged, she was afraid of her strict uncle and felt obliged to lie to save her reputation. The court case at Dorchester merely bolstered my opinion because I could not believe so many witnesses against her could have been orchestrated to perjure themselves in court.
But the story Maria told at Dorchester was extraordinary. If she were indeed lying, she must have had an impressive gift of imagination to think up this tale of pleading, threats and intimidation, to say nothing of the interlude with Mr Oxenham, the sleeping draught and the attempted sham marriage. Maria’s surviving letters to her daughter, albeit written in her later years, do not betray anything other than a sensible woman, firmly rooted in the real world. They are sweetly affectionate (she addresses her daughter as ‘my chick’ and ‘my pet’ and says she looks for her letters ‘just as a suckling baby would for its Mother’s milk’) and replete with domestic detail, news of friends and family. She worries for the health of servants (‘Your letter has this moment been given to me by poor old Knight who walked in this fearful weather all the way to Bridge to obtain it’ is a typical example) and shows compassion to those who have let her down (she sacks her young housemaid but then relents). She mends and amends her clothes, carefully husbanding her limited resources.
My growing belief in Maria was bolstered when I read Tuckett’s first pamphlet in which, steaming with anger, he detailed the Bowditches’ deception of the Dorset clergymen and the strategies they had used against his niece: denigrating her character, deliberately impersonating her and importuning witnesses. By the time I read the second tract, in which he described Joshua Whitby’s suspicious and mercurial behaviour and Tom Woodforde’s attempts to turn Mary Ann Whitby, my opinion had fully shifted. Maria was innocent. Not only that, I had by now developed a fullblown passion for my beleaguered subject. Her plainness, her terrible shyness and her loneliness, all found a resonance.
Even so, I wondered if she were telling the whole truth. What if she had indeed flirted with James Bowditch, even if only in a trivial way? Would she have been able to admit this to Tuckett? His robust defence of her and his insistence that she could not have done anything in the least bit wrong may have made that difficult.
So it seems to me entirely possible that some of the Bowditches’ allegations were true. Maria was only fifteen when she arrived at Holway Farm to recover from an illness so serious it could have killed her. During their stay, she and her cousins were in the care of no one in particular, except Mary Ann Whitby, who was fourteen. Like many girls, Maria was brought up to be ‘innocent’, that is, ignorant. Her life at boarding school or at home with the Tucketts, who did not socialize and received few visitors, did little to change this. She may have felt emotionally adrift, too. Her mother and grandmother were thousands of miles from her and she had no idea when or if she would see them again.
Not only that – she had reached adolescence, a supremely disconcerting stage of life for most people. She had been through puberty (the barrister James Scarlett remarked insultingly on her ‘ripeness’ at the Westminster Hall hearing in 1819) and was likely, therefore, to have had a burgeoning interest in the opposite sex, regardless of their rank. It would have been natural for a girl of her age, on her walks round the farm, to take special notice when good-looking James Bowditch raised his hat to her and to feel a thrill when he assisted her in the evening with the pony. She may have harboured secret yearnings or, not appreciating society’s rules of engagement, embarked on a flirtation without knowing what flirtation was and without realizing that she was being closely watched.
Despite Mr and Mrs Tuckett’s insistence that their girls should have separate quarters at Holway Cottage, Maria, her cousins and Mary Whitby lived intimately with the Bowditches. Their rooms were not closed off from the rest of the house, merely designated for their private use. On occasion, they may have ventured out of their parlour into the kitchen to pass time with the Bowditches, who were affable and welcoming. Away from the gaze of her guardians, Maria accepted without suspicion their friendship and that of their attractive friend Mrs Mulraine, who offered to teach her to paint on velvet and encouraged her to play with her little daughter. Holway was certainly a world away from Maria’s home in North Town, where playing a game of chess was enough to upset Tuckett’s concentration and earn a rebuke, and from the hated schools she had been forced to attend, where she was unpopular with the other girls. Here, where the atmosphere was casual and warm, she may have felt emboldened enough, and liked enough, to join in the Bowditches’ games and to banter with James. To a young girl with a reputation for being good, compliant and helpful, the opportunity to be slightly disobedient, to break the rules by playing noisy games with her social inferiors, may have been irresistible.
Then it all went catastrophically wrong. Suddenly, an exciting new way of being with people was out of hand, frightening and threatening. Mrs Bowditch’s friendly demeanour vanished, James Bowditch and his sisters had become sulky and even Mrs Mulraine, although outwardly supportive, implied that Maria could not escape her fate. Everything was both her fault and beyond her control. When she was told that James Bowditch would murder her and kill himself over love for her, Maria believed it. She had no reason not to.
The judges at the Westminster Hall hearing correctly recognized that the pressure she had been under was not physical but mental. Her compliance was in-built, part of her genetic make-up, but also conditioned from birth – she did as she was told by someone more powerful than she, no matter whether it was a servant (Jane Marke, pulling her down the stairs) or a yeoman farmer and his mother or indeed her own guardians.
After her rescue, Maria was so fearful of the Bowditches that Tuckett agreed to take her to London where her uncle John Burrows, a police magistrate, arranged for a restraining order against them. She was traumatized and depleted. Then, gradually during the months following, she changed. When Tuckett told her that Mary Ann Whitby was sticking to the story that she had wanted to run away with James Bowditch, she insisted on accompanying him to Bath to face her.
She endured Tuckett’s investigations in Dorset and Bristol in which he paraded her in front of witnesses and asked them to say whether or not they recognized her without complaint. If her story had been false, she would have done almost anything to evade these interviews, to dissuade Tuckett from the litigation he was planning or to actively try to scupper his investigation. She did no such thing. At Dorchester, she was, in the words of The Times, ‘elegant and prepossessing’. Her testimony contained no contradictions and she gave it while seated only a few feet from her aggressors. She did not break down or become upset or ask for time to compose herself. This was a new Maria, confident, mature and assured. She had been a naive child. She was now an adult and fully, and cynically, aware of the tricks adults could play.
Maria’s story was certainly unusual as noted by the prosecuting barristers at Dorchester. But its integrity is evident in the fleeting vignettes she described – Mrs Bowditch declaring that her family was as good as Maria’s and claiming (falsely) that she had two nieces married to baronets; Elizabeth Snell telling her scare stories about what had happened to other girls who had betrayed their abductors; Mrs Mulraine declaring that ‘I have had nothing to do with it, nor am I going to have anything to do with it,’ a refrain she used often; James Bowditch saying ‘that nobody could blame him, if he was ever so unkind to me, as I made him by my behaviour’; Susan Bowditch bursting into tears when she first saw Maria in the kitchen at Thornford; the fake clergyman; the misery and isolation she felt at Thornford at the sound of the men downstairs laughing. These are the vivid observations of a person in an extraordinary and stressful situation, every minute of which was etched in her memory.
Maria denied any kind of romantic attachment to James Bowditch. We cannot know if this was really true. In the end, it is irrelevant because one thing we do know is that the Bowditches had Maria in their sights. She was a perfect business opportunity and she had landed on their patch at just the right time.
Why would respectable, industrious yeoman farmers who owned their own farm risk all to abduct the niece of a local barrister? Why were they not more wary of Tuckett? They must have had some measure of him through their negotiations to provide a temporary home for Maria, her two cousins and Mary Ann Whitby. Were they confident their plot would succeed? Did they have a specific and pressing need for cash that trumped all caution?
We have no information about the Bowditches’ precise financial situation in 1817. There are few traces of the Bowditches in the archives and no family papers. However, we do know that the previous year’s harvest had been disastrous for all farmers. The wheat crop was well below average, noted the Taunton Courier, because of ‘the extreme changeableness of the weather’.205 What neither the Bowditches nor any of the other farmers across Europe and North America understood was that they were suffering the fallout from a ripple of catastrophic climactic events. A string of volcanic eruptions that started in 1812 with La Soufrière in St Vincent (Maria’s native island, which she had left the previous year) and Awu in the Dutch East Indies, followed in 1813 by Suwanosejima in Japan and in 1814 by Mayon in the Philippines, and culminating in April 1815 in the massive eruption of Mount Tambora in the East Indies, collectively had a major impact on the world’s weather system. Tambora was the largest volcanic explosion for 10,000 years, and it sent such huge volumes of gas and particulates into the atmosphere that the sun was blocked out and the climate chilled across Europe, ruining crops across the Northern hemisphere. The winter that followed was exceptionally severe. 1816 came to be known as the ‘Year Without a Summer’ or the ‘Poverty Year’ and the weirdness and bad conditions continued into the summer of 1817, which was when Maria arrived at Holway.
That the Bowditches were facing potential ruin or hardship as a result of poor harvests may not have been the whole story. It is likely that Maria was identified as a solution to a more intractable problem – what to do about James. Tuckett said in court that when he and his wife had visited Mrs Bowditch to look over her farm with a view to placing their girls there, she did not mention her adult children. This omission may have been deliberate, as Mrs Bowditch would not have wanted to draw their attention to her second son. The Tucketts would have removed their children immediately if they had known that an unmarried young man was sleeping yards from their fifteen-year-old niece.
James was an embarrassment to his family. He toiled in the fields with the farm labourers and wore the clothes of a working man. There was nothing wrong with this (and Tuckett claimed to respect all honest workers), except that as the only male Bowditch on the scene, he might be expected to be more of a manager than a field hand. The journalists attending the Westminster Hall hearing in November 1818 remarked on his amusing attempts to present himself as a gentleman farmer and they delightedly described every part of his brand new outfit down to his kerchief and boots. In the aspirational Bowditch family, where other siblings ‘married up’ (Juliana to a gentleman, Betsey to an army officer, Mary to a journalist), he certainly stood out.
Tuckett had specific objections to Bowditch’s personal habits and demeanour and could not believe that such a man, even given his good looks, could have captured Maria’s heart. In Tuckett’s opinion Bowditch was gross and brutal, an ‘uneducated clown,’ a man of ‘low birth, and of the lowest manners’. ‘No one who knew the man and the habits of his life could have believed that a young lady could fall in love with such an object,’ he wrote.
What was James Bowditch really like? And what made him so objectionable as a suitor for Maria? The ‘habits’ Tuckett complained of were probably alcohol but they could also have been fraternizing with prostitutes or, if Tuckett was privy to secret information, suspected homosexuality. Bowditch’s recorded words are few and most of them are reported by Tuckett or Maria. Even so, they indicate an unattractive character. His social skills were poor. He could not even be trusted to do his own wooing: his mother and siblings, as well as servants in Tuckett’s house and Susan Mulraine, had to get involved. His own attempts amounted to little more than sulky and aggressive assertions of attachment followed by insults (Maria said he called her a ‘little bitch’ at Thornford) and threats of violence and murder. He was probably poorly educated (or possibly dyslexic). He did not notice the misspelling of Maria’s surname and his only known written sentence was (as quoted by Tuckett), ‘You know my der Mary, her did say that her would heave me, if she went to hell for me.’ His sister Betsey claimed that he was a ‘determined man’ and would get anything he put his mind to but this was not borne out in the evidence. It was rather the opposite. Mrs Mulraine took the reins when they marched Maria to William Bowditch’s house to sign the documents and he looked to his brother for answers to the Reverend Cooper’s questions for the marriage bond.
The Bowditches claimed that the elopement had occurred only because Maria had insisted on it and they had reluctantly fallen in with her plans. This is absurd. They actively took all the steps necessary to prepare for the marriage: hiring the gig, arranging the licence (at some distance to Taunton) and thinking up a way to deceive the clergymen in Thornford. No one would have done this merely out of deference to a young girl, even a genteel one, especially one so shy and easily dominated. The Bowditches also claimed that they had been misled into thinking Maria was twenty-one, but this again is unlikely. In an era when early death was not unusual, birthdays were achievements and age a common subject of conversation, especially when it came to females of marriageable age. Maria’s age was probably the first fact the Bowditches established. And to find it out for sure, they would not have had to ask her directly as all they had to do was to speak to her maid or to her young cousins. The Bowditches knew she was underage but proceeded anyway.
Even so, as the day of the abduction approached, James and William Bowditch may have had qualms about the likely punishments for kidnapping. That is why William headed for Oxenham’s office when the brothers returned from Dorset after James had signed and sworn to the marriage bond. Oxenham would probably have advised William that the marriage of a minor by banns, without active parental opposition, was illegal but still possible and had risks. He was probably less keen on the deliberate deception of the clergymen and may have suggested that to be safe they take Maria to Guernsey instead. He may also have come up with the ruse to manufacture proof that Maria had lied to them about her age, by getting her to write something.
We can speculate that the next morning, acting on Oxenham’s suggestion, James Bowditch and Mrs Mulraine kept a watch on Tuckett’s house. They saw Maria leave to go to the poultry market and lay in wait for her return, at the same time dispatching a messenger to Oxenham to tell him to make his way to William Bowditch’s house. At William Bowditch’s house, the conspirators made Maria write out a statement. ‘I took the pen and wrote what Mrs Mulraine dictated, which was, that I would comply with everything which James Bowditch required, and that I was 16 years of age. I signed my name to it by Mrs Mulraine’s direction. I remember she made me leave spaces in the paper,’ said Maria in her affidavit.
The conspirators may have intended to use those ‘spaces’ for their own purposes but, in the end, it was too difficult to achieve the result they wanted. Instead, they used this example of her handwriting to forge a new letter, copying her style of spelling and handwriting and backdating it to the 14th. Oxenham’s important-looking and unreadable legal papers were intended to convince Maria that she had ‘signed her life away’. It was this story that her servants were instructed to spread about and to pass on to Tuckett after Maria had been taken from his house.
Even if most of what Maria said about her disappearance were untrue, the Bowditches were still guilty of conspiracy. They were just remarkably inept at putting it into action. Despite all their efforts – bribing and threatening the Tucketts’ servants, organising Maria’s removal to Thornford and fooling the local clergy – Maria did not marry James Bowditch.
What went wrong? Maria said that soon after she arrived at the Thornford parsonage Thomas Paul, James Bowditch’s brother-in-law, exclaimed: ‘We shall have all the bells ringing by and bye,’ which would imply that a wedding, at that stage, was on the cards. At this point, out of Maria’s hearing, William Bowditch told the Pauls that the church wedding must be called off. While Juliana Paul sent word to the Reverend Cutler cancelling the ceremony, James and William Bowditch and Thomas Paul must have speedily concocted a plan to compromise Maria’s reputation by tricking her into thinking she had been married by a clergyman, hence the use of the labourer Mr Gould, who was probably working near the parsonage that morning. They put him in a black suit (perhaps borrowed from the room the Reverend Bellamy used to put on his robes) and sprinkled powder in his hair. But when Gould fluffed his lines by telling Maria, ‘Poh, this marriage will never be lawful,’ Juliana knew that they would fail and sent Maria upstairs. Her absence allowed the family time to discuss their next move. The Bowditch brothers had probably not properly thought through their plan to go to the Channel Islands. They would need money for transport, overnight stays, sustenance and church fees, which was why, later in the day, Juliana asked Maria if she had any cash with her.
The dinner with Mr Paul’s nephew the Reverend Templer had either been set up in advance as a wedding party or was quickly arranged in order to give a veneer of innocence to a household containing a kidnapped young woman. Templer, a magistrate and clergyman, utterly respectable and extremely well connected, was an ideal witness to have on their side. If he wanted to preserve his own reputation, he would want not to incriminate them. The Bowditches may also have wanted to ask Templer for a loan to finance the journey to the Channel Islands.
It was too late, of course, for by now Mrs Mulraine, assuming the marriage had already taken place and wishing to exonerate herself, had told Tuckett where his niece was and Leigh was on his way to Thornford. The Bowditches’ plan, full of risk from the beginning, crumbled to dust and after Maria had been rescued they knew their only recourse was a campaign of damage limitation and victim denigration.
The paragraph about the elopement published in the Taunton Courier at the request of James Scarlett, who was married to Mary Bowditch, contained a number of strategically placed inaccuracies. Maria was said to be seventeen and a ward of Chancery entitled to a large sum on coming of age. These assertions made James Bowditch’s actions in taking Maria away look more forgiveable. The final sentence, ‘We are informed that during their absence, the conduct of the parties was irreproachable’ was tacked on in case Tuckett showed an inclination to sue for defamation on Maria’s behalf.
The family hoped that this publicity, so unwelcome to the upright Tucketts, would be seen as a shot across the bows. Its underlying message was that it will be better for you to let this lie as we can muster more if we need to. Tuckett did not take the hint, or ignored it, and he and Leigh responded quickly with letters of rebuttal. Soon after, the Bowditches would have known of Tuckett’s investigations in both Taunton and Thornford, of his cross-examination of his servants and the Bowditches’ neighbours, employees and friends. They were aware early on that a prosecution was coming.
The Bowditch family had been at Holway for generations and their solicitor Oxenham correctly calculated that they would have greater ‘muscle’ than the friendless and isolated Tucketts. He must have advised them to persuade, cajole or threaten friends, neighbours, employees and customers to come to their defence. It is probable that he himself prepared the defence witnesses for their appearance at Dorchester. Despite his efforts, their testimony was lamentable, full of contradiction and obfuscation. Samuel Mansfield, a labourer at Holway, could not identify Maria. Mrs Owen and Sarah Bowditch gave very different accounts of the time Maria arrived at Holway on the night of the abduction. Charles Puddy said that Maria had ridden out to Gotton and had borrowed his wife’s saddle to do so but James Scarlett, the son-in-law, said that she had walked. Some witnesses were drunk and could barely stand up. The more educated of them, Oxenham himself and the Reverend Templer, were expected to carry most weight but were amongst the worst, squirming under cross-examination, shiftily deflecting direct questions and offering up vague and irrelevant responses.
The efforts of the defence team failed and Maria was believed. Oxenham and his clients knew they had to raise their game and now went on the offensive. After they applied for a rule to show why they should not have a new trial, they appealed for new witnesses prepared to make affidavits. Dozens came forward. Some of those who had previously been Maria’s supporters went over to the Bowditches. There was no special need for truth. The campaign was all about saving a respectable family from a fate they did not deserve.
What are we to make of the support given by the big-wigs of Taunton, especially William Kinglake, Tom Woodforde and J.W. Marriott? These men may well have believed the Bowditches’ denials, but they also had their own agenda, which included taking the outsider Tuckett down a peg, being seen to support hard-working yeoman families who were trying to better themselves and, by putting themselves centre-stage in Taunton, to attract electoral support for the local Whig cause. They may have felt that the underhand methods used in defence of this family were justified if it meant that the Bowditches, in the end, received appropriate justice and that their own causes were promoted. That Henry James Leigh was acting for their political opponents merely added another strand to their motivation.
Tom Woodforde took up the Bowditches’ case with an energy bordering on obsession. He went to great lengths to turn witnesses on their behalf – Sarah Slade, the Tucketts’ former nursemaid, who was at first supportive of Maria but ended by saying that Maria’s behaviour was so scandalous she could not speak of it; Sarah Budd, the housekeeper at Bath, who had witnessed Mary Ann Whitby’s change of demeanour after confessing to Tuckett; Joshua Whitby, who had professed loyalty to Maria but fell in with Woodforde and later solicited bribes from Tuckett; and Mary Ann herself, who had remained loyal until she returned to Taunton and finally betrayed Maria.
Many who thought the Bowditches were guilty did not support their punishment and felt their crimes did not merit imprisonment. At a meeting in Taunton held after the defendants were sent down Mr Wilkinson said that it was seeing a mother and her whole family overwhelmed with destruction in such ‘extraordinary circumstances’ that compelled him to contribute his ‘humble services’ to the group. The Bowditches themselves were in a permanent state of denial about their behaviour and by enthusiastically disparaging Maria they were able to diminish the role they had played, rationalizing their actions and blaming their victim. This ‘minimization’ meant that they simply did not feel guilty or accept that they had done wrong.
There is no smoking gun in this story. No document that reveals the facts surrounding Maria’s disappearance from her home on 26 September 1817. All we can say is that the methods used by her enemies were ineffective and underhand and that her story was credible and that she never wavered from it.
The kidnapping of women with the aim of forcing them to marry was rare in Britain, and remained so, although there would always be people prepared to risk both the law and furious parents-in-law in order to marry the partner of their dreams and to acquire their fortunes. There continued to be some heart-breaking cases.
The brutal treatment of Maria Glenn was eclipsed nine years later by the so-called Shrigley abduction. Ellen Turner, a fifteen-year-old only child and heiress, from Pott Shrigley in Cheshire, was taken from her boarding school in Liverpool by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a thirty-year-old widower. He had form. At the age of twenty, he had eloped to Scotland with seventeen-year-old heiress Eliza Pattle, whose mother afterwards accepted the marriage and settled £70,000 on her daughter. But in 1820, Eliza had died in childbirth leaving him with two small children.
Wakefield, who had never previously met Ellen, stooped to astonishing levels of cruelty to deceive her. He sent his servant with a carriage to present a message to her schoolmistresses, stating that her mother had become paralysed and wished to see her daughter immediately. Then he told Ellen that her mother was fine but her father’s business had collapsed. The next day, he told her that her father would be rescued from his creditors only if she consented to marry him. Two banks had agreed that some of her father’s estate would be transferred to her, or rather, to her husband. They married at Gretna Green, after which Wakefield fled with his prize to France. The marriage was later annulled by Parliament and Ellen was legally married two years later to a wealthy neighbour. Wakefield and his brother William, who had helped him, were convicted at trial and sentenced to three years in Newgate.206
Wakefield’s abduction of Ellen Turner and the subsequent trial was the last major case of its kind. Even the ‘extraordinary’ case of Miss Ann Crellin, a wealthy Liverpudlian spinster who in 1842 prosecuted eight people for conspiring to take her away and forcibly marry her at Gretna Green to John Orr M’Gill, did not measure up. She was short, stout and forty and her suitor was a handsome thirty-year-old Irishman, so there was plenty of amusement for the public, which was much enhanced when they read that Miss Crellin was seen with her head on M’Gill’s knees and that while the conspirators had managed to pour large quantities of alcohol down her throat she herself was seen to order and consume six or seven brandies on the trot. (Miss Crellin claimed she had been made to drink a dark substance that made her ‘insensible’, echoing Maria’s story about Mrs Bowditch giving her a bitter black drink.)207
The jury was unimpressed and when delivering its guilty verdict against four of the defendants, the foreman told the judge that ‘Miss Crellin is also herself highly culpable in the business.’ The accused had feared transportation but the sentences were light: two of them were given imprisonment of eighteen and fifteen months and the others hard labour for two and twelve months respectively. The case served as a depressing example of the financial helplessness of women after marriage. Until their marriage was dissolved, M’Gill was still Miss Crellin’s husband and when he was incarcerated in prison awaiting trial for forcibly marrying her, he was able to instruct Miss Crellin’s bankers not to pay out her own money to her. She had to sue him for it.
This was a time when women did not have even the most basic human rights. They played no part in public life, they were not admitted to universities, they could not vote and, if they were married, they were not regarded as separate legal entities to their husbands. Although the social rules around marriage were changing, they had no real freedom to choose partners and very often were forced into strategic marriages based on financial gain, respectability and rank. If they did not fit with their families’ plans, their romantic aspirations were usually ignored.
Hardwicke’s 1754 Clandestine Marriages Act was repealed in 1823 and replaced with the Marriage Act. Most of the law was unchanged but now marriages would only be void if minors ‘knowingly and wilfully’ failed to comply with its provisions. When it came to fortune-hunters, there were special provisions to stop them profiting from marrying minors without the consent of their parents.
In the face of changes in English matrimonial law and better protection for women’s fortunes through trusts and Chancery, abduction for forcible marriage in order to acquire a fortune lost some of its allure. Perpetrators could not be sure they would get their hands on the lucre. It was not until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, which allowed women to be the legal owners of the money they earned and to inherit property, that protection for women’s money and possessions came to be enshrined in English law. Subsequent Acts of 1882 and 1893 extended their rights, but even then, the work of equalizing women and men in marriage was not over.
The fashion for romantic elopements declined, especially after 1856 when Scottish law was changed to require twenty-one days’ residence before marriage. As time went on, the Georgian period, and especially the Regency, came to be viewed with nostalgia as the golden age of runaway marriages. In abductions with forced marriage, it is unlikely that any resulting unions were filled with light and love. Maria, bullied, abducted and abused, was indeed fortunate to avoid the altar but her entanglement with the Bowditches created scars she carried to the grave.