I HAVE toured with my talk Four Scandals and A Gooseberry for more than five years, curing some listeners of insomnia and reminding others that an hour is too precious to waste again.

The talk got two airings this week, at Weardale Probus in Wolsingham and Darlington Men’s Forum. At each venue, at least one person was still awake when I finished and, by even greater coincidence, both asked a question which had never been raised in the five previous years.

“Is that where ‘stony broke’ comes from?”

The scandal under question concerns Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore.

In March 1776, aged 27, the death of her husband turned her into the wealthiest widow in the country with a fortune founded on Durham coal.

Society was shocked and scandalised when, just nine months later, she remarried.

Shocked and scandalised because nine months isn’t very long to grieve the death of your beloved husband, particularly not if during that time you fall pregnant four times by another of your lovers.

Of course, Mary and her lover took rudimentary precautions, but, as she said, in the heat of the moment “an instant’s neglect always destroyed” their good intentions. So she downed copious quantities of a “black inky kind of medicine” that was probably poisonous.

But mixed with a large brandy and topped with a liberal scattering of pepper, it had the desired effect on the pregnancy.

Gossip swirled through London about the men Mary was cavorting with and, in December 1776, letters about her appeared in the Morning Post. Signed “A Conscience-Stinger”, they condemned her for insulting her late husband’s memory and abandoning her children.

Out of nowhere, a gallant hero emerged to defend her honour. He was Andrew Robinson Stoney, an Irish lieutenant whose first wife, an heiress from Burnopfield, had just died in dubious circumstances allowing him to pocket her £5,000 fortune.

Stoney challenged the editor of the Post to a duel, which took place in a dark pub cellar on January 13, 1777. Shots were fired, swords were clashed, a mirror was broken and Stoney was carried out by his doctors, gravely white with his waistcoat soaked in blood.

His doctors said his wounds were fatal and Mary, heart a-flutter at the romance of it all, agreed to marry a dying man she barely knew.

The wedding was on January 16 – Mary spending the night before frolicking “in one and the same bed, naked and alone” with her other lover – in Piccadilly, Stoney carried into the church on his deathbed.

Next morning, though, he recovered sufficiently to party with his doctors. Then Mary learned that the duelling editor was a close friend of Stoney’s.

She realised too late she’d been had. Stoney had her fortune and all the coal beneath her Gibside estate.

He was brutal towards her, both physically and mentally, destroying her in body and spirit.

These were the days when women didn’t divorce.

They had no identity of their own. They were their husband’s property.

But, bravely, on November 9, 1786, she filed for divorce. Stoney kidnapped her and held her hostage, first in one of her castles – Streatlam, near Barnard Castle – and then in Darlington town centre.

Dramatically, he was apprehended at Neasham and Mary was freed. He was divorced, and without her massive fortune, declared bankrupt.

And he spent the rest of his days in a debtors’ prison because he was, quite literally, stoney broke.

● This fabulous story is told in the recent Wedlock by Wendy Moore (W&N, £18.99)