Andrew Robinson Stoney

Andrew Robinson Stoney, later renamed Andrew Robinson Stoney-Bowes, (1747–1810) was an Anglo-Irish adventurer of Greyfort House, Borrisokane, County Tipperary in Ireland. His grandfather, Thomas Stoney, had immigrated to Ireland from Yorkshire, England, in the wake of the Williamite conquest of Ireland, 1689-91. While Andrew Stoney-Bowes was a Member of Parliament for Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1780-4) and also High Sheriff of Durham, he is perhaps best remembered for his marriage to Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Dowager Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne. She became known as "The Unhappy Countess" due to their tempestuous relationship, which ended in scandal. The story of Stoney-Bowes and the Countess of Strathmore was fictionalized by William Makepeace Thackeray in The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Stanley Kubrick later adapted the novel into the 1975 award-winning film Barry Lyndon.

Mary Eleanor Bowes, the widowed Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, was engaged to her lover, George Gray, in the summer of 1777 when she met the charming and wily Anglo-Irish adventurer, Andrew Robinson Stoney, who manipulated his way into her household and her bed. Calling himself 'Captain' Stoney — although he was in reality a lieutenant in the British Army — he insisted on fighting a duel in Mary's honour with the editor of The Morning Post newspaper which had published scurrilous articles about her private life. In fact, he had himself written the articles that criticised her, as well as those defending her; and the duel between Stoney and the newspaper's editor was probably staged. Pretending to be mortally wounded in the duel, Stoney persuaded the countess as his dying wish to marry him. He was carried to the altar on a stretcher for his marriage to the Countess. Staging a miraculous recovery immediately after the marriage, Stoney took his wife's surname (as stipulated by her father's will) and was styled Andrew Robinson Stoney Bowes. He served as High Sheriff of Durham in 1780 and was elected MP for Newcastle upon Tyne later the same year, serving until he lost the next election in 1784.

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