The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce

by Hallie Rubenhold

  The only potential turncoat in his army of captive accomplices was Mary Sotheby. His wife’s letter, imploring her servant to come to London had never been delivered into Mary’s hands, but undoubtedly the maid was simmering with anxiety, anticipating a command from her mistress. Of all the servants under Worsley’s roof, no one would have been more distressed by the events of that morning than Mary Sotheby. Her concerns were not simply mercenary ones, that Seymour’s absence would inevitably signal the termination of her position, but genuine worry for the welfare of her lady. It was her responsibility to follow her mistress, to forecast her needs, to soothe her bodily discomforts, to dress her, to bath her and to coddle her emotionally should she require it. The complexities of women’s attire and the strictures of a genteel upbringing meant that a lady of privilege was virtually helpless without the assistance of her servant’s hands. Their relationship was a complicated one; an association of dependency based on mutual trust, subordination, friendship and sometimes unwavering fidelity and love. As it was Mary Sotheby’s occupation to observe her mistress’s person completely, she would have been privy to her most intimate secrets: the individuals with whom she corresponded, her private conversations, even the state of her naked body and undergarments. The bond that was forged between a maid and her mistress was often intense. Acts of disloyalty and disobedience could be taken as devastating betrayals.

  Mary would have known that Lady Worsley urgently required her presence. With no clothing but the functional brown riding habit in which she had absconded, without so much as a change of linen or stockings, without her jewels, her pomades or powders and without Mary Sotheby’s fingers to assist her, Seymour would be as vulnerable as a motherless child. She would be forced to rely on the housemaids wherever she resided, with their catty tongues and thieves’ pockets. Without her baby, bereft of her clothing and parted from her lady’s maid, both Mary and Sir Richard knew, Lady Worsley would grow increasingly desperate. So it was to Mary that he turned before his departure. He addressed her with sternness, impressing on her the importance of her duties to him, the master, rather than to her wayward mistress. It was the husband, not the wife, who paid her wages. Then, into her care he placed ‘Lady Worsley’s cloaths and jewels … with a strict charge not to let her ladyship have any of these in his absence’. He knew that Mary Sotheby’s heart would be burdened and her resolve slippery. Godfrey watched her closely.

  As predicted, the first test of her will came shortly after Sir Richard’s post-chaise had started for the capital. Out of the dust from his wheels came Joseph Connolly who had been lying in wait, anticipating that Worsley’s departure would unfasten the loyalty of his household. Like Lady Worsley’s distress for her maid, Bisset would be feeling the absence of his valet; his first line of defence against an irritating world of shopkeepers and creditors who required payment, of affairs that needed arranging and items that demanded tending. Connolly felt the same devotion as Mary Sotheby. He had done as the captain had instructed him and hired a post-chaise which he now had ready to ferry him and Mary to London. As he had received no response to his message, he returned with trepidation to the Worsleys’ doorstep and asked for Mary Sotheby. ‘It was Lady Worsley’s orders that you should immediately pack up her Ladyship’s cloaths as well as your own and prepare to follow on to London with me,’ Connolly told her, and then explained ‘that he had stayed behind to accompany her’. Godfrey stood over her, watching. Mary responded with emphatic regret that she could not perform ‘her duty to her lady’. As the butler looked on she told Connolly with firmness ‘that she was sorry but she could not comply with her ladyship’s order’, and the Worsleys’ door was shut.

  9

  Retribution

  On the western outskirts of London there lay a small, pastoral village known as Paddington. But for the drovers with their bleating herds and the hay wagons that rolled down the Edgware Road, it was a peaceful place. The green at its centre was encircled by a screen of stately elms which shaded the brick-fronted homes of gentlemen as well as the cottages of the area’s labourers. Paddington was the sort of location where the wealthy middle class came to retire, away from the noise and stench of the metropolis. It was also where Sir Richard Worsley came to hide from the public.

  The afternoon sky had just begun to darken when John Frederick Adam Hesse had an unexpected message placed in his hand. Hesse, an older man in his sixties, was of a convivial temperament. A member of a number of London’s more intellectual societies, he had a large capacity for friendship, books and wine. Now that his only son George was a married man with a household of his own, Hesse passed his days between his office at Horse Guards, where he held a position as Secretary and Chief Clerk at the Commissary General of Musters, and his comfortable home on Paddington Green with his wife, Elizabeth. He had been enjoying dinner at the home of an acquaintance when he received word that ‘Sir Richard Worsley … in a distressed situation … was then at his house … begging a bed … for him and his friend’. Hesse, ‘much surprised by the contents of the note’, immediately asked for his hat and coat.

  It is not known precisely how John Hesse, a high ranking civil servant of the London middle classes came into the orbit of the Worsleys of Appuldurcombe. Although Hesse was closer in age to Sir Richard’s father, the two shared a number of interests. Hesse regarded himself as a man of science and letters. In addition to being a member of the Royal Society and of the Society of Artists, his name could be found among the lists of subscribers (or patrons) to a variety of literary works. Certainly by 1781, theirs had been a reliable if not ‘intimate friendship … for some time past’. Above anyone else, Worsley felt he could turn to Hesse in his hour of desperation.

  When John Hesse returned home, he found that his friend ‘who appeared to be in the greatest distress of mind’ had settled into his drawing room. His cousin, Captain Worsley had accompanied him. Despondently, Sir Richard recounted the harrowing events of the day to his stunned host. Crippled by shame and in fear of London’s scandalmongers, Worsley explained that his secrets would soon leak from his Stratford Place town house were he to position himself so conspicuously in the West End. He required a well-camouflaged base from which to operate; a place where he could collect his thoughts, apply for assistance and conduct a clandestine correspondence. No one but those essential to his plotting was to know he was in town. Observing his good friend in such a distraught state, Hesse could not refuse Sir Richard’s request. What he could not have foreseen was that, by his act of generosity, Hesse would make himself the lightning rod for Worsley’s tempest.

  For nearly six weeks, Sir Richard remained under Hesse’s roof. During that period, Captain Worsley also lodged with him for a fortnight. Eschewing town and any public places, ‘he never once quitted’ the house on Paddington Green. Rather than risk showing his face, Sir Richard drew his personal business to him. John and Elizabeth Hesse’s entertaining rooms were commandeered as a base from which Worsley’s advisers mounted a full scale attack on his wife and her lover. Hesse’s opinion was never solicited, nor did he offer advice. Instead he maintained a wary distance. Observing his guest move broodingly between his walls, he and Mrs Hesse silently endured the burden the baronet had brought to them. Morose and overwrought, Worsley took over the spaces of his host’s home and bled a dark anxiety into Hesse’s life. Worse still, the civil servant found that his guest’s troubles were difficult to contain and soon spread beyond the confines of his Paddington residence.

  John Hesse’s primary responsibilities lay at his office in Horse Guards. It was here, on Wednesday afternoon, that he was summoned from his desk by a caller. The gentleman announced himself as George William Coventry, Viscount Deerhurst. He cut a grim figure standing in the entryway of the Commission. Deerhurst had once been a very handsome beau, a fast-living member of the fashionable set, but about a year earlier he had suffered terribly as a result of a hunting accident. ‘With characteristic imprudence’ he had urged his uneasy horse over a fi
ve-barred gate. When the beast slipped, he was thrown beneath it. Though fortunate to escape death, ‘his right eye was beat into his head, his nose broke and laid flat to his face’. The enduring result of his folly was blindness and disfigurement. After his tragedy, Deerhurst tried to minimise the horror of his appearance by wearing a green silk patch over his mangled right eye. Although equally sightless, his yellowing left eye remained open to view.

  The Viscount addressed Hesse with politeness. He had been to his house in Paddington that morning hoping to speak with Sir Richard Worsley. Deerhurst did not reveal how he had learned of the baronet’s undisclosed whereabouts, but many would have witnessed the activities and correspondence emanating from Hesse’s residence. With enough coin, secrets could be eased from the mouths of even the most tight-lipped servants. Notwithstanding the firm denials which the Viscount received when he enquired for Sir Richard at the Paddington house, Deerhurst was adamant that Hesse was harbouring Worsley. ‘I am charged with a message from Lady Worsley,’ he declared, ‘and I desire that … you … deliver it to Sir Richard.’ Then the Viscount began to dictate it from memory:

  ‘Lady Worsley having for some time past received many slights and inattentions from Sir Richard which she could not bear any longer and as she had for some time had a partiality for Captain Bisset, she has taken the opportunity of availing herself of it. She is so resolved to abide by it that in case Sir Richard should force her back again, which he certainly had a right to do, she would do the same again whenever she could.’

  Hesse stared at the messenger’s blank eyes in shock. ‘My Lord, this is a most extraordinary declaration,’ he breathed. ‘As this matter may probably come before a Court of Justice, if your Lordship is authorised to say so much, I must entreat your Lordship to repeat it again.’

  Deerhurst solemnly imparted his message once more. ‘Please communicate the same to Sir Richard Worsley,’ he concluded.

  Hesse remained stunned, then added after a moment’s thought, ‘If that was her Ladyship’s fixed resolution … she had better give her assistance towards obtaining a Divorce.’

  Indeed, the Viscount replied, he ‘believed that a Divorce was what Lady Worsley wished for’.

  Months later, the ageing servant of His Majesty’s government claimed that he could not recall any further details of what had passed between himself and Lord Deerhurst. From the instant the words were spoken, Hesse had tried to catch them in his head and went to ‘write a memorandum thereof’. He then hurried back to his home in order to relay the information to Worsley.

  Although Worsley had landed like a cyclone on Hesse’s home, it was not until Deerhurst’s visit that Hesse found himself pulled to the centre of the storm. With Sir Richard refusing to speak to the Viscount, John Hesse was forced to become the baronet’s intermediary and manage all communication between Worsley and his wife’s representative. This much was made apparent when on the following day, Lord Deerhurst’s figure appeared once more like a spectre in his doorway. The nobleman came with a further response from Lady Worsley. She had ‘authorised’ Deerhurst ‘to say that a divorce was what she particularly wished for and she would be glad if [Mr Hesse] would recommend it to Sir Richard Worsley’. As he had done the day before, the civil servant committed these weighty words to ink and remorsefully passed them on to his house guest.

  Though a painful process, Lady Worsley’s open declaration of her desires had the effect of quickly lancing what had promised to become a festering situation. If, in the days since his arrival in Paddington Sir Richard had held any doubt as to how he might proceed in resolving the crisis, the route forward had now been laid in front of him. In theory, if his wife favoured a divorce, she would provide no obstacle to her husband’s implementation of it. Such a gesture was further proof of the persistence of Seymour and Bisset’s naïve optimism that Worsley would ‘do the decent thing’, facilitating matters expediently and to everyone’s contentment.

  Shortly after his appearance at Hesse’s home, Sir Richard commenced a campaign of correspondence, begging advice from a number of acquaintances. The most useful of his respondents was a Mr Topham, a solicitor friend. Topham soon found himself sitting in the drawing room at Paddington Green where Worsley, still ‘extremely distressed’, placed ‘the entire management of the matter’ into his friend’s steadier hands. A day later, Topham returned with someone who was to prove far more useful than himself: James Farrer, an attorney who also was prepared to act as a private investigator. Since the 1770s, James Farrer and his brother Oliver had acquired a specialisation in the prosecution of divorce. To date, Farrer & Co.’s most spectacular case had been the scandal of the previous decade, the divorce of Lady Penelope Ligonier from her husband following her flagrant affair with the Italian dramatist Vittorio Alfieri. It was Farrer who would advise Worsley as to which from of divorce he should pursue. Steaming with rage, the baronet made it clear that he intended to exact the most uncomfortable of penalties for his wife’s transgressions.

  Of the two most regularly sought avenues for dissolving a marriage, a full divorce or a ‘Separation from Bed and Board’, Sir Richard chose the latter. Determined to strip his wife of any comfort and future happiness, this option presented the greatest scope for punishment. Such compensations as it held for the wife were paltry. Although she would be allowed to retain her yearly allowance of pin money, this sum alone was unlikely to sustain a lady’s lavish lifestyle. If, given her straitened circumstances she was privileged enough to outlive her estranged husband, she would also be entitled to receive her widow’s jointure. Negotiated as part of the marriage settlement, a jointure guaranteed a bereaved wife a house and an income suited to her needs. Crucially, a Separation from Bed and Board did not provide any alimony payment, the annual allowance that stood between a forsaken wife and hardship. By snipping the cords of financial obligation, a husband ruthlessly cast his wife into a life of destitution, or reliance on the favours of other men for a livelihood. A ‘divorce’ of this sort provided little hope of social rehabilitation through a second marriage. It would be, for Sir Richard, a fitting revenge.

  But Worsley’s appetite for retribution would not be sated by this action alone. His friend must also be held accountable in the stiffest terms possible. His betrayal was unconscionable and Sir Richard would concentrate the fire of his anguish into one lethal shot which he would aim directly at Maurice George Bisset. As an elopement was grounds for a virtually indisputable case of adultery, Worsley had determined immediately that he would prosecute the captain for criminal conversation. It would be a double suit. Farrer agreed to assume responsibility for both cases in the courts, but matters had to be conducted properly. In the eighteenth century, this might entail any number of unscrupulous tricks. Before he could procure the desired results, he needed Worsley’s assistance and that of his entire household in the laying of an elaborate trap.

  In the game of suing for criminal conversation, the first move was to lock on to the target, to learn his worth and to prepare one’s aim. Through James Farrer a Mr Herne, Bisset’s land agent, was approached and asked to ascribe a value to the rents received from the captain’s property on the Isle of Wight. Herne claimed that his employer was taking in ‘Somewhere about £800 or something more than £800 a year’. To this could be added the income from his other properties in Somersetshire which brought the amount of his total earnings to approximately £1,500 (a sum equivalent to an annual living allowance of roughly £1.9 million in 2008). The actual worth of his house at Knighton, which was filled with works of art and expensive furniture, was not included in these calculations.

  In theory, the paramour’s ability to pay the damages was immaterial in deciding the penalty a wronged husband might demand from him. If he could not pay, then he might find himself cast indefinitely into the bowels of a debtors’ prison, which at least in the plaintiff’s eyes was a fitting punishment or ‘a retribution for life for an injury for life’. Ultimately, it was held that the husband’s claim
for damages should reflect the dishonour perpetrated against him. There was no absolute sliding scale, but a number of factors invariably contributed to the tallying of what might be considered a fair sum.3

  Foremost in the prosecution of any suit was a consideration of the plaintiff’s wealth and position in society. Here, the edicts of hierarchy and a rigid class system would have massaged Worsley’s conventional prejudices: that an injury done to a gentleman of high standing was greater than one done to a lower-born counterpart. As he stood in a more prominent position and was accustomed to an existence of entitlement, a slight to him was an insult to the established order. Those further down the ladder, who had fewer privileges, would be more accustomed to having less and to swallowing indignities. Legally, their person did not count for so much. A gentleman of stature, due to the quality of his education, was also believed to be endowed with heightened sensitivity and ‘more tender feelings than the vulgar’. He should therefore receive greater compensation as any injury done to him would be experienced with more acute pain. Wealth, apparently, made one’s heart more vulnerable.