With the opening statement completed and a copy of the marriage certificate presented as evidence, the plaintiff’s counsel began to call their witnesses. The first of these was Richard Leversuch, now Captain Leversuch of the South Hampshire Militia. With a captaincy vacant after Bisset’s resignation, Worsley had been quick to reward the militia’s surgeon with a promotion for his selfless assistance. This act of generosity also ensured that Leversuch would give evidence from a script formulated by the baronet. He stepped into the witness box dressed in his brilliant red uniform, prepared to receive John Dunning’s questions. Dunning’s first tactic was to verify the intensity of the friendship that existed between Worsley and Bisset.
‘Had you any opportunities of knowing, whether Captain Bisset had or had not a great friendship with Sir Richard Worsley and his family?’ he asked.
‘It always appeared so to me.’
‘Do you remember their coming to Lewes and the breaking up of camp?’
‘Yes, Lewes was the place of the Headquarters,’ Leversuch replied.
‘I take it for granted that he was a Man of Fashion and kept company?’
‘Yes, sir,’ answered the captain.
And then, hoping that Leversuch might reveal a bit more about the living arrangements that existed between the married pair and their friend, Dunning enquired, ‘In the course of the summer was he [Bisset] ever at Sir Richard’s house in Maidstone?’
‘Yes, Sir,’ he responded through tight lips. There was a pause, but Leversuch refused to say more on the subject.
‘During the time Captain Bisset was in his winter quarters, I presume he had lodgings?’ Separate lodgings is what the lawyer was implying. But again, Leversuch said nothing.
‘Yes; he had lodgings in Lewes.’
‘And Sir Richard Worsley had a house there?’
‘Yes, Sir.’
Dunning soon abandoned this line of examination and inevitably turned to the events of the party on the night of the elopement, the details of which were certain to cause Leversuch some embarrassment.
‘Did you observe them [Worsley and Bisset] frequently together; and do you recollect him and Lady Worsley being together at a party which met at your house?’
‘I recollect that perfectly well.’
‘Be so good as to tell us the date?’
‘On Sunday the 18th of November, they drank tea, and supped at my house,’ the surgeon stated.
‘Upon whose invitation?’
‘Mine and my family’s.’
‘It was a general invitation I suppose?’
‘Yes; Married Ladies were invited, as well as their husbands.’
Dunning walked him through the events of the evening: Sir Richard ‘begging to be excused’ due to ill health, the appearance of Lady Worsley at seven in the evening and her peculiar insistence that she depart shortly after midnight. ‘What became of Lady Worsley after that?’ the lawyer asked, and Leversuch explained, perhaps still pained by the memories of letting the couple slip so easily away, that he had lighted them ‘within a few yards of Sir Richard’s door’.
‘And you saw no more of them?’ the lawyer confirmed.
‘No,’ Leversuch answered with regret, ‘I saw no more of them’.
The surgeon then described that tense period before sunrise, when Worsley came ‘violently rapping at the door’ and demanded to know if his wife was inside. Leversuch recalled telling Sir Richard that ‘had not seen her since one o’clock’.
Once Dunning believed he had drawn as much from Leversuch as the witness was likely to give he changed tack. The prosecution was determined to prove that Bisset had grossly abused Sir Richard’s trust. He had hoped that the surgeon would have attested to this by laying evidence that the captain lived with the Worsleys at Maidstone, but his promptings had failed to produce the information. Instead he brought to the stand a Mr Sadler who was able to positively identify Bisset’s handwriting on two letters. The first of these was intended to demonstrate ‘the friendship and attachment which subsisted between the Plaintiff and the Defendant’. ‘In this letter,’ claimed Dunning, ‘the defendant congratulated Sir Richard on Lady Worsley’s safe delivery of her daughter, and concluded by saying he was much concerned for her health and happiness, and that he wished for nothing so much as her return to quarters.’ Also presented was the letter which along with Bisset’s commission papers Sir Richard had unfolded on the morning of the 19th of November. The enclosed note asked Worsley to accept his resignation and requested that he send his answer to Lord Deerhurst on Cleveland Row.
Francis Godfrey was next called to the stand and asked to respond to questions framed by Thomas Erskine. It was requested that the butler recount the details of the evening of the 18th of November. He recalled Lady Worsley instructing him that ‘she would not sup at home that night’ and remembered dutifully ‘waiting up’ for her ‘till between four and five or six o’clock’. Godfrey also explained to the jury that in the early morning he had been sent across the road by Sir Richard to fetch his wife from the Leversuchs’ party, but when he arrived there, the surgeon told him ‘that Lady Worsley had left the house in company with Captain Bisset about one o’clock’. Erskine was keen to demonstrate that this news and the potential of a terrible betrayal greatly distressed the plaintiff. ‘How did Sir Richard Worsley appear? Very much agitated?’ he pressed.
‘Yes, Sir,’ replied Godfrey.
The prosecution, convinced they had established one of their principal points then moved on to the incontrovertible evidence that was certain to guarantee the plaintiff’s win: the details of the act of adultery. This would be the meat and potatoes of the legal action, the featured performance which many in the gallery had come to hear. Whilst trials for crim. con. were uncomfortable experiences for both parties at the best of times, this part of the proceedings was the most gruesome for all involved. To have one’s private torments and whispered confessions cried through an open court by loyal domestic staff, former friends or family was hideously mortifying. In the process of legal dissection, nothing was sacred. The jury required submission of every detail to confirm in their own minds that an act of adultery had taken place. In order to accurately assess the severity of the crime committed, the diligent spies who had spotted the soiled undergarments and who had pressed their ears against closed doors were required to present their findings in person. The presence of journalists at these proceedings ensured that, once disclosed, reportage of overheard grunts or the couple’s undignified position upon discovery would enter into general knowledge.
The ribald element was heightened by the witnesses themselves. Frequently, the servants who had seen the illicit acts were young women, brought blushing and nervous to the stand where they were made to recount to a male audience the minutiae of the lurid entanglement. Louis Simond, a visitor to London in the early nineteenth century remarked that he found it especially ‘indelicate and scandalous’ when ‘Young chamber maids’ were ‘brought into open court to tell, in the face of the public, all they have seen, heard or guessed at’. Simond condemned this practice as ‘another sort of prostitution more indecent than the first’. Moral scruples aside, Wallace, Lee, Dunning and Erskine prepared to roll out their big guns: the staff of Tubb’s lodging house and the Royal Hotel. The Grub Street hacks who jostled for space in the gallery must have licked their lips in anticipation.
John Lee called Joseph Tubb to give his testimony. The keeper of the lodging house presented his account of what transpired in the early hours of the 19th of November, when he had been awakened by ‘Mr Bisset asking me to let him light a candle’.
‘Had you any opportunity of knowing whether Mr Bisset was at that time alone, or whether he had company with him?’ enquired John Lee.
‘I don’t know,’ answered Tubb, ‘ … when he lit his candle, he was in his bed gown, or morning gown; and … went to his own room again. Some little time afterwards he came out, and called Connolly and desired him to go downstairs … and a very lit
tle time afterwards … I think Connolly or somebody else, went out of the door. In about ten minutes, or a quarter of an hour after that, I heard a noise in Mr Bisset’s room … I got out of bed and went to his room to see if he wanted anything. I rapped at the door and asked him if he wanted any assistance …’
At that cue, the gallery erupted into laughter. One of the journalists for the Morning Herald suggested that Tubb ‘by his ignorance of what had been happening in Bisset’s chamber … and in the simplicity of his heart’ had ‘unusually’ lightened the mood of the Court of the King’s Bench.
Lee, ignoring the disturbance, was eager to continue, but as Tubb persisted with his farcical story of doors opening and shutting and the sound of feet trampling down the stairs, Justice Mansfield began to lose patience.
‘This is nothing but travelling a long way about; why don’t you come to the point, and bring them to London at once?’ he demanded of the prosecution.
Tubb was summarily dismissed and replaced with Thomas Fort, whose evidence promised to be far more intriguing. The Attorney-General asked the Royal Hotel’s waiter to introduce himself and then cut abruptly to the heart of the matter: ‘Did you show them to any room in the Hotel?’
Fort described how he had tried to hand Bisset and Lady Worsley out of the post-chaise and said that the captain had, quite oddly, hesitated before throwing open the door and ‘going very fast into the house’. He then ‘showed them upstairs to a room called the Apollo, a large drawing room; and they immediately ordered breakfast’.
‘What did they do after breakfast?’ Wallace enquired.
Fort didn’t know. ‘I carried breakfast upstairs and then I left them.’
‘Did they desire you to prepare any bedroom?’
‘Yes, as near to the dining room as I possibly could; and I ordered a fire to be lit in No. 14,’ the waiter recalled.
‘What happened next?’
‘I don’t recollect anything more,’ he answered with honesty.
But this was not enough for Wallace, who was finding Fort a rather impenetrable witness. ‘When the bed was made, what did they do then?’ he persisted.
‘They went to bed,’ the waiter responded.
Justice Mansfield was becoming irritable. ‘How do you know they went to bed?’ he thundered from atop his dais.
The young man, slightly cowed, addressed the bench. ‘Because, my Lord, I went to take the things away and they were gone out of the dining room’.
This answer did not satisfy the judge. ‘You did not see them go into the bedroom?’
‘No, my Lord.’ The prosecution was not making much progress. The Attorney-General altered his course.
‘How long did they stay there?’ he asked.
‘Four or five days,’ said the waiter.
‘How did they pass?’
‘As man and wife,’ Fort stated plainly.
‘Did you hear anything to import that?’
‘I took them to be Man and Wife,’ he explained, ‘and I did not hear anything to the contrary.’
Wallace pressed him harder. ‘Did you hear them mention one another in any shape, so as to take them to be Man and Wife?’
Unfortunately, Fort could not give him the answer he desired. ‘No, I did not.’
‘Had they only one bed?’ an exasperated Mansfield interjected, grabbing the reins of the cross-examination from the Attorney-General’s slack hands.
‘Only one bed,’ Fort confirmed.
In an attempt to dispatch a now lame and circumlocutory line of questioning, the judge at last demanded, ‘How do you know of their lying together, if you never was in the room while they were in bed and what induces you to think they laid in one bed?’
‘Because,’ Fort answered matter-of-factly, ‘there was no other bed in the room, my Lord.’
The gallery, who had been waiting breathlessly for the appearance of a lewd-mouthed and fresh-faced chambermaid, may have sighed with disappointment when the Royal Hotel’s matronly housekeeper, Anna Watkinson took the stand. She was John Lee’s witness. With no positive confirmation thus far that the couple had committed adultery in room 14, the prosecution was anxious to secure an indisputable admission of some form from the lips of Mrs Watkinson. Lee was determined to know what precisely the housekeeper saw the couple do in the Apollo dining room and between the sheets of the nearby bedchamber.
‘Do you know whether they slept in the room, or where they slept?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know whether they slept in the room; I imagine they did,’ the housekeeper conjectured.
‘What is your reason for imagining, or thinking they did? Perhaps you mean the distinction of sleeping and lying in the room?’
No, Watkinson confirmed, ‘I did not see them sleep.’
‘Did you receive any orders about it?’
‘I received orders to make the room ready, and I got the room ready.’
‘Had you an opportunity of seeing the bed afterwards?’ Lee continued.
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘Had anybody been in it?’
‘I saw that somebody had laid in the bed,’ she commented, hoping that this was the answer the attorney had desired her to produce.
It was. With this statement, Lee had netted his confirmation. Fort had already affirmed that number 14 contained only one bed and that it had been hired jointly by the couple, but Lee wanted to elucidate this fact absolutely to the jury.
‘You never saw them in bed, did you?’ he asked.
‘I believed them to be in bed,’ Watkinson clarified.
‘What was your reason for believing them to be in bed?’ he prompted.
‘Because I heard them speak in bed.’
Two individuals lying together under the canopy of the bed was enough to conclude that an act of sexual intercourse had occurred. Wishing to leave not an inch for error, Justice Mansfield required a verification of the identities of the post-coital couple. ‘Do you know who they were?’ he asked.
‘Yes, My Lord,’ stated Anna Watkinson. ‘I did not know who they were when they came in; but I have heard who they were since.’
Mansfield then enquired if the housekeeper had ever heard ‘the Lady in the room’ called by any name in particular.
‘Yes,’ Mrs Watkinson stated. When asked, ‘ … She said her name was Lady Worsley.’
As Wallace, Dunning, Lee and Erskine were alive to the dramatic possibilities to be teased from a trial, they reserved the testimony of the sassy young barmaid, Hannah Commander for their grand finale. For all of her insolence under Farrer’s direction, when placed before the severe faces of the King’s Bench, Hannah appeared demure and circumspect. Under the Attorney-General’s questioning she presented clipped, concise and slightly nervous answers. Wallace required the barmaid to produce two specific pieces of information: a further confirmation of the couple’s names and a statement that she had indeed viewed them sharing one bed.
‘Do you recollect Lady Worsley’s name being mentioned in the room?’ he asked her.
‘Yes, Sir.’
‘When was that?’
‘The 24th, the morning they went away,’ said Hannah, recalling the excitement of the day.
‘How came that?’
‘I introduced two persons, two of Sir Richard’s servants, a woman and a groom to Lady Worsley and Mr Bisset while they were in bed.’ This was a daring admission.
‘How did they take this behaviour from you?’ Wallace prodded.
Hannah launched into her account. It was a tale that had almost certainly been committed to the library of legend stored below stairs at the Royal Hotel.
‘Why, Sir,’ Hannah began coyly, ‘in the evening Mr Bisset sent for me into the dining room, and desired to know the reason of showing such persons up as Sir Richard Worsley’s groom into Lady Worsley’s bedroom; and said it was much against the house to use Ladies of Quality in that manner.’
Hannah had thrown out this arch turn of phrase to the hacks in the courtroom. It was inten
ded to inspire sniggers of derision.
Desirous of bringing the prosecution’s indisputable case to a close, Lee continued: ‘Have you seen them in bed at any time?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Sir,’ the maid confirmed proudly, ‘at one o’clock in the afternoon.’
There was little more that required proving. From the perspective of the handsomely paid prosecution, this case had always promised an especially easy route to padding their purses. At last, Mr Lee rose to his feet and questioned his final witness, Mr Herne, Maurice George Bisset’s rent collector. So that the jury was informed of Bisset’s wealth and what portion of this might be siphoned from him to compensate Worsley, Herne was asked to confirm that the value of his estate could be approximated at £800 per annum. The conclusion of this minor task brought the prosecution’s evidence to a close. The Attorney-General and his indomitable team relaxed into their seats. Worsley must have drawn breath. The worst of the ordeal was over. On what ground the opposition might construct their feeble case was anyone’s guess.
The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce Page 15