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

by Hallie Rubenhold

  He took his place in the witness box, directly on the heels of the Earl of Peterborough. Edward Bearcroft requested that he recount his observation of events. He was asked to confirm that 1779 was the year when he first met Seymour Worsley. Bearcroft then continued:

  ‘During the time of your acquaintance with her, what was your general opinion of her character and behaviour?’

  ‘I thought she did not conduct herself as a woman regarding her own fame,’ Bouchier Smith replied.

  ‘Was that her general character?’

  ‘That is the character I have heard of her.’

  ‘At that time?’ the attorney clarified.

  ‘Yes, Sir.’

  ‘Do you remember, at any time, meeting Sir Richard, when you and his Lady were together?’

  Bearcroft wanted his witness to recall a day excursion to Blackheath that autumn. Shooters Hill, which rises 432 feet above London, provided a breathtaking view for those in search of the picturesque. The ‘vast prospect’ afforded a panorama of ‘several little towns all by the river, Erith, Leigh, Woolwich etc., quite up to London, Greenwich, Deptford, Black Wall’. By the second half of the eighteenth century, when outlooks and spots of natural beauty were becoming tourist attractions, an entrepreneur had opened ‘a hotel on the summit to entertain wealthy travellers’ and provide them with refreshment. A party set out with this destination in mind. It was by no means a private assignation, as Bouchier Smith was anxious to imply. He and Lady Worsley were accompanied by a number of their friends, including Henry Harvey Aston (a noted libertine and cohort of Charles Wyndham) and Caroline Vernon, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte who had a rather unfortunate habit of featuring in crim. con. trials, having been implicated in her sister, Lady Grosvenor’s affair with the Duke of Cumberland.

  ‘ … Do you remember any particular circumstance, on the occasion of the Shooters Hill party?’ the lawyer pressed Bouchier Smith.

  ‘We met Sir Richard, in a phaeton; and Lady Worsley desired him several times to go with her; but he refused and drove off towards town.’

  ‘Did he inquire where they were going?’ Bearcroft asked with a hint of disbelief.

  ‘Yes,’ responded Bouchier Smith.

  ‘And she asked him to go?’

  ‘Yes.’ But Sir Richard, too preoccupied with other matters, had no enthusiasm for an outing.

  Although Bouchier Smith later claimed that Seymour’s behaviour was irreproachable on that day, his testimony succeeded in exposing her husband’s lax approach to chaperoning and offered the jury food for thought.

  The defence would soon demonstrate that Sir Richard’s indifference to Lady Worsley and the company she kept opened the door for his wife to intrigue with whomever she chose. The next paramour to walk through it in the summer of 1780 was James Graham, the Marquess of Graham (later the 3rd Duke of Montrose). Graham had first been introduced to Lady Worsley in 1779, at a time when he ‘was more prominent in society than in politics’, but their affair did not begin in earnest until the following year. Like her relationships with Wyndham and Cholmondeley, her romance with Graham was rumoured to be among her most memorable and heartfelt.

  Unlike that of her other aristocratic devotees, Graham’s life was not centred exclusively on the pursuit of pleasure. Shortly after returning from his grand tour, he appeared in London, intellectually fired by the events in America. Energetic and hungry for a parliamentary seat, he was described by the English Chronicle as ‘a young nobleman of very promising abilities and admirable address’. For Graham, eager to inflate his influence and make a splash in political circles, this was a thrilling period of party-going and socialising. At some point his trajectory through the drawing rooms and theatre boxes sent him colliding with Seymour, but curiously not with her husband. Again, as in the testimony presented by Peterborough and Bouchier Smith, this was a detail that weakened the plaintiff’s case.

  Graham was Howorth’s witness and the attorney was determined to serve his evidence up to the jury as a veritable feast of revelations.

  ‘When did your Lordship’s first acquaintance commence with Lady Worsley?’ he asked.

  ‘Three or four years ago.’

  ‘You was not at all acquainted with Sir Richard?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘In your Lordship’s acquaintance with Lady Worsley, did you frequently visit at Sir Richard’s house?’

  ‘Not frequently,’ Graham demurred, recollecting the various instances when he had called on Seymour at Stratford Place. He paused and then amended his statement, ‘I believe … sometimes I did.’

  ‘What were your Lordship’s observations on Lady Worsley’s general deportment and conduct, during the time you knew her?’

  The Marquess imagined Lady Worsley as he had known her two years earlier in London, unfettered by concerns and left unchecked by her husband. ‘She was gay, lively and free in her behaviour.’

  ‘Was her behaviour such that became a modest and married Woman?’ Howorth enquired.

  Graham’s answer echoed that given by Lord Peterborough: ‘I think it was not.’

  ‘Was there any absolute impropriety in her conduct?’ Howorth would have liked the Marquess to have confessed to scenes of debauchery but Graham disappointed him.

  ‘There was no absolute impropriety in her conduct.’

  ‘Then your Lordship, during the time you knew her, had you no reason to observe that there was anything in her conduct improper or immodest?’

  ‘Not immodest.’ Graham was being cagey. He knew where Howorth was leading him and as a gentleman, he found himself reluctant to follow. Like those of Deerhurst his answers were tipped with a hint of contempt, a distaste at the disrespectful tone of the enquiries as well as a subtle desire to remind those assembled of his superior position over them.

  ‘You are speaking of her behaviour and manner?’

  ‘I am speaking of her conduct as it fell within conversation.’ In truth, what the defence desired Graham to disclose–an anecdote of Lady Worsley’s lewd behaviour, a situation where she freely espoused a love of fornication, where she indulged in sexual congress openly, or wantonly exposed her naked flesh –had never happened; at least to his knowledge. Seymour did not behave like a Covent Garden prostitute, sodden with drink, throwing her arms around the neck of her swain. Her outward appearance was almost always circumspect. Her language was polished and guarded. Her sins were committed in private, or at least in the shadows and with a modicum of decorum. Such were the rules of intrigue among her class and she did not break them.

  But Howorth required more elaboration. ‘What was your Lordship’s opinion, as to every circumstance which fell within your observations? Was it, that she was a modest, decent Married Woman?’

  Graham sensed the lawyer’s invitation to incriminate himself and hastily recoiled from it. ‘That part which relates to myself I have no business to answer.’

  ‘Had your Lordship not the occasion to know of her ill state of health, from the care and attention you may have paid to Lady Worsley?’

  At this juncture, Lord Mansfield thundered in. Howorth had overstepped the bounds of delicacy and strayed into a potential quagmire. He was, with subtle implication, asking the Marquess to betray a secret. He had offered Graham an opportunity to reveal that, in the words of Horace Walpole’s biographer W.S. Lewis, ‘his Lordship received favours from the Lady that made a lasting impression … the favours were a veneral disease and Graham had conferred them upon Lady Worsley’. Although the Marquess refused to answer, the testimony of a witness who followed him confirmed the suspicions of the jury absolutely.

  In addition to several of her lovers, Lady Worsley had also subpoenaed her physician, and what Dr William Osborn revealed during a short stint in the witness box provided more substance to the claims of Seymour’s prior ruin than the words of five gentlemen. Normally, eighteenth-century practitioners of medicine were as bound by codes of confidentiality as they are today, but according to the London Chroni
cle Doctor Osborn had received a specific request from Seymour to ‘make a point of attending and declare everything you know of me’. The newspaper not incorrectly interpreted this as a desperate cri de coeur ‘ … which plainly meant, criminate me, as by that means you shall save my lover from the effects of a heavy verdict’.

  It was in August 1780, towards the end of her affair with Lord Graham that Dr Osborn was summoned. He had received a request to visit Sir Richard Worsley’s wife at their town house on Stratford Place, but had not been given further details of his patient’s complaint. As a reputable surgeon and ‘man-midwife’ who conducted a sideline business in the treatment of genteel ‘lady’s disorders’, Osborn was familiar with the protocol of his profession and what he was likely to encounter on his arrival. The doctor was asked by Edward Bearcroft the year and month in which he first saw Lady Worsley. He then requested that Osborn ‘Give an account of the condition you found her in.’

  The doctor was not comfortable betraying confidences, and before continuing with his testimony made a point of salvaging his professional reputation by clearly stating that ‘Between a patient and a physician there is an implied secrecy; the nature of the case requires it: and that being the state of the case, I should hardly conceive myself at liberty to declare it …’ Osborn then took a breath: ‘But, I have the Lady’s permission to give evidence of the truth.’

  Bearcroft intended to make this revelation as distasteful and shocking as possible. ‘You was not employed by Sir Richard?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ answered the doctor, confirming that his call to the Worsley home was not as a result of a husband’s promiscuous behaviour passed on to his wife. Rather, it was a case of the wife having damaged her own health.

  ‘In what condition did you find her?’

  ‘Lady Worsley had some complaints on her, which I fancy were the consequence of a Venereal Disorder,’ he announced.

  ‘In what state did you find her?’ Bearcroft questioned, in an attempt to gain further particulars. But this was difficult as Osborn, in keeping with accepted practice, had not actually performed an examination of his female patient’s infected parts. The practitioner explained:

  ‘I believe it was never known; at least I was never asked my idea of the disorder; nor did I think it necessary to mention it. My business was to cure her …’ Lady Worsley, or perhaps even her servant would have presented the doctor with a description of her symptoms. The word gonorrhoea probably never passed either’s lips. At a time when many individuals, as Randolph Trumbach writes, would quite literally ‘rather have died than have it known’ that they bore such an illness, delicacy was of the utmost. Whatever cure Osborn had prescribed, whether this was a daily application of a mercury-based ointment on the affected area or an ingestion of mercury either neat or diluted in a substance, the process was certain to have caused Seymour a good deal of discomfort.

  Although the doctor’s testimony had come at the insistence of his patient, Osborn remained extremely uneasy about the task he was being asked to perform. Not only was Lady Worsley’s reputation at stake, but his own good name. After his last pronouncement, Osborn abruptly informed Mansfield that he chose no longer ‘to talk upon the subject, one way or [the] other’, whereupon the judge excused him.

  If there had been any doubt as to the veracity of the claims presented by Lady Worsley’s three lovers and if the character witnesses had not already convinced the jury of Seymour’s tattered reputation, then the appearance of Dr Osborn established with scientific authority that Sir Richard’s wife had undone herself long before Bisset ever enticed her to the Royal Hotel. Additionally, Osborn’s testimony raised some fairly bald questions about the state of the Worsleys’ marital relations. Although Osborn was not prepared to speculate on his patient’s condition or the possibility that she might have allowed the disease to fester without medical attention over the course of weeks or even months, its implications were obvious: Sir Richard had not been playing his conjugal role in the bedchamber for some time, or, as one wag commented, ‘It is somewhat remarkable, that the careless husband never once complained of any injury he had received from his faithless wife; a pretty certain proof that he had, by neglecting her charms, left family duty to be performed by substitutes …’

  It is hardly surprising that shortly after receiving her infection, Graham, ‘the substitute’, fell out of Lady Worsley’s favour. His departure from the courtroom, as well as from Seymour’s calendar of intrigues, leaves a gap in the story of her affairs from around September 1780, at about the time of the general election, when she and Sir Richard were to become more intimately acquainted with their neighbour, Maurice George Bisset. However, the gossip-mongers and newspaper men were not content with such an incomplete catalogue of Lady Worsley’s conquests. With time, they began to pencil names into the blank spots of her history. This exercise in speculation began shortly before the trial and continued long after it had ended. Subsequently the lines between fantasy and fact began to grow less and less distinct.

  By April of 1782, the list of individuals alleging to have passed an illicit evening in the embrace of this ‘Messalina of the Modern Age’ had swelled beyond any credible proportion. Idle gossip, fanciful boasting and rakish innuendo added a full range of names to her roll of theoretical lovers. Grub Street satirists made use of the opportunity to attach the names of figures from other notorious débâcles to this most recent scandal. The quill behind the anonymous publication, Sir Richard Easy, created a tableau of farcical bed-hopping, which paired Seymour with Lord William Gordon (mistaken in the pamphlet for his brother, the instigator of the eponymous Gordon Riots), Sir Charles Bunbury (the husband of Lord Gordon’s mistress, Lady Sarah Bunbury) as well as the MP, Satanist and necrophile, George Selwyn and his regular sidekick, Charles ‘Chace’ Price. Whether these names, and others like them, were included in the official tally of Lady Worsley’s lovers can only be guessed.

  While Grub Street enjoyed coupling her name with those of other personalities for comedic effect, in some instances men were prepared for reasons of vanity to boast of their (often invented) exploits with Sir Richard’s wife. Horace Walpole writes of one ungallant gentleman at the St James Coffee House who after clearing his throat, produced a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and proceeded to announce, ‘I have been very secret, but now I think I am at liberty to show this letter … I have loved Wyndham, I did love Graham, but now I love only you, by God.’ Given the usual displays of decorum surrounding clandestine romances it is doubtful that a bona fide paramour would have been as indiscreet, especially as he also ran the risk of being lumbered with a charge of criminal conversation.

  Nevertheless, among the collection of self-proclaimed or gossip-nominated candidates were several plausible additions; gentlemen who had for the most part attempted to keep their secrets from the public domain, though not always with success. Among the publications that appeared filled with stories of Lady Worsley’s adventures, The Memoirs of Sir Finical Whimsy and His Lady seems quite convincingly to be built on insider knowledge. Its astute and anonymous author makes use of precise biographical and chronological detail that cross-references consistently with other sources. The work’s pages contain the names of numerous gentlemen, both notable and unknown, who were understood to have intrigued with Sir Richard’s wife. Ranking highly among those who ‘have been the subject of tea table animadversion among the ton’ was the Earl of Egremont. A prodigious philanderer and the brother of Charles Wyndham, the suggestion that the Earl might be included ‘among that number who have possessed an exclusive share of [Lady Worsley’s] partiality’ would not be entirely unlikely. The Worsleys moved in Egremont’s circle and are known to have visited his estate at Petworth in the early summer of 1778, while the South Hampshire Militia were temporarily encamped on his grounds. Equally conceivable is the suggestion that Seymour was intimately acquainted with other officers in her husband’s corps beyond Edward Rushworth and Maurice George Bisset. The fabulously
wealthy Captain John Fleming, a Member of Parliament for Southampton was cited, as was Captain Simeon Stuart, the son of the regiment’s former commander and a man regarded as ‘a distinguished favourite among the ladies’.

  The list continued. The author added to it the name of George Pitt, later the 2nd Baron Rivers. Pitt, who eventually was forced to sell his ancestral seat, Stratfield Saye to satisfy his gambling debts, was a neighbour of Worsley’s as well as a companion of Wyndham’s. By 1784 his behaviour had become so reprehensible that his father publicly admonished him in a pamphlet entitled A Letter to a Young Noble Man on a Variety of Subjects. Lord Rivers was still brushing the muck off the family crest left by the humiliating divorce of his daughter, Penelope Ligonier, when his son had begun to run wild. A misadventure with Lady Worsley was to become only one sin in a lifetime of errors.

  Alongside George Pitt appeared the name of Francis North, a military commander and son of the Prime Minister, Lord North. The author of Sir Finical Whimsy writes little about this affair, beyond a remark that it amounted to ‘nothing exceeding the common adventures of gallantry’, before adding glibly that Sir Richard Worsley had been foolish enough to ‘think himself highly honoured by the connection’.