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

by Hallie Rubenhold

  Pye Donkin’s trial transcripts and the accounts in assorted newspapers were the beginning of a sustained campaign of destructive lampooning in both written and pictorial form. Sir Richard and his wife received equal treatment at the hands of illustrators and pamphleteers, though in the immediate wake of the verdict, Worsley, due to his more conspicuous profile, suffered more acutely than Seymour. Ridicule was a potent form of popular entertainment in the eighteenth century, and as the poet Mark Akenside expressed it, ‘fools who are ignorant of what they ought to know’ were considered among the most worthy objects of satire.

  Before pictures accompanied newspaper stories, the images which appeared in print sellers’ shops allowed the population to feel a part of current events. Almost as soon as reports of the latest political crises, scandals, and sartorial fads were set in type cartoonists had transformed them into lively and often subversive parodies. Animal-shaped politicians roared and clawed at each other while the bug-eyed King ate boiled eggs. Mountainous hair-styles caught alight, respectable ladies’ skirts flew over their heads, and fat bottoms filled chamber pots. No person’s misfortune was too tragic to portray, and not even the Royal Family was granted immunity from the satirist’s stylus. This sideshow was updated on a daily basis and drew a constant audience to print sellers’s windows. Those who jostled for a view were ‘of high and low birth alike’. Oliver Goldsmith commented that among such crowds, ‘the brick-dust man took up as much room as the truncheoned hero, and the judge was elbowed by the thief-taker; quacks, pimps and buffoons increased the group, and noted stallions only made room for more noted strumpets’. Sir Richard Worsley had everything to fear from this army of illustrators and print pedlars who would soon pepper the windows of London with his disgrace.

  In addition to his other misfortunes, the baronet’s life had been plagued by bad timing. On the 27th of February, the day he chose to re-emerge into the public arena and resume his seat on the parliamentary benches, William Humphrey, a New Bond Street print seller decided to hang the first of many Worsley caricatures in his shop window. With a ruthless flourish The Shilling; or the Value of a P——Y C——R’s Matrimonial Honor portrays Sir Richard’s moment of degradation. From across a table where the plaintiff sits, a bewigged James Wallace, holding a copy of the charges, tosses his client a shilling while ruefully commenting, ‘They would not believe you possess any of your contrivance for his peeping has ruined your cause.’ Worsley, looking over-fed and florid grasps his chest, his eyes rolling heaven-ward, his mouth gaping as if in the throes of a coronary. ‘O Lord O Lord no more than one shilling for my lost honour,’ he exclaims while dropping his sword (a symbol of masculine virility). From his head, a full rack of cuckold’s horns, the traditional emblem of the deceived husband, has sprouted, with each point bearing the name of a witness. Above this scene floats Lady Justice with her scales. As she points her sword at the damned baronet she utters a curse-like proclamation: ‘Take away that badge of distinction, Shame may transfer the colour to his face.’ As a representation of the judicial ruling, this first stab at Worsley’s character was a deep one. It played mercilessly to the gallery, that laughing mass who collected under the eaves of Humphrey’s shop, pointing and guffawing at Worsley’s freshly printed image while its subject, himself on view that day in Westminster, struggled to retain his dignity.

  Like a battery, the invectives followed in rapid succession: A Bath of the Moderns on the 4th of March, The Maidstone Whim four days later, The Maidstone Bath, or The Modern Susanna on the 12th and the coup de grâce of this collection, James Gillray’s Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly, Exposing his Wife’s Bottom; O fye! which arrived at the print sellers on the 14th. Unlike The Shilling, these works chose to focus on what became the defining incident of the scandal: the moment of Sir Richard Worsley’s self-ruin at the bathhouse. Nothing had captured the public imagination more than the events at Maidstone. The very act of a husband lifting his rival to the window had come to summarise all that was thrilling about this case; the folly, the titillation, the scandal, the corruption. It represented the instant that the Worsleys’ lives had tilted off their axes. The satirists immediately recognised the Maidstone bath as the crucial turning point of the Worsleys’ narrative. It was the breath-sucking moment of impact, when the fates of three individuals collided; the excitingly erotic first glimpse of an unclothed woman and the point of no return for one who had just committed a vital error. Each of the cartoons that appeared between the 4th and the 14th of March depicted this scene, and of the three individuals whose lives were irrevocably altered on this occasion, Worsley universally fared the worst.

  There was no mistaking the identity of the fat, compliant and foolish figure in the lampoons. Sir Richard is dressed as he appears in his dignified portrait by Joshua Reynolds, in the distinctive uniform of the South Hampshire Militia. But these images are not the glorified depictions of a soldier-philosopher, and he wears the emblems of his office with disgraceful irony. In The Maidstone Whim, he simpers stupidly as Bisset climbs on to his shoulders before planting a foot on the rack of horns springing from his head. As in The Shilling, this additional headgear bears the names of his wife’s various lovers. As Bisset hangs on to the balcony below the window, Sir Richard shouts out, ‘Seymour, Bisset’s looking at you’, echoing the words that Mary Marriott reportedly heard. A Bath of the Moderns offers a similar scenario but with a dollop of coarse bawdiness. The viewer is presented with a cut-away of what resembles more closely a country cottage than a bathhouse. Inside Lady Worsley dresses and her breast carelessly tumbles out of her bodice as she pulls her stockings over her exposed thighs. On the outside of the structure is Sir Richard with Bisset astride his shoulders. The dialogue is steeped in slapstick ribaldry: ‘Captain, do you see the whole Garrison?’ Worsley asks. ‘Only the Breast work and the cover’d way,’ his friend answers. Lady Worsley, meanwhile confides in Mary Marriott, ‘Blis.it, he goes to all lengths to please me,’ while the bathing-woman, sighting the lover at the window shrieks, ‘Lord, my Lady, I believe the Captain wants to be in the watering place!’

  For those who found this sort of mocking too vulgar, The Maidstone Bath, or The Modern Susanna offered a more aesthetic alternative. Its anonymous author wanted to create a realistic picture of the transactions at the bathhouse, drawing on two well-known ancient stories. The Susanna to which the title refers was a Babylonian maiden, who after being spied in her bath by two elders was forced to submit to their lust, while the inscription, Candaules Invenit, which appears along the side of the image, ties the players to the drama of King Candaules who opened the door to his destruction by inviting his servant Gyges to admire his naked wife. From behind the wall of the bathhouse, this contemporary Candaules assists his friend to a porthole where he can gaze on Lady Worsley, a Susanna, modestly posed like the Venus di Medici, standing in a plunge pool.

  The most iconic of these bathhouse pictures was created by the young cartoonist, James Gillray. Sir Richard Worse-than-sly Exposing his Wife’s Bottom; O fye! presents the same arrangement of characters and setting; Sir Richard squats down outside the building while Bisset, in a conquering pose stands on his back.5 Inside, a completely naked Lady Worsley is tended by Mary Marriott. Here, Seymour says nothing but coyly exchanges glances with her lascivious spectator, as her husband helps him to the view. ‘My Yoke is Easy and my Burden Light,’ Worsley says, while Bisset, playing the militia captain reports to his commander, ‘Charming View of the Back Settlements Sir Richard.’ Only Mary Marriott, in accordance with her trial statement, appears startled. ‘Good lack!’ she exclaims, waving her hand in the air, ‘My Lady the Captain will see all for Nothing.’ But the three parties are too preoccupied with indulging their whims to take much notice.

  Bribery was the accepted way of silencing the printing presses, but if Worsley attempted to take such measures there is no indication that he was successful. According to historian Vic Gatrell, in the face of such a barrage it was traditional for those subjected t
o the engraver’s mockery to ‘maintain a contemptuous silence rather than to stoop to challenge gutter products’. Outwardly they might express only fleeting disdain. Those such as politicians who were more accustomed to lampooning readily shrugged off the images as jests, or, as William Pitt deemed them, ‘the harmless popguns of a free press’. But for individuals like Sir Richard Worsley, who found themselves attacked for their personal failures rather than their political ideologies, the assaults from the printing presses could be genuinely wounding. As the fashionable classes were slaves to vanity, gossip and scandal could be lethal weapons in bringing down a reputation. No punishment was dreaded more than public demolition of one’s character. Relentless satirisation drove men like William Cobbett and Richard Payne Knight to despondency. Goldsmith expressed the fear of many who sat in the expensive theatre boxes when his character Charles Marlow in She Stoops to Conquer trembled at the thought of being ‘laughed at all over the whole town’ and being ‘stuck up in caricatura in all the print shops …’ Featuring in the print seller’s window was tantamount to appearing in the public stockades. For one accustomed to respect and deference, there could not be a more humbling experience.

  Worsley’s ruin occurred on a number of levels. The trial and its revelations exposed his weaknesses, the press and the print shops then disseminated them. Their writings and engravings helping to consolidate all of Georgian England’s assumptions and prejudices about men of Worsley’s position and about Sir Richard as an individual. They universally condemned him as an arrogant fool but also as something much worse. Among the most shocking revelations to emerge from Worsley v. Bisset were the acutely mortifying details of Sir Richard’s irregular sexuality. What became apparent to all of society was that the baronet was a voyeur.

  On its own, voyeurism offered no great offence to eighteenth-century sensibilities. ‘Keeking’ or secretly spectating on the sexual act or on unclothed women, while not encouraged, had a place within the spectrum of ordinary erotic experience. Exposure to the human body in unexpected and accidental circumstances was common. A general lack of physical privacy and a greater acceptance of bodily functions meant that one was likely to encounter uncovered flesh on a fairly regular basis. Before the widespread introduction of reliable indoor plumbing this might include frequent sightings of men and women urinating, defecating and washing on street corners, in alleys, in streams, pools, gardens and hedgerows. Neither the rich nor the poor had complete privacy. Servants were constantly moving through the rooms of their masters, while the poor bunked together or huddled into close living quarters. Under these conditions sexual pleasure had to be taken without concern about its visibility. Lovers of all classes copulated in corners, behind buildings, against trees and in the camouflage of the undergrowth. Prostitutes pleasured clients in shared beds, married couples made love behind curtained mattresses from which their children, parents or household staff might hear their sighs. Country dwellers stumbled across courting couples in the fields while Londoners cavorted in the metropolis’s parks and pleasure gardens. These sights were so common that they were likely to be most of the population’s first exposure to sex. In adulthood these experiences might take on voyeuristic dimensions as they often did in the era’s erotic literature and art. The majority of the eighteenth century’s most infamous works, including Fanny Hill, A Dialogue between a Married Lady and a Maid, and Venus in the Cloister incorporate at least one incident of voyeurism, where a couple or an individual are unwittingly observed by a third party. Engravings, usually created to accompany salacious publications, are also replete with images of the voyeur. Clergymen peek through grates at scenes of carnality in Histoire de Dom B——as bawds; Roman gods and putti observe the rutting taking place in the popular sex manual, Aretino’s Postures.

  While voyeurism in itself may not have been considered deviant, using one’s wife for the sport was. It contravened not only the traditional morality that governed married sexual behaviour and notions of female modesty, but also the dictates of common sense. As one moralist wrote, the deliberate exposure of a woman’s body was ‘an unpardonable crime … an offence against nature’ and should a man subject his spouse to the gaze of another ‘many inconveniences may arise from it’; not least, as the fabled King Candaules learned, a wife’s ‘wish for vengeance against such ill treatment’. Even to those willing to wink at the indiscretions of voyeurism, Sir Richard’s fetishistic interests would be considered a shameful abnormality and a step too far.

  Worsley’s secret would have been acknowledged only among his most intimate companions, gentlemen such as Lord Deerhurst and George Bisset who were honour bound to maintain their silence. However, after the sensational verdict revealed his foibles to the public, stories otherwise safeguarded began to circulate. In the months following the trial the popular press regaled readers with additional incidents said to have been whispered about town. Sir Richard’s practice of displaying his wife was rumoured to have begun shortly after marriage. Worsley’s vanity was cited as the root of his undoing. For a short period and much to the groom’s conceit, their union of wealth, youth and attractiveness had been the subject of fashionable society’s admiration. Sir Richard, it was claimed, ‘was not a little pleased at the fancied envy which he supposed himself the object of’ and as a result ‘never seemed so well pleased as when he could introduce his friends to a participation of his happiness’. The first opportunity for this arose during the winter of 1776 when Worsley hosted a hunting party at Appuldurcombe. The baronet was said to have enticed his guests with the promise of ‘a sight of the most beautiful woman in the world’ before ‘taking them to a glass door that communicated from his study to her ladyship’s dressing room’. There ‘while the unsuspecting beauty was disrobing [he] presented them with a side glance of the toilet’.

  Like the situation that Deerhurst had described in his testimony, it was alleged that these sorts of ‘presentations’ were commonplace entertainments for Worsley’s friends. A similar viewing was said to have been staged for Lord Cholmondeley, who at the time was already involved with Sir Richard’s wife. The spectacle was believed to have been the result of a wager. Cholmondeley, noted for his extensive knowledge of the female form, was invited by Worsley to examine his wife’s naked body and to judge for himself whether she was not one of ‘the finest proportioned women in Europe’. According to the author of The Memoirs of Sir Finical Whimsy, it was unknown to Cholmondeley that the baronet ‘had communicated the whim to his lady’, who prepared to titillate both her lover and her husband with an exhibition of her flesh. Under the direction of Sir Richard, Seymour was to disrobe, wash and then dress herself with deliberate slowness. Rather than performing this usual morning routine in her dressing room, she was to move to the parlour where Worsley and Cholmondeley could observe her from behind a sham door disguised as a bookcase. Together, Sir Richard and his guest squeezed into the aperture and awaited the peep-show. Lady Worsley did not disappoint them. In order to give ‘the umpire a fair opportunity of making an impartial decision’ she ‘displayed herself in the several postures, which the nicest virtuoso could have required: first sitting in front of the book case to draw on her stockings, and then setting her foot on the chair with her back the same way to tie on her garters’. It was purported that after the performance, and much to Worsley’s satisfaction, Cholmondeley was forced to ‘confess his wager lost’.

  As this distasteful aspect of the baronet’s personality came into sharper focus it opened the door to further conclusions about his character. To many, his voyeuristic habits were to be expected from someone so interested in artistic connoisseurship and collecting. Sir Richard defined himself as part of the cognoscenti; the intellectual elite. He allied himself with scholars of the classical world as well as acknowledged arbiters of taste, men who immersed themselves in the detailed study of artistic beauty, who debated its principles and dissected its components. In its pursuit, they ogled the round bottoms and firm breasts of marble Venuses, admi
red prostrate goddesses spread naked in bucolic landscapes, stared at disrobing Susannas, bathing Dianas and seductive Europas. However, as true connoisseurs they aspired to be unmoved by these shows of classical flesh. In the practice of evaluating beauty, they prided themselves on their dispassionate stoicism and strove to unplug their animal reactions. It was a type of behaviour that many critics believed to have a detrimental effect on a man’s sexuality. A connoisseur’s ‘dry aestheticism,’ John Brewer explains, appeared ‘to undermine his virility’. In relying exclusively on his gaze, the connoisseur ‘risked becoming merely a passive spectator in the thrall of feminine beauty’. It was argued that ‘looking took the place of anything more active’.

  This could be a genuine problem where the connoisseur’s wife was concerned, particularly as these men frequently ‘failed to distinguish between canvas and flesh and blood’. According to the moralist, Hannah More, the connoisseur had an unfortunate habit of regarding his wife as merely another valuable object for display. As he might with an antique urn or a painting, he delighted in sharing her beauties with his associates, permitting her to ‘escape to the exhibition room’ where she could be shown as if she were not ‘private property’. Just as Sir Richard Worsley had, his good friend and fellow antiquarian Sir William Hamilton fell into this trap. Renowned for his collection of art and artefacts, Hamilton also acquired an exceptionally beautiful mistress, Emma Hart who later became his wife. Emma, described by William Beckford as ‘a breathing statue’, was regularly placed on display at the collector’s villa in Naples. Hamilton would invite his guests to a spectacle where his mistress, through an artful use of shawls, expressions and postures transformed herself into classical goddesses and heroines. Hamilton, so pleased with his animate objet d’art eventually created an appropriate display case for her, consisting of ‘a chest … its front … taken off, the interior painted black and the whole set inside a splendid gilt frame … large enough to hold a standing human figure’. Given her exposure, it came as no surprise to anyone when, like Worsley, Hamilton became a willing participant in his own cuckolding by his friend, Admiral Lord Nelson.