These and similar incidents demonstrated to the eighteenth-century public that connoisseurship emasculated men. It detached them from the practical world and enslaved them to beauty. Overawed by women, they were incapable of discharging their masculine roles and performing sexually. As Thomas Rowlandson presented them in his cartoons The Collectors and The Cunnyseurs, these were impotent fetishists, only able to admire and observe but not to please. The connoisseur may be a learned man, but he is also a confused buffoon, unable to grasp or admit that he delights in the unclothed female body. Worsley’s identity as a member of the cognoscenti when coupled with his behaviour at the Maidstone bath instantly qualified him to be counted among these feeble and sexually dysfunctional specimens of masculinity. Accordingly, the lampoonists who attacked him embellished their depictions with references to his deficiencies. As Sir Richard treats Bisset to a view of his naked wife, the creator of The Maidstone Bath, or The Modern Susanna has strategically positioned a water spout shaped like a drooping penis at the height of the cuckold’s crotch. The artist behind A Bath of the Moderns is even more explicit. By including the caption ‘Lately discovered at Maidstone, by Sir Cuckledome Worse-Sly, Fellow of the Society of Antiqueerones’, he draws a direct correlation between the ‘queer’ or sexually base activities of the Society of Antiquarians to which Worsley belonged and the behaviour of one of its Fellows.
To literate middle-class England, the connoisseur was a figure of suspicion and derision and Worsley’s behaviour encouraged their preconceptions. To them he was a man with irregular sexual leanings, a deviant, an impotent, possibly even a homosexual. In their view he was so stupefied by his love of art and beauty that the dangers of displaying his wife as he might a painting or a piece of marble were entirely lost on him. For committing such a crime against common sense Worsley was regarded as an idiot, ‘a blockhead’ with so little wit ‘that it should be wondered how … horns could sprout from such barren soil’. Not only was he a cuckold but ‘the sower and cultivator of his own towering antlers’, a man who for his own stupidity should be ‘naturally pitied’. In a period when the very essence of masculinity was defined by a man’s ability to perform sexually and to beget children, these pictorial attacks tore into Worsley’s dignity. Furthermore, in the mass consumption of such images Britain absorbed an entirely new impression of Sir Richard Worsley. Not only was it one that counteracted all that he had striven to correct since his father’s death, wiping away years of skilful politicking and reputation honing, but it introduced his name to those who would not otherwise have known it. Infamy, not greatness, had projected him into the public consciousness.
If this was not devastating enough, the baronet was made to endure one further splash of mud. There were those sceptics who would always believe that Worsley had played some deliberate role in his wife’s elopement. In spite of the fact that the jury had found to the contrary and decided in the plaintiff’s favour–that he had not been ‘privy to or consenting at all or contributing’ to Lady Worsley’s actions–many refused to accept this. A number of pamphlet writers when referring to the events of the case assumed a mocking tone, ‘commiserating’ that one with such ‘an immaculate bosom’, ‘such an amiable man should suffer by fraud and deception’. How did it come to pass, questioned the author of The Cuckold’s Chronicle, that on the night of the elopement, ‘at this very crisis, poor Sir Richard finds himself indisposed and is necessitated to remain at home’ and then ‘waits till five in the morning … with a patience truly exemplary’ to enquire as to his wife’s whereabouts. The incredulous suspected connivance, possibly even collusion. As a result he was made to wear the additional epithet of scoundrel as well as that of cuckold and to bear the unjust accusation that he had attempted to defraud the justice system by arranging the entire event. One hack railed that for his ‘vile compliance’ he ‘should be damned’. Many theorised that although he ‘pled ignorance’, Worsley had intentionally set up Bisset, his dear friend, for the purpose of extracting £20,000 from him. In the aftermath of the trial the public was willing to believe the worst.
But the public did not know the entire story. The scandal that had been loosened from its moorings at the court of the King’s Bench was only half of the drama. The gossip-mongers thirsted for Lady Worsley’s words. So far her lips had remained firmly sealed, but since the end of the trial, attention had turned in Seymour’s direction. The public eagerly awaited her account of events.
17
‘The New Female Coterie’
At the end of February, a plate of polished metal was affixed next to the door of a house on Harley Street. The brass square was so large that it was plainly visible to anyone passing down the road. A correspondent of the Morning Herald noticed it and, amused by its appearance, thought it worthy of mention. The sign suggested to him that ‘the celebrated Lady Worsley was preparing to crow over her victory’. No longer ‘resolved that her place of rendezvous be kept a secret’ she had ordered ‘an oval brass plaque as large as the panel of a coach’ to be bolted on to her place of residence. On it appeared her name, boldly ‘engraved in letters many inches long’. More than an indicator of her new address, this was an announcement to the world that Lady Worsley was unrepentant.
To the ordinary English woman, the seamstress bent over her stitching, the grocer’s wife boiling puddings for dinner, the banker’s daughter thumbing her way through the pages of Pamela, Lady Worsley would have seemed a perplexing creature. Whilst the act of eloping with her dashing lover may have captured the secret sympathies of the nation’s novel-reading women, the revelation of the affair’s sordid details would have disgusted even the more romantically minded. Seymour Worsley was a far cry from the pure-hearted heroines of books and plays. Instead, Lady Worsley, an heiress and the wife of a wealthy baronet, who led an existence to which the majority of the newspaper-devouring public aspired, had cast aside morality, comfort and dignity. More baffling still, she never once displayed a hint of regret.
At a time when convention governed every facet of a genteel woman’s behaviour from her turns of phrase to the outward turn of her toes, Lady Worsley’s indifference to notions of feminine delicacy was considered utterly indecent. As one anonymous moraliser wrote in 1780, the ‘offence’ given to society by a highborn woman’s tumble from grace was much greater than that bestowed by any other female, as ‘from her station’ it had been ‘incumbent upon her to have been an example of purity to the rest of her sex’. In the aftermath of the criminal conversation trial it was expected that Seymour would retreat from the public stage to weep privately for her lost character in a foreign cottage or the draughty rooms of some forlorn family estate. In the manner of Lady Sarah Bunbury and, later, Lady Mary Cadogan, she was meant to swallow disgrace like bitter medicine. Withdrawing from respectable company and its lavish entertainments, she was to wear her shame and mourn for the loss of her honour. Quite contrary to this, Lady Worsley displayed no intention of withdrawing from fashionable London life.
The denunciation of Lady Worsley’s character which echoed from the courtroom of Westminster Hall heralded her initiation into the sisterhood of the ‘fallen fair’. The final sentence of Finical Whimsy made it abundantly clear to readers where Seymour’s future lay. By the end of February, she had ‘already received the compliments of Lady Harrington, and Lady Grosvenor’; two women whose names were synonymous with intrigue and wantonness. Banished from polite society, Lady Henrietta Grosvenor reigned as the empress of the demi-monde, or ‘half-world’ as it translated from the French. Noted for her illicit amours, Lady Caroline Harrington presided as a queen ‘demi-rep’, a lady who barely clung to ‘half of her reputation’ by remaining married. Unlike demi-mondaines who ‘dwelt on the fringes of respectable society’ and were ‘supported by wealthy lovers’, a ‘demi-rep’ was, as Henry Fielding defined it, a woman of ‘doubtful character’, ‘whom everybody thinks to be what nobody chooses to calls her’. They were among the select few of their sex who by virtue o
f their high birth could slip between the drawing rooms of the haut ton and the shadowy underworld.
The demi-monde existed as an alternative society, the establishment’s polar opposite. Comprised of enchanting courtesans, coquettish actresses and divorced wives, it teased, intrigued and infuriated the virtuous world by mirroring everything that was celebrated in it. It rivalled its respectable counterparts, with its own beauties and fashion icons. The chaste daughters of shopkeepers and the wives of clergymen were just as likely to style their hair like the actress Ann Cateley and copy the gowns of the courtesan Mrs Robinson as they were to follow the trends set by the Duchess of Devonshire. Much to the fury of moralists, the homes of these Cyprians were as expensively furnished with Turkish carpets and polished silverware as the town houses of the elite. They had the temerity to charge through the streets of London in their own silk-lined coaches, in colours designed to flatter their complexions. Butlers and housekeepers opened their doors, liveried servants ordered their homes and lady’s maids straightened their skirts. They made themselves as conspicuous as possible, flaunting their lovers’ gifts, which glittered on their necks and ears as they sat in their theatre boxes.
The mix of envy, curiosity and po-faced horror which the demi-mondaines inspired fuelled the sales of newspapers. Henry Bate Dudley, founder of the Morning Post, one of the most successful publications, recognised the public’s desire to reap more than just information from their daily paper. To the disdain of his competitors, Dudley filled his columns with gossip, reviews, poetry, sport, anecdotes and smut. When in 1781 his lucrative profits allowed him to launch a second publication, the Morning Herald, he single-handedly forced a revolution in British journalism. All other newspapers rushed to revise their content. The hunt for scandal and anecdotes to fill the sheets of newsprint became fierce. Not a day elapsed without some report of the caprices and movements of the demi-monde appearing in print. Their decisions to take lodgings in Bath or to set off for the continent, the costumes they wore to masquerades, the money they squandered at gaming tables, even the details of their lovers’ tiffs, were all catalogued in the dailies. Much like modern celebrities, the demi-monde’s shamelessness accounted for much of its allure. Its inhabitants basked in their publicity and felt no compulsion to apologise for their excesses, since their lives were entirely underwritten by the titled, wealthy and the powerful; men like the Earl of Derby, the Duke of Dorset, the Duke of Grafton and the Prince of Wales.
Relegation to the outskirts of respectable life did not always end in abject ruin. Eighteenth-century instructive literature was unequivocal in its threat of a dark and dejected fate for those women who ‘turned out off the right path’. Disowned by their beloved families and cherished friends, without the comforts of a home and bearing the scars of a sullied soul, a fallen woman was guaranteed to experience ‘a great torment of guilt and misery’ for abandoning her duties to both her husband and her children. Having ‘lost the peace and happiness of their whole lives’ they were certain to ‘languish away and die most wretchedly’. John Fordyce in his Sermons to Young Women, one of the most widely read moral tracts, suggested far worse. Such debauched figures would in the eyes of society transmogrify into monsters, who smiled ‘only to tempt’ and ‘tempted only to devour’. ‘Their hands,’ he wrote, ‘are the hands of Harpies. Their feet go down to death, and their steps take hold on Hell.’ Needless to say, having crossed the Rubicon into this sinister other world, many found this not to be the case. The scope for a woman to recover from a fall from grace was largely dependent on her financial circumstances and social standing, and those with titles often found themselves shielded from the full blow of complete disgrace. By far the most heart-wrenching experience in the tumble from honourable woman to demi-mondaine was the segregation from family and friends, especially close female associates whose company and counsel formed the backbone of an eighteenth-century woman’s existence. In an era divided by gender, tightly bonded female communities were essential lifelines and channels of support. Mothers, sisters, cousins and aunts offered vital information about uniquely female experiences which not only encompassed advice on the physical body, pregnancy, sex, childbirth and hygiene, but intimate wisdom on personal relationships, etiquette and the trials and joys of life. Not surprisingly, the close circles that existed among women in the respectable realm were duplicated in the demi-monde. As Lady Worsley was to experience, intimate friendships were formed between members of the ‘fallen sisterhood’, who leaned as much on one another as they had on their now estranged family and friends. In Seymour’s case, these new female companions were no less high-born than those she had left behind.
After her disgrace, the one woman of her extended family group who continued to receive Lady Worsley was the notorious but socially acceptable Caroline Stanhope, 2nd Countess of Harrington, her sister Jane’s mother-in-law. Undoubtedly, the friendship offered by the much senior Lady Harrington was a comfort to Seymour, who was frequently seen in her company. By the 1780s, the Countess was entering the twilight years of her life. Known in her prime as the ‘Stable Yard Messalina’ and considered ‘one of the haut ton’s most profligate toasts’, she had led an existence steeped in sin. The least of her transgressions was that she used her home, situated near St James’s Palace as an unofficial gambling house, even on Sundays, when the aristocracy and members of the royal family could be found gathered around her tables. The Countess was also known for ‘making introductions’ and acting as an unpaid procuress to many of her wealthy contemporaries. When not counting gaming chips and pairing peers with expensive prostitutes, she took lovers. Town and Country boasted that she had entertained so many paramours, ‘from a monarch down to a hairdresser’, that their names alone would have filled an entire page. When arranging for discreet places of rendezvous, the Countess had called on the services of Mrs Prendergast, the keeper of one of St James’s most elite brothels on King’s Place. Over the years, Sarah Prendergast proved to be a trustworthy friend, both to Lady Harrington and to her husband, who was known to society as ‘the goat of quality’ for his ‘exceptional immorality’. It is believed that, between Lord Harrington’s four times weekly visits to Mrs Prendergast’s establishment and the retainers paid by his wife for use of the bawd’s rooms, the couple almost single-handedly supported her enterprise.
Although the pair’s reputation for lechery was widely acknowledged, respectable society was prepared to wink at their misbehaviour. Lady Caroline was the daughter of the Duke of Grafton and a member of one of the most influential families in Britain. Her husband, William Stanhope, a military hero and a politician, held the title of Viscount Petersham before succeeding to his father’s earldom. The Earl and Countess moved in the highest circles, attending state occasions and royal functions. Regardless of Lady Harrington’s misdemeanours, even the condemnatory and prudish, such as Horace Walpole and Lady Mary Coke, saw the advantage in coming to play loo in the Countess’s drawing rooms. The merits of Lady Caroline’s position spoke loudly enough for Lady Fleming and Edwin Lascelles to permit Seymour’s sister to marry the Countess’s son, Charles Stanhope. So long as Lord Harrington agreed to maintain her as his wife, Lady Caroline’s character remained intact.
Lady Harrington enjoyed ‘a frequent association with demi-reps’ and other questionable characters whose companionship led to many ‘injurious insinuations against her reputation’. As propriety barred her from receiving these acquaintances in her own home, the Countess made use of Mrs Prendergast’s plush premises. Here she hosted a regular gathering of demi-mondaines who were dubbed ‘The New Female Coterie’. The title, which was either self-appointed or given by Grub Street, was, with a pinch of irony, a reference to the Ladies’ Coterie or Female Coterie, an exclusive club for ‘women of quality’ which met weekly in hired rooms at Almack’s. Although the group admitted men by ballot, its founders were six ‘fashionable ladies’: ‘Mrs Fitzroy, Lady Pembroke, Mrs Meynell, Lady Molyneux, Miss Pelham, and Miss Loyd’. Quite brav
ely, the founders had decided to blackball Lady Harrington from the outset. According to Horace Walpole, the association came together ‘every morning, either to play cards, chat, or do whatever else they please’. Dinner was provided if required and ‘a supper to be constantly on the table by eleven at night’, after which the assembled ‘played loo’. Mrs Prendergast’s undoubtedly offered a similar arrangement and variety of activities. For excluded women like Seymour, the opportunity to associate with others from similar backgrounds was invaluable. In ordinary circumstances, no respectable lady would be seen entering a house like Sarah Prendergast’s, but the soiled reputations of Lady Harrington’s guests liberated them from convention. Inside the sumptuously furnished abode, decorated with expensively upholstered chairs and sofas in the acidic greens and pinks of the Georgian era, this ‘New Female Coterie’–whose core membership included the infamous Lady Henrietta Grosvenor, Lady Penelope Ligonier, Lady Margaret Adams and later Lady Derby, Lady Anne Cork and the Honourable Catherine Newton–sipped tea and champagne, laughed and gossiped.
The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce Page 22