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

by Hallie Rubenhold

  With pomp surrounded, impotently gay,

  In groans she spends the night, in tears the day:

  Compell’d alas! In horrid grandeur drest,

  To kiss the man her feelings must detest

  The censorious world should show some pity, she declared, as such a fate ‘might shock the hardest heart’.

  She points her finger at Worsley for making her into what she became. Although she possessed many ‘charms’ which lured men, these alone were not responsible for her or her husband’s ruin:

  For wer’t not THOU the author of thy shame?

  –what madness Worsley could possess thy brain,

  To help a Wife to an admiring swain?

  A wife’s ‘desire’ can not be blamed ‘When Husbands are the cause’ of their undoing, she continues. A woman is then free to ‘Sneer at all discipline, and break their laws … And shew no dread of punishment, or G——d!’ After all, as a married woman, a ‘knowing, well-experience’d Dame’, she has an entitlement to ‘Enjoy the pleasure, and despise the shame’. And so, following ‘nature’s liberal plan’, she admits to him that, ‘’tis true I fled, in hopes to find a pleasure equal to my lustful mind’.

  The Epistle made clear to its readership that by the age of eighteen its heroine had found herself locked in a sexually dysfunctional and loveless marriage to a man with whom she was incompatible. Feeling isolated, emotionally unfulfilled, and finding her husband physically repulsive, her despondency soon grew into resentment, and eventually into hatred. This sentiment, which her separation hearings and disputes surrounding her belongings had been keeping fresh, throbs through the poem’s stanzas. Cursing Worsley’s vindictive decision to apply for a Separation from Bed and Board rather than a liberating divorce, she cries;

  And must I live; yet breathe this vital air;

  And must I then this name for ever bear?

  Yet, thanks to fate! The name remains alone,

  for all the duties of a wife are flown!

  Although shackled to him in name only, and despite Worsley’s ‘decree’ that she ‘should be from such a Tyrant freed’, ‘this one deed’ alone, she proclaims, is not enough to lessen the revulsion she feels towards him. ‘I gratefully confess …

  If it was possible–I’d hate thee less;

  But fixt and firm as unrelenting fate

  Is my determin’d, everlasting hate

  Their union has been truly crushed, their enmity as immovable as that of political opponents;

  Sooner shall Sackville be to Saville join’d;

  With Sandwich, Richmond, North with Fox combin’d;

  Than thou again should’st be ally’d to me,

  Or I again be ever [fucked] by thee.

  With one strike of the pen, An Epistle from Lady Worsley to Sir Richard Worsley hit precisely the right note to raise a chorus of public outrage. The long-anticipated confession was everything that the followers of the Worsley scandal had been hoping. Depraved, yet elegantly written, it stunned society and generated a confused outpouring of condemnation, fascination and praise. Within three days of its publication, letters began streaming into the offices of the Morning Post and the Morning Herald. The work was ‘certainly one of the most licentious and immoral productions that has been issued from the press for some time’, wrote one indignant correspondent, who claimed that it was rare to find vice ‘painted in such specious colours and morality and virtue so totally ridiculed’. Sensibilities had been so inflamed by this ‘obscene trash’ that no general consensus could be reached as to who was the most morally blameworthy: the author, the subjects or society for enabling the pamphlet to sell so successfully. After examining the Epistle, one Morning Herald reader decided that Lady Worsley came out of the situation all the worse, as her ‘conduct is … rendered still more unpardonably vicious than the world has before supposed it’; further still, ‘she leaves us at a loss to know which we are most to detest, the very extraordinary supineness of the husband or the libidinous and insatiable passions of the wife’. Another believed that the publication shamed the baronet more deeply. Even though ‘The World has been led to imagine that Lady Worsley has been solely culpable’, in her Epistle, where she ‘endeavours to vindicate her own conduct’, it is her husband who is painted ‘in the most severe and detestable colour’. Scorn was also heaped on society at large by a moraliser who wrote to the Herald in order to vent his spleen on this ‘instance of the licentiousness and depravity of the times’. ‘The … eagerness with which the whole fashionable world purchase An Epistle from Lady Worsley to Sir Richard Worsley’ was ‘very shameful’. ‘It abounds with severe satire, indelicate sentiments and corrupt morals’, he comments, and certainly ‘ … it would be much more commendable for persons of distinction instead of exerting themselves to promote its popularity to do all in their power to suppress it’.

  Contrary to the wishes of the high-minded, the pamphlet continued to sell by the bundle. It was available to buy ‘at every bookseller in London and all of the principal ones in every city and town in England’. By the first of May, it was reported that ‘a capital bookseller at the west end of the town has orders to send 500 copies to a neighbouring kingdom’, ‘a number quite sufficient to corrupt the minds of all its inhabitants’, commented the Morning Herald. In the spring of 1782, anyone possessing the faintest grasp of literacy, from the shop clerk to the gentleman of leisure, was burying their nose between the indecent pages of Lady Worsley’s Epistle. According to one of the newspaper’s more irate correspondents, where moral principles were concerned, the situation had truly spun out of control. Returning from an afternoon at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition he put pen to paper in a fit of righteous anger. At this polite location, the site of an annual showcase of taste and talent, he ‘observed two young married ladies of fashion (whose names will be concealed) perusing this luscious morsel [the Epistle] in place of a catalogue of the pictures’; even more disturbingly, they ‘were commenting in the loosest terms on one of its most obscene passages, a single line of which is quite sufficient to call a blush to the cheek of those who have the least pretensions to modesty’. Ruefully, he concludes that ‘It is a shocking thing to think [at] what a shameful pitch libertinism is now arrived’, when even ‘ladies of the first fashion and distinction’ are no longer ‘ashamed’ to be seen reading such filth and can ‘go publicly into the booksellers’ shops to purchase it’.

  Frustratingly for moralists, the Epistle could not be so easily condemned. Although its sentiments were lewd, what made it especially dangerous was its recognised ‘poetical merits’. Critics were forced to acknowledge that where literary style was concerned, An Epistle from Lady Worsley to Sir Richard Worsley was deemed to ‘surpass all modern productions’. ‘The lasciviousness of … [the] ideas might be almost pardoned,’ wrote one of the Post’s aficionados, ‘on account of the singular purity of the diction, and the unspeakable elegance of the versification’. Even the esteemed Dr Johnson was compelled to comment ‘that it is without exception the best written poem that has made its appearance for these many years’.

  Naturally, speculation as to the authorship was rife. As the verses contained such intimate information and the sentiments were so convincingly expressed, eyes turned immediately in the direction of Lady Worsley. However, as the publication was celebrated for its literary skill many remained sceptical. If this really was ‘her own production she must evidently stand unrivalled as a poetical genius by any of the modern race of females’, wrote the Morning Post. Another of the newspaper’s correspondents continued that, although he could ‘readily give her credit for the depravity of the sentiments and the indelicacy of the ideas’, he had been ‘well assured her ladyship does not possess talents that can for a moment justify the probability of its being her own production’. If Seymour herself was not capable of creating such a masterpiece then certainly the Epistle must have been a joint endeavour, the work of that terrifyingly immoral intellectual sisterhood, the New Female Coterie
whom Lady Worsley mentions in her poem as meeting ‘at midnight … in close divan’, planning ‘future schemes of happiness with man’. According to one of the Morning Herald’s ‘correspondents of the ton’, the publication bore all the witches’ marks of the Coterie’s pens. He ‘affirmed’ that he ‘well knows the pamphlet … to be the joint production of Lady Grosvenor, Lady Worsley, Mrs Robinson and several others of the amorous corps–who are enumerated in the … epistle’; after all, ‘such ideas could only flow from the imagination of a juncto of such characters in conjunction’. The league of demi-mondaines maintained their silence on the issue of the author’s identity, though Lady Worsley eventually did step forward to put an end to the conjecture ‘that she is the authoress’. ‘Although the production is not mine,’ she claimed, ‘the sentiments it contains flow from my very soul.’6

  In the months since the criminal conversation trial, Seymour had grown especially savvy in her ability to manipulate the press. Although they may not have realised it, the booksellers and printers along Fleet Street had been drafted into her crusade against Sir Richard. It served Lady Worsley’s interest to make a spectacle of herself and it benefited the publishers to let her. Her scandals sold their pamphlets and their pamphlets were pure poison for her husband’s reputation. Since the baronet had refused to free her with a divorce, she would drag their shared name through the dung. As she had anticipated, the Epistle, her latest tug at Worsley’s chain, had brought about a reaction. Finding himself under renewed assault, the baronet abandoned gossipy London and took shelter in Epsom with Captain Leversuch and his family. Here, seven days after the publication of the verses, Worsley rode to Guildford in order to appear before a registrar. He decided to settle the matter of his wife’s ‘wearing apparel’.

  Sir Richard swore via oath that he had recently given ‘orders to Mary Sotheby and Lucetta Jones, two servants in my family to collect together the cloathes and wearing apparel of my wife … in order that they might be delivered to her’. These articles and ‘other ornaments of her person’ were then, on his orders, sent to Lady Worsley. He confirmed that this comprised everything, ‘all the cloathes and wearing apparel’ left in his custody, before pausing and adding, ‘ … save and except the jewels and a quantity of fine and common laces, most of which had been worn by Lady Worsley while she cohabited with me’. These items ‘of great expense’ he announced defiantly, ‘I … detain in my custody’. This would not be an absolute capitulation. Although he now stood in contempt of a court order, he was loath to allow her all that she demanded. The baronet would not permit £7,000 worth of gold and precious gems to simply slide through his fingers; some of it, he would argue, had been purchased with his money. What became of the two gowns of fine point lace is unknown, and the jewels were later sold by mutual consent rather than returned.

  The ripples caused by the Epistle were felt in areas beyond Sir Richard and Lady Worsley’s private lives. Its success had demonstrated to hungry publishers that there was profit still to be milked from the Worsleys’ stories. In less than a fortnight after the Epistle’s sensational appearance, The Memoirs of Sir Finical Whimsy and His Lady, a work which disclosed the secret history of the couple’s flawed marriage became available for public consumption. The pamphlet jostled for attention with The Genuine Anecdotes and Amorous Adventures of Sir Richard Easy and Lady Wagtail which arrived just over a week later. The race to publish these exposés was intense, as the author of this later pamphlet concedes that midway through his narrative he ‘was almost induced to drop the pen upon seeing an advertisement in the papers of the publication of The Memoirs of Sir Finical Whimsy’. Rather than ‘committing these pages … to the flames’ he ‘immediately communicated them to the printer’. Well into the second half of the year, a steady flow of witty rhymes and bawdy dialogue, such as that featured in A Poetical Address from Mrs Newton to Lady W——, The Devil Divorced, and The Whore. A Poem Written by a Lady of Quality, continued to dry on the racks of the printing shops. By the end of the summer the Monthly Review was writing with exasperation that ‘surely the public are, by this time tired of Lady Worsley whatever may be the case with respect to her husband or her gallants’. They weren’t.

  Sir Richard, unlike his wife, had no wish to court publicity or flirt with the press. He wanted to remain invisible until the newspapers and Grub Street were distracted by another wealthy cuckold’s misfortunes. Undoubtedly, the longevity of the scandal’s appeal, which was continually fed by Lady Worsley’s antics, surprised him. The appearance of the Epistle was for him the final straw. If Seymour had learned to utilise the press to smear his name, he might harness it in order to defend himself. Exactly two months after the publication of An Epistle from Lady Worsley to Sir Richard Worsley the baronet offered a response. The Answer of Sir Richard Worsley to the Epistle of Lady Worsley, a reply in verse, issued from his own pen.

  As Sir Richard had not hired a poet to express his sentiments, the hurt and betrayal in his verses is more immediate. He, ‘thy suppliant husband’, pleads with her to be moved ‘by compassion’s tear, if not connubial love’ to end her public persecution of him. It is the ceaseless defamation of his name which he finds unbearable, that ‘the Grub Street Syrens … now strain their hackney’d throats with Worsley’s name, and Worsley’s crimes and Worsley’s verse proclaim’. What must he do, the baronet begs, ‘to save from Slander’s tongue my injur’d name?’ before displaying, in heartfelt words, his injuries;

  Too late I now complain–the fatal dart

  Grows to my side, and rankles in my heart.

  The whisper’d tale escapes from ear to ear,

  Lurks in a smile, and wounds me in a sneer.

  Unable to endure her battery of words and humiliating stunts, Worsley concedes defeat. The actions he has taken, defensive or otherwise, seem only to rebound on him. ‘Fruitless is my aim’, he confesses, ‘and vain the toil’, as ‘Back on myself the blunted darts recoil’. Lady Worsley’s scheme to ‘damn us both to never dying fame’ by swelling ‘our mutual shame’ had been successful.

  In addition to stirring the reader’s sympathy for what he had suffered by his ‘insatiate wife’s’ behaviour, Worsley used his Answer to denounce his betrayers. Sir Richard wanted the world to see that Seymour was not solely responsible for his disgrace. The blame could equally be laid at the feet of the so-called gentlemen who had breached the masculine honour code and colluded against him in court. As he had with Bisset, he regarded this treachery as a severe crime, as serious as the one committed by his wife. While acknowledging that Lady Worsley could have kept silent about the freedom he granted her and allowed him ‘to have tamely borne, the destin’d horns, unknowing …’ he would not have been made ‘the leader of the cornute band’, the king of the cuckolds, were it not for her conspirators. It was with their assistance that ‘at a public bar’, the Court of the King’s Bench, his ‘follies reign’d, the food of ev’ry ear’. Accordingly, Worsley’s condemnation of this ‘too victor’ous band’, these ‘young nobles’ whose lives are ruled by ‘am’ rous joys and wanton loves’, is sharp. ‘You’, he addresses them, ‘who on record betray’d’ me must remember that it is ‘by noble deeds’ that one will acquire ‘a deathless name’, not through acts of ‘am’rous dalliance’ with an insatiable Messalina whose sexual desires even ‘your efforts never could remove’ and who you, the renowned lovers, were ultimately incapable of satisfying. ‘I rise above your breed,’ the baronet boasted with angry arrogance, and ‘More splendid honors deck my greater name’.

  Throughout his Answer Worsley does not shy away from suggesting that his passions are not as ‘fired’ as that of his wife’s. He refers to himself as a man ‘of old’, who looks to the cool, rational behaviour of the ancients and who admires ‘the gorgeous temple of Diana’, representative of chastity and restraint. The baronet offers no apologies for his sexual shortcomings and writes with surprising candidness about his bedroom failures;

  … I try’d the combat to sustain,<
br />
  Then first essay’d, but first essay’d in vain.

  Exhausted, spent, unequal to the fight,

  I wish’d the morn, and curst the ling’ring night.

  His wife’s appetite wore him out and although he was ‘oft’ entreated to pursue the race’ he eventually came to ‘shun … the loath’d embrace’. Worsley seems not to have cared what impact this admission might have on his masculine reputation. To his mind, Seymour’s ‘boundless rage of lust’ was unnatural in a woman. In response to the Epistle’s attack on ‘modern Beaux’, with ‘their looks, their air’ and their ‘pretty forms’, he springs to their defence. He claims that she regards them as ‘a doubtful sex’, not ‘men, nor women, yet so mix’d together’ simply because they cannot staunch her lava flow of sexual desire. Worsley then makes a frank admission and addresses her directly; you have been urging ‘me in print with vaunting terms’ to explain why

  I, th’acknowledg’d guardian of thy fame,

  Should, like a pander, prostitute thy name,

  And at a public bath in open day,

  To the wild gaze of youth thy charms display?