What madness, dost thou say, could fire my brain,
To help a wife to an admiring swain?
And so he confesses that he had hoped to lighten his own burdens and ‘calm thy mad wishes’ through the assistance of other men, ‘brought … jointly to my aid’. Only then, he believed might ‘Their pointed efforts … have cool’d thy flame’.
Although Worsley concludes his missive with the same venomous sentiments expressed by his wife that he ‘hates her person’ as much as he ‘dreads her heart’, he intended to use the Answer not as a destructive weapon but a defensive one. Since February, the baronet had been subjected to a relentless tide of slander. His appeal to the public’s sympathy was an attempt to stop the attack as well as to counter Lady Worsley’s accusations. He did not wish to rekindle Grub Street’s dwindling memories of his ‘twelve penny verdict’ or to once again cause society’s critics to pass moral judgement against him. Instead, he wanted to issue a subtle but effective rebuttal.
The Answer of Sir Richard Worsley to the Epistle of Lady Worsley was printed once. It could be purchased at the shops of only three booksellers. In spite of having the Worsley name in its title, which would have guaranteed its sale at bookstalls across the British Isles, its availability was confined to the capital alone. Beyond an announcement of its publication on the 21st of June, the newspapers did not mention it. By bribing the Morning Herald and the Morning Post as well as the two most scandal-laden monthly journals, Town and Country Magazine and the Rambler, Sir Richard had taken the usual precautions to ensure that his verses would not be discussed, satirised or debated. It is likely that he knew his response would not bear too much scrutiny, that there would be only ridicule, not public sympathy for a man who could neither satisfy nor control his wife and who used his lack of virility as a defence for his actions. It is also probable that he feared his work would prompt others to come forward with additional tales of his sexual failings. At the time of publication, rumours were already in the air that Worsley had once pursued a number of fashionable courtesans, but that Sophia Baddeley, Elizabeth Armistead, Gertrude Mahon and Kitty Frederick had all jilted him for unspecific reasons. The author of The Genuine Anecdotes and Amorous Adventures of Sir Richard Easy and Lady Wagtail claimed that the baronet had been ‘frustrated in the amorous pursuit’ and that he was ‘despised by the first rate impures’. Vanity, rather than lust had been his motive for courting them.
Fleet Street and Grub Street had become Sir Richard’s persecutors and they dogged him to the point of despair. Their printed words and satires spread like poison into every corner of society, ensuring that knowledge of his misdeeds was distributed equally among men of politics, religion and law. It was with this last group that his greatest concern lay. Through the first half of May 1782, his suit for a Separation from Bed and Board was still pending at Doctors’ Commons. On the 15th, Judge William Wynne announced his decision to approve the separation. As anticipated, Lady Worsley was awarded the continuance of her annual pin money, amounting to £400. Additionally, her widow’s jointure ‘of two thousand pounds per annum’ and ‘the use of a dwelling house for her life … at the rent of three hundred pounds per annum’ were safeguarded. To the baronet’s annoyance, this clause also contained a number of perks, such as her entitlement to £200 worth of ‘household linen, china, furniture and plate’ that she might select from ‘his town dwelling house at his decease’. His wife would be well provided for in the event of his death. While these terms were not as severe as he had wished, to his mind they were not wholly unreasonable either. However, Judge Wynne’s legal ruling contained something far more objectionable.
It is likely that a Separation from Bed and Board had appealed to Worsley’s frugal instincts as well as his need for revenge. In contrast to a parliamentary divorce, husbands were rarely required to support their estranged wives with alimony payments. Provisions for pin money and a widow’s jointure remained as enforceable clauses in the marriage contract, but Sir Richard could look forward to wiping his hands of any additional financial obligations to Seymour. When the baronet presented his case for separation, it appeared to him to be a straightforward situation where his adulterous wife was clearly in the wrong. Judge Wynne, a Londoner, who read the newspapers and passed the windows of the print shops, who dined in the company of gossips, had begun to think otherwise. Although he did not want to condone the behaviour of an adulteress, Wynne ruled that this was an unusual case requiring special consideration. Sir Richard’s contribution to the destruction of his marriage meant that he should bear some responsibility for his wife’s uncertain future. Therefore, in addition to the award of £400 annual pin money, he ordered that yearly alimony payments of a further £600 be made. This £1,000 in total was to be given to her in monthly sums, the first instalment of which, the judge proclaimed to Worsley’s solicitor, ‘was now due in fifteen days’.
The baronet was outraged. He ordered that Heseltine issue an immediate ‘protest against the decree’ which he ‘found to be too much favouring Dame Seymour Dorothy Worsley’ to his ‘very great detriment and prejudice’. The appeal against the ruling was then moved into the higher Court of Arches where on the 4th of June, Sir Richard’s attorney appeared again to issue a complaint that ‘Sir Richard Worsley … was very much injured and aggrieved by … the ruling’. The demand for alimony was an insult. Notwithstanding James Heseltine’s fervent objections, the decision remained, with the minor concession that, rather than monthly, the instalments were to be paid on a quarterly basis.
All of his attempts at vindication had been crushed and Worsley was incensed. Incredibly, he had lost every skirmish to his wife; an enemy less well endowed and less justified in her cause. However, in this final struggle he refused to concede defeat. For the next six years, the baronet’s attorneys would continue to dispute the finer details of the separation and attempt to overturn the award of £600 alimony.
For most of 1782, Sir Richard had bravely weathered a ferocious storm of legal battles and personal smears but after so much abuse, cracks had begun to appear in his fortitude. No longer able to bear the sneers and his wife’s relentless taunting, unable to reside in London, unable to ride through Hampshire without exciting comment, the baronet realised that he must disappear. England must be made to forget him.
As Sir Richard retreated from the public glare, his wife surged forward. As the year progressed, Seymour’s undignified behaviour began to veer even further off course. It was reported in the Morning Herald that Lady Worsley had recently ‘been measured for boots at a well-known gentleman’s boot maker’. Shortly thereafter she appeared in public, ‘in buckskins, boots and long-heeled spurs’. However, it was not only her masculine dress that astonished but her sudden enthusiasm for dare-devil equestrianism. A ‘correspondent’ informed the readers of the Herald that ‘every morning’, dressed in tight breeches and straddling her horse, Seymour would ride ‘sixteen miles within the hour … with all imaginable ease!’ While riding in itself was considered a health-promoting pastime for both genders, extreme feats of sportsmanship were believed to be unsuitable for the female sex. Masculine competitiveness, in combination with too much physical motion, especially the jarring rhythm of excessive horse riding, was thought to damage the womb, which not only resulted in ‘hysteria’ but the masculinisation of women, possible infertility, and potentially miscarriage. Eager to observe this ‘female jockey’ tear across the fields, her legs akimbo, her bottom displayed and her thighs held taut in their sheaths of hide, the Prince of Wales arranged for a race on the Sussex Downs. ‘The scene,’ wrote the Herald on the 26th of September, ‘was a train of dissipation and folly.’ Everyone from the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cumberland to ‘the baron and the blackleg were in attendance’. On the rolling green hills, dotted with carriages and grazing horses, stood liveried valets and tailored men of the ton who had ‘assembled to see this exhibition’. A prize of 50 guineas was raised in this match between Lady Worsley and ‘Mr Villers’, the Prince’s
master of the horse. Unfortunately ‘after mounting her buckskins and half boots accordingly’, much ‘to the mortification of a great number of spectators’ Seymour ‘declared off at the moment they were expected to start’. The reasons for her withdrawal are not stated but she was to return later in the day to amuse her set of raucous acquaintances with further spectacles, this time as she raced in a two-wheeled phaeton, recklessly riding ‘so long in equilibrio that the least touch in nature would have reverted her fate and brought her flat to the ground!’ Even among the swaggering hell-raisers and demi-mondaines, these tricks were exceptional feats of audacity, not in the least because only two weeks earlier, Lady Worsley, without the slightest shame, had ‘professed herself pregnant’. To the onlookers scattered amid the tall grass of the Downs, her sudden passion for dangerous gallops was perfectly explicable.
In spite of her attempts, her efforts to miscarry would fail. As the child inside her began to grow, the Herald and the Post found fewer adventures of Lady Worsley’s to report. Although she continued to appear in Hyde Park dressed in men’s riding gear and ‘attended as usual by the Generalissimo Bisset’, her changing condition would not permit her buckskin breeches to fit much beyond the month of October. In the absence of substantial gossip, silence caused the public to knit together a collection of invented possibilities for the two paramours: that the lovers had departed for the continent, that a reconciliation had been reached with Sir Richard, that they were living quietly in an attempt to atone for their sins. What the matrons over their tea and seedcake would not have predicted was the announcement that came at the end of January 1783. Midway through her pregnancy, George Bisset had left Lady Worsley. The great romantic interlude had ended.
19
Exile
Just before dawn, on the morning of the 12th of February 1785, Sir Richard Worsley rose from his bed at the Villa Negroni. From the courtyard below came the hurried sounds of his Italian household readying his specially built carriages for an excursion. The two light, low-wheeled calesses (carriages), upholstered in leather and sprung to take the jolts of Europe and Asia’s pitted roads, were loaded with the equipment necessary for an epic journey. Mosquito netting, guns, candles, swords and copper cooking vessels, starched bedlinen and durable travel clothing, were strapped in next to boxes of maps and books on the history and antiquities of Greece, Egypt and Turkey. Eight horses were hitched to their vehicles. By 7 a.m., this lumbering train–which also ferried the baronet, his three servants and Willey Reveley, an English artist whom Worsley had hired ‘to make drawings of architecture and the most interesting ruins’–set out across the hills of Rome bound for Greece.
This was to be the second and most significant leg of a journey that had begun nearly two years earlier. Since May 1783, the baronet had been following a network of rocky routes through some of the most desolate corners of continental Europe. The searing gaze of ridicule had finally driven him to abandon England. Worsley had realised that only prolonged absence and a complete withdrawal from society might resuscitate his injured character. Like many others in the wake of disgrace, he had slipped across the Channel, hoping that the passage of time would dull the memory of his misadventures. However, in light of his wife’s persistent courting of scandal, the restoration of his reputation would be more difficult to achieve. The baronet needed to go to ground.
Neither France nor Italy, with their hotels and cafés bustling with English travellers, would have offered a respite from gossip. Instead, Sir Richard opted for a year-long sojourn amid the sunburnt hills of the Iberian Peninsula, a region beyond the itineraries of the casual tourist. Lisbon, the port city into which he arrived was little more than a network of buildings languishing in the rubble of the earthquake that had tumbled it twenty-eight years earlier. Few but the tubercular traveller in search of pure air, or the adventure seeker, could be found on the ‘strange and disgusting’ Portuguese streets, swarming with deformed beggars and feral animals. In terms of reputation, Spain fared little better. Its parched landscapes did not hold much interest for grand tourists, while its flea-ridden hostelries were considered ‘worse than dog kennels’. This was not a location for the uninitiated, which suited Worsley perfectly. Between the spring of 1783 and the late winter of the following year, he snaked his way northward from Lisbon to Cadiz and Seville, through the olive groves of Andalusia to Granada, arriving in Madrid in time to pass the winter. After nearly twelve months of hiding in the shade and dust, he then felt ready to emerge in Paris.
By the autumn of 1784 Worsley had begun to set his scheme for a lengthy expedition through the Ottoman Empire into motion. In October he arrived at Rome. He did not intend to linger. Still wishing to avoid the snarl of British artists and grand tourists who strolled along the Via Condotti and gathered around the brazier at the Caffè Inglese, the baronet hired lodgings at the Villa Negroni on the outskirts of town and hid behind its walls. But for occasional visits to fellow collectors such as Sir William Hamilton and a handful of art dealers, Worsley avoided social interaction where possible. Even in the eighteen months since his departure from England there had been no shortage of sniggering spectators; those travellers eager to fill their letters home with tales of foreign sights and encounters with the ‘Twelve Penny Cuckold’. It was precisely for this reason that Sir Richard had alighted on the idea of a Levantine journey.
Worsley hoped his absence from England would help the nation forget his dishonour, equally, he wished to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of his peers. His proposed tour of Greece, Egypt and Turkey, with a return journey through Russia and Eastern Europe, was to be not only a penance, but a self-imposed exile, a mortification of the character through the fire of the desert and the ice of the steppes. From this retreat the baronet intended to emerge both cleansed of past misdeeds and restored in the general esteem. To achieve this feat of rebirth, Sir Richard Worsley had to recast himself in an altogether worthier mould.
In the late eighteenth century there were few places so idealised and yet so frustratingly beyond reach as Athens. The mother culture which had given birth to the Roman Empire had in recent centuries received less attention from scholars than she was due. Travel to Greece, a region dominated by the Turks since the fifteenth century, was made especially unappealing by her frequent outbreaks of insurrection, war and plague. Consequently, the era’s fascination with the classical was largely biased towards Rome. Like his contemporaries, Worsley had been reared from boyhood on an intellectual diet of Latin and Greek writing, but his interest in antiquity had been broadened by his father’s influence. Sir Thomas had taken his young son up the steep Sicilian hillsides at Agrigento and Segesta and introduced him to the uniquely Doric forms shaped by the hands of ancient Greeks. This intriguing taste of an Hellenic past that predated even the revered foundations of Rome’s Forum lingered in the baronet’s imagination at a time when the scholarly circles of Europe were just beginning to consider the artistic contributions of Greece.
As few antiquarians had made pilgrimages to Athens or chanced a voyage through the outposts of Ottoman control to explore the Greek islands, the fertile banks of the Nile or the ruins beyond Constantinople, the precise influence of earlier civilisations on the sculpture and architecture of the Romans remained open to conjecture. It had only been in 1762, with the publication of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s Antiquities of Athens, that a movement known as the Gusto Greco had begun to stir much interest among British patrons. At the time Sir Richard was contemplating his journey many remained sceptical of the merits of Greek design. In the years before 1801, when Lord Elgin took an assortment of friezes and metopes from the Parthenon and shipped these exotic treasures to London, examples of Hellenic artistry were sparse in the collections of English antiquarians. The antecedents of Roman greatness could not possibly be examined in the absence of compelling specimens. It was in amassing such a collection, in assembling a sort of museum of Greek art, that Worsley saw his future. He would bring to England what no one
before him had: ancient Greece. In the process, he would immerse himself in the subject and emerge as an expert, Britain’s most knowledgeable proponent of Greek antiquities. Of course, the purpose of this mission was entirely self-serving. It was a desperate attempt to salvage the Worsley name from infamy.
On the day the baronet embarked upon his prodigious voyage, the winter sky ballooned with grey and burst into a shower of snow. The two calesses bumped along the roads south of Rome, travelling through the villages of Campania towards Naples. After a stint at Paestum where he and Willey Reveley paused to study the Greek temples constructed on Italian soil, they pushed onward through the bandit-filled hills into Puglia before arriving at Otranto nearly six weeks later. Here the wheels of their vehicles were removed and the carriages packed into the hull of a ship bound first for Crete and then for Athens.
Charting a slow progress along the eastern Peloponnesian coast, Worsley’s own three-masted sailing vessel, the polacca Aurora rounded the tip of Hydra on the 7th of May. By sunset of the following evening a spectacular vista rose from the water ahead of them. On the blustery deck Worsley pressed his prospective glass to his eye and watched the crest of the Parthenon take shape. This first sight of the exalted Temple of Athena filled him ‘with an inexpressible joy’. Much to Sir Richard’s frustration, adverse winds kept the ship beyond port until the 9th. When at last they weighed anchor, the baronet gave in to his excited impatience and came ashore. Refusing to wait for the assembly of his dismantled caless, Worsley, with Reveley at his heels, set off for Athens on foot, his enthusiasm propelling him along the five-mile route through a tangle of vineyards to the base of the Acropolis.
The structures on Athens’s ‘Sacred Rock’, the collapsing shrines once dedicated to the worship of the goddess Athena, enthralled him. With his draughtsman at his side, the baronet devoted two weeks of intensive study to these ruins, poring over the Erechtheion with its unique ‘porch of maidens’ and the once majestic Propylaea, the gleaming gateway to the hilltop’s temples. Long days were spent in the spring sunshine measuring, recording and drawing, investigating every worn pediment and cracked architrave. Of all these magnificent architectural creations, the Parthenon, its vivid metopes and friezes still in situ, gripped him with the greatest intensity. Worsley was mesmerised. No other experience during his voyages was to captivate him so entirely. This monument of human creation, Worsley eulogised in his travel diary, was ‘beautiful beyond description’. He returned each day for contemplation, writing on the 23rd of June that he had ‘passed the whole morning in the Acropolis admiring the beauties there’. ‘I could not help observing,’ he continued, ‘that the oftener these objects are seen the more effect they have upon the mind.’ Before his departure, he commented wistfully that ‘the ruins of the city … had given me the greatest pleasure’. They had also given his empty life a sense of purpose.
The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce Page 26