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

by Hallie Rubenhold

  Denied the money she had been promised, Lady Worsley’s financial footing began to slip. By late 1783, her creditors came calling. Benjamin Turtle, the Duke Street butcher who had been supplying Lady Worsley’s kitchen with meat, underwriting her lavish dinners of beef, suet puddings and oxtail soup, was lumbered with an unpaid bill of £88, an enormous amount for a man who might support his entire family on £300 a year. After numerous requests for payment yielded nothing, Turtle attempted to use Lady Worsley for the amount outstanding. Here he and doubtless other shopkeepers were foiled by a legal anomaly. In spite of the overwhelming sum owed, Seymour had managed to keep herself out of the Fleet prison by pleading ‘coverture’, a law which made a married woman’s husband responsible for her debts. As their case for separation had not yet been settled nor the deeds finalising it signed, Sir Richard remained liable for his wife’s bills. Unfortunately though, while the baronet remained on the continent, beyond the reach of English law, he was under no obligation to pay them.

  Frustrated by the courts, the aggrieved merchants soon took matters into their own hands. Lady Worsley began receiving visits from the bailiffs. The debt collector, or bully or dun, was one of the Georgian era’s most menacing figures. These men, hired by creditors to extract money by any means possible were often little better than extortionists. Bailiffs could haul defaulters to their privately operated gaols (known as sponging houses) or simply frighten them into making payments. Even when residing outside the walls of a dun’s sponging house a debtor was not safe from his demands. Those stalked by a bailiff were frequently assaulted in public, pulled from their carriages and menaced in the street. Indebtedness granted bullies free rein to humiliate and coerce for their own advantage. As the Gentleman’s Magazine reported, in addition to exacting the sums owed, ‘It has been common for bailiffs when they have arrested a person for debt to drag him to some public house and order liquors of their own accord for which they oblige him to pay.’ A similar campaign of terror was launched against Lady Worsley. Because she could not be prosecuted for her debts in court, an alternative means of securing repayment had to be found. According to the Rambler, ‘The Modern Messalina’ … was ‘now … the dupe of duns and the prey of bullies’. However, moralists had little sympathy for her plight. Now that she was no longer the triumphant vanquisher who paraded herself about town, the voices of Fleet Street, which had goaded her on a year earlier, turned ruthlessly against her. For one who had so brazenly flouted the conventions of decency, this punishment was ‘a just reward for bringing prostitution before the public eye so often clad in the allurements of dress and equipage’.

  As bailiffs pounded at her door, Seymour gave birth to Bisset’s child in May 1783. The fate of the infant, whether it was born screaming or feeble, whether it died immediately or was sent away to a country wet-nurse never to be retrieved, is unknown. Like their daughter Jane, this child too has disappeared without a trace. But Bisset’s baby was not the last she would bear. With little hope of having her separation finalised and of receiving her outstanding alimony, Lady Worsley fled abroad in an anxious attempt to evade her creditors. Byers accompanied her to Holland and to the Belgian resort of Spa before abandoning her for more illustrious prospects. To fashionable gentlemen, mistresses were exchangeable commodities, expensive ornaments with whom one eventually grew bored, before being distracted by another more alluring object. For Byers, this new distraction was Gertrude Mahon, the hotly pursued ‘Bird of Paradise.’ Following Seymour’s jilting, the newspapers found it difficult to trace her whereabouts until May 1785 when she appeared unexpectedly in London, heavily pregnant and alone. The Rambler reported that she had ‘returned from the continent for the purpose of lying-in’, possibly enticed back to England on the false belief that the case for her separation had been progressed.

  The news of Lady Worsley’s arrival in the capital immediately sprung her debt collectors out of the shadows. She had hardly been in town for six weeks before a programme of harassment recommenced. Although Seymour had instructed her creditors to appeal in writing to her husband’s stewards and bankers for the money owing, she was an easier target. Once more as she reclined in her lodgings, resting her round, tired frame in preparation for the birth, the bailiffs gathered at her door. Desperate for respite and on the advice of her lawyers, she eventually agreed to make a small settlement. With sneering double entendre the Rambler reported that Lady Worsley had ‘called a meeting of her creditors and means to make compound payment as far as her little all will go’. As the press sniggered at her misfortunes and the bullies circled, Seymour took to her bed and gave birth for the fourth time. This child was a girl.

  On the occasion that his daughter was born, the infant’s father was notably absent. Neither prying hacks nor meddling gossips had been able to discover his identity. As Lady Worsley had conceived the child while in France, it is possible that her unnamed lover was still there. She was especially eager to return as soon after the birth as possible. Her fragile newborn was only weeks old when Seymour and her lady’s maid packed their belongings in preparation for an emotional journey across the Channel. Not yet twenty-eight, Lady Worsley had gained considerable experience of parenthood and the emotional agonies it brought. When children could be so easily removed from their mother’s arms by the strictures of the law or by death, it was folly to love a baby. Seymour had neither a home of her own nor a stable income, nor could she expect a lover to support another man’s child. When her own survival depended on the generosity of men it benefited her to remove any obstacles to attracting their interest. Before the child that she had named Charlotte Dorothy Worsley had even been born, Seymour must have recognised that to keep her would have been virtually impossible.

  In July, Lady Worsley departed England with her daughter. Once in France, she travelled northward through the velvety forests of the Ardennes towards Spa. It was near here that she handed over her infant to the protection of a local family called Cochard. This practice of quietly depositing a baby ‘in a distant province … with a respectable family who would never connect it to its mother’, was, as historian Evelyn Farr explains, a common solution to the problem of illegitimacy among the fashionable in eighteenth-century France. Who precisely the Cochards were, if they had a connection to the child’s father or if they were simply hired to raise Charlotte from infancy, will remain a mystery. However, as her carriage turned toward Paris Lady Worsley certainly held one thought in her mind: whether she would ever again see her daughter.

  The sumptuous hôtels particuliers and clipped gardens of the French capital offered a retreat like no other for the demi-mondaines of England. Distance from London placed Paris safely beyond public scrutiny and nearly out of Fleet Street’s range. For those whose reputation had been soiled by scandal, a sojourn across the Channel in the fresh, permissive atmosphere of Paris, promised to breeze them clean. Here, among the French elite, a sexual code of conduct prevailed which contrasted sharply with the accepted moral practices of the British. Unlike their English counterparts, French high society revelled in its extramarital affaires du coeur and sexual desire was rarely tempered with shame. Between the English tea table and the French salon, attitudes to such matters could not have been more divergent. As British readers searched for vicarious titillation in the reprinted transcripts of Worsley v. Bisset, which appeared in March 1782, the French beau monde were eagerly cutting the pages of a new novel, Les Liaisons Dangereuses in search of depictions of themselves.

  The British preoccupation with ‘virtue’ and the maintenance of a chaste character, especially among gentlewomen, was not an interest shared by their counterparts in France. By contrast with the circumspect, restrained behaviour expected of ‘ladies of quality’, their continental sisters were granted a great deal more sexual licence. The conventions that governed French marriage contributed largely to this situation. Even by the late eighteenth century aristocratic unions were predominantly arranged and mercenary. Young couples who knelt at the alta
r might have had no more than passing acquaintance before uttering their eternal vows. In Britain the elite were now allowing love to dictate their choice of spouse, but their French neighbours had come to divorce the feelings of the heart from the duties of matrimony. By way of compensation, the haute noblesse created an entire mode of life based around the pursuit of romantic and sexual gratification outside marriage. After the obligations of her wedding night were performed, a young woman might look forward to the most exciting years of her life.

  To any moralising English observer a French married woman’s reputation would have seemed virtually indestructible. To accuse a wife of reckless flirtation or displays of immodesty in such a liberal climate would have been considered absurd. Gouverneur Morris, the American plenipotentiary to France was at first quite shocked by the open behaviour of aristocratic ladies. While the practice of entertaining company as one’s hair was dressed or face was painted was customary in the eighteenth century, Morris felt that his French acquaintances took this to an extreme. On one occasion, while attending such a toilette he was taken completely by surprise when his married friend stripped off in front of him and ‘began washing her armpits with Hungary water’. He later wrote that among French women, he believed, ‘the public performance of the toilette’ to be ‘merely a game played out of coquetry’. Morris was amazed at how active wives could be in encouraging sexual advances, wryly noting that in Paris, ‘nuptial bands do not straighten their conduct’.

  The elaborate game of pursuit and seduction known as galanterie was played with equal enthusiasm by both sexes. It included an implicit agreement that a husband should blithely ignore his wife’s love affairs, her flirtations and male friendships while she tamely tolerated his mistresses. Beyond these ground rules, men and women were permitted to roam through the bedrooms of whomever they pleased, often engaging in short but passionate trysts. Perhaps surprisingly, this was an arrangement which suited female sensibilities as well as male. Evelyn Farr explains that, in a competitive environment where a woman’s allure came to be measured by the number of hearts she had captured, ‘the only reputation worth preserving was that of a desirable woman’. French society ladies would hardly have batted an eye at Seymour’s list of indiscretions, nor entirely understood what had precipitated such a scandal in the first place. According to one of the most fashionable femmes galantes, Madame de La Tour du Pin, women were not only proud of their catalogue of conquests but were ‘remarkable for the boldness with which they flaunted their amours’. Quite converse to its definition in Britain, a lady’s ‘good reputation’ in France was defined by her skill at amorous intrigue, while the figure of the virtuous wife was ‘ridiculed and dismissed’. This complete reversal of the rules made Paris the destination of choice for those maligned English ladies seeking absolution from the sins they had committed at home.

  Fortunately, for the many who flocked there, in recent years the French beau monde had developed a liking for the English. In the late 1780s, partially sparked by a burgeoning political interest in the tenets of liberty, high society had become fascinated with England and its traditions. The influence of this Anglomania was felt in everything from garden design to furniture, and from the cut of a man’s coat to his choice of horse. First among the Anglomaniacs was King Louis XVI’s cousin, Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orleans, one of the richest and most fashionable men in France. The philandering, hedonistic Duke had taken Britain to his bosom, literally as well as figuratively. Orleans had not only acquired a taste for the elegant, simply styled tailoring favoured by English gentlemen, but a liking for their mistresses as well. By the time Grace Dalrymple Elliott succeeded to his bed in 1786, the Duke had already wooed Mary Robinson in vain. Orleans’s penchant for notorious English women had the Rambler exclaiming that ‘La Quadrille de Beauties Angloises’ (Lady Craven, Lady Worsley, Grace Dalrymple Elliott and Mary Robinson) had conquered the French haut ton. They were not the only English imports to do so. The Duke’s passions were distributed equally between the bedroom and the stable. His preoccupation with horse racing took him and his entourage frequently across the Channel to Newmarket and on raucous visits to a kindred spirit: the Prince of Wales. At home, English jockeys on English steeds entertained him with exhibitions of their equestrianism in races à l’angloise. With such an audience, Lady Worsley, known for her daring feats on horseback, was given numerous opportunities to display her skills, although her risky stunts on one occasion resulted in her being thrown while riding in the Bois de Boulogne.

  It was through the Duke of Orleans’s circle of racing enthusiasts that Seymour was introduced to the composer and swordsman, Joseph Boulogne, better known as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Like the English demi-mondaines who had been pulled into the Duke’s orbit, Saint-Georges had great novelty value. The son of an eminent Guadeloupean plantation owner and his mistress, an African slave, the Chevalier had been brought to France at a young age and provided with an extensive and rigorous education. He excelled in both academic pursuits and the martial arts. At a time when an even mix of physical prowess and courtly manners defined the essence of a gentleman, Saint-Georges with his remarkable strength and impeccable charm came to embody that ideal. The Chevalier made his name as a champion with the stiletto. The fencing master, Henry Angelo who staged Saint-Georges’s famous duel with the cross-dressing swordsman Chevalier d’Eon in 1787, claimed effusively that ‘No man ever united so much suppleness with so much strength’. He later commented that the Chevalier seemed to possess almost super-human abilities, triumphing in ‘all the bodily exercises in which he engaged’. This included dancing, at which ‘he was the model of perfection’, and horsemanship: he was known to ride ‘the most difficult mounts bareback and make them docile’. If these physical talents were not enough, Saint-Georges was also recognised as an accomplished violinist, conductor and composer. Referred to as ‘Le Mozart noir’, he made his début playing with the Concert des Amateurs at the age of thirty in 1769 before becoming the orchestra’s director and later the founder of the prestigious Concert de la Loge Olympique, for whom Haydn composed his Paris Symphonies. To the beau monde who were perpetually in search of the latest distraction, Saint-Georges with his dark skin and striking physique became an object of fascination. Admirers were drawn to him, wrote the author Alfred Marquiset, like ‘a rooster who receives the adulation of a swarm of beauties’. His popularity made him an ideal addition to the Duke of Orleans’s coterie, among whom he acquired a reputation as ‘a very valorous champion in love’.

  It was as the mistress of the handsome Chevalier Saint-Georges that Lady Worsley made her return to England in 1788. While the swordsman cut a dashing figure, this liaison, like her relationship with Isaac Byers, may have been based more on necessity than romantic inclination. Although she received pin money, the demands of fashionable living in Paris were extreme, requiring constant additions to her wardrobe and a fluid stream of cash to replenish all that had been drained away at the card tables. Only the year before, the World had proclaimed ‘Lady Worsley to be living in poverty’. Since Sir Richard’s departure for the continent in 1783 she had been eagerly awaiting some advancement in the resolution of their suit for separation. In the spring of 1788, after five years of fleeing from bailiffs and fending off creditors, she received word that it had come.

  While Worsley had led his friends and fellow collectors in Rome to believe that his intended journey to London in April was for the purpose of publishing the intellectual fruits of his travels, his underlying motive was to settle the outstanding matter of his separation. After much legal manoeuvring, by 1788 the baronet’s attorneys had succeeded in overturning the ruling which awarded his wife a further £600 in alimony. Once satisfied with the terms, Sir Richard was willing to sign. He had not, however, anticipated the complex snarl of bills and legal demands that also awaited him. In his absence, Worsley’s attorneys, bankers and his steward, Richard Clarke had been besieged by the claims of his wife’s creditors, all of which ha
d to be discharged before the separation could be finalised. Lady Worsley’s debts were considerable and clearing them would require drastic measures.

  In June, the deeds for their separation were at last drawn up. This was to be an absolute parting where it was ‘declared and mutually agreed’ that both sides would live ‘in all things … separate and apart … as if unmarried’. After their signatures had dried, only their shared name would remain between them. The document outlined in plain terms that Seymour would ‘be freed and discharged from the power, command and restraint of Sir Richard Worsley’ while he would ‘make payable to Dame Seymour Dorothy Worsley … the several annual sums of £100, £100 and £200 for her separate use’. Although the sum of £400 was less than she had anticipated, the law required Sir Richard to ensure he had the funds to pay it promptly each year. In order to effect this and also to cover the expenses his wife had accumulated in his name, the baronet would be forced to sell the Stratford Place town house along with its entire contents of ‘household goods, linen, china, furniture and plate’. Worsley’s attorneys, fearing that the liquidising of this asset alone would not yield a sufficient amount to entirely reimburse creditors and defray the baronet’s legal costs, also suggested that he sell the portion of his wife’s jewellery still in his possession.