While Worsley had been purchasing marble fragments in the Mediterranean his legal representatives had been maintaining a tally of Seymour’s debts. In June 1788 these amounted to at least £3,445 5s. 2d., a total (roughly equivalent to £4.3 million) which had been amassed between London and Paris. In the French capital she had accured ‘small bills’ of £130 and had managed to persuade a Monsieur Le Clere and a Monsieur de Selve to loan her £350 and £200 respectively. Although a list of names and a tabulation had been formulated of the sums outstanding, Worsley’s attorneys were not convinced that this represented the entire amount for which Seymour had made him liable. To settle these costs, the lawyers required Lady Worsley’s complete honesty and a promise that ‘she will aid and assist them to the utmost of her power in getting in the bills of her creditors and expediting the payment thereof’. In truth, it is likely that Seymour had lost count of what she owed and her debts far exceeded the sum she had disclosed. For the next several years, as her correspondence with Sir Richard’s bankers suggests, she would find herself periodically reminded of expenditures she had long since forgotten.
Although the law required him to do so, £3,445 5s. 2d. was not a figure that Sir Richard was willing to discharge passively. For such an exorbitant outlay, the baronet felt entitled to demand something in exchange. As the deeds for separation were being drafted he expressed a particular concern that he ‘should be secure from any future debts Lady Worsley may contract’. Furthermore, he demanded to know if there were any measures which might be taken to ‘to prevent her from harassing him in future?’ Although Sir Richard was assured that he would no longer be held liable for Seymour’s financial troubles, there did not exist a legal means of removing her menace entirely. Lady Worsley would remain free to resume her malevolent campaign of persecution against him whenever she chose. It was within her power to reveal further tales of the baronet’s exploits, to shamelessly publicise private details of their marriage, to perpetuate rumours and to fell the character he was striving to reconstruct. As the law could not offer him a safeguard against such attacks, he devised one of his own.
Included in the final paragraph of the Worsleys’ deeds for separation is an exceptionally unorthodox stipulation. It was a proposal deemed so outrageous that when examining the draft of the document, Sir Richard’s attorney felt compelled to scribble in the margin, ‘I can by no means as a British subject approve of this clause’. It suggested that ‘Seymour Dorothy Worsley … in the space of six months … absent herself and withdraw herself from the Kingdom of Great Britain for the space of four years commencing from the time of her departure …’. The contract held that if she were to return before this period had elapsed, her husband would be entitled to withhold payment of her pin money. Without this lifeline of resources, Seymour would be truly destitute. This imposed exile was, as his lawyer observed, ‘very far from legal’. Notwithstanding objections from the couple’s solicitors, Lady Worsley, perhaps out of desperation to finalise the separation and liberate herself from her husband’s manipulations, agreed to the conditions. The form that her signature takes on the deeds speaks clearly of her relief at this long-yearned-for resolution. Whether out of anger or exultation, Seymour gripped the pen and violently scrawled on the parchment the name she had come to loathe, Worsley. With each pass of her hand she drew an emphatic underscore beneath it, causing the lines to bleed into an indistinct blur of ink. It was as if she wished to cancel it out altogether. Later, Seymour would look back on that day, the 14th of June 1788, which promised her release to a happier, more carefree existence. At the time, relinquishing her right to remain in Britain or to retreat to its safe havens doubtless seemed an inconsequential price to pay for the guarantee of financial security. She could not have imagined how wrong she would be.
It was with eagerness that she departed for France at the onset of winter and returned to her friends in Paris. But the attractions that drew her there, the possibility of a life pursued without shame, the ‘whirlpool of dissipation, pleasure and indulgence’ described by the comte de Tilly, were at their twilight when her carriage re-entered the capital. In less than a year, the freedom in which she delighted, along with the walls of the Bastille, were to come tumbling down.
21
Museum Worsleyanum
Over the years, Sir Richard Worsley had grown accustomed to inspiring fascination. The searching eyes and the quizzical expressions, the smirks and gasps were reactions he often received when in company. But after 1786 the expressions of amusement were more often born of delight than ridicule. With his box of ancient gems and a portfolio bulging with Willey Reveley’s sketches of foreign lands, Worsley had acquired the power of entertainment. Like a magician, he would slide open the drawers of his cabinet and raise translucent cameos to the light, illuminating the figures of dancing fauns and goddesses in chariots. Intaglios featuring the heads of Mark Antony and Caesar graven into precious stones were passed among his audiences. Ceremoniously, his valet would lay his collection of drawings on a table. Egyptian landscapes, the exotic streets of Constantinople and views of the Acropolis were unfolded in front of his spectators. Each scene and artefact prompted the spinning of a traveller’s tale and with relish Worsley recounted his heroic odyssey: the skilful avoidance of Barbary pirates, the dances of slave girls, the discovery of treasures. At a time when a rare few were fortunate enough to glimpse the pyramids of Giza or the friezes of the Parthenon, the baronet’s voyages were regarded as journeys of awesome proportions. His stories and souvenirs would have seemed as wondrous as those brought back from a trip to the moon. For the baronet, these displays were opportunities not just to showcase his possessions but to present his reinvented persona to the world. Whatever people may have heard before they met him, his dazzling box of relics and adventurous tales stirred admiration for his bravery, knowledge and wealth.
It had not taken Sir Richard long to realise that when equipped with his cabinet of curiosities, he had the ability to disarm potential critics and charm his way into the good will of strangers. While in Constantinople he had encountered Lady Craven, an associate of his wife’s and also a friend of Horace Walpole, a fellow collector who in the past had been less than complimentary in his opinions of the baronet. Worsley wooed her with his stories before reaching into his box of treasures and cordially ‘entreating [her] to accept of some Egyptian pebbles as knife handles’. Eager to cultivate Walpole’s esteem, he then presented her with ‘a coloured drawing of the Castle of Otranto’ which it was suggested that she ‘as a friend of Mr Walpole’s might have the pleasure of giving to him’. The generosity of these gestures achieved a favourable result. The flattered Lady Craven not only arranged Sir Richard’s passage to Russia on the frigate she had sailed aboard but delivered the drawing to Walpole, who received the baronet’s ‘very valuable gift’ with ‘delight’.
Worsley’s greatest success had been with the royal courts of Russia and Eastern Europe. By the time he arrived in Russia, Sir Richard had become accomplished at beguiling company with his movable feast of curios. His reputation secured him invitations to present his collection and to examine those of other enthusiasts. In Moscow, the baronet was offered a rare glimpse of the private museum of a ‘Mr Dinedoff’, the exceedingly wealthy owner of several Siberian ore mines who had amassed ‘a very extensive collection’ of ‘a few good antiques and some good pictures’ as well as ‘many curious petrifications and a fine collection of chrystals’. Worsley was less impressed by Dinedoff’s ‘courtyard paved with iron’, decorated with ‘several iron statues and busts in a bad style’. The collections at the recently constructed Hermitage Palace as well as ‘the apartments of the Kremlin’ with their ‘great amount of gold and silver plate of different sizes and shapes’ were also made available for his inspection. More significantly, Worsley’s renown bought him an audience with Catherine the Great, a devoted patroness of the arts. In St Petersburg he was summoned to the Hermitage, where he ‘went at 12 o’clock to Prince Potemkin�
��s apartments in the palace’. ‘ … The Empress came and stayed two hours to see my drawings,’ he recorded in his diary. Sir Richard’s stories and images of sand-swept antiquity made a marked impression on Her Imperial Highness, who later described Worsley’s pictures to the French Ambassador as well as to Baron von Grimm, her art dealer. In Warsaw, Sir Richard met with a similar reception from Stanisław August Poniatowski, the King of Poland, at whose enlightened court he was invited to dine with a circle of nobles, ‘artists and men of science’. The monarch was captivated by the baronet’s objets d’art and for the short period that Sir Richard resided in Poland drew him into his confidence; escorting him to the salon of the mistress he had recently married and introducing him to other members of the royal family, to whom Worsley also displayed his treasures. Even after his return to Rome, word of the baronet’s drawings and antiquities circulated throughout the capital’s community of scholars, both resident and visiting. Among them was the German philosopher Goethe, who commented that Worsley’s ‘striking reproductions’ of the Acropolis had ‘left an indelible impression’ on him.
But while the accolades of foreign heads of state and continental collectors were appreciated, it was the approval of his countrymen that Worsley truly desired. The unique objects he had amassed had been intended for their eyes, for the admiration of his learned peers of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, for men of state and influence. As Worsley had not simply purchased his collection from art dealers but personally dug it from the ground or bartered for it on foreign soil, he felt that it merited a grand fanfare. He did not believe that the conventional route of announcing his findings by publishing in the Royal Society’s journal would trumpet his achievements sufficiently. Instead, the baronet decided that his collection deserved its own book.
Although Worsley falsely protested that the idea of publication came to him after ‘listening to the earnest solicitations of some literary friends’, he had returned to Rome from his travels in 1787 with the intention of immediately beginning work on a text. For what would be an extensive task of gathering and assimilating materials, the baronet enlisted the help of Ennio Quirino Visconti, a noted antiquarian and the President of Rome’s Capitoline Museum. Sir Richard’s ambitions demanded that the volume, which was to be entitled the Museum Worsleyanum, would be written in both English and Italian. The decision, he claimed, was not due to his obvious desire to make his reputation as a collector known as widely as possible, but inspired by his ‘warm attachment’ to Visconti. Additionally, he commented with a hint of intellectual superiority, he had acquired ‘an early partiality for the Italian language’, which he felt was ‘best adapted for the explanation of monuments of art’.
Sir Richard intended his Museum Worsleyanum to be a work of tremendous proportions, in its scholarly impact and its physical form. Every detail was designed to impress its readership and testify to its creator’s exquisite taste. He spent part of 1790 and the early half of 1791 searching for ‘the very best paper to be had … on which to print my Museum’ and examining the copper plates to be used in the printing process. By the time the first volume was published in 1798, he had spent a formidable £2,887 4s. for the publication and binding of 150 copies. This sum doubled with the production of a second volume in 1802. It was later estimated that the entire expense of the project, including the cost of Sir Richard’s travels, amounted to upwards of £27,000. Not a penny had been spent with profit in mind. The Museum Worsleyanum expressly was not to be sold. Instead, this academic text, designed exclusively for the erudite gentleman, was to be awarded to select recipients whose esteem the baronet wanted to cultivate. He would not allow it to fall into the ‘inappropriate’ hands of booksellers, who would compromise its elevated subject matter by ascribing a price to it. Worsley went to extremes to ensure his volumes remained beyond the reach of commerce. In 1804, when hearing that a copy he had given to a friend was about to be auctioned at Christie’s, he hastily reclaimed his gift.
In 1798, after eleven years in preparation, copies of the Museum Worsleyanum were generously dispatched to at least twenty-seven gentlemen as well as to the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries. Among those to receive these grandiose gifts were his friends and brother collectors, Sir William Hamilton, Charles Townley, Richard Payne Knight, and Thomas Astle, as well as the President of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, the Prime Minster, William Pitt, the leader of the opposition, Charles James Fox, the naval hero, Lord Nelson and the Duke of York. The parcel that arrived at their doors would have been enormous. Due to its weight and size–16 x 22 inches–the unfortunate servant who took the delivery would have found it difficult to carry. When its wrapping was removed, the Museum Worsleyanum gleamed in its supple blue leather binding and gold embossed lettering. Its size meant that it would not sit easily on library shelves beside other tomes of dull brown: it required its own large space or to be exhibited decoratively on a book stand, where as a focal point it would command admiration. The Museum Worsleyanum was more than a lavish bribe from a disgraced baronet, it was also a blaring advertisement for the new and improved Sir Richard Worsley.
The publication of the Museum Worsleyanum represented the culmination of his ambitions and his final determined attempt to restore his name. The words of his introduction, puffed with pomposity resound from the page like those of a master of ceremonies. ‘Impelled by the love of the Fine Arts and anxious to view the celebrated remains of sculpture when it was carried to the highest perfection by the most elegant nation in the universe, the Greeks,’ he announces, ‘I determined to visit Athens …’ After several effusive paragraphs commending Visconti and Reveley for their contributions and boasting of the support he received from his distinguished associates, ‘with whom I lived in the closest of friendship’, he at last provides the reader with the meat of his book. As might be expected of ‘Sir Finical Whimsy’, the ordering of his objects is meticulous and scientific. The baronet divided his work ‘into six classes or chapters containing one hundred and fifty one copper plates including a title page’, the text for which alternated between Italian and its English translation. The first three classes were composed of Greek and some Egyptian reliefs, busts, full statues, heads and fragments. The next three were dedicated to his collection of engraved gems (the intaglios and cameos) and his collection of drawings ‘taken on the spot’. Each item was illustrated with detailed accuracy, which Worsley felt would make the work especially useful not only to the connoisseur but to the artist who wanted to learn from ‘specimens of ancient sculpture at the most flourishing period of its existence’.
In the mind of its maker, the Museum Worsleyanum represented a colossal accomplishment. In the true spirit of enlightenment, Sir Richard, as a member of the gentry had embraced his ordained role as a patron of the arts. He had utilised his wealth to liberate the highest examples of human craftsmanship from their neglected positions in the Mediterranean and delivered them to Britain in the name of scholarship. He intended the Museum Worsleyanum and the unique collection it described to be his legacy. Accordingly, the baronet felt entitled to brag about his achievements. On the publication of his magnum opus, Worsley wrote to Sir William Hamilton, a man whose life had been devoted to the production of his own exquisite books, that ‘without vanity’ he believed the Museum Worsleyanum ‘to be the finest printed book I have yet seen’. As the years advanced, such insensitive expressions, even towards a man who regularly addressed Sir Richard as ‘my dear cousin’, became expected from the increasingly anti-social baronet.
Worsley had spent roughly fifteen years engaged in a penance. This epic undertaking to assemble an unrivalled collection of antiquities had absorbed his thoughts, his heart and much of his wealth, but whether these Herculean labours achieved their ultimate aim is questionable. Sir Richard’s extensive travels on the continent may have been responsible for the government’s decision to award him the diplomatic position of British Minister-Resident to Venice in 1793. Although the b
aronet had been campaigning for Robert Ainslie’s position in Constantinople, William Pitt would have seen Worsley’s intimate knowledge of Italy as an asset at a time when Europe was about to tilt headlong into war. This posting, and two re-elections for the rotten borough seats of Newport and Newton between 1790 and 1793, went some way towards soothing his injured dignity, but failed to restore it entirely.
In his ambassadorial role, Sir Richard was able to assume what he considered his rightful place in the hierarchy of worthies. He could live with all the self-importance and splendour of a foreign dignitary. Centrally placed at the Palazzo Querini with a view across the Grand Canal, Worsley became the master of a fiefdom of British subjects. Any English man or woman of rank whose boat crossed the harbour to the Republic was greeted by him. Through his hands passed all of King George’s concerns with respect to British interests in La Serenissima. Matters of war and highly confidential correspondence came directly from Westminster to his desk. The baronet’s assiduous application to tasks meant that he was tireless in their execution, from his regular reports to the Secretary of State, William Wyndham Grenville, about the activities of the French to the watch he kept on British subjects sojourning in Venice.
His situation in Venice also ensured that he was perfectly placed to make additional acquisitions. To his plushly adorned residence he had carried his cabinet of engraved gems and the exotic drawings which had captivated Catherine the Great and the King of Poland. To these objects he added further pieces: dramatic canvases painted by baroque and Renaissance masters, sweet-faced Madonnas and Venuses and pastoral visions of Arcadia. Ornate, gilt frames held masterpieces by Titian, Veronese and Caravaggio. Marble sculptures and busts, fragments of friezes and masonry filled the corners and lined the corridors. The Minister-Resident’s apartments were a casket of treasures, a visit to which promised a dizzying spectacle for any British traveller fortunate enough to be admitted. The surroundings also served as a stage for the performances that Sir Richard continued to mount.
The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce Page 30