In spite of his disastrous relations with members of the opposite sex and the legal entanglements they brought, Sir Richard was never interested in leading a chaste life of solitude. By prohibiting access to his residences Worsley was in part protecting his domestic arrangements from prying spectators. He was determined to conduct any further amorous relationships in complete secrecy. Furthermore, since the ecclesiastical establishment still regarded the Worsleys as married, any romantic affair that either party pursued was tantamount to an act of adultery, although conventional opinion was kinder to estranged husbands who kept mistresses than it was to estranged wives who took lovers. Consequently, insight into the baronet’s thoughts, desires or conquests following the trial and separation have remained shrouded in mystery, but for two poorly disguised instances.
Perhaps adding credibility to the rumours of Sir Richard’s early associations with a number of fashionable courtesans is a document that attests to his affair with one such woman in Paris. In May 1784, en route from Spain to Rome, Worsley passed several months in France in the company of a lady calling herself Clara Margaretta Sophia de Auguste de Ceve de Villeneuve Solar, the Countess d’Amey. In reality, the Countess d’Amey’s claim to noble birth was complete fabrication; she was commonly known as ‘Madame Palmerini’. Sir Richard had been fully aware of her identity when she became his mistress and subsequently attempted to defraud him of 75,000 livres. Their four-month liaison ended at the baronet’s solicitors in 1787, after the Countess d’Amey had travelled to London in an unsuccessful bid to obtain her money.
Worsley’s next relationship was concealed only slightly better. In December 1796, Lady Berwick wrote from Venice glowingly of the British Minister-Resident to her friend, Lady Bruce. She had believed that the ‘very civil’ gentleman who paid them visits and sent them ‘all the newspapers’ would have made a suitable husband for her eldest daughter, had she not learned that he kept ‘a bad woman’. ‘I am afraid,’ she wrote with gravity, that ‘she is one very bad woman’. The person to whom Lady Berwick referred was a self-professed widow by the name of Mrs Sarah Smith. Sarah Smith’s background and history are unknown, but she is thought to have entered Worsley’s life on his return from Italy in 1788. On legal documents she is cited as Sir Richard’s housekeeper, an eighteenth-century euphemism frequently employed to veil a relationship when a couple of unequal social status were cohabiting. Having travelled with her lover from England to Venice and braved the perilous journey by sea and land back to the Isle of Wight, Mrs Smith was undeniably a most dedicated mistress. It is hard to imagine that anything but a genuine love held the two together.
Although his relationship with Sarah Smith managed to withstand the adversities of the 1790s, Worsley’s finances did not fare so well. The protracted dispute surrounding his separation, and the expenses necessary to underwrite his travels and fondness for collecting, had by 1792 become a drain on the profitability of his estate. His situation was worsened still more by his hasty removal from Venice and loss of a position that had paid him a living of £600 per annum. He returned home in 1797 to a pile of bills, many of which had been outstanding since his departure four years earlier. Re-establishing himself in England involved further costs and resulted in the mortgage of several of his properties as well as a request for a £10,000 bank loan. The worst in a series of pecuniary calamities was to befall him in 1801.
By then four years had passed since Worsley had abandoned his collection of masterpieces in Fiume. As one of Napoleon’s objectives in his conquest of Italy had been the appropriation of the country’s celebrated works of art, Sir Richard’s vessel, its creaking hull loaded with booty, must have been an appealing spoil of war. After February 1801, when the defeat of Austria ceded further territories in Europe to the French, concealing the ship and its cargo would have proved even more difficult. In March, Worsley had ordered that the Robert Pattison, the hulk carrying his possessions, attempt to run the French blockade of the Mediterranean and sail for England. Six months later he received a letter. The vessel, which ‘had been brought into port at Malaga by a French Privateer’, had been emptied of its contents. ‘The pictures were bought up by the orders of Lucian Bonaparte on very moderate terms,’ wrote his correspondent, an agent of the British government. ‘ … All that remains at present are the antiquities which it is in my power to purchase’; the ‘original drawings of the Museum Worsleyanum and the other engravings’ he commented, ‘may also be had for a price’. In Venice, Sir Richard had purchased a number of historic manuscripts which, the agent mentioned with regret, ‘were all seized by the French Commissary’ and, with the other items, ‘forwarded to Paris’. Edward Bedingfield, the fateful letter’s author had requested that Worsley advise him on the size of ransom he wished to pay to have the remnants of his collection returned.
The baronet had valued his collection of fifty-eight Italian paintings at £14,000, a sum that is difficult to translate into modern worth when today one work by Titian alone might command as much as £7.48 million. For a short while, Sir Richard had been one of the few connoisseurs to have profited by the upheaval of the war, and now it was the turn of others to gain through his misfortune. With a certain smugness he had crowed too loudly and too soon about the acquisitions he had made at the expense of those caught up in the conflict. Many of the smaller objects he had added to his expanding cabinet of curiosities (which fortunately had accompanied him overland from Fiume to England) he had boasted of purchasing for a fraction of their actual worth. In 1794 he had acquired ‘a remarkable fine opal set around with diamonds’ from the collection of ‘a famous banker at Paris’ who ‘sent it to Italy to be disposed of’. Worsley had bought it for ‘278 sequins, but it has been valued by several jewellers at 1,000’. A cameo of ‘Alexander the Great, beautifully engraved’ had come from the closet of ‘the late Duke of Orleans’, a ‘beautiful head of cupid’ and ‘a vase with two pigeons’ had been sold by the Prince of Santa Croce, and ‘a head of Cybele on a large onyx’ came ‘from the Prince of Comte’ whose ‘Valet de Chambre sold it at Milan’. A significant number of the baronet’s treasures had once lined the corridors and salons of Europe’s noble families, many of whom were in need of emergency funds and preferred to sell their holdings rather than ‘have them fall into the hands of the French’.
In spite of the precarious state of his finances, Sir Richard agreed to the demands of the French and paid the bounty placed on his antiquities, drawings and engravings. However, the loss of his paintings was a defeat that far superseded the agonies of an additional and unnecessary expenditure. The emotional value ascribed to this vanished assembly of art by an heirless landowner determined to create a positive legacy for his damaged name was immeasurable. Bedingfield had conveyed what undoubtedly were the sentiments of many when he wrote at the end of his letter, ‘I feel sincerely for the loss you have sustained … it is a painful circumstance that you as a literary man should also be involved in the fatal consequences of the present war’.
This latest calamity finally induced Sir Richard Worsley to abandon what remained of his sense of restraint. The once prudent, methodically minded Finical Whimsy, who had balanced the King’s accounts with scientific precision, had been pushed to the brink. After 1801, the baronet dispensed entirely with caution. His lifelong interest in art suddenly boiled over into mania. Worsley’s bid to immortalise his memory by affixing it to antique sculpture and old master paintings reached new heights of desperation. These objects, the embodiment of the highest taste and scholarship, would represent him in centuries to come, where no living legacy could. In the last four years of his life, the baronet seemed determine to run through every penny his estate could yield in order to preserve his own memory for posterity.
Like a character from one of the era’s Gothic novels, Sir Richard sank deeper into the isolation of Sea Cottage. The dark temperament that Jeremy Bentham had identified as ‘haughty, selfish and mean’ had over time evolved into one which was also angry, embit
tered and withdrawn. Rarely straying beyond the boundaries of his property, Worsley recoiled from social contact but for occasional visits from those who shared his artistic interests. By making it known that his sole concern was the expansion of his collection, the baronet laid himself open to the schemes of conniving art dealers.
Worsley’s chief agent on the art market was the London-based William Dermer, who bombarded him with frequent propositions. He was also regularly approached by those with a sideline in the sale of paintings, such as the artist Benjamin West and fellow connoisseur, Charles Birch. Weakened by avarice and obsession, Sir Richard found it difficult to refuse their constant solicitations, especially when couched in grovelling flattery. ‘When I consider the admirers of the elegant arts in this country and how few there are who feel the higher excellencies of the great schools of painting–I know of no one I can address on that subject who feels those excellencies in a higher degree than yourself,’ wrote Benjamin West in a bid to sell Worsley a painting by Alessandro Paduano which had been ‘acquired on moderate terms … when the troubles commenced in Paris’. On occasion, when hesitation got the better of the baronet, dealers joined forces in a double assault. William Dermer, eager to sell ‘an exceptional work by Claude’, employed Charles Birch to write with an ‘impartial’ connoisseur’s opinion. His thoughts were that ‘Mr Dermer’s Claude is decidedly the most enchanting and capital performance in this kingdom’ and that naturally, ‘so high a character as yourself for discernment and encouragement of art’ should own it. In spite of the transparency of their intentions, on this and many other occasions Sir Richard accepted their approaches without much scepticism, and let himself be swept away in the current of their designs.
By 1803, Worsley seems to have purchased nearly every work offered to him by Dermer. The Claude was joined by a Velázquez, a ‘frost piece’ by the Dutch painter Cuyp, three paintings by Andrea del Sarto, a Greuze ‘from the late King’s collection in Paris’ and an Annibale Carracci, also brought from across the Channel. The very act of acquiring these paintings became a dance of futility. No sooner would Worsley agree to buy them than his bankers, solicitors or stewards would remind him of his financial shortfall. The art he had bought six months or a year earlier would then be sold back to Dermer at a loss. Towards the end of his life it is unlikely that Sir Richard so much as glimpsed a number of his pieces, a large selection of which were stored at his house in Grosvenor Square, a home he no longer visited. Others were delivered by cart to Appuldurcombe where they lay stacked in the uninhabited rooms. After his return from Venice, the ancestral dwelling of which he was once so proud, and so eager to embellish with fashionable Chippendale furniture and neo-classical décor, held nothing for him but the poison of memories. With its owner unwilling to live within its walls, Appuldurcombe grew into a cold mausoleum of antiquities and silent painted faces.
Sir Richard was unwell for most of the summer before he died. Yet even as he lay on his deathbed he allowed Dermer (obviously distressed at the prospect of losing such a good client) to continue to tempt him with objects. His letters were filled with promises of a picture which could ‘vie with the famous Mary in the Orleans collection’ and two more Carraccis ‘brought into England by Mr Day’. ‘I trust and believe that your collection will go down to posterity unrivalled both as to its founder and the beauty and perfection of the respective pictures,’ he reassured him. But all of Dermer’s obsequiousness and even a special batch of his own ‘ginger extract remedy’ failed to sustain the baronet’s flagging health. In 1805, on the 5th of August Worsley suffered an apoplexy (or a stroke) and expired. Mrs Smith had been with him throughout. Fifty-four was not an inconsiderable age at which to die in the early nineteenth century, but his life would hardly have been regarded as a long one. A miniature portrait made of him in his final years shows a man with an expression not unlike that of the self-assured young baronet in Reynolds’s image of 1775. The eyes of this older Sir Richard Worsley with his jowly jaw line and puffy face are as defiant as they had been in his youth, but the gaze is different. Whilst the young baronet regarded his viewer with a hint of disdain, the old baronet looks out from his frame with suspicion, as if wary that anyone should want to observe him for any length of time.
Ultimately, the legacy that Sir Richard Worsley left fell far short of the one he had envisioned. At his death his estate was more than £6,679 in debt. With so few assets which he could legally claim, the baronet had not bothered registering an official will. Instead he had written out directions to his steward to reward Sarah Smith with an annuity of £250 per annum so she could continue her life in comfort. The estate of Appuldurcombe–the land, the house, its contents and its unpaid bills–was passed to his niece, Henrietta Anna Maria Charlotte Bridgeman Simpson, the daughter of his sister, Henrietta. Sir Richard had left his affairs in such extreme disarray that it would be another twenty years before the estate was released from an entanglement of legal red tape. By then, his niece had died and what remained of any inheritance had passed to her husband, the 1st Earl of Yarborough.
More unfortunate still was the fate of Sir Richard’s collection of Greek marbles, the objects on which he had pinned his hopes of achieving immortality. Two years after his death, a shed on the corner of Park Lane and Piccadilly opened its doors to the public. Its content, a breathtaking assortment of metopes and friezes extracted from the Parthenon, belonged to another infamous cuckold, Lord Elgin. The impact of these pieces on the early nineteenth-century British psyche was profound. Lord Elgin’s marbles were so celebrated in literature, art, architecture and design that they overshadowed the significance of any other assortment of antiquities. The headless torsos, broken feet and masonry absorbing the chill on the Isle of Wight were soon forgotten. After the 1st Earl of Yarborough’s death ‘a large part of the museum of objets d’art’ at Appuldurcombe was sold in 1859. Although some of the finer pieces were kept by the Earl’s descendants, the remnants along with a clutch of Worsley’s paintings had been completely dispersed by 1863.
Indefatigable in his efforts to be remembered, one of Sir Richard’s last wishes was that a suitable monument be erected to him inside All Saints church at Godshill. Henrietta Bridgeman Simpson executed this desire in the shape of an imposing Grecian, claw-footed sarcophagus. Its austere and sombre appearance had been intended to reflect the gravity of the man it represented, but its tub shape soon gave rise to sniggers among the congregation. By 1904 this distraction had become a nuisance and ‘the pretentious monument’ was dragged to the back of the church and a pipe organ was placed in front of it. But hiding the stone structure could not obscure the memory of the man. They knew his story too well. In honour of it, they dubbed his memorial ‘Worsley’s bath’.
24
Mr Hummell and Lady Fleming
Although Seymour Worsley claimed to have reformed her character, society would have seen nothing commendable in the event which took place on the 12th of September 1805. Her husband’s coffin had not been in the family vault for a month when his widow and her twenty-six-year-old lover exchanged their wedding vows in Farnham, Surrey. Few would have believed that love had compelled Jean Louis Hummell down the aisle to greet his recently endowed forty-seven-year-old bride. However, the sincerity of his attachment and the scorn of others was of little concern to Lady Worsley. During her life she had learned that love could assume a variety of forms, spawned by passion or necessity.
Seymour would not have entered into this, her second marriage, naïvely. The charming Swiss musician may have loved her but it was undoubtedly an affection that had been fastened firmly in place by the possibility of an inheritance. Having never been considered a beauty in her youth, her appearance, as seen in a sketch by the artist John Russell, had failed to blossom in middle age. Double-chinned and slightly wild-eyed, her face was worn with tiredness. She was too old to provide her husband with an heir. In lieu of this, she could give him the blessings of wealth. Lady Worsley had not been coy about the situation
. Their wedding plans were set in motion so quickly after Sir Richard’s death that the possibility of remarriage had evidently been discussed beforehand.
As soon as Seymour received word that her ailing husband had breathed his last, arrangements were made to ensure her and Hummell’s future happiness. Eager to be rid of her past, her first act was to shed ‘that detested name of Worsley’ and on the 3rd of September, by royal licence, she resumed her maiden name of Fleming. The road was then cleared for her beloved one day to accept ownership of her estate. In homage to his wife and the family whose riches he would enjoy, Hummell also embraced the surname of Fleming and agreed to exchange the French-sounding Jean Louis for the Anglophonic John Lewis. More importantly, to avoid any legal obstacles which might have barred him from owning English land, John Lewis Fleming applied to become a national of Great Britain.
After decades of want and frustration, the assets that had been bequeathed to the young Seymour Dorothy Fleming at last fell back into her possession on the 29th of August. Remarkably, the newspapers and gossip-mongers who had perpetuated the myth of her financial worth thirty years ago were able to recollect the rumoured value of her holdings. Once more the printed page boasted ‘of a jointure worth 70,000 1.’ due to Lady Worsley, while society’s ceaseless chatter increased this sum exponentially. The diarist Joseph Farrington claimed that she was due £90,000 in addition to half of Sir Richard’s estate. In truth, the amount, although substantial, had always been less than most individuals believed.
The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce Page 33