In spite of lengthy legal disputes, Lady Worsley’s fortune remained intact, protected from the turmoil by the clauses of her marriage contract. Her widow’s jointure, which Sir Richard had attempted to reclaim, guaranteed her a further annual allowance of £2,000, as well as ‘the use of a dwelling house for her life’ to the value of £300 in rent per year. The agreement had also granted her £200 worth of goods from her husband’s town house. In order to ensure that Lady Worsley would not benefit from his prized art collection, the baronet made certain that the entire collection at his Grosvenor Square house was sold or moved before his death. Nevertheless, Seymour was free to claim any of his ‘household linen, china, furniture and plate’. More significantly, her £20,000 share of the lands purchased on her behalf on the Isle of Wight (which had been subsumed into the Appuldurcombe estate) was returned to her ownership. Her half of the Brompton estate was also restored to her. Technically unable to hold land in her own name, Lady Worsley was free to nominate a male trustee of her choice to safeguard her interests. Without hesitation she inscribed on her deeds the new name of John Lewis Fleming in place of that of Sir Richard Worsley. For the first time in her life, Seymour would be able to exercise some control over the wealth she had inherited. She had weathered nearly twenty-four years on the slim hope of this event. Now that it had arrived, there were others equally eager to share in her bounty.
In 1807, a ‘gentleman’ by the name of Charles Hammond and his new bride, Charlotte rented a house in a part of Kensington known as Little Chelsea, between what is now the modern Fulham Road and the edge of the Brompton estate. The Hammonds’ appearance at the foot of Seymour’s property was no coincidence. Rather it was a strategic advance towards breaching the wall that separated their lives.
The infant girl that Seymour had brought to northern France and deposited in the care of the Cochard family in 1785 had grown into a woman. What the intervening years of her daughter’s life had held or indeed what precisely she knew about her real mother beyond her name and noble status may never be known. What is certain is that at some point before her twenty-first birthday, Charlotte Dorothea Cochard had returned to England in search of an inheritance and a husband. Undoubtedly, mention of her pedigree aroused much interest among potential suitors. The possibility that Charlotte might be the legitimate heiress to the combined Worsley–Fleming fortune was enough to whet Charles Hammond’s appetite for a legal battle as well as a marriage. In the year that the recently wedded Mrs Hammond reached her majority, Lady Fleming’s attorney received an unexpected letter.
The Hammonds’ claims were so outlandish that it would have been immediately apparent to Seymour’s trustees and her solicitor that the couple had gleaned all of their information from the latest newspaper announcements. Probably at the encouragement of an unscrupulous attorney, Charles Hammond put forward the assertion that his wife was not only the daughter of Lady Seymour Dorothy Worsley but also ‘the only child of the late Sir Richard Worsley living at his death to be entitled to all the benefits secured to an only daughter by the settlement made on the marriage of Sir Richard Worsley and Seymour Dorothy Fleming’. Completely unaware of the details of the Worsleys’ separation, or, that at the time of Charlotte’s conception the couple had been estranged for nearly five years, Hammond demanded that ‘a proper conveyance be executed’ to release Sir Richard and Lady Fleming’s estates into his wife’s possession. Despite the absurdity of the suit, both parties’ solicitors would be obligated once again to begin the unpleasant business of rummaging through Seymour’s dirty laundry. Understandably, the prospect of this ‘occasioned great uneasiness to all parties concerned’.
Whether prompted by the dread of another legal action or by the emotions of motherhood, in early 1808 Lady Fleming called a halt to the proceedings and extended her hand to her daughter. No letters or diaries record their meeting or the details of the reconciliation; whether there were tears and pledges of forgiveness or simply remorse and stoic silence. For a woman who had believed all her children lost to her, this reunion in the later part of her life must have been an overwhelming experience. Fortunately, it yielded happiness for both. As stated in their legal agreement, Seymour was elated at having found Charlotte. In consequence ‘of the love and affection which Dame Seymour Dorothy Fleming has and bears towards her daughter’, a settlement of £1,000 was granted to Mrs Hammond. Additionally, Seymour directed that ‘a sum of three thousand pounds was to be made to any issue’ of the Hammonds’ marriage. It was a comfortable, if not generous sum and one which would secure the couple and later their two children, Charles and Seymour Louisa, a family home in Lewisham. Sadly, as social convention would have rendered intimacy between them inappropriate, it is unlikely that the Hammonds passed much time in the company of Lady Fleming and her husband after their initial meeting.
More than a quarter of a century had elapsed since the details of her misdeeds had appeared in print, yet few beyond her highborn relations and the louche members of fashionable society would have regarded Seymour Dorothy Fleming as a suitable companion. Even in an era when wealth could purchase respect, the restoration of her fortune was not in itself enough to rinse away the residue of her sins. Neither was her remarriage. Her choice of second husband had only fanned the dying embers of a scandalous reputation. But unlike Sir Richard Worsley, Seymour had no interest in cultivating good opinion on a wide scale.
The morally minded middle classes, who had relished tales of her titillating adventures and avariciously consumed the transcripts of Worsley v. Bisset, were the least likely to forgive her transgressions. Although they had delighted in her shocking story, in the new century their religiously grounded principles were responsible for blotting it out. As a letter from Sarah Burney, the sister of the celebrated author Fanny Burney reveals, nowhere was this more the case than in provincial circles. The unmarried Miss Burney, who was at Lymington in September 1812, found herself at a gathering alongside ‘an elderly woman married to a very young man’. She was among a number of friends invited to the cottage of a Monsieur de Chapelle. ‘It all seemed perfectly natural,’ Sarah Burney had thought at the time. ‘After hearing the young man perform with great admiration and looking at his nasty old wife with great contempt for marrying such a boy’, Miss Burney ‘came home in the carriage of this ill assorted pair, thanked them for their civility, went to bed and thought no more about them’. In less than twenty-four hours, word of her association with Monsieur de Chapelle’s disreputable guest flew into the far corners of Hampshire and Sarah suddenly found herself the recipient of letters which admonished her for ‘keeping bad company’. A friend of her father’s ‘wrote folio pages of self-justification’ on the subject, warning her that ‘Lady Fleming, as she now calls herself’ had ‘once discreditably been known as Lady Worsley and that her former fame got her blazoned here’, a fact unknown by her French hosts who were too busy ‘shewing her the most civility’.
With her tarnished past, it is likely that Lady Fleming felt more at ease in the tolerant society across the Channel. After the declaration of an armistice in 1814, many British nationals, including a number of Seymour’s Whig associates, returned to Paris with eagerness. Lady Fleming and her husband were certainly among their numbers by 1816. They settled in a villa at Passy, a suburb ‘only a half mile distant from the capital’ situated on ‘a lofty hill over looking the river, the city and a great expanse of gardens’. More tranquil than merry, the restful environment suited Seymour, whose health had begun to weaken.
It was at her home in Passy that Lady Fleming died of an undisclosed illness on the 9th of September 1818. She was nearly sixty-one and just shy of her thirteenth wedding anniversary. According to her wishes, John Lewis had her body committed to a modest white tomb at Père Lachaise cemetery, onto which the words ‘Yes Thou Shalt Be Obeyed’ were inscribed.
For a woman who had defined her life through flagrant acts of disobedience, this seems an ironic epithet. John Lewis may have been the only person t
o truly understand its coded meaning. Indeed, her second husband appears to have been the only individual who truly understood her. No other man had demonstrated such fidelity to her, while she lived or after her death. Among all the paramours who floated in and out of her life, Fleming remained at her side the longest. While he may have been lured by her inheritance, his respect and affection for her seemed genuine.
At her death, he was reborn as a wealthy, single land-owning gentleman. In honour of his departed wife, he adorned himself in the fine silk mourning clothes that her money had purchased for him. Not wishing to seem inappropriately enthusiastic at the prospect of remarriage, he waited a year and a half before wedding the twenty-four-year-old Ernestine Jeanne-Marie d’Houdetot, the daughter of César Louis Marie François d’Ange Houdetot, the Comte d’Houdetot, a celebrated French Marshal of the Camp. His second wife bore him a child to continue his name. The little girl, Césarine Fleming would become the next heiress of the Brompton estate.
By the end of his life in 1836 the Baron Fleming, as he had come to be known, had achieved a great deal. The Swiss stepson of a stocking manufacturer ended his days as a member of the French lesser nobility. He did so with the generous assistance of one of the eighteenth century’s most notorious women. The respectable world from which she had been thrown would always regard Seymour Dorothy Fleming’s name as a stain, one to be hidden or scrubbed out. John Lewis might have done just that and rid himself of the association when he laid her to rest. But this was not his wish. Rather than fleeing from her, he hoped that posterity would remember them together. He may have been the only person to do so. His final request was ‘to be buried along side’ his ‘dearly beloved first wife, Lady Seymour Fleming’, a woman of whom he had never been ashamed.
Also by Hallie Rubenhold
The Covent Garden Ladies
The Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, 1793 (editor)
Acknowledgements
At the end of this long journey many people deserve gratitude and recognition for their assistance.
First, the unflagging patience, expert advice and kind support offered to me by three wise women: my agent Claire Paterson, my editor Jenny Uglow and my publisher Alison Samuel at Chatto have carried me though this writing experience. I am also grateful to Parisa Ebrahimi for her assistance. Similar sentiments and a debt of gratitude should be expressed to Tina Bennett at Janklow in New York and my editor at St Martin’s, Charlie Spicer, who believed in this story from the start.
Over the past three years I have pestered a good deal of people in a number of archives. Richard Smout, Christine Broom and the team at the Isle of Wight Record Office have helped me tremendously, as have Lisa Snook at the Worcester Record Office, Deborah McVea at the Bentham Project, Hazel Cook at the Kensington Central Library and the indefatigable Alison Kenney at the City of Westminster Archives. The staff at the Lincolnshire Archives, the Lambeth Palace Archives and the British Library’s Rare Books & Music Reading Room also deserve my sincere thanks.
Many others have offered their expertise. I have Stephen Brumwell to thank for providing me with information about the militias and the British military during the War of American Independence. R.S. Taylor Stoermer’s advice about the last days of Lord North’s government was also invaluable, as was Simon Chaplin’s correct identification of Lady Worsley’s physician. I’m also grateful for the input of Wendy Moore, Christopher Jessel at Farrer & Co., Ivor Coward at the British Consulate in Venice, Father John Ryder at All Saints Godshill, Vic Barrett at Sea Cottage, Lord Teynham at Pylewell, and Jill Toovey for her assistance with the Croome Court papers, now at the Record Office in Worcester.
Where the creation of this book is concerned there are three exceptional people who may be named as its godparents. In March 2006, I invited a trio of strangers into my home for lunch. Over a lasagne and several bottles of wine the Worsley Society was born. Ann O’Conor has been overwhelmingly generous with her time, support and the Worsley books in her collection. Richard Grenville Clark’s insights and the work in his unpublished MA dissertation helped to form my initial thoughts on the Worsley case. Last and certainly not least, the brilliant Karen Lynch has been instrumental in assisting me to form a picture of Lady Worsley. A personal interest in the subject matter meant that she had already blazed a trail to many of the sources long before I began my research. These three people have demonstrated to me that research needn’t be a closed, jealous pursuit but collaborative, cooperative and fulfilling. Their friendship and expertise has sustained me in this endeavour.
Finally, I could not possibly have completed this work without the love and assistance of my family and especially my patient, supportive husband to whom this book is dedicated.
A Note on Eighteenth-Century Values and their Modern Conversions
Because issues of financial worth play such a large role in this book I felt it was important to try to convey an idea of eighteenth-century values by converting sums into approximate modern equivalents.
I have used two approximate measures which I have applied to eighteenth-century values according to their type: land or product/labour. I have relied on the work of the economic historian Gregory Clark at the University of California at Davis for my figures for Britain’s GDP in the 1770s (see his paper, ‘The Secret History of the Industrial Revolution’, 2001).
The first approach is a ‘proportion based comparison’. This looks at the estimate of gross domestic product in the 1770s and establishes the fraction of domestic product represented by £1,000 in the decade beginning in 1770. Having established the fraction of GDP represented by £1,000 in 1770, the 2006 GDP figure can be divided by that fraction in order to identify the current level of economic output required in 2006 to allow an individual in the present decade to be as relatively well off today as a person having £1,000 disposable income in 1770.
The second approach is an ‘expenditure based approach’. This identifies a commodity common to the 1770s and the present. In this case, I’ve taken the cost of labour. According to Clark, the average daily male wage in the 1770 was approximately 17.5 pence, meaning that £1 (240 pence) purchased the labour of approximately 14 men. The average annual wage in the UK in 2006 was £23,700 (Office of National Statistics). Allowing for the shorter working week, this results in an average daily wage of £91. The cost of the labour of 14 people for one day equals £1,274 at current prices. If amounts are multiplied by a factor of 1274 we arrive at figures which permit a contemporary value to be placed on the eighteenth-century figures.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
As the sources in this book have not been foot-noted, I have arranged the bibliography to assist those who might want to research specific aspects of the Worsleys’ lives or their criminal conversation trial and separation. The bibliography is broken into several categories and sub-headings and also includes a list of general material consulted.
SIR RICHARD WORSLEY
ARCHIVAL AND UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL
British Library: Correspondence to or from Sir Richard Worsley
Add. MSS: 27915 (f. 13), 30873 (f. 146), 30874 (f. 62), 34886 (f. 400), 37935c, 37060 (f. 72, f. 77), 41192 (f. 18), 46501 (f. 79, 114), 46825 (ff. 64–83b), 51315 (f. 66), 61867 (f. 178)
Hoare’s Bank Archives: Banking Records of Sir Richard Worsley: Volumes 1774–1805
Lincolnshire Archives: Worsley Papers: 1 Worsley 14–17, 23, 24, 27, 31, 38, 39, 42, 44, 53; 1 Worsley 55/7, 55/8, 55/11–14, 16–42, 55/44, 55/46–8; 1 Worsley 56, 59, 61
Isle of Wight Record Office:
Swainston Papers (Barrington Family): SW/812, SW/794a–b, SW/794d–e
Worsley Family Papers: JER/WA/3/9/56, JER/WA/33/25, 33/36, 33/44–9, 33/52, JER/WA/35/23–4, 35/25a&b, 35/28, 35/26–9, 37/22–31, 38/1, 38/3, 38/6–8, 39/4–6, JER/WA/AppV/12
Public Record Office, Kew
PCC Wills: Sir Richard Worsley, Sir Thomas Worsley
Foreign Office Papers: Correspondence as Minister-Resident in Venice
FO/
81/9–14 (1793–1805)
Probate Inventory: Prob 31/1002/374
Court of Chancery: C/12/612/34 Worsley v. Worsley, C/12/618/40 Worsley v. Lady Worsley, C/12/149/6 Countess d’Amey v. Worsley, C12/643/20 Poor of the Isle of Wight v. Worsley
Shropshire Archives: Attingham Collection: Letters from Lady Bruce to Lady Berwick, 112/23/3/22/1–11
CONTEMPORARY PUBLICATIONS
Almon, John (ed.), The Correspondence of the Late John Wilkes (1805)
Anon., An Epistle from Lady W——y to Sir R——d W——y (1782)
Anon., The Abbey of Kilkhampton or Monumental Records for the Year 1780 (1780)
Anon., The Abbey of Kilkhampton, an improved edition (1788)
Anon. (Sir Richard Worsley), The Answer of S——r R——d W——y, Bt. to the Epistle of L——y W——y (1782)
Anon., The Genuine Anecdotes and Amorous Adventures of Sir Richard Easy and Lady Wagtail (1782)
Anon., The Memoirs of Sir Finical Whimsy and His Lady (1782)
Anon., The Whim!!!, or the Maid-Stone Bath, a Kentish Poetic (1782)
Anon., Variety, or Which is the Man? (1782)
Craven, Lady Elizabeth, A Journey through the Crimea to Constantinople (1789)
Marshall, Catalogue of Five Hundred Celebrated Authors of Great Britain, Now Living (1788)
The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce Page 34