The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce (25 page)
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Authors: Hallie Rubenhold
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BOOK: The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce
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This was a game of wills and the baronet was stalling. His possession of Lady Worsley’s clothing and jewels was one of his last levers of influence. The law had robbed him of justice, leaving him with little alternative but to mete out punishment in the way he saw fit. As his wife waited anxiously for her urgently required wardrobe, Worsley stubbornly sat on his hands. What he hadn’t expected was his wife’s outrage. In each of his attempts to trample Seymour’s schemes and to contain her behaviour, he had failed, underestimating at every turn the ferocity he inspired in her. Lady Worsley’s reaction to her husband’s prevarication was swift. Prior to the trial, she had threatened to publicly denounce Sir Richard. Without an opportunity to defend her actions in court, she had no choice but to turn to the print media if she wanted to make her side of events known. Now, frustrated and furious, she was ready to fulfil that promise and ‘fully declare her innermost sentiments without the least reserve’.
Like
The Maidstone Whim
and
Variety
, Lady Worsley’s proclamation was written in verse by a hired scribe. A skilfully crafted work of insults and libertine philosophy, the
Epistle
is deeply vitriolic. ‘Detested Man!’ she barks at Worsley in the first line of her address, ‘To Thee I write, no follies to confess’; instead, in this pronouncement it was her ‘chief delight to own’ that the baronet never satisfied her. Then, for the next sixteen pages, she elaborates on her complaints.
The Maidstone Whim
and
Variety
, Lady Worsley’s proclamation was written in verse by a hired scribe. A skilfully crafted work of insults and libertine philosophy, the
Epistle
is deeply vitriolic. ‘Detested Man!’ she barks at Worsley in the first line of her address, ‘To Thee I write, no follies to confess’; instead, in this pronouncement it was her ‘chief delight to own’ that the baronet never satisfied her. Then, for the next sixteen pages, she elaborates on her complaints.
Foremost among these was what the lampoonists had already guessed: Sir Richard was impotent. That which ‘from thine arms I never could receive’ had driven her to seek comfort in the beds of his associates. After all, she claims, ‘man was a creature made our wants to bless’, and if ‘husbands can’t perform their dues’ then ‘surely they should excuse … The working passions of the tender Dame’. Then she twisted the knife; his good friend Bisset was quite capable of satisfying her,
From him no teizing titillations came;
He rais’d those passions which he well could tame
He rais’d those passions which he well could tame
‘Oh!’ she cries, taunting him with the joys of her betrayal;
… had you seen me on his breast reclin’d
Lips glu’d to lips, and limbs with limbs entwin’d
With oft repeated acts of dalliance spent,
My lust quite sated, and my heart content.
Lips glu’d to lips, and limbs with limbs entwin’d
With oft repeated acts of dalliance spent,
My lust quite sated, and my heart content.
According to Seymour, Worsley was too effete, too foppish to please her, or any woman for that matter. She grouped him among the ‘impotent Italian Beaux’, a euphemistic reference to homosexual men. Failing to provide ‘a more substantial food’, such macaronis ‘only serve to tantalize the Fair’. These are not real men, those ‘Whose joy it is to flutter at a play’ or who pass their time repeating ‘the news or scandal of the day’. Lady Worsley’s desire is for a man of physical and emotional substance, someone of ‘intrinsic worth, not tinsel clothes’. Her husband, the antiquarian, the artistic patron, the enlightenment thinker, driven by rational thought rather than passionate feelings, bored her. ‘Let other senses have an equal share,’ she exclaimed with the enthusiasm of a Romantic, ‘Nor think all pleasure center’d in the ear!’
Lady Worsley suggested that love played no role in the baronet’s decision to wed her. Rather, it was the ‘base chinking of
Ten Thousand Pound
’ that had enticed him. As affection had always been absent from their marriage, their relationship was soon eroded. Referring to herself as ‘the Wife whom Fortune made you wed’, she eventually came to ‘detest’ his bed and ‘loath’ his name. On her part, she admits, it was her youthful capriciousness and ‘inconstant charms’ that brought her ‘once a Virgin to thine arms’. However, marriage to Sir Richard held only disappointment. She felt like ‘Some hapless
Fatima
… in some seraglio’s dismal gloom’, a ‘solitary wretch’ who, completely alone, ‘tells to heav’n … her inward pains’. Removed ‘from her country and her friends’, but
Ten Thousand Pound
’ that had enticed him. As affection had always been absent from their marriage, their relationship was soon eroded. Referring to herself as ‘the Wife whom Fortune made you wed’, she eventually came to ‘detest’ his bed and ‘loath’ his name. On her part, she admits, it was her youthful capriciousness and ‘inconstant charms’ that brought her ‘once a Virgin to thine arms’. However, marriage to Sir Richard held only disappointment. She felt like ‘Some hapless
Fatima
… in some seraglio’s dismal gloom’, a ‘solitary wretch’ who, completely alone, ‘tells to heav’n … her inward pains’. Removed ‘from her country and her friends’, but
With pomp surrounded, impotently gay,
In groans she spends the night, in tears the day:
Compell’d alas! In horrid grandeur drest,
To kiss the man her feelings must detest
In groans she spends the night, in tears the day:
Compell’d alas! In horrid grandeur drest,
To kiss the man her feelings must detest
The censorious world should show some pity, she declared, as such a fate ‘might shock the hardest heart’.
She points her finger at Worsley for making her into what she became.
Although she possessed many ‘charms’ which lured men, these alone were not responsible for her or her husband’s ruin:
Although she possessed many ‘charms’ which lured men, these alone were not responsible for her or her husband’s ruin:
For wer’t not THOU the
author
of thy shame?
–what madness Worsley could possess thy brain,
To help a Wife to an admiring swain?
author
of thy shame?
–what madness Worsley could possess thy brain,
To help a Wife to an admiring swain?
A wife’s ‘desire’ can not be blamed ‘When Husbands are the cause’ of their undoing, she continues. A woman is then free to ‘Sneer at all discipline, and break their laws … And shew no dread of punishment, or G——d!’ After all, as a married woman, a ‘knowing, well-experience’d Dame’, she has an entitlement to ‘Enjoy the pleasure, and despise the shame’. And so, following ‘nature’s liberal plan’, she admits to him that, ‘’tis true I fled, in hopes to find a pleasure equal to my lustful mind’.
The
Epistle
made clear to its readership that by the age of eighteen its heroine had found herself locked in a sexually dysfunctional and loveless marriage to a man with whom she was incompatible. Feeling isolated, emotionally unfulfilled, and finding her husband physically repulsive, her despondency soon grew into resentment, and eventually into hatred. This sentiment, which her separation hearings and disputes surrounding her belongings had been keeping fresh, throbs through the poem’s stanzas. Cursing Worsley’s vindictive decision to apply for a Separation from Bed and Board rather than a liberating divorce, she cries;
Epistle
made clear to its readership that by the age of eighteen its heroine had found herself locked in a sexually dysfunctional and loveless marriage to a man with whom she was incompatible. Feeling isolated, emotionally unfulfilled, and finding her husband physically repulsive, her despondency soon grew into resentment, and eventually into hatred. This sentiment, which her separation hearings and disputes surrounding her belongings had been keeping fresh, throbs through the poem’s stanzas. Cursing Worsley’s vindictive decision to apply for a Separation from Bed and Board rather than a liberating divorce, she cries;
And must I live; yet breathe this vital air;
And must I then this name for ever bear?
Yet, thanks to fate! The name remains alone,
for all the duties of a wife are flown!
And must I then this name for ever bear?
Yet, thanks to fate! The name remains alone,
for all the duties of a wife are flown!
Although shackled to him in name only, and despite Worsley’s ‘decree’ that she ‘should be from such a Tyrant freed’, ‘this one deed’ alone, she proclaims, is not enough to lessen the revulsion she feels towards him. ‘I gratefully confess …
If it was possible–I’d hate thee less;
But fixt and firm as unrelenting fate
Is my determin’d, everlasting hate
But fixt and firm as unrelenting fate
Is my determin’d, everlasting hate
Their union has been truly crushed, their enmity as immovable as that of political opponents;
Sooner shall Sackville be to Saville join’d;
With Sandwich, Richmond, North with Fox combin’d;
Than thou again should’st be ally’d to me,
Or I again be ever [fucked] by thee.
With Sandwich, Richmond, North with Fox combin’d;
Than thou again should’st be ally’d to me,
Or I again be ever [fucked] by thee.
With one strike of the pen,
An Epistle from Lady Worsley to Sir Richard Worsley
hit precisely the right note to raise a chorus of public outrage. The long-anticipated confession was everything that the followers of the Worsley scandal had been hoping. Depraved, yet elegantly written, it stunned society and generated a confused outpouring of condemnation, fascination and praise. Within three days of its publication, letters began streaming into the offices of the
Morning Post
and the
Morning Herald
. The work was ‘certainly one of the most licentious and immoral productions that has been issued from the press for some time’, wrote one indignant correspondent, who claimed that it was rare to find vice ‘painted in such specious colours and morality and virtue so totally ridiculed’. Sensibilities had been so inflamed by this ‘obscene trash’ that no general consensus could be reached as to who was the most morally blameworthy: the author, the subjects or society for enabling the pamphlet to sell so successfully. After examining the
Epistle
, one
Morning Herald
reader decided that Lady Worsley came out of the situation all the worse, as her ‘conduct is … rendered still more unpardonably vicious than the world has before supposed it’; further still, ‘she leaves us at a loss to know which we are most to detest, the very extraordinary supineness of the husband or the libidinous and insatiable passions of the wife’. Another believed that the publication shamed the baronet more deeply. Even though ‘The World has been led to imagine that Lady Worsley has been solely culpable’, in her
Epistle
, where she ‘endeavours to vindicate her own conduct’, it is her husband who is painted ‘in the most severe and detestable colour’. Scorn was also heaped on society at large by a moraliser who wrote to the
Herald
in order to vent his spleen on this ‘instance of the licentiousness and depravity of the times’. ‘The … eagerness with which the whole fashionable world purchase
An Epistle from Lady Worsley to Sir Richard Worsley
’ was ‘very shameful’. ‘It abounds with severe satire, indelicate sentiments and corrupt morals’, he comments, and certainly ‘ … it would be much more commendable for persons
of distinction instead of exerting themselves to promote its popularity to do all in their power to suppress it’.
An Epistle from Lady Worsley to Sir Richard Worsley
hit precisely the right note to raise a chorus of public outrage. The long-anticipated confession was everything that the followers of the Worsley scandal had been hoping. Depraved, yet elegantly written, it stunned society and generated a confused outpouring of condemnation, fascination and praise. Within three days of its publication, letters began streaming into the offices of the
Morning Post
and the
Morning Herald
. The work was ‘certainly one of the most licentious and immoral productions that has been issued from the press for some time’, wrote one indignant correspondent, who claimed that it was rare to find vice ‘painted in such specious colours and morality and virtue so totally ridiculed’. Sensibilities had been so inflamed by this ‘obscene trash’ that no general consensus could be reached as to who was the most morally blameworthy: the author, the subjects or society for enabling the pamphlet to sell so successfully. After examining the
Epistle
, one
Morning Herald
reader decided that Lady Worsley came out of the situation all the worse, as her ‘conduct is … rendered still more unpardonably vicious than the world has before supposed it’; further still, ‘she leaves us at a loss to know which we are most to detest, the very extraordinary supineness of the husband or the libidinous and insatiable passions of the wife’. Another believed that the publication shamed the baronet more deeply. Even though ‘The World has been led to imagine that Lady Worsley has been solely culpable’, in her
Epistle
, where she ‘endeavours to vindicate her own conduct’, it is her husband who is painted ‘in the most severe and detestable colour’. Scorn was also heaped on society at large by a moraliser who wrote to the
Herald
in order to vent his spleen on this ‘instance of the licentiousness and depravity of the times’. ‘The … eagerness with which the whole fashionable world purchase
An Epistle from Lady Worsley to Sir Richard Worsley
’ was ‘very shameful’. ‘It abounds with severe satire, indelicate sentiments and corrupt morals’, he comments, and certainly ‘ … it would be much more commendable for persons
of distinction instead of exerting themselves to promote its popularity to do all in their power to suppress it’.
Contrary to the wishes of the high-minded, the pamphlet continued to sell by the bundle. It was available to buy ‘at every bookseller in London and all of the principal ones in every city and town in England’. By the first of May, it was reported that ‘a capital bookseller at the west end of the town has orders to send 500 copies to a neighbouring kingdom’, ‘a number quite sufficient to corrupt the minds of all its inhabitants’, commented the
Morning Herald
. In the spring of 1782, anyone possessing the faintest grasp of literacy, from the shop clerk to the gentleman of leisure, was burying their nose between the indecent pages of Lady Worsley’s
Epistle
. According to one of the newspaper’s more irate correspondents, where moral principles were concerned, the situation had truly spun out of control. Returning from an afternoon at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition he put pen to paper in a fit of righteous anger. At this polite location, the site of an annual showcase of taste and talent, he ‘observed two young married ladies of fashion (whose names will be concealed) perusing this luscious morsel [the
Epistle
] in place of a catalogue of the pictures’; even more disturbingly, they ‘were commenting in the loosest terms on one of its most obscene passages, a single line of which is quite sufficient to call a blush to the cheek of those who have the least pretensions to modesty’. Ruefully, he concludes that ‘It is a shocking thing to think [at] what a shameful pitch libertinism is now arrived’, when even ‘ladies of the first fashion and distinction’ are no longer ‘ashamed’ to be seen reading such filth and can ‘go publicly into the booksellers’ shops to purchase it’.
Morning Herald
. In the spring of 1782, anyone possessing the faintest grasp of literacy, from the shop clerk to the gentleman of leisure, was burying their nose between the indecent pages of Lady Worsley’s
Epistle
. According to one of the newspaper’s more irate correspondents, where moral principles were concerned, the situation had truly spun out of control. Returning from an afternoon at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition he put pen to paper in a fit of righteous anger. At this polite location, the site of an annual showcase of taste and talent, he ‘observed two young married ladies of fashion (whose names will be concealed) perusing this luscious morsel [the
Epistle
] in place of a catalogue of the pictures’; even more disturbingly, they ‘were commenting in the loosest terms on one of its most obscene passages, a single line of which is quite sufficient to call a blush to the cheek of those who have the least pretensions to modesty’. Ruefully, he concludes that ‘It is a shocking thing to think [at] what a shameful pitch libertinism is now arrived’, when even ‘ladies of the first fashion and distinction’ are no longer ‘ashamed’ to be seen reading such filth and can ‘go publicly into the booksellers’ shops to purchase it’.
Frustratingly for moralists, the
Epistle
could not be so easily condemned. Although its sentiments were lewd, what made it especially dangerous was its recognised ‘poetical merits’. Critics were forced to acknowledge that where literary style was concerned,
An Epistle from Lady Worsley to Sir Richard Worsley
was deemed to ‘surpass all modern productions’. ‘The lasciviousness of … [the] ideas might be almost pardoned,’ wrote one of the
Post
’s aficionados, ‘on account of the singular purity of the diction, and the unspeakable elegance of the versification’. Even the esteemed Dr Johnson was compelled to comment ‘that it is without exception the best written poem that has made its appearance for these many years’.
Epistle
could not be so easily condemned. Although its sentiments were lewd, what made it especially dangerous was its recognised ‘poetical merits’. Critics were forced to acknowledge that where literary style was concerned,
An Epistle from Lady Worsley to Sir Richard Worsley
was deemed to ‘surpass all modern productions’. ‘The lasciviousness of … [the] ideas might be almost pardoned,’ wrote one of the
Post
’s aficionados, ‘on account of the singular purity of the diction, and the unspeakable elegance of the versification’. Even the esteemed Dr Johnson was compelled to comment ‘that it is without exception the best written poem that has made its appearance for these many years’.
Naturally, speculation as to the authorship was rife. As the verses contained such intimate information and the sentiments were so convincingly expressed,
eyes turned immediately in the direction of Lady Worsley. However, as the publication was celebrated for its literary skill many remained sceptical. If this really was ‘her own production she must evidently stand unrivalled as a poetical genius by any of the modern race of females’, wrote the
Morning Post
. Another of the newspaper’s correspondents continued that, although he could ‘readily give her credit for the depravity of the sentiments and the indelicacy of the ideas’, he had been ‘well assured her ladyship does not possess talents that can for a moment justify the probability of its being her own production’. If Seymour herself was not capable of creating such a masterpiece then certainly the
Epistle
must have been a joint endeavour, the work of that terrifyingly immoral intellectual sisterhood, the New Female Coterie whom Lady Worsley mentions in her poem as meeting ‘at midnight … in close divan’, planning ‘future schemes of happiness with man’. According to one of the
Morning Herald
’s ‘correspondents of the ton’, the publication bore all the witches’ marks of the Coterie’s pens. He ‘affirmed’ that he ‘well knows the pamphlet … to be the joint production of Lady Grosvenor, Lady Worsley, Mrs Robinson and several others of the amorous corps–who are enumerated in the … epistle’; after all, ‘such ideas could only flow from the imagination of a juncto of such characters in conjunction’. The league of
demi-mondaines
maintained their silence on the issue of the author’s identity, though Lady Worsley eventually did step forward to put an end to the conjecture ‘that she is the authoress’. ‘Although the production is not mine,’ she claimed, ‘the sentiments it contains flow from my very soul.’
6
eyes turned immediately in the direction of Lady Worsley. However, as the publication was celebrated for its literary skill many remained sceptical. If this really was ‘her own production she must evidently stand unrivalled as a poetical genius by any of the modern race of females’, wrote the
Morning Post
. Another of the newspaper’s correspondents continued that, although he could ‘readily give her credit for the depravity of the sentiments and the indelicacy of the ideas’, he had been ‘well assured her ladyship does not possess talents that can for a moment justify the probability of its being her own production’. If Seymour herself was not capable of creating such a masterpiece then certainly the
Epistle
must have been a joint endeavour, the work of that terrifyingly immoral intellectual sisterhood, the New Female Coterie whom Lady Worsley mentions in her poem as meeting ‘at midnight … in close divan’, planning ‘future schemes of happiness with man’. According to one of the
Morning Herald
’s ‘correspondents of the ton’, the publication bore all the witches’ marks of the Coterie’s pens. He ‘affirmed’ that he ‘well knows the pamphlet … to be the joint production of Lady Grosvenor, Lady Worsley, Mrs Robinson and several others of the amorous corps–who are enumerated in the … epistle’; after all, ‘such ideas could only flow from the imagination of a juncto of such characters in conjunction’. The league of
demi-mondaines
maintained their silence on the issue of the author’s identity, though Lady Worsley eventually did step forward to put an end to the conjecture ‘that she is the authoress’. ‘Although the production is not mine,’ she claimed, ‘the sentiments it contains flow from my very soul.’
6
In the months since the criminal conversation trial, Seymour had grown especially savvy in her ability to manipulate the press. Although they may not have realised it, the booksellers and printers along Fleet Street had been drafted into her crusade against Sir Richard. It served Lady Worsley’s interest to make a spectacle of herself and it benefited the publishers to let her. Her scandals sold their pamphlets and their pamphlets were pure poison for her husband’s reputation. Since the baronet had refused to free her with a divorce, she would drag their shared name through the dung. As she had anticipated, the
Epistle
, her latest tug at Worsley’s chain, had brought about a reaction. Finding himself under renewed assault, the baronet abandoned gossipy London and took shelter in Epsom with Captain Leversuch and his family. Here, seven days after the publication of the verses, Worsley rode to Guildford in
order to appear before a registrar. He decided to settle the matter of his wife’s ‘wearing apparel’.
Epistle
, her latest tug at Worsley’s chain, had brought about a reaction. Finding himself under renewed assault, the baronet abandoned gossipy London and took shelter in Epsom with Captain Leversuch and his family. Here, seven days after the publication of the verses, Worsley rode to Guildford in
order to appear before a registrar. He decided to settle the matter of his wife’s ‘wearing apparel’.
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