The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce (27 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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For most of 1782, Sir Richard had bravely weathered a ferocious storm of legal battles and personal smears but after so much abuse, cracks had begun to appear in his fortitude. No longer able to bear the sneers and his wife’s relentless taunting, unable to reside in London, unable to ride through Hampshire without exciting comment, the baronet realised that he must disappear. England must be made to forget him.
As Sir Richard retreated from the public glare, his wife surged forward. As the year progressed, Seymour’s undignified behaviour began to veer even further off course. It was reported in the
Morning Herald
that Lady Worsley had recently ‘been measured for boots at a well-known gentleman’s boot maker’. Shortly thereafter she appeared in public, ‘in buckskins, boots and long-heeled spurs’. However, it was not only her masculine dress that astonished but her sudden enthusiasm for dare-devil equestrianism. A ‘correspondent’ informed the readers of the
Herald
that ‘every morning’, dressed in tight breeches and straddling her horse, Seymour would ride ‘sixteen miles within the hour … with all imaginable ease!’ While riding
in itself was considered a health-promoting pastime for both genders, extreme feats of sportsmanship were believed to be unsuitable for the female sex. Masculine competitiveness, in combination with too much physical motion, especially the jarring rhythm of excessive horse riding, was thought to damage the womb, which not only resulted in ‘hysteria’ but the masculinisation of women, possible infertility, and potentially miscarriage. Eager to observe this ‘female jockey’ tear across the fields, her legs akimbo, her bottom displayed and her thighs held taut in their sheaths of hide, the Prince of Wales arranged for a race on the Sussex Downs. ‘The scene,’ wrote the
Herald
on the 26th of September, ‘was a train of dissipation and folly.’ Everyone from the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cumberland to ‘the baron and the blackleg were in attendance’. On the rolling green hills, dotted with carriages and grazing horses, stood liveried valets and tailored men of the
ton
who had ‘assembled to see this exhibition’. A prize of 50 guineas was raised in this match between Lady Worsley and ‘Mr Villers’, the Prince’s master of the horse. Unfortunately ‘after mounting her buckskins and half boots accordingly’, much ‘to the mortification of a great number of spectators’ Seymour ‘declared off at the moment they were expected to start’. The reasons for her withdrawal are not stated but she was to return later in the day to amuse her set of raucous acquaintances with further spectacles, this time as she raced in a two-wheeled phaeton, recklessly riding ‘so long in equilibrio that the least touch in nature would have reverted her fate and brought her flat to the ground!’ Even among the swaggering hell-raisers and
demi-mondaines
, these tricks were exceptional feats of audacity, not in the least because only two weeks earlier, Lady Worsley, without the slightest shame, had ‘professed herself pregnant’. To the onlookers scattered amid the tall grass of the Downs, her sudden passion for dangerous gallops was perfectly explicable.
Morning Herald
that Lady Worsley had recently ‘been measured for boots at a well-known gentleman’s boot maker’. Shortly thereafter she appeared in public, ‘in buckskins, boots and long-heeled spurs’. However, it was not only her masculine dress that astonished but her sudden enthusiasm for dare-devil equestrianism. A ‘correspondent’ informed the readers of the
Herald
that ‘every morning’, dressed in tight breeches and straddling her horse, Seymour would ride ‘sixteen miles within the hour … with all imaginable ease!’ While riding
in itself was considered a health-promoting pastime for both genders, extreme feats of sportsmanship were believed to be unsuitable for the female sex. Masculine competitiveness, in combination with too much physical motion, especially the jarring rhythm of excessive horse riding, was thought to damage the womb, which not only resulted in ‘hysteria’ but the masculinisation of women, possible infertility, and potentially miscarriage. Eager to observe this ‘female jockey’ tear across the fields, her legs akimbo, her bottom displayed and her thighs held taut in their sheaths of hide, the Prince of Wales arranged for a race on the Sussex Downs. ‘The scene,’ wrote the
Herald
on the 26th of September, ‘was a train of dissipation and folly.’ Everyone from the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cumberland to ‘the baron and the blackleg were in attendance’. On the rolling green hills, dotted with carriages and grazing horses, stood liveried valets and tailored men of the
ton
who had ‘assembled to see this exhibition’. A prize of 50 guineas was raised in this match between Lady Worsley and ‘Mr Villers’, the Prince’s master of the horse. Unfortunately ‘after mounting her buckskins and half boots accordingly’, much ‘to the mortification of a great number of spectators’ Seymour ‘declared off at the moment they were expected to start’. The reasons for her withdrawal are not stated but she was to return later in the day to amuse her set of raucous acquaintances with further spectacles, this time as she raced in a two-wheeled phaeton, recklessly riding ‘so long in equilibrio that the least touch in nature would have reverted her fate and brought her flat to the ground!’ Even among the swaggering hell-raisers and
demi-mondaines
, these tricks were exceptional feats of audacity, not in the least because only two weeks earlier, Lady Worsley, without the slightest shame, had ‘professed herself pregnant’. To the onlookers scattered amid the tall grass of the Downs, her sudden passion for dangerous gallops was perfectly explicable.
In spite of her attempts, her efforts to miscarry would fail. As the child inside her began to grow, the
Herald
and the
Post
found fewer adventures of Lady Worsley’s to report. Although she continued to appear in Hyde Park dressed in men’s riding gear and ‘attended as usual by the Generalissimo Bisset’, her changing condition would not permit her buckskin breeches to fit much beyond the month of October. In the absence of substantial gossip, silence caused the public to knit together a collection of invented possibilities for the two paramours: that the lovers had departed for the continent, that a reconciliation had been reached with Sir Richard, that they were
living quietly in an attempt to atone for their sins. What the matrons over their tea and seedcake would not have predicted was the announcement that came at the end of January 1783. Midway through her pregnancy, George Bisset had left Lady Worsley. The great romantic interlude had ended.
Herald
and the
Post
found fewer adventures of Lady Worsley’s to report. Although she continued to appear in Hyde Park dressed in men’s riding gear and ‘attended as usual by the Generalissimo Bisset’, her changing condition would not permit her buckskin breeches to fit much beyond the month of October. In the absence of substantial gossip, silence caused the public to knit together a collection of invented possibilities for the two paramours: that the lovers had departed for the continent, that a reconciliation had been reached with Sir Richard, that they were
living quietly in an attempt to atone for their sins. What the matrons over their tea and seedcake would not have predicted was the announcement that came at the end of January 1783. Midway through her pregnancy, George Bisset had left Lady Worsley. The great romantic interlude had ended.
Exile
Just before dawn, on the morning of the 12th of February 1785, Sir Richard Worsley rose from his bed at the Villa Negroni. From the courtyard below came the hurried sounds of his Italian household readying his specially built carriages for an excursion. The two light, low-wheeled calesses (carriages), upholstered in leather and sprung to take the jolts of Europe and Asia’s pitted roads, were loaded with the equipment necessary for an epic journey. Mosquito netting, guns, candles, swords and copper cooking vessels, starched bedlinen and durable travel clothing, were strapped in next to boxes of maps and books on the history and antiquities of Greece, Egypt and Turkey. Eight horses were hitched to their vehicles. By 7 a.m., this lumbering train–which also ferried the baronet, his three servants and Willey Reveley, an English artist whom Worsley had hired ‘to make drawings of architecture and the most interesting ruins’–set out across the hills of Rome bound for Greece.
This was to be the second and most significant leg of a journey that had begun nearly two years earlier. Since May 1783, the baronet had been following a network of rocky routes through some of the most desolate corners of continental Europe. The searing gaze of ridicule had finally driven him to abandon England. Worsley had realised that only prolonged absence and a complete withdrawal from society might resuscitate his injured character. Like many others in the wake of disgrace, he had slipped across the Channel, hoping that the passage of time would dull the memory of his misadventures. However, in light of his wife’s persistent courting of scandal, the restoration
of his reputation would be more difficult to achieve. The baronet needed to go to ground.
of his reputation would be more difficult to achieve. The baronet needed to go to ground.
Neither France nor Italy, with their hotels and cafés bustling with English travellers, would have offered a respite from gossip. Instead, Sir Richard opted for a year-long sojourn amid the sunburnt hills of the Iberian Peninsula, a region beyond the itineraries of the casual tourist. Lisbon, the port city into which he arrived was little more than a network of buildings languishing in the rubble of the earthquake that had tumbled it twenty-eight years earlier. Few but the tubercular traveller in search of pure air, or the adventure seeker, could be found on the ‘strange and disgusting’ Portuguese streets, swarming with deformed beggars and feral animals. In terms of reputation, Spain fared little better. Its parched landscapes did not hold much interest for grand tourists, while its flea-ridden hostelries were considered ‘worse than dog kennels’. This was not a location for the uninitiated, which suited Worsley perfectly. Between the spring of 1783 and the late winter of the following year, he snaked his way northward from Lisbon to Cadiz and Seville, through the olive groves of Andalusia to Granada, arriving in Madrid in time to pass the winter. After nearly twelve months of hiding in the shade and dust, he then felt ready to emerge in Paris.
By the autumn of 1784 Worsley had begun to set his scheme for a lengthy expedition through the Ottoman Empire into motion. In October he arrived at Rome. He did not intend to linger. Still wishing to avoid the snarl of British artists and grand tourists who strolled along the Via Condotti and gathered around the brazier at the Caffè Inglese, the baronet hired lodgings at the Villa Negroni on the outskirts of town and hid behind its walls. But for occasional visits to fellow collectors such as Sir William Hamilton and a handful of art dealers, Worsley avoided social interaction where possible. Even in the eighteen months since his departure from England there had been no shortage of sniggering spectators; those travellers eager to fill their letters home with tales of foreign sights and encounters with the ‘Twelve Penny Cuckold’. It was precisely for this reason that Sir Richard had alighted on the idea of a Levantine journey.
Worsley hoped his absence from England would help the nation forget his dishonour, equally, he wished to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of his peers. His proposed tour of Greece, Egypt and Turkey, with a return journey through Russia and Eastern Europe, was to be not only a penance, but a self-imposed exile, a mortification of the character through the fire of the desert
and the ice of the steppes. From this retreat the baronet intended to emerge both cleansed of past misdeeds and restored in the general esteem. To achieve this feat of rebirth, Sir Richard Worsley had to recast himself in an altogether worthier mould.
and the ice of the steppes. From this retreat the baronet intended to emerge both cleansed of past misdeeds and restored in the general esteem. To achieve this feat of rebirth, Sir Richard Worsley had to recast himself in an altogether worthier mould.
In the late eighteenth century there were few places so idealised and yet so frustratingly beyond reach as Athens. The mother culture which had given birth to the Roman Empire had in recent centuries received less attention from scholars than she was due. Travel to Greece, a region dominated by the Turks since the fifteenth century, was made especially unappealing by her frequent outbreaks of insurrection, war and plague. Consequently, the era’s fascination with the classical was largely biased towards Rome. Like his contemporaries, Worsley had been reared from boyhood on an intellectual diet of Latin and Greek writing, but his interest in antiquity had been broadened by his father’s influence. Sir Thomas had taken his young son up the steep Sicilian hillsides at Agrigento and Segesta and introduced him to the uniquely Doric forms shaped by the hands of ancient Greeks. This intriguing taste of an Hellenic past that predated even the revered foundations of Rome’s Forum lingered in the baronet’s imagination at a time when the scholarly circles of Europe were just beginning to consider the artistic contributions of Greece.
As few antiquarians had made pilgrimages to Athens or chanced a voyage through the outposts of Ottoman control to explore the Greek islands, the fertile banks of the Nile or the ruins beyond Constantinople, the precise influence of earlier civilisations on the sculpture and architecture of the Romans remained open to conjecture. It had only been in 1762, with the publication of James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s
Antiquities of Athens
, that a movement known as the Gusto Greco had begun to stir much interest among British patrons. At the time Sir Richard was contemplating his journey many remained sceptical of the merits of Greek design. In the years before 1801, when Lord Elgin took an assortment of friezes and metopes from the Parthenon and shipped these exotic treasures to London, examples of Hellenic artistry were sparse in the collections of English antiquarians. The antecedents of Roman greatness could not possibly be examined in the absence of compelling specimens. It was in amassing such a collection, in assembling a sort of museum of Greek art, that Worsley saw his future. He would bring to England what no one before him had: ancient Greece. In the process, he would immerse himself in the subject and emerge as an expert, Britain’s most knowledgeable
proponent of Greek antiquities. Of course, the purpose of this mission was entirely self-serving. It was a desperate attempt to salvage the Worsley name from infamy.
Antiquities of Athens
, that a movement known as the Gusto Greco had begun to stir much interest among British patrons. At the time Sir Richard was contemplating his journey many remained sceptical of the merits of Greek design. In the years before 1801, when Lord Elgin took an assortment of friezes and metopes from the Parthenon and shipped these exotic treasures to London, examples of Hellenic artistry were sparse in the collections of English antiquarians. The antecedents of Roman greatness could not possibly be examined in the absence of compelling specimens. It was in amassing such a collection, in assembling a sort of museum of Greek art, that Worsley saw his future. He would bring to England what no one before him had: ancient Greece. In the process, he would immerse himself in the subject and emerge as an expert, Britain’s most knowledgeable
proponent of Greek antiquities. Of course, the purpose of this mission was entirely self-serving. It was a desperate attempt to salvage the Worsley name from infamy.
On the day the baronet embarked upon his prodigious voyage, the winter sky ballooned with grey and burst into a shower of snow. The two calesses bumped along the roads south of Rome, travelling through the villages of Campania towards Naples. After a stint at Paestum where he and Willey Reveley paused to study the Greek temples constructed on Italian soil, they pushed onward through the bandit-filled hills into Puglia before arriving at Otranto nearly six weeks later. Here the wheels of their vehicles were removed and the carriages packed into the hull of a ship bound first for Crete and then for Athens.
Charting a slow progress along the eastern Peloponnesian coast, Worsley’s own three-masted sailing vessel, the polacca
Aurora
rounded the tip of Hydra on the 7th of May. By sunset of the following evening a spectacular vista rose from the water ahead of them. On the blustery deck Worsley pressed his prospective glass to his eye and watched the crest of the Parthenon take shape. This first sight of the exalted Temple of Athena filled him ‘with an inexpressible joy’. Much to Sir Richard’s frustration, adverse winds kept the ship beyond port until the 9th. When at last they weighed anchor, the baronet gave in to his excited impatience and came ashore. Refusing to wait for the assembly of his dismantled caless, Worsley, with Reveley at his heels, set off for Athens on foot, his enthusiasm propelling him along the five-mile route through a tangle of vineyards to the base of the Acropolis.
Aurora
rounded the tip of Hydra on the 7th of May. By sunset of the following evening a spectacular vista rose from the water ahead of them. On the blustery deck Worsley pressed his prospective glass to his eye and watched the crest of the Parthenon take shape. This first sight of the exalted Temple of Athena filled him ‘with an inexpressible joy’. Much to Sir Richard’s frustration, adverse winds kept the ship beyond port until the 9th. When at last they weighed anchor, the baronet gave in to his excited impatience and came ashore. Refusing to wait for the assembly of his dismantled caless, Worsley, with Reveley at his heels, set off for Athens on foot, his enthusiasm propelling him along the five-mile route through a tangle of vineyards to the base of the Acropolis.
The structures on Athens’s ‘Sacred Rock’, the collapsing shrines once dedicated to the worship of the goddess Athena, enthralled him. With his draughtsman at his side, the baronet devoted two weeks of intensive study to these ruins, poring over the Erechtheion with its unique ‘porch of maidens’ and the once majestic Propylaea, the gleaming gateway to the hilltop’s temples. Long days were spent in the spring sunshine measuring, recording and drawing, investigating every worn pediment and cracked architrave. Of all these magnificent architectural creations, the Parthenon, its vivid metopes and friezes still
in situ
, gripped him with the greatest intensity. Worsley was mesmerised. No other experience during his voyages was to captivate him so entirely. This monument of human creation, Worsley eulogised in his travel diary, was ‘beautiful beyond description’. He returned each day for contemplation, writing on the 23rd of June that he had ‘passed the whole
morning in the Acropolis admiring the beauties there’. ‘I could not help observing,’ he continued, ‘that the oftener these objects are seen the more effect they have upon the mind.’ Before his departure, he commented wistfully that ‘the ruins of the city … had given me the greatest pleasure’. They had also given his empty life a sense of purpose.
in situ
, gripped him with the greatest intensity. Worsley was mesmerised. No other experience during his voyages was to captivate him so entirely. This monument of human creation, Worsley eulogised in his travel diary, was ‘beautiful beyond description’. He returned each day for contemplation, writing on the 23rd of June that he had ‘passed the whole
morning in the Acropolis admiring the beauties there’. ‘I could not help observing,’ he continued, ‘that the oftener these objects are seen the more effect they have upon the mind.’ Before his departure, he commented wistfully that ‘the ruins of the city … had given me the greatest pleasure’. They had also given his empty life a sense of purpose.
However, Worsley was soon to find that neither the Greeks nor their Turkish overlords ascribed such emotional or pecuniary worth to the stones they possessed. Strolling through the narrow lanes of the small settlement of modern Athens was for an antiquarian like perusing the halls of a treasury. The current inhabitants of the town lived casually among the history of their celebrated ancestors, incorporating ancient masonry into their roofs and planting their laurel trees amid broken columns. Their outdoor spaces were scattered with marble remnants while headless deities were left half buried or abandoned to the mercy of the sun. Sir Richard was all too delighted to observe this and remarked, with an eye to acquisition, that ‘there was hardly a house without some fragment of ancient sculpture over the door or in the courtyard’. During an excursion to Megara Worsley was able to purchase several discarded objects. In the courtyard of ‘a prominent citizen’ he noticed a three-foot statue of Asclepius, the god of medicine thrown carelessly on to its side. This piece as well as a ‘small monument commemorating Cafision’ and an intricately carved ‘bas-relief’ from the side of a sepulchre he obtained ‘for a mere trifle’.
To Worsley and other connoisseurs like him, all of Greece seemed an untouched orchard whose mouldering bounty was desperate for harvest. Precious objects of great scholarly significance lay strewn across the islands like broken vases in a potter’s yard. It therefore became the thinking gentleman’s duty to reap the benefits of Greek and Ottoman ignorance and liberate as much from their grasp as possible. As Worsley’s acquaintance J.B.S. Morritt wrote in the 1790s, Greece was ‘a perfect gallery of marbles … some we steal, some we buy’. While there is no evidence to suggest that Sir Richard actively stole any of the pieces that came into his possession, he does neglect to record the prices he paid for many of the items he took away, as well as their specific provenances. Most of these objects could be possessed for a surprisingly meagre amount; Morritt learned that he could buy antique medals for ‘under the price of silver’ and ‘the copper ones for halfpence’, while the collector Charles Robert Cockerell paid £40 for fourteen excavated statues (which he had originally tried to steal) worth £4,500.
The ease with which Sir Richard acquired items increased his appetite for further finds. A successful tour through the Peloponnesian and Cycladic islands yielded a bumper crop of bas-reliefs, statuary, small cameo-like intaglios and engraved gemstones. However, the riches of the Hellenic age were not confined to the Greek territories. They lay scattered along a broad axis throughout the Mediterranean. In July 1785, Worsley decided to seek their remains in Egypt. Sailing from Rhodes, he landed at Alexandria on the 26th, after a nervous voyage through pirate-plagued waters. From this port he proceeded by water to Rosetto (Rashid), then a balmy paradise of ‘luxuriant gardens’, before sailing down the Nile to Cairo.
The unforgiving August sun was baking the clay walls of Old Cairo when he arrived. In its modern incarnation, the once exalted capital did not match his expectations, having ‘lost a great deal of its ancient splendour and magnificence’ under Turkish rule. Nevertheless, Worsley enjoyed moving through the colourful commotion of its foreign streets with their markets selling senna and saffron and workshops pounding out ‘Turkish stirrups and all furniture for horses’. As authorities on Egyptian travel advised, both Sir Richard and Willey Reveley adopted Eastern dress and grew heavy Ottoman beards. Swathed in light robes and slippers, they slid into the eddying crowds of exotic faces, mingling among ‘the moors, Arabs, Coptics, Greeks, Syrians, Armenians, some few Christians and Turks’. Worsley observed with curiosity the ‘women covered from head to toe’ and the stern-faced ‘Janissaries patrolling the markets and gates to the city’. Wearing appropriate attire, which repelled ‘the insults of the lower class of people’, made a thorough investigation of Cairo’s corners easier.
Although Worsley knew that without an official firman, or mandate from the Turkish government, the excavation or removal of antiquities was forbidden, he was prepared to try his luck without one. However, after visits to dealers and a trawl through the bazaars he had only managed to buy a handful of engraved gems: a head of Alexander, a small onyx figure of Minerva, a lion on cornelian, and a ‘talisman of two crocodiles’. Much to his frustration he found the larger objects, those which he wanted most, virtually impossible to obtain. On a walk through the alleyways of Cairo, he noticed ‘near a disused fountain … a most beautiful sarcophagus of grey porphyry with very beautiful hieroglyphic figures’, which Worsley surmised had ‘probably been taken out of the great pyramid’. After a few enquiries he learned that it had in fact ‘been in this spot … above five hundred years’. His offer
of money for the item refused and his plans of acquiring it thwarted, the baronet complained bitterly that although ‘the Turks find no value to these wonderful and beautiful relicks of the ancients, they will not consent to have them removed …’ For the baronet, this was an infuriating setback and one with which he was to meet continuously.
of money for the item refused and his plans of acquiring it thwarted, the baronet complained bitterly that although ‘the Turks find no value to these wonderful and beautiful relicks of the ancients, they will not consent to have them removed …’ For the baronet, this was an infuriating setback and one with which he was to meet continuously.
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