The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce (4 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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While Sir Richard was absorbed in his own concerns, Seymour learned to entertain herself and was soon ‘seen coquetting in all the gay assemblies in the polite circles …’ Here her associates were not those of her husband’s acquaintance but the voluble and often controversial Whig leaders of fashion known as the
ton
, presided over by Lady Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire. It is unknown how closely Lady Worsley was affiliated with the Devonshire House set which, in its broadest definition ‘numbered more than a hundred people’ drawn from the ranks of the aristocracy and gentry and bulked out with notable artists, writers, actors and career politicians. The
ton
enjoyed an exchange of wit and intelligent conversation as much as they did public gatherings, parties, gambling to excess, drinking, flirting, spinning gossip and parading in outlandish fashions. The excitement and energy generated by the company of strong-minded women like the Duchess of Devonshire and her companions, Frances Crewe, Lady Melbourne, Lady Clermont and Lady Derby and her following of louche, droll men like the playwright and MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan and her husband’s political opponent, Charles James Fox were difficult to resist.
Seymour had obviously spent enough time among the set to serve (in part) as the inspiration for Sheridan’s character Lady Teazle in his comedy
The School for Scandal.
She was certainly among the members of high society who turned out
en masse
to watch themselves satirised at the play’s opening night in May 1777. Mrs Crewe was impressed by how shrewdly the playwright had captured the morals and malaise of their elite little world, commenting with a touch of pride that she thought ‘the Duchess of Devonshire, Lady Worsley, and I cut good figures in it’. Her remark offers a good deal of illumination of the lifestyle Seymour was leading at this period. Lady Teazle is one of Sheridan’s more sympathetic creations, a wife whose wholesome and principled upbringing is challenged by the dissolute habits of fashionable society. Her relations with her husband are strained; she flouts his authority and they frequently argue. Since marrying she has acquired a taste for profligate spending and amuses herself and her friends by proffering gossip. But at heart she as not as corrupt as those who surround her; she is simply bewildered by inexperience.
Unfortunately, unlike her character in
School for Scandal
, Lady Worsley’s relationship with her husband did not improve. In fact it conformed more to the description of Lord and Lady Besford’s marriage, two of the Duchess of Devonshire’s inventions in her novel
The Sylph
. ‘We do not disagree because we seldom meet,’ comments the cynical Lady Besford. ‘He pursues his pleasure one way, I seek mine another, and our dispositions being opposite, they are sure never to interfere with each other …’ Although it was expected in fashionable society that husbands and wives would each cultivate their own friendships, Lady Worsley may not have anticipated so much indifference from Sir Richard. It was not an arrangement which suited her, and later she would complain of feeling ‘slighted’.
During the Christmas and New Year period of 1778–79, Seymour found herself alone once more. There is nothing to indicate that her husband accompanied her to Harewood to spend the season with her family and to attend a New Year’s masquerade ball. This was to be an extravagant event to which Lady Fleming and Edwin Lascelles had invited a selection of local gentry and aristocracy. For several days, Harewood radiated with chandelier light and its marble fireplaces rolled with snapping flames. As was often the practice, the owners had arranged for every room in the house to be ‘thrown open and made common’ so that guests could stroll down the enfilades admiring the handsome décor of dressing rooms, bedchambers and closets. Throughout the night, revellers disguised behind papier mâché faces, were permitted to poke their long noses into the family’s intimate quarters, losing themselves in the corridors and upstairs rooms. Masquerades were known to encourage mischief and granting party-goers access to all areas was certain to invite trouble. However, it was not the guests who initiated the misbehaviour at Harewood but the owner’s stepdaughter, Lady Worsley. As ‘all the rooms of both ladies and gentlemen’ were available for free passage, Seymour and ‘the two Miss Cramers’, the daughters of Sir John and Lady Coghill, seized the opportunity to rummage through the visitors’ belongings. Choosing to make the men the object of their antics, they ‘threw the gentlemen’s cloaths out of the windows particularly their breeches thinking them … unnecessary’. In retaliation, one guest, a Mr Wrightson, ‘went into Lady Worsley’s room, took her caps and band boxes and hung them in a tree in the park where they remained all night’.
While some may have laughed at the impishness of these stunts, they mortified the party’s host and hostess, who had also suffered damage to their ‘glasses
and furniture to the value of £500’. ‘I fancy there will be an end of all Xmas meeting at Harewood,’ wrote Lascelles’s friend St Andrew Warde. The dangerous gossip that such behaviour generated coursed swiftly through the homes of northern polite society. It had the potential not only to damage the reputations of the two unmarried Miss Cramers but to jeopardise Jane’s engagement to Charles Stanhope, the future Earl of Harrington whose father had already voiced opposition to a match with the lower-ranking Miss Fleming. Unfortunately, in the coming weeks the situation was to degenerate further. By the end of the month, letters carrying the outrageous story were in rapid circulation.
Francis Ferrand Foljambe of Aldwark Hall could not resist repeating the sordid details of the affair. On the 14th of January, the same troop of troublemakers who had run riot at Harewood had grown restless. With Lady Worsley at their head the ‘three heroines desired Lascelles to lend them his coach to go to Leeds, which he refused. They therefore took the cart horses and rode them there.’
En route
the young ladies ‘stopt at one of the inns and ordered the waiter to show them into such a room, which he told them he could not do, as it was kept for the officers of the Militia and their colours, etc. were there’. Upon hearing this, Seymour and the Miss Cramers became ‘determined to go in and took the pokers and broke open the door, then they heated them red hot and pop’d them into the colours which set them in a blaze’. Worse still, Foljambe writes with amused incredulity, ‘How do you think they quenched the flame their own fair selves had caused? They did not call water! Water!, it was more at hand …’ these three well-bred young ladies, who had been taught to dance, embroider and lisp sweetly in French, lifted their silk skirts ‘and fairly pissed it out …’ The atrocities did not end there. From their vantage in the upstairs rooms, the women then directed their exuberance out the windows. One of their victims, a well-dressed gentleman by the name of Mr Scott, had the misfortune of sauntering by in ‘his best coat & wig & laced waistcoat’. As he passed beneath them ‘they threw some water,
I really don’t know what sort upon him
, and immediately a large bag of soot which covered him entirely over’, the correspondent exclaimed. After they had thoroughly raised terror at the inn, the gang proceeded on their cart-horses to Cannon Hall, the home of Walter Spencer Stanhope, where ‘they broke open his library, threw all his books about, and … took away a pockett book full of Bank Notes’. In the end, Lady Worsley and her companions ‘were out three days upon this expedition’ and
were said to have ‘played many more pranks’. St Andrew Warde doubtless expressed the sentiments of many when he claimed that he could not fathom such behaviour in ‘the fair sex’, ‘the whole was too bad for ladies in their right mind. The excuse I have for them is that they were drunk if I may say so … they did not know what they did’. Foljambe was more cynical and condemned their conduct as ‘a specimen of the wit and courage of the Belles of Harewood’.
What these busy scribblers did not know was that the targets of these acts had not been chosen at random. It was no coincidence that Lady Worsley, who led the charge, levelled her fire against men and more specifically at the symbols of her husband’s current preoccupations; the militia and the library. However hard the Worsleys had striven to maintain a smooth exterior on their marriage, the cracks were becoming difficult to ignore.
Maurice George Bisset
It had been convenient for all concerned that the baronet was not at Harewood to witness the events of January 1779. Later in the month he travelled north to Stilton to join his wife
en route
to London and also to meet Walter Spencer Stanhope, to whom Seymour owed both money and an apology for the ransacking of Cannon Hall. Presumably Worsley was able to make amends but he remained coldly unperturbed by his wife’s reprehensible behaviour. Like most fashionable married ladies of the
ton
, her flamboyant lifestyle would have been subject to disapproving noises from many corners. As an influential member of His Majesty’s government and a wealthy landowner, Sir Richard felt that he and Lady Worsley were above the petty dictates of those less privileged than himself. It mattered little to him that ‘the world now began to talk freely of her ladyship’. Worsley’s response was merely ‘to laugh at the scandal’.
By the end of that year, the ever-reliable Sir Richard Worsley was being asked to lend even more time and funds to sustain the increasingly troubled administration of Prime Minister Lord North. When the parliamentary seat for the county of Hampshire unexpectedly fell vacant in November, His Majesty’s government, wielding a purse of £2,000, proposed that Sir Richard stand for it in a by-election. This he did, and was duly beaten by those who resented the idea of returning a paid ‘placeman’ (or a plant) to represent their interests in Parliament. Having contributed a further £6,000 to his own election campaign, the baronet found himself out of pocket but he was
nonetheless prepared to rally his resources when, less than year later, the 1780 general election was called.
In the eighteenth century, few things were grubbier and more dishonourable than politics. For all of the era’s impassioned rhetoric and pamphleteering about liberty and the rights of freeborn English men, the country’s system of government could not, at the time, be regarded as a functioning democracy. By 1800 only 15 per cent of the male population over 21 was enfranchised. The criteria determining who was permitted to vote was haphazard and varied from borough to borough. In some areas a voter had to be a property-owning freeman or a householder who paid the poor rates. In other places, a voter might broadly be defined as someone who could maintain himself independently of charity or who possessed a hearth on which he could boil his own pots. Although enfranchised, these small property-holders rarely had the luxury of casting their votes as their consciences demanded. As cogs in society’s great machine, they were more often than not turned one way or the other by the interests of landlords and employers. Open ballots ensured that no man’s vote was secret. A signature placed against the local lord might mean that an elector and his family were turned out of their leased homes or, like those in the pay of the Earl of Sandwich at the Portsmouth Docks, told ‘if they did not obey his Lordship’s mandate on the day of the election’ that their master ‘would see fit to no longer employ them’. Those who could not be cajoled into casting their votes appropriately could usually be bribed. At the start of any campaign candidates and their supporters prepared a pool of ‘election funds’ to lubricate the decision-making process in their favour. The King himself participated in this practice and is believed to have spent £62,000 in 1780 securing the seats of those favourable to his Tory administration. At election time, obedient servants of His Majesty’s wishes would find themselves, like Sir Richard, rewarded with ‘honours, patronage, or court favour’.
On a local level, money and promises exchanged hands for votes just as readily. Men could buy and sell certain electoral privileges or, in advance of a ballot, agree among themselves who they would send as their member elect to Westminster. Such ‘pocket boroughs’ dominated by the exclusive interest of one or more land-owning patrons and ‘rotten boroughs’ which contained a meagre handful of voters with a disproportionate representation in Parliament were becoming notorious by the end of the century. The Isle of Wight was a festering nest of corrupt constituencies of both descriptions. The political reformer T.B.H. Oldfield complained that the borough of
Newton alone consisted ‘of only a few cottages’ which ‘paying no more than 3 shillings and 8 pence to the land tax, may be ranked with Old Sarum, Gatton and Midhurst [the country’s most infamous rotten boroughs], yet sends as many members to parliament as the entire county of Middlesex!!’
With the assistance of the island’s election-fixing Holmes family, an extended network of Worsley cousins were able to reign as the region’s dominant political force in all three of the locality’s seats. In principle, Sir Richard represented the borough of Newport only, but in practice his relations, James Worsley who held Yarmouth and Edward Meux Worsley the member for Newtown, cast their votes in Parliament according to the baronet’s direction. Sir Richard’s seat was controlled by a fixed number of approved electors known as ‘a corporation’, which Worsley could easily manipulate using bribes and coercion. The other two boroughs were comprised of ‘burgage tenements’, parcels of land to which voting rights were attached. As a burgage entitled its holder to a voice in elections, the often derelict plots to which these privileges were connected were jealously guarded as heirlooms and passed down through the generations. Alternatively they could be sold to the highest bidder. However, more often than not they featured in a pre-election bartering process, where deeds of ownership were unscrupulously distributed among a candidate’s supporters who, claiming to be tenants, would then cast their votes accordingly. The conveyances would be remitted to the rightful owner at the election’s conclusion in return for a pecuniary reward or compensation of some sort.
These tricks, along with an assortment of other more shamelessly overt tactics were deployed in an unsavoury scramble to grasp the majority of votes. During the 1779 Hampshire by-election, both sides shipped in boisterous crowds of rabble-rousers to intimidate voters and swell the appearance of their candidate’s support. On one occasion, ‘near two hundred common fellows in carter’s frocks, postillion’s jackets, and labourer’s dresses’ were brought to a hustings, having been ‘hired for the purpose of huzzaing and hissing’. Additionally, in a deliberate attempt to confuse voters, the traditional polling venue at Winchester was moved without prior notice to Alresford, eight miles away. Later, Sir Richard’s opponent complained of unfair practices when ‘his champions’ were unable to cast their votes. The officials (whom Worsley had bribed) ‘had wilfully neglected to provide poll books’. The circulation of handbills stained with vicious accusations, the publication of jeering campaign songs and the intentional misrepresentation
of election figures formed only a part of this vastly entertaining but grossly ignoble circus.
Amid the cajoling and the bamboozling, elections also offered an opportunity for celebration and public display. Such events, like executions, festivals and marketing days, gave the general population of enfranchised and disenfranchised alike an opportunity to don their finest apparel and enjoy the spectacle. During hustings speeches and polling days small county towns were rattled awake by the arrival of coaches and cart-loads of strangers. Bands of musicians belted out rousing anthems, while parades of candidates and their followers marched on foot or cantered on horseback to polling stations. Brigades of loyal voters carried slogan-bearing banners and adorned themselves with sashes in the Whig colours of ‘buff and blue’ or Tory red. The friends of Sir Richard Worsley’s cause, both male and female were recognisable among the crowd for their ‘red plumes and gold pendants’ as well as their flags emblazoned with ‘Worsley For Ever’.
While elections legally did not involve women, this did not exclude them from involvement in the campaigning or prevent them from rallying to the side of male relations with unabashed shows of support. Some, like Lady Melbourne, paraded with their husbands while other respectable ladies, eager to demonstrate their enthusiasm but wanting to maintain a distance from the unwashed horde, watched from in their garland-decorated carriages. Others, like Ladies Derby, Beauchamp and Carlisle in 1784, chose to overlook the activities of the hustings from conspicuously placed windows. Most of theses wives, mothers, sisters and daughters were willing to play the role of hostess in a busy round of election entertaining. Candidates were expected to amply reward their supporters, regardless of their social standing. While the candidate’s elite coterie would be acknowledged privately with invitations to balls and suppers, all freeholders were regaled throughout the election period at raucous public banquets. Sir Richard, who delighted in advertising his position with grandiose displays, was renowned for the extravagant feasts he spread before his voters. While his opponent hosted measly ‘venison roasts’, the baronet laid on ‘public breakfasts … for five hundred persons’ who were promised ‘tea, coffee, chocolate and a cold collation’, in addition to ‘three sheep … roasted whole’, and served up to the accompaniment of ‘several bands of music’. It was during the election season, at events such as these that Seymour was drawn to the company of her new neighbour, Maurice George Bisset.
Until that year, neither Sir Richard nor Lady Worsley had met the twenty-three-year-old owner of Knighton Gorges, the estate that lay a mere four miles from Appuldurcombe. Bisset had only recently returned from his continental grand tour to assume responsibility for the property he had inherited from his maternal grandfather, General Maurice Bocland. Unlike the Worsleys or the Flemings, the Bissets were neither wealthy nor titled. George Bisset (as he preferred to be known) was the eldest of five sons and two daughters born to the Reverend Doctor Alexander Bisset, the Archdeacon of Connor in Ireland. His early years had been spent in the parish of Kilmore, in County Armagh, in a rectory house bursting with children. From accounts, Dr Bisset was a devout and compassionate father, an academic man and an influential member of the Society for Promoting Protestant Schools. For him and an increasing contingent of the upper middle classes and lower gentry, education was of supreme importance. Nothing honed both mind and soul with as much precision as the philosophical writings of history’s learned men. A devotion to books not only bred civility and politeness but chased away the temptations of idleness, a sin linked to the insidious lures of the card table, the bottle, and fornication. Dr Bisset did not wish to see any of his sons fall victim to indolence, especially his favourite child, George, who due to his grandfather’s bequest of land was more likely than his brothers to be lured into its lair. All five of the Reverend’s boys were dispatched to Westminster School and at least three of them later matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford. George Bisset did so in 1775 and on completing his university study went on to learn the letters of the law at Lincoln’s Inn.
Beyond the basic details of his life, very little is known about the young man who stepped into the realm of inherited wealth while his brothers were left to find their feet in the church and the military. What few images there are of Maurice George Bisset are caricatures which portray him as being quite tall and of a slight build. In some, his nose appears long and sharp, while his small eyes are etched with dark brows. If a brief comment in the
Morning Post
is to be believed, Bisset was not the most conventionally attractive of men. He ‘owes but little to nature for exterior graces’, the author wrote; however, he was persuasively charming and ‘possesses in a great degree the art of captivating by address’. With the exception of this statement, no one, not even his neighbour John Wilkes who befriended him in his later years, passes any remark about his character. When his name first entered into common conversation by way of the events in
which he would feature, fashionable society regarded him as a complete unknown.
However, within the provincial circles of the Isle of Wight, George Bisset would have been a recognised figure. The families of ‘quality’, the merchants of Newport, the villagers, drovers, farmers and harbour men would have respected him as the gentleman proprietor of Knighton, one of the island’s most historic properties. With its grey stone exterior ‘half-mantled in ivy up to its roof’ and its ‘plain square tower of great strength and antiquity’, the Gothic romance of medieval Knighton could not have contrasted more with the austere, classically tempered symmetry of its nearest neighbour, Appuldurcombe. For centuries a convivial relationship existed between the owners of the two manors. Before the arrival of Knighton’s current proprietor, the estate had been let to the Fitzmaurice family, who, along with the actor David Garrick and his wife, were entertained by Sir Richard, his mother and sister in the summer of 1772. As the owner of Knighton had it within his gift to influence his tenants’ votes, Worsley’s effusive introductions and invitations would have been forthcoming before the dust cloths were so much as lifted from the furniture.
To the baronet’s happy surprise, he and George Bisset held more in common than the boundaries of their property. The discovery that the estate’s heir was his near contemporary and that they could amuse each other with a cache of anecdotes about their European travels, was enough in itself. As Bisset was also a distant relation of Sir Richard’s cousins, the Meux Worsleys he might be called on as a political ally. The baronet found it especially useful that his new neighbour held a burgage claim in Newton which he could command during elections. As the author of
The Memoirs of Sir Finical Whimsy
explained, Worsley ‘was always pointing out to … [Bisset] the great honours and rewards that were to be procured by a little parliamentary management, and the advantages that would arise to both of them by monopolizing the borough’. At the time, Sir Richard was measuring schemes ‘to overpower the parliamentary influence of Reverend Leonard Troughear Holmes’ and to establish his absolute primacy on the island. With the combined influence of George Bisset and Worsley’s godfather, Sir William Oglander, the achievement of this goal was within his reach. However, the baronet soon found that Bisset had little appetite for politics. Worsley’s plotting sounded to the owner of Knighton like ‘Don Quixote explaining knight errantry to Sancho Panza, and made about as much impression’. In the end, Bisset required minimal persuasion to lend
his support to Sir Richard. At the time of the election, he was far too preoccupied to do otherwise.

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