The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce

by Hallie Rubenhold

  An elopement would have tied Lady Worsley’s lot to that of the captain and whatever hardships he encountered would also become hers. Although society would stigmatise him less, George Bisset would still face stiff penalties for his behaviour. By absconding with the wife of his senior officer and intimate companion, Bisset would be in breach of a rigid gentleman’s code of honour which placed fraternal bonds and the dictates of hierarchy at the very heart of male relations. In future, virtuous women might think twice about receiving him while many of his male acquaintance would be less inclined to trust a man who was prepared to betray a friend and social superior. How his religious family would view his transgression can only be imagined. But in spite of this loss of esteem, scorn would not be Bisset’s primary concern. The possibility that Sir Richard might seek satisfaction in the form of a duel could not be discounted altogether; however by the late eighteenth century it was far more fashionable for a cuckolded husband to exact his revenge in court with a charge of criminal conversation.

  The offence of criminal conversation, or ‘crim. con.’ as it came to be known, was no more than a euphemism describing an act of sexual intercourse with another man’s wife. Since the religious laws that prohibited adultery had been relaxed in the late seventeenth century, alternative ways of punishing marital infidelity had to be found. The action for criminal conversation evolved out of the civil law of ‘trespass’, which covered offences of ‘mayhem, battery or wounding’. In this case, the ‘wounding’ had been done to the plaintiff ’s wife, by ‘polluting’ or ‘defiling’ her person and chastity, therefore the suit of crim. con. was about extracting reparations for the damage inflicted on a man’s property. As a legal action it stood entirely apart from any additional suit pursued in Parliament or in Doctors’ Commons. It was not obligatory for a man to secure a divorce before initiating proceedings for crim. con., nor did the result of a criminal conversation trial necessarily influence another court’s decision about the dissolution of a claimant’s marriage.

  Prior to 1760, the legal expenses of launching an action for crim. con. at the Court of the King’s Bench were so unaffordable that most disputes tended to be settled out of court, either by means of a private payment to the injured husband or, in some cases, by a duel. However by the second half of the eighteenth century a general increase in wealth meant that more husbands were prepared to do battle in open court. A successfully prosecuted suit for crim. con. also had the ability to restore a man’s injured sense of honour. This was duelling, but by another name.

  As might be expected, indignant spouses wishing to salve their dignity brought forth claims for astronomical amounts: £10,000 even £15,000. Spectacular payouts encouraged others to come forward with their complaints. The result was a veritable explosion of criminal conversation litigation between 1760 and 1829. At its peak between 1789 and 1799, 73 cases were heard.2 The numbers only began to drop when juries became less inclined to hand out large settlements and the action was eventually abolished in 1857, when public sentiment turned against the idea of ascribing a value to a man’s wife.

  It is remarkable that with so many factors to consider and the stakes so perilously high Captain Bisset and Lady Worsley decided to take their chances together. The headiness of romantic love alone guided their instincts. In the early weeks of November, Bisset began laying the groundwork for their escape. His plan was for a sudden flight to London when Sir Richard least expected it. Once there, the couple would lie low and await the baronet’s response. For this they would need a liaison in the capital, a trustworthy mediator who would manage their communication with Worsley and defend their interests. George William Coventry, Viscount Deerhurst, ‘a particular and intimate friend’ of Bisset and Lady Worsley’s, was the gentleman he had in mind. The rakish Deerhurst, no stranger to illicit dalliances, had been a confidant of the captain’s since the two matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford. He had also been privy to the clandestine attachment between his friend and Lady Worsley for some time. Sympathy for the lovers’ predicament combined with an acquired dislike of Sir Richard made him an amenable ally. The Viscount had even offered to arrange a safe house where the pair could shelter: the Royal Hotel on Pall Mall. With the preparations in order, the couple need only wait for opportunity’s signal.

  Sir Richard’s cousin, Captain Thomas Worsley had come from his lodgings at the White Hart Inn for Sunday dinner on the 18th of November. The three were still seated at the table as the afternoon sun began to flicker out on the horizon. The baronet’s new butler, a local man of considerable experience named Francis Godfrey, hovered in the dining room, lighting candles. As it had taken some time to replenish their household with servants, this was only Godfrey’s second day in employment and he was eager to please his master and mistress. Glasses were refilled and plates cleared at regular intervals. He kept an attentive eye on the party’s needs.

  Dressed in her ‘scarlet regimental riding habit’ Lady Worsley listened politely to the patter of conversation between her husband and his relation. Thomas Worsley was a man of few words and Sir Richard was contending with a heavy cold. They were to pass the remainder of the early evening together and later cross the road for a gathering hosted by Richard Leversuch and his wife for ‘the married officers and their ladies’. At about seven, Seymour excused herself from the gentlemen’s company in order to prepare for the party. Mary Sotheby assisted her out of her rumpled day clothing and buttoned her into a fresh brown riding habit which she paired with a blue hat embellished with a profusion of brown and white feathers. Once laced in and powdered sufficiently, she rang for Francis Godfrey to ‘light her across the road to Leversuch’s’.

  Neither Sir Richard nor his cousin, who had removed themselves to the sitting room, noticed Lady Worsley slip out the door. ‘Tell the cook that neither I nor Sir Richard shall sup at home,’ she instructed the butler. It was understood that the gentlemen would be joining her later, but as the hours pressed on, the baronet’s worsening cold pushed him back into the depths of his comfortable chair.

  At about ten, his cousin suggested that they join the party at Leversuch’s, but Sir Richard ‘being rather indisposed’ waved Captain Worsley on, asking him to ‘send his excuses’ and explain that he had ‘gone to bed early … to endeavour to get rid of his cold’. He requested a draft of ‘sack whey’, an eighteenth-century cure-all and afterwards disappeared into his bedchamber.

  By the time Captain Worsley appeared in the Leversuch’s drawing room, the surgeon and his wife had been entertaining a small gathering for a number of hours. Among the guests was Captain Bisset, who had placed himself attentively at Seymour’s side. In spite of gossip, Lady Worsley and her lover understood when to exercise restraint. Indeed nothing that night, their host was later to recall, ‘struck him as improper in their conduct’. They were ‘chatty and merry together’, but not in a manner which attracted curious glances. The couple had become practised at hiding their true thoughts. When Thomas Worsley entered the room offering Sir Richard’s apologies, both Seymour and her paramour must have caught their breath. This was the occasion for which they had been preparing. They sat for another hour by Leversuch’s fire, sipping tea and waiting.

  When supper was called at eleven, the group rose from their seats and went downstairs to the dining room. Bisset moved swiftly to Seymour’s side and took her arm. He lingered behind while the chattering wives and finely groomed officers filed down the staircase. Alone, at the foot of the stairs, ‘he pressed her hands’ urgently and leaning close to her cheek ‘whispered for the space of a minute or so’. They would go tonight.

  Although no one had seen the signal pass between the two, Lady Worsley’s demeanour quickly began to change. Mrs Leversuch’s seating arrangements, which placed Seymour between Bisset and Captain Worsley, had flustered her. A cold supper was laid before them, but Seymour’s thoughts and appetite were elsewhere. The minutes ticked away rapidly. In what must have seemed a disproportionate span of time, the empty dishes
were removed and Mrs Leversuch led her guests into the adjoining room, where Lady Worsley set her eyes on the clock.

  As the hands of the timepiece ticked past midnight, Lady Worsley quite abruptly ‘got up and made a motion to go’. Leversuch also rose to his feet and, playing the genial host, asked ‘if the company was not agreeable to her Ladyship?’ ‘No,’ Seymour answered. What then might they make of ‘Her Ladyship leaving them so early?’ Those assembled fixed their gazes on her. Lady Worsley’s nerves were decidedly rattled. As one ‘always remarkable for keeping very late hours’, she was betraying herself. In the end it was her lover’s words that settled her. ‘Don’t go yet, my Lady,’ he pleaded, taking out his watch and commenting on the time. Slightly chagrined, Seymour ‘thereupon sat down again’.

  The calm that came over her was fleeting. Hardly a half-hour had elapsed when, ‘in a hurry’, Seymour ‘rather unexpectedly to the company … got up again’. This time she was adamant that ‘she must go’. Captain Bisset also rose to his feet and simultaneously proposed ‘taking his leave … in order to see her Ladyship home’.

  The distance between the Leversuchs’ door and the dimly lit windows of the Worsley’s house was no more than a matter of steps. Nevertheless, the surgeon insisted on lighting a candle and escorting his commander’s wife to safety. The impatient Bisset followed closely, eager to rid them of the meddling man. In the middle of the road and ‘within a few yards’ of her home, Seymour stopped her well-intentioned host, commenting ‘that he should not trouble himself to go any further’. Accordingly, the surgeon bid the couple goodnight and, at last, retreated with his guttering candle back over the road.

  ‘It was extraordinary,’ Leversuch remarked to his wife later that night, after the rest of the party had departed, ‘the circumstances of Lady Worsley’s breaking up and leaving the company at so early an hour. For at all other times, when the same company spent the evening together in the same kind of way, Lady Worsley … never quitted company till two or three in the morning.’ Below stairs, housemaids ferried dirty plates and china cups into the scullery. The cook put away the scraps and locked the tea caddy. The household prepared for bed, but no one was to get much sleep that night.

  7

  19th of November 1781

  Standing beside the door to the Worsleys’ house, Seymour and Captain Bisset kept very still. On the other side of the wall sat the sleepy Francis Godfrey and Mary Sotheby listening intently for the sounds of their mistress’s return. In the stillness of the early hours the lovers watched for the surgeon’s shadow to disappear before daring to move. Only after his door had shut did they turn towards the Castle Green and creep away into the darkness. Near to the crest of the hill sat Tubb’s lodging house, folded in night. The house, sunk deep in sleep, issued only the faintest glow as the proprietor, Joseph Tubb, slumbered with a low fire in his bedroom grate. They tiptoed up the stairs and stealthily opened the door to the dining room adjoining Bisset’s lodgings. Once inside, a candle was lit. It was just after one o’clock in the morning.

  Before their departure there were several things they had to do. Bisset took out two sheets of paper. On one, he began a letter to Sir Richard in which he formally resigned his commission as an officer. Before placing a seal on it he retrieved another, slightly larger piece of parchment awarding him his rank of Captain in the South Hampshire Militia. Later, Bisset would hand this to his trusted valet, Joseph Connolly, who would be given the unenviable task of delivering the message to the baronet. Lady Worsley then wrote her instructions to Mary Sotheby, whom she commanded to come to Lord Deerhurst’s house on Cleveland Row in London bringing the contents of her wardrobe. Retrieving her infant daughter would be more complicated and would most likely require negotiation with her husband following the elopement.

  The letters were sealed and, not wishing to wake the house, the couple then extinguished the light and retired to Bisset’s bed. In the handful of hours that remained before their departure, sleep would have been inconceivable. Comfort in each other’s arms, however, was not.

  At about 4 a.m. there was still no hint of sunrise. Bisset’s hearth was cold and the room remained in blackness. During the nervous moments after their arrival at Tubb’s lodging house someone had neglected to keep a flame lit. Now, when they most urgently required it, there was none to be had. Without even the slightest glimmer to guide them they would be unable to prepare themselves for their journey. Recalling the sight of Joseph Tubb’s illuminated threshold, Bisset jumped from the bed in his nightgown, crossed the corridor and anxiously beat on his landlord’s chamber door. Tubb was jerked from his sleep by his ‘much agitated’ lodger ‘requesting that he let him light his candle’. The oddness of the incident piqued him. Afterwards, Tubb crawled back into the warmth of his bed and listened.

  From down the hallway he heard the floorboards creak. Someone, or several people were moving about. A loud whisper called out to Joseph Connolly. Fearing that his lodger was ill, Tubb cast off his bed covers and went quickly to Bisset’s rooms, where he banged at the door asking if ‘he might be of service’. The captain’s tense voice responded that he was indeed ‘exceedingly ill but that he had sent his man out for something’. The landlord was just about to return to his bed when he heard the murmurings of a conversation. Mr Bisset was not alone.

  Tubb did not go back to his bedchamber. Instead he climbed the stairs to the garret and rattled the door of his housekeeper, the matronly Elizabeth Figg. Through the door, her master instructed her to rise and ready herself immediately, since her assistance might be required. The housekeeper lit her own candle and poked the coals in her grate, preparing rather prematurely for a long day’s duties. As she dressed in the cold of morning, pulling on her skirts and adjusting her stays, she heard a carriage clatter up to the front of the house. The sound of Connolly in his heavy boots clumping up and down the stairs was replaced after an uncertain pause by Captain Bisset’s steps and then by the unmistakable tread of feminine shoes.

  Outside in the cobbled courtyard their carriage waited. Connolly, at 4.30 a.m. had been instructed to race across Lewes to the Starr Inn, where a post-chaise and a team of four horses could be hired at short notice. Bisset’s chargers and his groom were also staying at the Starr. Claiming that ‘his master … had received an express from London and was about to set off for that place immediately’, Connolly woke Bisset’s groom as well as the groom at the Inn, Jerah Thompson, who grudgingly rose from their beds to hitch the horses to the chaise.

  Thompson rode with the groom to Tubb’s lodging house and waited for Captain Bisset. Within minutes he appeared, accompanied by a lady, whom he escorted into the carriage. In the gloom of early morning, Thompson watched her cross the courtyard in a scarlet and blue cape. She was dressed to travel, in her brown riding habit, the feathers atop her fashionably tilted hat bobbing with the movements of her head. A suspicious Bisset caught Thompson staring. Through the open window of the chaise, he beckoned him round. ‘Take care of my horses,’ he instructed the groom from the Starr. ‘I shall send word for them to be sent on.’ Then Bisset shouted to the postilion and the chaise, containing Sir Richard Worsley’s wife, jolted off to London.

  At 5 a.m., while most of Lewes slept, a carriage shot up the High Street and on to the London Road. As they departed at breakneck speed for the capital, their chaise passed directly in front of Sir Richard’s darkened bedroom window, leaving a jangle of noise in its wake. The horses charged down the muddy, rutted roads with only the light from the carriage lanterns to guide them. Bisset and Seymour knew that every minute they put between themselves and the Sussex town they left behind was precious. Tubb would be dressed by now, Worsley would soon be stirring in his bed, servants would be waking and questions would be asked. In London, with its labyrinthine streets, its swarming crowds and countless hostelries, their hired yellow chaise would join a river of traffic and disappear into a stream of urban anonymity. However, while they rode they were vulnerable.

  Biss
et had ordered his groom (who, in the tradition of a post-chaise was driving the team from astride the front horse) to ride as hard as he could, pushing the beasts to exhaustion before changing them for fresh ones at each stage. For fear of discovery, neither Lady Worsley nor the captain dared move from the carriage. At about seven, their chaise pulled into the White Hart Inn at Godstone, a small coaching village roughly 30 miles from Lewes. As the spent horses were being unhitched from the carriage, Captain Bisset opened the door and stretched his legs. Confident that the most hazardous part of their journey had been accomplished, he paced around his vehicle. At that early hour there were enough enquiring eyes at the inn to notice the presence of a well-attired gentleman and the slightly obscured profile of a lady, hidden behind the panes of the carriage windows.

  In roughly two hours they had made considerable progress, but as they neared London, their pace would begin to drag. The roads soon grew dense with north-bound traffic: drovers behinds their herds, wagons of freight, passengers on foot, ungainly mailcoaches lumbering to the capital. They would pass through a series of towns and villages, inching towards the metropolis via the turnpike to Croydon, through the farmland and wooded glades of Mitcham, continuing through the increasingly populated parts of Streatham and Brixton with its collection of hamlets and greens. It was late morning when they crossed Westminster Bridge.