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

by Hallie Rubenhold

  They proceeded through Westminster and the Haymarket to Pall Mall where the chaise stopped outside the Royal Hotel, one of many new, respectable establishments in this, the most fashionable district of town. The Royal Hotel had opened its doors only five years earlier and its proprietor, a Mr Weston, wanted to preserve its reputation among a patchwork of gaming clubs, taverns, tradesmen’s premises and Dr Graham’s spurious ‘Temple of Health and Hymen’ with its fertility-restoring ‘Celestial Bed’. To maintain appearances, a waiter or footman was always on hand to assist arriving guests. On the morning of the 19th of November, this was Thomas Fort’s duty. He came down the steps of the hotel, dressed in tidy livery.

  As they sat in the post-chaise, Seymour and Bisset paused to catch their breath. Although their daring escape had been a success it would only be a matter of hours before Worsley, trailing their scent, would be searching every corner of the capital for their whereabouts. Soon word of their elopement would reach London and tongues would be wagging. They dare not venture out until they knew what Sir Richard was likely to do. In the meantime, everyone would crave a sighting of the pair, making it unwise even to pass by an uncovered window. They watched Thomas Fort approach the carriage. He would assist them as they stepped, in plain view, on to Pall Mall. Bisset turned and spoke to Lady Worsley, holding ‘the door for a minute or two in his hand as if hesitating and undetermined whether to get out of the Chaise or not’. Having braced themselves, the couple then briskly alighted, rushing through the hotel’s entry, ‘thro’ the passage and up stairs’ with the confused Thomas Fort pursuing them.

  After a very long, tense ride and a night without rest, Lady Worsley and her lover wanted breakfast. Hotels, taverns and coffee houses had a variety of upstairs rooms available for better-paying clients who preferred to separate themselves from the establishment’s less salubrious patrons when they dined. The management at the Royal Hotel therefore did not think it unusual when the pair requested a private dining room. It was about midday when Seymour and Bisset were shown into the Apollo, the hotel’s finest dining room on the first floor, ‘where breakfast was by their order immediately carried up to them’. As Fort laid the plates of buttered toast and breads on the table and poured the couple their tea he asked if they would be staying at the hotel. Lady Worsley answered yes and then requested ‘that a bed chamber be made up immediately for her and her husband’. Fort then rang for the housekeeper, Mrs Anna Watkinson.

  When the capable Watkinson trundled up from below stairs Seymour explained that she and her spouse intended to hire out the Apollo dining room for their exclusive use and therefore required a bedchamber ‘as near as possible’ to it. Mrs Watkinson settled on the perfect room: number 14, separated only by a corridor. The bed, Anna Watkinson remarked, was then ‘made ready for their immediate reception’.

  While Captain Bisset and Lady Worsley were taking their breakfast, two of the Royal Hotel’s housemaids had been inspecting the pair. At twenty-six and twenty-three, Sarah Richardson and Ann Ekelso had seen enough to know that not every married couple who slept in their hotel was a legitimate one. Ekelso’s suspicions were raised when she came above stairs in the middle of the afternoon to find that the two guests had retired to their bedchamber. She had been ordered to stoke the fire in room 14 but found the door locked ‘and the room shut up’. Furthermore, she noticed that the curtains had been drawn across their windows. ‘It was an odd time of day for people to go to bed,’ Richardson had commented knowingly to her fellow servant. From then on, for entertainment’s sake, the girls resolved to keep a close watch on the activities of the couple in number 14.

  Lady Worsley and Captain Bisset provided them with ample amusement. At some time after seven o’clock in the evening, the bell rope was pulled and the two housemaids were summoned above stairs to ‘relight the fire and remake the bed’. The young women revelled in the bawdy scene that greeted them. With the relish of a tell-tale, Sarah Richardson recounted that the bed ‘was extremely tumbled with the pillows and bed cloaths thrown about and the sheets twisted together and everything in much great disorder …’ But more peculiar still, she and Ekelso were compelled to ‘put new sheets on the bed’. This was an ‘extraordinary’ situation, Richardson added with a hint of coquettish mockery, as she had ‘believed the sheets they had first lain in to be quite clean when put on the bed’.

  Shortly after midnight, the tinkle of a ringing bell called them to number 14 once more. While the pair were enjoying their supper in the Apollo Sarah and Ann were requested once again ‘to make up the bed’, a task they had performed not five hours earlier. Lady Worsley took them aside and specifically ordered the girls ‘to make it as hard as possible and put [further] clean sheets on … the bed’. Incredibly, when the housemaids opened the door to the chamber, the room had been returned to its former state of disarray, with the ‘bed cloaths being thrown in a heap and the sheets all in a twist’. These sheets were now soiled like those they had already removed. The bed with its fibrous feather filling had been completely displaced. As a feather mattress required shaping to make it solid, the maids climbed on to this site of debauchery ‘and trod it down’, though probably not without a lewd jest. With hindsight, and after the details of Lady Worsley and Captain Bisset’s story had exploded into the public domain, Sarah Richardson confessed with an edge of acerbity that she and Ekelso had always nurtured ‘a suspicion between themselves that they were not really married’. That which betrayed them was simple: ‘there appeared a greater fondness between them than is generally seen between husband and wife’.

  Unfortunately, the situation that provided such fun for those on the opposite side of number 14’s locked door was becoming an increasingly distressing one for the couple behind it. By early evening, Joseph Connolly had arrived at the Royal Hotel. He had come without Mary Sotheby. He did, however, bring the news that Lady Worsley and Bisset were anticipating. Discovery of their disappearance had occurred shortly after dawn. Sir Richard and Captain Worsley, along with Leversuch, Joseph Tubb, the employees of the lodging house and the White Hart Inn, as well as various officers of the South Hampshire Militia, had become involved in a frantic inquest. He regretfully reported that Mary Sotheby and all of Seymour’s urgently needed clothing had been shut in the Worsleys’ house at Lewes. Connolly had come as soon as he had been able. Before his departure, he had caught sight of Sir Richard. He seemed a man ‘in great distress … confusion and panic’, and capable of anything. The last glimpse that Connolly had of him was when Worsley boarded a post-chaise and set off at full gallop for London.

  8

  The Cuckold’s Reel

  When Elizabeth Figg came down the dark staircase to Tubb’s basement kitchen she was surprised to find that someone had already lit the fire. Sitting beside it, dressed for a journey was Joseph Connolly. He looked up at her with a fearful expression. In his hands he held two letters ready for dispatch. Unnerved by his appearance, Elizabeth enquired if ‘he had known of the cause of the disturbance’. Connolly answered, quite shaken, ‘that his master, Captain Bisset was gone off with Lady Worsley and he … was to go to Lady Worsley’s maid to get her to go with him and to get Lady Worsley’s cloaths’. Then he gestured to the packet of papers in his hands: ‘the letter’, he stated with dread, ‘is from my master for Sir Richard Worsley, but I am too afraid to deliver it’. He had been stewing in the kitchen, attempting to fortify his nerve by the warmth of the fire.

  As Connolly spoke, Tubb came down the stairs. ‘What was this noise I heard in the night?’ the proprietor asked. The valet then began to tell his incredible tale again: ‘Captain Bisset was set off for London and had taken Lady Worsley with him!’ He showed Tubb the letter in his hand and explained ‘his master had directed him to deliver it but … he feared Sir Richard Worsley should blow his head off’. As Tubb and his housekeeper stood dumbstruck in the kitchen, a shaken Connolly excused himself to pack Bisset’s belongings and face the trials that awaited him. For those at Tubb’s and f
or many others in Lewes, this was to be the start of an extraordinary day.

  While Connolly and Elizabeth Figg were in the kitchen exchanging gossip, down the hill from Castle Green, Sir Richard Worsley rose from his bed. He had not slept well. Throughout the evening the muted glow from Lady Worsley’s dressing room hearth reminded him that she had not yet returned. Mary Sotheby, who had kept a vigil with Francis Godfrey in the servants’ room had come above stairs several times to stoke the fire. Hearing the swish of skirts and the shifting of coal, Sir Richard had called out his wife’s name, but only Mary Sotheby answered. The clock had struck each of the passing hours and still there had been no sign of Seymour.

  At shortly after 5 a.m. a post-chaise with a team in full flight had rattled the windows and jolted Worsley from his sleep. With his empirical, enlightened mind Sir Richard was not normally the sort of man to place much faith in his intuition. Strangely though, this noise, the race of horses’ hoofs and bounce of a sprung carriage unnerved him. He pushed aside his bed covers. From the door of his rooms, Worsley shouted to his staff below: ‘who is awake?’ he demanded. Mary Sotheby and Francis Godfrey replied. Sir Richard seemed perplexed. ‘Why has Lady Worsley not returned home?’ he called out through the unlit house, but neither the butler nor the lady’s maid could offer an explanation. When they climbed the stairs they found him in his nightgown looking ‘much surprised’ if not confused. ‘Certainly,’ he said to them, ‘she must have been taken ill or some accident must have happened.’ He glanced through the window to the house across the road and then turned to Godfrey: ‘go instantly over to Mr Leversuch’s and enquire for her,’ he directed. The butler made haste outside into the cold morning.

  Worsley tucked himself into the shadows by his window and observed with stoic stillness. Mary stood beside him. They watched as Godfrey pounded on the door, knocking again and again, the sounds travelling down the High Street. The servant ‘had knocked some time’ but the Leversuchs’ household, fatigued from a night’s entertainment was slow to its feet. Growing more anxious Sir Richard turned to Mary and ‘ordered her to go over to the Butler and to keep knocking ’til they made somebody answer’. And so she too was dispatched over the road.

  After much ‘violent rapping at the door’, Leversuch in his nightshirt threw open the sash window and stared quizzically at Worsley’s two servants. ‘Sir Richard Worsley desires that Lady Worsley would come home,’ Godfrey announced.

  ‘But Lady Worsley … was not there,’ the surgeon responded. She had, in fact ‘left his house about one in the morning’. She had been in the company of Captain Bisset, who ‘had handed her Ladyship over the way and he, himself had lighted them within a very few yards of Sir Richard’s door’. This was not the reply that anyone had been expecting.

  When Godfrey and Mary Sotheby returned to the Worsley house and repeated the conversation to Sir Richard the last of his solid composure soon melted into ‘extreme agitation’. The baronet ‘hurried on his cloaths’ and shouted for Godfrey ‘to light lanthorns’. He was determined to hear Leversuch’s story for himself.

  He marched Godfrey with his swaying lamp back over the road and thumped once more at the surgeon’s door. There, in the drawing room where Lady Worsley had anxiously watched the clock only hours earlier, Leversuch ‘gave him the same … account he had sent by the butler’; that he ‘had lighted her over the way’ and had last seen her ‘in the care of Captain Bisset’.

  Sir Richard stood in disquieted silence for several moments. The surgeon surveyed his expression, observing the incomprehension welling in his features. ‘Good God, Leversuch,’ he muttered at last, ‘what shall I do? I can not tell what to make of it, surely she must be playing me some trick.’ He then became ‘greatly alarmed’, pacing about, ‘quite undetermined what to do’ and ‘not knowing where to go to seek after her’. In fact, Sir Richard knew very well where he might have sought his wife. Leversuch had plainly told him with whom she had departed, but at that moment the betrayal it implied was too enormous for Worsley to accept. The possibility of his wife running away with George Bisset had always loomed, but given his liberal treatment of the affair and the dangerous secrets they shared as a trio, he may have convinced himself that the couple would never have resorted to such an irrational and impulsive act.

  After nearly fifteen minutes of fraught deliberation the baronet convinced himself that she must have spent the night at Captain and Mrs Chapman’s house, as Seymour and Mrs Chapman ‘were very intimate’. He announced to Leversuch that ‘he would go and enquire after her’ there.

  Godfrey strode briskly beside his master, lighting him down the road to the Chapmans’ rented house where Worsley believed he might find his wife. But after much anxious knocking and another quarter of an hour passed in Captain Chapman’s sitting room, he soon learned that they too ‘knew nothing of her’.

  Outside on the street, the butler waited. Worsley emerged wearing a stricken face and visibly ‘in the utmost agony and distress’. Overcome by ‘a state of uncertainty and suspense’, Sir Richard now realised that the matter was as grave as he had feared. Which aspect of the situation horrified him the most –the pair’s unexpected treachery or the knowledge that they now roamed at large armed with potentially lethal secrets–can only be imagined.

  He took Godfrey back up the hill to the White Hart Inn in order to rouse Thomas Worsley from his bed. On learning of his cousin’s distress, he too slipped on his clothing and ‘after about ten minutes … appeared at the house of Sir Richard’. By the time Worsley and his servant had returned home, the dawn had begun to colour the sky. In the glare of daylight there would be further discoveries.

  The commander and his cousin were sitting uncomfortably together, when at shortly after 7 a.m. a servant came to the door with a message. It was Joseph Connolly, relieved to deposit his small packet of bad tidings into the hands of Francis Godfrey, another unwitting messenger. Connolly did not linger for an answer. The butler examined the letters with some curiosity ‘and finding them to be directed to Sir Richard carried [them] to him’.

  Immediately, Worsley recognised his wife’s curved, delicate script on the note addressed to Mary Sotheby, and his friend, Bisset’s writing on the parcel that bore his own name. He cracked the seal ‘and took out a small parchment appearing to be an officer’s commission’. Carefully, he unfolded the attached note. Both Godfrey and Thomas Worsley held their breath as their eyes studied Sir Richard’s movements. ‘Oh,’ he looked up and uttered, ‘my Lady is found.’

  Mary Sotheby was summoned from below stairs. ‘Lady Worsley had been found’, she was told and Sir Richard required her ‘to attend him to the house of a Mr Tubb’. Sotheby had guessed that this trouble involved Captain Bisset. As she followed behind Worsley, moving briskly along the road, an increasing sense of dread began to overtake her, a fear that ‘Sir Richard and Captain Bisset might meet and that any mischief might then ensue’. Her trepidation was so great that when they approached the entry to the lodging house she could bring herself ‘to follow Sir Richard only as far as the stairs … and no further … being [too] frightened’.

  The baronet mounted the stairway that had led his wife and her lover off on their adventure from Lewes. As he took the steps in his impatient stride, he called out to the floors above, ‘Lady Worsley!’ Lady Worsley did not answer. Instead Sir Richard was met by Elizabeth Figg, who told him ‘that she was not there’.

  ‘Upon your honour,’ he demanded, ‘can you say that Lady Worsley is not in this house?’

  ‘She is not in the house,’ Elizabeth affirmed. She found Sir Richard not only ‘agitated’ but threateningly aggressive. In an attempt to assuage his temper she added, ‘you are welcome to search the house if you think proper’. Worsley continued up the stairs, inspecting the surroundings with acute suspicion.

  ‘Has she not been here?’ he asked her pointedly as he reached the top floor. They were standing outside her bedchamber. Elizabeth Figg was feeling intimidated. ‘It has bee
n my understanding,’ she commented, ‘that Lady Worsley had been here and was gone off with Captain Bisset at about five in the morning, but … I did not see her.’ Then, in an action that ‘seem[ed] rather to discredit her’, the baronet pushed open the door of Elizabeth’s room to ensure that the housekeeper had not been paid to harbour the errant pair. Satisfied, he stepped back and then addressed her one final time: ‘Do you know what road they have taken?’

  ‘No,’ Elizabeth answered, ‘I do not.’

  To the housekeeper’s relief Sir Richard said nothing more and silently ‘turned on his heel … and then went away’.

  Worsley now had time against him. He returned to his house ‘in a violent hurry’, bolting through the door and scattering servants in his wake. Urgent preparations were made for a journey to London. Gossip travelled faster than post-chaises. It was possible that the whispering had already gathered speed. He must do what he could to curtail it; to bring her back, to buy her silence, or to begin legal proceedings. Events had happened so suddenly that it is unlikely Sir Richard himself knew what course he would take, or even the situation he might find when his carriage arrived in the capital. He knew for certain that he would require moral support, and looked to his cousin, Captain Worsley, to accompany him.

  Another post-chaise and four horses were hired. The baronet took his butler aside and gave him ‘strict orders … not to leave the house or to admit any one into it ’til he should see or hear from him again’. This message was then impressed upon Worsley’s small corps of domestic staff, who would effectively be locked into the house until further notice. This, they were instructed, ‘was for the sake of Miss Worsley, [their] daughter who was then there’. Gratefully, their son Robert who remained safely sequestered in the nursery at Appuldurcombe, would be spared the upheaval. Sir Richard had begun to plot his strategy. He believed that if his wife were to return to Lewes on any pretext it would be with the intention of claiming her illegitimate baby. It would not be long, Sir Richard calculated, before the child’s true parents began to yearn for her. Should ‘Lady Worsley come to the house’, the staff were ordered ‘not to admit her or to suffer her to come in’. The baronet had publicly claimed Jane as his own and was determined for the sake of his dignity that she should remain so.