Hallie Rubenhold - Lady Worsleys Whim: An Eighteenth-Century Tale of Sex, Scandal and Divorce

An Eighteenth-Century Tale ofSex, Scandal and Divorce

It was the divorce that scandalised Georgian England She was a spirited young heiress. He was a handsome baronet with a promising career in government. Their marriage had the makings of a fairy tale but ended as one of the most salacious and highly publicised divorces in history.

For over two hundred years the story of Lady Worsley, her vengeful husband, and her lover, George Maurice Bisset, lay buried in long-forgotten newspapers, overlooked pamphlets and yellowing satires. No other author, past or present, has told it before. Now Hallie Rubenhold, in her impeccably researched book, brings the three protagonists back to life and presents a rarely seen picture of aristocratic life in the Georgian era.

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Epub ISBN 9781473524750

Version 1.0

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Copyright Hallie Rubenhold 2008

Halli Rubenhold has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

First published in Great Britain in 2008 by
Chatto & Windus

Published by Vintage 2009

www.vintage-books.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

For Frank

Hallie Rubenhold is a historian and broadcaster and an authority on womens lives in the 18th century. She has worked as a curator for the National Portrait Gallery and as a university lecturer. Her first novel, Mistress of My Fate was received with great acclaim. She lives in London with her husband. Chat with her on Twitter @HallieRubenhold

ALSO BY HALLIE RUBENHOLD

The Covent Garden Ladies
The Harries List of Covent Garden Ladies, 1793 (editor)
Mistress of My Fate

Plate Section I

Sir Richard Worsley, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1775

Jane, Lady Harewood, Henry Singleton, c. 1795

Edwin Lascelles, Lord Harewood, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1768

Jane, Countess of Harrington as Aurora, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1775

Lady Worsley, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1779

Harewood from the South, J.M.W. Turner, 1798

Appuldurcombe, drawn and engraved by George Brannon, 1834

A Trip to Cocks Heath by J. Mortimer, 1778

Captain Jessamy Learning the Proper Discipline of the Couch by Carington Bowles, 1782

Interior View of Westminster Hall, Showing the Court of the Kings Bench in Session by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson, 1808

The Shilling or the Value of a PY: Crs Matrimonial Honour, 1782

Sir Richard Worse-than-sly Exposing his Wifes Bottom O fye! by James Gillray, 1782

A Peep into Lady W!!!!!ys Seraglio by James Gillray, 1782

Maidstone Whim, 1782

The Maidstone Bath or the Modern Susanna, 1782

A Bath of the Moderns, 1782

Lady Worsley Dressing in the Bathing House, 1782

George James, 1st Marquess of Cholmondeley by Pompeo Batoni, c. 1770

Monsieur de St George, after Mather Brown, 1788

7th Earl of Coventry with his son Viscount Deerhurst, by Richard Dighton, c. 1817

The Most Noble, the Marquess of Graham and the Earl of Buchan, by J. Kay, 1784

Lady Worsley by John Russell, c. 1800

Lady Worsleys signature on her deeds of separation, 1788

View of Brompton Lodge, Kensington, Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, 1857

Sir Richard Worsley, frontispiece for the Museum Worsleyanum engraved by Anthony Cardon, c. 1802

An assortment of cameos and gems collected by Sir Richard.

The author and publishers would like to thank the following people and institutions for the permission to reproduce their images:

The Earl and Countess of Harewood and the Trustees of the Harewood House Trust, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6; The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 8, 11, 14, 18; The Trustees of the British Museum, 9, 12, 15, 16, 17; The National Portrait Gallery, London, 13, 19; The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, 22; The Bridgeman Art Library/Private Collection, 18; The Guildhall Library, City of London, 24; Private Collection, 1, 26, 27.

What do you know about Sir Richard and Lady Worsley of Appuldurcombe? I asked my taxi driver as our car rolled along the undulating road to Newport. I had just disembarked from the hovercraft at Ryde after gliding across the Solent from Portsmouth. The Isle of Wight, lingering off the coast of the English mainland has always held a reputation for its insularity and secrets. I was eager to learn if the secrets of the two subjects who had brought me there were retained in local memory. Oh the Worsleys, said my driver, rumpling his brow. There was some sort of trouble, wasnt there? Some sort of scandal. Something bad, he responded. It was an answer I received from almost everyone I quizzed on the island; hoteliers, parish priests, publicans and long-time residents. The Worsleys? one man questioned with a hint of a snarl. They were a bad family. I was intrigued by the use of the word bad. No one seemed to know what precisely it was that made the Worsleys bad or what bad events had reduced their once imposing ancestral seat of Appuldurcombe to the ghostly shell that stands today.

I had come to Newport hoping to discover the story that lay behind one of the eighteenth centurys most sensational legal suits: the trial of Maurice George Bisset for criminal conversation with the wife of Sir Richard Worsley, an MP and Privy Counsellor. In February 1782, the case and its lurid sexual details made headline news. The country gossiped about it for months while the newspapers hounded and lampooned its protagonists for the better part of their lives. Yet remarkably, a story that was as familiar to the inhabitants of the late eighteenth century as the Monica Lewinsky scandal is to living memory has virtually disappeared. All that seemed to remain on the Isle of Wight was a vague sense that disgrace clung to the familys name.

I was certain that within the archives of the islands Record Office lay the answers to the many questions I had about the calamitous union of Sir Richard and Lady Seymour Dorothy Worsley. If I was to truly know the Worsleys and understand their legendary badness I needed to read their own defences. I wished to hear what the Worsleys, now dead for nearly 200 years had to say and what explanations they might offer for their own failings. But as my days in the archive passed I realised that someone or perhaps even a number of people had beaten me to their correspondence.