In Bed with the Georgians Read online

  And then along came Andrew Robinson Stoney, an Anglo-Irish adventurer. He was a thoroughly bad egg. It was not the first time he had set his sights on a wealthy woman as the means to riches. He pursued her, and ingratiated himself with her after a series of derogatory articles alluding to her affair with Gray (and others) appeared in the Morning Post. Who should rush to her defence, in print, but Andrew Robinson Stoney. In due course he even challenged the editor of the Morning Post to a duel, over Her Ladyship’s honour. But it was all a put-up job – the critical letters, as well as the responses, were all written by Stoney. The duel was a sham, and the editor had been put up to it by Stoney.

  Stoney pretended to have been run through by the editor’s sword and staggered back to Mary to announce that he was dying for her, and her alone. Oh, and by the way, would she mind marrying him in order to satisfy his dying wish? What could the poor girl do? She agreed, and the recumbent body of the fatally wounded swain was brought into the church to gasp his wedding vows before he breathed his last. Only, he didn’t die, and leapt from his bed as soon as the wedding had taken place, and proceeded to make Mary’s life a living hell. He spent her money with wild extravagance; he forced her to sell her hothouses and rare plants; he beat her constantly, spied on her, raped her servants and forbade her to go out in any of her carriages. She was expected to sit down at table with a succession of her husband’s mistresses. Eventually, he dismissed all her servants. Her letters were intercepted, and apparently her husband took to imprisoning her in a cupboard where she would be fed one egg and one biscuit per day. He also bullied her into writing her ‘Confession’ – an account of her past indiscretions, which he intended to keep so that he could blackmail her into subservience. Above all he was furious that Mary had heeded the advice of her first husband, and had put much of her fortune out of his reach. In 1784 Stoney went so far as to seize Mary’s daughter Lady Anna Maria and send her to Paris. The young lady, being a ward in Chancery, had to be brought back by the Court.

  The following year, Mary escaped and started divorce proceedings. This slow process took four years to finalise. With the divorce suit pending, her husband seized her and carted her off to Streatlam Castle. Her supporters gave chase. For eleven days the kidnapped Countess was incarcerated in her carriage, and beaten savagely. Eventually Stoney was overtaken at Darlington, and the poor woman was freed.

  He was tried for assault and conspiracy to imprison his wife, and evidence that she had been tortured and mis-treated entered the public domain. Curiously, this did not particularly endear her to the public – especially when her action in putting her money out of her husband’s reach became known. To some extent she was viewed as the maker of her own misfortune. But her husband was found guilty, fined £300, and sent to prison for three years. His final act of revenge was to get the ‘Confessions’ published – no easy feat since the newspapers refused to have anything to do with the vendetta (or at least, not until he had bought a fifty-one per cent stake in the paper, and compelled the editor to obey his orders). Thanks to the disclosures in her ‘Confessions’, Her Ladyship’s reputation was in tatters, and never recovered. Ten years of litigation followed during which her ex-husband tried to lay claim to Mary’s estate – small wonder that the uncertainty and worry nearly drove the poor woman mad. But eventually all claims were struck out, leaving Stoney destitute and friendless.

  He was cast into prison, unable to pay his debts. For over twenty years he languished there under the jurisdiction of the Kings Bench. Prison however had its advantages – he hired a room within the confines of the jail, seduced a young girl called Polly, and kept her incarcerated inside this locked room, feeding her but once a day, and siring no fewer than five children by her. The unlovely, bullying, tyrant eventually died in June 1810. In an Age characterised by violence, depravity and greed, he was perhaps without equal. Thirty years after the brute died, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray used his story in his novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon.

  The story says much about the attitude of the Law towards domestic violence – it really had to be extreme before action could be taken. Here, the husband had compelled his staff to testify against Mary, stating that she willingly went along with the treatment. She was, after all, his property: he was, in law, her Lord and Master. Although it may be a fallacy to think that the law regarded it as a man’s right to use the rule of thumb (i.e. to administer a beating as long as it was with a stick no bigger than the width of his thumb) the saying nevertheless indicates how the rights of a wife in the eighteenth century were far inferior to the rights of her husband.

  Mary, known to all as the ‘Unhappy Countess’, had lived out her days with two of her daughters and a house full of dogs in eccentric isolation. She died at the age of 51 in 1800. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, apparently wearing full court dress, ready to meet her Sovereign Lord.

  Her eldest son John, who later became tenth Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, was, like his mother, to feature prominently in the dinner-table gossip and printed tittle-tattle of the late eighteenth century. This was on account of his liason with Sarah, Countess of Tyrconnel. Born Sarah Hussey Delaval, Sarah was ‘a bit of a goer,’ much loved by the papers because she was witty, charming, attractive – and, some might say, promiscuous. As a wealthy young heiress she was snapped up by George Carpenter, the earl of Tyrconnel, but she quickly got bored with him and set her sights, and more besides, on the Prince Frederick, Duke of York. Contemporary accounts suggest that the Earl was flattered by the arrangement, and actively encouraged it. The public were fascinated by the whole affair, and The Accommodating Spouse reproduced as Image 60 shows the Earl leaving the marital bedroom in which the Prince has already stripped off his jacket and trousers. The Earl announces that he will not be back before breakfast, just as the Prince is hopping into bed with Sarah.

  The Prince moved on to other pastures a year later, and Sarah settled for the bedroom charms of John, the aforementioned tenth Earl. John was a constant visitor at the family home of the Tyrconnels. Apparently the Earl of Tyrconnel was not worried by the arrangement, which saw the two men happily go off horse racing during the day, while John shared Sarah’s favours at night.

  In December 1791 the Bon Ton Magazine was able to report to its avid readers that Sarah had left her husband and had set up home with John at his home at Gibside, County Durham. This brazen display of living together outside of wedlock was unusual, and scandalised genteel society. Image 47 shows a print entitled A luncheon at Gibside with the lovers devouring a meal, and each other, while the Earl of Tyrconnel is riding past the open window wondering what is taking them so long.

  The couple appear to have been genuinely in love, but their happiness came swiftly to a close when Sarah developed tuberculosis. She died in October 1800, and poor John found himself burying his lover just six months after he had buried his mother. It meant another trip to Westminster Abbey, and another corpse bedecked in lace and fine jewellery. He was devastated, although rumour had it that he sought comfort in the arms of Sarah’s 19-year-old daughter. Keeping things in the family did not result in a long-lasting affair, and nine years passed before he finally ‘re-entered the amorous contest’. Being highly egalitarian, he fell for the charms of the daughter of his gardener, a 22-year-old by the name of Mary Milner. She bore him a son in 1811, and most unusually for the Georgians, he immediately admitted paternity. Nine years later, when he knew he was dying, he got up from his death bed to marry the everloyal Mary, hoping that his son would thereby be legitimated. He died sixteen hours later. To some extent it worked – the marriage legitimised the son under Scottish law but was ineffective so far as the (Irish) title and the English assets were concerned. John’s brother therefore succeeded to the earldom, but at least Mary and her son were provided for out of the estate. The son, also named John, was educated at Eton and went on to become a great patron of the Arts. His home at Barnard Castle was purpose-built to house his splendid collection of fine and dec
orative arts, becoming the internationally significant Bowes Museum. A background history of debauchery and infidelity within the family thus led ultimately to a truly magnificent memorial.

  LADY SEYMOUR WORSLEY – the lady with the twenty-seven lovers.

  1781 must have appeared to have been quite a good year for Sir Richard Worsley, Seventh Baronet of Appuldurcombe. A military man and a Member of Parliament, he was serving in Lord North’s government as Comptroller of the King’s Household; he was a Privy Councillor – and Governor of the Isle of Wight, where his country seat at Appuldurcombe was situated. The renovations and improvements at this stately pile were to be his life’s work – the gardens were later re-shaped by Capability Brown, and the house itself was to be stuffed with works of art and antiquities reflecting not one but two extensive Grand Tours.

  True, his wife Seymour was a bit of a hot-head: he had married her in 1775 when she was a wealthy heiress at the tender age of 17. Her father had died when she was very young, leaving some £100,000 shared between Seymour and her elder sister. Sir Richard was 21, and she did her duty, bearing him a son and heir the following year, but they were not exactly soul-mates. She wanted the social whirl, the glamour, and to be in the public eye. She was also an outrageous flirt. She liked London parties, not being shut away on the Isle of Wight while her husband pursued his political and military career. He wanted military precision, order, and a chance to spend his wife’s not inconsiderable fortune in amassing what he hoped would be the finest collection of sculptures from ancient Greece. It is possible that he also got his kicks from watching his wife in bed with other lovers.

  It was a hot September day in 1781 when Sir Richard, accompanied by his wife and his close friend and neighbour George Maurice Bissett, travelled to Maidstone and decided to use the cold baths. The bathing areas were segregated – Seymour using one bath, the gentlemen the other. Afterwards, when they were changing, Sir Richard noticed a window which gave a view of the changing area used by his wife. He called Bissett over, gave him a lift up on his shoulders and shouted to his wife ‘Seymour, Seymour! Bissett is looking at you!’

  According to the subsequent evidence of Seymour’s maid, Bissett continued to watch the naked Lady Seymour as she got dressed, for a full five minutes. Everyone then met up outside the baths, and went away in some merriment.

  Subsequently, Lady Seymour gave birth to a daughter who was almost certainly fathered by Bissett. This did not worry Sir Richard unduly and he was happy to acknowledge the child as his own, in order to avoid public scandal. In fact he appeared to be quite happy to turn a blind eye to his wife’s behaviour as long as it was kept private. But then the cat really got out of the bag: his wife eloped with Bissett, spending four nights with him at the Royal Hotel at Pall Mall in London, rarely leaving the bedroom except when asking for the sheets to be changed.

  Humiliated, Sir Richard plotted his revenge – he wanted to expose his wife’s infidelity and to punish Bissett. He declined to divorce his wife – or even to ask for a formal separation, and instead sued Bissett in the King’s Bench Division for ‘crim. con.’ and sought damages of £20,000. The amount would have been enough to have destroyed Bissett. The figure was so high because it was intended to reflect the fact that Bissett was a man who was in a position of trust (he was a neighbour, a friend, and above all a junior officer in the same regiment as the baronet). He had abused that trust when he committed adultery with Lady Seymour and thereby ‘damaged’ her.

  The problem was that Bissett was not the first to have ‘damaged’ her ladyship. By all accounts she was somewhat fast and loose when spreading her favours – and rather more besides. The newspapers were abuzz with stories that there were in fact another twenty-six paramours in the background. Bissett’s case was therefore that she was already damaged goods. Not, of course, that many of the other lovers would wish to step forward and own up – after all, that could leave them open to crim. con. claims. However, five of her alleged lovers were prepared to give evidence in support of Bissett, not admitting their part in adultery, but giving their views on the wayward and scandalous conduct of Lady Seymour. One such witness was Viscount Deerhurst, who had been encountered by Sir Richard in his wife’s bedchamber at four in the morning. He gave evidence admitting the encounter but declining to answer what he was doing there. He did however point out to the court that Sir Richard seemed disinterested – to the extent of allowing Lady Seymour to accompany the Viscount, on his own, when he left for Southampton a few days later.

  More damning was the evidence from the hotel staff – there was only the one bed in the room which the lovers shared. Another witness was a Dr Osborne, who was called to explain the circumstances in which he had examined Lady Seymour. He claimed patient confidentiality – but then went on to say that Lady Seymour Worsley had consented to him disclosing that she had sought treatment for venereal disease. The Press had a field day, and suggested that she had contracted the disease from the Marquis of Graham (also a witness in the trial).

  The gossip columns went into overdrive: twenty-six lovers in addition to Bissett, plenty of juicy details and gossip, and a tale of a man who dishonourably absconded with another man’s wife! And then there was the bath incident – it was pointed out to the court that Sir Richard was a party to his own cuckolding. When Lord Mansfield addressed the jury before they withdrew to consider their verdict, he made it clear that the facts were not in dispute, stating ‘This Woman, for three or four years, has been prostituted with a variety of people; that is extremely clear, and extremely plain.’ Finally, the jury decided that the baronet had been wronged and set the damages, not at £20,000, but at one shilling. It gave rise to the print entitled The Shilling, or the Value of a P[riv]y C[ouncillo]r’s Matrimonial Honour shown in Image 64.

  The maid-servant, Mary Marriott, had made a statement giving full details of the incident, and the public were fascinated. Cartoonists such as Gillray led the ridicule with his print entitled Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly exposing his wife’s bottom, o fye! Others followed, showing Bissett standing on the baronet’s shoulders peeping through the window at the naked wife.

  The humiliated baronet missed the important session of parliament the day after the trial, in which Lord North’s Tory government faced a vote from the Whig opposition that ‘the war on the continent of North America may no longer be pursued for the impractical purpose of reducing the inhabitants of that country to obedience by force.’ Lord North had previously offered to resign but the King had insisted that he remain in office. The Whig motion was narrowly defeated – Lord North won by a single vote – but was apparently heard to remark before the vote was taken ‘Oh! If all my Cuckolds desert, I shall be beaten indeed!’

  Sir Richard withdrew from politics, and without his support North’s administration soon collapsed and Sir Richard lost all his official posts. The war against the American colonies drifted towards an inevitable conclusion and Sir Richard’s wife became one of the professional mistresses who existed in London relying on favours and occasional financial support from wealthy aristocratic friends. Bissett found himself a younger lover, but not before getting Lady Seymour pregnant again. Eventually she went to live in Paris, where the French seemed less censorious about her lifestyle. In 1788 Sir Richard agreed to enter into Articles of Separation in return for her promising to accept exile in France for four years – in practice she then got caught up in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and was trapped in Paris during the Terror. The baronet, who had spent the intervening twenty years building up his art collection, died in 1805. Ironically, he never did achieve his ambition of being the pre-eminent collector of Greek sculpture, having been pipped at the post by Lord Elgin and his marbles.

  On Sir Richard’s death the fortune which Seymour had brought into their marriage reverted to her. Now wealthy and living in Britain, she married a Frenchman and obtained a Royal licence for both of them to adopt her birth surname of Fleming. She died in 1818.

  Gillray
drew his A peep into Lady W!!!!!’s Seraglio shortly after the trial. It is shown as Image 65. Gillray doesn’t just show the amorous lady in bed with one lover; he shows another leaving via the window and a further nine waiting their turn on the staircase. The suggestion that Her Ladyship enjoyed her pleasures like a common whore, a handful at a time, was scurrilously unfair and illustrates the casual disregard felt by the caricaturists towards the truth: once they had a victim in their sights, anything and everything was within bounds.

  The inscription on the staircase is from Rowe’s The Fair Penitent and reads: ‘One lover to another still succeeds, another and another after that; and the last fool is as welcome as the former, till having loved his hour out he gives place, and mingles with the herd which went before him.’ There was, of course, no suggestion that Seymour actually enjoyed all her twenty-seven lovers at the same time and place, but it made for an entertaining idea, and one which captured the public imagination.

  THE NEW FEMALE COTERIE

  When she was first publicly disgraced, Seymour became a member of an exclusive ‘club’ which customarily met every month at the very upmarket King’s Place brothel run by Sarah Prendergast. The gathering was known as The New Female Coterie – although this was probably a name coined by Grub Street hacks. Denied social acceptance elsewhere, this is where Seymour would have been able to catch up and gossip with other ‘fallen women’. The club had been established by Caroline, Countess Harrington when she was blackballed by the original Female Coterie (an altogether more reputable gathering which would meet at uber chic Almacks). Caroline was a woman of great sexual desires and for many years had used Sarah Prendergast’s premises as a rendezvous for her innumerable lovers. Curiously, the same brothel was frequented ‘four times a week’ by her husband, a notorious lecher. He was William Stanhope, Second Earl of Harrington, known to all as ‘the goat of quality.’ The New Female Coterie boasted membership by many of the great-but-no-longer-good, who would meet to have a good natter and get drunk on champagne and nostalgia. They included Penelope, Viscountess Ligonier. Attractive, witty and hungry for the love she could not find in her marriage to the somewhat dim-witted Lord Ligonier, she had embarked on a torrid affair with an Italian playwright called Count Vittorio Alfieri. Alfieri went on to write about the affair, and was challenged to a duel by the cuckolded Lord Ligonier. His Lordship injured Alfieri in the fight, which took place at Green Park, and went on to divorce his wife in 1771. She turned to Alfieri for support but found him unwilling to marry her because he knew full well that she had other lovers. Not only that, but she very publicly made it clear that she never regretted her ‘indiscretions’ – she deliberately set out to have an affair as a means of escaping from the tedium of a relationship where passion had run its course.