The Lady In Red: An Eighteenth-Century Tale Of Sex, Scandal, And Divorce (34 page)

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Authors: Hallie Rubenhold

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The baronet had valued his collection of fifty-eight Italian paintings at £14,000, a sum that is difficult to translate into modern worth when today one work by Titian alone might command as much as £7.48 million. For a short while, Sir Richard had been one of the few connoisseurs to have profited by the upheaval of the war, and now it was the turn of others to
gain through his misfortune. With a certain smugness he had crowed too loudly and too soon about the acquisitions he had made at the expense of those caught up in the conflict. Many of the smaller objects he had added to his expanding cabinet of curiosities (which fortunately had accompanied him overland from Fiume to England) he had boasted of purchasing for a fraction of their actual worth. In 1794 he had acquired ‘a remarkable fine opal set around with diamonds’ from the collection of ‘a famous banker at Paris’ who ‘sent it to Italy to be disposed of’. Worsley had bought it for ‘278 sequins, but it has been valued by several jewellers at 1,000’. A cameo of ‘Alexander the Great, beautifully engraved’ had come from the closet of ‘the late Duke of Orleans’, a ‘beautiful head of cupid’ and ‘a vase with two pigeons’ had been sold by the Prince of Santa Croce, and ‘a head of Cybele on a large onyx’ came ‘from the Prince of Comte’ whose ‘Valet de Chambre sold it at Milan’. A significant number of the baronet’s treasures had once lined the corridors and salons of Europe’s noble families, many of whom were in need of emergency funds and preferred to sell their holdings rather than ‘have them fall into the hands of the French’.
In spite of the precarious state of his finances, Sir Richard agreed to the demands of the French and paid the bounty placed on his antiquities, drawings and engravings. However, the loss of his paintings was a defeat that far superseded the agonies of an additional and unnecessary expenditure. The emotional value ascribed to this vanished assembly of art by an heirless landowner determined to create a positive legacy for his damaged name was immeasurable. Bedingfield had conveyed what undoubtedly were the sentiments of many when he wrote at the end of his letter, ‘I feel sincerely for the loss you have sustained … it is a painful circumstance that you as a literary man should also be involved in the fatal consequences of the present war’.
This latest calamity finally induced Sir Richard Worsley to abandon what remained of his sense of restraint. The once prudent, methodically minded Finical Whimsy, who had balanced the King’s accounts with scientific precision, had been pushed to the brink. After 1801, the baronet dispensed entirely with caution. His lifelong interest in art suddenly boiled over into mania. Worsley’s bid to immortalise his memory by affixing it to antique sculpture and old master paintings reached new heights of desperation. These objects, the embodiment of the highest taste and scholarship, would represent him in centuries to come, where no living legacy could. In the last four years of his
life, the baronet seemed determine to run through every penny his estate could yield in order to preserve his own memory for posterity.
Like a character from one of the era’s Gothic novels, Sir Richard sank deeper into the isolation of Sea Cottage. The dark temperament that Jeremy Bentham had identified as ‘haughty, selfish and mean’ had over time evolved into one which was also angry, embittered and withdrawn. Rarely straying beyond the boundaries of his property, Worsley recoiled from social contact but for occasional visits from those who shared his artistic interests. By making it known that his sole concern was the expansion of his collection, the baronet laid himself open to the schemes of conniving art dealers.
Worsley’s chief agent on the art market was the London-based William Dermer, who bombarded him with frequent propositions. He was also regularly approached by those with a sideline in the sale of paintings, such as the artist Benjamin West and fellow connoisseur, Charles Birch. Weakened by avarice and obsession, Sir Richard found it difficult to refuse their constant solicitations, especially when couched in grovelling flattery. ‘When I consider the admirers of the elegant arts in this country and how few there are who feel the higher excellencies of the great schools of painting–I know of no one I can address on that subject who feels those excellencies in a higher degree than yourself,’ wrote Benjamin West in a bid to sell Worsley a painting by Alessandro Paduano which had been ‘acquired on moderate terms … when the troubles commenced in Paris’. On occasion, when hesitation got the better of the baronet, dealers joined forces in a double assault. William Dermer, eager to sell ‘an exceptional work by Claude’, employed Charles Birch to write with an ‘impartial’ connoisseur’s opinion. His thoughts were that ‘Mr Dermer’s Claude is decidedly the most enchanting and capital performance in this kingdom’ and that naturally, ‘so high a character as yourself for discernment and encouragement of art’ should own it. In spite of the transparency of their intentions, on this and many other occasions Sir Richard accepted their approaches without much scepticism, and let himself be swept away in the current of their designs.
By 1803, Worsley seems to have purchased nearly every work offered to him by Dermer. The Claude was joined by a Velázquez, a ‘frost piece’ by the Dutch painter Cuyp, three paintings by Andrea del Sarto, a Greuze ‘from the late King’s collection in Paris’ and an Annibale Carracci, also brought from across the Channel. The very act of acquiring these paintings became a dance of futility. No sooner would Worsley agree to buy them than his
bankers, solicitors or stewards would remind him of his financial shortfall. The art he had bought six months or a year earlier would then be sold back to Dermer at a loss. Towards the end of his life it is unlikely that Sir Richard so much as glimpsed a number of his pieces, a large selection of which were stored at his house in Grosvenor Square, a home he no longer visited. Others were delivered by cart to Appuldurcombe where they lay stacked in the uninhabited rooms. After his return from Venice, the ancestral dwelling of which he was once so proud, and so eager to embellish with fashionable Chippendale furniture and neo-classical décor, held nothing for him but the poison of memories. With its owner unwilling to live within its walls, Appuldurcombe grew into a cold mausoleum of antiquities and silent painted faces.
Sir Richard was unwell for most of the summer before he died. Yet even as he lay on his deathbed he allowed Dermer (obviously distressed at the prospect of losing such a good client) to continue to tempt him with objects. His letters were filled with promises of a picture which could ‘vie with the famous Mary in the Orleans collection’ and two more Carraccis ‘brought into England by Mr Day’. ‘I trust and believe that your collection will go down to posterity unrivalled both as to its founder and the beauty and perfection of the respective pictures,’ he reassured him. But all of Dermer’s obsequiousness and even a special batch of his own ‘ginger extract remedy’ failed to sustain the baronet’s flagging health. In 1805, on the 5th of August Worsley suffered an apoplexy (or a stroke) and expired. Mrs Smith had been with him throughout. Fifty-four was not an inconsiderable age at which to die in the early nineteenth century, but his life would hardly have been regarded as a long one. A miniature portrait made of him in his final years shows a man with an expression not unlike that of the self-assured young baronet in Reynolds’s image of 1775. The eyes of this older Sir Richard Worsley with his jowly jaw line and puffy face are as defiant as they had been in his youth, but the gaze is different. Whilst the young baronet regarded his viewer with a hint of disdain, the old baronet looks out from his frame with suspicion, as if wary that anyone should want to observe him for any length of time.
Ultimately, the legacy that Sir Richard Worsley left fell far short of the one he had envisioned. At his death his estate was more than £6,679 in debt. With so few assets which he could legally claim, the baronet had not bothered registering an official will. Instead he had written out directions to his steward to reward Sarah Smith with an annuity of £250 per annum so she could continue her life in comfort. The estate of Appuldurcombe–the
land, the house, its contents and its unpaid bills–was passed to his niece, Henrietta Anna Maria Charlotte Bridgeman Simpson, the daughter of his sister, Henrietta. Sir Richard had left his affairs in such extreme disarray that it would be another twenty years before the estate was released from an entanglement of legal red tape. By then, his niece had died and what remained of any inheritance had passed to her husband, the 1st Earl of Yarborough.
More unfortunate still was the fate of Sir Richard’s collection of Greek marbles, the objects on which he had pinned his hopes of achieving immortality. Two years after his death, a shed on the corner of Park Lane and Piccadilly opened its doors to the public. Its content, a breathtaking assortment of metopes and friezes extracted from the Parthenon, belonged to another infamous cuckold, Lord Elgin. The impact of these pieces on the early nineteenth-century British psyche was profound. Lord Elgin’s marbles were so celebrated in literature, art, architecture and design that they overshadowed the significance of any other assortment of antiquities. The headless torsos, broken feet and masonry absorbing the chill on the Isle of Wight were soon forgotten. After the 1st Earl of Yarborough’s death ‘a large part of the museum of objets d’art’ at Appuldurcombe was sold in 1859. Although some of the finer pieces were kept by the Earl’s descendants, the remnants along with a clutch of Worsley’s paintings had been completely dispersed by 1863.
Indefatigable in his efforts to be remembered, one of Sir Richard’s last wishes was that a suitable monument be erected to him inside All Saints church at Godshill. Henrietta Bridgeman Simpson executed this desire in the shape of an imposing Grecian, claw-footed sarcophagus. Its austere and sombre appearance had been intended to reflect the gravity of the man it represented, but its tub shape soon gave rise to sniggers among the congregation. By 1904 this distraction had become a nuisance and ‘the pretentious monument’ was dragged to the back of the church and a pipe organ was placed in front of it. But hiding the stone structure could not obscure the memory of the man. They knew his story too well. In honour of it, they dubbed his memorial ‘Worsley’s bath’.
Mr Hummell and Lady Fleming
Although Seymour Worsley claimed to have reformed her character, society would have seen nothing commendable in the event which took place on the 12th of September 1805. Her husband’s coffin had not been in the family vault for a month when his widow and her twenty-six-year-old lover exchanged their wedding vows in Farnham, Surrey. Few would have believed that love had compelled Jean Louis Hummell down the aisle to greet his recently endowed forty-seven-year-old bride. However, the sincerity of his attachment and the scorn of others was of little concern to Lady Worsley. During her life she had learned that love could assume a variety of forms, spawned by passion or necessity.
Seymour would not have entered into this, her second marriage, naïvely. The charming Swiss musician may have loved her but it was undoubtedly an affection that had been fastened firmly in place by the possibility of an inheritance. Having never been considered a beauty in her youth, her appearance, as seen in a sketch by the artist John Russell, had failed to blossom in middle age. Double-chinned and slightly wild-eyed, her face was worn with tiredness. She was too old to provide her husband with an heir. In lieu of this, she could give him the blessings of wealth. Lady Worsley had not been coy about the situation. Their wedding plans were set in motion so quickly after Sir Richard’s death that the possibility of remarriage had evidently been discussed beforehand.
As soon as Seymour received word that her ailing husband had breathed
his last, arrangements were made to ensure her and Hummell’s future happiness. Eager to be rid of her past, her first act was to shed ‘that detested name of Worsley’ and on the 3rd of September, by royal licence, she resumed her maiden name of Fleming. The road was then cleared for her beloved one day to accept ownership of her estate. In homage to his wife and the family whose riches he would enjoy, Hummell also embraced the surname of Fleming and agreed to exchange the French-sounding Jean Louis for the Anglophonic John Lewis. More importantly, to avoid any legal obstacles which might have barred him from owning English land, John Lewis Fleming applied to become a national of Great Britain.
After decades of want and frustration, the assets that had been bequeathed to the young Seymour Dorothy Fleming at last fell back into her possession on the 29th of August. Remarkably, the newspapers and gossip-mongers who had perpetuated the myth of her financial worth thirty years ago were able to recollect the rumoured value of her holdings. Once more the printed page boasted ‘of a jointure worth 70,000 1.’ due to Lady Worsley, while society’s ceaseless chatter increased this sum exponentially. The diarist Joseph Farrington claimed that she was due £90,000 in addition to half of Sir Richard’s estate. In truth, the amount, although substantial, had always been less than most individuals believed.
In spite of lengthy legal disputes, Lady Worsley’s fortune remained intact, protected from the turmoil by the clauses of her marriage contract. Her widow’s jointure, which Sir Richard had attempted to reclaim, guaranteed her a further annual allowance of £2,000, as well as ‘the use of a dwelling house for her life’ to the value of £300 in rent per year. The agreement had also granted her £200 worth of goods from her husband’s town house. In order to ensure that Lady Worsley would not benefit from his prized art collection, the baronet made certain that the entire collection at his Grosvenor Square house was sold or moved before his death. Nevertheless, Seymour was free to claim any of his ‘household linen, china, furniture and plate’. More significantly, her £20,000 share of the lands purchased on her behalf on the Isle of Wight (which had been subsumed into the Appuldurcombe estate) was returned to her ownership. Her half of the Brompton estate was also restored to her. Technically unable to hold land in her own name, Lady Worsley was free to nominate a male trustee of her choice to safeguard her interests. Without hesitation she inscribed on her deeds the new name of John Lewis Fleming in place of that of Sir Richard
Worsley. For the first time in her life, Seymour would be able to exercise some control over the wealth she had inherited. She had weathered nearly twenty-four years on the slim hope of this event. Now that it had arrived, there were others equally eager to share in her bounty.
In 1807, a ‘gentleman’ by the name of Charles Hammond and his new bride, Charlotte rented a house in a part of Kensington known as Little Chelsea, between what is now the modern Fulham Road and the edge of the Brompton estate. The Hammonds’ appearance at the foot of Seymour’s property was no coincidence. Rather it was a strategic advance towards breaching the wall that separated their lives.
The infant girl that Seymour had brought to northern France and deposited in the care of the Cochard family in 1785 had grown into a woman. What the intervening years of her daughter’s life had held or indeed what precisely she knew about her real mother beyond her name and noble status may never be known. What is certain is that at some point before her twenty-first birthday, Charlotte Dorothea Cochard had returned to England in search of an inheritance and a husband. Undoubtedly, mention of her pedigree aroused much interest among potential suitors. The possibility that Charlotte might be the legitimate heiress to the combined Worsley–Fleming fortune was enough to whet Charles Hammond’s appetite for a legal battle as well as a marriage. In the year that the recently wedded Mrs Hammond reached her majority, Lady Fleming’s attorney received an unexpected letter.
The Hammonds’ claims were so outlandish that it would have been immediately apparent to Seymour’s trustees and her solicitor that the couple had gleaned all of their information from the latest newspaper announcements. Probably at the encouragement of an unscrupulous attorney, Charles Hammond put forward the assertion that his wife was not only the daughter of Lady Seymour Dorothy Worsley but also ‘the only child of the late Sir Richard Worsley living at his death to be entitled to all the benefits secured to an only daughter by the settlement made on the marriage of Sir Richard Worsley and Seymour Dorothy Fleming’. Completely unaware of the details of the Worsleys’ separation, or, that at the time of Charlotte’s conception the couple had been estranged for nearly five years, Hammond demanded that ‘a proper conveyance be executed’ to release Sir Richard and Lady Fleming’s estates into his wife’s possession. Despite the absurdity of the suit, both parties’ solicitors would be obligated once again to begin the unpleasant
business of rummaging through Seymour’s dirty laundry. Understandably, the prospect of this ‘occasioned great uneasiness to all parties concerned’.
Whether prompted by the dread of another legal action or by the emotions of motherhood, in early 1808 Lady Fleming called a halt to the proceedings and extended her hand to her daughter. No letters or diaries record their meeting or the details of the reconciliation; whether there were tears and pledges of forgiveness or simply remorse and stoic silence. For a woman who had believed all her children lost to her, this reunion in the later part of her life must have been an overwhelming experience. Fortunately, it yielded happiness for both. As stated in their legal agreement, Seymour was elated at having found Charlotte. In consequence ‘of the love and affection which Dame Seymour Dorothy Fleming has and bears towards her daughter’, a settlement of £1,000 was granted to Mrs Hammond. Additionally, Seymour directed that ‘a sum of three thousand pounds was to be made to any issue’ of the Hammonds’ marriage. It was a comfortable, if not generous sum and one which would secure the couple and later their two children, Charles and Seymour Louisa, a family home in Lewisham. Sadly, as social convention would have rendered intimacy between them inappropriate, it is unlikely that the Hammonds passed much time in the company of Lady Fleming and her husband after their initial meeting.
More than a quarter of a century had elapsed since the details of her misdeeds had appeared in print, yet few beyond her highborn relations and the louche members of fashionable society would have regarded Seymour Dorothy Fleming as a suitable companion. Even in an era when wealth could purchase respect, the restoration of her fortune was not in itself enough to rinse away the residue of her sins. Neither was her remarriage. Her choice of second husband had only fanned the dying embers of a scandalous reputation. But unlike Sir Richard Worsley, Seymour had no interest in cultivating good opinion on a wide scale.
The morally minded middle classes, who had relished tales of her titillating adventures and avariciously consumed the transcripts of
Worsley
v.
Bisset
, were the least likely to forgive her transgressions. Although they had delighted in her shocking story, in the new century their religiously grounded principles were responsible for blotting it out. As a letter from Sarah Burney, the sister of the celebrated author Fanny Burney reveals, nowhere was this more the case than in provincial circles. The unmarried Miss Burney, who was at Lymington in September 1812, found herself at a gathering alongside
‘an elderly woman married to a very young man’. She was among a number of friends invited to the cottage of a Monsieur de Chapelle. ‘It all seemed perfectly natural,’ Sarah Burney had thought at the time. ‘After hearing the young man perform with great admiration and looking at his nasty old wife with great contempt for marrying such a boy’, Miss Burney ‘came home in the carriage of this ill assorted pair, thanked them for their civility, went to bed and thought no more about them’. In less than twenty-four hours, word of her association with Monsieur de Chapelle’s disreputable guest flew into the far corners of Hampshire and Sarah suddenly found herself the recipient of letters which admonished her for ‘keeping bad company’. A friend of her father’s ‘wrote folio pages of self-justification’ on the subject, warning her that ‘Lady Fleming, as she now calls herself’ had ‘once discreditably been known as Lady Worsley and that her former fame got her blazoned here’, a fact unknown by her French hosts who were too busy ‘shewing her the most civility’.
With her tarnished past, it is likely that Lady Fleming felt more at ease in the tolerant society across the Channel. After the declaration of an armistice in 1814, many British nationals, including a number of Seymour’s Whig associates, returned to Paris with eagerness. Lady Fleming and her husband were certainly among their numbers by 1816. They settled in a villa at Passy, a suburb ‘only a half mile distant from the capital’ situated on ‘a lofty hill over looking the river, the city and a great expanse of gardens’. More tranquil than merry, the restful environment suited Seymour, whose health had begun to weaken.
It was at her home in Passy that Lady Fleming died of an undisclosed illness on the 9th of September 1818. She was nearly sixty-one and just shy of her thirteenth wedding anniversary. According to her wishes, John Lewis had her body committed to a modest white tomb at Père Lachaise cemetery, onto which the words ‘Yes Thou Shalt Be Obeyed’ were inscribed.
For a woman who had defined her life through flagrant acts of disobedience, this seems an ironic epithet. John Lewis may have been the only person to truly understand its coded meaning. Indeed, her second husband appears to have been the only individual who truly understood her. No other man had demonstrated such fidelity to her, while she lived or after her death. Among all the paramours who floated in and out of her life, Fleming remained at her side the longest. While he may have been lured by her inheritance, his respect and affection for her seemed genuine.
At her death, he was reborn as a wealthy, single land-owning gentleman. In honour of his departed wife, he adorned himself in the fine silk mourning clothes that her money had purchased for him. Not wishing to seem inappropriately enthusiastic at the prospect of remarriage, he waited a year and a half before wedding the twenty-four-year-old Ernestine Jeanne-Marie d’Houdetot, the daughter of César Louis Marie François d’Ange Houdetot, the Comte d’Houdetot, a celebrated French Marshal of the Camp. His second wife bore him a child to continue his name. The little girl, Césarine Fleming would become the next heiress of the Brompton estate.
By the end of his life in 1836 the Baron Fleming, as he had come to be known, had achieved a great deal. The Swiss stepson of a stocking manufacturer ended his days as a member of the French lesser nobility. He did so with the generous assistance of one of the eighteenth century’s most notorious women. The respectable world from which she had been thrown would always regard Seymour Dorothy Fleming’s name as a stain, one to be hidden or scrubbed out. John Lewis might have done just that and rid himself of the association when he laid her to rest. But this was not his wish. Rather than fleeing from her, he hoped that posterity would remember them together. He may have been the only person to do so. His final request was ‘to be buried along side’ his ‘dearly beloved first wife, Lady Seymour Fleming’, a woman of whom he had never been ashamed.

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