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

harbour men would have respected him as the gentleman proprietor of Knighton, one of the island’s most historic properties. With its grey stone exterior ‘half-mantled in ivy up to its roof’ and its ‘plain square tower of great strength and antiquity’, the Gothic romance of medieval Knighton could not have contrasted more with the austere, classically tempered symmetry of its nearest neighbour, Appuldurcombe. For centuries a convivial relationship existed between the owners of the two manors. Before the arrival of Knighton’s current proprietor, the estate had been let to the Fitzmaurice family, who, along with the actor David Garrick and his wife, were entertained by Sir Richard, his mother and sister in the summer of 1772. As the owner of Knighton had it within his gift to influence his tenants’ votes, Worsley’s effusive introductions and invitations would have been forthcoming before the dust cloths were so much as lifted from the furniture.
    To the baronet’s happy surprise, he and George Bisset held more in common than the boundaries of their property. The discovery that the estate’s heir was his near contemporary and that they could amuse each other with a cache of anecdotes about their European travels, was enough in itself. As Bisset was also a distant relation of Sir Richard’s cousins, the Meux Worsleys he might be called on as a political ally. The baronet found it especially useful that his new neighbour held a burgage claim in Newton which he could command during elections. As the author of The Memoirs of Sir Finical Whimsy explained, Worsley ‘was always pointing out to … [Bisset] the great honours and rewards that were to be procured by a little parliamentary management, and the advantages that would arise to both of them by monopolizing the borough’. At the time, Sir Richard was measuring schemes ‘to overpower the parliamentary influence of Reverend Leonard Troughear Holmes’ and to establish his absolute primacy on the island. With the combined influence of George Bisset and Worsley’s godfather, Sir William Oglander, the achievement of this goal was within his reach. However, the baronet soon found that Bisset had little appetite for politics. Worsley’s plotting sounded to the owner of Knighton like ‘Don Quixote explaining knight errantry to Sancho Panza, and made about as much impression’. In the end, Bisset required minimal persuasion to lend
his support to Sir Richard. At the time of the election, he was far too preoccupied to do otherwise.
    When exactly during that autumn the friendship between George Bisset and Sir Richard Worsley’s wife ignited into a love affair is unknown. The upheaval of the election period, though it lasted only a fortnight on the Isle of Wight, served both as a screen and a bellows to their simmering relationship. Having pledged his support to Worsley, Bisset was firmly affixed to the baronet’s train. In the ever-watchful eyes of the island’s residents he had rendered himself ‘a very intimate friend and acquaintance of the family’. With the baronet’s mind engaged in politicking, much of what passed between Seymour and Bisset would have gone unnoticed. At the time, what Sir Richard failed to recognise was that Lady Worsley was besotted: ‘Love alone engrossed all her powers,’ states one account. In September 1780, while the baronet and his associates were slipping banknotes into electors’ coat pockets, his wife was initiating his neighbour ‘into the arcana of love, in which science’, it was said, ‘he was not only an apt scholar, but soon became a thorough adept’.
    On the 11th of September 1780 Sir Richard, who had faced no real challenge from his opponent John St John, found himself re-elected as the member for Newport. For his assistance, the baronet wished to compensate the gentleman who had lately become so indispensable to him as a supporter and as a valued confidant. In return for permitting him to use his burgage