The Lady in the Riding Habit & the Worsley Scandal

Loretta reports:

Susan's recent blog about 18th C riding habits elicited some comments about the subject of the portrait she posted: Lady Worsley, who was at the center of a famous scandal in 1782.  I blogged on this subject a while ago, but it's such a funny scandal, I couldn't resist returning to it.

It was in all the newspapers and written up in pamphlets and zestfuly caricatured in satirical prints.

It seemed simple enough.  Sir Richard Worsley had sued Captain Bissett for "criminal conversation"* with his wife.   In times when divorce was insanely expensive, requiring an Act of Parliament, this was a common way for a cuckolded husband to get revenge.  In this case, though, it was one of those "What was he thinking?" incidents.

“The court heard that while [Sir Richard] Worsley was quartered in the military camp at Cox’s Heath, Lady Worsley had often used the nearby bathhouse at Maidstone. On one occasion her husband had tapped on the bathhouse door, saying ‘[Captain] Bissett is going to get up to look at you.’ Hoist Bissett up to the window Worsley duly did, for him to gaze on her nakedness.”

Worsley ended up with a one shilling reward from a disgusted court, and his wife became Society's big joke.  Horace Walpole, a great gossip and letter writer (about whom I've also blogged) wrote to his friends that "'thirty-four young men of the first quality had enjoyed her favours.'"  And one of them, the Marquis of Graham, had given her the clap.

Excerpts from Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London.

You can read the court proceedings here.

And more about Lady Worsley here. And here.

Here’s one of the satirical prints.

*Adultery.