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

the situation was to degenerate further. By the end of the month, letters carrying the outrageous story were in rapid circulation.
    Francis Ferrand Foljambe of Aldwark Hall could not resist repeating the sordid details of the affair. On the 14th of January, the same troop of troublemakers who had run riot at Harewood had grown restless. With Lady Worsley at their head the ‘three heroines desired Lascelles to lend them his coach to go to Leeds, which he refused. They therefore took the cart horses and rode them there.’ En route the young ladies ‘stopt at one of the inns and ordered the waiter to show them into such a room, which he told them he could not do, as it was kept for the officers of the Militia and their colours, etc. were there’. Upon hearing this, Seymour and the Miss Cramers became ‘determined to go in and took the pokers and broke open the door, then they heated them red hot and pop’d them into the colours which set them in a blaze’. Worse still, Foljambe writes with amused incredulity, ‘How do you think they quenched the flame their own fair selves had caused? They did not call water! Water!, it was more at hand …’ these three well-bred young ladies, who had been taught to dance, embroider and lisp sweetly in French, lifted their silk skirts ‘and fairly pissed it out …’ The atrocities did not end there. From their vantage in the upstairs rooms, the women then directed their exuberance out the windows. One of their victims, a well-dressed gentleman by the name of Mr Scott, had the misfortune of sauntering by in ‘his best coat & wig & laced waistcoat’. As he passed beneath them ‘they threw some water, I really don’t know what sort upon him , and immediately a large bag of soot which covered him entirely over’, the correspondent exclaimed. After they had thoroughly raised terror at the inn, the gang proceeded on their cart-horses to Cannon Hall, the home of Walter Spencer Stanhope, where ‘they broke open his library, threw all his books about, and … took away a pockett book full of Bank Notes’. In the end, Lady Worsley and her companions ‘were out three days upon this expedition’ and
were said to have ‘played many more pranks’. St Andrew Warde doubtless expressed the sentiments of many when he claimed that he could not fathom such behaviour in ‘the fair sex’, ‘the whole was too bad for ladies in their right mind. The excuse I have for them is that they were drunk if I may say so … they did not know what they did’. Foljambe was more cynical and condemned their conduct as ‘a specimen of the wit and courage of the Belles of Harewood’.
    What these busy scribblers did not know was that the targets of these acts had not been chosen at random. It was no coincidence that Lady Worsley, who led the charge, levelled her fire against men and more specifically at the symbols of her husband’s current preoccupations; the militia and the library. However hard the Worsleys had striven to maintain a smooth exterior on their marriage, the cracks were becoming difficult to ignore.

4
    Maurice George Bisset
    It had been convenient for all concerned that the baronet was not at Harewood to witness the events of January 1779. Later in the month he travelled north to Stilton to join his wife en route to London and also to meet Walter Spencer Stanhope, to whom Seymour owed both money and an apology for the ransacking of Cannon Hall. Presumably Worsley was able to make amends but he remained coldly unperturbed by his wife’s reprehensible behaviour. Like most fashionable married ladies of the ton , her flamboyant lifestyle would have been subject to disapproving noises from many corners. As an influential member of His Majesty’s government and a wealthy landowner, Sir Richard felt that he and Lady Worsley were above the petty dictates of those less privileged than himself. It mattered little to him that ‘the world now began to talk freely of her ladyship’. Worsley’s