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

many found the baronet’s constant influence on the boy worrying.
    Since the early seventeenth century, the reputation of the Worsleys as a family who enjoyed access to the monarch’s ear had diminished. Preferring a quiet local existence as gentry, they had retreated to their estates and bowed out of the prestigious circles of power. By the time of Richard’s birth they were known simply as country squires; backward, uncouth and fierce supporters of the Tory party. Their prominence had long been forgotten. One anonymous scribe dismissed the family as ‘never having been remarkable for producing either heroes or conjurors’; rather, they were a stock whose ‘hereditary characteristics’ had a history of ‘association with vanity
and folly’. With his boisterous and colourful behaviour, no one promoted this image of the Worsleys more than Sir Thomas.
    The 6th baronet’s aspirations were not lofty ones. Unlike many of his ancestors, he had no desire to hear his voice echo through the halls of Westminster. He did not wish to command a ship or assist in the governance of Britain’s growing empire. His primary interests lay in Hampshire where he executed his occasional duties as Justice of the Peace for Lymington, listening to his tenants squabble over the ownership of a cow or the paternity of an illegitimate child. From 1759 his time was chiefly occupied in the command of the South Hampshire Militia, one of thirty-six battalions raised to protect Britain from the possibility of a French attack. These legions of what Horace Walpole called ‘demi-soldiers’ were considered ‘a thing of jest’ among the military establishment. Led by ‘country gentlemen and men of property’ who were ‘imbued with a … looseness of conduct’, the militias were never destined to wield their bayonets in any real combat; instead they existed as a type of home guard and were marched futilely from county town to barrack and back again for no discernible purpose.
    As the Colonel of the South Hampshire Militia, Sir Thomas presided at these activities, both official and extracurricular. According to Edward Gibbon’s account of his commanding officer, the 6th baronet cut a clownish figure. ‘I know his faults and I can not help excusing them,’ he wrote somewhat apologetically. The baronet may have been a man who valued the classical lessons of stoicism and self-control but his outward personality betrayed no hint of this. Sir Thomas’s manner was distinctly ‘unintellectual’ and ‘rustic’. He was a man ‘fond of the table and of his bed’, Gibbon wrote. ‘Our conferences were marked by every stroke of the midnight and morning hours, and the same drum which invited him to rest often summoned me to the parade.’ Unreliable and fanciful, the baronet was better known for his musings on ‘sensible schemes he will never execute and schemes he will execute which are highly ridiculous’ than engaging in the practicalities of life.
    Undoubtedly this behaviour was due in part to his severe dependence on the bottle. When Gibbon first encountered him in 1759 Sir Thomas was already an incorrigible alcoholic and it was through ‘his example’ that ‘the daily practice of hard and even excessive drinking’ was encouraged among the officers of the battalion. A significant amount of time was spent in ‘bucolic carousing’ or the pursuit of drunken antics, like the incident when
the inebriated Sir Thomas roused his friend, the equally intoxicated politician John Wilkes from his sleep and ‘made him drink a bottle of claret in bed’. Although hard drinking among men of the landed classes was widely accepted as a normal part of masculine behaviour, Gibbon suggests that even by the liberal standards of the era, Sir Thomas’s attachment to drink was immoderate. By 1762 he had begun to feel the effects of gout and possibly other alcohol-related disorders. In the hope that the therapeutic waters of Spa might cure him, he travelled to