On the 21st of February, 1782, one of Britain’s most scandalous trials opened at Westminster Hall. An enraged aristocrat, Sir Richard Worsley, accused his close friend, Captain George Bisset, of engaging in a criminal conversation with his wife and demanded 20,000 pounds in damages. The charge was specific to the era: a man suing another man for seducing his wife. Crucially, the wife could not testify, as she was not a party to the suit.
Sir Richard was not suing Lady Worsley. He was suing Bisset. The woman at the center of this storm had been born Seymour Dorothy Fleming on the 5th of October, 1758, in Middlesex. She was the daughter of Sir John Fleming, an Irish-born landowner, and Jane Cammann, a wealthy heiress.
Her unusual male-sounding name honored her maternal grandmother’s family, the influential Seymours, who had produced Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII. Seymour and her older sister Jane were largely raised by their mother. When Seymour was five, her father died at around 33. Seven years later, her mother remarried, wedding Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood, a wealthy man whose family owned a sugarcane plantation in the Caribbean.
The family moved to Harewood House near Leeds, one of the great country houses of the era, where a famous portrait of Lady Worsley by Joshua Reynolds hangs to this day. As Seymour grew older, she became known as headstrong, with a fondness for horse riding, cards, and dancing, in contrast to her more reserved sister. As one of her father’s only two surviving daughters, she carried a large dowry, running into tens of thousands of pounds, and wealthy suitors soon lined up to win her hand. Her future husband was Sir Richard Worsley, born in 1751 on the Isle of Wight, where his family had been prominent landowners since the High Middle Ages.
Sir Richard had inherited a baronetcy at 17, served as a member of Parliament, and acted as controller of the household of King George III. He had originally courted Seymour’s older sister Jane, but she turned him down in 1772. He then switched his attention to Seymour after meeting her at the York races in the summer of 1775. In a whirlwind romance, he proposed in less than a week, and on the 20th of September 1775 the pair were married.
Seymour was 17, and Sir Richard was 24. The marriage contract was heavily stacked in his favor. A vast fortune was handed over to Worsley, while Seymour was left with only a 400-pound annual allowance, effectively giving him control of the wealth she had brought into the marriage. The marriage initially appeared conventional.
Lady Worsley was pregnant within months and gave birth to a son, Robert, in August 1776, their only legitimate child. But tensions soon surfaced. Seymour later described her husband as cold, rigid, and painfully dull, while she was spirited, flirtatious, and drawn to the glamorous inner circle of Georgiana Cavendish. Whispers of infidelity began to spread.
Rumors suggested Sir Richard was astonishingly indifferent to his wife’s affairs. On one infamous occasion, he reportedly discovered one of her lovers inside the house in the middle of the night but simply let the man go. Of all the men Lady Worsley had affairs with, none became more scandalous than Maurice George Bisset. He came from a noble family with lands on the Isle of Wight, and his residence lay only four miles from the Worsleys’ home.
Bisset was Sir Richard’s close friend. What followed was not simply an affair but a humiliating betrayal that turned friendship into scandal. The affair might never have been discovered had it not been for the American Revolutionary War. After France entered the war, Lord Worsley was tasked with drilling militias in southern England against a possible French attack.
Bisset was involved in these drills, and when Worsley rented a home at Maidstone in Kent, he invited Bisset to lodge there. It was during this time that the affair between Lady Worsley and Captain Bisset became widely known. In August 1781, Seymour gave birth to a daughter named Jane. Whispers spread almost immediately that the child was not Sir Richard’s at all.
Despite widespread rumors that the true father was Bisset, Worsley acknowledged the baby as his own to avoid an even greater public scandal. He seemed willing to endure the humiliation. One famous story held that in September 1781 he had joked about the relationship between Bisset and his wife while the trio visited a bathhouse in Maidstone. But Seymour had grown tired of the marriage.
In November 1781, she took the scandal to an entirely new level, fleeing with Bisset from Kent to London, where the pair checked into the Royal Hotel together as lovers. She then wrote to her maid, instructing her to send baby Jane and extra clothes to the capital. She appears to have believed her dramatic elopement would force her husband to agree to a divorce, clearing the way for her to marry Bisset. But Sir Richard, though he had long tolerated her affairs, had no intention of surrendering the fortune and status tied to their marriage.
What followed was a vicious separation and a sensational courtroom battle. Sir Richard prosecuted Bisset for criminal conversation, seeking 20,000 pounds in damages, a sum that would have ruined Bisset, nearly 3 million pounds in today’s money. The case convened at Westminster in February 1782. Instead of denying the affair, Bisset’s legal team argued that Lady Worsley had taken multiple lovers before him, so he had hardly stained her honor.
They further claimed that Sir Richard had been well aware of his wife’s unfaithfulness and had even seemingly encouraged it. Then former lovers were called to testify under oath. Viscount Deerhurst, clearly embarrassed, admitted that Sir Richard had known the pair had spent three days together in London and Southampton and had done nothing to stop them. One of her doctors appeared to testify that he had treated her for venereal diseases she had probably contracted from the Marquess of Graham, an unheard-of public discussion in an eighteenth-century courtroom.
Newspapers, cartoons, and pamphlets spread the revelations across London. In the end, the court ruled in Sir Richard’s favor. There was no doubt that Lady Worsley and Bisset were having an affair. Yet the jury awarded Sir Richard just one shilling in damages, the smallest possible sum.
It was a devastating public humiliation. The verdict effectively declared that while his wife had been unfaithful, Sir Richard himself had openly tolerated, even encouraged her affairs. The trial was a disaster for everyone involved. Sir Richard’s political career never recovered.
A transcript of the trial went on sale in London within days and became a bestseller, with George Washington owning a copy on the other side of the Atlantic. Bawdy pamphlets circulated with titles like The Genuine Anecdotes and Amorous Adventures of Sir Richard Easy and Lady Wagtail. And the conclusion of the trial did not mean the Worsleys could divorce. Sir Richard refused, as he stood to lose financially, while Seymour would have gained control of her dowry.
In a dramatic turn, Bisset then left Lady Worsley. She ended up in the worst of all worlds: her reputation destroyed, her lover and the father of her daughter gone, her husband refusing a divorce, and her wider family disowning her. She was also pregnant with another of Bisset’s children. After giving birth in 1783, Seymour became a courtesan to survive, relying on the money and patronage of wealthy men.
She joined the New Female Coterie, a group of noblewomen whose reputations had been destroyed and who lived in precarious circumstances, meeting in a brothel run by Sarah Prendergast. Its members included Lady Anne Coke and Lady Derby, while its founder, Caroline Stanhope, was the mother-in-law of Seymour’s own sister Jane. As part of the Coterie, Lady Worsley had numerous other lovers, but her debts began to mount. Eventually she left London for Paris, where there was greater tolerance for women publicly accused of extramarital affairs.
She became a fixture at the French court at Versailles and gave birth to another daughter, Charlotte, who was sent away to be raised by another family. One of her lovers was Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, a biracial composer and champion fencer. In 1789 the French Revolution began. The revolutionary years were not easy for her.
She was arrested in 1793 during the Reign of Terror on account of her noble status and ties to the royal court, and imprisoned. During this dark period, her son with Worsley passed away. Finally, in 1797, she escaped back to England. She then reconciled with her family and began to live quietly at her childhood home, Brompton Park, as she entered her forties.
Sir Richard continued to have a mixed career. He lived on the Isle of Wight with his mistress, Sarah Smith, and during the French Revolutionary Wars was appointed British Envoy to the Venetian Republic. He died back in Britain in 1805, aged 54, his estate saddled with heavy debts. After his death, Seymour was finally able to regain control of the 70,000 pounds she had brought into the marriage, a fortune tied up in legal disputes for more than two decades.
Suddenly restored to immense wealth, she could leave behind her years of precarious living. On the 12th of September 1805, little more than a month after her husband’s death, she married Jean-Louis Couchet, a 26-year-old musician. She retook her Fleming surname, which Couchet also adopted. Most accounts agree it was a happy relationship.
After the Napoleonic Wars ended, the couple moved to Paris, where Seymour lived for the remainder of her life. She died there on the 9th of September 1818, at 59, from an unspecified illness. The woman once notorious in the British public eye was buried in the famous Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, where she lies among the graves of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, and Frédéric Chopin.