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equivalent of roughly £2.5–£3 million today. In an era when a middle-class man and his family might live in comfort for £400 per year, Sir Richard’s assets rendered him soundly rich. With a baronetcy to crown his fortune and a provision of good looks ample enough to sway young ladies and their hesitant mamas, Worsley would have ranked highly on any list of marriage candidates.
    The baronet’s introduction to Edwin Lascelles and his wife probably occurred in London, as a result of their shared political interests. In the spring or summer of 1772, Sir Richard received an invitation to visit the family at Harewood, where the spacious rooms still smelt of freshly cut oak and clean fabric. At the time, the baronet was contemplating a grand scheme for the renovation of Appuldurcombe and doubtlessly was eager to inspect the recent achievements of Lascelles’s architects. The possibility of wooing the eldest of the two Fleming sisters was another motive for undertaking an inconvenient and expensive excursion to Yorkshire. Determined to make an impression on his potential in-laws Worsley equipped himself with ‘a new carriage, new liveries, and every external requisite’. Accompanying him was his steward, Richard Clarke, a man on whose friendship and advice he would lean for most of his life. Accounts of his early relations with the Fleming sisters suggest that in spite of his tailored appearance, his impressive brigade of shiny-buckled servants and his shellacked carriage, the object of his attentions failed to warm to him. After several days in his company Jane ‘soon discovered the emptiness of her admirer’. However, before his departure Worsley was determined to make a bid for her hand. Unable to read or comprehend her apparent lack of interest, his persistence forced her to ‘reject him with disdain,’ and ‘give him a positive refusal on his outset’.
    As this romantic spectacle unfolded, the fourteen-year-old Seymour had been studying its male protagonist with fascination. As Jane’s junior by nearly three years, she was still considered too young to enter into the game of courtship, but this did not deter Seymour from youthful attempts at flirtation nor did it prevent Sir Richard reciprocating with playful overtures of his own. By the time the gates of Harewood were opened to Worsley’s
London-bound carriage, the seeds for a successful later encounter had already been sown.
    It was 1775 when the younger Miss Fleming, aged seventeen, next dropped a curtsy to Sir Richard. They ‘renewed their former acquaintance’ amid the feathers and fans of the assembly rooms at York Races. Not wishing to hurry either of her daughters into a hasty union, Lady Fleming adopted the strategy of dangling her lavishly endowed girls under the noses of as wide a range of potential husbands as the passing years would permit. A suggested engagement between Jane and Lord Algernon Percy had recently amounted to nothing while Seymour had yet to encourage the advances of any suitor. This was her second spring on the marriage market and having shed the last of her childish figure she appeared before Sir Richard with the confidence of one accustomed to moving in elite society. In recounting the tale of their courtship, an anonymous Grub Street gazetteer records that the two took magnetically to one another, ‘he danced with her the whole evening; the next day they were inseparable, and the day after that they were constant companions upon the [race] course and at the assembly’. ‘Before the end of the week’, he continues, Worsley ‘had obtained a promise of her hand’. It is likely that their affections were sealed nearly as quickly as the author intimates. The racing season at York opened in May and by the 17th of June Gibbon writes about a dinner he gave at which Sir Richard announced to the assembled guests that ‘He is going to marry the youngest Miss Fleming’. He surmised that his friend was not compelled by passion