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also cause for serious reflection. Seymour’s education, like that of most of her contemporaries would have included moral instruction. Best-selling works such as James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women and Wetenhall Wilkes’s Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady , both of which remained in print throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, were given to girls to prepare them for married life. They preached that marriage required level-headed sobriety. Brides were reminded that ‘providence designed women for a state of dependence, and consequently of submission’. The duties of a wife were to include ‘love, fidelity and obedience to all [her husband’s] lawful desires’ through the practice of ‘meekness, tenderness, patience, and constancy’. Temptation would always beckon, especially within the higher circles. As the moralising Hester Chapone wrote in 1777, a young wife was bound ‘to meet with people who will ever endeavour to laugh [her] out of all regards’, and although a certain ‘dissipated’ element of fashionable society might ‘find something very ludicrous in the idea of authority in a husband’, breaking the hallowed vows of marriage had dire consequences.
    But on the 15th of September 1775 under the lightly dappled leaves of early autumn, such foreboding thoughts were far from the mind of either bride or groom. They were married at the ancient church of All Saints on the Harewood estate, a short stroll from the portico of Seymour’s stepfather’s home. As was the tradition in the eighteenth century, their wedding was a modest, private affair to which only their nearest relations were invited. Edwin Lascelles and his brother Daniel acted as witnesses and later hosted a celebratory feast for the assembled.
    That week, the newspapers made public ‘the marriage of Sir Richard Worsley of Pylewell in Hampshire, Bart … to Miss Seymour Fleming of the late Sir John Fleming, Bart’. Sir Richard’s local journal, the Hampshire Chronicle extended its congratulations by way of verse in which it boldly exclaimed;

    Tuneful hail the virtuous fair
Happy, happy be the pair!
     
    See with graceful mien the bride
By the happy bridegroom’s side
To the Temple’s altar move,
Call’d by Hymen–led by love!

    The anonymous poet echoed the sentiments of those who had bid the pair farewell from Harewood as the newly-wedded Sir Richard and Lady Worsley;

    May their years in pleasure run
End in love as they’ve begun!
May their lives in joy increase,
And their ends be crown’d with peace!

    In their sprung carriage, the rich heiress and her handsome husband bounced down the road toward their contented future together. Were their lives destined to be ordinary, their story would conclude here, in the embrace of a happy ending. But a quiet existence was not intended for the Worsleys and the first act of the drama that was to consume them had hardly begun.

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    Sir Finical Whimsy and His Lady
    In September 1775, a previously unknown girl of unexceptional appearance and the son of a backward country squire arrived in London. Following at their wheels came stories of the fortune that had recently exchanged hands. It was enough to arouse excitement and to make those not already acquainted with Sir Richard and Lady Worsley crane their necks in the couple’s direction, hoping to inspect them in their theatre box or during a promenade through St James’s Park. The newly-weds were the toast of balls, dinners and gatherings, and were trailed about from drawing room to levee, handed between the town houses of Lady Betty Worsley and the Earl of Cork, the man who had placed his signature on his grandson’s marriage contract. It was written that during the first few weeks of their union Sir Richard ushered his young bride through the capital ‘with the pageantry and pomp of an eastern sultana’, and that recently formed acquaintances and intimate friends alike ‘were continually striving to outvie