Scandal existed long before celebrity gossip columns, often hidden behind the closed doors of the Georgian aristocracy. But secrets were impossible to keep in a household of servants who listened at walls and spied through keyholes. The early mass media pounced on these juicy tales of adultery, eager to cash in on the public appetite for sensation and expose the shocking moral corruption of the establishment.
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It was just after breakfast at nine o’clock on a bleak winter morning when the housemaid Elizabeth Hopping hesitated by the parlour door, torn between apprehension and curiosity. A muffled thudding sound was coming from the adjacent room, echoing through the stillness of the old manor house. She crept towards the oak-panelled door, heart pounding beneath her stays, and swiftly crouched down to peer through the keyhole. There was no mistaking what was going on next door.
With a horrified gasp Elizabeth instinctively drew back. Her hands were shaking, and she pressed both palms flat against the smooth polished wood to steady herself as she bent her head for another look. On the far side of the parlour by the gilded oval mirror, Lady Abergavenny was leaning back against the hall door, her petticoats bunched up as high as the garters on her stockinged legs. Pressed up against her in a passionate embrace was her husband’s friend Mr Lyddel, his coat unbuttoned, doing something that a man ought not to do. Dazed and shaken, Elizabeth scurried away down the back stairs, scarcely daring to think about what she had seen. She whispered her secret only to a laundrymaid, afraid that no one else would believe the shocking discovery.
Richard Lyddel, ‘a very civil, modest, well-bred gentleman’, living only seven miles from Lord Abergavenny’s country estate in West Sussex, was a regular visitor to the house, often riding over to stay for a week at a time as a welcome guest of the family. But as the months passed, suspicion grew among the servants about the unseemly intimacy between him and Lady Abergavenny. The house porter William Smith noticed that every time Mr Lyddel called, he was told by the mistress that she would not be at home to anyone else during his visit. Laundrymaid Mary Hodson saw the couple kissing at the window of an upstairs dressing room, then hurriedly closing the shutters, and on several occasions one of the housemaids was ordered to leave the room with the bed still unmade when Mr Lyddel came to her Lady’s chamber.
By the autumn of 1729, Matthews, who as his lord’s gentleman was entrusted with family business matters, was becoming increasingly worried that the couple were involved in a criminal correspondence. During the week of 13 October he was dealing with the engrossing of tenants’ leases, working in an apartment beneath the White Room where Mr Lyddel was staying. Seated at his usual writing table, he was absorbed in the task when a sudden noise from above made him stop abruptly halfway down a page, quill poised over the inkwell. He could plainly hear a man’s voice and the sound of the bed creaking in the White Room, and rushing out onto the main staircase he saw Mr Lyddel appear and call for his man. Running as hard as he could, Matthews found one of the house servants and told them to send up the valet, then ran up the back stairs through the long gallery just in time to see Lady Abergavenny emerging from the White Room looking very red and disordered. The next morning he again heard noises in the room above and, determined now to find out the truth, dashed up the back stairs, along to the end of the gallery, and removing his wig lay down out of sight to wait. Shortly he heard the bolt drawn in the White Room and Mr Lyddel appeared, looking around furtively, then the mistress came out carefully spreading her petticoats to prevent the silks rustling.
On Thursday of that week he heard similar suspicious noises in the bedchamber and decided to report the matter to Mr Osman, the house steward, as he could not bear to see his lord betrayed in this fashion. On Friday and Saturday morning the two men waited together for the lovers to meet, and both heard the White Room bed creak, the door unbolted and saw her ladyship come out holding up her petticoats as before. With such clear evidence now of a clandestine liaison, they knew Lord Abergavenny had to be told the truth; they initially asked his mother if she would break the terrible news, but she was too upset to confront him. Eventually on 6 November Mr Day, a neighbour and relation who managed the family estates in several counties, agreed to take on the difficult task and asked his lordship to take a walk in the fields with him as he had something to discuss. Clearly alarmed by his grave manner, Lord Abergavenny pressed him to speak out at once, and when he heard what had been going on between his wife and Mr Lyddel was at first too shocked to believe that his close friend could have done such a thing. But faced with the facts of his wife’s bl