Then Lady W and Bissett spoiled the threesome by running away together, leaving Sir Richard humiliated. He hired James Farrer of Farrer & Co - then as now, evidently, the solicitors of choice for high-end marital disputes. He chose not divorce, but "Separation from Bed and Board", which meant Lady W was not free to marry in her husband's lifetime. Although Sir Richard asked for £10,000 compensation, the jury, in consideration of the bath-house episode, awarded him just one shilling. He became a reclusive and fanatical collector of antiquities, bid unsuccessfully for a slave-girl in Constantinople, brought home an Abyssinian boy instead, and died.

Lady W was soon abandoned by Bissett. She was pregnant again at the time. (All her various children either died or disappeared.) Just like Hester Thrale, she chose as her second husband a foreign musician. There must have been a supply of them to hand, ready and able. Hers was Swiss, and 26 years younger.

Hester Piozzi may never have met Lady Worsley, but Fanny Burney wrote to her with all the gossip about Lady Worsley's "flaming prank", and Mrs Piozzi, if she read the newspapers, would have known that Lady Worsley and Bissett, after they eloped from Coxheath, holed up in the Royal Hotel, Pall Mall. The hotel servants testified in court about the locked door of room 14, and about instructions given at odd hours to have rumpled and stained sheets changed.

The Piozzis stayed at the same hotel a couple of years later, Hester describing it as "the very worst Hotel I have ever been at in any Capital City of Europe". Personal research reveals that the site of the Royal Hotel is now occupied by "100 Pall Mall", a serviced office complex. No bedrooms, though, so far as I know.