in the years 1763 and 1764: with Remarks on the City of Constantinople and the Turks. Also Select Pieces of Oriental Wit, Poetry and Wisdom. The book, said Horace Walpole, "deserved no more to be published than his bills on the road for post-horses", adding that it demonstrated how "a man may travel without observation, and be an author without ideas". It gains a mention from a character in Tobias Smollett's epistolary novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Calvert's spending was prodigious, and he spent considerable sums of money on his family estate at Woodcote Park. According to Walpole, Calvert spent a great deal of money making the interior of the house "tawdry" and "ridiculous" in the "French" style. Trial, scandal and decline In 1768, Calvert was accused of abduction and rape by Sarah Woodcock, a noted beauty who kept a milliner's shop at Tower Hill. He was indicted at Kingston Assizes, and put on trial, pleading not guilty by reason of consent. After deliberating for an hour and twenty minutes the jury acquitted Calvert, believing that Woodcock did not make adequate attempts to escape. Much salacious gossip accompanied the trial, and in the same year, one of Calvert's willing sexual partners, Sophia Watson, found it opportune to write a salacious autobiography entitled Memoirs of the Seraglio of the Bashaw of Merryland, by a Discarded Sultana (London, 1768) Her readers were left in no doubt as to whom she was referring to, which further harmed Baltimore's reputation. Sultana Watson offered many intimate details of life in the seraglio, including the predictable, unkind suggestion that Baltimore himself was barely able to satisfy one, let alone eight, mistresses. Following his acquittal Frederick left England, presumably hoping that his notoriety did not extend to Europe. In this he seems to have been at least partly correct, as in July 1769 the British Ambassador to Russia reported that "Lord Baltimore arrived here last week from Sweden; I had the honour to present him to the Empress, who was pleased to receive his Ld extremely graciously." Nevertheless, Calvert's brush with the law does not appear to have affected his unconventional living arrangements. Count Maximilian von Lamberg wrote of his travels: In 1769, my Lord was travelling with eight women, a physician, and two negroes, which he called his corregidores, who were entrusted with the discipline of his little seraglio. With the aid of his physician,