“Lady Worsley dressing in the Bathing House.” The Cuckold’s Chronicle (London: H. Lemon, 1793). Courtesy of the British Library
In his fine book Fashioning Adultery, David Turner has very persuasively argued that, though adultery was by no means a new vice in Restoration England, there was a new level of concern, even anxiety, about it.1 And, in the face of some arguments to the contrary, Turner holds to an older view that, despite Filmer’s defeat by Locke, the link between familial stability and political, national stability was still widely upheld. Or, to quote a “Person of Quality,” writing in the 1690s, “a Family is the Epitome of a Kingdom.”2
It is worth spending a moment unpacking this widespread belief. In which ways were the fates of nations dependent on the health of individual families? Perhaps at the most fundamental level, it was held that the possibility of all sorts of governance and obedience rested on the security and inviolability of property, whether in land, women, or progeny: “… the whole band of civil society, and of a regular communion betwixt Men in the World, proceeds from the succession of a Lawful Issue, which is the Broad-seal of Heaven.”3 Stability of marriage, it was said, would inevitably produce stable government, “as Marriage abates the Irregular Lives of Men, so it produces a sober, and well-disposed Posterity.”4 Adulterers, in contrast, not only ruined family peace, but sowed social and civil discord, “For the Disturbers of Government are usually those who decry Marriage among themselves, and invade it in others.”5 And once the sixth commandment, forbidding adultery, was breached, it was just a matter of time until the seventh, against murder, was also ruptured.6 A corollary to the powerful analogy between families and governments, often supported by references to the decline and fall of earlier kingdoms and empires, was that adultery would inevitably lead to the military decline and fall of whichever nation accepted its imperatives. “And certainly if this lustful fire be not quenched, or else be timely not restrained, it will soon emasculate the age, consume the strength, and melt down the courage of the nation.… If we design to maintain our martial valour, for which we are now renowned thro’ the world, we must keep a distance from Venus’s tents.”7 In a period of intermittent though frequent warfare and the acquisition of empire, such a threat was taken seriously. This was perhaps significant for the “legislative initiative in 1699 to make adultery a capital offence … [which] only narrowly failed to become law.”8
Another widely held belief about this vice was that some segments of society were more apt to commit adultery than others, that for some it had ceased being viewed as a crime or even as a sin, but was instead treated gently, called “gallantry,” and formed a part of the mores of a privileged group in society. Most historians agree that from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century many believed that the beau monde lived by a code of sexual manners significantly different from the rest of society, and it was this belief that spurred calls for moral reform.9 At mid-century, Alexander Jephson summarized this attribution by noting that adultery, one of the “reigning and fashionable Vices of the Age,” was “favoured and encouraged by the Great and Powerful.” Unmindful of their influence, led by their vain and promiscuous passions to indulge in adultery, the upper classes, according to Jephson, were to blame for what he and many of his contemporaries saw as the growth of this grievous fault. “Nothing,” he commented, “hath contributed so much to the quick and extensive Propagation of these accursed Vices, as that so many Persons of the greatest Fashion and Distinction … have given so much Countenance to them by their own Example.”10 Adultery, commented the Grub Street Journal of 1730, was esteemed by “all well-bred persons … as a piece of gallantry and not a crime.”11
What did late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century contemporaries think could or should be done to end this vicious indulgence, this pernicious breach of God’s and man’s laws? The suggestions bear a strong resemblance to the proposed punishments for duelling. Some Members of Parliament thought that, from being a misdemeanor, adultery should become “criminalized.” This was a suggestion raised many times during the century, though never adopted. Thus, in 1724, Richard Smalbroke, Bishop of St. David’s, seemed to bemoan the leniency of British law.
it is a Duty the more incumbent on the Magistrate, to turn the keenest Edge of the Laws against those that notoriously live in a State of Adultery, both in order to rouze them by the Smart of the Inconveniencies they incur, out of their stupified Condition to a better Sense of things, and to deter others by their Sufferings from so pernicious a Crime. It must be confessed, indeed, that this Part of our Civil Constitution is defective, and that our Laws are not so severe as those of most other Nations, that punish Adultery with Death.…12
Others argued that a revival of a devout Anglican Christianity would be more effective than punitive legislation, though this too faltered in the practical implementation. Yet another suggestion that was periodically rediscovered though the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the public use of shame, either through the practice of ducking adulterers in neighboring ponds, through the attachment of marks of eternal infamy to their persons or dwellings, or through corporal punishment like horsewhipping. “[E]verlasting Reproach, and the Detestation of all the World, are deservedly the Portion” of those guilty of adultery, opined the Universal Spectator in 1734. In addition it was sometimes argued that officers of state, whether serving in the nation’s government or the military, should be evicted from these occupations if they were found guilty of adultery.
Though all these recourses were suggested, the only major changes that occurred in the way that adultery was treated was the institution, late in the seventeenth century, of full divorce through a private Act of Parliament for the cuckolded husband and the use of a civil suit of trespass or assault against the wife’s lover, which soon came to be called “criminal conversation,” and which awarded the aggrieved husband a monetary compensation for his loss.13 It is unclear, despite the pioneering work of both Lawrence Stone and David Turner, how lawyers and parliamentarians first came to invent these devices. What is certain, however, is that by 1680 both were being used and, for a small section of the population, full divorce with the possibility of remarriage became possible. It is ironic, perhaps, that for that section deemed in print most likely to be guilty of the sin in the first place, remarriage became, if not cheap or shameless, certainly negotiable for people of fashion.
If neither the vice nor its condemnation was therefore new, but in the post-Restoration period felt to be more predominant and more dangerous, was anything novel in the way that writers and readers, moralists and theater-goers, understood it or experienced it? David Turner argues that it was the appearance of printed criminal conversation trials in the first half of the eighteenth century that raised the issue in the public’s consciousness. “Since prosecutions for criminal conversation were not routine, trials generated huge public interest when they occurred.” Furthermore, both he and Lawrence Stone argue that “the lively publicity surrounding these trials,” largely in the form of pamphlets produced immediately after, widened and deepened this interest.14 While many of the most notorious of such cases, in the main involving at least one aristocratic male, did result in the production of a number of pamphlets about the trial, we may wish to reconsider the effect and scope of their influence. Before we examine their coverage and impact, however, let us briefly look at what other sorts of material dealing with adultery were popular before the accession of George III.
By the early eighteenth century, the London stage had become less aggressively libertine, less astringent in its humor or biting in its commentary, than had been the theater of Charles II. Though male adultery continued as a frequently featured and only mildly censured activity on this more moral eighteenth-century stage, female adultery was seldom condoned or left unpunished. This is not surprising, nor are the casual, offhand comments on the connection between adultery, divorce, and the morality of people of fashion in the first half of the century. Thus in David Garrick’s trifle of 1741, The Lying Valet, the young heroine, in the guise of a man of the mode, instructs a would-be member of the beau monde about what can and cannot be done by them. Addressing him, she comments “breaking of Contracts, suing for Divorces, committing Adultery, and such like, are all reckon’d Trifles now-a-days; and smart young Fellows, like you and myself, Gayless, should be never out of Fashion.” Similarly, in Garrick’s 1749 play, Lethe, Aesop informs a Mrs. Tatoo that she doesn’t need Lethe’s waters to divorce her from her husband; all, he says, she needs to do in order to forget him, is to remember “continually [that] he is your husband. There are several ladies have no other receipt.” She then explains to Aesop that, longing to be in fashion, she has been told that this is impossible for a happily married woman, but that if she would “but procure a separate divorcement … [she] should be as complete a fine lady as any of ’em.” These “throwaway” lines, these casual references to the manners and sexual standards of married people of fashion, show that, at least as “background” noise, eighteenth-century theater-goers were widely exposed to a shared set of assumptions about the married improprieties of their betters.15
The theater, however, was not the only medium for airing views about adultery and divorce. A wide variety of other sorts of popular writings, usually though not always religious or moral in character, also treated the same bundle of notions surrounding marriage, female honor, and class privilege. An interesting set of such views was expressed in Mary Wray’s discussion of “chastity” in The Ladies Library of 1722. First, recalling the failed bill of 1698 that had proposed to make adultery a criminal offense, Wray asked rhetorically why this wholesome piece of legislation had failed to pass; her answer was both ironic and pointed:
But to our Shame be it spoken, the Crime was too general, the Offenders too great, and not the Nation too merciful; for God forbid, that those who with pleasure see daily poor Criminals carry’d to the Gallows; for little Thefts and Robberies, shou’d be griev’d to see those punish’d with Death, that had robb’d whole Families of their Peace, and Honour, and Estates, by bringing into them Bastardy and Infamy.16
According to Wray, then, it was both the widespread nature of the sin and its practice by the Great that doomed this proposed change. More unusual, perhaps, was Wray’s verdict in her judgment of the relative sinfulness of men and women in committing adultery. Since men, she argued, have stronger understandings and resolution than women, “in respect of the Person” they were more blameable, though, she admitted, women were more at fault “in respect of the evil Consequences of Adultery,” i.e., the introduction of spurious heirs to property not rightly theirs. However, she concluded, “In respect of the crime, and as relating to God, they are equal, intolerable and damnable.”17
Several writers, both men of religion and others, blamed the decline of religious practice for the growth of this dreadful sin. According to Philogamus,
The first, and more general Cause of Lewdness, is the want of Religion, and the Decay of Christian Piety.… The poisonous Infusion of the most horrid Principles is sucked in, by both Sexes, with the greatest Avidity: The Deformity of Vice is extenuated, and even denied by some; and all intrinsic Virtue, particularly Chastity, is turned to ridicule; and almost catcall’d away.18
Arguing against the code of “modern gallantry,” whose chief activity was adultery, the anonymous author of the Essay on Modern Gallantry explained why religious arguments could not be used when discussing the vices of the fashionable:
[B]ecause most of these pretty Gentlemen, with whom I have to deal in this Controversy, have Stomachs too nice to digest any Arguments drawn from Religion, I shall throw Divinity entirely out of the Question, and address myself to them in their favorite Characters, as they profess themselves Men of Honour, Men of Pleasure and Men of Sense.
But this essay was not only addressed to men of the mode, did not only warn men of honor that adultery was a grievous offence in a code of secular friendship, sociability, and good manners, but also included a warning to those women who did not belong to the privileged fashionable world:
You will also do well to consider that Ladies of Rank, Fortune, and Distinction, may do a thousand irregular Things, without Censure, or at least with no other bad Consequence, by the very Circumstance of their being above the World; they have the same Privilege of being unaccountable for their Conduct, as Men, in the same high Station, have of not paying their Debts, unless they please. Whereas the World will not make the same Allowances to Women of an inferior Rank, but exacts the severest Account of their Actions, under Pain of Infamy and Reproach.19
In making this distinction between women of different ranks, this author was taking one side of a more controversial position. While most commentators agreed about the sanctioned irresponsibility of fashionable men, others, like Timothy Hooker, argued that all women, whatever their class, irrevocably lost their public repute through an act of sexual impropriety:
[E]very Woman who has once been so unhappy as to offend in point of Chastity, cannot by the most sincere Repentance, by all the merciful Abatements that ought to be made for human Frailty, and a thousand amiable Qualities besides, thrown into the Balance, be ever able to wipe off an indelible Mark of Infamy fixed upon her by all the ill-natur’d Prudes and Coquets about Town.20
Rank protected men and perhaps even women of the upper classes from ignominy, most authors agreed, and neither Christian religion nor morality was a significant hindrance to the vicious activities of these fashionable folk. “ ’Tis true, Custom and Fashion, and false Notions of Gallantry, have in great measure defaced the Boundaries of Vice and Virtue, Infamy and Honour in the Fashionable World …,” Hooker complained.21
As we have noted, both Stone and Turner have commented on the importance that criminal conversation trial accounts, published as pamphlets, had on stirring interest in, and familiarizing the general public with, the sexual vices of the Great. These, no doubt, were of some importance, though they probably served a reasonably restricted readership because of their price. There were five “great” trials that all produced published accounts in the period before 1760; these were the trials between Abergavenny and Liddel, Morice and Fitzroy, Cibber and Sloper, Biker and Morley, and Knowles and Gambier. Counting the pamphlets that have survived, however, we find that, on average, just over four pamphlets or editions were published for each case. Though this is by no means a negligible number, it is no more than the number published for other sorts of “interesting” cases from the 1690s onwards.22 These undoubtedly whetted the appetite of the reading public, and perhaps, over time, helped to create the seemingly endless interest in the sexual improprieties of the upper classes, which we will see was so glaring by the late 1760s. However, these early single accounts, and the few collections of cases I have come across for the first half of the century are not only scantier, but have a different “flavor” than later publications of this sort. For one thing, these early pamphlets tended to be shorter in length and unadorned by the colorful, imaginary illustrations that, we shall see, enhanced later pamphlets. Those earliest in the century were also, unsurprisingly, shortest in length; the average for the first three of these cases was a pamphlet of about 30 pages. The pamphlet of the Morice case of 1742 was longer (50 pages) while that of the Knowles trial of 1757 was twice the size of the earlier ones. When compared to the pamphlets covering the criminal conversation cases of the 1770s and 1780s, these earlier works are both fewer and briefer.
Equally “transitional” are the collections of notorious cases published before the 1760s. Morer’s Two Cases the first of adultery and divorce was more concerned with the punishment for adultery than in giving details of actual cases. In Edmund Curll’s Cases of Divorce for Several Causes of 1715, for example, only half of that book was devoted to trials that had occurred within the last three decades, and the judge’s verdict in the Duchess of Cleveland’s case was entirely in Latin, which would hardly have made it attractive or accessible to a broader reading public.23 The 1732 compendium The Cases of Polygamy, Concubinage, Adultery, Divorce, etc. by the most eminent hands contained a diversity of material, but only a passing reference to the case of Lord Roos, whose Parliamentary divorce of 1670 is widely considered as the first non-regal complete divorce. And though the 1739 volume A Collection of remarkable trials did include the Cibber and Abergavenny trials, it also included “four original letters” as well as an account of the trial of the infamous Colonel Chartres for rape. Not until the 1761 publication of Adultery Anatomized: in a select collection of Tryals for Criminal Conversation. Brought from the Infant Ages of Cuckoldom in England to its full growth in the present times did the reading public have access to a single work dedicated to the sordid details of actual criminal conversation cases.
What of the press, however? What sorts of items concerning divorce, adultery, crim. con. trials, etc. did they present to the wide reading public in the first six decades of the century? Of course, these topics had been discussed in a general way by the great pioneering essay-journals of the century. Thus, Addison in the Spectator, comparing the chief quality that made males and females virtuous, concluded that women’s virtue resided in their chastity.24 These sorts of general discussions continued in the magazines, covering many pages in the competing journals in the century’s second quarter. A quick run-through of this material will illustrate the point. In the 1730s, both the Gentleman’s and the London Magazine published an essay on marriage and divorce, and the London and the Grub Street Journal exposed “certain Fashionable Vices”; in the 1740s the Gentleman’s (copying this time from the Universal Spectator) discussed adultery in the context of what they called “modern conversation,” while in the 1750s, the Covent Garden Journal (later, once again, recopied in the Gentleman’s), in a mock dictionary entitled “A Modern Glossary” identified adultery as a central component of “gallantry.”25 The strongest, if by no means the only, denunciation of adultery, however, came from the repeated attacks made on it by Henry Fielding’s Covent Garden Journal:
By what means our Laws were induced to consider this atrocious Vice as no Crime, I shall not attempt to determine. Such however is the Fact: for as to the Action for criminal Conversation, tho’ some have severely smarted by it, yet the Lawyers well know the Difference between criminal and civil Proceedings, between that Process which is instituted for Punishment and Example, and that which hath merely the Redress of an Injury and Damages only in its View.26
Like many others, both before and after him, Fielding believed that adultery should be a matter of criminal, not civil law, that it was an offence against the stability of the state, and not merely a loss to a private person or family. These rebukes, however, only obliquely pointed at the Great and, however plentiful, still were moralistic in tone and general in target.
Given the reticence of the press to report on the suicides and duels of the beau monde in this period, it is hardly surprising that their adulteries and divorces only received scant magazine or newspaper coverage. Thus, one of the earliest of such reports, involving two men of quality, was only a single sentence long. “At a Trial in the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, Dingley Goodere, Esq., Son of Sir Robert Goodere, Bart. Recover’d of Sir Robert Jason, Bt. 1000l. for criminal Conversation with his Wife.” In contrast, only two months later, when the Gentleman’s Magazine, which had also reported on the Goodere trial, published the story of another adultery trial, this time in “low life,” many more details were forthcoming:
A Cause was tried in the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, between Joseph Green, Plaintiff and Joseph Molineux, Defendant, for criminal Conversation with the Plaintiff’s Wife. The Fact was proved; but it appearing that the Plaintiff’s House was a reputed Bawdy-House, and that some of the Witnesses had lain with his Wife and two of his Daughters, a Verdict pass’d for the Def.27
Similarly, when the Biker v Morley case of 1741 was reported, only one of the ten popular magazines or newspapers commented on it. Noting that it was “a remarkable Case” and that the hearing “had lasted twelve hours” the Daily Gazetteer merely reported that the jury “brought in a Verdict for the Defendant.”28 By the 1750s, though more accounts of adulteries and court cases appeared in the press, these either were mainly comic or had middling folk as featured protagonists. A good example of the former was the story told in the Gentleman’s Magazine of a dealer, coming home from a business trip, and finding his wife and her lover in bed. Tying them together in their naked state in front of a roaring fire, he invited the neighbors in to view them, and partake of the “tea, coffee and punch [which he] provided.” That same journal contained accounts of crim. con. cases involving Messrs. Teat and Craven, in which the former was non-suited (his wife, it appeared, was bigamous) and that of two eminent merchants, in which the husband received the rather large compensation of £2500.29 It is not until the 1757 suit between Admiral Knowles, whom we have already met in our previous discussion of duelling, against a Captain in his fleet, James Gambier, for the latter’s criminal conversation with his commander’s wife, that any significant press reporting of an upper-class adultery occurred.
In 1756, Knowles, then governor of Jamaica, sent his wife and children back to London on a ship commanded by Captain James Gambier. When, a year later, Knowles sued Gambier for adultery with his wife, the press reported the event, though without giving any of the steamier details or reflecting on the individuals or families involved. Both the Gentleman’s and the Universal Magazine matter-of-factly reported that the case had come before the courts, the former using dashes to imply, but not state, the full names of the participants, the latter merely referring to a case “between a late Governor of one of our Islands in the West Indies and his Lady” in their account of the ecclesiastical court procedures.30 The Public Advertiser, which also reported the affair, merely noted “that a certain Person of Distinction, having Reason to be much discontented with the Conduct of his Lady, is very soon to be separated from her.” The London Evening Post utilized the same euphemism employed by the Universal, noting that “a late Governor of one of our Islands in the West-Indies was Plaintiff, and a Captain of a Man of War Defendant.”31 Even in this most widely covered case of upper-class adultery of the 1750s, the tone was restrained, the names suggested but not spelled out, the details few. In terms of public involvement in the sexual improprieties of the fashionable, though some peepholes had undoubtedly been provided for those interested in upper-class adultery by the availability of pamphlet and press reporting of these affairs, this publicity would only have whetted the appetite, without satisfying the hunger, of any prurient moralist or critic of Society.
Thus we have seen that, while there were many critics of the sexual mores and free-and-easy ways of the bon ton, of fashionable gallantry, through the first almost seven decades of the eighteenth century, there was a real reluctance in the periodical press to attack, or even extensively to report, these affairs in the particular, or to give any specific details. It was only after a daring and path-breaking set of anonymous letters written under the name Junius was published, and quickly reprinted, collected, and republished, that the domestic world of society’s leaders was held up as a proper object of discussion, proper, at least initially, in so far as it had some bearing on the political arrangements and power relations of the day.
When George III ascended to the throne in 1760, a young, virtuous, and English monarch, there were many panegyrics to his private character and worth. One of the very few monarchs of Britain who not only abstained from sexual dalliance, but also made his family life an important symbol of both his personal morality and his public authority, George nevertheless found it impossible to rid his court of such behavior, or to select his ministers only from men of impeccable personal morality. Thus, the incongruity between his upright private life and the immoralities of members of both his family and ministries was to be a problem for the first quarter-century of his reign.
Through the second half of the eighteenth century, the view that “the personal was political,” that the morals of statesmen and their public conduct mirrored each other, became increasingly prevalent. Of course men in public life had always been chastised for various kinds of corruption, but, until this period, it was the sins of venality rather than those of immorality, that were seen as the most frequent, and attacked as the most nationally threatening vices of the ruling classes. Bribery and fiscal dishonesty, it was said, by appealing to the desire for private gain, disordered the public realm and introduced an imbalance of power and a misuse of authority. “Old Corruption” was the purchase of political support, and had little or nothing to do with the private, that is to say, domestic arrangements of its adherents and followers. Of course, this sort of venality continued, and continued to be attacked; what was new, however, was the focus on other kinds of personal and political vice.
Though the King’s tutor and confidante, the unpopular Earl of Bute, was frequently imputed to be the lover of the Princess Dowager, it was Junius’ attack on George’s chief minister in the late 1760s that inaugurated a campaign whose purpose was to cleanse political life by publicizing and focusing opinion “out of doors” on the hitherto passed-over questions of private sexual morality.
The main target of Junius’ attack was the Duke of Grafton. Grafton, who had married the daughter of Baron Ravensworth in 1756, had, despite his married state, continued to keep a number of mistresses and to lead a separate life from his duchess. When she eloped in 1768, pregnant with a child by her lover, the Earl of Upper Ossory, Grafton launched a criminal conversation suit against him, and petitioned for a complete Parliamentary divorce. Rather than becoming an object of sympathy or even of humor, however, the cuckolded Duke was condemned for his public immorality, especially for taking his mistress, Nancy Parsons, to the Opera, thus flaunting her and their relationship, in a public venue. This furnished Junius with the opportunity he desired:
Did not the duke of Grafton frequently lead his mistress into public, and even place her at the head of his table, as if he had pulled down an ancient temple of Venus, and could bury all decency and shame under the ruins?32
Yet whatever blame was heaped upon Grafton for this public display of his unrepentant immorality, he was also criticized by Junius for breaking with Parsons after his divorce was announced, and shortly thereafter marrying one of Ossory’s cousins.
Is there not a singular mark of shame set upon this man, who has so little delicacy and feeling as to submit to the opprobrium of marrying a near relation of one who had debauched his wife?—In the name of decency, how are these amiable cousins to meet at their uncle’s table?—It will be a scene in Oedipus, without the distress.33
In this attack Junius claimed, although in a sarcastic and biting manner, that the morals of the upper classes did not concern him, that what he attacked was the publicity of Grafton’s offence. A later article in the Town and Country, in a satiric account of Grafton’s installation as Chancellor of Cambridge University, playing on the fact of the close relation between the two sets of families, noted that there was “Dropt, two courtsies between the present and the late duchess of G—, who appeared very magnificently dressed, in honour of his grace’s installation.”34 Grafton’s virtuous remarriage, as well as his immoral public display of Parsons, thus inevitably involved public attention.
The example of the English nobility may, for aught I know, sufficiently justify the duke of Grafton when he indulges his genius in all the fashionable excesses of the age.… But if vice itself be excused, there is yet a certain display of it, a certain outrage to decency, and violation of public decorum, which, for the benefit of society, should never be forgiven. It is not that he kept a mistress at home, but that he constantly attended her abroad. It is not the private indulgence, but the public insult, of which I complain.35
Yet at the same time, Junius also attacked Grafton’s remarriage on grounds that were purely personal.
His grace, it seems, is now a regular domestic man; and, as an omen of the future delicacy and correctness of his conduct, he marries a first cousin of the man who had fixed that mark and title of infamy upon him which, at the same moment, makes a husband unhappy and ridiculous.36
Attempting to make intimations about the public delicacy, the public intelligence, and the public morality of Grafton by referring to his private life, Junius concluded, powerfully if illogically, in his address to the Duke, “Your grace’s public conduct, as a minister, is but the counter part of your private history; the same inconsistency, the same contradictions.”37
This rhetorical strategy, using the public press to target a political actor for his private failings, could also be used in the reverse. Thus “Tullius,” beginning an attack on the political character of the Duke, opened his letter to Grafton by arguing that he would not reproach him with his “private conduct in life,” but only with his conduct as chief minister.38 This elaborate refusal to discuss his private life underscored its reprehensible quality, while ostensibly taking the high road of abstaining from domestic slurs and focusing only on public issues.
Junius also tried this contradictory tactic on the conduct of the young king himself. In effect accusing George of using his private moral purity as an exculpatory device to skirt questions of public responsibility, Junius addressed the king, asking:
And if you are, in reality, that public man, that king, that magistrate, which these questions suppose you to be, is it any answer to your people to say that, among your domestics you are good-humoured, that to one lady you are faithful, that to your children you are indulgent?39
In his muddling of the domestic and the political, Junius and his press associates made it possible to go from the private, personal, and secret to the public, political, and open, in either direction, in a single bound.
Though it is difficult to tell the chicken from the egg, the causes from the effects, this period of political turmoil also saw the appearance of a variety of newspapers and magazines which featured both political and sexual scandals. The best known of these were probably the Town and Country Magazine40 (which contained at least ten stories relating to adultery and divorce in its first year of publication), the Oxford Magazine, and Bingley’s Journal; all began in 1769 and all had a significant role in making the adultery of the famous not only widely known but a topic of discussion amongst the hoi polloi. Their success also forced the older magazines like the Gentleman’s Magazine (or perhaps gave them the courage) to feature this kind of item. Thus, in February 1769, the Gentleman’s reported, in its Historical Chronicle section, that “the cause depending between the D. of G—n and his D—ss, was determined, and a divorce pronounced.”41 The Grafton case got more publicity elsewhere: the Town and Country noted, “We hear that the lately divorced lady of a noble d—, who has been since married to a noble lord, has had, on her divorcement, her whole fortune returned to her, which, as she was an only daughter, amounted to above eighty thousand pounds.”42 Many of the magazines published what purported to be the letters which Grafton wrote to Parsons, announcing their break and his impending marriage, and her heartbroken responses.43 In addition, a tell-all anonymous pamphlet was published before the year’s end, with the unambiguous title Memoirs of the Amours, Intrigues and Adventures of Charles Augustus Fitz-Roy with Miss Parsons. At the hefty price of 2s6d, it expanded on and gave the details of what the press had been reporting much more cheaply for a wider reading public.44
Just as the Grafton cause célèbre was running out of steam, another, much juicier affair engaged the public’s notice, and was covered in loving detail by the eager press. This was the adultery case featuring Lady Grosvenor and the Duke of Cumberland, the younger brother of good King George. The extraordinary criminal conversation case and divorce bill that followed kept the public riveted and the press filled for the next several years.45 The timing and connection between the two cases was not lost on periodical writers. Thus, in a mock letter addressed to Grafton, just one month after the Grosvenor affair was detected and made public, “A Cuckold” urged the Duke, as a way of securing “the interest and countenance of even your professed friends” to pass an Act in Parliament which would allow his friends “to get rid of their wives” more cheaply, by ordering “that all such acts might pass the house duty free.…” In addition, “Cuckold” recommended that Grafton “[get] another law, or resolution, to abolish all prosecutions and actions for crim. con. R[oya]l or otherwise.…”46
While the private affairs of the Duke and Duchess of Grafton had been discussed by Junius and others as indicative of the corrupt public morality of the ministry, the Grosvenor case, which featured the antics of Cumberland, linked this offence against the married state with the Court and the royal family itself. “An affair that has made much noise in the polite world,” announced the Town and Country, “is likely to be the first action that was commenced in England against one of the b[loo]d R[oya]l, for criminal conversation; except in the reign of James II, in the case of Clarendon.”47 When the case first came to light in December 1769, it was immediately picked up by the press. Even the high-minded Gentleman’s printed a paragraph in its Historical Chronicle section for that month, noting
An assignation at the White Hart at St. Albans, between lady G and a certain great D—e, was disconcerted by the forcible intrusion of my lord’s gentleman, who about two o’clock in the morning burst the chamber door open, and found the lovers sitting together in close conversation. An affidavit has since been made in the Commons with a view to a divorce, and a suit is likely to commence, in which the ablest lawyers will be employed.48
That same month, both the Town and Country and the Oxford published the story of the Grosvenors’ courtship and marriage. Before his marriage Grosvenor had, it was asserted, “by his irregularity brought his health into a very critical state, and his physicians recommended matrimony to him, as the most certain way of living regularly.…” Miss Vane, the future Lady Grosvenor, was almost the first woman he met after taking the resolution to marry; he proposed and they were married “within a month from that day.”49 Though neither magazine commented on this account, they certainly molded the story into the familiar tropes of male aristocratic license and female aristocratic greed. A month later, in its 1769 Supplement, the Gentleman’s Magazine repeated the story, prefacing it with the remark that it would “serve as a caution to youth against entering for life into hasty connections.”50 However, another, competing picture was suggested by a piece that purported to be a letter written, after the affair was discovered, by Lady Grosvenor to her husband. In it, she, in best sentimental rhetoric, threatened suicide if he did not accept her back, signing the missive Yours, or Eternity’s for ever. In contrast, the Oxford Magazine published immediately underneath this letter, a piece entitled Memoirs of his Royal Highness, William, late Duke of Cumberland, a Friend to Liberty, and an inexorable Enemy to the Scottish Rebels.51 Comparing the silly trifling Duke with his illustrious, public-spirited predecessor was one way, albeit an oblique one, of casting shame on the latter Cumberland’s life and actions. We will see this comparison repeated. Though the Earl’s conduct was, on the whole, exculpated, and the Countess’s reputation was somewhat tarnished by the affair,52 it was the conduct of Cumberland, and by extension of the upper ranges of the nobility, that were most adversely affected.
Referred to as “the illustrious personage, who descended to play the seducer,” Cumberland was found in Lady Grosvenor’s room at an inn, in a disguise which had led the inn’s servants to believe that he was a lunatic brought to visit “an eminent mad Doctor in the town.”53 When the discovery of the adultery was made, the Earl parted with his wife, and started a prosecution against Cumberland for criminal conversation. The Town and Country suggested that the Duke had written Grosvenor, “proposing an accomodation with Lady G—,” which the Earl self-righteously refused, not only because of his personal “sense of injuries received” but equally because he thought himself “bound to society to bring the perpetrator to justice.”54 Another note suggested that Lady Grosvenor might have been “framed” by her husband, who, seeking to rid himself of his wife, concerted “a diabolical scheme to get them separated.”55 Only one pamphlet, harshly reviewed in the Gentleman’s Magazine, attempted a similar whitewashing of Cumberland’s actions. While the reviewer agreed with the anonymous pamphleteer “that the Duke of Cumberland is pursued with personal malice rather than zeal for virtue … [and] reviled for a passion which is excused in others, although indulged with the same irregularity,” he found the implication, that private vice could have public benefits, contemptible and pernicious.56
That the trials (there was an ecclesiastical divorce suit, initiated by Grosvenor and begun in March 1770, a criminal conversation case, held before Lord Mansfield at King’s Bench on July 5, 1770, and a further counter-suit by the countess at Doctors’ Commons, initiated in December of that year) held the public attention is an understatement. Horace Walpole, in a letter to his friend Mann, noted that “We have lived these two months upon the poor Duke of Cumberland, whom the newspapers in so many letters call the royal idiot.”57 What becomes clear from the consideration of these trials is the degree of ridicule of as well as the contempt for the Duke, the role of the press in bringing these issues to light, and the questions that these trials raised about the influence of rank, and its responsibilities.
Three pieces of evidence were crucial in making the trials farcical: the first was the mawkish, ill-written, and misspelled love letters from the Duke to Lady Grosvenor that were read and reread, published, and commented on; the second was the various disguises adopted by Cumberland in his trysts with the Countess, and finally, third, was the patently false justification that Cumberland, discovered in Lady Grosvenor’s bedroom, uttered, that he would take a “bible oath he was not in my lady’s room.”58
In a fine copperplate featured in the September 1770 issue of the Oxford Magazine, entitled A certain great Personage learning to Spell, the Duke is portrayed at a table learning his ABCs. On the table along with his primer (open to a page which features the word Boo-by) is a scroll headed Specimens of R—l Spelling. Behind the studious Duke, the devil is holding up a dunce’s cap above his head. This picture accompanied a totally misspelt fictitious letter, addressed “To hiz Royal hynes they Dook of Comburrland,” which promised to make Cumberland as great a scholar as himself.59 Walpole commented that “The greatest abuse continues to be published against the Duke of Cumberland, and his governors for not having taught him to spell.” The Public Advertiser, in its brief report of the crim. con. trial, noted that when Cumberland’s letters were read out in court, they “raised a universal Laugh, while such as saw them, were astonished at the Method and Manner in which they were written.” Finally, in the Wilkite journal Bingley’s, which we shall consider in more detail shortly, its editor remarked that “Nothing, says Juvenal, is so cutting as an ill-timed joke. No sooner did the Duke of Cumberland enter Portsmouth, but some men at the engines asked, if his Royal Highness would take a spell at it.”60 That a prince of the blood and an Admiral of the Fleet could thus be teased, even fictitiously, by lowly tars and seamen, illustrates the devastating effects of mockery on aristocratic hauteur and the ridiculous public situation that Cumberland had brought himself into.
Similarly ridiculous and demeaning was Cumberland’s use of disguise in his rendezvous with Lady Grosvenor. Wedderburn, Lord Grovenor’s lawyer, recounted how the Duke assumed, at different times, the names of ’Squire Morgan, ’Squire Jones, the Farmer, etc.
that he sometimes appeared as a young ’squire disordered in his senses, and used to be called at the inns the Fool.…61
An item of dress came to seem symbolic perhaps of both the foolery and the duplicity of Cumberland’s disguises: a large rustic black wig that he wore in his Squire role. Thus Bingley’s reported, most likely tongue firmly in cheek, that Foote,
the witty [theatrical] manager has lately purchased of a certain chamber maid, the remarkable black bob worn by a Great Personage on a late amour, at no less a sum than two guineas; whence it is conjectured, the adventures of St. Alban’s, by a dramatic hocus pocus, may be translated to the theatre in the Haymarket.62
The Oxford Magazine that very month featured an engraving entitled A certain personage in the Character of a Fool as he perform’d it at Whitchurch & elsewhere. Cumberland, wearing a dunce’s cap, is kneeling at Lady Grosvenor’s feet, looking intently at her half-covered bosom. She remarks “Your H—s enters into the true Spirit of that Character,” the Duke responding, “It is not the first time I have play’d the Fool,” while his servant, addressing the viewer, comments “He is a very natural Performer, he looks for all the World like a Fool.” On the facing page was a poem called Duke of Cumberland, but it referred to that earlier Duke who conquered the Scots. Some lines capture the implicit comparison:
He [William] was wise, and he was brave,
Hated Fools, and scorn’d a knave;
He had learning, taste, and wit;
What he wrote was wisely writ;
Or he burnt each foolish letter,
Or he wrote none, which was better;
Never scribbled, never gabbled,
Nor with neighbour’s spouses dabbled.…
Strictly kept this golden rule—
Princes ne’er should play the FOOL.
Tell me—lives there such a one?
O, no—alas! he’s dead and gone.63
Finally, though this theme was more developed after, than during, the immediate aftermath of the criminal conversation suit, there was Cumberland’s blatantly untrue assertion that he “would take his bible oath” that he had not been in Lady Grosvenor’s room when the door to it was broken down.64 “A certain Gentleman,” reported an unnamed correspondent in the Public Advertiser two weeks after the trial, “instead of his Bible, should have offered to take his Spelling-Book Oath.” And though “Fair Locks” alluded to the “falsity” of this Bible oath in August of 1770, it received a much longer and more condemnatory play in a column written a year later in Bingley’s Journal. “When a Prince of the blood,” claimed the author of Anecdotes of his R—l H—ess the Duke of C—and the celebrated Lady G—r, “solemnly declares to those people, with whom by nature he is nearest connected, ‘That upon his honour, and by all his hopes of future happiness, he is innocent of the accusations laid to his charge’ … the unbecoming, the unhandsome circumstances, which attended this part of the Royal Lover, fired the indignation of every impartial man in the Court.” The attack continued with the column-writer noting “how odious and despicable a Prince of the Blood must appear in the eyes of every honest man [when he swears to something] he knew to be a most atrocious falsehood.”65
That the story offered the press an almost endless set of tales about the lives and loves of the great and famous was not merely accidental. Many historians have noted the development of the press at this time, and emphasized how the newspapers and periodicals of the Wilkite era were instrumental not only in creating political ferment, but also in creating new spaces for and encouraging greater participation in public debate. While the initial impulse behind this press expansion was political, commercial possibilities, in this, as in most eighteenth-century things, soon suggested other related interesting areas of discussion, discussions that increasingly turned on the twin subjects of rank and morality. Both of these areas crossed the public/private divide and both appealed simultaneously to principle and prurience, a winning combination. By the time of the Grosvenor divorce, those directly involved knew both the power and the intrusiveness of the press first-hand. Thus in a letter written by Lady Grosvenor’s sister to her just before the final exposé of the affair at the inn at St. Albans, she noted that “a story [was] now about town” linking her with the Duke, but, she continued “what is worse, I have enclosed a paragraph that was in the News Papers to day, from which you will learn how scandalously you are talked of; it frightens me to Death.”66
When the adultery case first came up in King’s Bench, lawyers for both the defendant and the plaintiff argued about the role that rank was to play in the proceedings. Laying the damages at the astonishing sum of £100,000, Wedderburn “particularly insisted on the defendant’s rank as an aggravation of his crime.” Though the Duke’s counsel argued that this penalty was “very excessive and immoderate,” the opposing lawyers cited several precedents, which, they argued, were necessary to “shew society, that where particular duty and respect is required, an action of criminality becomes doubly so, when these ties are broke through.”67 Thus, argued Wedderburn, the case was not just about the immorality of one particular man and woman, but about the ties that bound, or threatened to dissolve, a society of deference and rank. This theme was reiterated by a “Civilian,” writing shortly after the case’s conclusion:
To make loyalty the source of licentiousness and betray the confidence which superior rank might claim from superior virtue, is to pollute the streams that immediately flow from the fountain of honour, with the filth of the foulest drains of demerit and debauchery.68
For many the Cumberland-Grosvenor affair was about aristocratic license, about the sullied state of upper-class life and the epidemical effects of upper-class adultery. “By high Example, thus the Marriage State/Is epidemically stain’d of late,” noted one anonymous poet.69 In contrast to this privileged life of debauchery and fashionable vice, said another, Britain’s middling sorts were still untainted.
Thank Heav’n amongst those who hold Life’s middle Way
Nor blest with Pow’r, or Splendour’s dazzling Ray,
Such glorious Crimes we very seldom know,
Our Sentiments for such bright Deeds too low,
We think our Wives to ease our Troubles giv’n,
That Nuptial Faith is guaranteed by Heav’n,
Upon our Consorts Honour build our own,
And owe our Happiness to that alone.70
In fact, noted a letter-writer to Bingley’s Journal, although ideally the conversation of the upper orders should be more polite and virtuous than that of people beneath them in rank, their chat, like their morals, was depraved and often smacked of the gutter:
Persons in the middling walks of life, are very often led to consider the conversation of people of distinction to be adequate to their rank.… However this deception may be serviceable in supporting the system of subordination, nothing is, very often, falser in fact; and if we were to judge sometimes by our ears, instead of our eyes, we would find a fashionable tete-a-tete, approaching more to the meridian of Gutter lane or Billingsgate than the supposed politeness of St. James’s.71
The ending of this aristocratic romance seemed as tawdry and immoral as the conduct of the entire affair. And the legal issues were not yet settled, for though Lord Grosvenor won his suit at King’s Bench, Lady Grosvenor launched a recrimination against him at Doctors Commons, a countersuit which, if proved, disallowed for full divorce if the husband had also been guilty of adultery during the marriage. When the cases finished in December of 1770, not only had the newspapers had a year’s worth of stories, of jokes and correspondence, but their attention continued for another six months afterwards.
For one thing, though the affair between Cumberland and Lady Grosvenor received nothing but condemnation from the press, its termination was equally condemned. In July 1770, it was said that Cumberland spent all his time with Lady Grosvenor, and that “a great Personage has forbidden a certain Gentleman the Court, unless he desists from visiting a particular Lady”;72 by August of that year, a poem-epistle was published in several magazines, ostensibly by Lady Grosvenor to the Duke, bemoaning his faithlessness to her. An extraordinary letter, published six months later in the Town and Country, discussed this new affair. Supposedly “written by a certain eminent divine,” it was a “Letter of Remonstrance” to the Duke of Cumberland, for having taken up with a Mrs. Bayley of Hatton Gardens. Its author alluded to both the impropriety of the new affair and the political consequences of such repeated aristocratic misdeeds. “The illicit commerce which you carried on with lady G—was scarce publickly proved in a court of justice, ere you appeared at a summer watering-place, playing the same shameful part with another married woman,” he thundered. “Adultery, Sir,” he continued, “notwithstanding the modish doctrine of the times, is a crime of the blackest die, and the most pernicious of any to society.…” The consequences of such behavior would be devastating to the public weal.
If the peace and felicity of families are thus to be broke in upon by rank and power; if virtue and chastity are to be banished from this isle by title and elevated stations, will not the rational part of the nation consider such distinctions as fatal to their welfare, and justly lament the dreadful influence of superior birth and fortune?73
It was in response to this annus horribilus that Parliament attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to pass a law making adultery a graver offense.74 But perhaps even more important than this legislative effort was the continuing and growing trend of newspaper and magazine reportage of the salacious and anti-social sexual activities of the well-born and infamous. Beginning with the publication of Junius’ criticism of Grafton for political immorality, which his private immorality mirrored, through the affair of the Duke of Cumberland and Lady Grosvenor, which implicated figures among the very highest rungs of privilege and social hierarchy, the press soon realized the advantages and interest to be gained by this sort of reporting. Losing no opportunity to tie the public and private worlds together, the Town and Country published a mock tri-alogue between the Duke of Cumberland, his mistress Mrs. Bayley, and her husband. When her husband complained that “it is impossible any longer to support this infamy in England [seemingly referring to Cumberland’s repeated adulteries]—something must be done.…” his wife responded “To be sure, my dear, something must be done, and something shall be done—you must be provided for.” The duke, giving the matter some thought, replied “I have it. The d[uke] of G[rafton] you know is come into place again; I can do anything with him; his sentiments upon these matters are exactly like mine; I’ll open the thing to him this very day, and if there are any vacancy, I’ll push it home.”75 That public, political immorality was seamlessly linked to private, personal, domestic vice was a commonplace, illustrated in these three years by the careers of England’s prime minister and one of the princes of the blood royal. And so, less than a dozen years after the acquisition of her great Empire, many in England would have agreed with “Theophilus,” whose letter to the Oxford Magazine prognosticated “approaching ruin.” Listing first, as a proof of such national decay, the allegation that “Patriotism has been insulted by a majority in the House of Commons with imprisonment, and the maxims of Lewis XV adopted under George III,” he immediately followed this up with his charge that the “primary law of civil society, which establishes the order of the world, and secures the chief end of the two sexes, is treated with a most prophane and unhallowed freedom.” Bemoaning the laxity of the law of divorce, which had, he claimed “impiously established the lawfulness of adultery” he waxed Jeremiah-like:
The bodily prostitutions, both of the great and the vulgar, are shameful beyond example. The herd of the people are converted into brutes, and the modest oeconomy of the sexes is every where banished from society—this is another sure presage of ruin.76
But, as we shall note, more, much more was to come, and the coverage of such a disordered national economy was to remain a topic both of grave censure and of lively salacious interest for at least another half-century.
Thus we have seen how, in the late 1760s and early 1770s, building on an earlier wave of general condemnation of adultery, a new type of involvement and publicity occurred, arising from the combination of a contingent and particular set of marital scandals involving ministers and relations of the Crown, and the growth of new political circumstances and challenges by supporters of both Wilkes and Junius. In both the earlier and later discussions of aristocratic mores, we have noted the use of a variety of forms or sites of communication: sermons, magazine and newspaper articles, trial accounts and theatrical content. In this section I would like to extend the range of materials examined to support the contention that in the years after 1770, the topic of aristocratic adultery was “in the air,” could be found in all the venues of popular discourse, and engaged not only the passive participation of consumers of sexual scandal, but the active involvement of pamphleteers and letter-writers, parliamentarians and debating society orators, commercial publishers, advertisers and dramatists, satirists and poets.
Elsewhere I have considered in some detail the several attempts to pass legislation that, it was hoped, would decrease the incidence of such fashionable depravity. In that context I contrasted three different strands of the discussion: the arguments for and against these bills in Parliament, the several pamphlets published in support of the proposed legal changes, and the questions and responses of ordinary people discussing adultery and divorce in London’s many public debating societies. Let me briefly summarize those findings, at least for the legislation introduced in the 1770s, before considering additional sites and sources.
The first such bill, of 1771, was intended to prohibit the “person [always the wife] against whom the adultery has been proved, from marrying or contracting matrimony with the person with whom he or she shall be proved to have carried on such criminal intercourse; and to declare the issue of such marriage, incapable of inheriting.” Though this bill was lost in the House of Commons, it was the model on which the next bill was proposed by the Bishop of Landaff in 1779. He gave as his reason for introducing such a measure, that “the vice of adultery has risen” to a “shameful height,” which has brought “great misfortune on some of the first families in the kingdom.” It was imperative, he argued, that this vice be controlled, especially as it “was chiefly among persons of high rank that this crime had prevailed.…” This bill, like the last, was also lost in the House of Commons.
Three important pamphlets were written as the first bill was being discussed, and three more were written at the same time as the second was proposed. In 1771, the pamphlets stressed the importance of female conjugal faithfulness to both the stability of property and the endurance of the strength and happiness of the state, and attributed the degeneracy of the times to “the Profligacy of our Women.”77 By 1779, the arguments were both further-ranging and more varied. Publishing a pamphlet in support of the 1771 bill a year after its defeat, the cleric Thomas Pollen repeated the older view that the “state is one great family made up of many small ones: if these, by frequent and improper divorces, be dissolved, that must necessarily be weakened.” Therefore, he argued, it behooved the Legislature to find some proper punishment for so heinous an offence. “For an ignominious life deserves an ignominious death: and he who has wallowed in another man’s bed like a swine, ought for so doing to be hang’d like a dog.”78
Perhaps the most interesting essay on this topic was the Letter to My Lords the Bishops, on the occasion of the Present Bill for the Preventing of Adultery of 1779. In this, its author argued that vices grow from an inordinate liberty given to an innate human propensity, self-love. To balance this important though dangerous impulse, each human was also endowed by Nature
with controuls, both within and without his constitution, to balance these impulses and prevent their excess. Out of different governments arise different controuls: in a mixed or free state, the great controul is in the power of the people;—public trust cannot be obtained without popularity;—popularity can not be obtained without character;—character can not be obtained but by a conformity of manners and conduct to public opinion;—public opinion is always in favour of virtue; and thus virtue itself becomes necessary, and vice, of course, discountenanced and despised.
So why was it that vice had grown, that virtue seemed in retreat? The author dated this imbalance to a period nineteen years before (i.e., with the accession of George III) when “there was in truth no democratic interest in the state … and thus, my Lords, on the sudden inertion of an ancient interest, were all the old controuls taken off, as it were in a day, and at a time, too, when a very great accession of wealth and of empire had created new temptations, requiring more controul than ever.…” What was to be done? Increased punishment would not help: “Penalties, my Lords, go, at the most, only to the support of manners, not to their formation. Manners, my lords, it has been observed, are derived from the constitution of government, not from law of any kind.” It was the corruption of the “public will” that was responsible, argued this polemicist, and it was the “democratic interest” which must be restored. For otherwise, without this countervailing force, “if the legislators themselves, in their private and public capacities, be the great objects of necessary reform—where is the remedy?”79
In addition to these essays and the many discussions that took place in London’s debating societies, letters to the editors of various newspapers and magazines provide us with important clues about popular literate thinking about adultery. Of course not every communiqué, nor every “letter to the editor,” was, in fact, a real letter. Some were tales or dreams in the guise of epistles. Some were updates on recent adulteries, such as the letter to the Town and Country in August of 1769. This note from one “T. L.” told of a visit to the Highlands of Scotland, during which its author said he had encountered Lady Sarah Bunbury, who had eloped from her husband with Sir William Gordon, retired to a secluded cottage, and was awaiting a hoped-for divorce from her spouse. Others were satires disguised as letters, as was the mock letter from a Parliamentary candidate to his electors, telling them of his intended reforms, the sixth of which was “To prevent Crim. Con. amongst the nobility, and thereby abolish divorces.”80 However, many of them were, or purported to be, real letters from real people, and to express strong opinions on this topic.
Like many moralists, these letter-writers frequently decried the degeneracy and drift away from marital fidelity of the present period. Some compared the licentiousness of English aristocratic wives with the modesty and chastity of those of Rome, “in the better times of the republic.” In the same magazine a dozen years later, “BW” noted that, though divorce was allowed in pagan Rome, “it was 523 years before any one made use of it,” yet in a “nominally Christian” England, in the five years from 1776, “the number of them were very considerable.”81 Other letters compared the virtuous conduct of British wives in past times with their flightiness in the present era. “If we look back half a century past, a detection of crim con was mentioned as a prodigy, and it was reprobated by all the decent part of the sex; the culprit pronounced a monster, and shunned as such,” remarked an “Old Observer.” Comparing Edinburgh in the year 1783 with its condition twenty years before, “Theophrastus” noted that at the earlier date, “Any instance of conjugal infidelity in a woman would have banished her from society, and her company would have been rejected even by the men,” while in the present, “[w]omen, who have been rendered infamous by public divorce, have even been again received into society, notwithstanding the endeavours of our worthy Queen to check such a violation of morality, decency, the laws of the country, and the rights of the virtuous.”82
Several of the letter-writers had ideas about how such violations could be checked or diminished. These ranged from keeping women “to a stricter discipline,” to improving “the education of the fair sex, in order to preserve their morals, and make them hereafter good wives and mothers,” to training up daughters “in the ways of piety and modesty,” for as “Megaronides” commented, it was not that women of the present day were “now naturally more lascivious than in former ages” but that female sexual misconduct was due “to a real change in the circumstances or education of our women.”83 Others blamed male conduct, not female frivolity, for fostering the “fashionable vice.”84 Still others thought harsher punishment would cause the vice to decrease: suggestions ranged from the loss of the ring finger to exposure in the pillory and imprisonment to a tax on the adulteries of the rich.85
Two general points can be made in conclusion. The first is the almost unanimous agreement on the source of this vicious conduct and its significance; that adultery and divorce sprang from the habits and lifestyles of the upper classes was a commonplace. So, for example, “Tullius,” in his letter to the King on the Grosvenor adultery case sarcastically noted that if Cumberland had only seduced a wife or daughter of “honest, though poor, parents, no one would have thought it remarkable”; his fault consisted, at least in part, in his having hunted “after noble game, [and therefore] the atrociousness of the crime becomes more conspicuous, and he is deservedly esteemed the violator of an injured husband’s honour, and the destroyer of the domestic happiness of a whole family.” “A Friend to Fidelity in the Marriage Bed,” discussing the adultery of a clergyman’s wife, noted that “[h]itherto adultery was chiefly confined to women of spirit and fashion.” Another, examining “the frequent accounts of the infidelity of married women,” in giving examples of the bad marriage practices which inevitably led to such behavior, discussed only the adulteries of anonymous men whom he called Lord A, Lord C and the duke of E. “Flesh and Blood,” a correspondent to the Morning Post, concluded “That men of quality have a natural tendency to become cuckolds.… That women of quality have natural propensities towards granting this honour to their Lords [and] that, comparatively, rich men and men of rank, are more liable to be cuckolded than the middling or poor classes of society.” “Civis,” in his letter to the Times, in discussing “what is called gallantry,” questioned whether “it [would] ever have entered into the head of any man of middling life, and common understanding, that the seduction of married women … was a harmless piece of amusement, and necessary to finish the education of a Gentleman.” Though some thought that the infection could be caught by other ranks, most agreed with “Civis” and with “X,” a letter-writer to the Town and Country, “that in the middle stations of life, there is more real felicity found in wedlock, than in any other.”86 The other point, though less frequently made, was of real importance, and that was the central role of the press in making the wider public aware of such immorality. It is worth quoting in full from one such letter, commenting on the role of the press in disseminating this sort of information.
[L]et it be remembered, that till lately the newspapers were confined entirely to what might properly be called news, and that private memoirs and anecdotes never crept into them. We were then satisfied in knowing what ships arrived at Deal, the price of stocks, when the mails arrived from Holland, and when a labourer fell from a house and broke his neck. But the case is altered, curiosity is awakened, and we are desirous of knowing who and who are together; when a woman of fashion makes a faux pas, and when her husband takes another Dulcinea into keeping.87
That publishers realized the commercial value of such sexual scandal becomes very clear if we examine the coverage of one particularly “juicy” adultery case, and consider especially the innovative advertising campaign designed, using the popular press, to entice the reading public into buying the many published accounts, satires, and poems which dealt with the incident. These many publications centered on the adultery of Lady Seymour Worsley, a great heiress and beauty, the attempt of her husband, Sir Richard, to sue her lover Maurice Bissett for criminal conversation, the salacious evidence presented at the trial, and the light all this cast on the lives and amours of the rich and infamous.88
About ten days after the trial, at which five of Lady Worsley’s other upper-class lovers had testified, the first trial account was published. Lady Worsley had run away with Maurice Bisset at the end of November 1781, sending her husband a note by a previous lover, Lord Deerhurst, that she would never return to him. Even before the case came to court, the press leaked some of its details. It is even possible, if her later actions are any evidence, that Lady Worsley gave the press the story herself, in a move to make sure that her husband, an apparently compliant cuckold, did proceed with the divorce. In any case, early in the new year, both the Public Advertiser and the Whitehall Evening Post alluded to the new, “blush-coloured Dress which Lady W—has lately appeared in,” since, they claimed, her husband had burnt all of her other clothes when he had discovered “her being Naughty.” Less than a week after the trial, the Whitehall Evening Post asserted that, though only five of her previous lovers had testified to her promiscuity, “no less than twenty-eight were subpoenaed, at her own express command, every one of whom was fully competent to speak decisively on the pliancy of her Ladyship’s disposition.”89
Two days after publication of the trial, an item appeared in the Public Advertiser, which to all appearances was a piece of news, but which in reality was a puff for an account of the trial. Claiming that the first edition had sold out within a few hours of release, and “a great number of purchasers were consequently disappointed,” the public was notified that two more presses would be employed in producing sufficient copies for all. A day later, a similar item, this time appearing as an advertisement, announced that there were three presses at work producing enough pamphlets “to gratify the curiosity of the public.” A week later, another ad announced that “At the request of a respectable and learned Personage, a late very singular and interesting Trial is to be advertised in the following, instead of the former manner”; the change was only superficial and attention-grabbing, largely consisting of an omission of the names of the persons involved.90
On the same day that the trial proceedings appeared as a pamphlet, another work on the same topic, this time a satirical poem entitled The Whim!!! or the maid-stone bath, a Kentish poetic, Dedicated to Lady Worsley was also advertised. Four weeks later, a blurb appeared in the Whitehall Evening News, which, again masquerading as a news item, was designed to promote its sale. Remarking that “[n]otwithstanding a late decision, it appears yet a matter of doubt, whether Lady W—seduced the gentlemen, or they seduced her ladyship,” the puff claimed that “the matter will be best explained by a perusal of the Whim, or the Maid-Stone Bath, which is the product of Genius, assisted by the best information.”91
A number of other satirical works on the same topic appeared that year, but undoubtedly the one which had the most interesting advertising stratagem was An Epistle from L[ad]y W[orsle]y to S[ir] R[ichar]d W[orsle]y Bart, probably published towards the end of April 1782. This was a short satiric poem, in which Lady Worsley freely owned her many indiscretions, said that her giving nature accorded with the bountifulness of Nature itself, and accused Worsley of being unable to give her the satisfaction that all women required. Although, in reality, it was a pretty nondescript piece, neither pornographic nor particularly poetic, its advertising was original and probably quite effective. Three puffing paragraphs appeared in the Morning Herald in the week following its publication. The first, from “a correspondent, who professes himself an enemy to immorality,” warned the reading public that the pamphlet was “certainly one of the most licentious and immoral productions that has been issued from the press for some time” and thus that “he hopes no one who is not totally lost to every degree of decency, will, after this public notice of its contents, by any means deign to read it.” If this were not enough to rouse interest and sales, another “correspondent,” just one day later, referring again to the Epistle, remarked that its purported author, Lady Worsley, by writing this piece, “leaves us at a loss to know which we are most to detest, the very extraordinary supineness of the husband, or the libidinous and insatiable passions of the wife.” The final advertisement for the Epistle is perhaps the best. Citing the “very extensive circulation, amongst all ranks, of the new publication, entitled an Epistle from L—y W—y to S—r R—d” as evidence for the increasing licentiousness of the age, the puff’s author continues, and it is perhaps worth quoting the rest of his “condemnation” in full:
The uncommon popularity of this pamphlet is infinitely to be dreaded, not only from the abandoned morals and severe scandal it contains, but on account of the singular elegance of the language, which is so truly infatuating, that while it steals on the senses by the beauty of the poetry, it pictures in such irresistible colours, that it cannot fail rooting from the mind every sentiment of virtue and morality. Yet so strange is the depravity of the age, that it is no less extraordinary than true, that a capital bookseller, at the West end of the town, has actually orders to send 500 copies to a neighbouring kingdom—a number quite sufficient to corrupt the minds of all its inhabitants.92
Clearly sexual scandal had become an item well worth advertising. And, as we shall soon see, in the later decades of the century the press had a large stake in its packaging, promotion, and sales.
If the popular coverage of adultery had begun to become more flamboyant and more accessible in the 1760s and 1770s, there was a veritable avalanche of such stories in the following two decades; seven such cases appeared in the press in the 1770s, while twenty-six were reported in the following decade, and seventy in the one following that. And while pamphlet accounts of the cases continued to appear, there is some evidence that as press reporting became more lengthy and regular, fewer pamphlets were produced.94 The age of a mass readership for adultery cases had arrived.
We have already considered the press coverage and marketing possibilities of the Worsley divorce case. At least six other adultery cases of the 1780s, which occurred before the appointment of Lloyd Kenyon as the Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench in 1788, were sold as pamphlets, which frequently contained illustrations, appearing shortly after their trials, and also gathered together in two volumes of The Cuckold’s Chronicle of 1793.95 Yet while the newspaper and periodical press itself contained many satiric comments, jokes, and smutty asides, as well as an expanding coverage of the many legal venues where such adultery was being tried (the ecclesiastical courts, the trials for damages for criminal conversation, and the debates within the House of Lords and Commons), as early as 1783 the press contended that the public “are made duly sensible [of the increase of divorces] by the publication of the modest trials.” Others thought the avidity for such details among the reading public displayed a worrying incongruity: “They complain loudly of the Scandal often circulated in Newspapers and Pamphlets, yet they always encourage those that deal most in that Article! The Sale of the Tryal relative to the Conduct of a certain Baronet’s Lady, and her Gallant, is a most convincing Proof of the Truth of this Observation!”96 By the 1790s, however, the newspapers themselves were being taken to task for their increased and increasing coverage of such trials.
The daily papers are constantly retailing connections of this kind; and thus they become the vehicles of vice from the center to the most distant corners of the kingdom.… Adultery and elopements constitute a material part of our news, and, being commonly retailed with numerous and minute circumstances, help to inflame the passions, and abate our horror for the crimes. No paragraphs are more greedily read, than those which relate to business of this kind.97
When the press explained or justified the inclusion of such material, it usually took the position adopted by that expensive purveyor of upper-class scandal, the Town and Country Magazine. The publication made its first appearance in 1769, at a time of seemingly growing public hunger for stories of glamour and illicit sex, and continued in being for the next quarter-century, specializing in monthly exposés of the amours of the world of fashion. In the introductory preface to its fifth volume, its editors argued for their role as moral improvers:
Arduous as the Task has been, and in some Degree perilous, they [the editors] have the Satisfaction to find that the Judicious and Impartial still read these Histories with Rapture, and think them proper Portraits to discourage Vice and promote Virtue.
Of course, no contemporary would have missed the self-interested reality underlying this noble rhetoric; it was clear that smut sold. And yet others, untainted by such sordid motives, also argued that an intimate connection existed between private morality, of which marital fidelity was the core, and the public good:
… the Ruin of Matrimonial Happiness … which alone is a deplorable Infamy in private Life, is, at the same time, a most enormous Evil in its Consequences to the Publick. Conjugal Attachment is a Virtue the more to be prized, as it is usually the Foundation of the most persevering, invincible Courage and Manliness, Qualities that have never forsaken a People that was noted for the other.
For, despite John Barrell’s dazzling exposition of the way in which political radicals of the 1790s used a beleaguered notion of privacy to defend their rights to free speech and free debate, to mark off “private” spaces like the home or public table from the “public” spaces of debating societies or street corners, the notion that “the personal was political” was rampant through the whole of the century. Barrell’s protagonists, who feared that the eradication of this demarcation would encourage servants and other domestics to inform on private household activity and speech, were out of date, for it was already a reality that many divorce trials featured servants as well as family friends, whose testimony might ensure imprisonment for those found guilty, for sights seen and sounds heard through chinks in the wall, or keyholes. And few expressed any concern, few argued for the need to keep the bedroom, that most private of all spaces, free from such prying ears and eyes.98
In Lawrence Stone’s opinion, when Lloyd Kenyon became Lord Chief Justice in 1788, he “promptly inaugurated a reign of terror in King’s Bench against adulterers.”99 The section in which he discussed Kenyon’s “reign” is entitled “The Moral Panic of the 1790s,” a shorthand reference to the enormous anxieties of this first decade of the wars with France. But Kenyon came to the Bench four years before England’s engagement with the old enemy, and it may be worth considering his work in this early period, unclouded by the specter of republican revolution and warfare, to see just how fearsome his leadership of the court really was.
The first thing one notices is how many cases of criminal conversation he judged during these early years at King’s Bench. There is no question that Kenyon was determined to give such cases the publicity and notoriety he felt they deserved. In many of his addresses to the jury in divorce cases, Kenyon reminded them that they, the jurymen, were “the guardians of the morals of the public” and asked them to give damages “of such a nature, as to give stability and security to domestic life.”100 And while, during these years, the juries, under his admonition, did award some enormous damages (between five and ten thousand pounds), such fines accounted for less than a third of the awards; more than half resulted in fines of between forty shillings and one thousand pounds, with the remaining cases either non-suited, or found for the defendant.101 Rather than seeing Kenyon as a Robespierre-like figure, I think it more appropriate to view him as a convinced, active, and stern, but by no means tyrannical improver of public morality. This is certainly what the Times said of his campaign:
Lord Kenyon, to his honour, has behaved with peculiar severity against those who have committed the crime of adultery,—and he is intitled to the thanks of every virtuous man and woman in the kingdom for so doing. His conduct on those occasions will no doubt, in time, have a proper effect.102
And I think these early cases must have convinced Kenyon just how “far down” the infection of infidelity had spread; only two of the thirty-six men who came before him in these years, either as plaintiffs or defendants, were of the upper class; for the most part they were men of the wide “middling sort.” Exposure to adultery among these sorts, men and women, the solid, no-longer-silent, immoral minority, must have both saddened Kenyon and strengthened his resolve to conquer this pernicious vice.
That is not to say that Kenyon did not have his hobby-horses, or that he did not exhibit them in these adultery cases. The cases that usually raised his greatest ire were those where private or domestic connections had led to the illicit act; where the bonds of family, friendship, and obligation had served to introduce the vile seducer, and then given him the opportunity to betray these most sacred and significant bonds by practicing the arts of enticement and deceit. But that was a judicial attitude that predated Kenyon’s leadership of the court,103 though it does explain Kenyon’s remarkably long closing remarks to the jury, published in the press, in the Parslow v Sykes trial. Here is Thomas Erskine, speaking for the husband, Parslow, and encapsulating the particular offensiveness of this case:
… there was no case had happened like that which he was about to state. There was no instance where one brother officer had so grossly abused the friendship and confidence of another; because there was a spirit of noble heroism, which was the foundation of that profession, which made men stand aloof from such unchaste ideas.104
Kenyon, in this, as in many things, would certainly have agreed with Erskine, and, like others in his position, he also had total and open contempt for unbridled female sexuality; in one case he remarked of the erring wife, that
there never was a woman so contaminated in body and mind, and whose profligacy was beyond all example. She had lost all sense of shame, and there was no person within the walls of her house, excepting her children, who had not been witnesses to her prostitution.105
In some respects, however, Kenyon went some way beyond both precedence and perhaps even public opinion. Unlike most civil judges, he frequently remarked that if the defendant could not pay with his purse, then he must pay with his person, in effect treating the man found guilty of adultery as though he were a criminal, to be punished by incarceration; “the law says,” Kenyon noted, that “the captivity of the person may pay for the deficiency of the purse.”106 Kenyon also took an unequivocal stance on the impropriety of married women appearing at public events by themselves, or being left without a guardian, except in unusual circumstances. Thus in the case of Sheridan v Newman, which occurred during his first year as Chief Justice, Kenyon exculpated Mr. Sheridan from blame for having left his wife alone while he served in America: “The plaintiff went out to defend his country at a time when his services were extremely wanted, and no blame is imputed to him for not being her protector.” In contrast, eleven years later, in the case of Hennet v Darley, Kenyon nonsuited the husband because he “had contributed to his own dishonour” since “he had suffered his wife to go to plays, balls, masquerades, &c. without any person to protect her. A man who did that had no right to come into a Court of Justice to complain that his wife had been debauched.”107 In contrast, at least one husband thought otherwise, and stated his views in a letter to Mr. Baldwin, editor of the St. James’s Chronicle:
In my humble opinion, we pay no very great compliment to the ladies, when we suppose that they want to be more closely watched and guarded after marriage than before it … That which requires so much watching is seldom worth the care and trouble of it; and small, indeed, is our security, if bolts and bars are all we have to depend on.108
Juries also were more resistant to the view that husbands who did not keep a watchful eye on their wives should not receive compensation for spousal adultery, especially when not under the watchful eye of Chief Justice Kenyon himself. Thus, for example, when damages were to be decided in the case of Crewe v Inglefield, the sheriff’s jury (the defendant had let judgment go by default, and a common jury deliberated on the level of fiscal penalty) was addressed by Inglefield’s lawyer, who argued that damages should be minimal, since he had only minor responsibility for the criminal act. “The Lady” said Mr. Gibbs, “had been cast in his way, unprotected by the presence of her husband, and unshielded by his love and attention.” Furthermore, “Mr. Crewe had suffered his wife to go abroad at one time alone.…” Despite this evidence, the jury awarded Crewe a hefty £3,000 in damages.109
Finally, Kenyon was unusual among presiding judges of King’s Bench in making an argument about the moral obligations of the aristocracy, similar to that frequently found in the press, a part of his charge to the jury. In his address to the jury in the case of Sir Godfrey Webster v Lord Holland, he intoned:
In every community of men, those who move in the higher ranks of life … [were those who] owed to the lower classes of society, that of setting a good example.… For if the lower orders observed their superiors … violating the most sacred obligations to indulge their vicious passions, it was vain to preach to these orders morality in words, while every part of the preacher’s own conduct was most immoral.110
When assessing Kenyon’s judicial accomplishments at the end of the century, a contemporary commented that “he has most effectually vindicated the cause of virtue and morality, in those trials of adultery, which, at different times, have come before him. He has expressed a virtuous indignation in terms at once impressive and appropriate. Neither rank, nor wealth, nor station, are protected from the just animadversion they incur in these loathsome and detestable transactions.…” Presiding over more than four dozen criminal conversation cases in the period between the failed attempts to pass a harsher adultery bill in 1779, and the last attempt to pass similar legislation in 1809, Kenyon, acting from the Bench, endeavored “to make the law of the land subservient to the laws of morality and religion.”111
On Saturday, March 14, 1798, a new play starring two of London’s premier actors, Sarah Siddons and John Philip Kemble, opened to a packed Drury Lane Theater. The play, “The Stranger,” was a translation of one of the German playwright Kotzebue’s works, adapted and strengthened, it was unofficially said, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.112 “The House overflowed at an early hour, and was the fullest we have seen this season,” reported a correspondent to the Times. Needless to say, it was a great success. The receipts for the first ten performances alone amounted to almost four thousand pounds. “We have no doubt that this piece … will become a very great favorite with the Public,” concluded the Morning Post. Both the Times and the Post agreed that, in the latter’s words, “The public morals are likely to be highly benefitted by the frequent appearance of The Stranger.”113
What about this play, what in its plot or depiction, made critics think it particularly likely to improve public morals? For the main action of the drama occurred before the story even began, and centered around the adultery and elopement of the Countess Walbeck, as portrayed by Siddons. Overcome by repentance, by the realization that her only true affection was for her husband and children, the Countess retired to the countryside, and, as Mrs. Haller, became the guardian angel of the poor and worthy of the locale. In the meanwhile her heartbroken husband became “The Stranger,” and each, unbeknownst to the other, spent their days in anonymous charitable acts, friendless and alone. At the play’s denouement, the couple were reunited by their children’s love, with Mrs. Haller all the while protesting her unworthiness and undying affection. As the Morning Chronicle noted: “It is certainly a bold and in some measure a new attempt, to represent a character like that of Mrs. Haller, notwithstanding the error she has committed, amiable, virtuous and delicate.” Equally surprising as the play’s popularity, however, was surely the conclusion of these remarks by the anonymous critic:
We behold a woman, who has been guilty of a crime, but not debased by vice. We are led to pity and forgive error where the heart is uncorrupted, and taught that a single false step does not preclude the return to virtue. We see that she is still worthy to be loved; and we are forced to overcome the prejudice, which condemns the woman, who has been guilty of one frailty, to hopeless exile from honour and esteem.114
There is no doubt that many in the audience would have shared this emotion; “The progress of the story interests our sympathy, and its completion gratifies our wishes,” remarked the same reviewer. The Times reported a quip, reputedly made by Sheridan, about the play’s happy ending: “Mr. Sheridan, to whose pen many of the most striking passages in The Stranger are attributed, replied to a critic who wished for the sake of the moral, that the piece had ended tragically, ‘that he had thought of destroying Mrs. Haller, but he could not do it without killing the audience, too.’ ”115 But how was it that the same sort of people who could spend their evening sympathizing with the plight of a confessed adulteress could at the same time so glowingly commend Kenyon’s war on this crime, and on its perpetrators? Why was it, that in the discussions in both Houses of Parliament in 1800, everyone seemed to agree that adultery was a profoundly deleterious vice, that the nation’s welfare depended on its diminution, and yet were still able to attend the many performances of this drama, allowing their sympathy to overcome these frequently repeated moral stances?
A number of possibilities, of course, occur. The first and most obvious was that it was possible to love the sinner, while abhorring the sin. A second is that in the play sympathy was directed towards a seduced female, while in “real life” crim. con. damages punished the seducer. A third is that what people were willing to enjoy in an evening’s performance at the theater may have borne little relation to what conduct they were willing to approve of in the actual doings of their compatriots. Whichever of these, or other options, we chose to explain this seeming paradox, we can see similar, disparate strands of opinion in a host of other settings in this confused and confusing period. It is to the clash of these rhetorical and ideational stances that we must now turn.
Just a month before The Stranger first appeared at Drury Lane, a sensational criminal conversation case opened at King’s Bench before Lord Kenyon. The plaintiff, Ricketts, was represented by that darling of such cases, Thomas Erskine, and the defendant, Taylor, by George Dallas, an up-and-coming attorney. Part of the reason for this case’s notoriety was the familial relations invoked; Ricketts was the nephew of “a man who, in a most critical period, saved the honour of the country, and secured its lasting prosperity,” Admiral of the Fleet, Earl St. Vincent. In Kenyon’s closing remarks to the jury, the fact of Ricketts’s family ties, “related to one whose actions would form a distinguishing feature in that part of the history of this country which recorded the splendid exploits of its naval heroes,” would argue for hefty damages. Taylor, Member of Parliament for Wells, on the other hand, was described rather scurrilously, after the trial’s conclusion, as the descendant of “the German Commissary” and nephew to a man lately imprisoned in the Fleet gaol.116
The evidence for the commission of “the act” rested on the testimony of one Crook, a tailor who lived near the reputed house of assignation, and who kept his eyes peeled on the comings-and-goings, especially of women, to this building. He also “knew” that the house belonged to Taylor’s valet, who kept it for him. He swore that he had seen Mrs. Ricketts enter this dwelling three times, stay for a while, and leave in a surreptitious manner later. Mr. Taylor always admitted her, and once was in a dressing gown when she left.
Dallas, Taylor’s lawyer, argued that the adultery was unproven, that Crook’s testimony only showed that “improper familiarities had taken place between his client and Mrs. Ricketts, but yet it by no means followed she had permitted that last act,” i.e., adultery, to occur. Kenyon disagreed with Dallas’s assertion that this was “the first time an attempt was made to get a verdict on evidence of this kind” and insisted that “he had no doubt but circumstantial evidence was admissible.” The general newspaper readers, who clearly had followed the trial in the press, were not so sure; for two weeks after its conclusion, a debate occurred at the Westminster Forum, with the question for the evening being “In this age of conjugal depravity, ought the singular conduct of Crook the Taylor, as displayed in a recent Crim. Con. Trial, to be shunned as a mean and mercenary exposure of Female Frailty; or imitated, as a virtuous and laudable communication to an injured Husband?” Though we do not, alas, have that evening’s vote, the very formation of the question testifies both to the detailed interest ordinary people took in such cases, and to the possible presence of a more sympathetic, sentimental response to the plight of poor Mrs. Ricketts.117 In addition, a rare critical letter, ostensibly from one of the jurors, appeared in the Times less than a week after the case’s conclusion. Addressed to Kenyon, it explained that he, as a juror, had voted for large damages because, while doubting the evidence, he had thought “the well-known sagacity, the unimpeached integrity of your Lordship, a safer guide than the imbecility of my own judgment.…” Concluding, he explained his letter as a “caution [to] all those, who will in future form the Juries of the Country, to erase from their minds every impression but that which is made by the establishment of evidence, before they pass their verdict.”118 This letter, though very unusual, deserves to be quoted because it is one of the very few indicators we have of some sympathy, albeit after the verdict, for the people found guilty of adultery, or at least some unease about Kenyon’s acceptance of circumstantial evidence.
For, as far as we can tell, most expressed opinion was strongly hostile to those engaged in such acts, and many supported those members of the Lords and Commons who wished to criminalize adultery in 1800. Four pamphlets were published supporting this attempt in the years immediately before and after the bill’s introduction. All condemned the laxity of the law; one thought that the proposed bill, which would have made adultery a misdemeanor, too lenient: “To punish, as a misdemeanour, a crime which endangers the very existence of society, if an error, is certainly one on the side of lenity.” All agreed that “a civil war of lust” was raging in the country, and that the growing tide of adultery cases had “almost converted an action, in which reparation is sought for a private injury, into a trial for a public offence.” Two of the pamphlets explicitly paid tribute to Kenyon’s labors in trying to come to grips with this problem, one calling him “the Cato of the Age.”119
After the bill’s failure, there were calls for the speedy reintroduction of such a measure. The Times expressed a hope that “the very virtuous and able Peer who proposed it, will renew it another session, according to his own first and genuine conceptions, without any compromise with the wishes and opinions of others.” Two years later, it noted that “The great majority (as we sincerely believe) of the Public, are anxious for the introduction of an Adultery Bill, although a difference of opinion may prevail with regard to the extent of its prohibitions, or the severity of its penalties.” The severity of opinion expressed by the Times found articulation elsewhere, for example, “Observator’s” letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine, which suggested corporal punishment as well as the deprivation of certain civil privileges for such offenders. A correspondent to the Times also hoped that “Parliament may take the hint, and enact that these convictions [for adultery] shall disqualify not only for the Legislature, but the Bar, and the Magistracy.”120
Acts speak as loudly as words, however, and one can see men other than Kenyon or the supporters of the harsh new Adultery Bill acting severely against adulterers. For one thing, sheriffs’ juries, empaneled to award damages when the defendant did not contest the issue, increasingly awarded enormous amounts to the husband; for example, in the case of the crim. con. case between the Marquis of Abercorn and Captain Copley, the jury, after only a short deliberation, awarded Abercorn £10,000 in damages, the same amount that the Duke of Cumberland had been fined thirty years before. While it had been thought that cases in King’s Bench, especially under the eye of Kenyon, were awarded maximum penalties, by 1802, according to Erskine, this had all changed:
Plaintiffs had formerly suffered much inconvenience from the course pursued by adulterers, in suffering judgment by default, and withdrawing the question from the superior Tribunals. This had not been the rule of late, because, in consequence of a Rule of Court, the same gentlemen were called upon to decide upon an inquisition who would have formed the jury upon a trial before the Chief Justice.
By the later 1790s, juries in other courts, not presided over by Kenyon, were also awarding very large damages.121 If the size of penalties awarded is any measure of the perceived severity of the offence, many people shared Kenyon’s views on the need for fiscal punitiveness.
But this was by no means the whole of the picture, nor everyone’s judgment; take, for example, the letter that “A Methodist” sent to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1801. “There is a manifest and kindly leaning towards the frailties of the fair sex,” he commented, but added that “no sentiment of chivalry should compel us to forget what is due to truth.” He concluded by noting that he dreaded “that immorality of principle, which excuses every crime to which beauty gives occasion, which softens criminality by sentimental names, which argues from the point of an epigram or the stanza of a song.” It was this sort of palliation, he noted, that had overthrown France. The connection between adultery, revolution, and France seemed part of a single evil, so that, when a possible peace with France was being discussed in Parliament, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported on “an observation of Mr. Windham’s, that an alliance with France would tend to render adultery fashionable.…” And the defense attorney, in his address to the jury in the Taylor v Birdwood criminal conversation case, noted that he was not trying to excuse vice or exculpate adultery:
He did not stand there as an advocate for French vices, which had been employed in corrupting the morality of this nation, and of which the very cause furnished a proof. For it resulted from the same origin—the same French education which this Lady [Mrs. Taylor] had received in that detested land and which had led to the commission of this crime.
Counsel also made another interesting comment in this address. Arguing that he believed adultery to be a crime, “so declared by the promulgated will and law of God,” he added (and the Times reported the following, all in capital letters, indicating perhaps the gravity or loudness of his voice): “AND NOT EVEN A HOST OF TITLED ADULTERERS SHOULD BE ABLE TO INDUCE HIM TO CONSIDER IT IN ANY OTHER LIGHT.”122 The connection made here was between the moral licentiousness of France, some licentious English legislators, and the failure of the Divorce Bill of 1800. Here the reference was to the argument, made in the House of Lords by the Earl of Carlisle just a week before the outset of the trial, that the bill before the House was written by men of “monkish seclusion” and that “the studies of a recluse did not lead to a knowledge of the world; in order to correct morals, it was necessary to mix with society, to dive into the minds of men, to be acquainted with their actions, and search the motives of their conduct.” Not only did Lords Eldon and Auckland take umbrage, but so did Kenyon. In both this case, and in one two months later, at Maidstone, Kenyon strongly joined these slurs with French immorality and English aristocratic profligacy. In June he remarked that “somebody or other” had called judges “legal monks” and that he thought “that a more infamous, a more unqualified assertion, and that a more scandalous conduct never disgraced the pages of Daily Histories”; by August he said
he had heard and believed he knew a little of the character of the persons who had taken upon them to censure his conduct in the administration of justice; they were persons of the highest rank and elevation in society; but high and elevated as they were, he thought it right to say, that … he never wished to have any intercourse or acquaintance with them, moral, religious or social.123
That Kenyon reacted so strongly in public is perhaps not surprising; that the press chose to report his remarks in both instances is more revealing, both of their own views, and of what they thought the public wished to read on this contentious issue.
But, as we have seen in “A Methodist’s” letter, there was another sentiment which also found expression, one which while condemning the act of adultery, evinced sympathy and a painful sensibility for those caught up in love’s untidy and unfortunate trammels. Even Kenyon at least once seemed moved by such an appeal, perhaps because it came wrapped in a critique of the immorality of the upper classes, a favorite topic of his. In 1794, in the case of Howard v Bingham, the defendant’s attorney, Erskine, argued that no “real” adultery had occurred, because Howard’s wife had been coerced to marry the heir to the Norfolk titles and estates by her parents, and that her heart was never really his. Here is Erskine’s description of Mrs. Howard on her wedding night: “You must behold her given up to the Plaintiff by the infatuation of parents, and stretched upon this bed as upon a rack, as a legal victim to the shrine of Heraldry; torn from the arms of a beloved and impassioned youth, himself of noble birth, to secure the honors of a higher title.” Bingham, he went on to note “has only to defend himself, and cannot demand damages from Mr. Howard for depriving him of what was his by a title superior to any law which man has a moral right to make: Mr. Howard was never married: God and Nature forbid the banns of such a marriage.…” Most extraordinary, however, was the closing summation that Kenyon made to the jury at the case’s conclusion:
To the defendant, for a great part of the time, I can impute no blame at all; he did that which was difficult for a young man. He seems to have bridled his passions for a considerable time; he retired with his friends, young men, branches of honourable families to the country, to see whether absence might not wean his affections. Unfortunately for both, the absence was not of very long continuance; he returned to town—they saw each other. The half extinguished flame was again lighted up, and the unfortunate consequence followed which you have heard.… You will not give large damages which shall press a young man, who, it is clear, at one time of his life had weaned himself from the unfortunate snare the beauty and perfection of this lady had got him into.
The jury decided on damages of £1,000, a small sum considering the status and wealth of both men.124 Sometimes, occasionally, even with Kenyon, sentimental appeals worked.
More often, however, they did not. Juries usually seemed to unwilling to be swayed by such appeals, even when free of Kenyon’s weighty presence. In a case that closely recalled the Bingham defense, the lawyer for Captain Copley argued that an “early attachment” had existed between him and the Marchioness of Abercorn, that he had gone “abroad to avoid being in her company” and that he had done “every thing which depended on man to obliterate his affections for her,” only to be swept away by his feeling on his recall to England. Still, the jury returned a verdict of £10,000 damages, an enormous sum for a man who claimed to be worth less than £300 a year. Similarly Sergeant Best defended his client, Fawcet, by “ascribing it [the adultery] to the excess of his passions, heated by his constant intercourse with a lovely and beautiful woman.” The jury rewarded the wronged husband £7,000. Even the great Erskine himself, pleading before Lord Ellenborough, failed with an extravagant appeal to the jury. In the Lingham adultery case, he argued that while it was true that the defendant, Hunt, had committed adultery with Lingham’s wife, the fault was rather the husband’s: “Such was the nature of man, such was the impetuosity of his passions, that he was not always capable of resisting a temptation. The defendant had been placed in situations from which the prudence of the plaintiff should have withheld him; he was sensible he had committed a wrong, and was distracted at the sense of it—he was a victim of his passion.” In this case, following Ellenborough’s stinging response to this attempt to exculpate the adulterer, the jury awarded £5,000 to the injured husband.125
While lawyers repeatedly instructed juries in such cases that these were civil, not criminal proceedings, that it was not “consonant to the law of England to make a civil action the medium of inflicting criminal punishment,” juries often resisted, awarding high and punitive damages.126 It was well and good to go to the theater, to allow sympathetic effusions of the heart for the penitent adulteress-heroine of The Stranger, perhaps to read and thrill to romances of illicit love, but faced with “real” adultery, they usually seemed unwilling to be so moved.
While it may be that moralists wrote to newspapers more than sentimentalists, we have no comparable series of newspaper letters to those of “J. S.,” written to the Times between May 23 and June 24, 1811. The first supported and reiterated the plea of the “hard-liners” in the Lords for the practice, in every instance, of a standing order “prohibiting the future marriage of the guilty person with the sharer in [her] guilt.” The second, written a month later, was a harangue against the practice, usually insisted upon by the lecherous elements in the Commons, of granting the divorced wife a maintenance. Even the French, “J. S.” noted, had condemned adulterous women, and by the “298th article of the Napoleonic code, the wife is condemned to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years.” The third letter, which responded to a mistake in the second that another letter-writer had pointed out, went on to condemn such a “most false and pernicious practice of liberality, contrary to the conduct of wise legislators in all other times and countries.” Though another series of three letters were written just two years after, in the Universal Magazine, arguing the need for an enlarged and simplified divorce law, the great body of expressed opinion seemed, both in thought and practice, to favor severity.127
In the thirty years between Kenyon’s appointment to the position of Chief Justice in 1788, and the retirement of his successor, Lord Ellenborough, there were interesting continuities and differences, not only between these two men, but among presiding judges of different courts. Kenyon took on many more cases during his tenure than did Ellenborough; furthermore, criminal conversation cases in which he presided appeared at least twice as frequently in the press. Both judges strongly condemned the vice of adultery and both held that it was not merely against the laws of the land, but against the laws of God and morality; there were, however, some interesting differences in approach. Although Ellenborough was clearly very incensed at the behavior of William Smith, the defendant in the crim. con. case of Smith v Smith, in his address to the jury he instructed them that “[it] were not to punish the Defendant for a crime, but to give the Plaintiff a compensation, as far as money could make it.” Furthermore, he noted, after telling them what the defendant was worth, that “they would not give such a verdict as would utterly ruin the defendant.” One can hardly imagine Kenyon making either of these judgments. Another interesting difference was the lengths to which Kenyon and other judges were willing to go in terms of circumstantial evidence. We have already seen the strength of Kenyon’s reliance on such evidence in the Ricketts v Taylor case; in a case which presented similar evidence, Chief Justice Gibbs of the Court of Common Pleas was more cautious. When Robert King brought a criminal conversation suit against Lord Middleton, Gibbs, in his summation, noted “that there was no proof of any express acts of adultery, but only of visits at untimely hours, from which it would be, perhaps too much to infer adultery.”128 Kenyon, if he could have, would have uttered a loud and angry harrumph from the grave.
Only a month after Lady Roseberry eloped with Sir Henry Mildmay, leaving her husband and four children for her widower brother-in-law with whom she had been conducting an affair, her husband had his suit of criminal conversation before the courts. Because Mildmay had “suffered judgment to go by default” the inquiry into damages came before the Sheriff’s court. Even more remarkable than the trial’s testimony was its coverage by the press. Every newspaper in London covered it, most at extraordinary length, often filling the bulk of an entire issue with the account.130 In interesting ways this trial offered the public many of the same features that the Grosvenor-Cumberland case had more than four decades before; the lover arranging meetings in disguise, saving love letters, and being discovered in the bedroom with the guilty wife. However, in addition, this trial also contained the frisson of incest; Lady Roseberry and Mildmay’s dead wife were sisters, and, it was hinted, the intimacy between the two arose when Lady Harriet acted as comforter and confidante to Mildmay following the death of his wife in childbirth. In other ways the tone of reports and comments about this trial was significantly different than that earlier case, blacker, less satirical, and more Byronic.
When Lady Mildmay, the sister of the countess of Roseberry, died in 1810, Sir Henry became a regular visitor to the home of his brother-in-law, the Earl of Roseberry. At this point the Roseberrys had been married for two years, and Lady Harriet was only twenty. However, it was not until 1814, four years later, that the affair started. Called to Scotland to the deathbed of his father in March 1814, the Earl on his return noticed “a difference in the conduct of Lady Roseberry to him.” Informed of the many morning visits that Mildmay had made to the Countess in his absence, he requested that Mildmay no longer visit, and did not “notice” Mildmay in the street. In addition, Lady Harriet’s father spoke to Sir Harry “on the impropriety of breaking in on the comforts of this domestic circle.” To no avail. When the Earl removed his family to Scotland, hoping perhaps that time and distance would restore his wife’s former affections, Sir Harry followed in disguise, traveling “under the assumed name of Col. DeGrey of the Guards.” Settling into a pub near Roseberry’s home, he let his beard and whiskers grow, dressed as a sailor, and attended to “some errand or other every evening.” When the ladies of the Roseberry family retired from the dining table, Lady Harriet, rather than joining them, began instead to retreat to her bed chamber. One evening, suspicious of this activity, Lord Roseberry’s brother caused the door of her room to be breached, and found her with Mildmay, “in disguise and with a pair of loaded pistols before him.” After a bit of heated discussion, Mildmay left and the next morning, Lady Roseberry, claiming to be retiring to her father’s house, eloped and joined her lover. Within a week they were on their way to France.131
At the ensuing trial, the appeals of both lawyers to the jury were presented and published at length. In opening, the Attorney General, Sir William Garrow, speaking for the plaintiff, remarked that “in the whole course of his life, he had never felt any thing, approaching the difficulty, distress, and embarrassment he now experienced … the circumstances of this case differing so much from every thing he had ever read, or heard of before, in the extraordinary atrocity by which it was peculiarly distinguished.” He indulged the jury and courtroom spectators with excerpts from Mildmay’s letters to Lady Roseberry, and remarked that in these “she was addressed in language which a man of the most libidinous character would not have used toward a lady of rank, even if he had succeeded in debauching her person.” In contrast, though Brougham, the defendant’s lawyer, also made “a speech of great length, eloquence, and feeling,” he did not attempt to mitigate the extent of his client’s fault but noted instead that “justice should be tempered by moderation” and that Garrow’s “artful address” “should not wash away the cool, the dispassionate, the equitable feeling of their hearts.” Though Garrow had presented this case “as the most atrocious that had ever come under consideration,” Brougham reminded the jurors that that courtroom had “witnessed many cases which were marked by circumstances far more heinous, and of a deeper and more guilty dye.”132 He then proceeded, in an extraordinarily effective rhetorical move, to note that “his hands were bound by his instructions” which forced him “not to breathe a whisper of reproach against any one branch of the noble families” affected by the adultery, intimating that if his hands were free, he could tell them a great deal to these families’ discredit. Finally, Brougham vigorously denied that Mildmay had been ordered out of Lady Harriet’s bedchamber, “and that he had gone out … disgraced, spiritless, and lost to all those manly feelings by which he had previously been characterized.” This slander, he continued, “if it had been proved … would have been worse than all that had been imputed to the Hon. Baronet … because it would have called in question that which was the dearest to his heart as a man of honour—his courage.” This self-identification of Sir Harry’s as a man of honor was also made earlier in the trial, when Garrow read out a letter of Mildmay’s, in which he explained that he meant to coerce Roseberry into fighting a duel with him, but that he would refrain from firing, and thus shame the cuckolded husband into a reconciliation and renewed invitations to his home and, implicitly, renewed access to Lady Harriet. Other than adverting to the “the agony, the sorrow, the wretchedness, which the conviction of the transgression had excited in the minds of the guilty pair,” Brougham ended the defense’s case.133
This defense became the subject of a lengthy satirical poem published less than a week after the trial, entitled “How to serve a client who cannot be defended/ Or/ The Apotheosis of Courage.” In it, the narrator, the defense attorney, after remarking—
I’m forbidden by my instructions,
To presume to make deductions,
From whatever may occur,
‘Gainst the Plaintiff’s character;
Thus tied down I’ll nothing say,
revealed explicitly what Brougham had only suggested:
He in fault was all along;
If his wife, or friend he’d started,
And for ever kept them parted,
Ere the business far had gone,
There had never been “Crim. Con.”
Like Brougham, however, the poem’s narrator insists on Mildmay’s repudiation of any slurs of cowardice, or that he had retreated from Lady Roseberry’s bedchamber through fear of chastisement:
Brand his name unnumber’d times
With all sorts of wrongs and crimes;
These, if they fall to his share,
He may well contented bear;
They from Fortune should not sever,
Nor yet exile him forever;
But to say he courage lack’d,
That with fear he ever back’d;
That’s what cannot be endur’d.134
Unlike the earlier trials of Grosvenor or Worsley, this case inspired the immediate publication of only this single satirical piece. What of the other items which were published soon after? A week after the trial, an item appeared that listed “the matchless assemblage of Royal Sevre, Dresden and French porcelaine” which were being sold at auction to pay off some part of Mildmay’s damages. Two short poems, both sentimental and playing on the floral appellations of the parties in the case, the Lady Rose(berry), whose family name was Primrose, and the seducer who was personified as a cruel Mild-May, also appeared, which, while condemning the adulterer most strongly, noted of the injured wife: “Thy hour is past—thy little day is run,/Nor can the morrow raise thee with its sun.”135 In addition, the same paper published an unattributed comment on Brougham’s defence. Speaking of the couple’s anguish for their misdeed, it noted
The fearful perversion of moral principles, and disregard of every social and sacred duty displayed on this melancholy occasion, will, we trust, operate as a beacon against the indulgence of criminal passions, without the aid of persuasion to enforce the palpable truth, that the fruit of vice is indeed full of bitterness and ashes.136
And in a letter which appeared in the St. James’s Chronicle, a correspondent linked this particular case with broader questions of the appropriate response among men of different ranks to such betrayal, and, by the way, with the upper-class need to avenge lost honor by the duel. Noting the general civility of the Roseberrys towards Mildmay, he contrasted their recourse to the law with the violent and horrific assault by an “Irish peasant” on the man sleeping with his wife, and concluded:
When we consider what trivial circumstances render it indispensably necessary, according to the notions of high life, to seek the life of the offending party, one cannot but be surprised at the coolness with which are borne affronts and injuries calculated to excite the liveliest indignation in the natural man.137
When the Roseberry divorce, and its provisions, came to be argued in Parliament, several of the themes that had already appeared before resurfaced. In the Lords, Ellenborough, sounding surprisingly like his predecessor Kenyon, remarked of Lady Harriet’s offence, that it was “a crime than which, under the circumstances, nothing short of the higher felonies could be more atrocious.” In the Commons, on the other hand, M. A. Taylor, arguing against the clauses which would harshly penalize Lady Roseberry, said he would vote against them because if they passed, the “unfortunate woman” would not have the peace she needed “for reflection and repentance.” And during these deliberations, a letter appeared in the Times, which spoke for the importance of such punitive clauses, not so much for their effects on the guilty woman, as for their influence on the public. “Under the notion of liberality we are daily obliterating all those stigmas which create a horror of vice, and which broadly and palpably distinguish it from virtue,” noted “X.Y.”; furthermore, he remarked that “the greater frequency of this crime in modern days is plainly enough to be traced to the greater indulgence it meets with. It is rendered interesting on the stage, and extenuated in the Senate.”138
“X.Y.’s” reference to the sympathetic portrayal of adultery on the stage was surely a comment on the current production of The Stranger at Covent Garden. Now, in 1815, almost two decades after its debut, the play’s reception by the press, most notably by the Times, was vastly different from what it had initially been. Perhaps influenced by the Roseberry case, the condemnation of the play was formidable. Though her performance of Mrs. Haller was praised, the Times hoped that in future, the young actress who performed this role would be “attracted by a character of less doubtful morality.” For, it noted, though Kotzebue’s intent was clearly to portray the power of redemption, adultery should not be so palliated; it was “a crime which ought to be, in all public senses, considered as beyond the chances or lenitives of reform.…”140 Even harsher were its remarks on the play three months later, when Kemble gave it “the sanction of his first appearance” that season as its eponymous protagonist. It was, they said, “a play … fitted to do evil” and worse still, to spread its evil among vast numbers. “It is, perhaps, a strongly diminished estimate, that no less than 50,000 of that class of citizenship whose virtue is most essential to the state have been already exposed to the contagion of this canonized adultery,” it noted. The metaphor is significant. Earlier moralists had bemoaned the force of example, but while the vices of the Great were sometimes called “contagious” this notion had not been invoked in judgments of theatrical performances. However, in postwar Britain, contagion had replaced imitation, even in the theater, and moral weakness had been replaced by the metaphor of epidemical disease.
Less than a month later, Edmund Kean, a rising star on the English stage, and a challenger to Kemble for male theatrical pre-eminence, appeared in a play by Richard Cumberland, The Wheel of Fortune. Though it was based on, or inspired by, The Stranger, the Times praised Cumberland’s play, whose “genius was satisfied in culling from ‘the misanthropy and repentance’ of Kotzebue” the outline of an interesting fable, and who had the “judgment and morality to throw aside with contempt the false taste and mischievous sentiment of the German.” Two decades after Bowdler had lent his name to the “sterilization” of noxious books, the theater was also undergoing a similar Bowdlerization.
And the Times, the incipient “Thunderer,” was at the forefront of this campaign. But, as we have seen, adultery trials, replete with the publication of sordid actions and scandalous letters, were a staple in its pages, as in the pages of most of the press. “This is a subject,” a Times editorial confessed, “which occasions us some perplexity.” After noting that it “suppress[ed] as much as possible all indelicate and offensive matter” from its published adultery reports, it went on to give three reasons for such continued public notice. First, that publicity given to court cases ensured “pure impartial justice”; second, that the publication of immorality, by naming names and circumstances, was itself a form of punishment or chastisement; and finally that if such cases, involving “persons of some opulence,” were omitted, readers might suppose that journalists had been paid to delete such stories. “We may therefore be the more zealous in giving notoriety to trials for adultery, the more our suppression of them might subject us to unjust imputations.”141
This seemingly nice balance between publicity and prurience, between reporting and advocacy, was nowhere evident in the Times’s handling of the Cox v Kean adultery trial and its aftermath. On January 17, 1825, Robert Albion Cox, an alderman of London and failed banker, took the great actor Edmund Kean to court, to sue for damages in a criminal conversation case. Not only, and perhaps unsurprisingly, was this trial given remarkable coverage, but, starting the next day, the Times launched a campaign to remove Kean from the English stage. “It is of importance” it argued, “that public feeling be not shocked, and public decency be not outraged” by the appearance of “such a creature as this to the gaze of a British audience.” Though the managers of Drury Lane, and Kean himself attempted to continue with his announced appearances, two weeks of the Times’s incitement and of mayhem at the theater made that impossible.142 Kean shortly after left the country for a tour of America. Though the public could not stop adulterers from sitting in the Lords or the Commons, the power of the press declared itself as firmly opposed to their appearance before the public, either as the subjects of or the actors in theatrical performances. Adultery did not vanish, but became instead much, much more discreet.