‘Adultery à‐la‐Mode’: Privilege, the Law and Attitudes to Adultery 1770–1809

After a brief examination of the vices which were condemned as the constituent elements in an aristocratic code of licence, this article considers the complex public discussions of the duties of marriage and the relations between marriage, property and aristocratic privilege, and the attacks on adultery that took place in Britain between 1770 and 1809. In order to understand the nature of the public contentions that occurred over this issue, both parliamentary debates and reaction out‐of‐doors (in pamphlet and newspaper comments and in public debating society meetings as well as in courts of law) will be examined to see how, and with what unanimity, the attack on fashionable adultery took place. For, by the early nineteenth century, the campaign against both upper‐class infidelity and its corrosive effects on law and property was systematically and powerfully articulated. Though unsuccessful in passing a parliamentary Act to curb this activity, the work of the campaigners itself heightened public awareness of and focused public antipathy towards the code of gallantry, the sexual equivalent of the code of honour, and the privileged morality of the higher orders.