Publicizing Private Life: Criminal Conversation Trials in Eighteenth-Century 
Britain
by
Abby L. Sayers
A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of
Auburn University
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the Degree of 
Master of Arts
Auburn, Alabama
August 9, 2010
Copyright 2010 by Abby L. Sayers
Approved by
Christopher J. Ferguson, Chair, Assistant Professor of History
Abigail L. Swingen, Assistant Professor of History
Ralph F. Kingston, Assistant Professor of History
Abstract
 The project examines the gender relationships within the household, between 
master and mistress, master and servant, and within the servants? quarters, alongside 
gendered experiences in the courtroom and constructions of masculine and feminine 
identities in printed trial accounts, and how these changed during the century. The trials 
also provided a context in which the spatial boundaries between the private and public 
could be debated and therefore offer a unique window for examining the physical 
development of private space in contemporary architecture. The legal procedure of the 
trials and the published accounts reporting them indicate a growing awareness of a 
?private life,? while the expanding print culture offered a perfect medium to maximize 
the publicizing of private life already unfolding in the court room. Crim. con. trials and 
the literature they inspired, therefore, represent a particularly rich set of sources for 
considering definitions of ?public? and ?private? in eighteenth-century Britain.
ii
Acknowledgements
 First and foremost I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Christopher Ferguson, 
for his generous support, encouragement, and unremitting patience throughout this entire 
process. This thesis would not have been possible without his expert knowledge and 
advice regarding eighteenth-century Britain and, of equal value, general stress-
management techniques. I am also deeply indebted to my other committee members, Dr. 
Abigail Swingen and Dr. Ralph Kingston. A special thanks is likewise due to Dr. Donna 
Bohanan, who kindly provided support and feedback during the weekly meetings of the 
Group of Five last fall. I am genuinely grateful for all of their guidance and support.
 It is impossible to overstate how invaluable my family and friends have been 
during the completion of this project (including through a couple missed ?sister 
vacations? and a missed birthday). I am not sure why I am so blessed, but I give thanks 
for all of you daily. I must give a special shout-out to my better ?halves? in the Early 
Modern England Trio, Josh Barronton and Nick Faucett. Finally, much, much love goes 
to my fabulous family: Mom, Dad, Jordan, Leslie, Wes, Miles & Jonah, and Grandma 
(and Biscuit). There aren?t words to adequately express how much all of you mean to me. 
I love you!
iii
Table of Contents
Abstract .............................................................................................................................. ii
Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ iii
List of Tables ...................................................................................................................... v
List of Figures ................................................................................................................... vi
Introduction: The Eighteenth-Century Criminal Conversation Trial ................................. 1
 Divorce, Separation, and ?Criminal Conversation? ............................................... 3
 A Legal and Cultural Phenomenon ........................................................................ 8
 ?Crim. Con.? and Eighteenth-Century British Society ........................................ 17
Chapter One: The Space of the Home ............................................................................. 30
 The Architecture of Privacy ................................................................................. 31
 Securing Privacy in the Home ............................................................................. 42
 Servants and the (In)security of Secrets ............................................................... 47
Chapter Two: Servants and Masters ................................................................................. 51
 Servant Resistance to ?Domestic Enclosure? ...................................................... 51
 Curiosity, Camaraderie, and the Servant Community ......................................... 61
 Prying for Power .................................................................................................. 67
 Containing Secrets Within the Household Community ....................................... 74
Chapter Three: The Legal Imperative .............................................................................. 79
iv
 Patriarchy, Politeness, and Control of the Private ................................................ 81
 Reputation and the Power of ?Peers? in the Courtroom ...................................... 89
 Trial Publicity and the Crim. Con. Spectacle ....................................................... 96
Chapter Four: Publicizing the Private ............................................................................ 103
 The Publicity Paradox ........................................................................................ 103
 The Pleasures of Publicity .................................................................................. 111
 Erotica ................................................................................................................ 123
Conclusion: The Crim. Con. Cabinet of Curiosities ...................................................... 145
References ...................................................................................................................... 153
v
List of Tables
Table 1: Men of Title Involved in Criminal Conversation Actions ................................... 8
Table 2: Recorded Criminal Conversation Actions, 1680-1849 ...................................... 13
Table 3: Damages Over ?2,000 in Criminal Conversation Actions, 1680-1857 ............. 15
vi
List of Figures
Figure 1: ?Mrs. Collet Discovered in Bed with John Branch by Edward Chapman and 
Others? (1780) ..................................................................................................... 55
Figure 2: ?Lady Abergavenny & Mr. Liddel, Amusing Themselves? (1780) .................. 58
Figure 3: Curiosity (1817) ............................................................................................... 59
Figure 4: ?The Rev. Mr. Craven and Mrs. Harris Discovered by Sarah Simmons in 
Amorous Dalliance? (1780) ................................................................................. 69
Figure 5: Rowlandson, Court of King?s Bench (1808) ..................................................... 99
Figure 6: Gillray, A Peep into Lady W!!!!!y?s Seraglio (1782) ...................................... 118
Figure 7: Gillray, Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly, Exposing his Wifes Bottom -- O Fye! 
(1782) ................................................................................................................. 119
Figure 8: ?Captain Gambier and Lady Knowles habited in loose Gowns and toying 
together? (1780) ................................................................................................. 129
Figure 9: ?Mr. Coates Undressing Mrs. Baxter? ............................................................ 132
Figure 10: ?John Motherill?s First Attempt on Miss Wade? .......................................... 135
Figure 11: ?The Barbarity of a Ravisher? ...................................................................... 137
Figure 12: ?Sensual Barbarity: or, Refinement on Navel [sic] Discipline? ................... 140
vii
Introduction: The Eighteenth-Century Criminal Conversation Trial
In 1782, G. Lister published an account of the recent scandals surrounding the Earl of 
Coventry?s daughters, promising an account, not only of The Life and Amours of Lady 
Ann F--l--y, but also ?some curious anecdotes of her [Lady Foley?s] sister, Lady Maria 
Bayntun.?
1
 The Life and Amours of Lady Foley was a report of the two legal actions filed 
by her husband, the Hon. Edward Foley: a divorce on grounds of her adultery, and the 
civil action against her lover, the Earl of Peterborough, for which Foley was awarded 
?2,500 damages. The latter suit was known as an action for ?criminal conversation,? 
where a husband sued his wife?s lover for damages under the pretense of ?trespass.? 
These trials fed the market for scandal literature detailing the various sexual liasons of the 
wealthy in and out of the bedroom. Often for as little as one shilling, people could 
purchase a lurid account of another person?s private life. What readers got with The Life 
and Amours of Lady Foley was a description in both words and illustrations of Lady 
Foley?s ?sexcapades? in and around her estate in Herefordshire, all of which had been 
witnessed by various neighbors as well as servants within the household (who happily 
testified to the events in court).
 ?Crim. con.? trials (as they were commonly abbreviated) did more than expose 
private indiscretions. Through the evidence presented, they documented everyday life as 
1
1
 The life and amours of Lady Ann F-l-y: develloping [sic] the whole of her intrigues... Including 
the whole substance of the trial for Crim. Con. between the Hon. Mr. F-y and the Earl of Peterborough, ... 
Together with some curious anecdotes of her sister, Lady Maria Bayntum (London, [1782?]).
people lived and experienced it within the domestic interior. They therefore reveal the co-
existing and often conflicting ideas and realities concerning domestic sociability: how 
husbands and wives should interact, and how they really interacted; how a hostess and 
male guest should behave, and how they sometimes misbehaved; how domestic servants 
should remain out of sight, and how being ?invisible? allowed servants to observe many 
things their superiors meant to go unseen. The trials also provided a context in which the 
spatial boundaries between the private and public could be debated. The ?curious 
anecdotes? concerning Lady Foley?s sister, Lady Bayntun, almost always included the 
observation that her adultery, at least, was conducted in a less ?public? and scandalous 
manner than her sister?s. While Lady Foley and her lover?s ?clandestine? encounters took 
place outside the house, in the grotto, in the park, and even in the chaise when they 
traveled, Lady Bayntun?s adultery occurred in her bedchamber: ?This Lady has not 
indeed been detected in a shrubbery, in the open face of day, to gratify the eyes of a 
peeping Tom.?
2
 Implicit in this comment on discretion was an idealized concept of 
privacy that was located specifically in the domestic interior, and it was only within that 
physical space that ?appropriate? sexual conduct should occur. The crim. con. trial 
illuminates the ubiquity of privacy in eighteenth-century Britain and the ways that 
contemporaries conceptualized, practiced, created, debated and built privacy. It informed 
their perceptions of themselves, their personal relationships, and social, cultural, and 
legal relations more broadly.
2
2
 Ibid., 16. For additional details on these trials, see Foley v. Foley (1787), Divorce [adultery], 
Court of Arches MSS, Lambeth Palace Library, London: D 611; E 45/40; E 47/20; and Bayntum v. Bayntum 
(1782), Divorce [adultery], Court of Arches MSS, Lambeth Palace Library, London: Ee 11f.64; Eee 16ff.
8-21. (The Lambeth Palace Court of Arches records hereafter cited as LPCA.)
Divorce, Separation, and ?Criminal Conversation?
Lawrence Stone described Early Modern England as ?the worst of all worlds: marriage 
was all too easy legally to enter into, but all but impossible legally to get out of.?
3
 Indeed, 
England was not a divorcing society, and an official system of legalized divorce was not 
established until 1857.
4
 By the eighteenth century, however, divorce remained technically 
prohibited but became possible in special circumstances by a private act of Parliament 
around 1700, although it was very difficult to obtain.
5
 Only men could procure a 
Parliamentary divorce, and only on grounds of their wife?s adultery. Additional 
?qualifiers? limited the number of successful divorce petitions: one had to be a childless 
heir with an adulterous wife whose infidelity resulted in illegitimate offspring.
6
 
Parliamentary divorce therefore functioned primarily to protect the ?patrilineal descent of 
property in the legitimate male blood line.?
7
 Later in the century, officials acknowledged 
the inherent inequity of these stipulations for women and began requiring lawyers to 
prove no prior adultery by the husband that may have led to the wife?s adultery.
8
 
 This was a somewhat superficial legal overture, however. The underlying 
principle of the earlier standard persisted into the nineteenth century, as evident by an 
3
3
 Lawrence Stone, Uncertain Unions: Marriage in England, 1660-1753 (New York: Oxford 
University Press, 1992), 4.
4
 Stone, Broken Lives: Separation and Divorce in England, 1660-1857 (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 1993), 12. 
5
 Stone, Road to Divorce: England, 1530-1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 20.
6
 Ibid., 320-321. With the strict requirements imposed on petitioners, only thirteen divorces were 
granted in the first half of the eighteenth century.
7
 Ibid., 320-321.
8
 Ibid., 323.
1804 remark when a contemporary defended a legal double-standard on the principle that 
a husband?s infidelity could not defraud the wife or children the way a woman?s infidelity 
could by becoming pregnant by her lover.
9
 This pervasive mentality has led scholars to 
describe this period as one in which ?the defense of property was a higher priority than 
the defense of life.?
10
 Even with proof of the husbands? adultery, wives could not reclaim 
their marriage portion in a divorce. Husbands were required to provide some kind of 
maintenance, however, despite the wives? adultery.
11
 England?s policy made it the lone 
Protestant country in Europe without a legalized system in place to obtain a divorce with 
permission to remarry in cases of adultery, cruelty, and abandonment. This did not, 
however, prevent people in the pre-divorce era -- at least, those who could afford it -- 
from exploiting loopholes in the English legal system to escape unhappy marriages.
12
 One alternative was to obtain a legal separation in the ecclesiastical courts. Unlike 
petitions for Parliamentary divorce, both spouses could file for separation in the church 
courts, which was granted on grounds of adultery and life-threatening cruelty.
13
 The 
canon law held that either spouse?s adultery was grounds for separation, not just the 
wife?s. Despite this, women almost never filed on grounds of adultery; when they did, 
these charges were usually coupled with allegations of cruelty (the most common 
4
9
 Ibid., 242.
10
 David Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 
1999), 49. See also Douglas Hay, ?Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,? in Albion?s Fatal Tree: 
Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. E. P. Thompson et al. (New York: Penguin Group, 
1975), 17-63.
11
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 324.
12
 Ibid., 9-11.
13
 David Turner, Fashioning Adultery: Gender, Sex and Civility in England, 1660-1740 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 145.
complaint of wives seeking legal separation).
14
 All matters relating to marriage, 
separation, and sexual behavior were traditionally addressed in the ecclesiastical courts, 
but legal separation was as far as the canon law reached and it did not allow either spouse 
to remarry.
15
 The church courts were not the only venue for contesting matrimonial issues. 
England had three legal systems in place: canon law, equity law, and common law. Each 
had its own courts and procedures, but all three exercised some authority over the laws of 
marriage, separation, and divorce. England?s multiple, often-overlapping legal systems 
provided an alternative for spouses unwilling or unsatisfied with the prospect of legal 
separation. By the 1690s, and increasingly throughout the 1700s, people became more 
adept at manipulating these systems to their advantage. It was within this web of legal 
jurisdictions that the action for criminal conversation emerged as a viable avenue for 
ending a marriage.
16
 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ecclesiastical courts punished 
adulterers by public confession and shaming. Justices of the Peace employed similar 
tactics at the local level by putting adulterers in the stocks or levying fines as 
punishment.
17
 By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the church courts? 
authority to regulate morality was in decline. This coincided with a growing reluctance 
by local JPs to prosecute adultery for adultery?s sake. This and other issues of morality 
5
14
 Ibid., 146. Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
15
 Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 145.
16
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 24-25.
17
 Ibid., 232.
were viewed increasingly as ?private? concerns that ought to be handled outside of the 
courtroom. Although it remained on the books as a criminal offense, by the 1730s, state 
prosecutions for adultery and other ?private vices? had ceased almost entirely.
18
 
 The practice of husbands privately obtaining a monetary settlement from their 
wives? lovers outside the courts was fairly widespread among men from the middling 
sorts in early modern England. The threat of publicity that might accompany a trial -- 
and, in the ecclesiastical courts, the public form of punishment handed down upon 
adulterers -- was sufficient incentive for a man to pay the husband in exchange for 
keeping the adultery private.
19
 As Stone has observed, ?[M]ost cases of litigation between 
individuals were intended merely to force the defendant to arbitration. For a majority of 
litigants...going to law was a tactical maneuver, part blackmail and part bluff, the object 
being to obtain an out-of-court settlement.?
20
 While the perception that private life was 
no longer the jurisdiction of the state gained traction in this period, the practice did not 
disappear entirely from the public realm. The regulation of adultery and seduction 
transitioned into the common law courts, where it unfolded within the process of civil 
6
18
 Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 5. There is evidence of occasional adultery prosecutions (as a 
misdemeanor) up to 1746, but secular court records do not document further occurrences after this point. 
Stone, Road to Divorce, 232.
19
 Ibid., 232, 244-245. Private correspondence between spouses and between a spouse and his or 
her lawyer reveal instances where the threat of public litigation was used to blackmail a spouse into 
submission. Ibid., 19. 
20
 Ibid., 24. Stone estimates that the number of cases filed in ecclesiastical and civil courts that 
actually went to trial was somewhere between one-fifth to one-half of the total cases initiated. He contends 
this is a reflection of the plaintiffs? ulterior motive, which was to use the suit (and its ensuing legal costs 
and publicity) as a threat to force the defendant into arbitration. The suits that did not result in a sentence 
were either settled out of court or dropped.
litigation in the form of the crim. con. trial.
21
 These trials facilitated the negotiation of 
private life between civilians, rather than between a civilian and the state.
 Crim. con. emerged in the common law courts around 1670 and were heard 
almost exclusively in the central common law courts in London, either in the Court of 
Common Pleas or, more frequently, in the Court of King?s Bench, with the Lord Chief 
Justice presiding over the proceedings.
22
 While it was a viable legal option in the 
seventeenth century, use of the action was very rare, especially among social elites.
23
 
Early cases were brought as actions of trespass, for assault and battery, but these trespass 
suits were soon given their own distinct title, ?criminal conversation,? and ?provided 
monetary damages for the loss of male honour incurred through the seduction of a 
wife.?
24
 David Turner has speculated the name-change might have been intended to 
distinguish the suit from rape, but also possibly an attempt to attract a ?politer sort of 
litigant.?
25
 The court records certainly support this theory, as crim. con. clientele were 
almost exclusively members of the aristocracy from the late-seventeenth century through 
the mid-eighteenth century (see Table 1). One reason for this was undoubtedly the high 
cost of filing the suit, which could only be heard in Westminster Hall, where the central 
common law courts of King?s Bench and Common Pleas were located. Rising legal fees, 
combined with travel expenses and accommodations for the litigants and their witnesses 
7
21
 Ibid., 232-233.
22
 Ibid., 233. Scholars have attributed this to the charisma and efficiency with which Lord Chief 
Justice Mansfield ran the Court of King?s Bench. Ibid. For more on Mansfield, see James Oldham, English 
Common Law in the Age of Mansfield (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
23
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 296.
24
 Ibid., 296; Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 175.
25
 Ibid.
in London, limited litigants to the upper- and upper-middling orders of society.
26
 In the 
following decades, as the proportion of elite litigants increased, the number of crim. con. 
cases nearly doubled.
27
 By the end of the eighteenth century, crim. con. had developed 
into an established legal phenomenon. 
Table 1: Men of Title Involved in Criminal Conversation Actions
A Legal and Cultural Phenomenon
A confluence of factors contributed to the emergence of the crim. con. suit in its 
eighteenth-century form. In addition to England?s prohibition of divorce and the 
overlapping legal systems that shared jurisdiction over matrimonial disputes, the 
ecclesiastical courts likewise declined as an efficient avenue for settling such disputes. An 
8
26
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 247. Even when men from the middling ranks began bringing the suit 
in greater numbers after mid-century, aristocrats represented one or both parties in the highest-profile cases.
27
 Ibid., 245-247. During the second-half of the eighteenth century many crim. con. actions were 
uncontested. Plaintiffs won their suits in the King?s Bench by default and a sheriff?s jury -- most often the 
Middlesex jury, due to the large number of plaintiffs who resided in London -- determined the damages. For 
plaintiffs residing outside of London, however, damages could be determined by a sheriff?s jury in the 
assizes of the plaintiff?s county of residence. Ibid., 235.
additional factor was the decision in the common law courts to expand their function to 
include awarding monetary damages for any tort, which entailed broadening the 
definition of ?trespass? beyond ?a remedy for mayhem, battery, or wounding? to include 
a husband?s charge of ?trespassing? against his wife?s seducer, which was defined as 
?criminal conversation.?
28
 As an action of trespass, the offense of seducing a married 
woman entailed the violation of the husband?s property in his wife, and the legal 
language of crim. con. (and ecclesiastical) suits typically emphasized that the offender 
had had ?carnal knowledge of the wife?s body.? The wife, therefore, was a passive figure 
in the crim. con. action, and could not testify or enter any evidence on her behalf during 
the trial.
29
 
 In the early period of the action, the husband brought the suit against his wife?s 
lover under the pretense of wounded honor, the objective being to collect monetary 
compensation for an injured reputation. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the 
principle of the action was recompense for the ?loss of comfort and society? the husband 
experienced as a result of his wife?s seduction.
30
 Scholars have pointed to this discursive 
shift as an indicator of changing notions of masculinity and male honor in eighteenth-
9
28
 Ibid., 237, 232-233; Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 6.
29
 This was due in part to the general rule prohibiting women from bringing suits in secular courts. 
Historians have pointed to women?s lack of legal agency in the common law system and argued that the 
Court of Arches provided an opportunity for women to defend their reputations against decisions made 
against them in lower courts. Ibid., 146-147. See also Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, 
and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Ingram, Church Courts; Tim 
Meldrum, ?A Women's Court in London: Defamation at the Bishop of London's Consistory Court, 1700?
1745,? London Journal 19 (I994): 1-20; Donna Andrew, ?Adultery A-La-Mode?: Privilege, the Law and 
Attitudes to Adultery, 1770-1809,? History 82, Issue 265 (January 1997): 5-23.
30
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 287. Susan Staves, ?Money for Honor: Damages for Criminal 
Conversation,? Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 11 (1982): 279-297; Donna Andrew, ?The Code of 
Honor and its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700-1850,? Social History 5, Issue 3 
(October 1980): 499-434.
century Britain, and have linked this change to emerging attitudes towards marriage that 
emphasized domestic happiness and spousal companionship over the traditional view of 
wives as the property of their husbands.
31
 The new legal description of the offense as an 
injury to spouses rather than an injury to the individual man of honor was certainly 
significant, but this development should not be interpreted as evidence of the declining 
importance of defending personal honor and reputation from insult.
32
 Rather, it was 
precisely because of the continued importance of honor and reputation in society that 
crim. con. became popular in eighteenth-century Britain; articulating the offense as a 
?loss of comfort and society? was merely an extension of this. The nature of personal 
honor was shifting in this period, and contemporaries used these trials as a space for 
negotiating the defining features -- both positive and negative -- assigned to notions of 
status and reputation.
 It was not only the premise of the crim. con. suit, but also the trial process that 
played a role in challenging and shaping notions of honor. The crim. con. jury confirms 
the importance of status and reputation not only in the trial itself, but in wider eighteenth-
century society. While most jury trials featured jurymen from the lower-middling orders, 
crim. con. cases were tried by a special jury, composed of twenty-four ?gentlemen of 
10
31
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 237-238, 241-242, 287. Recent scholarship on the family and notions of 
companionate marriage in early modern England highlights the uneven emergence of new marital practices 
and philosophies. See, for example, Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in 
England, 1660-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends 
in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2001); Elizabeth Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (Harlow, 
England: Longman, Ltd., 1999); Alexandra Shepard, The Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England 
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Susan Staves, Married Women's Separate Property in England, 
1660-1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and 
Subordination in England, 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
32
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 237-238, 241-242, 287; Robert Shoemaker, ?The Decline of Public 
Insult in London, 1660-1800,? Past and Present, no. 169 (Nov. 2000): 98-99.
fortune? from the upper-ranks of society. These men were deemed more qualified 
because they ?were thought to be more sensitive to the value of honour to a gentleman 
than were? men of lower rank.
33
 Special jurors initially included prominent freeholders, 
knights, and urban gentry, but by the second half of the eighteenth century, crim. con. 
trials were heard mostly by special juries comprised of wealthy London merchants, many 
of whom gained considerable experience by sitting on multiple crim. con. juries 
(occasionally in the same day
34
), which further increased their ?qualifications.?
35
 The 
main criteria for securing a guilty verdict was proof of the ?seduction? (adultery), which 
relied heavily on circumstantial witness testimony, and no evidence of collusion between 
any of the parties. When determining the amount of the damages rewarded, however, the 
jury took the status and reputation of both the plaintiff and the defendant into 
consideration.
36
 At the trial?s conclusion, the judge provided instructions to the jury with 
regards to relevant legal guidelines, pertinent details of the case, and the criteria for 
11
33
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 234-235. 
34
 The 1790 crim. con. trials Cecil v. Sneyd and Barttelot v. Hawker were heard back-to-back in the 
Court of King?s Bench. Two Actions for Criminal Conversation, With the Whole of the Evidence; Both 
Tried...On Wednesday, June 26, 1790: The first between Henry Cecil...Rev. William Sneyd. The second 
between Hooker Barttelot...and Samuel Hawker (London, [1790]). This point was likewise made in A New 
collection of trials for adultery, or, General history of modern gallantry and divorces: containing a variety 
of the most remarkable trials heard and determined in the Courts of Doctors' Commons ... from the year 
1780 to the present time (London, 1799). See also Bartelot v. Bartelot (1790), Divorce (adultery), LPCA: G 
153/37.
35
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 234-35. Additional scholarship on eighteenth-century juries and jurors 
includes Thomas Green, Verdict According to Conscience: Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 
1200-1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Peter King, ?Decision-Makers and Decision-
Making in the English Criminal Law, 1750-1800,? The Historical Journal 27, no. 1 (1984): 25-58; J.S. 
Cockburn and Thomas A. Green, eds., Twelve Good Men and True: The Criminal Trial Jury in England, 
1200-1800 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).
36
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 242-47.  James Oldham, English Common Law in the Age of Mansfield 
(Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
assessing and awarding damages. The jury then deliberated the amount of damages (if 
any) that ought to be awarded to the plaintiff.
37
 Witnesses were almost always family, friends, or neighbors, with the most crucial 
among these being domestic servants. As the overwhelming majority of litigants in crim. 
con. cases were social elites, servants were a staple of their household family and had 
access to the most intimate behavior conducted in the home.
38
 This demonstrates the 
range of groups and individuals in eighteenth-century British society that were involved 
with evaluating, debating, and enforcing notions of honor. These issues lay at the heart of 
the crim. con. trial and helped propel it from a burgeoning legal transpiration into a full-
blown cultural phenomenon.
 Stone has described the early history of the crim. con. action as an ?era of 
stagnation,? with only fourteen cases occurring during the period spanning 1692-1730.
39
 
A closer examination of this period by decades, however, reveals that the suit was 
experiencing a steady rise in popularity, with the number of actions consistently 
increasing (see Table 2). If we extend the period by a decade to 1740, the total number of 
trials recorded increases from fourteen to twenty-three. There were seven suits that went 
12
37
 Ibid., 234. In eighteenth-century trials, juries reached a decision very quickly, sometimes in a 
matter of minutes. On some occasions the jurors did not even leave the room, and remained instead in the 
jury box where they conferred on the merits of the case in whispers. The average time of deliberation 
increased significantly in the early nineteenth century, a development Stone attributes to a growing sense of 
responsibility among jurors.
38
 Ibid., 211. See also Meldrum, ?Women's Court in London;? Ingram, Church Courts; and 
Gowing, Domestic Dangers.
39
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 246. By 1800 a previous crim. con. action -- or a plausible explanation 
for the lack of one -- was required in order for Parliament to even consider granting a private divorce. This 
did not, as Stone points out, mean that all crim. con. suits were brought for this purpose, especially in the 
eighteenth century. Not every crim. con. suit was followed by a petition for divorce, and in the eighteenth 
century not every successful crim. con. suit guaranteed that Parliament would grant a divorce if a petition 
was filed. Stone also points to five cases in the eighteenth century where a crim. con. suit had ended in an 
acquittal or only ?derisory? damages awarded, but Parliament still granted a private divorce. Ibid., 324-325.
to trial in the 1740s, and this number more than doubled in the 1750s and 1760s, with 
seventeen and eighteen actions each decade, respectively. The number doubled again over 
the following two decades, with thirty-six suits in the 1770s and thirty-seven brought in 
the 1780s. The apogee of the crim. con. action was the 1790s, when seventy-three cases
Table 2. Recorded Criminal Conversation Actions, 1680-1849
went to trial. The number of cases the following decade dropped relatively sharply to 
fifty-two, although this number was still higher than the thirty-seven actions recorded in 
13
the decade preceding crim. con.?s ?peak.?
40
 The number of trials continued to slowly 
decline during the first half of the nineteenth century until the action was formally 
abolished with the 1857 Divorce Act.
41
 Although its lifespan covers the period from the mid-seventeenth century through 
the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century was a singular moment in the history of the 
crim. con. suit. In the opening decades, the trials were deemed legitimate legal actions, 
but exposing such intimate matters in court for profit was not culturally acceptable. By 
the 1760s, however, crim. con. was not only tolerable, it was thriving as a legal and 
cultural phenomenon. What fueled the trial?s popularity during this period? What 
motivated the litigants to bring the suit in the first place? The common law courts? 
expansion of the definition of trespass was certainly an effort to increase business, but 
this does not account for the crim. con. trial?s appeal beyond the litigants inside the 
courtroom. As Stone rightly observed, ?it was one thing to set up the legal machinery, and 
another to persuade the public to use it.?
42
 
 While the issues of privacy and private life are fundamental to the eighteenth-
century crim. con. trial, publicity was key in its evolution. At its inception, crim. con. was 
a tool for husbands to force their wives? seducers into private compensation for 
cuckolding them. This was still in practice in the early eighteenth century, its appeal 
14
40
 Many contemporaries were alarmed by the spectacular proliferation of suits in the 1790s. In 
1800, Lord Auckland introduced a bill criminalizing adultery described as ?for the purpose of doing away 
with the action for criminal conversation.? While the bill was ultimately defeated, Stone notes that it 
enjoyed considerable support in Parliament and among the populace. Ibid., 287-288.
41
 Ibid., 290-91. The abolition of the crim. con. action was included in a clause for the 1857 
Divorce Act. The amendment passed the House of Lords by a vote of 78-46, but when the bill reached the 
House of Commons, the members added a clause that retained a form of the crim. con. suit under a 
different name. This ?action for damages for adultery? remained on the book until 1970. Ibid., 294-295.
42
 Ibid., 237.
being that it allowed the husband to receive financial compensation for the seduction 
without either parties having to endure the publicity of a trial.
43
 Publicizing the adultery 
brought public shame for all the parties involved, which functioned as a deterrent in the 
beginning for elite litigants who could afford the legal process. The number of crim. con. 
trials increased in proportion to the publicity they received, which appeared also to be 
connected with the amount of damages awarded (see Table 3). In the period between 
Table 3. Damages Over ?2,000 in Criminal Conversation Actions, 1680-1857
15
43
 Ibid., 244-245.
1692 and 1742, seven major crim. con. trials received extensive coverage in print form 
(out of roughly twenty-three cases tried), beginning with the Norfolk trial.
44
 The Duke of 
Norfolk?s divorce from his wife on grounds of adultery was initiated in 1692 and settled 
in 1700, and established a precedent not only as a legal avenue for wealthy litigants, but 
also in terms of the publicity and scandal the case generated. The 1690s was a crucial 
moment for the crim. con. trial not only for the precedent of the Norfolk scandal, but also 
for a significant development in Britain?s print culture: the lapsing of the Censorship Act 
in 1695. This provided a ?green light? for publishing material that was previously 
prohibited or at least very tedious to acquire permission for publication. Norfolk v. 
Germaine was the first widely-publicized crim. con. trial, and it provided printers with a 
sense of the potential profit to be made from publishing similar aristocratic scandals. 
Reproducing official court records provided legitimacy for publicizing illicit information 
pertaining to the sexual (mis)behavior in prominent people?s private lives. The result was 
an expanding print culture that magnified the spectacle of the crim. con. trial.  
 Crim. con. publications developed out of a growing trend of publishing summary 
accounts of criminal trials begun in the mid-seventeenth century with the Old Bailey 
Proceedings.
45
 These accounts evolved from brief abstracts to verbatim transcripts of trial 
proceedings. Official court records did not include the arguments of the lawyers and the 
judge?s instructions to the jury.
46
 In the eighteenth century, however, stenographers began 
16
44
 Ibid., 430; Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 180. They were: Norfolk v. Germaine (Jermaine); 
Dormer v. Jones (1715); Abergavenny v. Lyddel (1730); Gouldney v. Harvey (1732); Cibber v. Sloper 
(1738, 1739); Biker v. Morley (1741); and Morice v. Fitzroy (1742).
45
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 249.
46
 Ibid., 45.
transcribing this information for use by members of the legal profession (many 
publications noted on the title page that the trial account had been ?taken in short-hand by 
a civilian? -- usually a student of the civil law -- which infused the account with a sense 
of legitimacy for the readers
47
) and this information was included in printed crim. con. 
tracts.
48
 Individual adultery trial accounts began appearing in the 1690s; by the end of the 
century such accounts were commonplace and were even popular enough to be organized 
into published collections of sensational trials, such as the seven-volume Trials for 
Adultery (1780).
49
 This kind of literature emerged alongside other ?intimate? genres such 
as ?secret histories? and novels which provided readers access (real or imagined) into the 
private lives of others.
50
?Crim. Con.? and Eighteenth-Century British Society
Historians have studied crim. con. trials alongside other adultery trials to explore 
contemporary attitudes and practices related to the family, marriage, and divorce. 
17
47
 Urmi Bhowmik, ?Facts and Norms in the Marketplace of Print: John Dunton?s Athenian 
Mercury,? Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 3 (Spring, 2003): 351.
48
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 28.
49
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 28; Trials for adultery: or, the history of divorces. [...] From the year 
1760, to the present time. [...] The whole forming a complete History of the Private Life, Intrigues, and 
Amours of many Characters in the most elevated Sphere..., 7 vols. (London [1779-]1780).
50
 Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 193. The crim. con. phenomenon can be situated within the 
context of the history of celebrity, and specifically the emerging form of ?celebrity culture? in eighteenth-
century Britain. For examples, see Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: 
Oxford University Press, 1986); Mary Luckhurst and Jane Moody, ed., Theatre and Celebrity in Britain, 
1660-2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Anna Clark, Scandal!: The Sexual Politics of the 
British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Paula Byrne, Perdita: The Literary, 
Theatrical, Scandalous Life of Mary Robinson (New York: Random House, 2004); Katherine Kittredge, ed. 
Lewd and Notorious: Female Transgression in the Eighteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 
Press, 2003). For an account of the parallel development in Britain?s colonies and across the Channel, 
respectively, see James Epstein, "The Politics of Colonial Sensation: The Trial of Thomas Picton and the 
Cause of Louisa Calderon." American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June, 2007): 712-741; Sarah Maza, 
Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Celebres of Prerevolutionary France (Berkeley: University of 
California Press, 1993).
Scholars have also used these trials to investigate attitudes towards adultery, sexual 
morality, and gender roles, and have identified the importance of these sources as 
commentary on larger political and social issues with which contemporaries were faced. 
None, however, has treated the crim. con. trial independently, as an entity in which the 
myriad interrelationships displayed in the trial proceedings constitute a microcosm of 
eighteenth-century British society.
51
 These trials reveal more than marital breakdown or 
the changing cultural meaning of adultery. The crim. con. phenomenon illuminates the 
profound and pervasive preoccupation with the private in eighteenth-century Britain. 
These issues generated enormous publicity in various forms. The 1730 Abergavenny v. 
Lyddel trial, for example, was printed and sold in pamphlet form at the time of the trial, 
and an account of the proceedings was included in collections of trials for criminal 
conversation and adultery published throughout the century. Crim. con. was likewise 
referenced in plays, newspapers, and even foreigners? travel letters.
52
 Crim. con. trials and 
the literature they inspired, therefore, represent a particularly rich set of sources for 
considering definitions of ?public? and ?private? in eighteenth-century Britain.
 Over the course of the century, the legal procedure of the trials, as well as the 
published accounts reporting them, indicate a growing awareness of a ?private life.? 
18
51
 Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Penguin Books, 1990); 
Ibid., Road to Divorce; David Turner devotes a chapter to crim. con. in his analysis of public and private 
debates about the meaning of adultery in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth century in Fashioning 
Adultery, 172-193; Sarah Lloyd uses adultery trial publications, including crim. con. accounts, from the 
1780s to trace the sexualization of popular landscape terminology, as editors of trial literature used these 
terms as ?slang? for female genitalia, and her three main examples are divorce trials that were preceded by 
highly publicized crim. con. trials in ?Amour in the Shrubbery: Reading the Detail of English Adultery 
Trial Publications of the 1780s,? Eighteenth Century Studies 39, no. 4 (2006): 421-442); Susan Staves 
explores the link between civil damages and honor in ?Money for Honor.?
52
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 254; Shoemaker, ?Decline of Public Insult,? 120. For contemporary 
examples, see William Congreve, The Way of the World (1700), quoted in Stone, Road to Divorce, 254; and 
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu?s letter to Lady Pomfret, 4 Nov. 1742, in Robert Halsband, ed., The Letters of 
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 2:295.
Historians tend to begin the history of private life with the Reformation and the 
emergence of the internally-pious, privately-devotional Christian. The concurrent rise in 
literacy and the improvements in printing technologies fostered the emergence of a 
private self and ?private sphere.?
53
 The crim. con. action evolved during a transition in 
English legal philosophy concerning the role of the state in regulating private matters. 
The intersection of publicity, privacy, and the law is evident in the growing tendency to 
exploit private scandal for the ?public good.? The expanding print culture offered a 
perfect medium to maximize the publicizing of private life already unfolding in the court 
room.
54
 
 In England, the most prolific crim. con. coverage was devoted to trials that 
involved members of the social elite, which frequently included members of the 
government and even on occasion members of the royal family.
55
 These trials, and their 
popularity in print form, reveal more than political sentiments, however; they provide a 
window onto Britain?s dynamic society as a whole. The crim. con. trial can therefore be 
19
53
 Roger Chartier, ed, A History of Private Life, vol. III: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Phillippe 
Ari?s and Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).
54
 There was a flourishing market for published accounts of sex scandals in both England and 
France during this period. Historians such as Anna Clark and Sarah Maza have illuminated the politically 
subversive nature of many of these publications and have shown how they were sources that both 
documented and shaped public opinion in the late eighteenth century. Clark, Scandal!: The Sexual Politics 
of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004); Maza, Private Lives and Public 
Affairs. 
55
 The sensational 1770 crim. con. trial of Lord Richard Grosvenor against the king?s brother, 
Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland generated an enormous amount of publicity. See, for example, The 
whole proceedings at large, In a Cause on an Action Brought by The Rt. Hon. Richard Lord Grosvenor 
against His Royal Highness Henry Frederick ... (London, [1770]); The trial of His R. H. the D. of C.... For 
criminal conversation with Lady Harriet G----------r (London, [1770]); The genuine copies of letters which 
passed between His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland and Lady Grosvenor, 5th ed. (London, 
[1770]); A full and complete history of His R---l H---ss the D- of C-d, and Lady G---r, the fair adultress, 2 
vols. (Dublin, [1770]). Following his successful crim. con. suit, Lord Grosvenor brought another action in 
the Doctors Commons against his wife, Henrietta, for adultery. S. Bladon, Trials for Adultery, (London, 
1779-80). The publisher devoted the entire fourth volume in this seven-volume collection to the adultery 
trial between Lord and Lady Grosvenor.
viewed as a medium that exposed the central foundations of eighteenth-century British 
culture.  It was a space in which contemporaries attempted to organize and control the 
changing world around them, and rearticulate their place within it. This work uses crim. 
con. to investigate not only the ways in which contemporaries conceptualized various 
personal and social relationships, but also to explore changes in material culture, print 
culture, and definitions of gender, honor, and reputation. These developments, in turn, 
will each be examined within the larger framework of an evolving eighteenth-century 
culture of privacy.
 The exposure in crim. con. was not limited to details of intimate personal 
interactions; the trials also provided a context in which the spatial boundaries between the 
private and public could be debated. In their testimonies witnesses paid as much attention 
to where in the house the adultery occurred as they did to the illicit behavior they had 
observed. For this reason, crim. con. trials also offer a unique window for examining the 
physical development of private space in eighteenth-century architecture.
 Crim. con. trials were also a space for negotiating ideas of gender and a close 
analysis of crim. con. trial records complicates many of the categories used by historians 
?particularly historians of gender ? studying eighteenth-century British society. Scholars 
typically employ the ?separate spheres? model for studies of women?s and gender history, 
which identifies an emergence of two separate, gendered spheres -- a ?private? or 
?domestic? sphere for women, and a ?public? (and usually ?political?) sphere for men -- 
in the late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century. The public-private dichotomy has been 
a useful tool for historians, and gender analysis remains central to any evaluation of the 
20
changing notions of public and private. However, the history of crim. con. demonstrates 
that definitions of ?male? and ?female? cannot be easily imposed onto strict distinctions 
between public and private. Rather, historians must consider such categories as sex and 
gender within each the respective notions of ?public? and ?private.? This examination of 
the evolution of concepts of privacy in criminal conversation trials will investigate gender 
relationships within the household, between master and mistress, master and servant, and 
within the servants? quarters, alongside gendered experiences in the courtroom and 
constructions of masculine and femine identities in printed trial accounts, and how these 
changed over the course of the eighteenth century. This research, therefore, will be in 
conversation not only with historians of eighteenth-century law, space, and print, but also 
with scholars of gender and culture who have explored the relationship between gender 
and the public-private dichotomy in a number of different historical contexts.
56
 The 
significance of studying the private cannot be limited to its relation to gender. The tension 
between concealment and exposure of the private is paramount for understanding both 
the intimate minutae of daily life and contemporary conceptualizations of society. 
 Historians have articulated multiple ways of investigating eighteenth-century 
society through the use of conceptual models that most frequently organize contemporary 
experiences into categories based on socio-economic status, political participation, and 
21
56
 The literature on gender and private life is vast, but some important examples include Amanda 
Vickery, ?Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English 
Women's History,? The Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (June 1993): 383-414; Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender 
in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? (Harlow, England: Addison Wesley 
Longman, 2001); Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, eds., Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, 
Representations and Responsibilities (Harlow, England: Longman, 1997); Karen Harvey, Reading Sex in 
the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 2004); Shepard, Meanings of Manhood.
commercial activity.
57
 These are generally formulated within one of three customary 
frameworks that conceptualize society either as a polarized, binary entity, as a traidic 
social system in which the ?middle? group is ultimately the most dominant, or as a 
traditional hierarchical structure of ranks and orders.
58
 Historians have used these models 
to explore various aspects of British culture during the ?long? eighteenth century, often 
for the purpose of charting Britain?s transition from an early modern to a modern society. 
All of these models share another common theme: they depict, implicitly if not explicitly, 
the social conflicts that emerged out of contemporary struggles for power. Historical 
conceptions of this era are invested in the question of whether society was one of stability 
and order or one marked by conflict, either open or perpetually seething beneath the 
surface. Proponents of the social-stability interpretation are more likely to embrace the 
hierarchical model, whereas scholars that characterize contemporary society by conflict 
more often employ the dichotomous or triadic models. 
 We can explore these same questions of stability vs. conflict and premodern vs. 
modern, through the study of privacy. Ultimately, the underlying issue in the eighteenth-
century crim. con. phenomenon is power. Crim. con. trial accounts reveal a struggle for 
power that was located in the control of knowledge about the private -- most importantly, 
22
57
 David Cannadine, Rise and Fall of Class; E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in 
Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1993); Peter Earle, The Making of the English 
Middle Class: Business, Society and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (Berkeley: University of California 
Press, 1989); Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender, and the Family in England, 
1680-1780 (Berkeley: University of California-Berkeley Press, 1996); Lawrence Klein, ?Politeness and the 
Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century,? The Historical Journal 45, no. 4 (2002): 869-898; Paul 
Langford, A Polite and Commercial People. England, 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); 
Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
58
 For a more detailed discussion of these social models, see Cannadine, ?The Eighteenth Century: 
Class Without Class Struggle,? in Rise and Fall of Class, 25-58.
personal control over the concealment (or exposure) of one?s own privacy. Power was 
also attainable through access to (and knowledge of) other people?s private life, as well as 
through control of the media and technologies for publicizing the private. Organizing 
society according to levels of intimacy, rather than according to political, economic, or 
other divisions, offers a different perspective on eighteenth-century culture and provides 
new insight into the nature of contemporary struggles for power. In particular, it 
highlights a more nuanced power-struggle that pervaded eighteenth-century Britain than 
what is addressed in the traditional historiographical interpretations. Studying privacy 
reveals a power struggle rooted in knowledge, but particularly a knowledge of the 
private, or ?intimate knowledge.?
59
 Scholars have discussed the emerging methods of 
social control during this period.
60
 Crim. con. trials reveal a similar power struggle, but 
one that was not only focused on the physical control of bodies (through offical 
punishment, imprisonment, transportation, or hospitalization). In this status-seeking 
society that valued reputation arguably as much as it valued life and property, access to 
privacy yielded power over reputation, thus it was control of the private -- one?s own 
private life and intimate experiences as well as control of  other people?s knowledge of it 
-- that yielded power.
61
23
59
 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon Books, 
1977).
60
 Ibid.; Peter King, ?Decision-Makers and Decision-Making in the English Criminal Law, 
1750-1800,? The Historical Journal 27, no. 1 (1984): 25-58, esp. pp. 25-27; Randall McGowen, ?Civilizing 
Punishment: The End of Public Execution in England,? Journal of British Studies 33, no. 3 (July 1994): 
257-282; ibid, ?The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England,? Journal of Modern History 59, 
no. 4 (December 1987): 651-679. 
61
 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People. England, 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 1993); Faramerz Dabhoiwala, ?The Construction of Honour, Reputation and Status in 
Late Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Cenutry England,? Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 
(1996): 201-213.
 My analysis of crim. con. reveals an eighteenth-century British society comprised 
of three layers of community that can be conceptualized as concentric spheres of 
relations. A defining characteristic of each layer is the level and nature of intimacy in 
those relations. Within the smallest layer -- the domestic realm -- relationships were more 
intimate and involved direct contact with other members of that community (the 
household, and members from other households in the surrounding geographic area). The 
next level of community was the legal realm, which featured direct and personal relations 
among members, but was a less intimate, more ritualized, depersonalized form of 
interaction. It was also a space in which notions of ideal relations were negotiated and 
applied to other levels of community, including the most intimate sphere. This included 
the struggle to define social and cultural identities such as gender, husband and wife, 
matron and patriarch, and servant, in order to regulate the ?appropriate? social behaviors 
for each. The third (and largest) level of community was the most complex. It was in 
many ways both the most intimate and the least intimate, encompassing the greatest 
number of people but characterized by the least amount of direct personal interactions. 
This ?public realm? exposed and circulated the most private details of life at the most 
intimate levels of community. People in disparate parts of the country could know the 
sexual indiscretions of a person whom they had never -- and would never -- meet. As 
crim. con. trials developed into a full-blown cultural phenomenon over the course of the 
century, there was a more concrete sense of a ?private life,? but it was, ironically, only 
legitimized through its highly public exposure.
24
 The domestic sphere was a site in which conceptions of privacy were physically 
constituted, but these meanings were constantly challenged by the transgressions of 
existing boundaries, especially by servants. Crim. con. trials illustrate how, through 
violating boundaries delineating private space, domestic servants also contested the social 
hierarchy of the household. Servants who attained knowledge of their superiors? privacy 
-- which, in crim. con., meant they had witnessed their mistresses? infidelity -- gained a 
sense of power over them. In order to retain power over the private and reassert the 
traditional social hierarchy in the household, husbands sought damages from their wives? 
lovers through actions for criminal conversation. The trials relied heavily on the witness 
testimony of servants, and the trial process functioned to remove control over the private 
from the servants and return it to the master of the house. The trials, however, ultimately 
succeeded only in returning servants to the bottom of the private-power hierarchy. Rather 
than regaining control over their privacy in the legal sphere, the plaintiff-husbands 
effectively surrendered any authority over the publicizing and circulation of knowledge 
of their private lives. 
 In the domestic realm, the circulation and dissemination of ?private knowledge? 
was achieved through the direct, personal exchange of information between people (oral 
gossip). In the legal realm, as in the domestic, ?private knowledge? was made public via 
oral transmission, but in a much more formal, regulated, and depersonalized fashion. 
Servant-witnesses had to testify in open court, with their identity (which included name, 
age, place of birth, profession/employer, and relation to the parties involved in the case) 
25
then a matter of public record. Their ?private knowledge? was revealed through responses 
to specific questions posed by the legal counsels. 
 The courtroom was traditionally an arena in which elites enjoyed considerable 
power. By the eighteenth century, however, the legal realm had expanded far beyond the 
walls that encased legal institutions, such as Westminster Hall and the Inns of Court, and 
even beyond the narrow audiences that formerly comprised legal professionals and 
members of the government or the court who had a formal or informal interest in the 
legal affairs. The jurisdiction of the central common law courts expanded in the 
eighteenth century to cover a wide array of offenses, including crim. con. suits. The 
broadening definition of trespass, coupled with a 1730 statute that mandated the 
translation of legal proceedings and decisions from Latin into English, meant that the 
range of private disputes settled in the courtroom were accessible (and legible) to a much 
wider audience.
62
 Not only was the legal sphere expanding, it also intersected with the 
public sphere, particularly through the publication of trial proceedings. This practice 
gained in popularity during the long eighteenth-century and the publications formed their 
own genre of trial literature.
 The legal realm was the most controlled, regulated layer of community. The 
private was exposed in public, but the people directly involved were all identified, 
publicly known. In the courtroom, the audience was also visible, which ensured that the 
people consuming the ?private knowledge? were also known (or at least seen) by the 
26
62
 Statute 4 Geo. II c.26; William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 5th ed. 
(Oxford, 1773), 3:21, 322-323. Court records and legal decisions were translated from French to Latin 
during the reign of Edward III. They were temporarily kept in English under Cromwell, but reverted to 
Latin until the 1730 statute. Ibid.
plaintiffs. In this way, the men enjoyed a sense of control not only over the private details 
revealed by their servants? testimonies, but also because their status in the highly-
regulated trial procedure fostered a sense of control over the publicizing of their privacy 
before the court. This level of control was mostly contained within the perimeters of the 
courtroom, however. The legal sphere beyond the court?s physical structures expanded in 
the eighteenth century, and the private disputes brought before the law were recorded, 
printed, and published for profit. The popularity of published crim. con. accounts fueled 
the circulation and consumption of ?private knowledge? about the litigants in the public 
realm of print. The plaintiff-husband?s exercised little if any control of the publicity of 
their private affairs, thereby negating much of the power regained from their 
insubordinate servants during the trial.  
 The crim. con. trial testimonies reveal a social hierarchy of power-relations rooted 
in privacy. It was through challenging and contesting the boundaries of public and private 
-- whether by physically or visually transgressing material boundaries, by behaving 
contrary to prescribed social roles, by exposing the secrets of another, and even by simply 
knowing intimate details about someone?s private life -- that individuals and groups could 
achieve and exercise agency in eighteenth-century Britain. In the domestic sphere, 
servants achieved this through spying on their mistress but withholding their knowledge 
from their master. The traditional hierarchy became inverted through this process and an 
alternative hierarchy was established in which the servants enjoyed power over their 
masters based on their possession of their superiors? secrets. The masters, once they 
became aware of the situation, brought a crim. con. action in London to reassert their 
27
authority in the home. Within the legal sphere, there were dueling hierarchies. The 
traditional, patriarchal hierarchy was acknowledged, but reinforced only within the 
domestic realm. The crim. con. trial fostered another hierarchy in which legal 
professionals (lawyers and judges), along with merchant jurors, mediated and controlled 
the private life (and thus the power) of the aristocratic plaintiffs. Within the public sphere 
there was also a hierarchy based on ?private knowledge,? with those who controlled the 
publicizing of ?private knowledge? at the top, those who consumed or acquired ?private 
knowledge? (via print, theatre, gossip, or other means) as the middling order, and those 
without control over their privacy at the bottom.
63
 Understanding eighteenth-century British society as one organized by levels of 
intimacy, therefore, produces a vision of a society characterized by the same dynamism, 
mercuriality, and mutual reciprocity as the one represented in traditional social histories 
of the period, and that likewise shares the same underlying power struggle rooted in 
knowledge.  It differs, however, by privileging personal intimacy ? by locating power in 
control of the private, the ability to keep one?s secrets.  It reveals individuals and groups 
that were formerly separated according to socio-economic status, political activism (or 
political representation), or commercial interests, coexisting or in conflict within the 
different levels of the ?intimate model.?  Despite their pronounced socio-economic 
differences, most eighteenth-century Britons shared a preoccupation with the private, and 
28
63
 Robert Robson, The Attorney in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1959). For a broader account of the professions during this period, see Wilifred Prest, ed., 
The Professions in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1987), and Penelope J. Corfield, Power 
and the Professions in Britain, 1700?1850 (London: Routledge, 1995).
this concept served as a means of contemplating the personal experiences, interpersonal 
relations, and the material environments each navigated in the course of their lives.
29
Chapter One: The Space of the Home
Quid enim sanctius, quid omni religione munitius, quam domus unusquisque civium? 
[What more sacred, what more strongly guarded by every holy feeling, than a man's own 
home?]
64
 
     -- Marcus Tullius Cicero
Chapter one explores the eighteenth-century domestic interior. Just as the space of the 
home was the primary site of ?criminal conversation,? this chapter lays the foundation for 
an historical analysis of crim. con. trials and establishes the context of their larger 
significance in eighteenth-century British society. Concerns about security pervaded 
British culture during this period. They were discernible in the laws on property and 
ownership and were equally prevalent in contemporary literature. The domestic realm 
was a primary site where this new concern was expressed. Eighteenth-century 
conceptions of private property celebrated the ?Englishman?s castle? -- the house and its 
human and material occupants. The house was a symbol of power for those who were 
fortunate enough to own one, therefore it is unsurprising that the protection of the home 
was a top priority in the eighteenth century. There was a widespread preoccupation with 
the protection of private property, and Britons used both legal and material means to 
achieve this. The manner in which mechanisms of security developed within the domestic 
realm, however, reveals another concern that pervaded the period: privacy. The 
30
64
 Quoted in Blackstone, Commentaries, 4:223. This principle was established as common law a 
century earlier by Sir Edward Coke in The Institutes of the Laws of England (1628), when he stated, "For a 
man's house is his castle, et domus sua cuique est tutissimum refugium [and each man's home is his safest 
refuge]." Quoted in Amanda Vickery, ?An Englishman?s Home is His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and 
Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House,? Past and Present 199 (May 2008): 154n12.
architectural styles, interior designs, curtains, cabinets, and lock-and-key mechanisms 
that became prominent features of the eighteenth-century home were all part of the effort 
to create a culture of privacy.
 The crim. con. suit was a legal action where a husband sued his wife?s lover in 
court for damages. The crime, ?criminal conversation,? was adultery, but crim. con. was 
about more than marital breakdown and moral indiscretions. The suits were brought in 
the common law courts of King?s Bench or Common Pleas and were tried as an action of 
trespass. The domestic realm was a primary site where this new concern for security and 
privacy was expressed.
65
 Crim. con. testimonies illustrate the ways contemporaries 
worked to create a culture of privacy. They also demonstrate that the concept of privacy 
developed unevenly. Privacy relied on the construction of boundaries, and trial transcripts 
reveal that the domestic realm was a site for contesting boundaries as much as it was for 
establishing them. 
The Architecture of Privacy
Crim. con. manipulated the traditional definition of trespass, but it did not completely 
abandon it. Even with its multiplicity of meanings, understandings of trespass were 
31
65
 This theme has been explored by scholars including Ari?s and Georges, eds, A History of 
Private Life, especially the essays in Part Three, ?Community, State, and Family: Trajectories and Tension,? 
397-608, and particularly Nicole Castan, ?The Public and the Private,? 403-445, and Alain Collomp, 
?Families: Habitations and Cohabitations,? 493-529;  Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: 
Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); 
Linda Pollock, ?Living on the Stage of the World: The Concept of Privacy among the Elite of Early 
Modern England,? in Rethinking Social History: English Society, 1570-1920, and Its Interpretations, ed. 
Adrian Wilson, 78-96 (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1993); Carolyn Sargentson, 
?Looking at Furniture Inside Out: Strategies of Secrecy and Security in Eighteenth-Century French 
Furniture,? in Furnishing the Eighteenth Century: What Furniture Can Tell Us about the European and 
American Past, ed. Dena Goodman and Kathryn Norberg (New York: Routledge, 2007); Vickery, 
?Englishman?s Castle,? 147-173.
rooted in the private and intended to enforce its various demarcating boundaries. The 
crim. con. action prosecuted the defendant?s sexual trespass upon a married woman?s 
body (and the subsequent violation of her husband?s honor, reputation, and marital and 
familial comforts). While this was technically the primary offense, lawyers and witnesses 
repeatedly emphasized the transgression of the husband?s house during the trial. The 
private property that was trespassed in a crim. con. suit, then, was not just the plaintiff?s 
wife; it was also his house. The legal maxim ?the Englishman?s home is his castle,? 
suffused eighteenth-century British culture. The physical structure of the house conveyed 
the owner?s status and taste and was treated as an essential right for Englishmen in 
common law theory and practice. To breach the threshold of a man?s house, therefore, 
was a violation of physical and social boundaries, and crim. con. trial testimonies 
highlighted both forms of trespass.
66
 The physical perimeter of the house was sacrosanct under English law.
67
 Law 
officers could not enter a house without a warrant. Even in the line of duty, when the 
occupant was clearly in violation of the law, a civil officer could not break a window or 
any locked passageway to enter the house; ingression was permissible only if the door 
was open or the premises were not sufficiently secured.
68
 Securing the house conferred its 
legal status as ?private.? English common law placed the onus on the homeowner to 
properly fortify his ?castle? from intruders. Records from the Old Bailey Proceedings 
reveal that victims of burglary whose security measures were found to be inadequate 
32
66
 Ibid., 154. 
67
 Ibid., 153.
68
 Ibid, 155; Peter King, Crime, Justice and Discretion in England, 1740-1820 (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 2000), 174.
were not granted the maximum protection of the law. Many accused burglars successfully 
defended themselves from the charge by arguing that they had not had to break into the 
house to rob it, as a door or window was left open or unlocked.
69
 Adequate efforts to 
secure the home, however, were fiercely defended under the law and the punishment for 
invading another?s residence was severe. Burglary, for example, was a capital offense 
during this period.
70
 These changes in the legal status of the home occurred during a 
period in which the social importance of the home also transformed. Not only does the 
law evince the significance of the house, transmutations in the physical structure and the 
social interactions within it likewise signify the centrality of the space of the home in 
eighteenth-century Britain.
 For eighteenth-century elites, the private house symbolized personal reputation 
and public status. This period has been described as the ?Golden Age? of the British 
country manor. The architectural designs of the eighteenth-century country manor 
physically embodied the polite values and social importance of the elite gentleman.
71
 
Country houses were built in the Palladian style in the early part of the century, and 
33
69
 Vickery, ?Englishman?s Castle,? 157. They were not charged with burglary -- which was a 
hanging offense -- but were instead charged with the lesser crime of theft. Vickery investigates the presence 
of locks through burglary and robbery cases recorded in the Old Bailey Proceedings and uses this evidence 
to explore the ways privacy was materially constructed and experienced in eighteenth-century London?s 
lodging-houses. See also King, Crime, Justice and Discretion, 174. The records of the Old Bailey 
Proceedings are accessible through the online database Old Bailey Proceedings Online, available at 
www.oldbaileyonline.org, 12 July 2010.
70
 Vickery, ?Englishman?s Castle,? 154. Burglary was both a criminal and civil violation, so 
victims of burglars had a choice in how justice would be administered. This period witnessed a rise in civil 
suits against trespassers of private property. This recourse for civil damages became increasingly popular 
during the period, but its relevance as a mentalite -- even more than a law -- is evident in the way the law 
was manipulated and exploited in the form of the civil trials for criminal conversation. Ibid., 155; Stone, 
Road to Divorce, 246-47.
71
 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New 
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 204.
characterized more by the neoclassical style by the nineteenth century.
72
 The rational 
construction of the house was paramount in the eighteenth century. Architectural styles 
projected the vision of a rational and ordered society in which elites, especially elite men, 
presided at the top.
73
 In this way, the house reinforced the patriarchal social structure. 
Furthermore, it displayed the intellectual superiority of the resident patriarch. 
 The design and decoration of the interior likewise projected and reinforced elite 
ideals. The furniture of the country manor served the same purpose as the paintings, 
sculptures, and architecture of the house ? it was intended to reflect superior tastes and 
the status and reputation of the owner.
74
 Eighteenth-century furniture was ?architectural 
in feeling,? although architects preferred the style and feel of Italian Baroque and, later, 
the lightness of French Rococo over the Palladian style that tended to complement the 
architecture of the room. The elegant furnishings were usually arranged symmetrically 
around the edges of the room. Changes in the domestic interior also included the 
establishment of rooms that were designated for distinct uses. Certain rooms, for 
example, were intended for social interactions between guests and the owners, such as the 
parlors, dining rooms, and breakfasting rooms. These designated ?social? rooms were 
necessary in order to create and secure separate private, intimate spaces for personal 
use.
75
34
72
 Gervase Jackson-Stops and James Pipkin, The English Country House: A Grand Tour (New 
York: Little, Brown, 1985), 35.
73
 Ibid., 231, 244.
74
 Christopher Christie, The British Country House in the Eighteenth Century, (Manchester: 
Manchester University Press, 2000), 232. 
75
 Girouard, Life in the Country House, 231, 239).
 The closet is arguably the domestic interior space most identified by 
contemporaries and historians alike with emerging notions of privacy in the early modern 
period.
76
 Closets were usually smaller rooms that were adjacent to the bedchamber. It was 
a place of solitude and the occupant usually spent his or, more frequently her, time in 
private meditation or reading and writing. Most closets were furnished with books and a 
writing desk equipped with paper, pen, and ink. In elite residences these rooms were 
often ornately decorated, but closets of all ranks tended to include at least some 
decoration of personal items, such as portraits or drawings on the walls and a few objects 
on a shelf. The standard closet featured a door with a lock on the inside. Sash doors were 
fairly common in the eighteenth century and usually included curtains that could be 
drawn over the glass to conceal the closet?s occupant. The glass door might function to 
allow light into the closet from the hallway or bedchamber (and a candle would be used 
when the curtains were drawn over the door), but these rooms had at least a small 
window whenever possible (and were sometimes called a ?light closet? as a result).
77
 By 
the early eighteenth century, the closet was an established symbol of personal privacy. 
Karen Lipsedge contends many Britons held the closet to be something of a right to 
which individuals were entitled.
78
 This even applied to servants, who were often provided 
a closet of their own, although they were not as large as the masters? and were sometimes 
35
76
 Brown, ?The Female Philosophe in the Closet?; Orest Ranum, ?The Refuges of Intimacy,? in A 
History of Private Life, 207-263; Karen Lipsedge, ??Enter Into Thy Closet?: Women, Closet Culture and the 
Eighteenth-Century Novel,? in Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 
1700-1830, ed. John Styles and Amanda Vickery, 107-124 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). For 
contemporary accounts of the closet, see Edward Wettenhall, Enter Into Thy Closet: or, A Method for 
Private Devotion (1663); Oliver Heywood, Closet-Prayer a Christian Duty...Tending to prove that the 
Worship of God in Secret, is the indispensible duty of all Christians (1668). 
77
 Lipsedge, ?Enter Into Thy Closet,? 110-111, 116; McKeon, Secret History, 40, 225.
78
 Lipsedge, ?Enter Into Thy Closet,? 112.
simply small alcoves or ?nooks? rather than proper rooms. Another difference was that a 
servant?s closet rarely had a lock on the door, while this was a defining feature of their 
mistress?s closet.
79
 The spatial boundaries of the closet created a ?community of one,? but the 
architectural mechanisms for intimacy were not limited to isolating one individual from 
the rest of the household. The domestic realm also featured spatial and social segregation 
between different groups in the home. The popularity of Neoclassicism, Palladianism, 
Rococo, and Gothic architectural styles fueled the frequent remodeling of the buildings? 
exteriors and interior designs in this period. The use of interior spaces, however, was 
influenced less by aesthetic preferences than by social ones. While the eighteenth-century 
house was certainly a ?social? site, the organization of the interior functioned to create a 
greater sense of privacy for the family. Separating ?social? spaces from ?private? spaces 
in the domestic interior entailed separating the family?s apartments from those of guests. 
This was most often achieved by moving the family?s rooms to the back or sides of the 
house while the guest apartments and visiting rooms remained in the front. Within the 
family apartments, some spaces were more private than others. The closet was not the 
only ?private? room in the house, however. The bedchamber and dressing chambers were 
formerly ?social? rooms that became designated as private spaces for the master and the 
mistress.
80
 In the sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, owners received guests and 
performed numerous public activities in their bedrooms, but this began to change in the 
late seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, receiving rooms were increasingly 
36
79
 Ibid., 111.
80
 Girouard, English Country House, 231.
located in another room in the family apartment. Dressing rooms usually attached to 
bedchambers, and also frequently doubled as sitting rooms. Women spent their mornings 
in the dressing room, but did not normally entertain guests there. By the mid-eighteenth 
century, this rule was fairly widely observed in the houses of London and other towns, 
although the practice still lingered in some country houses. Even then, however, the 
dressing room was for entertaining close friends rather than general visitors. A reception 
room might be added to the lady?s dressing room and called a ?sitting room? or ?drawing 
room,? ?boudoir,? or simply her ?room,? while the master of the house began receiving 
guests in his study. In some residences, receiving guests was strictly limited to a parlor or 
sitting room on the first floor. 
 In all instances, however, by mid-century it was deemed wholly unacceptable to 
entertain company in one?s bedroom, particularly at certain times of the day and 
especially members of the opposite sex.
81
 A late-night visit by a gentleman could only 
mean one thing, and British men and women violated this rule at their peril, as the 
evidence employed in crim. con. trials frequently demonstrated. The arguments for the 
plaintiff in the 1794 crim. con. trial Cadogan v. Cooper, for example, appealed to these 
standards as evidence of adultery between the defendant and the plaintiff?s wife. Servants 
testified during the trial that they waited up one night to witness a suspected late-night 
rendezvous. Although they did not directly observe their mistress and her lover in the act 
of adultery, they described Reverend Cooper entering Lady Cadogan?s apartment in the 
middle of the night in a state of undress. The lawyers asserted that, although the 
37
81
 Ibid; John Fowler and John Cornforth, English Decoration in the Eighteenth Century 
(Princeton: Pyne Press, 1972), 81.
witnesses only saw Cooper enter the green room, which connected to both the 
bedchamber and the lady?s drawing room, it was obvious which room he entered after the 
green room. Emphasizing the fact that he was undressed, they inquired rhetorically as to 
why he would go to sit naked in a dressing room, when the lady he had been lusting after 
was in the next bedchamber?
82
 Cooper and Lady Cadogan?s failure to observe the 
prescribed social etiquette assigned to that particular domestic space confirmed their 
guilt. In the 1730 crim. con. trial Abergavenny v. Lyddel, a servant testified that her 
mistress, Lady Abergavenny, once ordered her out of the room when a frequent male 
visitor, Richard Lyddel, was there. The request piqued the servant?s curiosity, as her lady 
did not usually receive visitors in her bedchamber, and only entertained guests in her 
adjoining dressing room with her maid present.
83
 A man in a woman?s apartment left no 
doubt in the minds of the jurors as to what occurred behind closed doors.
 Within the bedroom, the bed -- and by extension any activities conducted upon it 
-- was also identified as a private space. Customs that required the presence of neighbors 
or people outside the family in the bedroom were no longer in vogue in the eighteenth 
century. The practice of having a group of onlookers tuck newlyweds into bed and greet 
them again in the morning declined in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries.
84
 
Christenings were formerly performed in the bedroom, with the mother and child in her 
38
82
 Cadogan v. Cooper (1794), 19-20, 29-30. This particular publication is entitled The Trial at 
Large of the Right Honourable Lady Cadogan for Adultery with The Rev. Mr. Cooper (London, 1794), but 
its contents are the crim. con. proceedings for Cadogan v. Cooper. Hereafter cited as Cadogan v. Cooper.
83
 The Whole Tryal of Richard Lyddel...For Carrying on a Criminal Conversation with the late 
Lady Abergavenny (London, 1730), 6-7.
84
 Ari?s, introduction to History of Private Life, 5.
bed, but in the eighteenth century this ceremony moved from the bedroom to another 
chamber in the house, such as the drawing room, or even to a church.
85
 
 Architectural mechanisms -- an alcove, for example -- further reinforced the 
intimacy of the bed. Beds also tended to have canopies from which the curtains were 
draped with cords to draw them open or closed around the bed as desired. An alternative 
to the canopy was to hang the curtains directly from the ceiling, a practice that emerged 
in this period. Even a sofa bed in a sitting room might have a canopy with curtains.
86
 The 
privacy of this space was identified with spousal intimacy, although this was not always a 
sexual association. The bed was also a place where a husband and wife could have a 
private conversation at the end of the day, even though popular references to this practice 
represented the moment as an ample opportunity for women to corner their husbands and 
nag them.
87
 With both the closet and the bed, curtains allowed the occupants of that space 
to not only withdraw physically from the presence of others, but also to conceal 
themselves from view.
88
 
 Architectural innovations not only created greater space between the owners and 
the guests in their house, but also separated those of superior rank from those of the 
lowest rank, especially domestic servants. These features were components of the 
39
85
 Girouard, English Country House, 231.
86
 Fowler and Cornforth, English Decoration, 81; Ari?s, introduction to History of Private Life, 9.
87
 This was known as a ?curtain lecture,? which Samuel Johnson defined in his 1755 Dictionary 
as, ?a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed.? Quoted in McKeon, Secret History, 243. 
88
 This was cause for concern for some contemporaries, however, who depicted the closet in 
particular as a ??locus of liberation and licence,?? because it facilitated women?s withdrawal from the 
authoritative gaze of men in the house and allowed them to engage in clandestine intellectual and even 
sexual affairs. Quoted in Lipsedge, ?Enter Into Thy Closet,? 112.
widening gap between elite and plebeian cultures in eighteenth-century society.
89
 The 
presence of domestic workers in close proximity to their social superiors in the household 
became an affront to elite sensibilities, and this necessitated the removal of servants from 
sight as much as possible. This distancing of servants from elites manifested both in 
emerging modes of polite sociability and in new architectural styles for the domestic 
interior. It was common practice to designate the basement or the garrets as servants? 
quarters, relegating them to the periphery of the house so that elites could inhabit the 
main apartments. This separation was reinforced by other architectural mechanisms for 
privacy, such as back hallways and stairs, servants? bells, and lock-and-key features, 
among others. The inclusion of back hallways and staircases enabled servants to move 
from different parts of the house to perform their various duties without bringing them 
into direct contact with elites.
90
 Renowned architect Isaac Ware explained in 1768 that, ?a 
good house should always have two staircases, one for shew and the other for 
domesticks.?
91
 Servants? bells were also gaining prominence in this period. Many houses 
were equipped with a bell in various chambers, especially in parlors and dining rooms, 
and they served the same purpose as back hallways and stairs. The bells allowed elites to 
summon an attendant from other parts of the house, making it unnecessary for servants to 
remain in close proximity in order to hear their master?s call. This enabled the widening 
40
89
 Thompson, Customs in Common, 16-36.
90
 Girouard, English Country House, 138; Isaac Ware, A Complete Body of Architecture. Adorned 
with Plans and Elevations, from Original Designs (London 1768), 322, 325. Tim Meldrum notes the 
exceptions to this trend and takes into account the particular roles of certain servants, such as the mistress?s 
personal maid, who often was supposed to be near her lady at all times, unless otherwise instructed. 
Meldrum, ?Domestic Service, Privacy and the Eighteenth-Century Metropolitan Household,? Urban 
History 26, no. 1 (1999): 37-38. 
91
 Ware, Complete Body of Architecture (London, 1768), 325.
distance between servants and masters in the home and provided a greater sense of 
privacy for elites in the domestic sphere. 
 Drawn curtains and servant bells were two features that eighteenth-century 
Britons used to effect intimacy in the home, but the primary mechanism for achieving 
this was the door. An emerging notion of private or personal space materialized in the 
inclusion of chamber doors that opened into hallways. The practice of having various 
chambers strung together fell out of favor, as people began to complain of the 
inconvenience of having to pass through multiple rooms -- and encounter multiple 
inhabitants -- to reach a certain chamber. Ware demonstrated he was attuned to the 
intrinsic desire for privacy in the home when he explained that the architect?s job was to 
?contrive secret ways to them all? to avoid this inconvenience.
92
 In 1757, architect 
Abraham Swan published the two-volume A Collection of Designs in Architecture, in 
which he also distinguished between private and public space in the home based on direct 
entry to the rooms: ?All the Rooms in his House are private, that is there is a Way into 
each of them without passing through any other Room; which is a Circumstance that 
should always be attended to in laying out and disposing the Rooms of a House.?
93
 He 
utilized other architectural features to ensure this. His design in the opening plate of the 
second volume features ?Two Stair cases which are so placed that every Room in the 
House is private,? and goes on to identify which set of stairs is for the servants? use (not 
the ?best Stair-case,? but the other set).
94
41
92
 Ibid., 328.
93
 Abraham Swan, A Collection of Designs in Architecture (London, [1757]), 1:2.
94
 Ibid., 2:1.
Securing Privacy in the Home
While doors and staircases created privacy, locks were necessary for maintaining it. 
During this period the ability to close (or ?fasten?) a door and lock it was essential for 
creating and maintaining privacy in the home. In fact, this conferred the legal status of 
?private? upon a house, as legal protection from a house robbery hinged upon owners? 
adequate measures for securing it. Similarly, the legal criteria for identifying a ?private? 
room was whether the door was shut and locked.
95
 It was not simply the ability to 
physically enclose one?s self (or one?s things) in a room that made the space intimate; the 
seclusion needed to be secured. The locks on the closet door -- and the ability to lock it 
from the inside -- as well as locks on bedroom doors achieved this.
96
 Seventeenth- and 
eighteenth-century writers described the closet with specific references to the features of 
a closed and locked door ? the purpose being to seclude the person inside and to exclude 
other persons outside.
97
 Locks also regulated access to ?social? rooms such as parlors, 
drawing rooms, dining rooms, or music rooms. This allowed the person or persons 
occupying a particular room to render it ?private? at any given moment by simply closing 
or locking the door.
42
95
 Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 158. In elite residences, this distinction sometimes depended on 
whether the door was closed and latched, or also locked.
96
 Lipsedge argues that Samuel Richardson?s prolific protagonist Clarissa excercises power by 
being able to control her private space of the closet when she locks the door and draws the curtain to 
exclude Bella?s unwelcome lecturing. Lipsedge, ?Enter Into Thy Closet,? 116-19.
97
 McKeon, Secret History, 40. For example, see Wettenhall, Enter Into Thy Closet; Heywood, 
Closet-Prayer a Christian Duty.
 This period saw major improvements in lock security, and professional locksmiths 
began to patent their products in the last quarter of the century.
98
 In a printed ?how to 
guide? for the various arts of smithing (originally published in the 1690s), the section on 
locksmiths included a short-list of the types of locks one might encounter in the trade. 
There were different locks for different purposes: street-door locks (street locks), 
chamber-door locks (spring locks), cupboard locks, chest-locks, trunk-locks, and pad-
locks (also known as ?secret-locks?
99
), among others.
100
 In the third edition of The City 
and Country Purchaser's and Builder's Dictionary, published in 1736, the entry for 
?Locks? included a disclaimer for the abridged description: ?These are some of the 
Names and Prices of Locks; for to enumerate them all, were needless; and besides, there 
is no Price, from a Groat, or Sixpence, to 50 l. but a Lock may be made to deserve, 
according to some.?
101
 These developments in lock and key mechanisms were not strictly 
the product of technological innovations. The proliferation of locks on items ranging 
from the doors of public and private buildings to desks, cupboards, chests, and individual 
lock-boxes, represents the physical manifestation of underlying notions about personal 
ownership of property and the need to protect it, which fueled the development of more 
effective technologies to secure those possessions.
43
98
 The first patent for locks was in 1778; Joseph Bramah received a patent for his new lock design 
in 1785, and he promoted the ingenuity and necessity of his lock in a published account entitled A 
dissertation on the construction of locks (London, [1785?]).
99
 Richard Neve, The city and country purchaser's and builder's dictionary: or, the complete 
builder's guide, 3rd ed. (London, 1736), 207.
100
 Joseph Moxon, Mechanick exercises: or, The doctrine of handy-works. Applied to the art of 
smithing in general (London, 1693-1694), 21.
101
 Neve, builder's dictionary, 207.
 Locks also became features on a range of ?domestic? items, including cabinets, 
drawers, lids, and doors.
102
 These and other mechanisms for domestic security -- such as 
improved latches, curtains, street lights, or ?entry bells? -- on doors and windows to the 
outside, on doors to interior chambers, on cabinets and drawers in the kitchen, study, and 
bedchambers, were all constructed in increasingly intricate and precise detail in order to 
enhance the protection of the contents and prevent breaches of that security by intruders. 
Amanda Vickery has investigated the methods used to secure the perimeter of the home 
from external breaches in eighteenth-century London. This was so important to 
contemporaries that it developed into a daily ritual known as ?shutting in.? This practice 
began at nightfall and entailed methods for safeguarding the house at multiple points of 
entry that could range from the use of an assortment of locks, bolts, and bars for windows 
and doors, to stationing servants and/or attack dogs at entrances during the night, to 
keeping more conventional defensive weapons on hand.
103
 
 Concerns over domestic security did not only apply to preventing a breach of the 
exterior, however. Locks were also essential to the fortification of internal boundaries 
within the house.
104
 Many British men and women considered their private property to be 
particularly vulnerable to theft by domestic workers.
105
 The characterization of the 
44
102
 Bramah, Dissertation, 7.
103
 Vickery, ?Englishman?s Castle,? 156.
104
 Ibid., 153-163. 
105
 Bramah claimed that this threat was his primary focus as he developed his patented design for 
an ?un-pickable? lock in 1784. Homeowners? anxiety over this issue was not entirely misplaced, however, 
as the records of the Old Bailey Proceedings reveal significant numbers of servants who were found guilty 
-- and many were subsequently sentenced to death -- for stealing from their master?s home. For an early 
example from 1715, see Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, 10 June 2010), 27 April 
1715, the trial of Mary Nash (t17150427-2).
servants in crim. con. trials fit within a larger discourse of a ?servant problem? in 
eighteenth-century Britain that reinforced notions of the threat they posed to domestic 
tranquility.  A 1728 pamphlet by a ?Converted Thief,? entitled Street-Robberies, 
Consider?d: The Reason of Their Being so Frequent, with Probable Means to Prevent 
?Em, portrayed servants as a danger to home security.
106
 The author advised homeowners 
to be vigilant about their servants, especially elites since their households required a 
greater number of domestic workers. He recalled that a number of robbers found jobs as 
servants ?on no other Design than to facilitate the robbing of the House.? He emphasized 
the importance of a servant?s reputation and advised against hiring maids who lacked a 
good recommendation. He warned employers not to be fooled by the air of innocence 
surrounding the young country girls who had arrived in town fresh ?out of a Waggon? 
and looking for work, and estimated that half these women were merely putting up a front 
to secure employment in a nice house.
107
 
 The account portrayed female servants as particularly dangerous, as the ones who 
were not thieves themselves could unwittingly facilitate a robbery. Even if a maid was 
honest upon her arrival in the house, the author argued, she was likely to be corrupted, as 
young women were love-sick romantics by nature and therefore easily seduced by 
robbers, who were then able to persuade the maids to let them into their master?s house at 
night.
108
 He identified as high-risk maids who have too many male acquaintances and 
45
106
 Converted Thief, Street-robberies, consider?d: the reason of their being so frequent, with 
probable means to prevent ?em (London, [1728]), 69.
107
 Ibid.
108
 ?For there are Setts of Fellows that make it their Business to gain upon the Inclinations of the 
Maids, who are susceptible of Love, to gain an Opportunity of robbing the House.? Ibid.
recommended that these women be fired promptly. He advised housekeepers to pay them 
a month?s wages and make their termination effective immediately, rather than give them 
the customary month?s notice: ?For many Servants will do more Mischief in that Month, 
than perhaps ten times their Wages would come to.? He admitted, however, that there 
might be exceptions to this rule, and for these honest servants an alternative method of 
dismissal would be more appropriate.
109
   
 Other tracts likewise warned homeowners of the potential threat servants posed to 
private property. Joseph Bramah introduced his new patented lock in his 1785 publication 
A Dissertation on the Construction of Locks. He explained the necessity of a new type of 
lock that could provide better security than the models currently in use. He included 
illustrations and detailed descriptions of the construction of the most commonly used 
locks and exposed the flaws in their designs that made the locks easy to ?pick.?
110
 Rather 
than emphasizing the purpose of his new lock-and-key model for securing the entries to a 
house from robbers and burglars, Bramah explicitly located the value of his design in its 
application to the domestic interior. He explained to his readers that when designing his 
?unpickable? lock, his ?chief attention...was applied to contrive a security against the 
advantage, which a domestic enemy possesses, in the opportunity of executing his 
purposes at his leisure.?
111
 Because servants were in the house most of the time, they had 
access to all of their master?s secured possessions and could take advantage of the 
owner?s absence to break the locks and abscond with the stolen items.
46
109
 Ibid.
110
 Bramah, Dissertation, 5-7.
111
 Ibid., 26 (emphasis is Bramah?s). 
 Bramah?s tract demonstrates that contemporary concerns with security were 
rooted in the private -- the private property of the home, one?s money and material 
possessions, and the concealment and protection of personal items. In the domestic 
sphere, security and secrets went hand in hand for contemporaries, as the presence of a 
lock indicated that the content beyond it was in need of protecting.
112
 Owners used 
?locked spaces? not just for storage, but also to hide things, their purpose being ?the 
creation and maintenance of a secret, the knowledge of whose existence was the object of 
protection.?
113
 Desks, cabinets, and other furniture pieces functioned to conceal 
inanimate objects such as love letters, diaries, and jewelry, from unwelcome eyes. Studies 
of the intricacies of eighteenth-century furniture reveal how meticulously devoted 
contemporaries were about creating and maintaining their secrets. A desk, for example, 
might have a lock on its drawer, but inside the drawer there might be a hidden 
compartment that functioned to hide secret items.
114
 The lock, therefore, was a tool used 
not only for security but also for concealment. 
Servants and the (In)security of Secrets
Masters and mistresses were not only concerned with securing their material possessions 
from their servants, however. In cases of criminal conversation, the mechanisms for 
47
112
 Carolyn Sargentson makes this connection between the presence of locks and protecting a 
secret in her study on eighteenth-century French furniture. Sargentson, ?Strategies of Secrecy,? 206-207.
113
 Ibid., 207. 
114
 Ibid., 207-208. For more studies on the role of furniture and objects in creating and 
maintaining, or facilitating the exposure of, secrets within the domestic interior, see Mimi Hellman, 
?Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-Century France,? in ?Sites and Margins of the Public 
Sphere,? special issue, Eighteenth-Century Studies 32, no. 4 (Summer 1999): 415-445; Mike Blackwell, ed. 
The Secret Life of Things (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2007); Brown, ?Female Philosophe in the 
Closet;? and Ari?s and Georges, History of Private Life.
secrecy were meant to conceal people, rather than objects. In his study of eighteenth-
century architecture, Mark Girouard observed that ?Apartments are planned so that all 
ways of access can be sealed off at will, independence secured as a result, and the 
surprising discovery of secrets made impossible.?
115
 In most instances, the mechanism 
for secrecy was a closed door that was either locked or fastened, enclosing the wife and 
her lover on the inside and concealing them from the view of the servants on the outside. 
Locked doors proved to be a superficial barrier much of the time, however, as prying eyes 
merely found their way to the keyhole instead. As Carolyn Sargentson notes, ?The 
discovery of secrets was, of course, never an absolute impossibility, and therein lay the 
significance of the fine line between concealment and exposure, the treading of which 
seems to have been such a central feature of eighteenth-century social life and gender 
relations.?
116
 Discovering a secret relied heavily on the investigator?s ability to navigate 
the mechanisms employed for protecting the secret:
The investigative fingers of a determined seeker of secrets, informed by a certain 
familiarity with similar objects and motivated by familial strategies or 
subterfuge, might probe for spaces disguised by clever cabinetmakers. Here the 
legibility of furniture was a key to discovering the secret.
117
In this way, the domestic servants were among the key offenders in crim. con. trials. They 
comprised the bulk of the witnesses to the adultery, but their methods of observation were 
as much a cause for concern as the adultery itself.  They were not only familiar with the 
mechanisms of secrecy employed by their mistress, they were driven by an apparently 
insatiable desire to discover what was being kept from them. The lovers? attempts to 
48
115
 Quoted in Sargentson, ?Strategies of Secrecy,? 221.
116
 Ibid.
117
 Ibid.
maintain a clandestine affair in a house full of people were consistently undermined by 
curious servants, who constructed a culture of curiosity that was perpetually in conflict 
with the culture of privacy. If curious servants could not observe what was happening 
beyond the door, they might strategically situate themselves within the vicinity of the 
room so they could at least be privy to any incriminating behavior after the fact, even if it 
was simply witnessing any attempts at a discreet escape through a back exit.
118
 This is evident in the 1794 crim. con. trial Cadogan v. Cooper, where the 
plaintiff?s counsel capitalized on servants? manipulation of architectural mechanisms for 
secrecy to spy on their mistress. In fact, Lord Cadogan?s lawyer, Thomas Erskine, 
presented a floor plan of Cadogan?s London house to demonstrate the architecture of 
adultery to the jury. He used it to illustrate the lovers? attempts to maintain the secrecy of 
their affair through their use of connecting rooms and back hallways. He also laid out the 
servants? plan of observation to support testimony that they witnessed the adultery from 
various vantage points in the house and assured the jury that if there was any doubt that 
they could see the actions they described, he would refer to the floor plan for proof, and 
asserted, ?Gentlemen, you will easily see how necessary it was for Lady Cadogan and 
this gentleman (Mr. Cooper) to conceal their amours from the view of an injured 
husband.?
119
 
 The space of the home was the primary site of ?criminal conversation? in 
eighteenth-century Britain and provided a stage for negotiating meanings and practices of 
privacy both within the house and beyond. Crim. con. trial records illustrate how a 
49
118
 This can be seen in Cadogan v Cooper and Harris v. Craven, to name a few.
119
 Ibid., 12-13, 18. 
culture of privacy developed in the domestic realm, but they also illuminate the 
concomitant emergence of a culture of curiosity among domestic servants. A woman?s 
attempts to conduct intimate relations free from observation existed in constant tension 
with her servants? unrestrained curiosity. Crim. con. testimonies illustrate just how 
precarious secrecy was, even at the most intimate level. The line between concealment 
and exposure was tenuous at best and, in crim. con. trial testimonies at least, the ease with 
which boundaries were breached reduced all security to what Bramah described as 
?imaginary security.?
120
 The trial records demonstrate that servants proved remarkably 
adept at contravening any mechanisms of secrecy their mistress employed, perpetuating 
the constant tension between curiosity and privacy in the household. Crim. con. trial 
testimonies reveal that this tension was a defining characteristic of the relations between 
servants and masters in eighteenth-century Britain.
50
120
 Bramah, Dissertation, 5.
Chapter Two: Servants and Masters
Servant Resistance to ?Domestic Enclosure?
Elites appropriated the practice of enclosure in their efforts to create a culture of privacy 
in the home, a parallel development that can be described as ?domestic enclosure.? The 
enclosure of lands in the English countryside began during the late medieval period, but 
the process took on a new form in the eighteenth century and had a significant impact on 
contemporary English society.
121
 One result of land enclosure during the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries was that it necessitated the migration of many rural inhabitants to 
English towns, particularly London, to find work. Historians have linked this 
development to the rise in various forms of service, from domestic labor to 
apprenticeships, as the number of people seeking wage-based employment grew. Those 
who found work as domestic servants encountered another form of enclosure in the 
domestic realm, however. Enclosing formerly-common land entailed constructing fences 
around areas to designate private property and establish physical boundaries that were not 
to be breached. This privatization was one aspect of a growing culture of privacy in 
eighteenth-century Britain, and chapter one explored the ways that contemporaries 
constructed similar boundaries within the domestic sphere, most notably through 
51
121
 J. M. Neeson explores the social impact of enclosures on the ?commoners? during the 
eighteenth-century in Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 
1700-1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Thompson also addresses the subject in two of 
his works: Customs in Common, and The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin Books, 
1991). In the latter work, Thompson contends that enclosures amounted to ?a plain enough case of class 
robbery.? Ibid., 218.
architectural innovations. Elite households secured private property and spaces with 
improved lock-and-key mechanisms, concealing secrets as well as protecting physical 
items. Enclosure in the home removed servants to the periphery and limited their access 
to newly-?private? spaces and goods they were previously permitted to use with relative 
freedom.
122
  
 Crim. con. trials show how servants resisted attempts at ?domestic enclosure.? 
They constantly tested and transgressed the boundaries elites imposed to secure 
?distance? from their subordinates. The more barriers elites constructed, the more 
aggressively servants worked to overcome them. A latched or locked chamber door made 
servants suspicious of what was being secured inside the room that was suddenly 
inaccessible to them. In an age where natural curiosity was increasingly praised as a 
virtue,
123
 mechanisms of secrecy encouraged the invasion of privacy far more than it 
discouraged it. Nowhere is this more evident than in the phenomenon of the crim. con. 
trial. 
 Trial records described the impressive efforts taken by servants to observe their 
mistresses? conduct behind closed doors. Crim. con. testimonies documented the various 
sites in the domestic interior where clandestine encounters took place. These accounts 
illustrate the tension between elites? efforts to establish privacy and servants? desire to 
discover what was being hidden from them. Many times the same architectural 
innovations that elites employed to create a culture of privacy in the home were exploited 
52
122
 Peter Linebaugh, ?The Cat Likes Cream: The Waging Hand in Five Trades,? in The London 
Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century, 2nd ed., 225-255 (New York: Verso, 2003).
123
 Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), especially the 
introduction.
by servants to observe private behavior. The role of the closet in crim. con. testimonies in 
many ways encapsulates the tension between servants and masters and concealment and 
exposure. This is due to the closet?s prominence as a symbol of privacy in this period, 
particularly for women.
124
 Although it was meant to be a site for removing the person 
from the view of others in order to conduct themselves in private, crim. con. testimonies 
reveal that closets were utilized as spaces for both maintaining and exposing adultery.
 A notorious example of this appears in one of the most sensational crim. con. suits 
of the century. In the 1757 trial, Knowles v. Gambier, a servant named Elizabeth Bentley 
told the court that Mrs. Knowles and Captain Gambier arrived in London from Jamaica, 
where Admiral Knowles remained on duty. Upon their arrival, Mrs. Knowles and the 
captain cleaned out a closet in her bedchamber and Knowles ?fitted himself to it, that, in 
case of the sudden arrival of the Admiral, the Captain might hide himself there.?
125
 
Bentley further deposed that, ?I saw him go in and try the closet, and he told me, it would 
do for the purpose; and the key was put inside.?
126
 Mrs. Knowles?s closet was 
accommodated specifically to conceal her lover in the event of a surprise visit from her 
husband. Ultimately, however, that fact served as evidence against Gambier.
127
 
 There were other instances where closets facilitated the discovery of a ?criminal 
conversation? rather than concealing it. In Abergavenny v. Lyddel (1730), three witnesses 
concocted a plan to catch the Lady Abergavenny with her paramour. They hid in the 
53
124
 Lipsedge, ?Enter Thy Closet,? 112. For additional discussions on the closet and privacy, see 
Brown, ?Female Philosophe in the Closet;? and Ranum, ?The Refuges of Intimacy,? in A History of Private 
Life, 207-263.
125
 Knowles v. Gambier (1757), in Trials for Adultery, 5:24.
126
 Ibid.
127
 Ibid.
bedroom closet early one morning and waited for indications an adultery was taking 
place. The witnesses then burst from the closet, threw back the bed curtains and found 
their mistress ?in a very indecent posture,? lying on her back with her dress pulled down 
to her knees, so that her thighs were exposed.
128
 Similar ?discovery scenes? were 
described in other crim. con. trials and were depicted in illustrated trial accounts (see fig. 
1).
129
 These trials illustrate the way elites attempted to create spaces of intimacy in the 
home where they withdrew into seclusion from other members of the household, but 
found their efforts thwarted by the very people from whom they wished to be isolated. 
 Other witness testimonies likewise illustrate servants? familiarity with 
architectural mechanisms for privacy, and their willingness to exploit those mechanisms 
for their own ends in order to spy on their superiors.  Trial records further reveal that in 
the household community very little was outside the purview of domestic servants. In 
1730, Lord Abergavenny brought a crim. con. suit before the Court of Common Pleas 
against Richard Lyddel. The evidence provided came almost entirely from household 
servants. The footman?s bedchamber in the Abergavenny?s country manor was located 
beneath the guest apartment, where Lyddel stayed during his visits. During the trial, the 
footman described an incident when, upon hearing the bed creaking in Lyddel?s 
apartment, he went upstairs to see who came out of the bedchamber. When Lyddel peered 
out of the room and saw the footman approaching, he sent him to fetch his personal 
servant. The footman agreed, but he suspected the ?guest? was leaving another way and
54
128
 Abergavenny v. Lyddel (1730), in Adultery Anatomized: in a Select Collection of Tryals, for 
Criminal Conversation (London, 1761), 95-96.
129
 Fig. 1: ?Mrs. Collet discovered in bed with John Branch, by Edward Chapman and others,? The 
Trial of Anne Charlotte Collet (1770), in Trials for Adultery, inserted between pp. 2:4-5.
Fig. 1. ?Mrs. Collet discovered in bed with John Branch, by Edward Chapman and others,? The 
Trial of Anne Charlotte Collet (1770), in Trials for Adultery
55
quickly rushed up the back stairs and through the long gallery just in time to see Lady 
Abergavenny exit Lyddel?s apartment looking very red and disheveled.
130
 The footman 
further testified that the following morning he heard the bed creaking in Lyddel?s 
chamber again. In order to see if his lady was in Lyddel?s bedchamber, he went into the 
gallery, removed his wig and laid low on the floor to avoid being detected. Once the 
creaking stopped, he heard the door unbolt, after which Lyddel opened the door, peaked 
out into the hallway, and returned inside. Then he saw Lady Abergavenny exit, pressing 
down her petticoats, presumably, the footman conjectured to the court, to keep the guest 
in the next room from hearing the rustling of her silks.
131
 Other servants also took advantage of the layout of the interior to spy on their 
mistresses. The architectural trend of removing servants? areas from the main part of the 
house could backfire. In fact, the testimony of another witness in this same trial suggests 
that this practice actually facilitated the observation of the mistress?s adultery, rather than 
provide an obstacle to be overcome. The laundry maid, who deposed that ?the Building 
of the Laundry is a back Building cross the Gravel Court, right against her Lady?s 
Dressing Room,? described one occasion when the window shutters that were usually 
closed were opened just wide enough that she could see inside the chamber, where she 
observed Lyddel pull Lady Abergavenny ?by the pinners?
132
 and kiss her. She testified 
56
130
 Abergavenny v. Lyddel (1730), in Adultery Anatomized, 91-92.
131
 Ibid, 92; Tryal of Richard Lyddel, 11.
132
 A ?pinner? was a type of vestigial cap that was pinned to the top of the head. It was dressier 
than a regular cap and was often made mostly of lace. A pinner could have lappets, which were two long 
strips of fabric that hung down in the back or could be pinned up on top. These lappets are probably what 
the maid saw Lyddel ?pulling? as he kissed Lady Abergavenny. For a glossary of terminology for 
eighteenth-century costume, see Sue Felshin, Glossary of 18th Century Costume Terminology, http://
people.csail.mit.edu/sfelshin/revwar/glossary.html (accessed July 13, 2010).
that she continued watching this episode for a quarter-hour, and claimed she witnessed 
similar encounters on more than one occasion.
133
 A maid named Elizabeth Hopping also 
described the suspicious incidents she had observed between Lyddel and Lady 
Abergavenny. On numerous occasions, she claimed, she had seen them kissing in her 
Lady?s dressing room and ?thought the Familiarity was too great betwixt them.? While 
rooms began to feature doors for direct entry from hallways or stairs, many of these 
?social? rooms were also adjoined by a connecting door. One morning when they were 
alone in the dining room, Hopping snuck into the adjacent withdrawing room to watch 
them through the keyhole. She described seeing her Lady with her petticoats pulled up 
and Lyddel pressed against her, ?doing something that a man ought not to do? (see fig. 2). 
 Clearly, the lock-and-key feature on doors to interior chambers could be breached 
by clever servants. This threat was palpable enough to merit depictions in contemporary 
literature of maids watching through keyholes (see fig. 3). Mary Bewicke and William 
Vaughan tried to preempt any keyhole-prying by pinning a handkerchief over the door 
knob, but they forgot to remove it on one occasion and the maid found it. This aroused 
suspicion among the servants, who determined to watch Bewicke closely to discover the 
secret their mistress was shielding from them with her handkerchief.
134
 A less 
conspicuous mechanism for secrecy was the bed curtain.
135
 Curtains created a greater 
sense of intimacy for the bed?s occupants, be they amorous spouses or adulterous lovers,
57
133
 Abergavenny v. Lyddel (1730), in Adultery Anatomized, 84-88, 95-96; Tryal of Richard Lyddel, 
7.
134
 The Trial of Mary Elizabeth Bewicke...for Adultery with William Welby Vaughan (1793), in The 
cuckold's chronicle; being select trials for adultery, incest, imbecillity, ravishment, &c. (London, 1793), 
2:266.
135
 Collomp, ?Families: Habitations and Cohabitations,? in A History of Private Life, 509.
Figure 2. ?Lady Abergavenny & Mr. Liddel, Amusing Themselves? in Trials for Adultery 1
58
Figure 3. Curiosity (1817), in Stone, Road to Divorce.
59
but for Bewicke and Vaughan, it merely provided them with an imaginary cloak of 
security. One of Bewicke?s maids testified that she peered through the partially-opened 
door of a spare room and saw her mistress and Vaughan committing adultery. They had 
drawn the curtains closed on the side of the bed that was visible from the door without 
realizing that the mirror on the opposite wall exposed the bed?s occupants to full 
view.
136
 
 A servants? bell was another feature of domestic architecture intended to assist in 
distancing masters from servants.
137
 Like the other mechanisms, however, the servants? 
bells did not guarantee absolute privacy. In Sarah Worgan?s 1768 adultery trial, a servant, 
Anne Nichols, told the court that after Worgan and Robert Rowe ?had been in the 
[parlor]...alone for a considerable time,? Worgan rang the parlor bell to summon her 
maid. Nichols, who was ?just then coming down stairs, opened the parlour door almost as 
soon as the bell rung.? The pair, not having anticipated the maid?s immediate arrival, had 
not had time to fully dress and compose themselves, and Nichols observed that they were 
?very much confused and hot?  when she entered the room.
138
 In another trial, a servant 
described an instance where he listened through the parlor keyhole to his mistress and her 
lover committing adultery. He deposed that when they were finished his mistress, 
unaware that her servant had been spying on them outside the door, rang the parlor bell to 
summon him for food and wine. He cleverly hurried down the hall, ?then turned about, 
60
136
 Trial of Mary Bewicke (1793), in Cuckold's Chronicle, 2:268, 272.
137
 Girouard, English Country House, 264-65. 
138
 The Trial of Sarah Worgan (1768), in Trials for Adultery, 7:52; ibid., in Crim. Con. Biography, 
1:338.
and appeared as if coming up stairs? so his mistress would not discover what he had been 
doing.
139
Curiosity, Camaraderie, and the Servant Community
The new culture of privacy meant a loss of traditional rights and privileges that servants 
had come to expect as part of their employment.
140
 Servants resisted these attempts at 
?domestic enclosure? and quite were adept at circumventing the barriers emplaced to 
regulate their presence in the home. These efforts fostered camaraderie and a sense of 
community among household servants. Social roles were far from universal in the 
eighteenth-century British household, and servant-master and servant-servant relations 
varied at different times and different places. Even where behaviors appear uniform, the 
motives driving those actions could be remarkably diverse. (Although, the larger body of 
evidence relating to servant vigilance in crim. con. trials indicates that the majority of 
witnesses seemed to spy out of curiosity and camaraderie more than any other reason.) 
Motives aside, however, trial records reveal a nebulous servant community in the 
eighteenth century, but one that elites often perceived as a palpable threat that needed to 
be addressed. A burgeoning and increasingly self-conscious servant community 
compromised the ideal of patriarchal authority and highlighted the unreliability of servant 
subordination to their superiors. There was a subtle acknowledgement in crim. con. trial 
61
139
 Elizabeth Campbell Trial for Adultery (1777), in Trials for Adultery, 2:19. This case was 
preceded by the crim. con. trial Campbell v. Wade (1777).
140
 Linebaugh, ?The Cat Likes Cream,? 225-255.
accounts of a ?domestic allegiance? that undermined the authority of both the master and 
the mistress: loyalty to the servant community.
 The issue of servant loyalty suffused the crim. con. trial. Servant-witnesses 
provided testimony in court on behalf of either the husband-plaintiff or the seducer-
defendant (and the adulterous wife), which essentially established an allegiance to one 
side or the other. Despite this, trial transcripts reveal a heightened apprehension of an 
alternative loyalty among servants. The line between concealment and exposure was 
certainly thin, but a servant?s discovery of his or her mistress?s secret did not always 
mean a full disclosure of the fact. Servants frequently concealed their knowledge of the 
adultery from their mistress, and rarely did they expose the affair to their masters. 
Masters interpreted this as neutrality and treated it as an act of disloyalty when in reality, 
servants were very much practicing loyalty, but to each other rather than their superiors. 
The servants did not merely withhold their intimate knowledge from their masters and 
mistresses, but in many cases actively sought these secrets collectively, then shared their 
discoveries with the other servants in the home.
 Attaining knowledge of the secret adultery gave them a sense of power over their 
superiors. This is evident by the fact that servants often made sure to avoid detection 
themselves as they spied on their mistress. Knowledge of the lovers? secret was the 
servants? secret, one they often shared only amongst themselves and rarely with their 
mistress or master. In most trials servants testified that they had no intention of revealing 
the adultery to their master unless they were directly confronted about it by him.
141
 This 
62
141
 Cadogan v. Cooper and Abergavenny v. Lyddel, among others.
evidence indicates the widespread inability of elites to maintain control of the 
mechanisms for protecting (or exposing) household secrets. Servants could, and did, keep 
their masters? secrets ?locked rankling in their breasts,?
142
 and the power to conceal or 
expose secrets was in the hands of those servants. An unregulated, curious servant 
community, then, posed a threat not only to the mistress or the authority of the patriarch, 
but potentially to the entire social hierarchy.
 Trial testimony often reads like a game of ?hide and seek? between servants and 
their mistresses. It was a battle of wits, and the servants usually won. Dorothy 
Hanckwitz?s trial for adultery in 1772 was preceded by a crim. con. trial in December 
1771 between her husband and her lover, George Lambertson, in which her husband was 
awarded ?500 damages plus the cost of suit.
143
 The witnesses in these trials testified to an 
incident when Lambertson unsuccessfully tried to trick them into thinking he had gone to 
bed in his room. They told the court that he walked very loudly up the stairs to his 
bedchamber, to make sure the servants heard him leave Mrs. Hanckwitz?s room. The two 
teenaged servants, Elizabeth Fulcher and Jane Yeomans, pretended to go to sleep, but 
waited up, as they were ?curious to know where the said George Lambertson and 
Dorothy Godfrey Hanckwitz would lay that night.? Fifteen minutes after he loudly exited 
their lady?s bedchamber, they heard someone sneaking into her room. Because they 
anticipated his return, they were still waiting and watching, and when the door opened, 
63
142
 Cadogan v. Cooper (1794), 41.
143
 Trial of Dorothy Godfrey Hanckwitz (1772), in Trials for Adultery 3. Also see this trial in 
Francis Plowden, Crim. Con. Biography (London, 1830), 1:367-369, 2:3-9.
the candlelight in her room was sufficient for the maids to identify her late-night visitor 
as Lambertson.
144
 
 Their superiors? desire for secrecy meant little to the servants. If anything, it 
piqued their curiosity and made them more determined to observe potential indiscretions. 
The fact that they made a point to mention in their testimony the detail about 
Lambertson?s noisy production of leaving Hanckwitz?s room and returning to his own 
reveals not only the efforts at secrecy by the two lovers, but the cleverness of the servants 
who anticipated the scheme and artfully undermined it. These details were sprinkled 
throughout their testimony. For instance, following a rendezvous in Lambertson?s room, 
the couple apparently attempted to reshape the mattress to hide the fact they had just been 
in bed together. Hanckwitz and Lambertson were wise enough to realize the servants 
could discover them, but once again underestimated their cunning. When the maid, Mary 
Bassett, saw them leave the bedroom together, she determined to find out what they had 
been doing in there. She inspected the bed and discovered a dent, but made sure to note in 
her testimony that they had tried, unsuccessfully, to conceal the impression from her and 
the other maids by commenting that, ?an attempt had been made to put the bed to rights 
in some measure, though the dent was very discoverable.?
145
 This type of back-and-forth 
between the clandestine lovers and their watchful servants played out very much like a 
game, and reading the servants? testimony reinforces who the victors were.
 According to the evidence from crim. con. trials, when servants suspected or 
witnessed their mistress committing adultery, they also rarely rushed to confront their 
64
144
 Ibid., 3:22-23, 30, 34, 37.
145
 Ibid, 20, 28-29, 34.
master or mistress with the information. Instead, they usually discussed it amongst 
themselves and waited for new opportunities to observe their superiors? misbehavior. One 
example of this can be seen in the testimony of Sarah Simmons and Elizabeth Holden, 
both maids, and John Appleton, the footman, in the 1776 crim. con. and adultery trials 
John Potter Harris filed against Rev. John Craven and Harris?s wife, Elizabeth. Like most 
servant-witnesses in these trials, the servants in the Harris household did not seem in a 
rush to divulge their secret to Mr. Harris. They suspected the affair for months and had 
witnessed Elizabeth?s adultery many times. Rather than promptly reporting to their 
master, they collectively connived at different ways to observe the ?criminal 
conversations.? On one occasion when Mr. Harris was away and Craven was a guest in 
the house, Appleton suspected Craven and Mrs. Harris would sleep together that night. 
He wanted ?to find out whether his suspicions were well founded,? so he pretended to go 
to sleep and waited until everyone went to bed. He was ?determined to listen at the door 
of Mr. Cravens? room, ...[so] he pulled off his shoes, and put out his candle, and went to 
Mr. Craven?s room-door and listened.?
146
 When he heard the bed creaking and clothes 
rustling, he went and fetched Sarah Simmons to listen with him. They listened at the door 
until they heard the lock unbolt and the door handle move, at which point they hurriedly 
returned to their respective apartments. Appleton continued watching through his cracked 
bedroom door and saw Mrs. Harris leave Craven?s room and go into her sister?s room, 
who was also a guest in the house, where she stayed for a short while. Afterwards, she 
65
146
 The Trial of Elizabeth Harris (1776), in Trials for Adultery, 5:46.
returned to Craven?s bedchamber and, his curiosity apparently satisfied, Appleton 
returned to bed.
147
 
 In Henrietta Arabin?s trial for adultery with Thomas Sutton, one witness suspected 
Arabin and Sutton were alone in the parlor and peeked through a keyhole to see. His 
reaction when his suspicions were confirmed was to run and get another male servant to 
join him and watch the lovers commit adultery. The next day, they sought further 
evidence of the affair and inspected the parlor, where they found powder and pins on the 
furniture and carpet. They also found a footprint on the windowsill where Sutton snuck in 
?to avoid detection.?
148
 It is possible that the initial spectator ran to get the other servant 
in order to have a second witness to support his story when he told his master. However, 
there is no indication that they told him right away. They waited at least one day, based 
on their testimony about inspecting the parlor the following day, but even this 
investigation was a joint mission. They deposed that they watched and listened to the 
adultery through the parlor keyhole for the duration of the amorous encounter, a decision 
that was neither explained nor questioned by the witnesses or the lawyers. Once they 
were sure of what was occurring on the other side of the door, there was no need to 
remain, yet they did. This made going back to inspect the parlor floor and furniture the 
following day somewhat redundant, as they could already provide two eye-witness 
accounts to the affair. If they were after evidence, they had enough, yet they persisted in 
their observations. All of this suggests that they were mostly motivated by idle curiosity, 
66
147
 Ibid, 46-47.
148
 The Trial of Henrietta Arabin (1768), in Cuckold?s Chronicle, 2:30; Arabin v. Arabin (1787), 
Divorce [adultery], LPCA: E 47/19.
they wanted to know what was being hidden from them, and the more knowledge about 
the adultery they could acquire, the better. In this way, the discovery of powder stains and 
loose pins was necessary, not for proving the affair, but for enhancing their knowledge of 
it. This in turn enhanced their power over their mistress.
Prying for Power 
Some servants did confront their mistress about her behavior, however, and used the 
power of their knowledge for their own personal benefit. In Elizabeth Harris?s adultery 
trial, Sarah Simmons testified that the morning after she had witnessed Craven sneak out 
of Elizabeth?s bedchamber, she told her lady what she had seen. After breakfast, Craven 
asked Sarah for her assistance with putting on his coat to leave, at which time he gave her 
a guinea ?and said something to her which she did not understand.? She told the court 
that such compensation from Rev. Craven was unusual. Later that afternoon, Elizabeth 
summoned Sarah to her bedchamber and gave her a gown, petticoat, and a few other 
items, but warned her ?not to tell tales, for...servants never got any thing by it.?
149
 Despite these bribes, Sarah Simmons was relatively aggressive in her vigilance. 
One morning, when Mrs. Harris and Craven were alone in the parlor, Elizabeth Holden 
told Sarah their mistress had requested that they place the firewood for the parlor 
fireplace outside the door, as Mrs. Harris planned to build the fire herself. Elizabeth had 
already observed one encounter between the lovers that morning, and Sarah was 
determined to witness further indiscretions. Instead of placing the firewood outside the 
67
149
 Trial of Elizabeth Harris (1776), in Trials for Adultery, 5:25-26.
door, she walked into the parlor where she found Mrs. Harris and Mr. Craven standing in 
front of the fireplace with their arms wrapped around each other. Surprised by the sudden 
intrusion, ?they immediately started up, in seeming confusion,? and Mrs. Harris told 
Sarah to leave the wood, that ?she would put it on the fire herself; and [she] accordingly 
put down the wood, and went out of the room, leaving Mrs. Harris and Mr. Craven 
together.?
150
 This ?discovery scene? was depicted in an illustration included in Trials for 
Adultery (see fig. 4). The image shows Mrs. Harris and Rev. Craven situated as Sarah 
described in her testimony: Harris is leaning forward against the fireplace as Craven, 
standing behind her, has his arm wrapped around her waist and is caressing her. The wall 
behind them is unadorned except for two individual portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Harris. In 
the background, Sarah is shown entering the room carrying a bundle of firewood in her 
arms. Although she is barely through the door, her gaze is fixed intently on her mistress 
and Rev. Craven, which  suggests she anticipated the scene she discovered and 
deliberately interrupted it. Readers know from her testimony, however, that the episode 
ended with Sarah setting down the firewood and exiting the room without any fanfare, 
shrouding her motives in ambiguity. The situation is less ambiguous for the amorous 
couple. The image depicts the moment before the lovers realize they have been 
discovered, as they are engaged in their affair and completely unaware that a servant is 
behind them, watching. The power inversion is emphasized by the juxtaposition of the 
blissfully ignorant elites in the image foreground, and their surreptitiously enlightened
68
150
 Ibid, 14-15.
Figure 4. ?The Rev. Mr. Craven and Mrs. Harris Discovered by Sarah Simmons in Amorous 
Dalliance,? in Trials for Adultery
 
69
servant emerging from the shadows in the background. The ambiguity of Sarah?s 
intentions -- why did she enter the room unannounced (and against her mistress?s direct 
orders)? Why did she leave without acknowledging the adultery? -- only heightens the 
sense of bemusement for the elites and the viewers.
151
 
 It is not clear why Sarah interjected herself into the dalliance only to leave 
without a word. Perhaps this enhanced her leverage when she confronted her mistress 
later, as both Harris and Craven knew that she had caught them in a very compromising 
situation. There is no direct evidence of blackmail, but it is difficult to imagine what she 
stood to gain from such a revelation to her mistress, other than the gifts that Harris and 
Craven promptly provided her. Furthermore, her testimony indicated she had no intention 
of exposing her mistress, as she and the other servants indulged their curiosity for quite 
some time without a word to anyone but each other. Sarah seemed acutely aware of the 
power-inversion that resulted when servants spied on their superiors, particularly that the 
mistress stood to lose far more from the exposure of her adultery than the servants did 
from insubordination, and she maximized her personal gains from her newly-obtained 
power.
152
 Sarah?s confrontational method of observation was an exception rather than the 
rule in crim. con. trials, but it was precisely the covert nature of servant curiosity that 
made it so threatening to elites. 
 Trial documents reveal that the social hierarchy of the household could be quite 
complex and this could influence servant loyalties in different ways. In Campbell v. 
Wade, for example, Joseph Harris?s loyalty to his master reinforced John Campbell?s 
70
151
 Ibid, 15.
152
 Ibid. 
patriarchal authority, but his adherence to the traditional household hierarchy might have 
stemmed from his own position of authority.
153
 In the seventeenth century, footmen were 
among the lowest-ranked domestic workers in the household, but they rose to the top of 
the servant hierarchy in the eighteenth century.
154
 Trial testimony indicated that Harris 
had his own room in the house, ?beyond the servants-hall? but clearly on the same floor 
as the other domestic workers (which was the basement, below the main apartments).
155
 
One of the ways to distinguish ?elite? servants, then, was to provide them with their own 
living space. The idea of privacy or personal space carried a value for servants and elites 
alike, so much so that it conferred status on those who possessed it, and with that status 
came authority. This was evident in testimony that showed the other servants respected 
Harris?s authority in a particular incident in which Harris vetoed a plot concocted by the 
servants to spy on the lovers during the night.
156
 For Harris, then, his elevated status 
meant that he was entitled to some sense of privacy or personal space, at least from the 
other servants in the house.
 This trial also shows that the concept of a ?community of one? in the domestic 
sphere could extend beyond elites to include servants. If the closet symbolized the 
concept of the private self in the eighteenth century, the fact that employers provided 
71
153
 And he was rewarded for that: in his deposition, Harris was sworn in as a servant to John 
Campbell despite being fired by his wife, while the other servants who had been dismissed -- and who did 
not, apparently, go out of their way to alert their master to the adultery -- were forced to find employment 
elsewhere. For example, William Jenkins was Elizabeth Campbell?s coachman when she fired him, and he 
was listed as the coachman for a Mr. Hankey in Middlesex County in his deposition. The Trial of Elizabeth 
Campbell (1777), in Trials for Adultery, 2:27.
154
 Girouard, English Country House, 141.
155
 Trial of Elizabeth Campbell (1777), in Trials for Adultery, 2:18, 34. 
156
 Ibid., 15-18, 32.
servants with one if possible, even if it was not as elegant as the elites? closets, 
demonstrates that privacy could be enjoyed by individuals of all ranks. Joseph Harris 
demonstrated a sense of personal ownership and a desire to secure certain possessions in 
order to maintain secrecy that was shared by elites, and equally precarious. He had a 
lock-box of his own in which he could secure his intimate belongings or, in this case, his 
mistress?s intimate belongings. Just as Harris felt entitled to transgress the boundaries of 
privacy his mistress had established, Elizabeth Campbell did not believe that her servant 
had any right to privacy from her and felt free to go through his locked compartments in 
search of the letters.
 In Campbell v. Wade, Joseph Harris?s position within the household hierarchy 
influenced his loyalty to his master. Cadogan v. Cooper demonstrated that elevated status 
sometimes engendered servant-employer loyalties to the mistress: Farly Bull was Lady 
Cadogan?s personal maid and assisted her mistress in conducting and concealing her 
affair with Mr. Cooper.
157
 Farly was not only a threat to patriarchal authority, however, 
she was also a renegade in the servant community. She was an active participant in 
concealing the adultery not just from her master, but from the prying eyes of her fellow 
servants. In their testimony, other servants depicted Farly as an obstacle they had to 
overcome in order to observe Lady Cadogan?s adultery. One servant recalled an incident 
where she went up to make her lady?s bed, but found the door was locked. She 
immediately suspected that Cooper was in the room because she had not seen him leave 
the house and there were no other guests who would warrant locking the door to prevent 
72
157
 Cadogan v. Cooper (1794).
unwanted company from intruding. The lawyer narrated the maid?s testimony for the jury, 
and told how, ?She went downstairs full of suspicion... One servant made this observation 
to another. They watched.?
158
 They knew Cooper would attempt to leave the room 
undetected, and the lawyer used the floor plan to illustrate how they were able to observe 
his exit without him knowing he had been seen.
159
 As the servants waited and watched to 
see who came out of the room, Farly emerged to disperse the crowd of potential 
witnesses by sending them on various errands and chores. When she thought all the 
servants were gone, she twice uttered ?[a]hem!? to signal the coast was clear, ?and then 
out walks Mr. Cooper, imagining he had got out without observation.?
160
 He quickly left 
the bedchamber and went downstairs, where Farly let him out at the street door. They 
were unaware, however, that another maid, who suspected their ruse, had positioned 
herself on the stairwell that overlooked the passageway from Lady Cadogan?s 
bedchamber and witnessed Cooper?s exit.
161
 The lengths to which Farly had to go in an 
attempt to evade other servants, and the fact that despite those efforts another servant still 
saw everything, underlines the salience and complexity of the servant community in the 
domestic sphere.
 In the case of crim con. trials specifically, curious servants amplified the threat to 
patriarchal authority already being posed by the ?criminal conversation? itself. The 
combination of an adulterous wife, a libertine male house guest, and ?disloyal? servants 
73
158
 Ibid., 15-16.
159
 Ibid., 15-16.
160
 Ibid, 16.
161
 Ibid, 15-16. The lawyer used the floor plan to demonstrate where the servant positioned herself 
and how her location did not restrict a full view of the scenario. 
created a house in total disorder. One of the most extreme examples of disorder in the 
household, then, combined all these threatening elements: an adulterous wife who had an 
affair with a servant. This was the situation in Dormer v. Jones, one of the earliest highly-
publicized crim. con. trials of the eighteenth century. A published account of the trial 
appeared in Cases for Divorce for Several Causes in 1715, the same year as the trial, and 
included a preface that warned the reader that he or she was about to encounter a 
despicable and appalling case of the worst kind of adultery.
162
 The exceptional nature of 
the crime was the rank of the seducer, Tom Jones, who was the Dormers? footman. The 
social status of the two men colored the discussions of character and crime throughout the 
trial. Lawyers, witnesses (including other servants), and editorial comments portrayed 
Dormer as a gentleman and Jones as the lowest sort in society. When they were not 
referred to as ?Plaintiff? and ?Defendant,? it was always ?Mr. Dormer? and ?Tom.? 
During the testimony of ?a gentlewoman,? Jones was not even referred to by name but 
merely by his profession, although she adjusted his title to emphasize his inferiority: he 
was referred to condescendingly as a ?foot-boy,? as his station and conduct were so low 
she did not even consider him fully a man. The trial testimonies made it clear that Jones?s 
crime was a social transgression more than a moral or legal one.
163
Containing Secrets Within the Household Community
74
162
 Dormer v. Jones (1715), in Cases for Divorce for Several Causes (London, 1715), Preface. This 
trial was also included or referenced in later collections, including Adultery Anatomized (1761) and 
Cuckold?s Chronicle (1793).
163
 Dormer v. Jones (1715), in Cases for Divorce, 45.
In Dormer v. Jones, the footman Tom Jones was guilty of a social transgression, of 
violating the established hierarchy of the household, but his lack of discretion in 
conducting the affair exacerbated his crime. Witnesses testified to hearing Jones mock 
Dormer for being a cuckold and brag about being the man who made him so. One witness 
described a performance of ?rough music? where Jones threw pebbles at Dormer?s 
window while singing a ballad about cuckolds. Dormer?s attorneys insisted that Jones?s 
efforts to publicize the adultery beyond the household into the local community 
aggravated the injury.
164
 After all, the key element of ?rough music? was its public 
character, the purpose of which was to maximize the humiliation of the target(s).
165
 In the 
Dormer case, not only had the husband?s wife committed adultery with his footman, but 
the public exposure of his cuckolding amplified his humiliation. Notably, the lawyers felt 
compelled to make this point immediately following testimony describing the footman 
bragging about making his master a cuckold, as though there was a need to publicly and 
officially reaffirm Dormer?s authority to counter the humiliating details of his wife?s 
infidelity with a servant in his own household.
166
 Insubordinate servants, therefore, were 
not only a threat in the domestic realm, but they could potentially undermine a man?s 
authority in the wider community. This meant that the plaintiffs in crim. con. trials not 
only needed to reaffirm their authority over servants in their own homes, they also needed 
to gain some form of control over their conduct outside the home, at least as it might 
pertain to their elite employers. 
75
164
 Ibid, 57-58.
165
 Thompson, Customs in Common, 524-25, 530.
166
 Dormer v. Jones (1715), in Cases for Divorce, 57-58.
 The culture of curiosity was not limited to the domestic realm, so it is not 
surprising that curious servants found other inquiring minds with which they happily 
shared their masters? secrets. One prominent social practice that characterizes early 
modern cultural history is gossip, which Benedict defines as ?an unregulated exchange of 
an unverified information that commodifies others.?
167
 In crim. con., at the most intimate 
level of community, the curiosity of servants inspired them to spy on their masters. 
Rather than exposing the secret to regulate or enforce a common sexual morality, the 
servants merely shared the secret amongst themselves, fostering the development of a 
servant sub-community within the domestic community. These horizontal solidarities 
often extended beyond a single household to include servants from other households or 
people of a similar social status in the surrounding community. Gossip was one way to 
foster these solidarities.
168
 
 Trials presented the communication of secrets outside the home as particularly 
significant. Crim. con. lawyers portrayed the discussion of adultery among the wider 
community as gossip by deploying linguistic phrases such as ?confiding secrets? or 
?confiding intimacies.? Legally, this established that certain relations conducted in the 
domestic sphere (between elites, at least) were secret, or intimate, and not meant to be 
shared with people outside the household community. Many trial records referred to 
servants and others gossiping about the adultery and argued that it aggravated the offense. 
76
167
 Benedict, Curiosity, 2.
168
 Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighborhood in Early Modern 
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 170-172; Castan, ?The Public and the Private,? 416-418; 
Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century (New York: Walker & Company, 
2006), 170; Lucy Delap, ?Kitchen-Sink Laughter: Domestic Service Humor in Twentieth-Century Britain,? 
Journal of British Studies 49 (July 2010): 628, 651.
In Abergavenny v. Lyddel, the lawyers asked servants to disclose all the people they 
discussed their discovery with in an attempt to establish a genealogy of the ?public? 
adultery and gauge the notoriousness of the scandal.
169
 Indeed, it was part of the criteria 
in adultery trials -- the extent to which the transgression was ?true, public, and notorious? 
-- for assessing the extent of the injury to the plaintiff and the subsequent damages he was 
awarded.
170
 
 Thus, husband-plaintiffs used the crim. con. trial to reassert their authority in the 
home, which buttressed their reputation beyond it, by regulating curiosity and gossip 
about their private affairs. For elites, the trial was necessary to curtail the threat that 
curiosity and gossip posed to their power. These practices eroded patriarchal authority in 
two ways: the primary participants were their social inferiors (servants and women), yet 
they were behaving contrary to their subordinate positions; furthermore, the nature of the 
information being exchanged undermined the master?s control over his private life. 
Regaining control of the private was imperative, and husbands sought to ?lock the door,? 
so to speak, on spreading secrets outside the domestic sphere. Through the trials, by 
bringing witnesses -- subordinate servants, mostly -- into court, they established an 
?official? account of the incident on the record that usually, though not always, presented 
a sympathetic and favorable portrayal of the plaintiff and his circumstances. (Of course, 
the financial compensation from the defendant was an added perk, no doubt.) By the end 
of this process, the popular gossip transitioned from ?an unregulated exchange of an 
77
169
 Tryal of Richard Lyddel, 5-7, 15, 30. 
170
 The expression that something was ?true, public and notorious? appeared in nearly every 
adultery trial deposition, as it was criteria for libel cases brought in the ecclesiastical courts and particularly 
in divorce proceedings in the Court of Arches. For examples, see LPCA cases listed in the bibliography.
unverified information? to an official, ?final? version of a story about someone?s private 
life. The revised account of the adultery returned some authority to the cuckolded 
husband. The reliance on servant testimony served a similar purpose. As we saw above, 
testifying in court gave the servants an opportunity to publicly display their power over 
their superiors in the domestic realm through their accounts of successfully thwarting 
elites? efforts to impose boundaries on them through a process of ?domestic enclosure.? 
At the end of the day, however, they confessed their knowledge to their master and 
testified on his behalf. A successful crim. con. trial, then, brought spying servants back 
under the control of their master, punished the male lover financially, publicly exposed 
the adulterous wife, and laid the groundwork for a successful separation or divorce. In 
short, it restored order to the household.
 The imperative of securing the ?domestic enclosure? of their secrets led masters 
into the courtroom. Elite men used this arena to reinforce their cultural hegemony, not 
only by demonstrating their symbolic authority, but also by making it ?official? via the 
common law courts. Paradoxically, legitimizing domestic privacy was achieved through 
very public venues, particularly since the crim. con. trial, in the early stages of an 
emerging mass media culture, enjoyed a level of publicity that was unprecedented. This 
highlights the existence of a concept of privacy and private life located in the home, but 
also exposes the tensions that persisted between competing notions or ?private? and 
?public? in the eighteenth century.
78
Chapter Three: The Legal Imperative
The struggle to maintain control over the private extended beyond the home and into the 
courtroom. The legal sphere represented a site for negotiating boundaries of public and 
private in both the legal realm and the domestic realm. Elite masters also used the legal 
arena to reassert the social hierarchy that had been undermined by insubordinate servants. 
One of the underlying goals of the action was to put servants? spying and gossiping about 
their superiors? private affairs to an end, or at the very least, to bring it under the control 
of the patriarch. While husbands succeeded in reinforcing their authority over their 
servants, however, they also unwittingly undermined their position against an emerging 
group challenging the ruling elites for authority in eighteenth-century Britain: the 
?professional? class of merchant traders, lawyers, judges, and publishers.
 The historiography of eighteenth-century Britain has described an emerging 
conflict between ?two political nations -- a ruling oligarchy and a broader, more inclusive 
one.?
171
 Bob Harris stresses the importance of a nuanced consideration of this 
development, however, particularly the fact that the ruling elites maintained their 
hegemony through ?a series of negotiations and compromises? with the lower orders of 
society.
172
 The crim. con. trial itself could be seen as one example of this process of 
?negotiations and compromises.? In the seventeenth century, publicizing private strife, 
79
171
 Bob Harris, Politics and the Rise of the Press: Britain and France, 1620-1800 (New York: 
Routledge, 1996), 29.
172
 Ibid., 30. See also Thompson, Customs in Common.
particularly in the form of collecting damages from a wife?s seducer, was considered 
beneath persons of elevated rank.
173
 Despite a pair of high-profile precedents set in the 
1690s by the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Macclesfield, members of the aristocracy 
were reluctant to settle marital disputes publicly. That gradually changed during the first 
half of the eighteenth century, and during the second half, it appeared as though crim. 
con. was very much in vogue among elites. There was a difference between the 1690s 
trials and their eighteenth-century counterparts: Norfolk and Macclesfield brought their 
complaints before Parliament; crim. con. litigants filed suit in the central common law 
courts of King?s Bench or Common Pleas. 
 The eighteenth century was an especially litigious age, which was characterized in 
part by a significant growth in civil tort actions. It has been suggested that the rise in civil 
cases during this period was due to changing cultural perceptions concerning proper 
recourse to defend one?s honor, particularly that dueling was too risky and no longer 
appropriate.
174
 A new culture of ?politeness? emerged in the early eighteenth century that 
emphasized ?genteel modes of expression and the display of benevolent generosity and 
accommodation to one?s companions.?
175
 For the Englishman, one performed one?s 
manhood and status as ?Gentleman? through public forms of sociability and defined 
against other men.
176
 With manhood and honor defined increasingly by public conduct, 
80
173
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 233.
174
 C.R. Kropf, ?Libel and Satire in the Eighteenth Century,? Eighteenth-Century Studies 8, no. 2 
(Winter, 1974-1975): 153.
175
 Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 14.
176
 Ibid., 14, 16.
publicly defending one?s honor in a civil suit gradually gained acceptance as a legitimate 
course of action.
Patriarchy, Politeness, and Control of the Private
Wives, lovers, and servants manipulated architectural components of the domestic realm 
to create and contest secrecy and security, but the stakes in the crim. con. trial pertained 
to the husband in the form of his social, legal, and material security. First at stake was his 
role as patriarch and master of the household. Second, it was the security of his property 
in the form of his house and his wife, both of which had been trespassed by her lover. 
This entailed the security of his lineage under threat by illegitimate children. Finally, the 
protection of his reputation was at stake, and the cultural value of one?s reputation was 
worth as much as any monetary wealth. For aristocrats, it could have meant more, as their 
hegemony in the eighteenth century was essentially dependent upon their symbolic 
power, which was maintained through public displays of authority and linked to their 
status as property owners.
177
 The husband?s manhood was primarily located in the 
domestic realm. This identity, however, and the authority of the patriarch, was a cultural 
construct that was reinforced in the legal realm, inside the courtroom and within the legal 
sphere. Crim. con. testimonies reveal that husbands, however, were rarely ever home, and 
these extended absences from the house undermined any real authority they might have 
had. The husbands relied on the symbolic power assigned to their domestic space, as 
81
177
 This theme is explored in the collection of essays edited by Douglas Hay et al., Albion?s Fatal 
Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Penguin Group, 1975).
patriarch. When their authority came under attack, they entered the space of the 
courtroom to reinforce patriarchal power. 
 On the surface, the action for criminal conversation was the pursuit of monetary 
damages from an alleged seducer for ?trespassing? another man?s property in his wife 
and house. There was another form of ?trespass? on trial, however, that the plaintiff 
sought to rectify through the legal system, and that was the transgression of established 
boundaries in the master?s home. Trial transcripts reveal that the ?criminal? breaches 
were not limited to physical spaces and bodies. They also violated the established social 
hierarchy. In this way, the paramours, the domestic servants, and, although passively, the 
wives, were also on trial. Elite husbands went to court to regain control of the private and 
reassert their power over these insubordinate groups. 
 The servants? testimony during crim. con. trials publicly confirmed their power 
over their superiors, yet simultaneously brought them back under the control of elite 
males. Through the trial process, servants became objects of inquiry for lawyers due to 
their knowledge of intimate information about their mistress and her lover. In agreeing to 
testify in court, servants surrendered their knowledge of their masters? private lives to the 
legal elite. The dissemination and use of this information was subject to the control of 
courtroom ritual, lawyers? inquiries, and the judges? and juries? evaluation. Not only did 
servants relinquish their power to the legal authorities, it was often to their masters? 
benefit more than their own. Crim. con. trials also provided lawyers and commentators 
with an opportunity to reinforce servants? subordinate role in the household and social 
hierarchy by representing their curiosity and gossiping in a negative light or by 
82
describing it in terms of their master?s honor. Reinforcing the social transgression of their 
pursuit of secrets reinforced servants? inferior status to their masters and mistresses both.
 Patriarchal anxiety was the underlying concern in crim. con. trials, and mistress-
servant adulteries represented the ultimate undermining of a man?s authority in the home. 
When the male lover was the servant, he did not merely challenge or undermine 
patriarchal hierarchy, he inverted it.
178
 When a gentleman?s servant usurped his sexual, 
marital, and patriarchal role, the household community was ?turned upside down.? 
Lawyers reinforced the master?s social and sexual superiority over his servants in the 
courtroom. In Middleton v. Rose, Middleton?s attorney explained to the jury why a wife?s 
adultery ?with [her husband?s] own servant, it was much fouler than if it had been with 
any other person.? It violated the trust between a master and his servants. A man must be 
able to rely on his servants because the nature of their relationship
179
 provided servants 
with ?opportunities of committing not only frauds upon the property, but frauds upon the 
master?s comfort and tranquility, beyond what any other character can have.? A man 
could only grant that kind of access to a person in whom he could have full confidence. 
A trustworthy servant was a most valuable friend to the master, but a dishonest 
?domestick? was ?one of the bitterest enemies, and one of the keenest-biting vipers that 
can find its way into human society.?
180
 The connection between the threat a servant 
83
178
 Tim Meldrum notes the tension and disruption of daily life in the household that resulted from 
the Dormer-Jones affair, particularly Jones?s elevation by Mrs. Dormer to ?favorite,? which gave him free 
reign to exercise authority over other servants and caused considerable vexation among them. Meldrum, 
Domestic Service and Gender, 1660-1750: Life and Work in the London Household (Essex, U.K.: Pearson 
Education, Ltd., 2000), 199. 
179
 A term he defends by saying ?The duty and relative situation of master and servant is a degree 
of relationship.? Middelton Versus Rose. A report of an action...by William Middelton, of Stockeld Park, 
esq. against John Rose, his groom, for Criminal Conversation (London, 1795), 10.
180
 Ibid.
could pose to a man?s property and the threat he could pose to a man?s wife is significant. 
The two concepts were conflated in crim. con. trials. Lawyers, witnesses, and 
commentators emphasized the defendant?s trespass upon the man?s real property as much 
as they did the trespass upon his property in his wife?s person. In many cases, the two 
forms of trespass could not be separated.
 Trustworthiness was imperative for female servants as well. The issue of servant 
loyalty in general became more and more prominent in the eighteenth century. During the 
trial, lawyers cast aspersions on servants who actively assisted their mistress with 
maintaining the secrecy of an affair from the husband. This subversion of patriarchal 
authority was increasingly presented as a betrayal on the same level as the wife?s 
infidelity to her husband. In the 1794 crim. con. trial between Lord Cadogan and Henry 
Cooper, the counsel for the plaintiff extended the charge of seduction against Cooper to 
include Lady Cadogan?s personal maid, Farly Bull. In his opening he told the jury how, 
after Cooper seduced Lady Cadogan, ?he seduced her servant to be the criminal agent in 
that conspiracy against the husband,? and thus ?the Plaintiff has lost one witness.?
181
 
Even so, he warned, ?She deceives herself, if she thinks to deceive his Lordship and 
you.?
182
 Farly Bull was Lady Cadogan?s personal maid, but her ultimate loyalty, ideally, 
should have been to her master. During the trial, lawyers went so far as to compare 
Farly?s role in concealing the affair from her master as treason. In this way, a crime 
against patriarchal society was likened to a crime against the state. This was one of the 
more extreme analogies deployed by crim. con. lawyers and was playing off of public 
84
181
 Cadogan v. Cooper (1794), 11.
182
 Ibid., 12.
emotions surrounding a recent naval battle and dramatic victory for Britain by Lord 
Howe against France.
183
 In the 1792 crim. con. trial, Duberley v. Gunning, the plaintiff?s 
counsel made the following appeal to the jury: ?I conjure you, by your regard for the 
public good; if such persons as the defendant are not punished, and if men?s domestic 
comforts are thus to be invaded with impunity, the energy that unites the human race will 
be lost, and the welfare of the state at large endangered, -- for the state is but the model of 
a private family.?
184
 Although extreme, the analogy was not exceptional. The more 
common comparison, however, presented servant-mistress loyalty as tantamount to theft 
from the master, as the counsels articulated in the Cadogan trial.
 This spoke to the plaintiffs? authority as masters of the house, but it was the 
lawyers who articulated their clients? power and it was they who likewise controlled the 
discourse on servants? loyalty, servants? spying, and essentially servants? power. 
Unsurprisingly, competing narratives emerged as the opposing counsels argued cases. In 
Cadogan v. Cooper, Cadogan?s lawyer portrayed Farly Bull as a sort of traitor to her 
master for helping to conceal her mistress?s affair, but Cooper?s lawyer questioned the 
sincerity of the ?loyal? servants who testified to the adultery in court. He observed to the 
jury that they ?have kept this secret locked rankling in their breasts, till they had an 
opportunity of divulging it.?
185
 In fact, when lawyers asked the servants when they 
85
183
 Ibid., 23. One of the counsels for the Plaintiff referenced Howe?s victory in his opening address 
to the jury, and the transcriber or publisher included a notation at the bottom of the page: ?This speech was 
delivered the next morning after intelligence was received of Earl Howe?s victory over the French fleet.? 
Ibid.
184
 The Trial of Major-General Gunning...for Criminal Conversation with the Wife of the Plaintiff 
(London, 1792), 11.
185
 Cadogan v. Cooper (1794), 41.
planned to alert their master to his wife?s infidelity, two of them replied that they had no 
intention of exposing their mistress and added that they only revealed the affair when 
Lord Cadogan confronted them about it.
186
 Cadogan?s lawyers defended the servants? 
credibility and justified their initial reticence, then resolve for coming forward with their 
information. They were not trying to hurt their mistress by inventing evidence, he 
explained, nor did they mean to hurt their master by concealing it from him. They simply 
wanted to be sure their suspicions were correct before burdening Lord Cadogan with their 
discovery.
187
 Cooper?s lawyer countered by emphasizing the secretive nature of the 
servants and reminded the jury that they ?kept the secret concealed in their own breasts, 
and had thereby been guilty of a breach of duty to their master, in not revealing it sooner, 
if they really believed his honour had been invaded.?
188
 This trial highlights two themes 
that emerged in crim. con. trials regarding servants: their secretive nature and their 
subversive tendencies. That servants were privy to their masters? most personal secrets 
was a cause for concern, and their furtive methods of observation compounded elite 
anxiety. Elite husbands, through their lawyers, were able to reassert their superiority over 
their servants during the crim. con. trial. The negative representation of servants was not 
limited to the legal sphere. Their curiosity made the servants themselves ?curiosities? 
86
186
 Ibid. One of the maids, Mary, did not reveal the affair to any elites until she was directly asked 
about it (35), and Lord Cadogan?s personal servant, Lloyd, admitted the same upon questioning (39). The 
affair was only brought to light after an unnamed servant told Lord Cadogan?s son from a previous 
marriage, Rev. Dr. Cadogan, who then told his father (28). This was not uncommon in crim. con. trials. In 
Abergavenny v. Lyddel, a lawyer asked the maid why she did not immediately alert her master to the affair, 
and she claimed she thought he would not believe her: ?Being ask?d, how it came to pass when she saw so 
notorious a Fact, that she did not discover it presently to her Lord, [she replied] that no Person dare open 
such a Thing to his Lordship, that it was discovered [to Abergavenny] by her, but not ?till her Lord had 
asked her about it.? Trial of Richard Lyddel (1730), 5.
187
 Cadogan v. Cooper (1794), 17.
188
 Ibid, 43.
within the social and legal worlds of eighteenth-century Britain. The growing publicity 
surrounding crim. con. trials facilitated the proliferation of these representations.
 The print media portrayed curious servants in the press depicted their 
inquisitiveness as a danger, both to the servants themselves and to society as a whole. The 
danger of spying servants lay in the publicity of both what they observed and of their acts 
of insubordination. The 1733 tract Modern Amours included an essay entitled ?The 
Unhappy Adultery,? which was a ?secret history? of Lady Abergavenny, the seduced wife 
at the center of the 1730 crim. con. trial between Lord Abergavenny and Richard 
Lyddel.
189
 The author presented a defense of Lady Abergavenny?s -- or ?Castilia,? as she 
was called in the essay
190
 -- honor and reputation, and accused her husband of 
orchestrating the adultery in order to have cause for legally ridding himself of his wife 
without ridding himself of her fortune.
191
 To succeed in his plan, the author claimed, Lord 
Abergavenny enlisted the assistance of his servants to spy on their mistress and report 
any discoveries to him. The servants were ?over-officious? in their quest to
insinuate themselves into [their master?s] Favour; and without dispute they were 
reasonably paid for swearing what they never saw; for had they not been order?d, what 
Servant would have dar?d to have had the Impudence and Assurance to peep through a 
Key-hole, to see what her Lady was doing? non but a Person that had been in Bed with a 
Footman, and might be willing to persuade herself all Flesh has its Frailties; and there 
was willing to satisfy her Curiosity so far as to see if her Lady [was guilty of the same 
?Errors?].
192
 
87
189
 [Lydia Grainger], Modern amours: or, a secret history of the adventures of some persons of the 
first rank. Faithfully related from the author's own knowledge of each transaction. With a key prefixed. 
(London, 1733). The affixed key listed ?The Unhappy Adultery? under the title ?The fatal History of Lady 
A- ---y.?
190
 ?Castilia? was probably meant to be ?Calista,? the tragic heroine of Nicholas Rowe?s play The 
Fair Penitent (1703). See Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 184-186, and n230 below.
191
 [Grainger], ?The Unhappy Adultery,? in Modern Amours, 37.
192
 Ibid., 48-49.
The portrayal of the servants in this publication reduced them to pawns of their superiors, 
and suggested that, while inherently curious, a servant would only be so bold as to 
indulge that curiosity if she had been encouraged by her master. (Innate curiosity is one 
matter, but to suspect a virtuous and revered woman as Lady Abergavenny? The author 
bluntly explained to the reader that that particular form of curiosity stemmed from the 
maid?s moral corruption due to her own sexual affair with the footman.) This sort of 
behavior was far too ?curious? for the author not to assume that Lord Abergavenny had 
orchestrated it ?behind the scenes.?
193
 That a husband needed to employ his servants to 
spy on his wife and report their findings to him indicates that the husband was unable to 
observe her himself because he was away from home.
 The 1777 crim. con. trial [John Hooke] Campbell v. [William] Wade, and the 
subsequent adultery trial against Campbell?s wife Elizabeth, demonstrated that this 
contributed to the limits of patriarchal ideals.
194
 Husband-plaintiffs entered the courtroom 
to reassert their patriarchal authority, but in the process exposed their absence in the 
home. Each witness?s testimony reiterated the fact that John Campbell was rarely under 
the same roof as his wife and five children. One servant-witness offered an explanation 
for this, saying that he believed his master?s long absences from his wife were due to the 
renovations and improvements being made to their estate in Pembrokeshire, Wales, which 
88
193
 Ibid., 30.
194
 Trial of Elizabeth Campbell (1777), in Trials for Adultery 2.
required his presence as overseer.
195
 This same servant, Joseph Harris, was a key player 
in this particular trial. When Mrs. Campbell requested that Harris mail her love letters to 
Wade in Bath, Harris sent them to Campbell?s business associate in London and 
requested that they be forwarded to his master.
196
 This suggests that Campbell traveled 
often and his itinerary rarely included trips to see his family. The most sensational crim. 
con. trials tended to feature absentee-patriarchs. This underscores the symbolic nature of 
their authority and offers another reason as to why elite men felt it necessary and were 
willing to publicize their private lives in the courtroom. In bringing suit, however, 
husbands put themselves on trial. In the courtroom, these plaintiffs subjected themselves 
to judgment by their ?peers? not only as authoritative or impotent (or ?absentee?) 
husbands and masters, but also as men.
Reputation and the Power of ?Peers? in the Courtroom
The crim. con. trial offered husband-plaintiffs an opportunity to respond to the multiple 
threats to their power. In addition to reasserting their authority over insubordinate 
servants, husbands also addressed the challenge posed by the defendants. This threat was 
two-fold. Seducers usurped the plaintiffs? role as husband and in the process subverted 
the patriarchal ideal of a man?s sexual control over his wife. As elite men?s public status 
was tied to their patriarchal identity, the adultery also injured the husbands? honor and 
89
195
 Ibid., 27. It is unclear which side -- the husband?s or the wife?s -- brought it up, but it seems 
that Harris was responding to a question that was posed to him. Women had a greater opportunity to defend 
themselves or mitigate the punishment in adultery hearings, so her lawyers might have raised the issue. 
During the second-half of the eighteenth-century, crim. con. defenses increasingly emphasized the 
husband?s absence from his home (and his wife) as a way of shifting the responsibility of the affair to him 
for neglect.
196
 Ibid., 2:33-3, 20-22.
reputation. The primary malefaction was a social violation, but one that also entailed the 
transgression of the physical boundaries that were intended to signify and enforce social 
relations. Male seducers undermined the symbolic power elite husbands derived from the 
space of the home. The legal proceedings presented the offense as a violation of a man?s 
property in his private place of habitation (the physical structure of the house) and of his 
private life (which was often described as an invasion of a man?s domestic comforts).
197
 
The connection between man and house was not new in this period, but it gained in 
importance among the upper orders of society. This resulted from the increasing wealth 
being accumulated by the rising middle class, who promptly converted their economic 
capital into cultural capital by purchasing a country estate and building a mansion.
198
 This 
simultaneously displayed and cemented their newly-elevated status in society. Indeed, the 
eighteenth century is considered the Golden Age of the British country house, as 
approximately 150 new houses were built in England alone in the first half of the 
century.
199
 The building of country manors during this period was of national importance 
because they were understood to be critical expressions of artistic, political, and 
economic ventures. The house served to display the owner?s status as a gentleman. 
Breaching the house?s perimeter was therefore an especially heinous offense.
200
 
 Crim. con. testimonies underscored the cultural values that linked a man and his 
manhood to his home. As Amanda Vickery has noted, ?The house had long been a 
90
197
 One example can be found in a published account of the 1792 crim. con. trial, Duberly v. 
Gunning: The Trial of Major-General Gunning, 4, 6, 11.
198
 Pierre Bourdieu, ?The Forms of Capital,? in Handbook of Theory and Research for the 
Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241-258.
199
 Christie, British Country House, 4.
200
 Ibid.; Girouard, English Country House, 189.
universal metaphor for the person and the body? in English culture, and trespassing these 
physical demarcations indicated a sexual transgression, especially in crim. con. trials.
201
 
Trial records often noted where the adultery took place, and emphasized that the sexual 
iniquity was compounded by the violation of the husband?s hospitality in the home. This 
was a social offense rather than a sexual one, although it is unsurprising that in an era 
celebrated for its ?politeness,?
202
 crim. con. suits tended to weigh social violations at least 
equally, if not more heavily, than sexual misdeeds. The published account of the Duberly 
v. Gunning crim. con. trial, for example, noted that Mr. Duberly frequently hosted 
General Gunning in his house ?with great hospitality,? and emphasized the ?crime? of 
having an affair in the home of someone who is providing room and board for you.
203
 In 
another trial, a maid described how her lady?s lover took no notice of the servant on his 
way to the lady?s bedchamber (despite the deponent looking directly at him and uttering 
her disapproval as they passed each other in the hallway). This prompted the maid to 
observe that, ?he seemed to be perfectly easy, as if he had been master of the house.?
204
 
The husband?s ownership of the house was likewise emphasized throughout Sarah 
Worgan?s trial depositions. For example, it was noted that the adultery occurred ?in a 
parlour in her husband?s house? -- a point mentioned several times.
205
 The husband?s 
authority, linked to his role as patriarch, was undermined by his wife?s adultery when it 
91
201
 Amanda Vickery, ?Englishman?s Castle,? 153; Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 177.
202
 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People. England, 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford 
University Press, 1993).
203
 Duberly v. Gunning (1792), in The Cuckolds Chronicle, 2: 132. 
204
 The Trial of Lady Carmarthen (1779), in Trials for Adultery, 2:21.
205
 Trial of Sarah Worgan (1768), in Crim. Con. Biography, 336.
occurred in his own house. Servants? depositions in the Worgan trial highlighted this as 
witnesses testified that Mrs. Worgan?s lover, Robert Rowe, bragged that he could do 
whatever he wanted in Mr. Worgan?s house.
206
 
 Lawyers for plaintiffs highlighted the violation of polite modes of conduct -- a 
guest misbehaving in another man?s home -- in cases against defendants, and often with 
success. In the eighteenth century, private patriarchal honor and public politeness were 
not mutually exclusive concepts of manhood. The two frequently intersected in the trials 
for criminal conversation.
207
 The primary difference between the patriarchal man of 
honor in the seventeenth century compared to the eighteenth century was the shift in 
focus from the wife as the cuckold-maker, or main agent in the adultery, to the male 
seducer. The plaintiff?s lawyers typically berated the seducer for violating the codes of 
polite gentlemanliness, but the underlying offense was his cuckolding the husband. 
Patriarchy was still the framework for defining one?s manhood, and a husband?s ability to 
control his wife?s sexuality was still a crucial component of how a man defined himself. 
The public performance of polite gentlemanliness in relation to other men was of 
growing importance in the eighteenth century, however, and the crim. con. trial provided 
a perfect stage for such a spectacle.
 The reputation of both litigants was a major factor in the trials, and their personal 
conduct over the course of the affair could impact the amount in damages awarded by the 
92
206
 Ibid. Yet another example is found in the Errington trial account included in The Cuckold?s 
Chronicle, in which the editor observed that Buckley acted as if he were master of the house. The Trial of 
Harriet Errington, in Cuckold?s Chronicle, 1:118.
207
 In fact, Turner has argued that the language of politeness pervaded these trials. Turner, 
Fashioning Adultery, 163.
jury.
208
 Men were punished for disrupting another man?s domestic peace and wreaking 
havoc within his home. Crim. con. exposed disorder in the household in the form of male 
guests enjoying liberties that belonged to the master, wives engaging in illicit activities 
when their husbands were away, and servants flouting the domestic power structure by 
spying on their superiors. Disorder within the house reflected poorly on the patriarch. A 
man?s inability to run his household effectively undermined his manhood. His inability to 
control his wife sexually already emasculated him in one sense, and having another man 
enter his home and violate the code of politeness that existed between two gentleman by 
seducing his wife exacerbated the patriarch?s emasculation even further.
209
 A wife?s 
adultery not only affected a husband?s relationship with his family, it also damaged his 
reputation, and particularly his masculinity.
210
 In the courtroom, the husband and his counsel adopted cultural stereotypes that 
held meaning for the jury and the public in order to effectively discredit the defendant 
and encourage sympathy for the plaintiff. They employed labels such as ?rake? and ?fop? 
to describe the defendant in the counsel?s arguments and witness testimony, while 
referring to the plaintiff as a ?gentleman? and ?polite,? and praising his embodiment of 
the ideal master or husband. Their method was to publicize the plaintiff?s private life 
through gender stereotypes. Over the course of the century, they formulated a script for a 
crim. con. narrative that was performed in the courtroom time and again. The intention 
93
208
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 242-47, 296; Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 175.
209
 Michele Cohen, ??Manners? Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of 
Masculinity, 1750-1830,? Journal of British Studies 44 (April 2005): 312-329; Foyster, Manhood, 4; 
Shepard, ?From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500-1700,? Journal 
of British Studies 44 (April 2005): 282.
210
 Oldham, English Common Law, 340-41; Stone, Road to Divorce, 262.
was undoubtedly to appeal to popular, recognizable categories that would easily inspire a 
positive or negative reaction or association from the audience with regards to how they 
received and interpreted information about the plaintiff?s private life. In the more 
controlled arena of the court room, the plaintiff held the advantage. After the trial, 
however, the narrative was transposed to print editions and introduced into the public 
sphere, a realm in which the plaintiff had considerably less control over the intimate 
details contained within his narrative.
 There were myriad webs of power in eighteenth-century Britain and the ruling 
elites maintained their hegemony through ?a series of negotiations and compromises? 
with the groups competing for authority.
211
 The crim. con. trial was one way in which 
elites negotiated and compromised as they attempted to preserve their social prominence. 
In order to reassert their authority in the home, husband-plaintiffs transferred power over 
their reputation and private life to the legal authorities in the courtroom. In this arena, 
lawyers controlled the discourse on elite masculinity and reputation, but husband-
plaintiffs relinquished a different form of power over their reputation to a jury of their 
?peers.?
 English men and women considered a trial before a jury of one?s peers a right 
dating back to the Magna Carta.
212
 Crim. con. suits that went to court were tried by a 
special jury. The composition of these juries reflects the importance of the issues of status 
and reputation and their relationship to personal wealth and fortune not only in the crim. 
94
211
 Ibid., 30. See also Thompson, Customs in Common.
212
 Blackstone devotes a chapter to the jury trial in his Commentaries. Blackstone, ?Trial by Jury,? 
in Commentaries 3.
con. trial, but in wider eighteenth-century society. Crim. con. juries were composed of 
twenty-four ?gentlemen of fortune? who were deemed more qualified because they ?were 
thought to be more sensitive to the value of honour to a gentleman than were? men of 
lower rank.
213
 Special jurors initially included prominent freeholders, knights, and urban 
gentry. By the second half of the century, however, these juries were comprised 
predominantly -- if not exclusively -- of wealthy London merchants.
214
 They were, in 
many instances, of equal or greater wealth than the aristocratic litigants, and the tension 
that resulted from the (diminishing) distance between the landed elites and the rising 
merchant class manifested in many forms in eighteenth-century British society.
215
 Yet, in 
the case of crim. con., aristocratic plaintiffs willingly placed their cases in the hands of 
their merchant-peers, and entrusted them with the task of ultimately assigning a value to 
the plaintiff?s (and defendant?s) reputation, his relationship with his wife, and his 
performance as a husband and master, in the form of damages rewarded. Thus, the 
?professional? class could directly exercise their authority over their social superiors in 
the courtroom through judges? and juries? decisions and lawyers? services.
 The power vested in the special jurors and other members of the ?legal elite? in 
the common law courtroom fueled the elevation of their status in British society. Many 
special jurors gained considerable experience by sitting on multiple crim. con. juries 
95
213
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 234-235.
214
 Ibid. Additional scholarship on eighteenth-century juries and jurors includes Green, Verdict 
According to Conscience; King, ?Decision-Makers;? Cockburn and Green, eds., Twelve Good Men.
215
 A sample of works that explore this development include Langford, A Polite and Commercial 
People; Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 2005); and John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century Britain 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
(occasionally in the same day
216
), which further increased their ?qualifications? and 
propelled their elevation to a ?professional? status.
217
 In the last quarter of the century, 
the names of the special jurors were included on the title or opening pages of crim. con. 
trial accounts, along with the representing counsels and the presiding chief justice (whose 
name was featured regularly on published accounts by mid-century).
218
 The common law 
was established as an official field of study at Oxford in 1753, and the proliferation of 
published trial accounts and histories of English law, legal decisions, and legal 
philosophies, demonstrate its popularity outside official legal and academic 
institutions.
219
Trial Publicity and the Crim. Con. Spectacle
Crim. con. trials acquired a new dimension in the eighteenth century -- publicity. In the 
opening decades of the eighteenth century, civil trials for adultery were deemed 
legitimate, but not culturally acceptable. By the 1760s, however, they were not only 
culturally acceptable, they had become fashionable. Implicit in the various interpretations 
96
216
 Cecil v. Sneyd and Barttelot v. Hawker. 
217
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 234-35. Robert Robson, The Attorney in Eighteenth-Century England 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). For a broader account of the professions during this 
period, see Wilifred Prest, ed., The Professions in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 
and Penelope J. Corfield, Power and the Professions in Britain, 1700?1850 (London: Routledge, 1995).
218
 For example, see The whole proceedings at large, In a Cause on an Action Brought by The Rt. 
Hon. Richard Lord Grosvenor against His Royal Highness Henry Frederick Duke of Cumberland; For 
Criminal Conversation with Lady Grosvenor (London [1770]); The trial, with the whole of the evidence, 
between the Right Hon. Sir Richard Worsley...and George Maurice Bisset... for criminal conversation with 
the plaintiff's wife. Before the Right Hon. William Earl of Mansfield, and a Special Jury, in His Majesty's 
Court of King's-Bench, Westminster-Hall, on Thursday the 21st of February, 1782. (London 1782); Trial 
between James Duberly, Esq. plaintiff, and Major-General Gunning, Defendant, for Criminal conversation 
with the wife of the plaintiff. tried before the right Hon. Lord Kenyon, and a Special Jury (London, 1792).
219
 Oldham, English Common Law; David Lemmings, Professors of the Law: Barristers and 
English Legal Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and ibid., ed., 
The British and Their Laws in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Boydell & Brewer, 2005).
and applications of the action of civil trespass were expanding definitions of public and 
private (and a simultaneous broadening of the appropriate arenas in which those 
definitions could be negotiated). Whether adultery was a private matter or subject for 
public regulation was an underlying question being debated in the crim. con. trials.
220
 The 
act of adultery itself remained a fundamentally private issue, and a spouse or their lawyer 
sometimes used the threat of public litigation to coerce the other partner into submitting 
to particular terms of an agreement.
221
 The crim. con. action placed the dispute between 
the husband and his wife?s lover, but the possibility of publicizing the adultery through 
the trial process involved the wife?s reputation as much as the actual defendant in the 
cause. In the legal realm, publicizing the wife?s adultery was ?step one? on the husband?s 
path to reasserting his authority over his household and re-establishing his manhood in a 
legal ?duel? with his wife?s seducer.
 English law had to contend with publicity beyond the philosophical debate over 
public regulation of ?private vice.? The trial itself was a social event in London, 
especially the trials brought before the Court of King?s Bench. The physical layout of the 
court facilitated this function. Located in a corner of Westminster Hall, it featured open 
and fully ?exposed? proceedings until around 1740, when a partition was built to create 
an enclosed space into which all protagonists and spectators crammed for trials. The 
97
220
 David Turner explores the changing cultural meanings of adultery in the first-half of the 
eighteenth century in Fashioning Adultery, 173.
221
 Stone, Road to Divorce, 19. Stone elaborated further: ?[M]ost cases of litigation between 
individuals were intended merely to force the defendant to arbitration. For a majority of litigants...going to 
law was a tactical maneuver, part blackmail and part bluff, the object being to obtain an out-of-court 
settlement [to restore order].? Ibid., 24.
effect was something like a stadium which hosted public spectacles (see fig. 5).
222
 The 
1757 trial against Captain Gambier for criminal conversation with General Knowles?s 
wife attracted such a large crowd that it obstructed the jurors from entering the courtroom 
and being sworn in.
223
 
 The spectacle of these trials perplexed some contemporaries, who complained that 
they violated a space that should be treated as sacred. In his 1788 tract, Speculations upon 
law and lawyers, Samuel Paterson criticized the courtroom for having devolved into a 
scene of jests and merryment. ?People flock to Westminster whenever any thing droll is 
expected (that is, something ruinous to the peace of families, and the reputation of 
individuals). [...] The audience turn out of court with vast satisfaction, and in full titter!? 
Paterson went on to cite an assault case where the plaintiff was awarded one shilling: 
?But why give him anything? you?ll say -- O, for the joke?s sake! -- for the poor man 
went by the name of FARTHING-NOSE ever after -- Ha! ha! ha!? Civil actions to settle 
personal injuries were so common-place by 1788 that, not only did the litigants become a 
source of mockery, but the trials, the lawyers, and even the legal system itself were 
viewed as folly.
224
 Did the trial drive the case?s publicity, or did the case?s publicity drive the trial? It 
is impossible to know for certain. Many cases did, however, open with the attorneys
98
222
 Ibid., 233.
223
 The Trial of Captain G------, for Crim. Con. with Ad----l K----s?s Lady, 5th ed. (London, 1759); 
Preface to Knowles v. Gambier (1757), in Trials for Adultery 5. Other trials were notable for drawing such 
large audiences, including Boddington v. Boddington (1797); Kelly v. Williamson (1797), among others. 
224
 Samuel Paterson, Speculations upon law and lawyers; applicable to the manifest hardships, 
uncertainty, and abusive practice of the common law (London, 1788), 37-38. Paterson wanted to check the 
growing influence and grandeur of the common law, especially ?in the persons of professional lawyers,? as 
it had increased - and continued to increase - ?far beyond their original and constitutional standard.? Ibid., 
94.
Figure 5. Rowlandson, Court of King?s Bench (1808), in Stone, Road to Divorce
99
acknowledging that members of the jury (and presumably the ?audience?) ?must have 
had previous knowledge of this business through the various channels of information;? or 
?...that the Jury who lived in this great town [London], could not be altogether strangers 
to them.?
225
 The primary concern in these cases was that extensive coverage in the print 
media created a bias against the defendant, but it could also work against the plaintiff. In 
the 1737 crim. con. trial between the famous actor Theophilus Cibber and William 
Sloper, Cibber?s lawyer observed ?[t]hat there had been a good deal of Pains taken to 
spread a Report about Town, as if the Plaintiff had been consenting to the Wrong the 
Defendant had done him; but this was only to blast the Credit of the Plaintiff?s Cause 
before the Trial; and that it might come with Prejudice before the Jury.?
226
 The growing 
publicity surrounding these trials had to be navigated carefully by lawyers in earlier trials. 
They struggled with how to reconcile discussing private matters in open court. In the 
1742 trial of Lord Augustus Fitzroy for criminal conversation with Sir William Morris?s 
wife, Morris?s attorney used his opening remarks to justify bringing the suit before the 
court, rather than the more typical formula of opening by detailing the defendant?s crime 
and proclaiming his guilt:
Among the many Miseries and Calamities that a Transactions of this Kind brings on 
the Person injur?d, even this Prosecution, at this Instant Time, is none of the least; by 
Reason of his being under a Necessity to expose to the Public the Misconduct and 
Failings of a Person who stands in the nearest Relation to him [his wife]; [...] I say, 
that even this Calamity must render the case extremely afflicting, ...to lay open before 
100
225
 Erskine, while representing Valentia, in The genuine trial of John B. Gawler, Esq: For criminal 
conversation with the Right Hon: Lady Valentia (London, [1795]). An account of this trial was also 
included in A New collection of trials for adultery (London, 1799). A sampling of trial coverage in 
newspapers and gossip magazines can be found in Grub Street Journal 6, 12 Feb. 1730; Whitehall Evening-
Post, 1179, 17 Feb. 1730; Daily Universal Register, 27 April 1782, 2 Sep. 1785, 26 June 1786; London 
Chronicle, 23?25 June 1785; Morning Post, 2 Aug 1785. Sarah Lloyd, ?Amour in the Shrubbery,? 440-441.
226
 A Collection of Remarkable Trials, viz. I. The Trial Between Theophilus Cibber...and William 
Sloper (Glasgow, 1739), 5.
you a Thing of this Nature: But as there is an absolute Necessity for so doing, in 
order to the Preservation of the Family, and receiving such Satisfaction and Justice as 
the Law allows, by Way of Punishment for such an heinous Offence and Injury, I 
shall lay the Case briefly before you.
227
The lawyer defended his client?s decision to file suit by arguing that exposing the wife?s 
sexual misconduct was necessary not only to secure the justice and satisfaction to which 
the husband was legally entitled, but also out of a larger duty to defend the family. He 
was referring, in particular, to the Morris family and, more broadly, to ?the family? as a 
social unit. He emphasized the threat adultery posed, describing it as ?the most injurious 
and scandalous, cruel and barbarous, [crime] that can be introduced into a Family.?
228
 
This crim. con. trial, he proclaimed, functioned not only to deliver personal justice to the 
plaintiff, but also to protect society from moral collapse by publicly prosecuting and 
punishing men like Lord Fitzroy who seduced married women. 
 That the plaintiff?s side needed to open the proceedings with such a defensive 
speech suggests that in 1742, prosecuting private (mis)conduct in open court was still 
viewed as a gross violation of privacy by many Britons. A form of justice that punished 
adultery but reduced the wife?s private life to ?collateral damage? did not yet enjoy 
widespread validation. This changed noticeably after 1760, as the burgeoning print 
culture augmented the spectacle of the crim. con. trial and helped transform this legal 
101
227
 The Tryal Between Sir W[illia]m M[o]rr[i]s, Baronet, plaintiff, and Lord A[u]gst[u]s F[i]tz-
R[o]y, defendant, for Criminal Conversation with the Plaintiff's Wife (London, 1742), 2.
228
 Ibid.
institution into a cultural phenomenon.
229
 During the second half of the century, the 
number of suits increased rapidly, as did the scandal associated with them. The spectacle 
of crim. con. expanded beyond the legal realm and into the public sphere.
102
229
 Lord Abergavenny was the subject of particularly harsh criticism because his wife passed away 
shortly after the discovery of her affair. There was a sense of public outrage directed towards her husband 
for sullying her name with the trial. The public romanticized her death as a tragedy, and several poems were 
published in the wake of her death and the trial that portrayed Lady Abergavenny as ?Calista,? the tragic 
heroine of Nicholas Rowe?s play The Fair Penitent (1703), whose remorse for betraying her husband with 
adultery drove her to suicide. In fact, in the week after the trial, two performances of The Fair Penitent 
were staged before sell-out audiences, ?at the particular Desire of several Ladies of Quality.? Turner, 
Fashioning Adultery, 184-186.
Chapter Four: Publicizing the Private
The Publicity Paradox
As argued in the previous chapter, the legal sphere was a site for negotiating boundaries 
of public and private in both the legal realm and the domestic realm. Just as transgressing 
boundaries of public and private signified power for the spying servants, exposing their 
wives? adultery in a public courtroom demonstrated the husband-plaintiffs? power over 
their (and their wives? and the defendants?) private lives. If one underlying goal of the 
crim. con. action was to reassert patriarchal authority in the home, the decision to expose 
the most intimate details of elite families? private lives in court ultimately undermined the 
masters? symbolic authority outside of the home. Aristocratic plaintiffs entered the legal 
arena of crim. con. with a sense of entitlement and presumption of authority that was 
better suited in the realm of Parliament among their literal peers. Their hegemony did not 
extend into the common law courtroom, at least not unequivocally. In bringing a suit for 
criminal conversation, husband-plaintiffs placed control over their status and reputation 
in the hands of the legal elite and an emerging group of middling sorts in the midst of 
challenging the ruling elites for authority in eighteenth-century Britain. 
 It was a voluntary transfer of power that husband-plaintiffs perhaps viewed as 
innocuous for two reasons. It was relinquished to a select group of men of equal if not 
greater wealth, which would work to the husbands? advantage against their servants. It 
was also contained, in theory, within an identifiable and controlled space (the courtroom), 
103
and they believed that within that space they were the dominant authority. The crim. con. 
phenomenon was not enclosed within the courtroom, however. Elite husbands understood 
the threat that exposure posed to their wives and the defendants, but they overestimated 
their power to control it beyond the legal realm. If the ?professional? sorts could directly 
exercise their authority over their social superiors in the courtroom through judges? and 
juries? decisions and lawyers? services, a larger segment of the middling classes exerted 
even greater authority in the public realm of print media. Testimonies and arguments 
were a matter of public record, and the moment the details were exposed to the court, 
they were eligible -- and, in the case of crim. con. trials, practically guaranteed -- to be 
published and circulated among the public. 
 The expanding print culture of eighteenth-century England magnified the 
spectacle of the crim. con. trial. Pamphlets and newspapers enjoyed a growing influence 
in Britain, especially after 1760, when pamphlet-printing developed into an important 
industry. The production of pamphlets for individual crim. con. trials, then, emerged out 
of an established network of printers and publishers that made it easier to diffuse these 
stories to a broad audience.
230
 The crim. con. trial publication format of ?official? 
accounts of legal arguments and testimonies about real people?s indiscretions fostered a 
sense of intimacy that allowed readers to imagine a connection with the subjects, and 
infused the trial accounts with a subjective rationale for publicizing private matters. They 
also contributed to the cultural conversation and debate on issues ranging from adultery 
and masculinity to aristocratic vice and social stability. Crim. con. trials became more 
104
230
 Harris, Politics, 39, 45.
sensational as witness testimonies described the sexual encounters between the defendant 
and the plaintiff?s wife more explicitly and published trial accounts included all the 
prurient details. 
 The legal counsels representing the plaintiff-husbands acknowledged the public 
unease over the nature of the material revealed during the trial. There was also a tacit 
acknowledgement of the audience physically present in the courtroom as well as the 
wider ?public? who would be granted access to the proceedings thanks to new laws 
concerning the recording and reproduction of legal documents. Critics voiced their 
objections to the growing publicity of private scandals more than a century before the 
1857 Divorce Act, however. In an essay in the September 1732 issue of the London 
Magazine entitled ?Against Immodesty,? the author noted that the documented accounts 
of private transgressions that formerly ?lay happily concealed in Manuscript, or in a 
foreign Language, now [are] publickly expos?d to every common English Reader.?
231
 The 
author specifically identified ?The Proceedings of our Courts, in the Trial of Rapes, 
criminal Conversations, and something still more abominable? as the most offensive of 
these publicized accounts.
232
 The prurient information documented during the 
proceedings was, at one point, considered to merit a warning to the more ?delicate? 
spectators attending the trial so that ?whenever they came on, the late Lord Chief Justice 
Holt would often give Notice to his Female Auditors.?
233
 Such courtesies were relics of 
the past, as far as the author was concerned. Not only were the people present during the 
105
231
 ?Against Immodesty,? in The London Magazine; or, Gentleman?s Monthly Intelligencer 
(September, 1732), 298.
232
 Ibid.
233
 Ibid.
trial exposed to all the lurid revelations, but that information was ?now printed in Words 
at Length, or with such Marks and Breaks as are easily intelligible.?
234
 While current 
trials were documented in this manner, older proceedings from the Doctors Commons 
were being translated simultaneously into English from Latin, providing even more 
examples of prurient material for eager readers. The combined efforts meant that not only 
could common people read accounts of intimate personal details, the author complained, 
but they were also able to (and did readily) engage in their own conversations about the 
material by publishing and circulating ?whole Tracts and Essays upon such Subjects as it 
would be offensive even to mention.?
235
 ?Against Immodesty? highlighted the complexity surrounding the danger of 
publicity. There were multiple levels of exposure of the ?immodest? information revealed 
during the trial. Its placement on the ?official record? in the form of witness depositions 
and other procedures of inquiry was formerly disclosed before a predominantly male 
audience, and then ?decently concealed? from lay readers by being recorded in Latin. As 
those controls were removed, the intimate details were made available to a larger 
audience.
236
 The information being exposed was one layer of the danger of publicity, 
then, and its new audiences another. Developments in communication and transportation 
technologies broadened the realm of print and enabled the reproduction and 
dissemination of lurid information to an audience that was more expansive in both 
numbers and distance. An additional threat lay in the composition of the new audience, 
106
234
 Ibid.
235
 Ibid., 298-299.
236
 Ibid., 298.
which included groups that previously could not access these accounts, including the 
?common? people, and women in particular. Thus, crim. con. publicity facilitated a 
conversation among a broader segment of society that entailed criticizing social elites 
through publicly commenting on their private lives. If technological improvements made 
printed materials more accessible in general, the public demand for sensational 
information precipitated the emergence of a network of newspapers, periodicals, and 
satirical prints devoted to the latest rumors or scandals involving the most prominent 
members of society. 
 The publicity surrounding these trials during and after proceedings contributed to 
the spread of this form of inquiry into people?s private affairs beyond the courtroom into 
the most expansive realm of society. The rate at which Britain?s dynamic print culture 
emerged in the eighteenth century undermined the husband-plaintiffs? ability to control 
the publicity surrounding their private lives. In the courtroom, the husband-plaintiff 
exposed the adultery in terms that favored his character at the expense of the other 
persons involved. In the realm of print, however, authors, artists, and printers seized 
control of the crim. con. ?script? and, subsequently, the litigants? reputations. 
 The public sphere could also offer a site for defending reputations sullied in the 
courtroom or for attacking the husband-plaintiffs? characters.  Lydia Grainger?s 
anonymous commentary on the ?secret history? of ?Castilia? (Lady Abergavenny) did 
both by simultaneously highlighting the publicity paradox and emphasizing the 
sacredness of private life, which the husband (Lord Abergavenny) had violated by 
107
bringing the crim. con. action.
237
 Grainger opened her essay with an apology and 
explanation for her unkind conjecture against Lord Abergavenny. She defended her 
depiction of his character, however, by insisting that it was truly the most generous 
interpretation she could extract from her analysis of ?such odd Proceedings,? by which 
she meant the crim. con. trial itself, the testimonies presented by witnesses, and their 
illumination of the husband?s and servants? conduct.
238
 The scandal, for this author, was 
not the wife?s infidelity, but rather ?the unheard of Proceedings, and treacherous Plots 
that were contriv?d, carry?d on, and executed, to ruin poor Castilia.?
239
 She described 
how the husband returned to his country seat from London with his charismatic male 
friend, ?Philander? (Richard Lyddel), urged his wife to be extra attentive to his dearest 
friend?s every need, then abandoned the two of them in the country and returned to 
court.
240
 Why would a husband be so careless as to introduce such an appealing rival for 
his wife?s affections and encourage the development of an intimate relationship in his 
home and in his absence? The author determined that Lord Abergavenny?s request was 
incomprehensible and could only mean that he had a ?premeditated Design...to tempt his 
Wife, to make an Addition to her Fortune of ten thousand Pounds [the amount Lord 
Abergavenny was awarded in damages in his crim. con. trial], at so dear a purchase as her 
Virtue, Honour, and Reputation.?
241
 Grainger criticized Abergavenny for being a sort of 
108
237
 [Grainger], ?The Unhappy Adultery,? in Modern Amours.
238
 Ibid., 30-31.
239
 Ibid., 37.
240
 Ibid., 33-34, 36.
241
 Ibid., 36.
absentee-husband who not only neglected his wife, but conspired against her virtue and 
reputation to make a profit.
 Even more reprehensible was the husband?s apparent eagerness to expose the 
adultery before ?the Eyes of the World.?
242
 It not only publicized his wife?s 
transgressions, it illuminated his own status as a cuckold, something Grainger highlighted 
in her observation that, ?I fear there are too many of these modern Husbands in this Age, 
that would be contented to have themselves register?d in the illustrious Roll of Cuckolds, 
for the bare Lucre of the Damages that might be brought in for their intended 
Sufferings.*?
243
 She offered another explanation for husbands who were willing to 
publicize being cuckolded. Besides the financial compensation they receive for their 
perceived injuries, ?another great Conveniency attends; they get rid of their Wives by the 
Bargain, without returning their Fortunes.?
244
 The author went on to warn Lord 
Abergavenny and this new breed of ?modern husbands? inclined to litigation that the 
financial and legal ?remedies? they attained from the crim. con. trial were ephemeral, but 
the infamy from publicizing their indiscretions would be preserved in perpetuity: ?My 
Lord may imagine he has acquir?d no Imputation on his Fame, through such dark and 
mysterious Proceedings; but succeeding Generations will repeat the Story of Castilia?s 
109
242
 This expression, in reference to the public (or audience), was used multiple times in the essay. 
Ibid., 57-58.
243
 Ibid., 37. The asterisk signified the following comment at the bottom of the page: ?Sir W. 
Y.? [Likely, William Younge]. For a defense of Younge?s wife from the public shame she endured during his 
crim. con. and adultery trials, and ultimately Parliamentary divorce proceedings in 1724, see Mary Wortley 
Montagu?s poem, ?The muse in distress: a poem. Occasion'd by the present state of poetry; humbly 
address'd to the Right Honourable Sir William Yonge,? (London,  1733).
244
 [Grainger], ?The Unhappy Adultery,? in Modern Amours, 37. Placing ads regarding credit was 
a way of shifting public shame from husband to wife and lover; in this case, publicity could be a means of 
saving a man?s credit rather than damaging it. Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 111.
Fate, and shed Tears of Compassion on her Tomb.?
245
 The husbands might have enjoyed 
the advantage of authority in the legal realm, but their personal legacy would be reified in 
the realm of print through a public of ?curious consumers.?
246
 Grainger warned plaintiff-husbands of their lack of control over their private lives 
once they willingly exposed them, proclaiming that justice prevailed in the ?court? of 
public opinion even though it was denied in the Court of Common Pleas.
247
 The same 
lurid details that incriminated the wife and her lover in the more controlled arena of the 
courtroom could incriminate the husband or servant-witnesses in print. For example, a 
published collection that featured a crim. con. trial account alongside an impotency trial 
presented an opportunity for the reader to interpret the woman?s preference for a man 
other than her husband as a reflection on the plaintiff?s sexual deficiencies rather than the 
defendant?s or wife?s lack of moral character.
248
 Publicizing intimate details of one?s 
private life, then, was a double-edged sword for litigants in eighteenth-century Britain. It 
provided a platform for reasserting the husband?s power over those directly subordinate 
to him. Paradoxically, however, the manner in which he accomplished this -- through the 
spectacle of a crim. con. trial -- placed himself, along with the scandalous details he had 
revealed about his private life, at the mercy of a curious public. The result was that, 
despite having consolidated some power by restoring a sense of order within his 
110
245
 [Grainger], ?The Unhappy Adultery,? in Modern Amours, 49.
246
 Benedict, Curiosity, 9.
247
 [Grainger], ?The Unhappy Adultery,? in Modern Amours, 49.
248
 For example, an account of the Dormer v. Jones crim. con. trial was included in the 1715 
collection, Cases of Divorce for Several Causes, which also featured the infamous impotency trial Weld v. 
Weld.
traditional communities of control, the plaintiff-husband enabled his authority to be 
undermined by forces beyond his sphere of influence.
The Pleasures of Publicity
If we judge by the growing popularity of crim. con. trials and published crim. con. 
accounts during the eighteenth century, not everyone felt that publicity was ?dangerous? 
for readers. Crim. con. cases circulated in many forms, from formal trial accounts to 
moral prescriptive essays and tracts on masculinity and national security. Many editors 
defended publicizing intimate details of private lives by professing a sense of civic duty, 
justifying the publicity as being for the ?public good.? The preface for the 1715 
collection, Cases of Divorce for Several Causes, proclaimed that the work was legitimate 
and was intended to correct loose morals rather than incite them. The author assured 
readers there was no intention to make light of such serious issues, and warned that if it 
did lead to emulating the cases? immorality, it was the readers? fault for misinterpreting 
the author, scribe, publisher, and illustrator?s honest and pure intentions.
249
 A similar 
situation accompanied the published account of Catherine Newton?s 1778 adultery trial. 
The details in the case were particularly lewd, which prompted the editor to preemptively 
defend himself from any accusations that the trial might incite. He argued that it was 
111
249
 Preface to Cases for Divorce (1715) [no pagination]. The author went on to characterize those 
who censure such publications as religious zealots (specifically talking about the Society for the 
Reformation of Manners and similar associations) and proclaimed that they had no business trying to 
?intermeddle in affairs that no ways concerns them.? Ibid. The decline of church courts? authority in 
prosecuting adultery at the local level in the late 17th-early 18th centuries left a hole in the regulation of 
morality which the private Societies for the Reformation of Manners attempted to fill, although emphasis 
was placed more on prostitution, blasphemers, and Sabbath-breakers than adulterers. Their impact was 
minimal and their efforts ultimately unsuccessful, and these societies faded from existence by the 1720s. 
Stone, Road to Divorce, 232-233.
okay to publicize the Newton trial evidence and insisted that it was not an affront to 
public virtue; rather, ?the exposure of such circumstances to public view? produced 
disgust in the hearts and minds of those who encountered it and thus discouraged sexual 
immorality.
250
 
 Publishers -- and, as we saw in chapter three, the counsels for the plaintiffs in 
crim. con. trials -- justified publicizing the ?private? through a conceptualization of a 
?public? in whose interests they had a right, and even an obligation, to act. The 
boundaries between ?public? and ?private? were constantly shifting, especially by the late 
eighteenth century, and there were many proponents of the principle that published 
accounts provided moral instruction through detailing other people?s private lives, all in 
the name of the ?public good.? The two concepts were mutually-reinforcing. Some 
publishers espoused ?purist? principles and simultaneously pushed their publications to a 
less discerning clientele. Edmund Curll used the preface to Cases of Divorce to advertise 
the impious nature of the cases included in the collection, and his appeal to the ?public 
interest? in reference to his publishing the details of Dormer v. Jones was based on the 
?enormous amusement and entertainment? the trial inspired.
251
 It was nearly impossible 
to separate private and public in crim. con. publications. While there were those who 
objected, it was precisely this blurred distinction that imbued trial accounts with their 
fundamental appeal. The pleasure crim. con. provided for contemporaries had two 
distinct characteristics: it was a source of amusement and of erotic enjoyment.
112
250
 Catherine Newton Trial for Adultery (1778), in Cuckold?s Chronicle, 1:111.
251
 Turner, Fashioning Adultery, 182-83.
 The eighteenth century was a period known for the pursuit of pleasure. New 
forms of entertainment emerged in London and throughout Britain, from new seaside 
resorts to the spa towns of Bath and Tunbridge Wells.
252
 The popularity of crim. con. trial 
publications was an extension of this pursuit of pleasure and were a source of 
entertainment for contemporary Britons. These accounts amounted to printed gossip, 
quite similar to the activities of the spying servants discussed in chapter two. Although 
polite society considered this behavior most unbecoming, and particularly so for ?ladies 
of quality? (by the end of the century gossip is an almost irreversibly feminized term),
253
 
the upper ranks enjoyed idle gossip and lewd humor as much as anyone in eighteenth-
century Britain.
254
 In fact, they incorporated scandal-mongering into country-house 
sociability. Aristocrats sometimes kept satirical prints on hand so that, when the host and 
guests engaged in the ?country-house habit of perusing portfolios,? they were assured at 
least one amusing item and took extra pleasure in their laughter ?if at the expense of a 
113
252
 John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century 
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1997); Berg, Luxury and Pleasure; John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., 
Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993); Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, 
The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text, New Edition (New York: Routledge, 1997); 
J. H. Plumb, ?The Commercialisation of Leisure,? in Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, eds., 
Birth of a Consumer Society (New York: HarperCollins, 1984); Phyllis Hembry, The English Spa, 1560?
1815: A Social History (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1990); Terry Castle, Masquerade and 
Civilisation: the Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Palo Alto, CA: 
Stanford University Press, 1986).
253
 By the eighteenth century, gossiping was a feminized trait that was strongly associated with 
women of the lower orders of society. Castan, ?The Public and the Private,? 416-418. Servants had a 
reputation for spreading rumors: The OED definition of ?gossip? not only identifies its feminine 
connotations, but the example sentences, particularly the ones from the eighteenth century, refer to 
maidservants who are off gossiping with friends. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. ?gossip.? See also 
Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighborhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 2003), 170-172; Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 
1985); and Meldrum, ?Women's Court in London.?
254
 Cindy McCreery, ?Keeping up with the Bon Ton: The Te?te-a-Te?te Series in the Town and 
Country Magazine,? in Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations, and 
Responsibilities, ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (Harlow, England: Longman Limited, 1997), 207?
29; Spacks, Gossip; Gowing, Domestic Dangers.
particular friend.?
255
 Lady Worsley and the Countess of Strathmore were the sources of 
much entertainment and conversation among their peers in the 1780s. Many elites owned 
caricature prints inspired by the women?s sensational and widely publicized trials.
256
 
Worsley?s trial was a crim. con. action brought in 1782 by her husband, Sir Richard 
Worsley, against her lover Captain George Bisset.
257
 The Strathmore scandal involved 
two trials. The first was the divorce suit initiated by the Countess in 1785 on grounds of 
cruelty (life-threatening abuse). This was followed by her husband?s criminal trial the 
same year for kidnapping and assaulting his wife in order to prevent her from leaving him 
(and taking her fortune with her), for which he was found guilty and imprisoned, 
ultimately paving the way for their divorce.
258
 Their laughter was not necessarily vicious, although in the Countess of 
Strathmore?s case it may seem shockingly insensitive (to modern readers, at least), 
especially considering that her husband, Andrew Robinson Bowes, beat her so badly after 
kidnapping her that she was unable to walk or stand for a month.
259
 Aristocratic interest 
in these scandals was often driven by the same idle curiosity that inspired domestic 
servants to spy on their superiors. Surviving correspondences between town and country 
reveal that many aristocratic women were simply bored in their country manors while 
their husbands were away for extended periods of time and often wrote to their friends in 
114
255
 Gatrell, City of Laughter, 240. 
256
 Ibid., 236.
257
 See The Trial With the Whole of the Evidence, Between Sir Richard Worsley and George 
Maurice Bisset for Criminal Conversation, 7th ed. (London, 1782).
258
 Anna Clark, Scandal, 68-69.
259
 Gatrell, City of Laughter, 341. An account of the trial is included in A New collection of trials 
for adultery (London, 1799).
London seeking the latest gossip. Their friends happily obliged with written updates and 
sent them newspapers and magazines that documented London?s flourishing social 
scene.
260
 Images, such as the humorous prints of Lady Worsley and Countess of 
Strathmore, often accompanied these reports.
261
 
 The exchange of information between London and the countryside increased in 
this period as it became more efficient, and metropolitan gossip was a key export to rural 
estates.
262
 Idle women were not the only gossip-mongers residing in the countryside, 
however. A Piccadilly printseller sued a man in King?s Bench for failing to pay for the set 
of satirical prints he ordered. Thomas Erskine represented the printer and told the court 
that the defendant was seeking to amuse himself and, since he resided in the countryside, 
desired ?and opportunity of being acquainted, though at a distance,? with the quizzical 
?odd fishes? among London?s population.
263
 He contended that ?it was natural to suppose 
that a gentleman residing in a remote part of the country should wish to be acquainted 
with the fools that inhabit the metropolis.?
264
 For Erskine, this sort of personal curiosity 
for idle entertainment was quite common in men. And he was quite right, as men and 
women of all ranks indulged in printed materials depicting real, personal subjects for 
their own amusement. 
115
260
 Ibid., 359
261
 Ibid., 236.
262
 Ibid., 239. Oliver Goldsmith commented on the fervent communication of news and follies 
from London to the countryside. He opened his 1773 play, She Stoops to Conquer, with the character 
Hardcastle lamenting, ?I wonder why London cannot keep its own fools at home. In my time, the follies of 
the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stage-coach.? Goldsmith, She Stoops to 
Conquer: or, the Mistakes of a Night (London [1773]), Act I, scene 1.
263
 Quoted in Gatrell, City of Laughter, 240.
264
 Quoted in ibid.
 The prevalence of crim. con. accounts in the form of ?secret histories? and idle 
gossip, a more burlesque than ?polite? literary style, reveals an underlying stratum of jest 
and mockery of real individuals that served as the basis for the trials? popularity. One way 
to circumvent official censure for publicizing defamatory details of an aristocrat?s private 
life was to replace letters of the individual?s name with dashes in order to ?conceal? their 
identity. This was a hollow effort by printers, and the author of ?Against Immodesty? 
observed that trial proceedings were now ?publickly expos?d to every common English 
Reader...[and] are now printed in Words at Length, or with such Marks and Breaks as are 
easily intelligible.?
265
 This was evident in The Modern Amours, in which a key was 
affixed as a ?Table of Contents? that listed Grainger?s essay, ?The Unhappy Adultery,? as 
?The Fatal History of Lady A---------y.?
266
 The essay opened with a background on the 
character Castilia that documented her birthplace, her father?s profession, her husband?s 
profession, and their place of residence.
267
 This method of ?disguising? an individual?s 
identity was clearly subterfuge, especially when combined with the details included in the 
text. 
 A later example can be seen in the printed and illustrated accounts of the 
sensational 1782 crim. con. trial brought by Sir Richard Worsley against Captain George 
Bisset for adultery with Lady Mary Worsley.
268
 A published defense of Worsley, who was 
publicly lampooned when a jury awarded him embarrassingly low damages of one 
116
265
 ?Against Immodesty,? in London Magazine, 298.
266
 [Grainger], ?The Unhappy Adultery,? in Modern Amours. 
267
 Ibid., 29-30.
268
 The Trial with the Whole of the Evidence Between Right Hon. Sir Richard Worsley, Bart., and 
George Maurice Bisset, Esq., for Criminal Conversation with the Plaintiff?s Wife, Seventh Edition (London 
1782).
shilling after he was exposed during the trial as actively encouraging his wife?s many 
affairs, quite needlessly employed dashes in the individual names listed in the title: The 
Answer of S-r R---d W---y, Bart. to the Epistle of L---y W-----y.
269
 Satirist James Gillray 
used similar techniques in the titles of two prints that ridiculed Lady Worsley?s 
promiscuity, entitled A Peep into Lady W!!!!!y?s Seraglio (see fig. 6) and Sir Richard 
Worse-than-Sly, Exposing his Wifes Bottom -- O Fye! (see fig. 7).
270
 The latter print 
depicted an infamous incident revealed during the trial in which Worsley, after shouting 
his intentions to his wife, lifted Bisset onto his shoulders so he could observe Lady 
Worsley getting dressed after emerging from a bath. Both the subjects of the prints and 
the story behind the scene depicted would have been obvious to contemporary observers. 
Encoded titles merely heightened the sense of scandal associated with the content.
 Quite similar to the spying servants in the domestic realm, this exchange of 
scandalous information depicting elites? private lives was much like a game, and crim. 
con. was a form of entertainment for a curious readership. Another element of appeal for 
the printed form of crim. con. ?gossip? -- filling in the ?dashes,? piecing together textual 
?clues? -- was that it allowed readers to ?discover? the secret themselves, instead of 
relying on vicarious voyeurism through servants? testimony. The partial concealment 
provided by the dashes, the ?keys? that were either affixed to the publication or printed 
separately, all seemed to invite the reader to ?play? the guessing-game. It was much like a 
riddle, and if you solved it correctly, you discovered a secret.
117
269
 The Answer of S-r R-----d W-----y, Bart. to the Epistle of L---y W-----y (London, 1782),
270
 James Gillray, A Peep into Lady W!!!!!y?s Seraglio (1782) and ibid, Sir Richard Worse-than-
Sly, Exposing his Wifes Bottom -- O Fye! (1782). Both of these images are reproduced in Gatrell, City of 
Laughter, 2-3.
Figure 6. Gillray, A Peep into Lady W!!!!!y?s Seraglio (W. Humphries, 1782), in Gatrell, City of 
Laughter.
118
Figure 7. Gillray, Sir Richard Worse-than-Sly, Exposing his Wifes Bottom -- O Fye! (W. 
Humphries, 1782), in Gatrell, City of Laughter.
119
 In City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London, Vic Gatrell 
finds that contemporaries? love of pleasure manifested in a shared love of laughter. The 
eighteenth century has been described as the Age of Satire, with Alexander Pope?s biting 
wit symbolizing the genre for many. Yet Gatrell demonstrates that Pope?s humor was not 
representative of what contemporary Britons found funny. Satire flourished, but its 
?smiling? form enjoyed greater prominence than did ?savage? humor.
271
 In fact, Most 
satirical prints are better characterized as ?celebrations? of the subject for sheer 
entertainment, not as deliberate attempts to correct inappropriate behavior, and Gatrell 
illustrates how this form of satire fit within a contemporary culture that relished laughter 
and amusement more than blunt criticism.
272
 In the case of crim. con. trials, the 
scandalous details were printed in the emerging network of gossip magazines, then 
became the target of satire and public scorn.
273
 Depictions of aristocratic excess were 
more humorous than biting and intended to evoke laughter for general amusement. 
Scholarship on satire tends to focus on its political component, but it was the distinctly 
non-political nature of many eighteenth-century British humor prints that allowed these 
sources to permeate and shape contemporary culture more broadly and profoundly than 
the explicitly political commentary could.
274
 This had important implications for the 
120
271
 Gatrell, City of Laughter, 141.
272
 Ibid., 167-176.
273
 Ibid., 141. Although moralistic criticism abounded, Gatrell has warned against interpreting 
eighteenth-century British satire as overtly political attacks on aristocratic vice, noting the prominence of 
?smiling? satire over the more ?savage? form.
274
 Gatrell explains that the prominence of ?smiling? satire was not necessarily ?anti-political? -- 
the proliferation of the relatively innocuous, albeit unflattering, images did not subliminally transmit 
negative perceptions of the aristocracy that evolved later. Ibid., 154.
individuals or groups being laughed at, and nevertheless chipped away at the 
aristocracy?s cultural hegemony.
 Gatrell describes eighteenth-century satire as a ?great leveler? because it 
demonstrated the ?similitude of manners in high and low life? by illustrating elites? 
indulgence in the same vices that polite society deemed ?vulgar? and associated with the 
lower sorts.
275
 The (mis)behaviors highlighted in the satire were not the only similarities 
between the rich and the poor, however. The mentalities and practices that drove interest 
in the material further ?equalized? the cultural consumers. Indeed, curiosity about other 
people?s private lives can be more accurately understood as more of a universal ?habit? 
than one more closely identified with either ?high? or ?low? society. The subjects of the 
most sensational scandals, however, represented the upper orders disproportionately. This 
meant that ?smiling satire? was far from harmless for elites. Being the source of lurid 
gossip and idle entertainment was a threat to husband-plaintiffs because they could not 
control the manner in which their private character was represented in the print media and 
interpreted by curious consumers. In fact, during a late-century trial the lawyer Thomas 
Erskine, who frequently represented plaintiffs and occasionally defendants in crim. con. 
suits brought in King?s Bench, argued that satirizing character was practiced with such 
frequency it was now a problem that needed to be addressed and had become more 
dangerous to its victims than text libel.
276
 Images were especially threatening because 
?they remained beyond the control of language? and were open for interpretation.
277
 Even 
121
275
 Ibid., 142.
276
 Ibid., 223.
277
 Ibid., 227-28.
illiterates could read them. This meant that not only could husbands not control how 
people viewed the representations, they essentially could not even know how they were 
being perceived by the rather anonymous public of readers and viewers. Such knowledge 
had to be both frustrating and threatening on some level, particularly as the breadth and 
nature of publicity in British print culture was so new.
 Thus, in the public realm, the inability to control the publicity of one?s private life 
effectively rendered one powerless over one?s own reputation. Even though ?[t]he 
satirical engraver himself had come to be regarded as something of a licensed jester?
278
 in 
the flourishing form of ?smiling satire,? some contemporaries lambasted satirists like 
Gillray for being a ?caterpillar on the green leaf of reputation...a sort of public and private 
spy.?
279
 Earlier critics of satire expressed similar anxieties. Early eighteenth-century 
satire highlighted particular actions over the perpetrators, as proponents of ?polite? 
laughter promoted humor but rejected ridicule that targeted individuals.
280
 This policy 
was not always put into practice, however, and Joseph Addison, for example, remarked 
disapprovingly on satirists? ?secret stabs to a man?s reputation.?
281
 Satire became more 
personalized later in the period, and the ?stabs? were far less subtle -- contemporary men 
and women knew who as well as what they were laughing at.
282
 The tools printers used to 
conceal the subject?s identity were opaque cloaks that merely amplified the pleasure of 
consuming the scandal. 
122
278
 Ibid., 136.
279
 Quoted in ibid., 136.
280
 Ibid., 257.
281
 Joseph Addison, Spectator, no. 23 (March 1711), quoted in ibid., 172.
282
 Ibid., 257.
Erotica
The pleasure derived from crim. con. accounts was both humorous and erotic. Many 
critics attacked crim. con. publicity for rousing prurient interests, but this was also part of 
its appeal. On the surface, the widespread appeal of sex scandals to the general public 
may seem to contradict popular conceptions of eighteenth-century British society as 
?polite.? Historians who have attempted to reconcile this duality have tended towards 
either dismissing the prominence of the ?polite? model or by representing less ?polite? 
sexual experiences as a subculture. Karen Harvey has argued for a more balanced 
consideration of these ?two Englands,? as co-dominant cultures of ?restraint and license.? 
She identifies erotic material as an important navigation tool, both for contemporaries 
and present-day historians, because it was situated ?in contexts with pretensions to 
refinement.?
283
 The concept of eighteenth-century polite masculinity and the practice of 
measuring manhood through public manners and against other men developed in tandem 
with the rise of the public sphere.
284
 Because polite sociability demanded discretion and 
propriety in one?s public conduct, bringing an action for criminal conversation might 
seem contrary to those ideals. However, the plaintiffs, through their counsel?s arguments 
and witness testimonies, usually styled themselves as the embodiment of the ?polite 
123
283
 Harvey, Reading Sex, 1, 36. See also Langford, A Polite and Commercial People; Roy Porter 
and Lesley Hall, Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950 (New Haven, CT: 
Yale University Press, 1995).
284
 Carter, Polite Society, 44-45. The seminal work on the public sphere in eighteenth-century 
Britain is Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a 
Category of Bourgeois Society, Thomas Burger, trans. (Boston: MIT Press, 1991). See also, Langford, A 
Polite and Commercial People; and Clark, Scandal.
gentleman.? The importance of public reputation and defining one?s manhood against 
other men brought the crim. con. trial firmly into the realm of politeness. As the century 
progressed, many husbands were increasingly willing to exploit their private lives in the 
public courtroom, as the need to defend their manhood, formerly achieved through more 
private avenues, merged with the desire to exact public (and financial) revenge. These 
needs, combined with the public thirst for accounts of private indiscretions, thrived in a 
culture with a growing infatuation with scandal --particularly involving elites -- and 
emerged at a time when such scandal became increasingly available for public 
consumption.
285
 In the courtroom, lawyers articulated and controlled the discourse of aristocratic 
men?s honor and reputation. They adopted cultural stereotypes and commonly employed 
terms, such as ?rake? and ?polite gentleman,? that the jury was likely to identify and 
interpret positively, or at least sympathetically, in the plaintiffs? favor. Their control did 
not extend into the public sphere. In this realm, control over aristocratic litigants? private 
lives was firmly in the hands of printers and journalists. They adapted the lawyers? 
narrative and the gender-formula of the crim. con. ?script? for published trial accounts, 
and supplemented the transcripts with editorial commentary and illustrations. In some 
cases, when possible, they combined proceedings from the wife?s adultery trial in the 
Doctors Commons in order to maximize the scandalous details they could reveal to the 
public. In doing this, the printers appropriated the litigants? formula for publicizing their 
private lives and effectively usurped the husband?s control of it in the public realm. The 
124
285
 Ibid., 2.
trial now told the story, mainly from the perspective of the spying servants, of a 
cuckolded aristocrat whose ?loose? wife easily succumbed to the advances of the 
charming but amoral gallant. The husband?s ?identity? as a cuckold was amplified in the 
published accounts and diffused across eighteenth-century British culture in multiple 
printed editions and trial collections. The husband?s lack of power was two-fold in the 
public sphere: not only did the print media replace his self-fashioned image as a 
gentleman with wounded honor with the persona of a cuckold who was unable to control 
his wife sexually, the husband was also utterly powerless to curtail or control the 
circulation of his emasculated reputation. These trial accounts demonstrate that despite 
the value placed upon the variegated modes of performed manliness, including 
?politeness? and ?sensibility,? contemporary conceptions of manhood were predicated on 
male sexual prowess.
 The ability to control one?s wife by satisfying her sexually continued to be an 
important component of ideal masculinity throughout the eighteenth century. The cuckold 
already carried the connotation that the man was sexually inadequate, but many 
publications further reinforced the husband?s emasculation by supplementing the 
published crim. con. themes of cuckoldry and virility in trials for impotency. The 1715 
collection Cases of Divorce, featured the crim. con. trial Dormer v. Jones, but concluded 
with the issue of impotency. Depositions from the well-known case of Lady Frances 
Howard, who filed for divorce from her husband in 1613, on the grounds that he was 
unable after three years of trying to consummate their marriage, are included along with a 
125
series of diverse official commentaries about impotency and its impact on marriage.
286
 In 
all of the cases, consummation as a mark of legitimacy for a marriage plays a key role, 
while the man?s role in consummating (or not consummating) the marriage is especially 
highlighted. The 1761 publication of a self-styled ?history of cuckoldom? entitled 
Adultery Anatomized, likewise highlighted the link between manhood and sexual 
performance through its inclusion of impotency cases with its collection of crim. con. 
trials.
287
 Presenting the reader with a series of scandalous cases that depicted the men 
being cuckolded on multiple occasions begged the question of why the wives were 
unfaithful to their husbands. It was not only the inquiring minds of readers that wanted to 
know. The plaintiff?s counsel in crim. con. trials tacitly acknowledged the insinuation by 
offering various explanations to the court that located fault in the wife or the defendant.  
These ranged from the wife?s insatiable lust to her inherent weakness and inability to 
resist sexual corruption by a relentless seducer. Through their inclusion of impotency 
cases, however, the publishers implied another reason for the wife?s infidelity: the failure 
of the husband to perform sexually. Publishing crim. con. trials alongside impotency 
trials highlighted the patriarchal notion of manhood through its inversion, the cuckold, by 
linking cases of a wife?s adultery to cases of a man?s inability to satisfy his wife sexually.
126
286
 George Abbot, The Case of Impotency as Debated in England, in That Remarkable Tryal an. 
1613. Between Robert, Earl of Essex, and the Lady Frances Howard,...for Impotency, 2 vols. (London,  
1715). 
287
 For example, in Adultery Anatomized the final case in the collection is the Weld v. Weld (1730) 
trial for divorce on grounds of impotency. Also see, The Whole of the Proceedings...Between the Hon. Mrs. 
Catherine Weld, Daughter to the Lord Aston, and Edward Weld Esquire, her Husband. Containing, I. Her 
Libel Exhibited Against him for Impotency (London, 1732). This trial account went through several editions 
and remained popular throughout the eighteenth century. Curll also published a separate account of the 
Howard trial (which he included in Cases for Divorce): The Case of Insufficiency Discuss'd; ...the Divorce 
Between the Lady Frances Howard, and Robert Earl of Essex,...for Impotency, 1613  (London, 1711).
 Crim. con. trial accounts further amplified the husband?s emasculation by 
juxtaposing him with a seducer-stereotype that embodied the cuckold?s opposite, the 
virile British man with a  physically aggressive sexuality. An early example of this can be 
found in the popular 1757 crim. con. suit, Knowles v. Gambier. During the trial, the 
plaintiff?s lawyer asked the chambermaid, Elizabeth (Betty) Bentley, to recount seeing 
Captain Gambier and Mrs. Knowles in bed together, and instructed her to ?speak a little 
louder, that my lord, and the gentlemen of the jury may hear you.?
288
 She described an 
incident she observed through the key hole to Mrs. Knowles?s bed chamber. After 
Gambier and Mrs. Knowles undressed into their nightgowns, the captain flung her onto 
the bed and leapt on top of her, but she then ?disengaged? and ran around the bed, 
making him chase her. When she grew tired, he ?took advantage? of the opportunity and 
forced her onto the bed again, threw himself on top of her, and pulled the covers over 
them.
289
 Betty also described other instances where she witnessed Captain Gambier 
groping Mrs. Knowles?s breasts and putting his hands in her pocket holes and up her 
petticoats, to which Mrs. Knowles?s response was to ?beat, pull, and strike him 
amorously.?
290
 Published accounts highlighted the physical aggression of the seducer (in 
Knowles v. Gambier, Mrs. Knowles had to literally fight him off), but the message was 
clear. The wife seemed to find his behavior more sexually appealing than her husband?s 
more polite and restrained manner. 
127
288
 Knowles v. Gambier (1757), in Adultery Anatomized, 180.
289
 Ibid., 183-184.
290
 Ibid., 184.
 Publicity swirled around Knowles v. Gambier at the time of the trial, and the 
scandal continued circulating in the public realm in multiple editions of published 
accounts and trial collections well into the nineteenth century.
291
 The descriptions in 
widely-publicized trials helped construct an archetypal ?female resistor? that featured 
prominently in cultural representations of women?s sexuality throughout the century. 
Bentley described Mrs. Knowles as responding to Gambier?s physical aggression in-kind, 
but the primary aggressor in these and other trial scenes was the male lover. Trial 
accounts that depicted female aggression usually portrayed it as a response to the man?s 
advances, or as a method of resistance. As with Mrs. Knowles, however, women?s 
resistance to manly aggression was portrayed as sprightly and insincere, even amorous. 
Labeling Knowles?s behavior ?amorous? imbues her resistance to Gambier?s sexual 
advances with an erotic charge and an underlying consent. Scenes like the one to which 
Betty Bentley testified were characterized as merely two lovers at (fore)play. In the 
public sphere, it fostered a cultural perception of female resistance being a universal 
mask for sexual desire. After 1770, this was further reinforced by the proliferation of 
published trial accounts that featured illustrations depicting a particularly amorous or 
sensational scene revealed during the trial (see fig. 8). The husband is practically non-
existent in the crim. con. trial accounts (in many cases he is reduced to a portrait on the 
wall overlooking the affair), yet his sexuality and inferior manhood is apparent in the 
juxtaposition of the seducer. Although he was the lead actor in the legal arena, in the 
realm of print he joined his wife as passive recipient of the virile British man.
128
291
 In addition to multiple editions of individual published accounts, the trial was featured in 
various trial collections, including Adultery Anatomized (1763), Trials for Adultery (1780), Cuckold?s 
Chronicle (1793), A New collection of trials for adultery (1799), and Crim. Con. Biography (1830). 
Figure 8. ?Captain Gambier and Lady Knowles habited in loose Gowns and toying together? in 
Trials for Adultery 5
129
 Eroticized depictions of aggressive physical encounters were particularly 
prominent in characterizations of the defendants in sex trials during the last quarter-
century, as evident by the two-volume 1793 publication, The Cuckold?s Chronicle. 
Despite the title?s emphasis on cuckoldry, this collection included any type of trial that 
involved male sexual conduct, from adultery and rape to impotency, and judging by the 
nature of the sexual acts described, late-century masculinity was defined increasingly by 
violent sexual aggression towards women.
292
 The intensified emphasis on physical 
strength as a primary component of masculinity, when combined with the traditional 
emphasis on men?s sexual relations with women, had potentially dangerous implications. 
This version of celebrated masculinity privileged virility to the point where the line 
between vigorous, ?manly? pursuit and excessive (non-consensual) force was difficult to 
distinguish. Some crim. con. trial testimonies described incidents that amounted to rape 
in everything but name, only the witnesses and lawyers framed the sexual interactions 
within the context of aggressive seduction.
 In the 1789 trial Baxter v. Coates, for example, a witness testified that, as he 
passed by the Baxter residence, he overheard Coates trying to seduce Baxter?s wife.
293
 
The deponent approached the window and observed Coates?s unsuccessful attempts to 
coax Mrs. Baxter to sleep with him. When she refused and retreated to the upstairs 
130
292
 Robert Shoemaker, ?Reforming Male Manners: Public Insult and the Decline of Violence in 
London, 1660-1740,? in English Masculinities, 1660-1800 (Harlow, England: Longman, 1999), 149-150. 
Shoemaker argues that there was an overall decline (but not disappearance) of violence in London in the 
eighteenth century, and he attributes this to the growing emphasis on public manners, which led to violent 
behavior being replaced by public insult. The increase in aggression displayed by the men in crim. con. 
trials, especially in the Cuckold?s Chronicle, may not reflect a wider trend in society, but these examples of 
violence show that some men were grappling with anxiety that was expressed through aggressive physical 
and sexual behavior towards women.
293
 Baxter v. Coates (1789) in Cuckold?s Chronicle, 2:146.
bedroom, Coates apparently followed her, locked them both in the bedroom and placed 
the key in his pocket. The witness then located a convenient seat on the penthouse roof, 
which provided him a perfect view of the action taking place in the bedroom. From there, 
he testified that he watched as Coates, despite Mrs. Baxter?s protests, undressed her, 
threw her onto the bed, and had sex with her.
294
 This testimony indicates a rape occurred, 
but the witness did not present it as such (nor did the pamphlet?s publisher, the attorney, 
judge, or jury).
295
 In fact, the publisher included an illustration of the scene that did not 
depict the wife in a state of distress or genuine resistance. Rather, while her body is 
leaning away as she is pushes him back with her arm, she is looking at him with a coy 
smile, clearly enjoying his advances (see fig. 9).
296
 That is not to argue that this should 
have been a rape trial rather than a crim. con. trial, however. Other witness testimonies 
depicted separate sexual encounters between Mrs. Baxter and Coates that appeared to 
have been entirely consensual.
297
 Regardless, although the witness to the scene in 
question did not accuse Coates of rape, he did not describe Mrs. Baxter eventually 
welcoming Coates?s advances, either. Instead, he described her as resisting the entire 
time, and he sat on the penthouse and watched this scene unfold without any inclination 
to intervene on her behalf.
 Employing the trope that women who resisted men?s sexual aggression secretly 
desired it enveloped crim. con. trial accounts with erotic ambiguity. This tactic was
131
294
 Ibid.
295
 Ibid.
296
 ?Mr. Coates Undressing Mrs. Baxtor,? in Cuckold?s Chronicle, inserted between pp. 146-147.
297
 Baxter v. Coates (1789) in Cuckold?s Chronicle, 2:147.
Figure 9. ?Mr. Coates Undressing Mrs. Baxtor,? in The Cuckold?s Chronicle
132
likewise applied to emphatically less ambiguous situations throughout The Cuckold?s 
Chronicle, perhaps most disturbingly in the trial accounts for rapes. These images did not 
always present the woman as necessarily enjoying the sexual encounter. They did, 
however, depict rape in a highly eroticized manner, presenting the victim more as a 
damsel in distress who is overcome by the robust man. She is a highly sexualized figure 
and is often shown lying down as he overpowers her, with one or both of her breasts 
exposed and usually being groped by the attacker. The style and imagery of the 
illustrations are very similar to the illustrations of crim. con. scenes and erotica (for 
illustrated examples of this to compare with Coates?s assault on Mrs. Baxter, see figs. 
10-11). The two images seem to suggest that some men, at least, were not capable of 
controlling their sexual desires and could not help but satisfy those urges. When the 
images are viewed in tandem with the trial accounts the message is even clearer. The 
result for someone reading a printed transcript of the trial is an explicit description of 
sexual intercourse and an eroticized illustration of the scene that amplifies the sexuality 
of the woman and the impending event, while minimizing her resistance. The trials that 
concluded with a verdict of not guilty consistently downplayed this lack of consent. Trials 
that ended with a guilty verdict (they were rare among the rape trials included in 
Cuckold?s Chronicle) concluded instead with a postscript from the editor impugning the 
rape by questioning the verdict or the victim and/or witness testimony.
298
 
133
298
 See the Motherhill and Davidson trials discussed below.
 The collection included an account of the 1786 trial of John Motherhill for the 
rape of Catherine Wade.
299
 Wade was questioned, cross-examined and re-examined 
numerous times, forcing her to recall in painstaking detail her account of Motherhill 
raping her. Defense attorneys seized upon some contradictions in her story. In particular, 
they questioned her assertion that when he first approached her and grabbed her, she did 
not realize he intended to rape her (which is why she did not scream for help and 
immediately run away).
300
 The defense was able to raise reasonable doubt, and the jury 
found Motherhill not guilty.
301
 The editor included an illustration of the rape (fig. 10), 
again depicting an account of a ?ravishment? from a trial which ultimately ended with the 
defendant?s acquittal. This is an example, as Karen Harvey has written, of the use of 
?metaphor and suspended denouements? in order to create ?a decorous distance between 
reader and text? that she identifies as a defining characteristic of erotica.
302
 It is the 
moment just before the alleged rape (that the jury determined was not proved beyond 
doubt), and thus viewers can relish Motherhill?s physical and sexual dominance of the 
petite and beautiful Miss Wade, without actually condoning the rape they are visually 
consuming.
134
299
 The Trial of John Motherhill for Rape Upon the Body of Catherine Wade, in Cuckold?s 
Chronicle, 1:45-93.
300
 Trial of John Motherhill, 69. That is not to suggest that this practice by lawyers of exploiting 
subtle contradictions to raise a reasonable doubt about the defendant?s guilt was exceptional to the 
eighteenth century; however, the editor of The Cuckold?s Chronicle (if not others) used the ?reasonable 
doubt? as an opportunity to perpetuate the notion that women were being disingenuous when they resisted 
men?s sexual advances.
301
 Ibid., 91.
302
 Harvey, Reading Sex, 1.
Figure 10. ?John Motherill?s First Attempt on Miss Wade,? in The Cuckold?s Chronicle
135
 There is also a scene from the 1774 trial of George Davidson for the rape of 
Isabella Blair (fig. 11).
303
 The illustration depicts Blair being pinned down by Davidson, 
with his hand groping her exposed breast -- a familiar image to the reader at this point in 
the Chronicle. Her facial expression indicates surprised panic, but her body is not 
portrayed in an especially defensive position: her arm that is farthest from the viewer?s 
vantage point is pushing Davidson away, but it is heavily shaded compared to the rest of 
her body, which is in a rather less resistive position. The jury found Davidson guilty and 
he was sentenced to death, but the editor questioned the verdict and insinuated that Blair 
might have provoked Davidson?s sexual assault by inviting him back to her house at one 
point, despite his ?threat, or rather bargain,? as the editor described it, that he would ?kiss 
her or lye with her? if he went home with her.
304
 He attributed the barbarity of Davidson?s 
actions to the fact that he was extremely drunk, and suggested that the punishment did not 
fit the crime when he noted that ?the state of [Davidson?s] intoxication, and what 
followed as the consequences of it, though tinctured with wantonness and barbarity, was 
dearly atoned for, in the sacrifice of a life that might probably have repaired the injury 
sustained.?
305
 His opinion that Davidson?s state of mind was to blame for his sexual 
aggression is reaffirmed by the illustration, entitled ?The Barbarity of a Ravisher,? where 
the depiction of Davidson, particularly his facial expression, clearly indicates some sort 
of mental incapacity, thus undermining the labels of guilt and barbarity that normally 
applied to a rapist.
136
303
 The Trial of George Davidson for Rape Upon the Body of Isabella Blair (1774), in Cuckold?s 
Chronicle, 1: 412-420.
304
 Ibid., 418-419.
305
 Ibid., 419.
Figure 11. ?The Barbarity of a Ravisher,? in The Cuckold?s Chronicle
137
 Although manly sexual aggression was often celebrated to a fault in the later 
eighteenth century, excessive physical violence against women was portrayed as contrary 
to notions of British masculinity. The Cuckold?s Chronicle included an account of the 
1785 trial of navy captain Isaac Prescott to illustrate this point.
306
 Prescott was prosecuted 
for abusing his wife and witness testimonies described how frequently and savagely the 
captain beat Mrs. Prescott. The author did not extend the empathy to Prescott that he did 
for the rapists; he did not challenge the sworn statements or question the witnesses? 
credibility or character. Rather, he presented Prescott as the embodiment of what the 
?British Man? was not. First and foremost, then, he was not an abusive husband. On the 
surface, the condemnation of domestic violence may seem to be the corollary of a more 
benevolent and chivalrous view of women and how men should treat them. The author 
berated the captain for abusing ?a poor defenceless woman.?
307
 This mentality defended 
female victims of male violence while simultaneously reinforcing women?s status as the 
?weaker sex.? Furthermore, this was immaterial to the author, as the sex of the victim 
was only relevant insofar as it related to the male aggressor and notions of manhood more 
generally. The author?s emphasis on the ?singularly remarkable? fact that Prescott?s 
violent behavior was only ever directed against women and not men presented a nuanced 
understanding of British masculinity.
308
 Wife-beating was emasculating not because it 
victimized women, but because the abuser gained a false sense of manliness from his 
physical dominance. Brute masculine strength could not be proven against an inferior 
138
306
 The Trial of Isaac Prescott, Esq. a Captain in the Royal Navy, for wanton, tyrannical, 
unprovoked, and savage cruelty, towards Jane Prescott, his Wife (1785), in Cuckold?s Chronicle, 1:139-147.
307
 Ibid., 142.
308
 Ibid.
opponent, which included all women. This facet of manhood was measured against other 
men. One proved his manhood with women sexually.
 Measuring manhood against other men was a tenant of ?polite gentlemanliness,? 
but this was the only one presented positively in the Cuckold?s trial account. The author 
put politeness on trial alongside Prescott by linking his character flaws to polite 
principles. When acquaintances (possibly sworn in as character witnesses for the 
defendant) described their public encounters with Prescott and portrayed him as kind and 
dignified, the author scoffed, ?He was not without his pretences to honour and exterior 
etiquette!?
309
 His comments were not without merit, however, as witness testimonies 
detailed Prescott?s savage treatment of Mrs. Prescott alongside accounts of his gentility 
when others were present to observe him. The captain intended to maintain his false 
public character and one witness testified to Prescott?s rage on an occasion when he 
realized he was about to be exposed. He described how Prescott heard someone 
approaching his room just as he had finished beating his wife and, as she lay crying on 
the floor, yelled ?Damn you, damn you, you bitch, the servants shall see you!?
310
 The 
author referred to the Captain?s duplicitous nature multiple times and criticized him for 
performing the part of gentleman in public while being an abusive coward in private.
 The trial account featured an illustration of a scene described in witness 
testimonies entitled ?Sensual Barbarity: or, Refinement on Navel [sic] Discipline? (fig. 
12). The image reinforced Prescott?s failure to meet any standard of manliness, much less 
that of the ideal ?British Man.? In Prescott?s trial alone, the author addressed multiple
139
309
 Ibid., 144.
310
 Ibid., 145.
Figure 12. ?Sensual Barbarity: or, Refinement on Navel [sic] Discipline? in Cuckold?s Chronicle
140
masculinities, not just the ?polite gentleman.? He highlighted Prescott?s shortcomings as 
a patriarchal figure as well. His eleven-year-old daughter often witnessed him abusing her 
mother, and court depositions allege that the captain?s abuse escalated when his wife was 
pregnant.
311
 Testimonies described Prescott?s fury over his servants discovering his 
abuse, and the image depicts a servant entering the room with a horrified expression on 
his face when he see his mistress on the floor in tears and his master hovering over her 
menacingly. The servant had been summoned to the room by the captain?s young 
daughter, who is cowering in the corner, terrified. Jane Prescott is sympathetic, yet still 
portrayed as a passive, sexualized figure. She is leaning away from her husband and 
taking a subtle step backwards, clutching the edge of her skirt with it pulled up above her 
knees, one exposed leg prominently extended and her breasts barely contained in her 
gown. The captain is dressed in full navy uniform, quite fat and unattractive with a scowl 
on his face. The facial expressions and body languages of the members of his household 
who are in the room display a range of emotions -- agony, fear, horror -- all negative, and 
all inspired by and directed towards the patriarch. 
  By the author?s standards, at least, rape could pass as an acceptable, or at least 
forgivable (and even pleasurable) act of violence, but spousal abuse did not. The 
distinguishing factor between acceptable and unacceptable physical aggression was sex. 
This view of physical violence resulted from the combination of the changing notions of 
human sexuality and a rampant male chauvinism. Contemporaries began to evaluate 
human behavior according to notions of a basic human ?nature? which held that certain 
141
311
 Ibid., 145-46. ?Sensual Barbarity: or, Refinement on Navel [sic] Discipline? in Cuckold?s 
Chronicle 1, inserted between pp. 144-145.
impulses and dispositions were ?natural? and therefore, to an extent, unavoidable. 
Humans -- males and females alike -- were viewed as fundamentally sexual beings.
312
 
When a heightened chauvinism carried this theory to its extreme, male sexuality was not 
only natural, but was also celebrated as the ideal form of British masculinity. In this way, 
one could view a rape victim?s refusal of a man?s sexual proposition as both ?unnatural? 
and ?unpatriotic,? two traits that were especially unlikely to garner sympathy in the final, 
?revolutionary? decades of the century.
313
The rape trials and the Baxter crim. con. trial, along with their accompanying 
illustrations, display an image of masculinity that is characterized by the men?s sexual 
control of women. The 1793 collection presented physical sexual aggression as an ideal, 
but the line between virility and rape, and to what extent a woman?s body was an object 
for male ownership, was incredibly blurry. Even when a jury determined that that line had 
been crossed, some -- like the editor of The Cuckold?s Chronicle, through his comments 
and illustrations, and the people who purchased the Chronicle for their reading or 
viewing pleasure -- appear to have been less certain. What is certain from these trials is 
142
312
 Tim Hitchcock, ?Redefining Sex in Eighteenth-Century England,? History Workshop Journal 
41 (Spring 1996): 72-90. Randolph Trumbach and George E. Haggerty situate homosexuality within the 
increasingly heterosexual culture (per Hitchcock) in eighteenth-century Britain. See Trumbach, ?Sex, 
Gender, and Sexual Identity in Modern Culture: Male Sodomy and Female Prostitution in Enlightenment 
London,? Journal of the History of Sexuality 2 (1991): I86-203; and Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity 
and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). Another influential 
work on eighteenth-century sexuality is Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 1: An Introduction (New 
York: Vintage, 1990).
313
 Historians have noted the heightened sexual anxiety among men during the later eighteenth 
century and some have posited a connection to rising national military-imperial anxieties. For example, see 
Dror Wahrman, ?Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England,? 
Past & Present, no. 159 (May 1998): 113-160; Linda Colley, Britons; and Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of 
the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University 
Press, 1998).
that the courtroom was still as much a site for debating the meaning of masculinity at the 
end of the eighteenth century as it was at the beginning, and the cuckolded patriarch 
remained a key player. The plaintiff?s lawyers typically accused seducers in crim. con. 
trials of undermining polite codes of conduct, and this characterization was echoed by the 
editors and publishers of crim. con. trial publications throughout much of the century. As 
we have seen, during the last two decades of the century manhood was still the key issue 
in crim. con. trials, and the image of the cuckold remained prominent, but the husband 
was juxtaposed with a new virile kind of manliness. The emergence of this brand of 
masculinity can be understood in the context of Britain?s growing involvement in military 
conflicts in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Having lost the American 
colonies in the 1780s, Britain remained involved in India and the West Indies, and 
declared war on revolutionary France in 1793 (the year that Cuckold?s Chronicle was 
published). Wartime tends to amplify national masculine anxieties and can result in 
increasing male violence and concerns with male sexual potency and procreation as a 
matter of national survival. In one sense, the meaning of manhood had come full circle 
from the previous century?s conceptions, with manliness associated once again with 
physical aggression and sexual control over women.
314
 Ultimately, one must conclude 
that, much as Alexandra Shepard has demonstrated for the seventeenth century, there 
were likewise many different meanings of manhood in the eighteenth century.
315
143
314
 It would be interesting, for example, to investigate if these seventeenth-century conceptions of 
masculinity were linked to the experience of the Civil War and Interregnum. 
315
 Shepard, Meanings of Manhood.
 Furthermore, these trial accounts blur the line between crim. con. trial accounts 
and erotica, but intentionally so. The ambiguity provides readers more freedom to 
interpret the crim. con. details as they please, even if that means viewing a rape as a 
highly aggressive -- but ultimately welcome -- sexual dalliance. The general opaqueness 
of crim. con. trial accounts facilitated its broad appeal in the public sphere, more than 
other trial accounts and erotic literature might have enjoyed. The crim. con. phenomenon 
cannot be explained strictly by its sex appeal, however. Published trial accounts were 
sources of pleasure for those who were simply seeking amusement. The ?non-political? 
material of ?smiling? satire trial prints, intended to entertain rather than rebuke, was 
emphatically personal, as the value of the material was its stake in the private. The 
?harmless? humors of crim. con. accounts was indeed a great leveler. It obliterated the 
traditional hierarchy and replaced it with a power structure predicated on privacy.
144
Conclusion: The Crim. Con. Phenomenon and the Eighteenth-Century Cabinet of 
Curiosities
The concept of the ?cabinet of curiosity? is a useful heuristic device for exploring the 
eighteenth-century crim. con. phenomenon in Britain. The cabinet of curiosities was 
adapted in the seventeenth century from its Renaissance predecessor and comprised an 
entire private room (in both private houses and public institutions) in which the owner 
exhibited a hodgepodge collection of objects from the natural world. Eighteenth-century 
?cabinets? continued to display ?natural wonders? predominantly, but collections 
increasingly incorporated examples of nature?s oddities, along with specimens of natural 
beauty and the occasional man-made curiosity.
316
 Those who sought curiosities of natural history were ultimately seeking ?truth,? 
looking for what was ?real? in the world. By mid-century, many Britons had become 
disillusioned with the superficialities of the age, an unavoidable fault in a ?polite? society 
that emphasized display and appearances over genuine character. The emerging 
preoccupation with the ?real? did not completely replace ?politeness? and its perceived 
artificialities, but it gained currency with a growing portion of the population.
317
 
Descriptions of natural curiosities took care to evince the truth of the wonders by 
145
316
 For an account of this phenomenon in the seventeenth-century, see Barbara Shapiro, A Culture 
of Fact: England, 1550-1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); ibid., Probability and Certainty 
in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships Between Natural Science, Religion, History, 
Law, and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Steven Shapin, A Social History 
of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 
1995).
317
 See, for example, Gatrell, City of Laughter; Harvey, Reading Sex.
presenting them in a ?matter of fact? reporting style that emphasized accuracy and 
attention to detail.
318
 This desire to know and understand ?real life? was an elite 
preoccupation in the early years of the Enlightenment, but it was a popular concern by the 
later-eighteenth century and broadened to include an interest in people as well as 
nature.
319
 Curiosity about human nature and human society fueled studies in the social 
sciences, and the legitimacy of this form of inquiry in contemporary British culture was 
evident in a pervasive desire to know (real) people?s private lives. The crim. con. 
phenomenon was a testament to this.
 Curiosity collections sought to represent the world with all its idiosyncrasies in 
one place.  The crim. con. trial ought to be understood as a similar type of cultural 
phenomenon.
320
 Curiosity was linked to materiality, as ?elite? curiosity involved an 
appreciation of finely-crafted objects, such as those displayed in the houses, collected or 
modeled after the Grand Tour, or craftsmanship as a skill, but strange and unusual human 
beings likewise qualified as curiosities.
321
 Curious items were usually notable for being 
rare or novel, but everyday objects could be considered curiosities if they were combined 
with a wonderful ?backstory.?
322
 The crim. con. trial offered a glimpse inside the 
aristocratic home and exposed the ?real? behavior of elites behind closed doors, behavior 
146
318
 Katie Whitaker, ?The Culture of Curiosity,? in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas 
Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 84.
319
 Ibid., 78. See also Larry Stewart, The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and 
Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and 
Porter and Hall, Facts of Life. For contemporary texts concerning human nature, see John Locke, An Essay 
Concerning Human Understanding (1690); David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), and An 
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1742).
320
 Whitaker, ?The Culture of Curiosity,? 88.
321
 Ibid., 76, 78.
322
 Ibid., 78.
that contrasted rather starkly with the image presented to visitors on guided tours or in 
commissioned portraits.
 The eighteenth-century country house functioned like a ?cabinet of curiosities,? as 
a site that (literally) housed aristocrats and their peculiar world of luxury goods and 
lavish furnishings that adorned the walls, lined every hall, and were situated perfectly in 
each room. Aristocrats likewise treated their manors as curiosity cabinets.
323
 Curiosity 
was a celebrated ?attitude of mind? among elite British men; they were ?trained? in 
curiosity as part of their Grand Tour education.
324
 They embarked on the Grand Tour and 
spent several months, and occasionally years, traveling the continent and socializing with 
the European nobility, while immersing themselves in Europe?s high culture of art, 
literature, and music.
325
 Over the course of their travels, the landed gentleman 
accumulated a small collection, usually consisting of literary and philosophical works, 
paintings and sculptures, then returned to his country manor with his ?tour d?cor? and re-
fashioned the house as a sort of ?museum of Taste.?
326
 The function of the aristocratic 
house was to publicly display the owners? power and status, which required public 
viewing to be legitimized.
327
 There were multiple ways of accomplishing this, including 
the publication of books of views describing the grandeur of various country estates, 
147
323
 Ibid., 85.
324
 Ibid., 75; Jeremy Black, The British and the Grand Tour, 234, 246-47.
325
 Jeremy Black, preface to The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century 
(Gloucestershire, U.K.: Stroud, 2003), [no pagination]. For a discussion of the various cultural attractions 
in which travelers frequently indulged, see ?The Arts,? in ibid., 277-314. For an account of women?s 
experiences of the Grand Tour, see Brian Dolan, Ladies of the Grand Tour: British Women in Pursuit of 
Enlightenment and Adventure in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: HarperCollins, 2001).
326
 Ibid.
327
 Christie, British Country House, 29.
illustrated accounts and guides, and designated public viewing days opened the manor to 
visitors who wished to personally observe the ?taste? of the owner.
328
 By controlling the 
viewing process -- what was viewed, when and by whom -- the landed gentleman was 
able to construct and reinforce his superiority. He fashioned his reputation through his 
material milieu. 
 Eighteenth-century British society became more ?public? as the groups vying for 
power expanded with the influx of wealthy merchants, traders, and professionals. Their 
ability to maintain power, however, did not only come from public titles or money or 
public institutions. Social status still depended heavily on reputation. The new emphasis 
on ?polite? sociability meant that status was legitimized by being performed between 
individuals, or at least in the presence of other observers. The importance of public 
display for reputation meant that any behavior contrary to ?polite? values must be 
concealed from view. This concept was not necessarily new, but contemporary 
developments both amplified its importance and posed unprecedented challenges. New 
technologies for publicity emerged in this period that could produce and circulate 
representations of a person?s character -- beyond his or her control -- to an expanding 
market of cultural consumers. Thus, protecting one?s reputation (and by extension one?s 
power) was becoming increasingly necessary at the same time that publicizing private 
behavior was achieved with greater ease, and consumed with greater fervor. Personal 
power, then, was rooted in privacy and one?s ability to control its concealment and 
exposure.
148
328
 Ibid.
 The ?culture of curiosity? that characterized the period of the Enlightenment 
enhanced the value of things unknown and rare or novel, particularly if their discovery 
yielded an improved understanding of the world. To stretch the analogy a bit further, 
crim. con. trials allowed Britons to discover the secret conduct of the ?beau monde? (a 
label -- which translates as the ?beautiful world? -- contemporaries applied to the 
fashionable elites) behind closed doors where, so they believed, they were hidden from 
view. The inherent value of secrecy was further amplified by the culture of privacy that 
was manifest throughout eighteenth-century society, for example in architecture, security 
mechanisms, legal theory and practices, politics, and social relations. A pervasive and 
multifarious system of enclosures signified ownership over items and spaces and 
subsequently isolated non-owners? access to these things, often for the first time. Thus, 
domestic servants were removed to the periphery of the household and suddenly found 
themselves locked out of cabinets, closets, and chambers to which they had previously 
enjoyed unlimited access. The owners saw a need to protect their property by concealing 
and securing their possessions, yet in many cases, as crim. con. trial testimonies revealed, 
this only piqued the servants? curiosity about what was being kept from them. The private 
possessions were valuable to both the owners and the inquisitive servants alike.
 The practice of collecting was a practice of power, as it entailed the production of 
knowledge in the form of taxonomies and other classification systems for natural 
phenomena.
329
 Curiosity cabinets not only displayed the knowledge and status of the 
owner, they also displayed his power over knowledge through his ability to both produce 
149
329
 Foucault, ?Panopticism,? in Discipline & Punish, 195-228.
and possess it. The Renaissance habit of collecting was an elite endeavor, but by the mid-
eighteenth century, non-elites also engaged in the practice of organizing and classifying 
social phenomena. Those with access to print media, for example, used those networks to 
represent, evaluate, and disseminate ?classifications? of identity categories that suffused 
eighteenth-century culture and continued to circulate in the next century. Published crim. 
con. accounts articulated taxonomies of masculinity that ranked the myriad manhoods 
from the ideal, which included at various times the polite gentleman, the man of feeling, 
and the virile British male, to the offensive, which almost always featured the cuckold, 
the fop, and the macaroni among its ranks, if not the libertine rake and blackguard. These 
were the types of ?curiosities? one encountered in the crim. con. ?cabinet,? along with the 
noblewomen who slept with their footmen, spying servants, husband-pimps, military 
gallants, and even the occasional nymphomaniac. These ?characters? represented real 
people, however, prominent people, and these representations were drawn from their 
(alleged) conduct behind closed doors. They no longer controlled the representation of 
their house as a self-fashioned curiosity cabinet. Crim. con. litigants became the objects 
of curiosity.
 In response, husband-plaintiffs sought to fence in the domestic realm and 
essentially close the door on servant gossip about the private household.  To achieve this 
husbands employed the crim. con suit as a form of counter-gossip in an attempt to 
discredit any defamatory information and introduce the ?true story? for their audience. 
The husband-plaintiffs? counter-gossip was to bring the crim. con. suit and use the trial to 
write a final and ?official? crim. con. ?script? to replace the unregulated gossip and 
150
rumors already circulating. Exposing their private lives in the public courtroom might 
seem contrary to the goal of eliminating gossip, but the husband-plaintiff could establish 
a version of events that exposed the private lives of the litigants but presented himself 
favorably. Masters reverted the household power-relations to their ?proper? patriarchal 
order through the crim. con. trial, but they achieved this at their own expense by placing 
themselves in another web of power. Husband-plaintiffs had to submit their cases 
(through their legal counsels) to the judges and special merchant juries, which effectively 
placed the value of their private lives in the hands of the juries and other legal 
professionals. This, by extension, transferred the power over aristocratic men?s 
reputations to these elites of the legal realm. 
 These trials were not private hearings. They were public -- and widely publicized 
-- and were therefore presented to an audience who had, especially in the more 
sensational trials, crammed into the courtroom to witness the spectacle of crim. con. first-
hand. The crim. con. ?audience? extended beyond the courtroom, however, and into the 
public realm where the revised crim. con. ?script? circulated most prominently through 
published accounts. As Benedict notes that ?Although status-enhancing accumulation 
meant physical acquisition, it traditionally also extended to the mental possession of 
learning, and this forms one of the roots grounding spectatorship as an aspect of curious 
acquisition.?
330
 Along with the ?legal elites,? these observers of crim. con. curiosities 
likewise attained a sense of power over the litigants whose private lives were laid open 
for observation. 
151
330
 Benedict, Curiosity, 18.
 The attempt to secure ?domestic enclosure? through the crim. con. trial backfired 
for the plaintiff-husbands. Instead, they turned their household into a cabinet of curiosity, 
?enclosed? in a sense by the publishing industry and a viewing public. In addition to 
losing the ability to control knowledge of their private lives, the litigants? power was 
further depleted because they were reduced to objects of curiosity and subjected to a form 
of surveillance where the most intimate moments of their lives were accessible to 
relatively anonymous spectators.
331
 Finally, the crim. con. phenomenon illuminates 
another public-private paradox: contemporary interests in crim. con. were fueled by a 
pervasive curiosity about real, private lives, but the manner in which eighteenth-century 
Britons pursued intimate knowledge of social elites rendered the litigants curious objects 
more than human subjects. With a sense of a private self emerging within the 
?community of one? and developing notions of personality in this period, the value 
associated with intimate knowledge of real people was firmly rooted in its private nature, 
yet its consumption by the communities in the more expansive public realm 
depersonalized the individuals. In this way, the legal institution of the crim. con. trial and 
the publicity which accompanied it demonstrated the ways in which the emerging public 
sphere threatened ?private life? from the earliest moments of its creation.
152
331
 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 210.
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