Adultery remained quasi-criminal in the legal imagination in various ways over the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Irish legal writer Sollom Emlyn alludes to this in his preface to the second edition of the popu-lar State Trials (1742)—a compilation of significant criminal trials, which continued through multiple editions into the nineteenth century. While he acknowledges “the general opinion” that adultery is no longer criminal he adds, referring to the dormant yet still-existent Interregnum statutory authority, “I must confess, I see not but that Adultery is indictable by our Law” More to the point, in 1800 Lord Auckland made an unsuccessful attempt to formally re-criminalize adultery as a misdemeanor punishable by a fine and imprisonment. In a speech to the House of Lords Auckland echoes the language of empire Henry Fielding deployed seventy years earlier in The Modern Husband, declaring that “Great Britain had preserved her existence amidst the paroxysms and convulsions, and downfalls of nations by the effect of or being a little less irreligious and less immoral than others.” As in the eighteenth-century examples described in Chapter 1, Auckland makes the discursive link between marital fidelity and British sovereignty.

Yet just 30 years later, even the tort of criminal conversation met its official demise after the public trial of another woman named Caroline. In 1836 Tory MP George Norton made a poorly-calculated attempt at political gain by suing incumbent Prime Minister Lord Melbourne for criminal conversation with his wife, the beautiful society hostess, poet, and feminist writer Caroline Norton. While Norton's evidence was so thin that the jury did not even retire before delivering its verdict against him, it was still an occasion of humiliation for Caroline, who stated that she was made to “appear a painted prostitute in a Public Court.” While the defendant in tort, Lord Melbourne, not only won the verdict but if anything “relished,” as Ian Ward puts it, “his depiction in court as an ageing roué, one that was capable of seducing the beautiful young wives of political opponents,” the proceeding effectively functioned as a criminal adjudication for Caroline. As she describes it, she was “condemned … to remain perfectly neuter; perfectly helpless; excluded, by the principles of our jurisprudence, from all possibility of defence.”