On June 5, 1820, Lord Liverpool delivered a message to the House of Lords concerning the impending trial of Caroline of Brunswick, wife of the recently ascended King George IV, for divorce on the grounds of adultery. “The King,” the Lord Chancellor read aloud, “has felt the most anxious desire to avert the necessity of disclosures and discussions, which must be as painful to his people as they can be to himself,” but Caroline's decision to return from self-imposed exile in Italy to claim her place as Queen of England “leaves him no alternative.” From both a social and a political standpoint, Caroline's trial was one of the most notorious and divisive episodes in the history of the modern British monarchy; many witnesses testified to her romantic relationship with her Italian steward Bartolomeo Pergami, and a bill of divorce passed the House of Lords. Nonetheless, due to Caroline's immense popularity as a figure of reform and George's reputation as a cruel husband and dissolute monarch, the bill was not submitted to the House of Commons. (George did console himself by having Caroline refused access to his coronation, at bayonet-point.) Beyond its much-discussed political significance, Queen Caroline's trial was also an important moment of cultural ferment surrounding the nature of adultery as a legal wrong.

The King's message for Parliament on that first day of the divorce proceedings, alluding to the harm to “the people” arising from disclosure of Caroline's alleged indiscretions, is clearly a case of political grandstanding. Yet he made the statement in the context of a trial that was, due to the parties involved, at once a private divorce and a proposed public bill. It should therefore also be understood as a particular sort of legal claim, with relevance to the basic classification of a wrong as a tort or a crime. When Blackstone distinguishes between “public” and “private” wrongs at the start of Book Four of his Commentaries, he states that English criminal law is known as “the doctrine of the pleas of the crown” because