VICE AND PURITY

Ideas about sin and providence saturated English politics after the overthrow of James II in 1688. Although worries about immorality had been only incidental to the revolution itself, they quickly grew prominent in its aftermath. Their importance was amplified by the widespread perception that the revolution had come about through divine intervention: it was God's way of giving England one last chance to reject sin, irreligion, and ill government, or else suffer his violent wrath. The idea of a reformation of manners in all walks of life was eagerly embraced by many churchmen, as an antidote to irreligion and indifference, as well as by nonconformists who lamented the laxity of the times. It was also strongly promoted by the new monarchs, who sought to play up their moral legitimacy in contrast to the iniquity of the previous reigns, and to justify the dangerous and expensive wars upon which they embarked.Footnote 6

There had been calls already in the reigns of Charles II and James II for Parliament to resume stricter measures against sexual offenses. Under ecclesiastical and common law, all sexual relations outside marriage remained culpable, but the church courts had found it difficult to reestablish their moral jurisdiction after 1660, and many offenders appeared to go unpunished.Footnote 7 At various times, members of Parliament were thus exhorted to ensure that “the good laws in being for the suppression of … whoredom … be effectually revived, and put in execution,” to draft new statutes against uncleanness, or to reinstate the death penalty for adultery.Footnote 8

The example of other reformed communities was distinctly encouraging. Several continental law codes ordered the infliction of imprisonment, banishment, corporal punishment, or death upon sexual offenders.Footnote 9 In the Dutch Republic, a movement for “further reformation,” including the stricter repression of adultery, fornication, and prostitution, gathered pace throughout the later seventeenth century.Footnote 10 In New England, colonial legislators reaffirmed the laws against sexual offenses in the 1660s and again after the Glorious Revolution.Footnote 11 In Scotland, where stiff penalties for fornication and adultery likewise remained on the statute books, Parliament and the General Assembly of the Kirk moved swiftly after 1688 to extirpate the “frequent filthiness, adulteries, and other abominations” that had recently seemed to overspread the land. In July 1690 Narcissus Luttrell noted that the Scots had passed an act “for suppressing the vices of swearing, drinking and whoring”; three months later, that “they are setting up the stool of repentance in their churches as formerly, where people guilty of incontinency are to doe pennance.”Footnote 12 Fresh statutes in 1690, 1693, 1695, and 1696 affirmed and encouraged the execution of Scottish laws against sexual and other immorality, while a further Act of 1701 particularly ordered the “strict and vigorous execution” of capital punishment upon notorious adulterers.Footnote 13

Renewed pressure for similar action in England was evident even before William and Mary had assumed the throne.Footnote 14 In February 1690, the new king duly went on the offensive, issuing an open letter for distribution to every parish in the land. Exhorting all clergymen to assist toward “a general reformation of the lives and manners of all our subjects,” he commanded them to preach against blasphemy, perjury, drunkenness, and profanation of the Sabbath and to read out the statutes in force against those offenses. His remarks on the punishment of sexual offenders went notably further. Churchwardens were ordered “to proceed without delay” to the presentment and censure of all such persons, but only as “there is as yet no sufficient provision by any statute-law for the punishing of adultery and fornication.”Footnote 15 A few weeks later, when William and Mary's first new parliament met, a group of reform-minded bishops accordingly set out to introduce a bill “for more effectual correcting of the notorious sins and vices of this nation.”Footnote 16

Although in the end this initiative came to nothing, the draft legislation that survives is notable for what it reveals of the early ambitions of the campaign for moral reform. Its provisions against blasphemy, swearing, and abuse of the Sabbath merely introduced new fines and incentives to enforce existing legislation. But, following the royal lead, and in consultation with several judges, its proposals against prostitutes, bawdy houses, and “the brutish sins of adultery and fornication” were more ambitious.Footnote 17 Adultery was once more to become punishable by death, and fornication by imprisonment: penalties “such as are warranted by the laws of God and man.”Footnote 18 Compared to the puritan Adultery Act of 1650, whose provisions it echoed, more serious attention was now paid to the particular problem of public vice. Constables and other parish officers were every month to inquire after and search out all “persons who shall prostitute themselves as common strumpets”; anyone “so suspected, and not being able to give a good account of themselves,” it was recommended, should be punished as a vagrant. “Music houses” in the capital, notorious places of assignation, were to be banned outright. Keepers of taverns and alehouses who admitted women after dark would be summarily penalized. Procurers and brothel keepers were to be fined, pilloried, and, if necessary, banished overseas.Footnote 19

These were not merely symbolic proposals.Footnote 20 Some of the measures projected, notably the summary punishment of prostitutes, were already being successfully adopted by judicial campaigners. Others anticipated provisions to be introduced half a century later by the Disorderly Houses Act of 1752. Still others targeted the growing problem of malicious counterprosecutions, which was to undermine successive campaigns against vice in the decades to come. Even the clauses against adultery and fornication were essentially pragmatic—to overcome the perennial difficulty of proof in such cases, they provided that the offense might be presumed if any man “shall be found in bed, or in any such posture of nakedness, with any other woman than his wife, from which it may be reasonably presum’d that any such act of carnal copulation was committed by the said parties.”Footnote 21

The same practical concerns informed later attempts to legislate against sexual vice. In 1698, draft statutes against immorality were introduced in both houses. That of the Commons, which covered “prophanesse, swearing, drunkennesse, and whoring,” was again intended to make adultery punishable by death, but also to prohibit sexual rendezvous in places such as hackney carriages.Footnote 22 In the following Parliament, of 1699, there was considerable momentum toward the passage of another bill against sexual offenses. Scaling down earlier ambitions, but in tune with established legal practice, this measure proposed that adultery and fornication be tried as misdemeanors and punished by fine, and also steeply increased sanctions against bawdry. Anyone who kept a brothel or otherwise abetted adultery or fornication was to be barred from keeping an alehouse, set in the pillory, and subjected to punitive penalties: not a mere five or ten pounds, as had been suggested in 1690, but a hundred pounds or a year's imprisonment at hard labor.Footnote 23

The ultimate failure of these successive attempts at legislation obviously implies that most contemporaries thought them ill-advised. Some MPs opposed them as setting up an “inquisition,” while others argued that “those that would not take the old and new testament for a rule of life would never be reformed by an act of parliament.”Footnote 24 Even the most sympathetic modern historian of the attempted act of 1699 is inclined to dismiss it as an example of “extremism,” whose proposals against adultery and fornication were “so ill-judged as to guarantee the bill's failure.”Footnote 25

Yet although its supporters were in the minority, the desire to strengthen the law against sexual immorality was widely felt. The bills of 1698 and 1699 formed part of a broader resurgence of political efforts against vice, articulated in a rush of addresses, speeches, and proclamations by the king and Commons, as well as proposed legislation in both houses, some of it successful, against blasphemy, profanity, gambling, and dueling.Footnote 26 Nor was the draft act of 1699 particularly extreme. Its provisions against prostitution were uncontroversial, while those against adultery and fornication merely sought to codify and extend existing common-law procedures. A majority of the House voted to give the bill a second reading, and ultimately it was foiled only through repeated adjournments.Footnote 27 Meanwhile bishops and reformers mounted a public campaign, urging its addition to the statute books.Footnote 28 Many of them thought new legislation was essential. As the lawyer George Meriton put it, the existing sanctions against sexual immorality were ridiculously “gentle and easy.” If vice was to be restrained, agreed John Bellers, “less than parliament authority will not do it.”Footnote 29 During subsequent sessions of Parliament, too, the hope remained that “it would be possible to get a new bill through the House against immorality.”Footnote 30

On the other hand, activists often expressed the view that there was less need for fresh laws than for the proper implementation of existing ones.Footnote 31 After all, even during the decades of the Restoration, despite the decline of the church courts, illicit sex had remained a major target of secular policing in the capital, with many hundreds of prosecutions being brought every year.Footnote 32 As a consequence there was a concerted effort at the start of the campaign to maintain the grip of the common law upon notorious adulterers and fornicators, as well as bawds and prostitutes. In the early 1690s about a hundred common-law prosecutions for adultery and fornication were brought every year before metropolitan JPs, at Quarter Sessions, and at King's Bench: clearly such proceedings remained widely acceptable, even without statutory sanction.Footnote 33 In Bristol, similarly, reforming magistrates ordered constables to draw up lists of persons “supposed to live lewdly” with one another, or “in whoredom,” and took steps to flush out secret whores.Footnote 34 As the campaign for reformation constantly advised its supporters, “adultery, &c and all acts of baudry, are breaches of the peace … for which an indictment will lie.”Footnote 35

Some later commentators likewise continued to insist on the prosecution of notorious offenders. Although they were but imperfect weapons compared to the death penalty, urged one of George II's bishops, fines and shaming punishments “ought more strictly and impartially to be inflicted” upon adulterers.Footnote 36 Throughout the eighteenth century, zealous magistrates maintained that men and women discovered in whoredom should be charged: for “acts of lewdness were always punishable at the common law.”Footnote 37 Although “the general opinion” had developed that it could not be prosecuted “in a criminal way,” agreed one of the editors of the State Trials in 1730, “I must confess, I see not but that adultery is indictable by our law.”Footnote 38 Others remained hopeful that Parliament might yet restore harsher sanctions.Footnote 39 Yet in the longer term the failure to enshrine the principle in legislation was decisive. Already by 1703 the number of prosecutions brought in London had halved, compared to a decade earlier. In the years that followed, the notion that adultery and fornication were publicly actionable gradually faded away. By 1730 few men and women appealed to it, and most magistrates no longer recognized the procedure.Footnote 40 The last English prosecution for adultery as a misdemeanor appears to have taken place in 1746.Footnote 41

SOCIETIES OF VIRTUE

The attempt to tighten the law against sexual offenses in the 1690s was part of a broad popular movement for moral reform. From the moment that William and Mary were proclaimed king and queen, there had been spontaneous efforts across the country to crack down on immoral behavior. In some places godly magistrates waged war on wickedness more or less single-handedly. The mayor of Deal, Thomas Powell, plastered his town with royal proclamations against vice and went around personally admonishing and punishing swearers, Sabbath breakers, and other offenders against decency. “I took up a common prostitute, whose conduct was very offensive,” he wrote in his diary, “brought her to the whipping-post,—being about mid-market, where was present some hundreds of people—I caused her to have twelve lashes; and at every third lash I parleyed with her and bid her tell all the women of the like calling wheresoever she came that the Mayor of Deal would serve them as he had served her, if they came to Deal and committed such wicked deeds as she had done.”Footnote 42 Local religious associations also sometimes prosecuted immorality.Footnote 43 But the most distinctive response was the formation of numerous grassroots societies dedicated to moral reform, whose sole purpose was the discovery and prosecution of public drunkards, swearers, gamblers, Sabbath breakers, adulterers, and fornicators.

By the early eighteenth century, with recurrent encouragement from monarchs and bishops, scores of societies for reformation of manners had been founded across the British Isles, the North American colonies, and continental Europe. There were rural and countywide associations in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cheshire, Gloucestershire, Kent, Monmouthshire, Staffordshire, Pembrokeshire, and the Isle of Wight. They existed also in many small towns, including Alnwick, Bangor, Tamworth, Kendal, Carlisle, Kidderminster, Lyme Regis, Shepton Mallet, and Longbridge Deverill in Wiltshire (where there was a society of “zealous & able” elderly people). But they were formed most numerously in larger boroughs and cities, where vice and disorder were most prevalent. By 1699 societies for reformation were at work in Coventry, Chester, Gloucester, Hull, Leicester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Nottingham, and Shrewsbury. Others were founded at Bristol, Derby, Canterbury, Leeds, Norwich, Northampton, Portsmouth, Reading, Wigan, Warrington, and York; set up in Dublin, Edinburgh, Boston, and Jamaica; and projected in Belgium, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Sweden, and Denmark.Footnote 44

The origin and center of the movement was London, and here the first concern was to curb sexual license. Its best-known clerical supporter was, characteristically, the Reverend Dr. Thomas Tenison, a man entirely unafraid of adultery and fornication. In 1687, he attended Nell Gwyn on her deathbed and encouraged her penitence. After the revolution, he preached before the queen against lust and uncleanness, reproved the new king for keeping a mistress, and, as archbishop of Canterbury, was a tireless promoter of legislation and activism against immorality.Footnote 45 It was also Tenison who, as rector of St. Martin in the Fields, had presided over the first practical efforts at moral reform in the capital. Soon after the coronation of William and Mary, in the summer of 1689, his parish mounted a petition against local bawdy houses. A few weeks later, a group of local magistrates began to clear the neighborhood of prostitutes.Footnote 46 In the City, similarly, the new Whig lord mayor soon issued a proclamation, commanding the suppression of all notorious vices and denouncing in particular the spread of “a most dissolute and infamous practice, for men and women in the evening to wander about the streets and impudently sollicit others to wickedness.”Footnote 47 Shortly after these initiatives in the City and the West End, a group of churchwardens, constables, and other householders in the East End (“the Tower Hamlets”) combined together to form a society for “the suppression of publick bawdy-houses.” They resolved to raise money among themselves, to employ lawyers to prosecute all keepers and frequenters of brothels, and to organize a network of local representatives or “stewards,” who would supervise the constables and officers of their neighborhood and organize the collection and disbursement of money. By the end of 1690, the society had gained the unanimous support of the Middlesex Bench. Six months later, hoping to inspire others, it published to the world its “honest and joynt-design … for the general suppression of bawdy-houses.”Footnote 48

This scheme provided the impetus for a host of loosely connected associations for moral reform that sprung up around the metropolis from early 1691 onward. By the end of the decade there were well over a dozen different groups in the capital with the objective of prosecuting vice. But the bulk of activity against sexual crimes remained in the hands of the original Tower Hamlets society, which expanded and reorganized itself into the main citywide organization for detecting “houses of lewdness and bawdery and persons that haunt them, in order to their legall prosecution, conviction and punishment.”Footnote 49 It remained the most prominent reforming organization and operated largely as an independent entity, with its own subscribers, officers, and administrative machinery.Footnote 50 It was also the first to publish an annual account of its achievements. Every year from 1694 to 1707 the society produced a Black Roll or Black List, which displayed, in exact alphabetical order, the name and crime of every sexual offender it had brought to justice over the past twelve months.Footnote 51 Thousands of these papers were distributed and posted up, within the capital and far beyond, as a warning to sinners and an inspiration to their enemies.

The campaign against sexual vice concentrated primarily on streetwalking and brothel keeping. These were the most disorderly forms of debauchery, whose prevalence in the capital seemed particularly aggravating. As one magistrate put it, “Vice when it is private and retired is not attended with those provoking circumstances, as when it revels in your streets, and in your markets, and bids defiance to God and religion, in the face of open day.”Footnote 52 Of all sexual crimes, explained the founders of the first society with impassioned eloquence, prostitution was the one whose effects were most pernicious. Its spreading of venereal disease destroyed healthy soldiers and sailors, and killed innocent wives, while the plague of bawdy houses ruined the peace and livelihood of honest citizens. For it was here that impudent harlots

From the outset, the mentality of the reformation societies appears particularly to have echoed the concerns of tradesmen, shopkeepers, artisans, and other middling householders.Footnote 54

Yet the movement's ultimate ambition extended well beyond organized sexual trade, to the prosecution of all adulterers and fornicators.Footnote 55 The methods used against streetwalkers, brothel keepers, and their clients thus also recalled the traditional means and ends of sexual policing. Although reprobates were punished corporally, through whipping, carting, and hard labor, attempts were made to redeem less hardened offenders by reproving them, reasoning privately with them about their way of life, and distributing admonitory literature to them.Footnote 56 The innovative use of the press to name and shame sexual offenders, which some of the campaign's publicists were keen to expand, followed similar principles.Footnote 57

It was also widely hoped that parochial discipline might yet provide an additional sanction, offsetting the decline of the ecclesiastical courts. The main society for reformation proposed that in every parish the minister should appoint secret inspectors to spy on those persons “most known or suspected” of debauchery. Each Sunday he would then “in the presence of the congregation, cause the[ir] names and crimes to be distinctly read,” excluding them from communion “till they purge themselves by open confession, and visible tokens of repentance.” In the eighteenth century the idea was taken up by Queen Anne, who commanded that every presbytery and parish “nominate fit persons … to take notice of vice and immorality, and to delate and prosecute those guilty thereof,” in cooperation with secular justice. The ultimate prospect was a society in which the immoral were “shunned by all but the unclean herd of the vicious and prophane” and forced to hide away “in dark corners, and in continual fear of being discovered.”Footnote 58

What, then, was the immediate impact of the campaign? The judicial evidence of the period, although incomplete, suggests that it was considerable. In 1693, the first year in which the main society appears to have been fully active across the metropolis, it prosecuted several hundred men and women for promiscuity. It also achieved the indictment of thirty brothels in the City of London, a spectacular increase over Restoration levels of prosecution. What is more, although they all pleaded their innocence, most of the brothel keepers were heavily fined, and several were whipped through the streets.Footnote 59 Such unusual severity testifies to considerable support for the campaign by ordinary citizens, who assisted in many prosecutions and served on trial juries, as well as by the bench of magistrates who imposed the punishments. Their sentiments were amplified in statements by successive grand juries, composed of men who were experienced officeholders in their ward and parish.Footnote 60 In language that echoed the propaganda of the societies, these repeatedly demanded the punishment of “all disorderly and lewd women commonly called night walkers, who do pick up and corrupt the youth of this citty,” called for action against “taverns and other publick houses who dare entertain leud and disolute people who pick up one another in the streets,” and kept up the pressure to close down all “brothell houses, & places of evill resort.”Footnote 61

These high levels of activity were maintained for many years. Between 1700 and 1710 well over a thousand prosecutions of sexual offenders were brought by the societies almost every year. Between 1715 and 1725 the figures were even greater, at times approaching two thousand convictions annually. Probably not since the reign of Elizabeth had sexual discipline been enforced on such a scale. The consequences were particularly visible in the City of London, the symbolic heart of the campaign, as it was of the nation.Footnote 62 Within a few years, both streetwalking and brothel keeping were much less in evidence.Footnote 63 By 1709, the societies’ account of proceedings against bawdy houses proudly proclaimed that they had uncovered “but one within the City”; a few years later, that there had been “none within the City.”Footnote 64 Even toward the very end of the campaign, the City appears to have been kept relatively free of overt vice.Footnote 65

Throughout these decades sexual immorality remained the most prominent target of metropolitan campaigners. From 1708, when the London societies first issued a combined report of their activities against all forms of vice, until 1738, when they published their last statement, there were few years in which sexual prosecutions accounted for less than 40 or 50 percent of the total.Footnote 66 The consequence of their zeal was that the societies soon became responsible for the bulk of sexual policing in the capital. In 1693, the campaign could claim credit for roughly a quarter of all prosecutions of prostitutes and brothel keepers, the remainder having been brought in conventional fashion by local officers and private individuals.Footnote 67 A decade later, the Black List for 1703 enumerated about 875 convictions of sexual offenders, or around 85 percent of the total number recorded in the judicial records for that year.Footnote 68 The prosecution of homosexual acts and places of rendezvous between the 1690s and 1730s appears likewise to have been largely due to the efforts of the reform societies.Footnote 69 The campaign thus began by supplementing the existing levels of sexual policing but ended by more or less taking over the task completely.

Yet even as they came to dominate judicial activity against immorality, the societies faced mounting difficulties. The most intractable problem was simply the unceasing expansion of the metropolis. Set against this backdrop, even the seemingly impressive trend of convictions for prostitution takes on a different complexion. The ever greater number of “lewd and scandalous persons” punished each year could not begin to match the general rise in summary jurisdiction, let alone the overall increase in sexual vice. In 1703, streetwalkers accounted for almost two-thirds of all committals to suburban houses of correction. Twenty years later they made up less than half of the total.Footnote 70 Thus, just as the campaign appeared to be going from strength to strength, it had begun to be overwhelmed by the task at hand.

AMATEURS AND PROFESSIONALS

The rise and fall of the societies helped to bring about lasting legal and social changes. The most far-reaching, yet least well understood, was their effect upon popular involvement in the law.

This is an area of some controversy. The societies themselves claimed merely to be reinvigorating the traditional machinery of justice. In contrast, many contemporaries regarded them as a dangerous innovation. For their part, modern commentators often presume that the societies relied on large numbers of amateur informers, “‘lay’ groups of tradesmen and shopkeepers, who did the actual work of combing the city for criminals and informing on them to the justices.”Footnote 71 Yet each of these assessments is misleading.

The metropolitan societies certainly had a popular membership and a broad appeal. The large numbers of pamphlets and broadsides they distributed, the amounts of money they appear to have raised by subscription, and the elaborate networks they set up to register supporters all suggest that, already by the mid-1690s, they had attracted at the very least several hundreds of associates. Moreover, most of their identifiable activists were drawn from relatively humble backgrounds in crafts and trades.Footnote 72

And yet an equally striking feature of the main society is how small its active membership was. Unless they happened to be parish officers, most of its supporters simply contributed a quarterly subscription. The core of the society—those who attended a monthly general meeting and stood for election to its various offices—numbered only “about Fifty persons,” and most business was dealt with by an acting committee of nine.Footnote 73 Nor did the campaign against sexual immorality depend upon an army of lay activists. On the contrary, in order to fulfill its main objective, the detection and prosecution of bawdy houses, the society relied on a handful of salaried agents.Footnote 74 As the legal records reveal, in the 1720s as in the 1690s, it was invariably these employees who took action: usually two men, supported by sympathetic constables, sometimes with one or two additional helpers.Footnote 75 In its policing of prostitutes, too, the campaign worked mainly by encouraging existing officers and magistrates to do their duty. On the one hand, its literature, bureaucracy, and network of local supervisors spurred on reform-minded constables.Footnote 76 On the other hand, it eased and rewarded their work with large amounts of cash. In 1694, the only year for which detailed accounts survive, the main society paid out almost two hundred pounds to its two full-time brothel detectors and its clerk, another eighty pounds toward prosecuting bawdy houses, and a further sum reimbursing “severall constables &c. their expences (who have been diligent).”Footnote 77 Even the parish representatives or “stewards” of the society were paid a commission for every subscription they raised.Footnote 78 “Since the process of our law is not a little chargable,” explained the chief propagandist of the campaign with a Ciceronian flourish, “it must be allowed, that money is the sinews of this war.”Footnote 79

The main tendency of the campaign for reformation was therefore not to set up “a kind of voluntary police,” as has been traditionally thought, nor even to “mobiliz[e] ordinary citizens in the enforcement of the laws,” as the New Oxford History of England describes it, but simply to increase the efficiency of existing methods of policing.Footnote 80 Even before 1688, the prosecution of sexual offenders had tended to be dominated by a minority of particularly zealous justices and constables.Footnote 81 To this the campaign added its employment of dedicated assistants, the systematic use of blanket search warrants, and the establishment of regular petty sessions by reforming justices—over half the commitments of sexual offenders to Westminster house of correction in 1693, for example, were made from such meetings.Footnote 82 Through the exploitation of these techniques, even a handful of men could achieve very large numbers of summary convictions.Footnote 83

The same methods characterized the societies’ efforts against other vices. Of course swearing, drunkenness, and Sabbath breaking were often detected by chance, and ordinary citizens did incidentally inform against them. But even in the early years of the campaign, when efforts against these vices were at their height and there was talk of hundreds of volunteer informers, most convictions were “owing to the zeale of about 40 or 50 persons.”Footnote 84 In general, and especially after the turn of the century, the societies’ prosecutions of all kinds were dominated by their dedicated agents.Footnote 85 As is evident from the campaign's own propaganda, most of its sympathizers were discouraged from going to law themselves by the trouble, expense, and unpopularity of informing against moral offenders.Footnote 86

It is notable, in fact, that volunteers who consistently took a more active part in the campaign tended to end up making a living from the law. The most famous of all the societies’ activists was John Dent. At the outset of the campaign he had been a devout young man of lowly origins, a member of one of the metropolitan religious societies. In October 1692, his name headed a list of their members who declared themselves willing to inform on moral offenders. A decade later he was at May Fair, busy “suppressing the publick lewdness,” when soldiers attacked one of his colleagues. Dent pulled him from the fray and held him, as he lay dying, in his arms. Between 1704 and 1707, we catch sight of him working as a regular informer against profanation of the Sabbath, swearing, and drunkenness. By 1709 he had been made a constable. In March of that year, he was himself killed while assisting in the arrest of a streetwalker. Although Dent was, as his friends eulogized, an honest, pious man, one of the pillars of “the good fight of faith,” he was clearly also something of a professional, whose life had become devoted to “the apprehending and prosecuting of several thousands of lewd and profligate persons [i.e., prostitutes], besides a vast number of Sabbath breakers, prophane swearers, and drunkards.”Footnote 87

Jonathan Easden, a joiner by trade, was part of the campaign even earlier than Dent; in fact, he helped found it. In 1690 he was one of the signatories of the original East End declaration against bawdy houses; within a few years he had developed into one of its leading activists. But almost from the outset his motives were publicly impugned. In October 1692, six men and women, including several he had prosecuted for brothel keeping, indicted him as a common barrator (i.e., for vexatiously inciting discord and litigation). Easden managed to remove the case to King's Bench, where it ran into the sands, but a few months later he was in more serious trouble, when the Middlesex bench ordered an inquiry into his apparent blackmail of keepers and clients of disorderly houses. While this enquiry was still in progress, a further three indictments were brought against Easden for barratry, extortion, and riotous assault. In February 1694, he was ordered to be bound over for a year, fined, and outlawed. He spent much of the year imprisoned in Newgate, and in April was tried again, now at the Old Bailey, over a murky incident involving a pregnant woman who owed him money, his attempt to arrest her at the house of her mistress (who Easden claimed was a bawd), and their joint taunting of him as a “perjured rogue.” The following year the House of Commons heard evidence of his extorting money from women for not prosecuting them as whores and bawds. More than a decade later he was again tried and convicted of fraud, fined twenty pounds, pilloried, bound over for twelve months, and sent to prison.Footnote 88

A still fuller example of how lay activism against immorality could shade into venality is provided by Easden's colleague Bodenham Rewse, another linchpin of the movement in its earliest years. Rewse appears to have started out much like John Dent: when the campaign was launched, he had just married and was one of the young men of the religious societies who pledged their support for the reformation of manners. By training, like his wife Thomasine, he was an embroiderer, but he used the movement to forge himself a successful career at the underside of metropolitan law enforcement. Between 1693 and 1695 he was employed by the main society as one of its detectors of bawdy houses, earning about seventy-five pounds a year in salary and expenses. This led him to the even more lucrative business of pursuing felons. In the later 1690s Rewse became a successful thief taker, reaping large rewards for the capture of Jacobite conspirators, clippers, and coiners. Within a few years he had made enough money to buy himself one of the deputy keeperships of Newgate, where he remained until his death in 1725. If Rewse had any great antipathy toward sexual immorality when he started out, it had certainly vanished by the turn of the century, by which time he had taken up with whores, infected his wife with the pox, and begun physically to abuse her in the cruellest manner.Footnote 89

So the truth is that we are faced with a remarkable irony. The societies were avowedly popular in their appeal, and their declared aim was to revive community involvement in moral regulation. Yet their campaign had exactly the reverse effect. Despite the rhetoric of grassroots activism, it relied mainly upon a small group of regular informers and officers. Rather than lending personal assistance, most sympathizers simply gave cash. Its main consequence was therefore to place metropolitan policing on a more mercenary footing.

This was a development with long antecedents. Since at least the reign of Elizabeth, the growing size and complexity of life in the capital had undermined the appeal and effectiveness of the traditional system of policing, in which ordinary householders patrolled the streets and took turns serving as constables and other officers. The earliest casualty was the night watch, which already by the early seventeenth century appears in many parts of the city to have been largely made up of hired substitutes. By 1700, this practice had become so common that some neighborhoods levied a formal tax for the purpose. The hiring of deputy constables also steadily increased, as the demands of the office became more onerous. Yet the principle of personal obligation remained intact, many householders still served in person, and the piecemeal employment of substitutes did not really improve the system's effectiveness.Footnote 90 This was the context that spawned the methods of the reform societies—raising money by subscription, rewarding dedicated officers, and employing full-time informers. These innovations offered a radical new solution to the breakdown of amateur office holding. Their relative success formalized the idea of law enforcement for payment and helped accelerate the professionalization of policing.

The decline of the societies coincided with a general perception that London was inadequately policed. The result was a fundamental overhaul of the system in the years around 1740. Every parish in the capital now set up a permanent, salaried night watch. Dedicated constables became more common. Across the city, magistrates established public offices devoted full time to law enforcement. Everywhere the number of justices of the peace was increased considerably. The wholesale introduction of these changes marked the end of the long-established principle that policing was a matter of civic duty, to be undertaken in person. Henceforth, the role of householders was simply to pay for the work of others, and the practice of professional patrols and businesslike magistracy was to be the norm, rather than a perversion of it.

The result was that, by the middle of the eighteenth century, ordinary citizens who sought to fight vice no longer prosecuted offenders themselves but instead employed others to do the job for them. Faced with the nuisance of brothels in the 1750s, the inhabitants of Covent Garden offered rewards to informers, rather than taking matters in their own hands. Attempting to stamp out streetwalking in the 1760s, householders in St. Martin's Ludgate hired in an expert to clear the streets on their behalf.Footnote 91 When broader campaigns against immorality were mounted their methods were similar. Sexual impropriety of various kinds was one of the targets of a revived London society for reformation of manners, which lasted from 1757 to 1766; of the national Proclamation Society founded by William Wilberforce in 1787; and of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, which came into being in 1802. In each case, the reformers raised money by subscription and encouraged constables and magistrates to put existing laws into effect. But only exceptionally did they take a regular part in actually policing and prosecuting offenders: such business was now largely left to hirelings and specialists.Footnote 92

There were similar developments in other areas of policing. Local societies for the prosecution of felons, which employed much the same methods as the reformation societies, began to be established in the 1690s and became commonplace in the second half of the eighteenth century.Footnote 93 Over the same period, the prosecution of all kinds of crime came to rely increasingly on the offering of rewards and the encouragement of mercenary informers and “thief-takers.”Footnote 94 Although London was often in the vanguard, these were national trends. Moreover, the gradual professionalization of criminal justice appears to have been part of a general decline in the use of the law by ordinary men and women throughout the country. Although historians have spent much time debating the social function of the law in the eighteenth century, the coincidence of these developments is only beginning to receive sustained attention.Footnote 95 Yet their cumulative impact was surely considerable. Compared to the extent to which people were involved in civil, ecclesiastical, and criminal jurisdiction in the seventeenth century, a hundred years later litigation and legal mechanisms appear to have been far less central to social and communal relations. The ideological importance of the law remained very great; in certain respects it even increased. But its collective basis, and its role in everyday life, were markedly and irrevocably diminished.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

A further lasting effect of the campaign for reformation of manners was that all forms of sexual policing became ever more suspect. This, too, was a striking change, for although by 1700 the prosecution of adultery and fornication was increasingly controversial, that of common whores and brothel keepers remained uncontentious. No one thought that such criminals were beyond punishment, and reformers were able to proceed vigorously against them. Yet just a few decades later the societies were defunct, and it had come to be seriously doubted that the law extended even to public prostitution. How, then, did this remarkable reversal come about?

It is easy to see why support for the societies diminished steadily between the 1690s and the 1730s. They faced mounting hostility on religious and political grounds, as well as growing competition from more constructive projects for social and spiritual improvement.Footnote 96 Yet it was precisely during the years when the societies came in for the most criticism that they racked up the greatest number of prosecutions. The key to their ultimate downfall, and to the difficulties faced by subsequent campaigns against sexual immorality, lies therefore in the gradual disintegration of their judicial approach. There were three main developments. The impartiality of moral policing was increasingly discredited, new ideas about proof and due process undermined the scope of summary punishment, and the rising cost and professionalization of litigation played into the hands of experienced sexual criminals.

At the start of the campaign for reformation, the most common criticism faced by reformers was not that moral policing was wrong but that its practice was unfair. It was evident that only the poor suffered for their vices, critics objected, while the rich escaped punishment. This was an old problem, one that advocates of sexual discipline had always acknowledged and fought against. In fact, they had traditionally urged, it was more important to punish vice in high places than in low. What matter thy eminence and grandeur, asked a Jacobean preacher, “shall this protect thee in evill, shall it challenge any immunitie, or priviledge to sinne?” On the contrary, “the greater men are in place, the more distastefull and fowle are their voluptuous actions,” and the more they deserved to be punished.Footnote 97 At the end of the seventeenth century it remained axiomatic that “the quality of the persons aggravates the crime” and that the punishing of one great criminal did more good, by example and influence, “than of twenty meaner ones.” Merely to punish “little sinners” but not “the whore-master of quality” was thus ineffective, offensive to God, and distasteful to the world.Footnote 98 Sporadic efforts were made at the outset of the campaign to put these principles into practice.Footnote 99

But as time went on most activists were content to settle for less. Whoredom and the like, acknowledged a clergyman in 1697, were patently “not the vices only of servants, but masters; not of meaner people only, but of your equals and superiors.” And in principle all were equally culpable, “for what is an offence against the law of God and the land in one man, is so in another.” All the same, he advised reformers, “where it would be likely to do more hurt than good, I think you may forbear … sometimes the best rebuke that can be given some great men and superiours, is to let them see what is the just and deserved punishment of their own faults, by the punishment of inferiours, for the same things which they know themselves to be guilty of.”Footnote 100 It was this attitude that provoked Daniel Defoe in 1698 to one of his earliest publications. A national reformation of manners was “absolutely necessary,” he complained, yet “the partiality of this reforming rigor makes the real work impossible.” It was unreasonable and unjust to pursue commoners but to leave unpunished the gentry and magistracy, whose bad example was the real cause of English degeneracy.Footnote 101 A decade later, while living in Scotland, Defoe withdrew for similar reasons from the main Edinburgh society for reformation, which had chosen to ignore the exposure of one of its leading members as a notorious adulterer. No real reformation, he warned bitterly, could ever be accomplished on such a hypocritical basis.Footnote 102

Yet in the eighteenth century precisely such social selectivity came to be robustly defended. It was only proper, argued one of George II's bishops, that the reforming societies confined themselves to the lower orders, “upon whose industry and virtue the strength and the riches of the nation so much depend.” Persons of superior rank could be left to their consciences and to higher judgment.Footnote 103 All sexual indecency was to be condemned, agreed Sir John Fielding in 1763, but worst of all were the “low, and common bawdy-houses, where vice is rendered cheap, and consequently within the reach of the common people, who are the very stamina of the constitution.”Footnote 104 It was more important to regulate “public” behavior, argued the Society for the Suppression of Vice a few decades later, than to police the “private” conduct of the upper classes. Even though by 1800 denunciations of aristocratic depravity had become rather more trenchant than they had been a century earlier, it had also come to be widely accepted that judicial campaigns had their limits. It was now the exception, rather than the expectation, that any society “for the suppression of public lewdness” should pursue offenders of all ranks.Footnote 105

This shift of principle helps explain why, in the course of the eighteenth century, the criticism of sexual regulation as inequitable became ever sharper, more vociferous, and more widely held. Such doubts were enhanced by the narrowing basis of policing. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sexual discipline had been enforced by institutions that could at least claim universal authority and obedience: the church, the crown, its parliaments and courts, and the governors of towns and cities. But after 1688 the impetus increasingly came from semiprivate groups.Footnote 106

Particularly contentious was the growing reliance on informing. Already by the reign of James I it had been widely felt that common informers acted merely “for malice and private ends and never for love of justice,” as Sir Edward Coke expressed it. In 1624 their role was sharply curtailed. However, fresh statutes in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries extended the practice into new areas. In the reigns of Charles II and James II, its use against dissenters became particularly controversial, as it allowed venal and unscrupulous people to profit from denouncing sincere Christians. In London between 1682 and 1686, at the high point of the state's persecution of nonconformists, thousands of men and women were arrested, fined, and imprisoned for their religious views—yet most were the victims of a gang of mercenary informers.Footnote 107

When the campaign for moral reform employed the same methods just a few years later, it therefore struggled to overcome a barrage of doubt and hostility. Even its backers needed constant reassurance that informing was now God's work, “however scandalous, and infamous, that term hath appeared in these late days, whilest some have been agents for the devil, and made it their design to ruine men, and enrich themselves.”Footnote 108 Though informers against immorality were not supposed to receive reward money, the whiff of venality was impossible to shake off. “It must indeed be confest,” the societies themselves acknowledged in 1709, “that there have been some base and wicked persons … who have extorted money from offenders, and sometimes from honest men.”Footnote 109 Informers against vice were honorable men, agreed the bishop of London in 1724, and if “an ill-designing person shall sometimes mix with them, and carry on his own private interest under colour of suppressing vice and profaneness, this is not to be wonder’d at.”Footnote 110 But most observers were less forgiving. The suppressing of debauchery was, of course, wrote the journalist Edward Ward, “a most commendable undertaking.” But the whole thing was falling “under a great disreputation” by relying on greedy informers, “who live by filthy means, like flies upon a t[ur]d.”Footnote 111 Even ostensible supporters of sexual policing were increasingly disillusioned by the grubby methods and concerned that its entire foundation seemed to be biased and corrupt. The project had begun with excellent intentions, noted Jonathan Swift, but had degenerated into no more than “a trade to enrich little knavish informers of the meanest rank, such as common constables, and broken shopkeepers.”Footnote 112

The lecherous, hypocritical reformer thus became an instantly recognizable figure of ridicule in early eighteenth-century drama. In Mary Pix's farce The Different Widows (1703), the reformer Mr. Drawle is a canting fool whose wife despises him. When discovered under a bed with a young woman, he is forced to confess “that many times, when I have rebuk’d the wicked, my self have been tempted,” so that many a “pretty white Transgressor” had ended up in his bed, rather than in bridewell.Footnote 113 George Farquhar's The Constant Couple (1700) featured an elderly alderman, Mr. Smuggler, who boasts of his many exertions against vice, even as he intrigues with the disreputable Madam Lurewell. The moment she appears to give way, he reveals the truth: “I am an old fornicator, I’m not half so religious as I seem to be. You little rogue, why I’m disguis’d as I am, our sanctity is all outside, all hypocrisy.”Footnote 114 In another play, the archetypal “scourge to publick lewdness” is a deputy alderman, Mr. Driver, who admits that “privately I love a Wench my self,” and that his society for reformation blackmails whores and pickpockets.Footnote 115

Such mockery followed in a long literary tradition of portraying puritans and other zealots as dissembling and misguided. But in the eighteenth century it gained in force and currency because the ethical objections it raised had become increasingly plausible. Not only did moral reformers openly discriminate against poorer sinners, but as time went on they ever more overtly embraced the use of mercenary agents, and even of unscrupulous tactics.Footnote 116 It was pointless not to descend to this level, argued the propagandists of the Vice Society in 1804, for “the rat is only to be hunted to his hole by the ferret, and iniquity can only be tracked to its burrows, by beings like itself.” The consequence was that many critics saw little moral distinction anymore between prostitutes and those who policed them. “A modern reformer of vice,” sneered Ned Ward in 1700, was “a man most commonly of a very scandalous necessity who has no way left, but, pimp-like, to live upon other people's debaucheries. Every night he goes to bed he prays heartily that the world may grow more wicked, for one and the same interest serves him and the devil.” More than a hundred years later, Sydney Smith attacked the Vice Society in identical terms. “Men, whose trade is rat-catching, love to catch rats; the bug destroyer seizes on his bug with delight; and the suppresser is gratified by finding his vice. The last soon becomes a mere tradesman like the others; none of them moralize, or lament that their respective evils should exist in the world.”Footnote 117

The second development was that the summary conviction of sexual offenders was increasingly called into question. Ever since the start of the campaign there had been concerns that the overzealous pursuit of moral offenders might lead to abuses. But initially such doubts did not extend to the punishment of sexual indecency. On the contrary, one of the societies’ greatest successes was their systematic use against prostitutes of so-called general warrants, which empowered constables to round up anyone they suspected. Yet by the early decades of the eighteenth century even the targeting of common whores had become exceedingly controversial.

One manifestation of this was the growth of popular resistance to the arrest of streetwalkers. The growing presence in London of large numbers of soldiers and sailors meant that antagonism toward moral policing became increasingly aggressive and commonplace. In 1702, and again in 1709, reforming constables were stabbed to death in public while attempting to detain streetwalkers. In the spring of 1711, a drive against “loose women and their male followers” in Covent Garden was foiled when “the constables were dreadfully maimed, and one mortally wounded by ruffians aided by 40 soldiers of the guards, who entered into a combination to protect the women.” On another occasion in the East End, a crowd of over a thousand seamen mobbed the local magistrates and forcibly released a group of convicted prostitutes being sent to bridewell.Footnote 118

As well as this newly muscular popular antagonism toward moral policing, there was a growing undercurrent of unease about its legal implications. The latter came to the fore in 1709, at the trial of three soldiers who had stabbed a constable over the arrest of a prostitute. At the instigation of the lord chief justice of the day, the proceedings turned into an argument about the reformers’ methods. When a jury found the soldiers guilty of murder, the court instructed them instead to return a special verdict, whereupon the case was removed to Queen's Bench and retried at length before the full bench of royal judges, who reduced the conviction to manslaughter. The point at issue was whether the prostitute, Ann Dickins, had been lawfully arrested, given that, as reformers commonly did, the constable had acted beyond his own parish, without a specific warrant, and on his judgment of her character rather than any evidence of unchastity. Before 1688 no one would have doubted that common whores could be summarily punished, or cared much about the legal niceties of their detention. But the actions of the societies made it, for the first time, a matter of serious debate how far the law should be stretched to correct the morals even of harlots and scoundrels. The tendency of legal opinion was increasingly sceptical. “What!” exclaimed Sir John Holt, in an interpretation upheld by the majority of his fellow judges, “must not a woman, tho’ she be lewd, have the liberty to walk quietly about the streets? … What! must not a woman of the town walk in the town streets? … why, a light woman hath a right of liberty as well as another to walk about the streets.” It was insupportable that “the liberty of the subject shall depend upon the good opinion of the constable”; to arrest a woman “upon a bare suspicion that she was lewd … is not that against Magna Charta?”Footnote 119 It was on similar grounds that the campaign for reformation was dealt a fatal blow in 1725, when its use of general warrants to round up suspected prostitutes was ruled by the Westminster bench of justices to be irregular and illegal.Footnote 120

Not surprisingly, reformers believed that such legal challenges arose from opposition to the very idea of moral policing. It was obvious that many JPs disliked informers, refused to assist the societies, or discouraged their work. But quite often such distaste appears to have concerned the methods, as much as the aims, of the campaign—even some of the magistrates who were most vilified as enemies of reform were themselves notably active against immorality.Footnote 121 More generally, the difficulties faced by the societies reflected deeper shifts in legal principle, which affected the treatment of all kinds of crime in the course of the eighteenth century. One crucial change was that punishment was increasingly inflicted only upon proof of specific misconduct. In earlier times, the perception of immoral demeanor had often sufficed: the law allowed men and women to be arrested if they were accounted “lewd, idle, and disorderly” or “of evil name and fame, generally.” Now its scope was gradually limited to particular actions, rather than a person's general character, and magistrates, judges, and Parliament were concerned to define offenses with greater specificity. A related development was that, as eighteenth-century statutes relied ever more upon summary jurisdiction, the powers of JPs and inferior officers were increasingly subjected to scrutiny, formalized, and more clearly delimited.Footnote 122 In this climate of greater scrupulosity, the societies’ methods could seem alarmingly cavalier. When questioned by Secretary of State James Vernon in 1698, one Presbyterian reformer conceded that they sometimes proceeded contrary “to the received rules of law.” But this, he maintained, was “justifiable by the prerogative of the king of heaven, whose honour ought to be vindicated by extraordinary methods.” The secretary of state was, unsurprisingly, unimpressed.Footnote 123

As a consequence of such trends, it gradually came to be doubted whether prostitutes were culpable at all. This did not mean, of course, that such women were no longer subjected to harassment, arrest, and incarceration: the balance of power was still heavily stacked against them.Footnote 124 But it was nevertheless a remarkable development, which reversed centuries of legal tradition and—at least in principle—gave them unprecedented rights. Even a woman known to be a common whore, as Lord Chief Justice Holt successfully argued by 1709, could not be arrested solely on the basis of her past crimes, for “tho’ she had been lewd, she might reform.”Footnote 125 By the middle of the eighteenth century the idea had become firmly established that streetwalking by prostitutes was not itself punishable.Footnote 126 In 1749, Henry Fielding identified this as an abuse in urgent need of remedy, while in 1770 his half brother, Sir John, confirmed to a parliamentary committee that there was a “great difficulty, as the law now stands, to punish those offenders, they being, as common prostitutes, scarce, if at all, within the description of any statute.” Even open soliciting, and “prostitutes … walking the streets and using the most obnoxious and obscene language,” the Guardian Society for the Preservation of Public Morals found a generation later, had come to be entirely beyond the reach of justice.Footnote 127

The nineteenth century saw repeated attempts to remedy this increasingly glaring defect, but their failure shows how completely the underlying assumptions of the law had changed since the early seventeenth century. The Vagrancy Act of 1822 briefly revived the Jacobean interpretation, by specifying that “all common Prostitutes … not giving a satisfactory account of themselves, shall be deemed idle and disorderly persons,” but two years later another statute restored the principle that only an actual breach of the peace was punishable.Footnote 128 The three Contagious Diseases Acts passed in the 1860s empowered policemen in certain military districts to identify women as “common prostitutes” and forcibly register them. Yet this system of licensing and regulating prostitution proved deeply controversial, and, following a national campaign, the acts were repealed in 1886.Footnote 129

The final and most striking change of all was the dwindling hold of the law upon bawds and brothel keepers. Up to the end of the seventeenth century, legal action against such offenders had remained commonplace and fairly effective. In the early 1670s there were perhaps four or five hundred prosecutions each year across the metropolis, accounting for as much as a quarter of all criminal indictments brought at the main suburban sessions.Footnote 130 In the 1690s, the societies for reformation stepped up the pressure further, particularly in the City, leading to the fining and public whipping of dozens of brothel keepers every year. Yet over the first half of the eighteenth century the number of prosecutions steadily declined, and by the middle of the century the law had effectively lost its grip on the problem.Footnote 131 In 1748, in an attempt to reinvigorate justice, the energetic new high constable of Holborn, Saunders Welch, himself brought indictments against the three most notorious brothel keepers in London: Peter Wood of The Star, Elizabeth Owen of The Crown, and Anne Everett of The Bunch of Grapes, all on the Strand. His own petty constables acted as witnesses. About a hundred other bawds were prosecuted in the course of the year, many of them more than once. Not one was convicted.Footnote 132

This was all the more remarkable because it was also in the early eighteenth century that bawds and brothels came to be viewed with mounting hostility. As it became fashionable to downplay the personal culpability of individual prostitutes, the role of the wicked procurer was newly emphasized. The capital's bawdy houses were also increasingly singled out as a prime cause of robberies, burglaries, and serious lawlessness.Footnote 133 The middle decades of the eighteenth century therefore saw redoubled efforts to stamp out the problem. In 1752, Parliament passed a new “Act for the better preventing thefts and robberies … and punishing persons keeping disorderly houses,” in order to solve the legal difficulties. It outlawed the most common defense tactics, offered large rewards, and obliged parishes to bear the costs of prosecutions.Footnote 134 Yet its impact was negligible. In 1758, Saunders Welch, by now a magistrate, noted with dismay the Act's failure to suppress even “the open and bare-faced bawdy houses.”Footnote 135 That same year there were, despite his own efforts, probably no more than ten or fifteen successful actions for brothel keeping across the whole of London, a city of some seven hundred thousand people.Footnote 136 In the following decade, the Act proved equally useless to the new society for reformation of manners. Thus, by the later eighteenth century, even the application of special zeal, private largesse, and tailor-made legislation, in a sympathetic climate of opinion, could not bring about the effective repression of bawdy houses.

Why did the law prove so inadequate and impossible to remedy? In this case, the most obvious difficulty was expense. Already in the 1690s the various proposed acts against immorality had been concerned to remedy this. For even though the societies for reformation raised and spent unprecedented sums on legal fees, they never had enough money to see through every case, let alone to indict all the brothels they detected. Most bawds fought back viciously, not only defending themselves tenaciously but mounting vexatious counterprosecutions that tied up the reformers legally and crippled them financially. Other moral offenses, by contrast, remained comparatively easy and inexpensive to prosecute. When the new society for reformation was first set up in the later 1750s, it was able to prosecute over six thousand Sabbath breakers, gamblers, and drunkards, and distribute over forty thousand books and broadsides, for about seventy pounds per year. But from the moment it joined battle against prostitution, its finances became much more precarious. Annual expenditure shot up to between three and four hundred pounds, at least half of which was spent fending off malicious prosecutions by the keepers of disorderly houses. It was just such a countersuit that destroyed the new society in 1763, when the mistress of a Chancery Lane brothel used perjured evidence to win punitive damages against it.Footnote 137

A deeper problem was therefore the rising legal expertise of hardened sexual criminals. Litigation against such people must always have been particularly difficult,Footnote 138 but in the eighteenth century the balance seems to have shifted decisively in their favor. It was dismaying to see how easily lewd and disorderly houses brushed aside justice by “the suborning of false witnesses, and perjuries in the open courts,” complained a preacher in 1734.Footnote 139 Compared to their opponents, bawds and their associates increasingly had deeper pockets and greater confidence in manipulating the law. An important contributory factor appears to have been the growing involvement of lawyers. Their influence is evident from around the turn of the century in several procedural challenges to the prosecution of whores and bawds.Footnote 140 By the 1730s it was not uncommon in cases of all kinds for solicitors and barristers to offer themselves for hire to offenders taken before a magistrate, put on trial, wishing to appeal, or looking to sue for damages. In Westminster, the bench repeatedly ran out of money defending constables against vexatious suits by the keepers and frequenters of disorderly houses.Footnote 141 By the middle decades of the century, even ordinary streetwalkers sometimes had recourse to attorneys.Footnote 142

The rising litigiousness of such experienced sexual miscreants inhibited constables and magistrates from pursuing them. It made the work of moral reformers so difficult that some gave up on legal methods altogether, while others, such as the early leaders of the Vice Society, resorted to fraud and perjury themselves.Footnote 143 Above all, it greatly reduced the willingness of ordinary men and women to take part in moral regulation. Even in the 1690s it had been common for householders to be well acquainted with the machinery of the law and to take an active role in the policing of bawds and whores. Yet just a few decades later they had become notoriously reluctant to do so, for fear of abuse, expense, and vexatious litigation. Most respectable parishioners, already far removed from the day-to-day policing of their neighborhoods, preferred to keep their distance from such dangerous adversaries.Footnote 144

CONCLUSION

In the century after 1688, most forms of consensual sex outside marriage drifted gradually beyond the reach of the common law. This was a development that overturned some of the longest-established principles of moral and criminal jurisdiction in England. This article has tried to elucidate the judicial trends underlying it, and to show how these were, somewhat paradoxically, stimulated by recurrent campaigns for moral reform. Toward the end of the seventeenth century there remained considerable enthusiasm for maintaining or even extending traditional forms of moral regulation. The societies for reformation of manners had powerful support and were able to achieve considerable success against public debauchery. At later times of moral panic, such as the 1760s, 1780s, and 1790s, their memory inspired the formation of similar groups. Yet ultimately their legacy was equivocal. Although the societies sought to reinvigorate the collective oversight of morals, they were forced to use methods that pushed policing in the opposite direction. Instead of reviving the traditional, voluntary participation of amateur citizens, they accelerated a general reliance on separate, paid groups of semiprofessionals. In place of mass zeal, they depended largely on money. In addition, their persecution of sexual offenders provoked a mounting backlash against the idea that even blatant sexual unchastity should be punished at all. The final irony was that the increasing professionalization of justice helped in various ways to limit, rather than to strengthen, judicial action against vice.

Up until the later nineteenth century, there were attempts once more to make sexual infidelity a criminal offense. The idea was canvassed by successive groups of moral reformers, and legislation penalizing adultery in a variety of ways was introduced in Parliament in 1771, 1779, 1800, 1809, and 1856–57.Footnote 145 The arguments usually put forward in its support were little different from those that had sustained punishment in earlier times: the offense was a clear breach of God's commandments, it caused grave injury to individuals and families, and it disturbed the order of civil society. But the motives and circumstances were by this time crucially different. The main objective now was not necessarily to punish or even to prevent immorality but to improve the law of divorce and to restrict suits for criminal conversation. Moreover, the prospect of treating adulterers and fornicators as public criminals was no longer one with any substantial basis in current jurisdiction, which made it much more difficult to contemplate. Around 1700, the intention of legislating had been to shore up a legal practice that, although on the decline, was still current. But a century later the machinery of criminal justice in this sphere, vigorously active for so many hundreds of years, had fallen almost entirely into disuse.

This did not mean that heterosexual misconduct was no longer policed or punished. Bawds and prostitutes remained subject to various forms of legal and semilegal harassment and penalty. For plebeian men and women, the bearing of children out of wedlock continued to be culpable under the bastardy laws. Among the propertied classes, the gradual rise of new forms of private litigation and divorce over unchastity compensated, at least symbolically, for the falling away of public jurisdiction.Footnote 146 Outside the Church of England, various religious groups continued to exercise communal discipline over the misbehavior of their congregants. Moreover, sexual conduct had always been regulated as much by informal sanctions as by legal injunction. As the judicial punishment of immorality declined, ever more energy was expended on the inculcation of sexual mores through education, literature, and social norms. For women in particular, especially those in middling and polite society, the result may well have been a tightening of moral control, rather than the reverse.

Communal policing was thus never more than one aspect of sexual discipline. But its decline over this period was nevertheless momentous. Up until the later seventeenth century, the courts of the state, like those of the church, publicly enforced the principle that illicit sex should not be tolerated by the community. By 1800, as far as such collective justice was concerned, laissez-faire had become the legal norm.