ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that in Britain over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the understanding of adultery as a tort was complicated by an accompanying discourse of what can be termed “quasi-criminality.” Specifically—while formally trivialized—adultery remained linked to a threat to British kingship. In criminal cases generally, the fiction of the king as the implied victim of a criminal act suggests something in the English common law imagination that sees a potentially interdependent relationship between tort and crime, centered on the body of the sovereign. In the case of adultery, the tension between the weight of relevant monarchical history and the absence of contemporary criminal enforcement created a new cultural narrative about the offense which attempted, itself, to serve a penal function.
