THE morals of the British have always intrigued and baffled foreigners. For centuries, Europeans visiting that cold, controlled country have discovered to their amazement—and frequent envy—that the abundance, subtlety and variety of sexual sport in London's demimonde make continental capitals seem parochial. Until recent years, it was impossible to go to dinner at London's most fashionable clubs or private houses without passing swarms of well-turned-out and sometimes handsome streetwalkers standing guard on the sidewalk. Like many another foreign analyst of Anglo-Saxon attitudes, French Diarist Hippolyte Taine, visiting London in the mid 19th century, could not comprehend how the English could sustain the "vehemence and pungency of their passions" against "the harsh, though silent, grinding of their moral machinery."
There is a widespread feeling that Britain's moral machinery is not grinding as harshly as it used to. Much in English life today suggests decadence and dissolution. Since the girls were driven off the streets four years ago, they have taken to advertising their services in shop windows as "masseuses," "models," or "French teachers." London's booming striptease parlors offer some of the crudest live pornography to be seen publicly in Europe. Its parks in summer are pre-empted by couples who aren't just necking. One third of all teen-age brides in Britain are already pregnant. Innumerable scandals preceding the Profumo case suggest considerable promiscuity, along with sexual arrangements infinitely more complex than the old-fashioned triangle. And, as everyone knows, homosexuality is "the English vice." Psychologist G. M. Carstairs commented recently: "Popular morality is now a wasteland, littered with the debris of broken conventions. Concepts such as honor, or even honesty, have an old-fashioned sound, but nothing has taken their place."
Getting Caught. This harsh judgment may overlook the fact that Britain was never the sort of place Victorian morality pretended it was. If London today resembles Babylon-on-Thames, it is little more than a de luxe model of the brutal, carnal 18th century city whose brothels, boudoirs and gin shops ("Drunk for a Penny, Dead Drunk for Tuppence") were pictured by Hogarth, Richardson and Fielding.
Says Malcolm Muggeridge: "There's always been a lot of high-grade whoring in this country," and there is a lot of past evidence to prove him right. George IV had his queen tried publicly for infidelity; in the early 18th century, an Archbishop of York maintained a harem at his palace. The 18th century Christine Keeler was a Miss Chudleigh, who had been the mistress of three peers when George II spotted her at a costume ball, cunningly disguised in a transparent gown. Her Georgian era came between two noble marriages (one bigamous). In the 18th century phrase, borrowed from nautical terminology, Miss Chudleigh had "bottom," or what it takes.