(2 of 3)
Indeed, the British reserve a special Order of Venery for distinguished doxies such as Emma Hamilton, the onetime streetwalker who for years was civilly shared by her ambassador husband, Sir William, and Admiral Lord Nelson, the father of her daughter. One of the most successful of all high-society hustlers was Harriette Wilson, a Regency beauty whose guest register would have read like Burke's Peerage; when she started publishing her memoirs, she managed to collect double dividends from many former patrons who preferred not to be immortalized. But not the iron Duke of Wellington, who, when told by Harriette that she planned to chronicle his indiscretions, roared: "Publish and be damned!" She did.
Since the mid-19th century, sin for a politician has , meant getting caught at it. At least three officially virtuous Prime Ministers, Lord Palmerston, Arthur Balfour and Lloyd George, were inveterate adulterers.
Thus the state of sexual morality in Britain today is probably no worse than it ever was, and there is much evidence that it is better. Britain may not be a moral wasteland but a battleground in which a more realistic, less hypocritical generation is attempting to win legal and social recognition of the facts of everyday life.
Sparing the Horses. With the loss of empire and the decline of the church as an influence in society, Britons have tempered their old moral certitudes. Author James Morris fears that his compatriots are becoming "congenitally incapable of disregarding the opposite point of view, are constantly groping toward some general synthesis of everybody's point of view on everything." But the stir created by the Profumo case suggests that there is still a lot of power left in the "moral machinery."
What has really changed in Britain are matters of style and outlook, of class and economic structure. Fornication has always seemed more spectacular in the upper and lower reaches of society. But now, says D. W. Brogan, "It may well be that the middle classes are taking up the vices of their betters and also of their inferiors."
If there is no longer real poverty in Britain, the affluent society has been even kinder to the new-rich. It is at this level that life in Britain often seems tasteless, aimless and immoral. A new twist to a Victorian music hall ballad—"It's the rich wot gets the pleashoor, it's the poor wot gets the blyme"—was added recently by Minister of Housing Sir Keith Joseph, who said earnestly: "It is harder for the rich or the relatively secure to be pure." And yet too much can be blamed on economic factors, leading to what the Economist calls "the untenable implication that adultery would have been less rampant if only the country had been decent enough to stay poor."