One in Four

"Public opinion, which once ostracized adulterers, does it no longer," sighed the Archbishop of Canterbury in his Diocesan Letter last week. A month ago the archbishop proposed that adultery be treated as a crime. The argument has been boiling along ever since.

In the House of Lords, Earl Winterton raised a practical objection: "I do not think the Primate can have thought very carefully over the results of his action. If this law was put into operation, there would be at least another thousand people in prison. I do not want to be offensive, but they might even include some members of Your Lordships' House."

Adultery aside, some of their lordships were causing concern enough. The latest statistics show that society mothers launching their daughters would do far far better to snare for a son-in-law an ordinary bloke with a kind heart than the wearer of a coronet. While only one in 15 marriages between commoners breaks up in Britain, seven of 25 of Britain's nonroyal dukes have been to the divorce court, and three of these--Leinster, Leeds and Argyll--have been there more than once. Last week the Duke of Bedford, 42, was in the middle of divorce proceedings started by his Duchess No. 2. In Edinburgh last week, Argyll, Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland and Salesman of Argyll Socks in all the ads, was trying to shed Duchess No. 3. Fortnight earlier, the Duchess of Bedford's sister was divorced by Earl Cadogan (who owns one-quarter of London's arty Chelsea district) on the ground of adultery with the earl's former accountant. "If this pace keeps up," said one Londoner, "there will soon be no one on the Queen's lawn at Ascot [to which divorced persons are never invited] except Prince Philip and the Queen herself."

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