With all the divorce drama going on in the news today, it's interesting to see the way things were. This weekend I learned about Caroline Norton, daughter of British playwright Richard Sheridan. She is the woman directly responsible for modern British divorce law. Caroline married George Norton, a conservative politician, in 1827. Their marriage quickly ran into trouble when George began beating his wife.

During this time, a woman could only apply for a divorce under the regulations set out by the Church of England. The church might grant a divorce under one of three conditions. The first was if the marriage could be considered annulled through potential incest, insanity, or impotence. In these cases the church would allow the petitioner to re-marry, but any new children would be considered illegitimate. The second condition to prove adultery, in which case Parliament would eventually grant a divorce with the church's blessing that would allow the spouse to re-marry and their children would be considered legitimate. Finally, you could prove sodomy or physical violence, but this would only allow the couple to separate and neither would be allowed to re-marry.

Obviously unhappy with this state of affairs, Caroline petitioned, with the help of sympathetic members of parliament, to have the divorce laws changed. She asked that mothers not convicted of adultery be allowed to keep custody of their children, who at the time were considered to be property of the father. Her call for reform resulted in the Marriage and Divorce Act, passed 150 years ago, which transferred the jurisdiction of marriage and divorce away from the church and to a newly-created civil court.

It took time, and Caroline was 50 in 1858 when the bill was finally passed. But it wasn't until after the death of George Norton in 1877 that she was finally able to re-marry. She did re-marry, at the age of 69, to Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, only three months before her death.