“The Sinister (or Left-Handed) Theatrical Duel.” The Town and Country Magazine, March 1770. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University
it is a Scandal, that our Nation only has not made sufficient Provision against this Crime, but that we may have the Liberty of Killing one another, and yet be reckon’d good Subjects, and be as much commended for Destroying as Propagating one of our Species.1
This comment, coming after the murderous Mohun-Hamilton duel of 1712, the duel, as Victor Stater has dubbed it, “that shook Stuart Society,”2 was part of an appeal to Parliament to pass legislation that would finally end the practice.3 This demand, many times repeated in the eighteenth century, was never satisfied, and many doubted legislative efficacy in combating such an entrenched custom. While duelling continued into the nineteenth century, a variety of alternate remedies were put forward for its cessation, yet none were adopted. Though men and women of all sorts, clerics, novelists, poets, and playwrights, presented, and mainly censured, the duel as an outmoded relic of a bygone age, it continued to be practiced and to go unpunished. And then, after more than a century of debate, duels ceased to be fought in England. This chapter seeks to explore the confused welter of representations, attitudes, and acts surrounding this persistent vice through the eighteenth century and then to suggest some reasons why, in England alone of European nations, men of honor turned away from this fearsome custom.
The eighteenth-century debate on duelling grew naturally from and repeated many of the earlier complaints and criticisms of the practice. While some continued to describe the act as devilish, seeing Satan and his minions as still active in the world,5 more common in the explanations for this widespread vice was the influence and force of custom, and the deformation that this inertia caused to notions and practices of virtue and honor. Thus in Fielding’s Amelia, when the voice of reason and religion, Dr. Harrison, attempted to answer Amelia’s plaint that her husband’s honor as well as his life must be preserved, he noted:
Can Honour dictate to him to disobey the express Commands of his Maker, in Compliance with a Custom established by a Set of Blockheads, founded on false Principles of Virtue, in direct Opposition to the plain and positive Precepts of Religion and tending manifestly to give a Sanction to Ruffians, and to protect them in all the Ways of Impudence and Villainy?6
Here, in the guise of the Doctor, Fielding was gesturing to a connection that would become clearer in the last third of the century: that between an uncivilized gothic inheritance and the practice of duelling, the distance between a savage practice smacking of the Vandals and the acquisition of gentility and politeness so valued by contemporary society.7 How else could this powerful, deadly compulsion be explained but by the irrational but potent force of custom?
“That, to let any thing grow into Custom, which is against Law, is owing to the Inadvertency, Negligence, or Guilt of Princes.”8 This quote, from the Spectator, served as the opening line of a letter on duelling in a mid-eighteenth-century newspaper. Three-quarters of a century later, in a survey of persuasives against the practice, the anonymous author of The Duellist quoted from the same magazine, the Spectator, for Addison’s articulation of the nature of false honor. The continuing appeal of the writings of Addison and Steele are examples of what Philip Carter has noted: “that would-be polite men continued to consult seminal guides to polite conduct like the Spectator throughout the [eighteenth] century.”9 By the mid-century such guides, along with various sorts of didactic and literary material and newspaper accounts and comments, both formed and informed contemporary opinion about the nature, prevalence, and undesirability of the practice of duelling.
Of course, while the attack on stultifying, savage custom was at the forefront of anti-duelling rhetoric, the most traditional sort of criticisms of the practice came from clergymen, sometimes delivered as sermons and other times as tracts and pamphlets denouncing this unchristian vice. However, at the end of the day, neither military men, moved by the exigencies of their profession, nor gentlemen, persuaded by their own code of propriety, heeded any of these, and felt they could avoid the duel. So whatever ministers and preachers might have taught, whatever Addison and Steele advised, many would surely have agreed with the Lieutenant’s comment to Tom Jones:
My dear boy, be a good Christian as long as you live: but be a man of honour too, and never put up an affront; not all the books, nor all the parsons in the world, shall ever persuade me to that. I love my religion very well, but I love my honour more. There must be some mistake in the wording of the text, or in the translation, or in the understanding of it, or somewhere or other. But however that be, a man must run the risk, for he must preserve, his honour!10
In fact, the presentation of the duel in the literature and drama of the first half of the eighteenth century was largely favorable, and only very occasionally condemnatory. Many of the period’s most popular plays, ranging from Centlivre’s The Beau’s Duel to Popple’s Double Deceit, had their heroes cheerfully and without censure so engaged.11 Neither the heroes of Haywood’s novels nor Fielding’s celebrated the duel, but nevertheless they engaged in them when required by the demands of honor and public shame. While Richardson’s exemplary aristocrat, Sir Charles Grandison, not only refused to fight duels himself, but expatiated at some length upon their criminality, Richardson had, in an earlier work, presented Colonel Morden, the greatly beloved and highly virtuous cousin of Clarissa, challenging and killing Lovelace in such an encounter.12 So while religious men condemned the duel, few authors or dramatists issued strong denunciations of the practice.
Duelling was an illicit activity. What this meant, of course, is that most people who duelled tried to evade detection, tried to conduct their encounters at out-of-the-way spots and at odd hours of the day. If the meetings did not result in fatal wounds, it is possible that they entirely escaped notice, and so were lost both to contemporaries and to historians. Though we can never recover the totality of duelling for the eighteenth century, we do have a great deal of contemporary evidence that allows us partially to reconstruct what ordinary men and women of the time might have read and consequently thought about this practice. One of the best of these sources is the growing newspaper press.
However, we must first pause a moment to consider what constituted a duel. On the whole, we assume that we know what a duel was. Ideally, the duel, like the minuet, was above all a formal and well-mannered event. It was supposed to contain and give shape to the passions which generated and animated it. By giving these passions a limited mode of expression, duelling, at least in theory, substituted a conventionalized, well-demarcated conflict for a potentially endless state of war. “Casual or irregular violence,” the assassination and the vendetta, were replaced, it was frequently claimed, by the recognized rules of the field of honor. What this meant was that, following an affront, the parties were expected to approach seconds to represent them, who would attempt peacefully to resolve the conflict, but, if this proved impossible, would assist their principals at the event, would try “to see that all was upon the square, and make a faithful report of the whole combat.”13 They would secure weapons, transportation, and medical assistance; they would discuss duelling procedures and would attend the duel to make sure that only honorable conduct would occur. However, in practice, as far as we can tell, these requirements were often ignored, especially before mid-century. In each of the major reported duels and in several of the minor ones before the late 1760s, one or more of these necessities was often missing. The Mohun-Hamilton duel was notorious for the involvement of the seconds in the conflict itself; in neither the Deering-Thornhill, the Walpole-Chetwynd, nor the Clarke-Innes duels were seconds present, and in the last, the opponents fought with weapons of vastly different sizes. Both the Dalton-Paul and Byron-Chaworth duels took place in darkened rooms with no witnesses.14 For these decades, then, what made an encounter a duel, at least in so far as the press and the public were concerned, was the use of weapons, i.e., swords or pistols, sometimes the testimony and forgiveness of the injured or dying duellist, and the social class of the participants. The rather hit-and-miss, unregulated quality of these early eighteenth-century duels can be seen in the press accounts of four rather commonplace matches reported during the reigns of the first two Georges. It should also be noted that, on the whole, these reports were brief and almost never commented directly on the duel itself.
The first, a fatal duel between two young men who lodged in the same house, is a good example of the rather hot blood and lack of preparation that typified the reports we have of the conflicts of this period. After fighting on the evening of their quarrel, they parted when the sword of one of the men was broken. Next day, Mr. Andrews, an ensign in a regiment of foot, came to his opponent, Lee’s, room, and challenged him to fight again. The two young men left the house, procured swords along the way, and walked deep into Kensington Gardens where “on a sudden Mr. Andrews bid the other draw, and after a short Engagement,” Andrews was fatally wounded. Similarly unstructured and un-seconded was the meeting between two Irish friends, who one evening exchanged “some words.” Despite the attempts of one to apologize for having caused offence, the two men renewed their quarrel; “Here no third Person being present, they were heated into Passion, and a Case of Pistols lying in the Window, they engag’d in a Duel” in which one was fatally shot. A similar affray between two young friends during a walk, arguing philosophical questions this time, led to a sword fight, and to the death of one.15 Finally, the affair between a Captain Gray of the Guards and Lord Lempster was also resolved without prior challenge, seconds, or ceremony. The duel, occasioned by a quarrel over a gambling match, was insisted on the next morning by the Captain, and the two men went into Marybone fields, where the Captain died of a sword wound.16 The pattern seems clear; though some duels were more formal, many were reported as occurring without the regularity or control that seconds and rules afforded and that the manuals insisted they required.
Between 1680 and 1750, the press reported 356 duels or inquests and trials of duelling offences. Through these seventy years, the great majority of these reports were only one sentence long and gave no reason for the contretemps. The weapons employed in these contests consisted for the most part of the sword, or the sword and pistol. While much remained constant in such accounts, two changes of emphasis did occur. The first was the steady growth in the reports stating the weapons employed; the second was the declining number of named duellists, and the replacement of names with either their occupations or their status. Thus, by the 1740s, a common description of a duellist was “a person of distinction” or “of honour.”17
It is unclear why newspaper accounts of duels were so abbreviated, seldom mentioning details or outcomes. Part of the explanation undoubtedly lies with the small size of the early eighteenth-century newspaper itself, and the few pages available for news of all sorts. It may be that editors just did not consider such items to be “news-worthy.” Perhaps they were intimidated by the possibilities of prosecution, or even violence, if they reported such events. Or it may be that the widespread use of “omission fees” made it both safer and more profitable for newspapermen not to write about such conflicts. This is certainly what occurred in one eighteenth-century novel, The Woman of Honour [1768]. In a letter to a female correspondent, the novel’s protagonist, Lady Harriet, explained that after her brother’s duel “their steward did a very sensible thing: considering the pain which the publication of the incident would give to all parties, he sent round to the editors of the news-papers to have it suppressed.”18 Clearly many of the upper classes felt demeaned and sullied by having their private affairs made public. Commenting in the aftermath of Lord Byron’s trial of 1765, for killing his neighbor in a duel, Horace Walpole, though openly unsympathetic to the man and his cause, still noted that though Byron “escaped with his life and recovered some portion of honour, if that can comfort him” it must have been a terrible ordeal “after the publicity made of his character.”19
It was in the 1750s that the press response to and reportage of duels deepened. In the accounts of one of these, the duel between Captains Innes and Clarke of the Navy, we can observe both the rhetorical and intellectual reliance on older sorts of criticism and some of the newer arguments coming to the fore, as well as a certain hesitant reluctance to acknowledge the difficulties, for military men at any rate, in retaining their most prized possession, their honor and reputation.
Briefly to recapitulate the events leading up to this duel: in 1749, Admiral Knowles, commander of the British Navy in the Caribbean, was court-martialed for what some thought naval mismanagement or negligence. During the trial, one of the Captains under his command, Captain Clarke, was called by the court to testify and gave evidence which mitigated the culpability of his Admiral. The Admiral was reprimanded, though not condemned, and the trial’s outcome led to a series of challenges and duels, most notably between Knowles and several of his Captains, but also between Innes, another naval officer, and Clarke. Innes himself was court-martialed by Knowles, found guilty of not obeying orders, and suspended from command for three months. Innes, however, asserted that Clarke had perjured himself at the trial, giving false evidence on the Admiral’s behalf; as a consequence Innes proceeded to taunt and heckle Clarke until he agreed to meet him in a duel. The event was totally unregulated, without any seconds present and each using his own weapons. Clarke fired first, with a gun twice as long as Innes’s, from a range of five or six yards, and gave his opponent a mortal wound. It is unclear whether Innes ever got a chance to return the shot. Despite some contradictory evidence about Innes’s last words, when the jury, rather unwillingly, found Clarke guilty of murder, the foreman remarked that “the provocation given by the Deceased to the Prisoner, was so extraordinary, that they begg’d the Court would please to recommend him to his Majesty’s Mercy.” This was accordingly done, and Clarke was pardoned and freed.20
Unlike the duels of the preceding two decades, this duel provoked more newspaper coverage and commentary. Waiting, perhaps, until the outcome of Clarke’s trial and sentencing was announced, an interesting front page letter about this affair appeared in the Whitehall Evening Post on April 19, 1750. A little more than a month later another account was featured on the front page of Old England, which was edited and copied as an item in the Gentleman’s Magazine of the same month. Both of these essays cited the criticisms of duelling made almost forty years before in the Spectator. This reliance on the received wisdom of moral arbiters, like the Spectator, was joined with a comment in Old England, which connected the outcome of this event with that of the infamous Mahon-Hamilton conflict, and even with the Pulteney-Harvey duel. It also noted that while the Spectator’s virtuous king, Pharamond, had, in his Edicts, “parted with a branch of his prerogative,” i.e., his power to pardon duellists, England’s George had not.21
The discussion of this duel not only relied on earlier analyses, but came up with new proposals. The first, made by Old England, was that words, as well as blows, be seen as sufficient legal provocation to mitigate the severity of the offence of duelling. The second critical remark stressed the private evil of the duel, invoking a language of sentiment and domesticity that connected the transgression of the duel with an attack on the sanctity of the family and its members. Finally, the commentary on this duel again raised the question, which was a central one in this century in which England was intermittently, but almost constantly at war, of the difficulty of being both a military officer and a man who wished to obey the law, and thus not duel. So Whitehall’s noted, as a matter of fact, that “should an Officer in the Army or Navy, in Reverence of the Law, either of God or Man, refuse a Challenge, his Commission shall be taken from him!” Yet, it went on to argue that the duellist, in regarding only the purity of his personal honor, ignored the demands of his position, and by endangering his life, shirked his duties “of doing Service to his King and Country.” Old England on the other hand, saw the revival of duelling as “prevailing after a bad Peace.” Unlike Whitehall’s, Old England asserted the centrality of honor to the military man, arguing that “to be traduced and vilify’d … are more than Man can bear, or indeed what ought to be borne by a Gentleman; more especially, by one who holds his Commission by the Tenure of his Sword, as Obedience to the Laws of the Land in such a Case would render him contemptible by those of Honor.” What could a man do who must either fight a duel or lose his job or his honor, or both?22 After the mid-century, then, both the volume and detail in press reporting of duels increased significantly, and many of these involved military men, or, in the wake of the insurgent anti-Scots sentiments egged on by the North Britain, duels between Englishmen and Scots.23 Since for the six decades from 1680, it was quite apparent from the newspaper reports that a sizeable percentage of duellists were military or naval men, it is clear why they were seen as most under the tyrannous sway of this barbarous ritual.
Yet, despite the visibility of duelling among military men, the duel which received the greatest coverage at this time was fought for quite different reasons by men of quite a different sort. This was the encounter between William, Lord Byron and William Chaworth, his neighbor and relation, which occurred at the Star and Garter tavern in Pall Mall on January 26, 1765. This was a duel fought because of a quarrel which occurred at a London club-meeting of Nottinghamshire gentlemen. One account claimed that the men fought over which of them had the best method for promoting game on his estate, another, that Chaworth resented Byron’s guests hunting on the land of his tenants. Whatever the argument, Byron and Chaworth fought within minutes of the dispute, in a dark room without any seconds. After securing medical care for Chaworth, mortally wounded in the combat, Byron went into hiding, eventually giving himself up for trial. Undoubtedly the fact that Byron chose to be tried by his peers, i.e., by the House of Lords, and that this was the first such serious trial since Earl Ferrers had been tried and found guilty of murder, did much to enhance its notoriety. To give some sense of the widespread nature of its coverage: from the date of the duel through the subsequent trial, which took place on April 16th of the same year, that is, in almost a three-month period, at least sixty-eight items related to the duel appeared in six of London’s newspapers, as well as in most of her periodical press. It is true that most of these notices were either very short, or virtually identical with stories printed elsewhere, but it is hard to think that anyone reading the press in London (and much of the kingdom received London periodicals) in those months could be ignorant of the duel or not have an opinion about its outcome. While the spectacular nature of the trial as well as the differing versions of the duel itself made the event a media “happening,” equally interesting, perhaps, was the number of letters that the duel evoked, and the dialogue that began within the press through such letters, about this particular duel, but more about the practice of duelling in general. While three of the eleven letters published in the six months after the duel were concerned with the costs of the trial to the public,25 all of the others were on matters of principle, and several appeared on the front pages of their papers. While one of these letters argued that, for a man reviled “in the most bitter and biting terms of contumely,” there was no recourse but the duel, more typical was that which asserted that duelling could only be stopped by insisting that “the Legislature must forbid all (save military) men from wearing swords; and a decree for this purpose, I am certain, can be of no injury to this nation, as I am sure that the advantages resulting from wearing swords, are far short of countervailing the various mischiefs that attend the use of them.”26 Perhaps most interesting of the eleven letters that appeared following this engagement was the last, which purported to be, and was perhaps, a “genuine Letter” from one Alexander Robinson to a Walter Smith, refusing to accept a challenge to engage in a duel. In this note, Robinson made three interesting points. The first was an answer, of sorts, to the “silence of our Legislature with regard to Duelling”; Robinson pointed out that in the ancient world, laws against parricide were also thought unnecessary “because they thought it a Crime the worst of Villains would be incapable of.” Second, he argued against the duel on traditional Christian grounds, and finally concluded by reminding Smith that as a furious duellist, he, Smith, was a slave “to the Tyranny of your Passions,” while he, Robinson, “remain Master of my own.” This final argument, which recalls the earlier comments that those truly manly can rise above their passions, and display cool control, was perhaps the lowest blow of all.27
Despite these public condemnations, both the well-respected Gentleman’s Magazine and its younger but prestigious rival, the Annual Register, published as their concluding comments on the affair, an article entitled “An authentic Narrative of the Duel between Lord Byron and Wm Chaworth.” This essay, glossing over the impropriety of an unwitnessed, unregulated duel fought in the dark by two men who had spent the evening drinking and quarrelling, determined that
it should seem that neither Mr. Chaworth nor any of his friends could blame Lord Byron for the part he had in his death. Mr. Chaworth it is manifest, was under the apprehensions of having mortally wounded Lord B and Lord B being still engaged, had a right to avail himself of this mistake for the preservation of his own life. His lordship himself, no doubt, may wish that he had, in that situation, disabled him only; but in the heat of duelling who can always be collected?28
Thus, while duelling became more frequently featured and more negatively portrayed in the press, there still seemed to be a basic incapacity to come to terms with the vice. For the Gentleman’s in 1765, as for Steele in 1709, the enigma, the inability forcefully to find and recommend an antidote remained:
It is confessed, I have writ against Duels with some Warmth; but in all my Discourses, I have not ever said, that I knew how a Gentleman could avoid a Duel If he were provoked to it.…29
For most of the eighteenth century, whatever being a gentleman meant in the everyday, it was a commonplace that, if demeaned physically by a blow, or verbally by being called a liar or coward, every gentleman, whatever his situation, station, or occupation, had to “resent so gross an insult” “in the manner [in which] such indignity ought to be resented,” i.e. cudgelling non-gentle and duelling with gentle antagonists.30
In the early eighteenth century contemporary commentators frequently characterized duels as having arisen from political disagreements. Both the Mohun-Hamilton and the Hervey-Pulteney duels fit this model. Both of these, it was said, were connived to settle long-standing scores. Other duels, like the one between Lord Walpole and Walter Chetwynd, erupted both from older grievances, and from words spoken in anger in Parliamentary debate.32 In these, neither man was hurt, and no more was heard of the quarrel. Little more was published about John Wilkes’s first duel of 1762. Most of the press reports of this meeting were equivocal and did not name the antagonists.33 A year later, however, Wilkes’s next duel received much more press notice, and in fact might be seen as the beginning of an epoch in which the political duel, and duelling more generally, became a sought-for news item and one commonly found in the daily and periodical press. While the duels of notable political figures were most prominently featured in the press, there was also an increase in stories of others whose duels were described as resulting from political disputes.34
What was considered so noteworthy about this second duel of Wilkes? First, while in France, Wilkes had been repeatedly challenged to fight by a young Scot, Forbes, and had evaded that encounter. Furthermore, the political situation in the House of Commons was electric, as the Ministry had done every thing in its power to find ways of silencing Wilkes. After the failure of General Warrants, and Wilkes’s triumph over the Ministry, he must have felt invulnerable. So, in November 1763, he called out his fellow Member of Parliament, Samuel Martin, and, in the resulting duel, Wilkes suffered what might well have been a fatal wound. Early press accounts presented Wilkes as going out of his way to be a magnanimous opponent, urging Martin to flee after wounding him; later stories gloried in the polish that Wilkes’s tarnished reputation had received. “The Affair effectually wipes off all Aspersions of Cowardice, which the Scots attempted to fix upon him [Wilkes] by the Scheme of Capt. Forbes.”35 Within two weeks of the duel, at least five letters were published about it. Only one, the earliest, lamented its occurrence, though it did not condemn it. All the rest reflected on the degree of honor that each of the contestants had won through his actions.36
The next decade, however, saw the first full flowering of political duels, with a number of very prominent public men fighting about things said or done in public, usually in Parliament, which, they felt, impugned their honor, and could only be eradicated by blood. Newspapers also became much more important for the proper conduct of the duel, with participants and seconds often sending in their accounts, to inform the public that things had gone properly and in an honorable fashion. Rather than paying editors not to publish such stories, public men who duelled increasingly seemed to feel that it was imperative that their story be correctly told, and that the public be informed of its true circumstances. Increasingly the public were invited to view the duel, to see how coolly and fairly it had been conducted, and how all the rules of honor had been obeyed.
The first of these political duels, which ended happily, was between Governor Johnstone and Lord George Germaine. Germaine, who had been court-martialed after the battle of Minden, had, like Wilkes after Forbes’s challenges, publicly duelled to regain his honor, which the encounter completely accomplished. Thus the Gazetteer recounted the story of “a witty gentleman” who maintained that the duel was “the greatest act of grace that L[ord] G[ermaine] could have received. “When his companion asked ‘why is that,’ the wit replied ‘because the G[overnor] has thoroughly whitewashed him.’ ” Many of the papers repeated the words or sentiments of the Lady’s Magazine that Lord Germaine “behaved with much cool and real courage.” Horace Walpole seems to have captured the general mood when, in a letter to Mann, he wrote: “… whatever Lord George Sackville was, Lord George Germaine is a hero.”37 The gentility and honor of both men was proved not only by their duel, but by their subsequent behavior. The press noted that “Lord G- G- and Gov. J- are now entirely reconciled: a few mornings since they walked together near an hour in St. James’s park, and conversed the whole time seemingly in the most friendly manner.”38
Undoubtedly, however, two of the most famous political duels of the 1770s and ‘80s were the meetings between Charles James Fox and William Adam in November 1779 and that between the Earl of Shelburne and William Fullerton, fought about four months later. Both these duels were widely reported, with accounts from the seconds as well as letters between the duellists published in the press. In addition, a poem, in French, praising Fox, a satirical ballad entitled “Paradise regained, or the Battle of Adam and the Fox,” was published on this occasion.39 Both duels were fought with Scots, both resulted in minor injuries to their English participants, and both were the talk of the day. Of the four letters to the printer written on this affair, two applauded Fox’s behavior as “manly, determined and liberal” while one took strong exception to this encomium. Arguing that words were wounds, “JB” wrote about the impropriety of Parliamentary privilege for unfettered speech. For “JB,” the very publicness of the offence required the possibility of the duel to keep “political incendiaries” in check. Only “Right” argued against both the practice of, and praise for, any political or other sort of duellists; “I believe,” he said, “it to be bigoted and rank cowardice and very high presumption to give or accept a challenge.”40 While duelling for men out-of-doors, though still practiced, was increasingly condemned, opinion about the propriety of public men duelling was less clear.
The letters following the second duel, between the Earl of Shelburne and William Fullerton, were more generally negative, though employing a wide range of condemnatory tropes. That old chestnut, that duelling was the result of custom, that it was “astonishing that fashion should so darken the mind and pervert the understanding, as to annex honour to the most unreasonable and dishonourable thing in the world” was joined in the same letter to violent anti-Scots sentiment, and to the accusation that Fullerton was an assassin hired by the Ministry. Another letter, while claiming no acquaintance with either combatant, offered to “satisfy” either of the duellists by a martial engagement. A third extraordinarily long missive, which took up almost a whole newspaper page, after arguing at great length for the need for unchecked Parliamentary free speech, concluded by noting that it took Fullerton two weeks from the time of Shelburne’s original comments to decide that these had injured his reputation, and needed to be atoned for by a duel. Though the bulk of these letters, and of most of the press comments, were both partial and congratulatory, we do see views publicly expressed, not only by newspaper writers, but also by their readers and correspondents, which raised serious questions about the role of duelling amongst public men. By the early 1780s there was some sense that such behavior demeaned the political process and was inappropriate in a “certain Assembly, where good manners and politeness should form the basis of all debates which are there agitated.”41
The question of duelling in general, and especially of political duels, was taken up by the many debating societies in London from the mid-1770s onwards. From 1773 through 1779 ten such debates took place at different venues. Of the three debates for which we have the audience vote, we know that, in each case, the practice of duelling was condemned. Thus, for example, in 1778, when the Robin Hood Society asked “Whether the observation of the general rule of appealing to arms upon particular affronts or personal insults, deserves greater censure than a deviation therefrom?” the answer was unambiguous: it was “determined that giving into the practice of duelling on any account deserved greater censure than avoiding the same upon any provocation.”42 And, in the March and April following the Shelburne/Fullerton duel, five debates were held on the propriety of duelling in general, and three on the specific situation of political duels. Thus, on March 25, 1780, the University for Rational Amusements raised the question of whether “challenging a Member of Parliament for any freedom he may take in debate, was contrary to any principles of the Constitution?” and two weeks later, the Carlisle House School of Eloquence wondered whether it was “consistent with the necessary freedom of Parliamentary debate, that the gentlemen should not be accountable in a private capacity, for any expression they may use as members of the Senate?”43 Though we do not have the result of either of these questions, that they were raised at non-elite fora shows the level of popular interest in and concern about this phenomenon. Yet perhaps popular opinion was already more condemnatory of such practice than that found within the House of Commons. Following a debate on political duels in the wake of the Wilkes, Fox, and Shelburne affairs, one MP, “high in office,” argued in Parliament that “No means, nor no authority could prevent gentlemen, who felt or who thought their honour injured, from seeking and obtaining redress in the customary mode. In talking of the recent affairs he said, they were matters which every man must lament, but which no man, nor no set of men, were able to put a stop to.”44 The argument was made that only in private conversation did every man have a duty “to be on his guard, and to take care, that he let no expression slip, which might either give offence to any individual, or to disturb the harmony of the whole. In public debate, the case was widely and essentially different.”45 Here we see the beginning of a new doctrine: gentlemen “in private life” were to be governed by the code of politeness and refrain from wounding words, but men in public roles were not only allowed, but obliged to speak freely and without restraint, and act on the consequences, be they what they might.
The last major duel of the eighteenth century to arise because of words spoken during debate occurred during the Napoleonic wars, with George Tierney, leader of the opposition, the challenger, and William Pitt the younger, the offender. The cause of the conflict was itself very slight. When, during Friday’s debate, Tierney had demanded more time to discuss a Navy bill, Pitt implied that Tierney did not wish to properly defend his country, and then refused to explain or apologize for his remarks when this was called for. Later that night, Tierney sent Pitt a challenge, and the duel, which took place on Whitsunday afternoon, passed without injury, the two men firing simultaneously and missing, then Tierney firing and missing, and Pitt shooting above his head. It may well have seemed an odd time for such a rencounter; England was fighting a desperate war against the forces of republican France on the continent, while, closer to home, Ireland was, yet again, in flames, torn by civil strife. And Pitt was still the great hope of the rising Evangelical party in Parliament, a party devoted to ending the slave trade, the lottery, and the practice of duelling. This cadre of dedicated and religious men and women saw themselves as the vanguard of a movement of social and political rehabilitation through moral and religious reform. And, for most of these ventures, Pitt proved an ally and, if not a leader, at least a willing fellow-traveller. Though they few in numbers, the influence of the Evangelicals, both within Parliament and without, was to prove tremendously important in organizing and focussing public attention, and leading a national campaign to return English men and women to a purer, primitive Protestantism, a creed of both faith and action. While this movement was not without its critics, it did manage to capture the moral “high ground,” to present its goals and agenda as perhaps the only, and undoubtedly the best, program for national amelioration. Only a year before the duel, William Wilberforce, the most prominent Evangelical in Parliament and a close friend of Pitt’s, had published his widely read and influential Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians in which he forcefully denounced those contemporaries who thought that “to covet wealth is base and sordid but to covet honour is treated as a mark of a generous and exalted nature.”46 And by the 1790s, even secular writers were arguing that what was said by Members in the Houses of Parliament should not be considered either personally dishonoring or publicly disreputable; “the law can not take cognizance of what is there said, be it ever so treasonable.” If Parliamentarians were held back from freely expressing their views by fear of challenge and the necessity to fight, real debate would be fatally constricted. “What passes in the Senate is not subject matter of personality that any man out of Parliament” or even within it “can take up as an individual offence.”47 However, by their duel, both Tierney and Pitt demonstrated that not everyone agreed. The Evangelicals and the King were horrified, Wilberforce going so far as to draft a piece of legislation which, if passed, would have prevented any Parliamentarian who fought a duel from sitting in the House.
But how was this duel presented to the public by the press? Of course, much of what was printed was prompted as much by political alliance as by conviction; various newspapers tended to be either pro-Ministry or pro-Opposition. Given that, however, they still had to present arguments rather than blatant slurs, and it is in the careful consideration of such stances that we can discern differences or nuances of principle, not just of political expediency. Several papers remarked on the potential disaster that might have resulted from such a duel; the Prime Minister, it was said, was too important to the future of England and to the freedom of Europe to endanger his life in such a way, however honorable; “it is now become a doubt whether he [Pitt] was justifiable, having the business of the Empire on his head, to try the precarious direction of a bullet.”48 The opposition papers, not surprisingly, stressed Pitt’s highhanded refusal to explain or apologize for his language, and took great delight in the discomfort that Pitt’s duel had given to his Evangelical friends.49 What gave these papers especial glee was the fact that the duel had occurred on a Sunday, and the pain this had caused Wilberforce and his associates. “Mr. Wilberforce is highly displeased with his friend, Mr. Pitt, for his late unchristianlike conduct, in fighting a duel on the Sabbath,” remarked the London Packet. “The Premier hath much offended his best friends, by going out on such a profane business as a duel during Divine Service,” quipped the Morning Chronicle; “Indeed this is so much worse than dining on a fast day, that nothing short of an octavo can apologize for it.” And, after Wilberforce’s withdrawal of his censuring motion, the Morning Herald snickered that “at the particular request of Mr. Pitt’s friends, the meek and pious Member does not mean to persist in his determination to bring the subject before the House [emphasis mine].”50
But, at the end of the day, almost none of the newspapers took a legal, moral, or religious stance; only one said that duelling was illegal or unchristian, or that the tacit complicity of the Law condoned acts in Parliamentarians that would have been condemned in lesser men.51 In all the to-ing and fro-ing, only one voice was heard to make these sorts of comments, and that belonged to a mocking member of the Common Council of London, Mr. Hodgson. If “two carmen, or carcass butchers had met in a field to fight on a Sunday,” he noted, “the Lord Mayor, or any other Magistrate, would have sent them to the Comptor, where both these Gentlemen should have gone for disregarding the Sabbath, and giving such an example to the different orders of society.” In contrast, the Morning Herald applauded the late duel, seeing in the resort to gentlemanly violence a method of promoting Parliamentary propriety.
One good effect may result from a late Duel; it will probably teach every Prime Minister, that however he may find himself entrenched under a covering majority in a certain House, it will not protect him from those explanations in the open air, which every Gentleman there may freely demand of another by the common courtesy of English honour!52
Whatever their political position, all the papers agreed “that that nothing could be more honourable than the conduct of all parties upon the occasion,” and that since firing in the air “is considered as an apology; or, as an Irish Gentleman said, a tacit acknowledgement of error. In this view Mr. Pitt may be said to have made the amende honorable to Mr. Tierney, by the shot explanatory.”53 And after rounds of shots had been fired, Pitt and Tierney’s seconds retired to consult together on what should next be done. During this time, the two duellists, who, moments before, had fought on the field of honor, were left by their friends, “in conversation together.” They then shook hands and left the field. Next day, the Morning Chronicle reported, “Mr. Tierney called on Mr. Pitt, and left his card; and Mr. Pitt returned the compliment to Mr. Tierney. This was the etiquette of expressed satisfaction.”54 However unexpected and troublesome to some, if prominent public men fought over slurs to their political honor, and did so in an ordered, regulated, and approved fashion, neither the state nor the Church, nor the voice of public opinion, the press, was willing wholeheartedly to condemn it.
If the 1770s were pre-eminently the era of the political duel, the 1780s saw a great many military duels and some spectacular military cases which received much publicity and caused continual discussion about the role of honor and duelling in the armed forces.56 We have seen how, through the first half of the eighteenth century, most critics of duelling still recognized that military men had a particular problem with loss of face, with courage, and with public displays of honor. Though the percentage of duels involving military men was probably no greater in the 1780s than it had been a decade before, they seemed, in several instances, to have taken on a new ferocity and, perhaps for that reason, to have evoked a much greater public response. “X.Y.” whose front page letter was published in Lloyd’s Evening Post, blamed “arrant custom” for the continuance of this practice “in an age so polished and refined as the present.” And, he noted, “those who contribute to the making this custom fashionable, are the military gentlemen who are so absurdly tenacious of (what they are pleased to call) their Honour”57 that they will fight a duel on the slightest pretext. And, as though to concentrate the public’s attention, three fatal military duels occurred in one year, 1783. Perhaps the commentator in Old England who had remarked that a rise in duelling was the result of a bad peace had some real insight, for that year, at least.
The first of these, between two young men who came from military families and who had served together some years before, may have begun in a quarrel over gambling debts; the newspapers were largely silent on the origins of the enmity. Most of the information about it came either from the seconds or from the father of one of the young men, Sir James Riddell, and almost every account started with an explanation to the reader of the need to make the events entirely clear: “When it is considered how many erroneous accounts are generally fabricated on similar occasions, to answer private purposes, we trust an impartial narrative in the present unfortunate instance, will be considered as a faithful discharge of the important duty we owe the public.” The Morning Herald underlined this necessity by claiming that “various reports [were] being circulated of a late duel, which might be prejudicial to the honor of both men.…” and that only an unbiased account, signed jointly by both seconds, and published above their names, could be trusted.58 Contrast this view with that we have already noted in the Prompter, almost half a century before, which claimed that duelling was a private matter, not to be discussed in a public communication. Because of pressure, perhaps stemming from the need to demonstrate the fairness and well-ordered nature of this affair, the very privateness which had been so valued was deliberately put aside and the public invited to sit in judgment.
There are several elements in this tale that made it particularly chilling and melodramatic, and perhaps explained the public’s strong interest. First, though there were various versions of the conflict in the press, was the fact that the duel seemed to have been necessitated, not by the men themselves, but by the regiments to which they belonged.59 Second, the father of one of the duellists, Sir James Riddell, had not only recently lost his only other son in fighting in the Mediterranean, but having received the challenge in his son’s absence, had read it, resealed it, and done nothing other than ensure that adequate medical care be present at the confrontation. “The situation of Sir James Riddell, as a parent, is truly pitiable.” Third was the fact that, while the younger Riddell fired the first shot, which pierced his opponent Cunningham’s chest, and though Cunningham said he was mortally wounded, he still insisted on taking his shot, “declar[ing] that he would not be taken off the field until he fired at his adversary,”60 thus inflicting the deadly wound that took Riddell’s life. Finally, Riddell’s funeral, which occurred with magnificence in his family’s vault in Westminster Abbey, was also reported in great detail. While a full-blown military procession had been planned to accompany the body, this was “prohibited by a special order,” though the next day various aristocrats and generals, along with seventy officers, attended the interment. The General Evening Post gave details of the dress and order of the ceremony, and named most of the well-born pall-bearers and mourners. The Morning Chronicle noted that Purcell’s service was movingly sung, and that a young man in the procession “wept bitterly.”61 The duel also occasioned many remarks in the press, in the form both of letters and of editorial comment, and all, unsurprisingly, were hostile to the practice of duelling. The first, published in the Morning Chronicle less than a week after the event, began by noting that “In the whole code of penal laws, no one perhaps is more unequivocally established, than that against duelling,” and at the same time no one less enforced. Its author addressed himself to the “giddy unthinking Gentlemen of the army” and urged them to “look upon the catastrophe of [Cunningham and Riddell’s] bloody temerity, with silent awe and horror.” Another very pointed and very condemnatory letter, signed “A.O.W.,” criticized the actions of both Sir James Riddell, who by forwarding the challenge, made himself “an accessory to his [son’s] fate,” and Cunningham, whose “very unusual and shocking thirst for blood” caused him to insist on returning Riddell’s fire “when every claim even of honour would have been more generally applauded by discharging his pistol in the air.” Finally, this correspondent bemoaned the “pomp and pageantry” of the funeral itself, which “could with propriety only be exercised at the funeral of warriors and conquerors.”62 Other correspondents suggested a number of expedients to reduce the practice: the London Packet noted that one proposal, “an efficacious law, if every person who returned from the field without a wound, should be hanged for cowardice, … it would probably induce men to reflect cooly before they went into the field.” The threat of Gustavus Adolphus to the officers of his army was recommended—that the victor of a duel would be hanged by the neck and his opponent by the heels—and it was claimed this punishment was presently being employed in Holland.63 Furthermore, another claimed (and in 1783, with the great rise in crime of all sorts, this was a potent threat) that the proliferation of duelling would lead to a general increased incidence of violent crime.64 Satire was also employed against the practice. A columnist for the Morning Chronicle gave two (perhaps) mock responses to challenges which employed wit rather than the sword to encounter foolish opponents. But perhaps the most interesting response came in the form of a letter-essay on the front page of the London Packet of May 14, 1783. The first part of this essay on duelling examined in detail why “the usual excuse” for the practice, that it “is for the preservation of honour,” was incorrect. All the claims of religion, of duty, and of self-worth were explored, with the now-common appeals to humanity as well. “View the bleeding body of a newly killed duellist—view his parents—his frantic father—and speechless mother—view their grey hairs brought with sorrow to an untimely grave.” But remarkably, this essay concluded with a comparison between the guilt of parallel pairs; the one who coolly and deliberately engaged in a duel, in which “the survivor is pronounced a man of honour, and his crime manslaughter;” while the other pair who, “in a drunken brawl, through no premeditation and in hot blood, engage in a scuffle in which one is killed, is adjudged guilty of murder and hanged at the gallows.” The relative guilt was clear: coolness made the crime worse, not better; there was nothing honorable or distinctive in a well-regulated and orchestrated butchery. Even if one did not wish to go so far, to see hot-blooded killing as better somehow than cool encounters, one could still deprecate the relative public odium attached to those who refused, as compared to those who accepted challenges: “Thus they who obey the law are scorned and indeed punished; while we see those who act in direct contradiction to these wise, humane institutions (not to mention anything of divine ones) honoured and respected either in life or death.”65 About a month after this duel, the debating society which met at the Coachmakers’ Hall argued the question “Can duelling be justified upon the principles of reason and true courage?” probably in response to the enormous publicity and public discussion that the duel had evoked.66
In another duel that took place later the same year, both the officers were considerably older, the reason for the duel much graver, and in this case the coroner’s jury found the survivor guilty of murder, not manslaughter, though he, like Captain Clarke, was also later pardoned. The conflict between Colonel Cosmo Gordon and Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Thomas, both of the Guards, went back to the American war, during which Thomas had accused Gordon of mismanagement and had him brought before a court-martial tribunal. After Gordon was found not guilty at his trial, he repeatedly challenged Thomas to a duel until such a meeting was arranged for the morning of September 5, 1783. There were several odd things about this meeting. First, for whatever reasons, it was clear from the testimony of Thomas’s manservant that for almost a year Thomas had evaded Gordon’s repeated demands for a duel. Second, after the first round of bullet shots, in which Gordon was slightly injured, there were no reports that the seconds had attempted mediation, but instead they had re-loaded the pistols, which enabled Gordon to fire the fatal bullet. Lest the public be prejudiced by these reports, however, within a week of the duel, an anonymous correspondent, impelled, he argued, by the ‘very unfair state” of the event as reported, presented a description of it much more sympathetic toward the survivor, Gordon. “Col. G,” he reported “gave Col. T. every advantage” and the whole “business was conducted in a manner every way satisfactory to the two gentlemen present.”67 In the weeks that followed, this duel, like the last, also generated a great deal of comment and many letters. One correspondent remarked (yet again) about the need to have legislative changes, like those proposed in Pharamond’s edict, while others thought some Parliamentary action, and perhaps even a bill to be introduced by the Bishop of London, to be imminent. This, of course, was a hope that had been expressed several times before and that was to be yet again disappointed.68
In the five front-page letters on the topic sent after this duel, a number of themes we have already seen emerging were repeated even more forcefully, while others were brought up for the first time.69 A frequent trope, that of the sorrow of the bereaved wife, deprived of a husband by the demands of honor, was brought forward, yet again, here. Another reflection, which we have already seen raised in the letter following the Riddell-Cunningham duel, but which was even more powerfully stated here, was against the coolness, and by implication the barbarity, of the modern duel. Thus “A Constant Reader,” though deprecating duels in general, insisted that “If it should unfortunately so happen, that two men should quarrel, let them at the time (if justifiable at any) take upon them to avenge their cause, not go home, cool, and appoint meeting, the event of which may be fatal to both.” But it is the last letter of this group, signed “Scrutator,” which is in many ways the most interesting. Again, like “Constant Reader,” this author maintained that while some conflicts may in fact be unavoidable, that “if we would submit to be governed by common sense, duels would rarely, or, perhaps, never happen.” “Scrutator” then proceeded to discuss those occasions in which duelling was inappropriate, or the methods by which it was currently practiced, were unwarranted. “No man who has distinguished himself in the service, or otherwise, by his valour is under the least obligation to send or accept a challenge”; he further noted that “no man need challenge another on account of words spoken in a Court of Law.” Finally, “Scrutator” argued that “the practice of duelling should be regulated with some regard to the preservation of life, and the seconds should never allow it to become a matter of mere butchery.” These dicta, clearly influenced by reflection on the spate of military duels of the decade, concluded a letter which began with a quote from the Mirror: “He was a man of that extraordinary courage, that he dared not to fight.”
The third fatal military duel of the year, in some ways the most tawdry and dishonorable, arose over a squabble over seats at the theater which led to two duels (one of which was fatal) and a third stopped only by the interposition of the magistrates.70 The cumulative effect of these three fatal episodes, though significant, was by no means fatal to the practice of military duelling. However, by the mid-1780s, even for those who saw the inevitability of some duelling, it was an activity not to be admired, but to be regulated and kept within the strictest check, even for military men.71
Early in the eighteenth century, Swift had made a sort of modest proposal, warning Parliament not to make laws against duelling, since “the methods are easy, and many, for a wise man to avoid a quarrel with honour, or engage in it with innocence.” And, he added, he could “discover no political evil in suffering bullies, sharpers and rakes to rid the world of each other by a method of their own, where the law hath not been able to find an expedient.” In contrast, through the first three-quarters of the century, almost all writers on the subject condemned the practice and the false honor on which it was based. In fact the only exception I have been able to find is an anonymous Hint on Duelling of 1752, whose basic message was “that the Mischiefs attending this Practice are Inconsiderable; the resulting Advantages Important; the Enormities that will ensue its attempted Abolition Terrible; and that we much more want a Regulation, than a severer Prohibition, of it.”73 By the mid-1770s, however, not only were there a spate of defences of the practice, but these began appearing in the daily press, to be consumed with breakfast or afternoon tea. Before we consider these arguments, however, we must look briefly at the perceived relationship between duelling and its press coverage.
First, it is important to get a sense of the increased breadth of press reporting of duels. For, when a duel had occurred, and was noted in the press, it was usual by the 1760s for some account of the event to appear in several papers, usually within a week of the meeting itself. This meant that it was likely that whatever paper a reader favored, he or she would generally get an account of whichever duels any of the press reported. Though the most famous duels were reported, usually multiply, in all the papers, even quite minor events could get significant press space. Five of London’s major newspapers, for example, included an account of two unnamed men, a Mr. S and a Mr. G, who fought a duel near Kensington in a dispute over a lady, and fired at each other with no harm to either; twenty years later another, similar duel, this one taking place in Hyde Park, was reported in three of the metropolis’s major newspapers.74 This coverage not only testifies to the depth of public interest in duelling, but to its availability to an eager readership.
Second, as we have seen, the volume and nature of newspaper accounts of duels changed from the mid-century. By its third quarter, it was more and more common for the seconds to send their accounts of the incident to the press, for reports of the coroners’ inquests to appear, for letters to the printer to be published, and for a wide variety of other sorts of items about recent duels to find their way into print. However, the willingness of the press to publish these accounts was condemned by both supporters and opponents of the practice of duelling. In a letter signed “Truth,” a correspondent to the Morning Post bemoaned what he claimed had been an incorrect and scurrilous account of a duel that had just taken place; such improper and insulting accounts were, in his opinion, the best reason for finding an alternative to the duel: “it were only to be wished that another mode of deciding differences of this sort between gentlemen was to be adopted, not only for their own peace of mind, but also to prevent their being publicly abused by every insignificant garretwriter.” Only a few agreed. Others thought the growing practice of including the testimony of seconds scandalous: “It is the height of impudence and ignorance, … to obtrude their cases upon the public—that published within these few days by a half-payofficer, should be noticed by the Magistrates, as being an insult upon the law and police of the country.”75 Still others argued that when the opponents were military men, whose “courage is not only a professional but essential qualification, it may be sometimes necessary that the persons attendant on the issue of their quarrel should give a public statement of the manner in which it was conducted,” but that this sort of coverage should never be accorded to conflicts involving “lawyers’ clerks, petty gamblers or any similar characters.” Such accounts, “A Friend to true Honour” continued, “really make men of honour ashamed of the weapons they wear” and which, he concluded, they cannot help employing in duels now and again. On the other side, most argued that only satirical or ridiculous stories of duels should appear in the press, only stories which mocked the practice and its participants. Furthermore, said one, “let no accounts appear as written by the parties, for it is a thousand to one that a little newspaper fame was all the combatants had in view, when they pretended to quarrel.”76 A good example of the “proper” sort of story was published in the Universal Register. Signed by the two seconds, a hairdresser and a chimney sweep, the account exactly copied the structure and language of other duelling accounts, except that the quarrel was between characters at the very bottom of the social scale, and that fists, rather than swords or pistols, were used. While such satires increasingly appeared, press coverage of duels and their circumstances grew even more quickly.77 Excusing themselves, the Times noted that they had only “entered into this detail” in publishing a minute-by-minute account of a duel between two military captains, “in hopes that PRIVATE COMMENTS may effect a PUBLIC GOOD, and be the means in time, of suppressing this irrational mode of Gentlemanlike satisfaction.” While these hopes may have been sincere, equally important to the paper’s editor and owners was the draw that these sorts of accounts had for the public, and the number of papers sold by including such details.78
In addition to this increased coverage also came a spate of pamphlets and press items which, if they did not all support the practice of duelling, at least saw it as an ineradicable part of the social world, a practice which was less damaging than its alternatives. It is not clear why these opinions began to be publicly expressed at this time. For much of the earlier eighteenth century, supporters of the code of duelling did not feel the need to appear in print to defend the custom; duellists did what they had to do, sure that all those who mattered would understand and condone their actions. So perhaps the appearance of defences of duelling in print is evidence of some loss of confidence, some perceived need to explain and convince the wider newspaper readership of the legitimacy and value of their honorable intent and necessary practice.
Those engaged in this debate took one of three positions: that duelling was “a good thing,” that it was a bad though necessary thing, or that it not only could be but must be ended. The first defence I have found is actually contained in an anti-duelling pamphlet, the Thoughts on Duelling of 1773. Its anonymous author, noting that the arguments he was presenting are in “the high Stile in which the Practice of duelling is usually stated and defended,” maintained that supporters held that when the law of the land could not give satisfaction to individuals, those persons reverted to the state of nature, in which they “may take the matter, in their own case, into their own cognizance, and redress it themselves; for, ‘The law of nature is the law of God.’ ” And, according to these defenders of duelling, “Affronts of Honor are actually such cases, which it is not in the nature of human Laws to redress or take cognizance of; yet are they grievous and intolerable to noble and generous minds: and, if suffered to pass uncontrouled, would soon remove all order, decency, and good manners from human Society.” An item in the Morning Post five years later seemed to be using a slightly modified version of this defence; duelling was necessary, it said, for the preservation of natural right and good order, “but in no one instance where the laws have secured the subject from violence, and oppression.” Thus, this view held that the Law could not adequately punish breaches of certain kinds of interpersonal hostility, and that the impulse and justification of duelling was “something antecedent and stronger than any law.” Even more eloquent was the essay which appeared in the Gazetteer in December 1784, simply entitled “Duelling.” Its author argued that
Duelling is a topic of general and unjust reprehension. It has its uses, and is a corrector in society, without which we should have no security against the petulancies of the proud, and all the nameless transgressions of breeding, which would render our lives unpleasant.
He continued that certain offences, when committed by or against people of “breeding,” were necessarily outside the reach of the Law, though Law was fully applicable to less well-bred folk. Giving several mock accounts of such duels involving shoemakers, haberdashers, and the like, he asserted that if “[m]atters of bargain and traffic” became “duel-able” subjects, such bouts “would be ridiculous as well as incompatible” with true honor.79
The clearest expression of this view, that the Law could only take cognizance of certain kinds of offences, was most strongly stated in the response to a judgment by Lord Ashurst, who had fined a Mr. Johnson £60 for challenging a Mr. Toovey to a duel. While Ashurst had asserted that “duelling was not to be tolerated in a country governed by laws, and where redress might be had for every injury that had been sustained,” the Times noted that “advocates for duelling, however, differ a little from his Lordship.” They, it went on to say, and to repeat in print the next day as well, knew that “a Gentleman might be grossly insulted in various ways, without being able to make out an actionable case.”80 For these proponents of the duelling code, then, the Law was not properly sensitive to the noble and delicate feelings of men of quality, and had to be complemented by extralegal means.
Not only was duelling necessary, but, some thought, even desirable. Thus, in a letter to the Town and Country Magazine “J.C.” gave five reasons why the practice was admirably justifiable: it was an alternative to nations fighting; it was more above-board than assassination—the other way that personal honor could be avenged; it ended animosities between men; it was necessary to preserve the “courageous and generous spirit of the nation”; and it was the best defence “from the assaults of power, pride and brutality, and … promote[d] that reciprocality of good offices and attentions which constitute true politeness.…” That this was a not uncommon view among supporters received confirmation from the comment found in A Short Treatise upon the Propriety and Necessity of Duelling, published the same year as this letter. Though its author argued against duelling, he noted that the “Government makes a point of extending their indulgence and lenity to the criminal,” since they maintained the practice made “people civil, and polite to each other, and that of many evils which would arise from insult, a duel is the least.”81 Several letters and comments in the press suggested that, for some people, the connection between duelling and politeness was a causal one.82 But perhaps the clearest articulation of this point of view appeared in a pamphlet, The Principles of Duelling, published in 1790 by a military man, Lieutenant Samuel Stanton. Arguing that duelling was both necessary and salutary, Stanton not only bemoaned the fact that duelling was “now daily resorted to by the lowest classes of society” but also urged gentlemen to engage only with others of their own sort; “were such instances [of inter-class duelling] frequent,” he noted, “they would entirely do away with all distinction of person, and render the name, gentleman, a nothing, a nonentity.” But Stanton also remarked that the practice could be defended on the “grounds of general utility”: “it affords satisfaction, where nothing but that, and that alone, could do so; and independent of the law’s delay, of money, superiority in rank, power, birth, or interest, points out a very proper and necessary mode of redress.”83
In between these advocates for duelling and their vociferous opponents were those who thought duelling to be a regrettable, but inescapable practice. While admitting that such engagements were only justified by prejudice, passion, custom, and the fear of shame, the penal reformer William Eden noted that neither the law nor the fear of punishment could cause their cessation. While admitting that men who refused challenges were often braver than those that accepted them, an “Old Officer” noted that those military men who refused challenges were often broken. Similarly “Scrutator,” whose letter to the Morning Chronicle was printed in a coveted first-page position, expressed his hope “to mitigate, and in some degree regulate what it seems impossible to prevent entirely.” The tone of a contemporary article in the Gazetteer was more pessimistic, noting that men the world over obtained what revenge they could whenever they felt themselves to have been misused. “So strong is the desire of redress for injuries received, that for an offence of which the law takes no cognizance, we appeal to the pistol or the sword, in defiance of the laws of God as well as of man.”84
In contrast to the novelty of defences of duelling by the first group, and to the resigned acceptance of the practice by the second, the arguments of its opponents, while most vocal and most prominent, were least original. Repeated yet again, this time in direct opposition to its proponents, was the claim that duelling, rather than being a mark of a polite society or an agent of the civilizing process, was a sure feature of barbarism.85 Another argument, not new but given a more insistent tone and wider coverage, was the deleterious effects of private vice on the public weal. Noting as a commonplace that the very foundation of politics was morality, the London Packet contended that “[t]he first object of a legislature should be the manners of the people; permit them to become profligate, and they will by degrees overturn the Constitution, without knowing the mischief they are working.” The great bulwark of the Constitution was, of course, the law, applied uniformly and equally. If men could not get the satisfaction they desired from its operations, this did not, however, justify their illicit activity:
if a man does suffer in any case, for want of an established Law to redress him, such evil is unavoidable: the State must not be thrown into confusion, nor the Laws already established infringed, that his wrongs may be redressed in that instance: he must be content with the enjoyment of the many other valuable blessings and privileges which Society affords him.…86
Of course, both the stability of society and the power of the law depended on Parliament’s monopoly of punishment, on the exclusive control by the legislature of the authority to punish wrongdoers. By allowing duellists to go free and unpunished, though they broke the law, the government not only turned a blind eye, but “they really tacitly encourage murder.” As an alternative to duelling, these opponents repeated the old suggestion that men become soldiers, and spill their blood for their nation’s sake. And, with the outbreak of the French Revolution and the war against the traditional enemy needing dedicated soldiers, a clear role existed for those desiring conflict. However, countering the argument that duelling kept a martial nation in “fighting-trim,” Jonas Hanway, employing the comparison yet again between the duellist and the highwayman, argued that both illegal activities, the second as well as the first, could be commended on these (false) grounds.87
Perhaps of most interest in this debate was the point on which all agreed: that, while duelling had previously been the preserve of only the upper classes, it was becoming more widely indulged in by commoners. “Was duelling confined to Lords and Commoners, there would be no cause of complaint, but the nation suffers by permitting manufacturers to blow out each others’ brains.”88 It is not entirely clear what is being complained of here; but perhaps that is part of the message. On the one hand is the implication that manufacturers, unlike Lords and Commons, were productive citizens whose loss would impoverish the nation, on the other the fear that violence had been generally unleashed, and that murder and rapine would surely follow.
In addition to the newspaper and pamphlet contributions to the debate about duelling, a variety of popular literary works also appeared, which almost exclusively argued, one way or another, against the custom. Thus, in The Duel, a play translated from the French by the actor William O’Brien, the father of a young man about to fight a duel tries to persuade him against it, by arguing that it takes more courage to pardon than to fight: “A coward, Sir, may fight—nay, cowards have fought—a coward too may conquer, but ’tis the truly brave only can forgive!”89 In a pair of poems of 1775, both called “Duelling,” their authors repeat the charge that “As murder first arose by Satan’s means/So Duelling, tho’ he the falsehood screens/By names or reasons wrongly understood,/But fully open to the wise or good.” Both saw that the claims of outraged honor as the motive to duel was only an excuse “to authorize infernal Crimes … [which] subvert the high decree of Heav’n/And cancel ev’ry bond ’twixt Man and Man.” And in a slight piece of fluff entitled “Modern Honour, or the Barber Duellist,” published in the same year, the plot revolves around two tradesmen, a barber and a tailor, who almost come to a duel. At its end, the story’s hero, young Steady, remarks, in a joking tone befitting light comedy, “Well, I hope since Barbers have caught the spirit of duelling, all real gentlemen will despise it in future.”90 Though the manner of the rebuke differed, the message, that duelling was spreading outwards and becoming a resource to the ungentle as well as their betters, was the same.
By the next decade, at least in theatrical comedies, when male protagonists/heroes accepted challenges to duel, they did so in a very modified form, a form which in fact stopped the duel from occurring, but without a subsequent loss of honor. So, in both Miles Peter Andrews’s The Reparation of 1784 and John Burgoyne’s The Heiress, performed two years later, when the central figures meet at the duelling assignation, one of the two drops his weapon and “exposes his breast.” In Andrews’s play, its hero, Loveless (an ominous name for eighteenth-century theater-goers and readers) had, in his misspent youth, seduced a virtuous but poor young woman by staging a false marriage and then marrying another, richer lady. The father of the abandoned woman, a retired soldier, believing her to be “a wanton,” abandoned her to what he thought was her deserved infamy. Finding out years later about the “pretended solemnization of [the] marriage,” he challenged Loveless to a duel. Though Loveless was advised by his best friend, Belcour, that such “a meeting would be impossible” for not only would it be comply[ing] with the false idea which that world calls honour” but wicked and unjust “to raise your arm against a man already too much injured,” Loveless answered: “Mistake me not—I have no such intention—I have been the aggressor; and ’tis proper, if such is the reparation he wishes, that I shou’d abide its consequence—yes, I will meet him—but without resistance—I shall offer myself a willing victim to his resentment.” Needless to say, the duel does not occur, everyone is reconciled, and the past forgotten and forgiven. Similarly in The Heiress, the play’s two heroes, Lord Gayville and Clifford, agree to fight a duel due to a complex misunderstanding; Gayville thinks Clifford, his closest friend, has stolen his true love, Harriet, not knowing that she is Clifford’s sister, whom he is merely trying to protect. When they meet at the duelling grounds, Clifford, “[a]fter a struggle with himself” drops his sword and invites Gayville to do his worst: “You said nothing but my life wou’d satisfy you, take it, and remember me.” After the inevitable denouement, of course, no blood is shed, and both heroes honorably unite with the women they love. In these two plays we can see the combination of anti-duelling rhetoric with a new, sentimental male hero, one who, while not completely abjuring the duel, renounces the murderous and revengeful impulse which was its signature.91 Duelling on the stage was no longer a laughing matter.
When, on March 16, 1792, the elderly Earl of Coventry rose in the House of Lords, asking for action against a Mr. Cooksey for a breach of privilege in sending him a challenge to a duel, the Times, in the words above, applauded his stance, noting that this response was the correct one and merited popular approval. More than twenty years before, another Member of Parliament, Sir William Meredith, had made a similar request when challenged, and also had his opponent, Miles Burton Allen, committed to Newgate. Unlike the Coventry case however, the earlier appeal received less newspaper coverage.93 Perhaps little should be made of the similarity and differences in these two cases. Yet by the time of Coventry’s appeal, and its wide newspaper coverage, the London press had enormously expanded its reporting not only of cases brought against challenges but also of various types of legal recourse available to men who refused to duel. If historians of the law are correct, if eighteenth-century courts were stages on which the power of the state was performed, then newspapers, in their reporting of these legal challenges to the code of honor, acted as amplifying devices for the dissemination of alterations in the stance of the state toward duelling. When news of such cases was published, readers could see that there were honorable alternatives to the duel, or at least that men of family, lineage, and propriety were willing to use legal means to avoid bloodshed. It is to these uses of the law that we must now turn.
It may have been much more common than the press record suggests for men facing duels to resort to the law.94 There were two major methods by which this could have been effected; the first, a warrant sworn before a magistrate, which would cause the impending conflict to be broken up, and the antagonists bailed for good behavior, or the second, an action brought before a court, for the offence of sending a challenge. In the first sort of interference, while there were many press reports of duels stopped by magistrates, by Army guards, or by sentinels, no indication was given that these were initiated by either of the duellists. The only examples of such practice, that is, of voluntary resort to the law in the first half of the century which was described by the press, were cases brought against the challengers by reluctant duellists. According to newspaper accounts, there were just a trickle of such cases before the mid-century; and the only clue given in the papers about the source of magistrates’ knowledge of impending duels before 1786 was that “information” had been received.95
However, in the years between 1780 and the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, newspaper stories of men taking challengers to court or going to magistrates increased dramatically; in fact in these thirty years there were at least 164 such reports. Nearly ninety percent told of men who were challenged to a duel and took their opponents to court rather than accepting the meeting. Included in this number were the interesting cases in which the prosecutors claimed that the defendants, by their words and deeds, had attempted to provoke them to either issue or accept a challenge.96
Most of these reported cases occurred at the Court of King’s Bench, and some received multiple reports at various stages of the proceedings.97 Furthermore, while there were many press stories which told of duels either stopped or interrupted by the exertions of London’s magistrates, most often those who were employed at Bow Street, in at least 18 cases we know that the challenged person brought this to the attention of the magistrate, and himself initiated a charge against his challenger.98 In addition to these two main sorts of duelling-related reports were a variety of other kinds of stories of interrupted affairs; accounts of duels that were compromised at the last moment by friends or family, by Scottish courts, or by an apology from the offending party.99 These not uncommon stories meant that newspaper readers could see not only that legal alternatives to the duel existed, but also that people of name and position were employing these avenues, and perhaps that the vaunted inevitability of the duel was fallacious.
This supposition is supported by a letter from a reader, addressed to an aristocrat who, instead of fighting, sued his challenger in court. On February 1, 1800, a story appeared in the press, that Thomas Erskine, acting for Lord George Henry Cavendish, was taking a criminal information against John Bembric for attempting to provoke Cavendish into an armed conflict by insulting him at the Opera, and widely posting him as a “poltroon, a coward and a scoundrel.” Less than two weeks later, an anonymous correspondent, who signed his letter “Anti-Duellist,” commended Cavendish’s action, noting that he:
can only wish your Lordship to enjoy such thanks as mine, which I am sure must also be the wish of every rational man, who looks with horror at the system of duelling. I trust your Lordship will ascertain how far the Law will protect a Gentleman against abuse; and I consider your appeal to the laws as a more effectual means of preventing this detestable alternative of duelling, than all the logic that can be used.100
In the past an aristocrat like Cavendish might simply have refused to meet Bembric, a man of lower station, or have caned him in self-protection. The status inequalities, as well as the legal recourse sought by a man of rank, made this case unusual. However, newspaper accounts both of actions of the courts and the activities of the magistrates made it clear that many men of family and wealth were taking the same action against others of their own rank and circle. Members of Parliament, challenged for words spoken or letters sent, now sometimes took their opponents to court rather than fight them; aristocrats sometimes took embattled relations to court, or were themselves taken there by former friends or neighbors.101
Even less dignified than these court appearances, however, were the reports of the increased activities of the London magistrates and the peace officers working for them, in breaking up or preventing duels from occurring in “high life.” Thus, on June 30, 1795, when Earl Fitzwilliam and Mr. Beresford came to the duelling fields, their seconds could not, though they tried, effect a reconciliation and end the threat of violence. When the magistrate, however, intervened, and as the Times reported it, “threatened to take them into custody” unless they gave “their words of honour that nothing further should pass between them … to this they at length consented.”102 How gratifying must have been the sense of the middling reader, seeing these great men humbled by the power of the Law. Some aristocrats, like Lord Craven, were actually summoned to the magistrate’s office, to explain and apologize for having sent a challenge; others, even grander, like Lord St. Vincent, commander of the Mediterranean fleet, and his second-in-command, Sir John Orde, were arrested on the way to their duel, and had to give hefty recognizances to keep the peace.103 Members of Parliament also featured in newspaper accounts of challenges or interrupted duels in this period; thus when James Brogden, M.P., challenged a Mr. Brown, a warrant was taken at Bow Street, and like commoner miscreants, Brogden had to be bailed.104 The appearance of such men both in the magistrates’ offices and in the more prestigious courts like King’s Bench would have given readers a sense that, at least in some instances, the Great were as liable to prosecution for breaking the peace as the small.
A second impact of this increased coverage was to familiarize the reading public with the hefty fines paid for such law-breaking. Duellists or challengers potentially faced serious fines, though sometimes, if they were willing to be reconciled and go in peace, such fiscal punishment could be waived. Thus, when two members of the Opera corps, Didelot and Onarati, having “agreed to settle some difference in Hyde Park,” were apprehended and taken before Justice Addington at Bow Street, he “persuaded [them] to shake hands in good fellowship” and let them leave. When, after being arrested and imprisoned in a roundhouse overnight on a warrant, two prospective duellists, John Newbon, an attorney’s clerk, and Thomas Gibbons, a nightman, came before Justice Bond, “they said they were perfectly reconciled, they were reprimanded and discharged.”105 At King’s Bench, we also sometimes see such an attempt at mediation. When the Rev. James Beevor took a Major Payne to King’s Bench for attempting to provoke him to a duel, Thomas Erskine, Payne’s attorney, said he thought he could resolve the dispute between the two men outside the court, and Lord Kenyon, addressing Beevor, commented that “he would leave it to the Prosecutor as a Gentleman, and hoped that Mr. Beever would think, on recollecting what was past, that there was more dignity in overlooking the offence than in punishing it.”106 On the other hand, when such peacemaking either was not attempted, or proved impossible to effect, the financial penalties were significant. Of the twenty-one such cases seen by the magistrates in the period 1795–1815, for which the press reported the sureties demanded, in about one-third of the cases the bail was one to two hundred pounds for each potential duellist (with additional smaller sums payable by third parties), in another third between four and five hundred pounds, and in a final third between one thousand and five thousand pounds. It was even whispered that the violent and combative aristocrat Lord Camelford, after he challenged Captain Vancouver to a duel, was “sworn in a private room at the House of Lords before the Lord Chancellor to keep the peace, under a penalty of Ten thousand pounds!”107 By the first years of the new century, not only were duellists themselves forced to enter into recognizances for future good behavior, but seconds also sometimes had to find such guarantees, ranging, in the cases for which we have evidence, from two hundred to five hundred pounds.108 The wages of sin were not only being seen to be charged, at least some of the time, but to be sizeable and punitive.
And, though the fines and sureties demanded at King’s Bench were, on the whole, less hefty, as part of the court decision the challenger might well face time in gaol, time ranging from three weeks to a year, incarcerated for an event that, in the end, never took place. Furthermore, when two unnamed men decided to duel, after having given the court one thousand pounds each as their recognizance to keep the peace, the Times reported that “The Court, however, with its accustomed impartiality and justice, have ordered the recognizance to be sent in to his Majesty’s Exchequer, to be estreated, and the sum to be levied by the sale of their effects, or their persons to be imprisoned.” This “exemplary punishment,” the Times commented, “will not only be a means of enforcing a due obedience to the laws, but of checking that rage for duelling, which has too long reflected a stigma on the civilization of mankind.”109
Newspaper readers could not only witness upper-class malefactors appearing in the press, along with “common” criminals, and observe them punished by having to serve prison time or pay large sureties, but could read, often at great length, the views of some of England’s greatest judges about the heinousness of duelling, delivered at their trials, and made widely available through press coverage. The comments of the judges in these cases were, on the whole, more often published, and at far greater length, than in most other sorts of King’s Bench cases. In almost one-third of these cases, we have a published statement of principle by the judge; in one case this ran to more than 2,000 words, or more than one-quarter of all the news published that day.110 And the press recognized that a significant portion of the court’s work was dealing with provocations to duel or challenges sent. By 1794, under the general title “Law Reports” the Times on occasion had a subcategory simply labeled “Challenges.”111
We can get some notion of the flavor of these long judicial decisions by considering four such trials that occurred between the beginning of February 1798 and the end of that month one year later. The first was a case which the Times itself tagged as “highly worthy of the attention of all men of rank and fashion.” In his summary, Kenyon, a well-known enemy to duelling, noted that “the Laws of Honour have been alluded to” in the course of the proceedings, but that he knew “of no law which ought to bind the honour of people, except prompt obedience to the Law of the Country in which they live,” and he went on to argue that “in this particular case it is become absolutely necessary that this Court should not acquiesce in those supposed Laws of Honour.” He then laid down rules which he felt must govern all judges in like circumstances: “A Judge, who should fritter away the law in such a case, would but ill deserve to continue on the seat of Justice … they fail in their duty, when cases of this kind come before them, and they decide according to the notions of honour, in opposition to the Law of the Land.”112 Kenyon also officiated at the second case, a trial in which the bearer of the challenge, an attorney, rather than the challenger himself, was the defendant. Characterized as “the officious minister of mischief” by the prosecutor’s lawyer, the defendant was admonished by Kenyon to apologize. “The Defendant,” he noted, “who was of the Profession of the Law, should not have been induced to do what he had done. His Lordship supposed he was a man of liberal education, and, on reflecting on his conduct for a moment, he must feel he was in the wrong; and if so, it was no degradation of him to ask pardon.”113 The third defendant, a clergyman who had libeled the prosecutor, “one of the commanding Officers of the light troop of Yeomanry Cavalry for the Country of Somerset” in his attempt to incite the officer to fight a duel with him, was chastised by Justice Grose. After castigating the challenger-libeler for acting in a most unchristian and particularly un-clerical fashion, Grose commented, “By your example, I trust every man will see, whether he be of your profession or in any other situation of life, that the laws of the land are not to be infringed with impunity; and the higher the station of the offender is, the greater ought to be his punishment.”114 Kenyon was once again the acting judge in the last case under consideration, a case in which the prosecutor’s lawyer, Thomas Erskine, described the goal of Kenyon’s legal career, “to make the justice that was administered in that Court an improvement on the morals of the public, and beneficial to the public comfort and tranquillity.” Erskine was not wrong in this characterization; speaking of himself in an earlier challenge case, Kenyon described his function to be “a Minister of Law and Morality.” This case was one in which the defendant had severely assaulted and battered the prosecutor in an attempt to provoke him to a duel. After giving a very long discourse on the history of duelling in the ancient world and on the barbarity and gross irreligion of the practice in the modern world, Kenyon bemoaned the fact that the defendant “had harboured in his mind too long the thought of duelling.… A man must never lay down upon his pillow with such a thought. The Law of England did not grant so much indulgence.” His conclusion was significant; this case, he commented “is of importance to the public.… It is addressed to the minds of gentlemen of the higher orders of society and you, as gentlemen and as jurymen, will give such damages as you shall think fit.” Unsurprisingly, the jury found for the defendant, awarding him a handsome sum.115
Together these three elements in reports of duels ended or challenges brought to the court may well have created a sense of possibility, that duelling was not the only or even the most desirable recourse for the insulted or injured gentleman. As important, perhaps, as this general sense that such reports gave the reading public of available alternatives to the duel, was the large number of military men who, as either challengers or prosecutors, figured in both the magistrates’ and court reports. In approximately two-fifths of all the reports we have been looking at, of duels interrupted or challenges brought to court, at least one of the major actors was described by a military title. Not surprisingly, perhaps, most but not all of these military men were the challengers. Here too the reported comments of the judges were important in creating new attitudes even to these most vulnerable victims of the challenge. Erskine, involved in both defending and prosecuting military men for challenging or attempting to provoke, often used the service record of the defendant as exculpatory; for example, when speaking of a naval defendant whom he was representing, Erskine exclaimed, “I am quite overpowered and disabled by my own sensation, when I reflect that the honour and safety of a brave and glorious British seaman is committed to my care and protection.” When appearing for the prosecution, however, Erskine argued that military men were in this respect under the auspices of civil law; he said he “could not compromise that offense at all by any judgment that could be given by military men, because he [the defendant] had offended against the law of the land, which all military men were bound to see observed.”116 The judges, in these cases, were generally, though not always, given to a strict construction and application of the law to military men, whether they were defendant-challengers or prosecuting-challenged. In a case where a clergyman had attempted to provoke a soldier to a duel, the judge, addressing the minister, noted that his
behaviour to the Prosecutor has been atrocious, and much aggravated by his situation. That situation as to the Public, has been exceedingly meritorious, in protecting and really serving the country in the moment of rebellion and war; and his particular conduct now before the Court, is a proof that that merit is increased. Some men in his situation would have erroneously imagined, that to have recourse to the laws for protection, would betray pusillanimity and cowardice. But such men should learn, that true courage consists in daring to be void of offence; in daring to obey the law of the land, and spurning at those notions of honour, as they are falsely called.…117
In another case, the judge commended the prosecutor, an army general, for bringing the suit, which, the Times noted, “was of great importance to the public, and particularly to the army.” By refusing the challenge, General Coote had “bid defiance to those laws of BARBARISM which some men forgetful of morals and their obligations to society have deemed laws of honour.” To a military challenger in a third case, the judge remarked that “it was the duty of military men not only to fight the battles of their country, but to abstain from wanton and unnecessary violence and insolence to individuals.”118
However, before we leave the courts and the judges we must acknowledge that even they thought that military men deserved special respect and treatment, and that the lack of such consideration could mitigate, if not excuse, challenges to the duel. Thus, for example, when the Mayor of Tiverton, in having to find billeting for a corps of military men, attempted to put officers and soldiers in one room, and in response to a complaint that these were inappropriate facilities for gentlemen, the Mayor responded that “he was not talking of room for a gentleman, but for an officer,” Kenyon discharged the rule, indignantly commenting that “the putting of the officers and men together in the same room was not to be endured” and that the Mayor “was bound to call the officers gentlemen.” Similarly in another case also involving Erskine for the defence, Kenyon refused to overlook both the military and status distinctions of the challenger. On the grounds that the prosecutor had given “very strong provocation” before the challenge had been sent, combined with the unacknowledged effect that Erskine’s characterization of the defendant as one of “the heroes of the British Navy” had had on the judges, Kenyon declared that he was “glad that the evidence of the transaction enables us to pronounce a nominal Judgment upon so meritorious an officer.”119 Everyone, even judges of the high court, it seems, loved a military man.
As we have seen, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, any man who, by reason of birth, wealth, and education, was acknowledged by his contemporaries to be a gentleman, was both the possible subject and object of the code of duelling. If he was insulted by another such as he, he could demand that satisfaction to which he had a right, i.e., to face his antagonist in a duel; if he was the offender, the injured party also had the right to demand a duel, a duty which he was equally obliged to fulfil. While, in theory, this duty and privilege continued to hold through the eighteenth and a good bit of the nineteenth century for all who were recognized to be gentle, in practice the field in which a man might feel constrained either to challenge an opponent or himself accept a challenge became narrower, or at least less clear and binding. Perhaps as “new men” themselves began duelling, began to adopt what Lord Justice Ellenborough dismissively characterized as the “spurious chivalry of the compting house and the counter,”121 the cachet of the duel faded somewhat. Or perhaps it was only in those two occupations in which one’ s personal character, one’s honesty and courage, were thought essential to its proper fulfilment, i.e., in political and military life, that the force of the code duello was slowest to wane.
We have already noted the rash of political duels of the late 1760s and 1770s, and considered the extraordinary reaction to Pitt’s duel while Prime Minister in 1798. While politically motivated duelling was not nearly as rampant during the wars as it had been in previous decades, it still occurred every now and then. We know of at least three such duels that occurred in the 1790s: one between the Earl of Lauderdale and the renegade Benedict Arnold for words spoken in Parliament, the second in which the Duke of Norfolk challenged Lord Malden for what he took to be derogatory language in a letter that Malden had sent to the electors of Leominster, and the third between two Irish politicians in “consequence of a dispute which occurred on the late election for the County of Donegal.122 However, we know of at least two instances in these same years when Members of Parliament, challenged for political statements or views, either refused to duel or talked their way out of a meeting. Thus, in 1792, an MP refused a challenge to duel with someone upset at his comments about Ireland; just three months later, it looked very much as though the Duke of Richmond and the Earl of Lauderdale would meet because of words uttered by the two during debate in the Lords. However, when Lauderdale explained that “the expressions used by him, applied solely to the Duke of Richmond’s public conduct, and that he meant nothing in any respect personal to his Grace’s private character,” the Duke graciously replied that “he did not persist in the term he used to Lord Lauderdale, those expressions having been suggested solely by the idea of his private character having been attacked”123 and they both went away with honor intact.
In the first fifteen years of the new century, I have come across only two major political duels. The first, in June 1800, received only brief press coverage, and was between the Earl of Ormond and the brother of the Marquis of Drogheda, Sir Robert Moore; “The duel originated in a dispute relative to the Union.” The second, much more widely reported, was the duel between George Canning and Lord Castlereagh, which took place in September 1809. Both men were cabinet ministers, and the duel arose from a challenge Castlereagh sent to Canning, because he thought that Canning had been plotting to have him expelled from his position. The two men met, two sets of shots were fired, and after the second, Canning was wounded in the thigh, and the duel concluded. What is remarkable about the coverage of this incident is while the press gave a great deal of space to reflections on the political proprieties and consequences of such a conflict, virtually no attention was paid to the duel itself, to the fact that duelling was illegal. I have been able to find only one press notice, in the Morning Advertiser, that made any sort of disparaging comment on the spectacle, but one that deserves to be quoted in full:
The practice of Duelling requires some direct and legal check. The example of Cabinet Councillors is dangerous in the extreme—it leads to corrupt public opinion, and even, by a very natural and intelligible influence, to soften down the interpretation of the Law, as it actually stands.—With what reluctance must a Judge declare Duelling murder—and a Minister recommend the execution of the consequent sentence in Council, when the Minister himself is a Duellist.124
In comparison with political duels, however, military duels during the Wars received much attention. Perhaps this is because they appeared so much more frequently in the press. In a rather rough-and-ready count made of duels which appeared in the London newspapers between 1793 and 1806, in 63 of these reports both participants were in the military services, in 45 at least one of the duellists was a military or naval officer, and 42 incidents were between civilians. Thus, the great majority (72 percent) of the cases found involved at least one such officer.125
One of the recurring features of all the reports was the rather petty motives for which they were fought. The most famous military duel of this period, which we will look at shortly, occurred because the Newfoundland dog of one of the antagonists snarled at the other. Another meeting, between a young lieutenant and a military surgeon’s mate, in which the former died on the spot, arose from a quarrel at the billiard table. A third, between an aristocratic naval Captain and another member of Society, was fought because the Captain addressed the other, a Mr. Powell, by an inappropriately familiar nickname. The last instance, between two young officers described as the “most intimate friends,” which resulted in the death of one, arose from a quarrel “concerning a female with whom both were intimate.”126
But more worrying perhaps, in a time of all-out war, were the duels and challenges that seemed to have stemmed from failures of military discipline. One early example of this was the infamous duel between Lt. Col. Roper and the man whose court-martial he had ordered, and whom he had cashiered, Ensign Thomas Purefoy, for challenging him to a duel. Though the initial incident occurred in St. Vincent’s in 1787, Purefoy pursued Roper to England, and posted him as a coward. He finally persuaded Roper to fight; the two met in December of 1788, and Roper was killed. Purefoy fled the country, only to return in 1793, to stand trial. William Garrow, the prosecuting attorney, after noting that even if Purefoy were found guilty, he would never be executed, informed the jury that “it was also material to consider, that the conduct of the unfortunate gentleman at the bar was such, as if not legally punished, precluded all idea of due discipline and subordination in the army.” Though the judge and the jury overruled Garrow’s concern (the judge, Baron Hotham, instructed the jury that an acquittal “may trench on the rigid rules of law, yet the verdict will be lovely in the sight of God and man”), the same anxiety surfaced in several of the challenges we have already considered. For Purefoy’s case, challenge and dismissal were not unheard of; the armed forces took a very dim view of subordinates challenging their superiors to duels for any reason.127 When one disgruntled Major, angered by the required testimony of his superior officer at his court-martial, challenged his commander to a duel, the King himself intervened, and ordered his Adjutant-General to send a letter praising the conduct of the senior officer in bringing the case to court. This letter, which Erskine, the prosecuting attorney, read, noted that “his Majesty had seen this matter in so serious a light towards the Army” that his commendation was to be sent to and read aloud in every military camp in the country. Direct monarchical involvement and publicity in such affairs was surely very unusual, and gave newspaper readers some sense of what their ruler thought about military duelling.128
Even before the war’s end, contemporaries had already noted the changes that had occurred among this group, who remained, perhaps longer than any other, susceptible to the pressures of “honor” and the requisites of the duel. How could good citizens risk their lives on such foolishness, asked Rowland Ingram in 1804; “Call him not a Briton, who, in this time of unparalleled emergency, would relinquish his post—the post of efficient duty and real fortitude—to exhibit such a pitiful display of brute hardihood.…” In response to Erskine’s hyperbolic whitewashing of a military-client challenger, Samuel Romilly, speaking for the prosecution, claimed that “there is more courage in resisting the custom of duelling, in such a situation, than in marching up to the mouth of a cannon, or exposing the individual to the utmost degree of personal danger.” And, in a prize-winning Oxford essay, John Taylor Allen argued that modern military strategy made individual courage inessential: “The fortune of the field does not now depend on exertions of individual prowess, or the valour and hardihood of an individual chieftain; it is from the concentrated efforts of a well-disciplined army; from the bravery and firmness of united battalions, that the fate of battles and of empires must now be decided.”129
While duelling did not end during the Napoleonic conflict, or with the war’s end, despite such optimists as the Rev. William Butler Odell (“The officers of the army do not often fight duels”130), much had changed, in a piecemeal and unplanned fashion, over the previous hundred years. Duels were now no longer private, but public affairs, thanks to the ubiquity of the newspaper press, and the appetite of its readers for reports of these sorts of affairs. Duelling, from being the obligation and privilege of every gentleman, had increasingly been recognized as appropriate only for public men, whose professions depended on their veracity and courage, i.e., political and military figures. And, by the end of the Napoleonic wars, again thanks to the publicity afforded by press coverage, more and more of even such men were using the Law, the magistracy, and the courts, as alternative venues to the fighting field. Duelling had not ended, but its imperative, its power, had waned and could be, though it not always was, resisted.131