Duel personalities
Only a few generations ago, our forebears were prepared to shoot each other when affronted. Ian Morton reports on man’s fatal attraction to the art of duelling
ALTHOUGH ordinary fellows tended to square up on the spot to settle a disagreement, the most influential of sporting gentlemen —who owned huge tracts of land, as well as the folk who lived there, and who hunted, raced, shot and gambled together—were inclined to act out, at an agreed time and place, a ritual that could well prove fatal.
In some cases, the reason was trivial. The poet Lord Byron’s great-uncle killed his neighbour and cousin William Chaworth in a rapier duel in 1765, over a dispute about the quantity of game birds each had on his land and the best way to hang them. Byron was fined.
The pistol replaced the blade as the weapon of choice and the finest makers produced identical pairs, greatly valued then and now. Some 1,000 duels with powder and ball were recorded between 1785 and 1845, about one in five resulting in a fatality. A few ‘winners’ were hanged for murder. Swells were quick to take offence. Grantley Berkeley, heir presumptive to his brother the 6th Earl of Berkeley, was so incensed by a criticism of his book about Berkeley Castle in Fraser’s
Magazine that he thrashed the publisher and had the critic, Dr William Maginn, face him over pistols. Maginn received a flesh wound and the Berkeley honour was satisfied.
Duels were commonplace at the highest levels of society. Napoleon’s nemesis the Duke of Wellington went on to become Prime
Minister. A keen country sportsman, he was a sought-after guest, but not all his visits were without blemish. In 1823, he managed to hit his host Lord Glanville in the face and, at Lady Shelley’s, his shot reached a tenant who was hanging out her washing. His hostess declared: ‘You have endured a great honour today, Mary—you have the distinction of being shot by the Duke of Wellington.’ Mary’s grateful response is not recorded.
Wellington took umbrage when his parliamentary bill to allow Catholics into government after 200 years provoked criticism from the Earl of Winchelsea. The duke called him out and they met at dawn on Battersea Fields in March 1829. As challenger, the duke fired first, aiming wide, and the earl then discharged skywards.
Wellington was not the only British prime minister to duel. William Pitt faced George Tierney on Putney Common, both missing, and the Earl of Shelburne and George Canning also survived ritual combat. These affairs were often mere gestures—but not always.
The 7th Earl of Cardigan, soldier, fine horseman and shot, called out Capt Harvey Tuckett, in 1841, for publishing an account of a mess incident involving a black bottle of porter and shot him with a duelling pistol with a rifled barrel and hair trigger; both features considered unsporting. Arraigned for wounding, Cardigan demanded to be tried by his peers. Queen Victoria let it be known she hoped he would ‘get off easily’ and he was acquitted on a technicality. Cardigan had previously offered to duel with a Capt Johnstone, whose wife he had romanced, but Johnstone declared that he had given him satisfaction by taking on ‘the most damned bad-tempered and extravagant bitch in the kingdom’. Probably the most flamboyant sportsman
of the era was ‘Squire’ George Osbaldeston, a Yorkshire landowner, hard cross-country and race rider, pugilist, inveterate gambler and remarkable shot whose recorded flintlock achievements included 100 pheasants with 100 shots, 97 grouse with 97 shots and 20 brace of partridge with 40 shots. ‘And he was a dead shot with a duelling pistol, for he put 10 shots on the ace of diamonds at 30ft,’ wrote the editor of The Field in an introduction to Osbaldeston’s autobiography, discovered in his papers and published in 1926. ‘I do not wonder that most people were carefully polite to a plucky little customer who kept his temper better than most, but could either knock you down out of hand or put a bullet through your head next morning.’
Osbaldeston challenged Lord George Bentinck over his refusal to honour a 200-guinea bet, Bentinck claiming that the Squire had misrepresented the provenance of his horse Rush and had pulled the animal in a previous race to secure a light handicap for a big 1835 race. Osbaldeston’s request for the money was ‘damned robbery’, declared Bentinck. Osbaldeston’s associates perceived him to be in the wrong and, the night before the 6am Wormwood Scrubs confrontation, a friend spent hours trying to mollify him, to no effect. In the event, the umpire fumbled the loading and Osbaldeston was convinced by the light recoil that his pistol was not loaded. If so, Bentinck’s pistol also carried a blank charge. No blood was spilled and the pair reconciled.
Another contemporary, Horatio Ross, named after his godfather Lord Nelson, was formidable in the field (he marked his 82nd birthday by shooting 82 consecutive grouse) and a top pistol shot, holing playing cards at 40 yards and winning bets by shooting swallows on the wing. His reputation ensured that Ross was never challenged. A huntdinner guest felt slighted by a fellow diner’s comments and swore that, if he knew who it was, he would horsewhip him. Told that it was ‘that pistol-shooting fellow Ross’, he melted away. Ross personified the role of the second in dissuading a would-be combatant. He mediated on 16 occasions, with not a shot fired.
Lord Byron’s greatuncle killed his cousin over a dispute about the quantity of game birds each had