The Duel in European History by Victor Kiernan

Author:Victor Kiernan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2016-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

11

Decline and Rebirth

I find in one memoir a note of a newly-joined ensign after mess addressing the assembled officers as follows: ‘By Jasus, gentlemen, I am conscious you must have the meanest opinion of my courage. Here have I been no less than six weeks with the regiment, and the divil of a duel have I fought yet. Now, Captain C., you are the senior captain, and if you please I will begin with you first: so name your time and place.’

Oman, Wellington’s Army, 201.

DESPITE the apparent ineffectiveness of legal bans and spiritual rebukes, there must have been many who had qualms about duelling, and the prospect of being branded by both earthly and heavenly law as a Cain. Bellicose combatants were increasingly a minority, while most men would only throw out challenges under pressure of opinion or persuasion of officious tongues, or accepted them because they could see no decent way out. With newer currents of opinion so critical of aristocratic assumptions, and of the ‘point of honour’ as one of the most pernicious, hesitation about being drawn in, even indirectly as a second, must often have been painful. There were no doubt many unevennesses in the trend. Duelling is in fashion, Horace Walpole remarked in a jocular letter of 1774.1 In 1791 young Coleridge was writing from Cambridge to his brother the Revd George about ‘a dreadful circumstance’: two Pembroke men had gone to Newmarket to settle a difference, and one was killed. ‘A fellow of our college made a very just observation, that formerly students of Colleges were censur’d for being pedants—but that now they were too much men of the world.’2

Still, the number of encounters would seem to have been falling off in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Young William Gilpin, enjoying the social whirl at Bath in 1773, had high praise for the master of ceremonies, Captain Wade, for his prohibition of sword-carrying in public places, ‘which is the bane of civil society: he always interposes in every quarrel and has been known to sit up all night to prevent a dual’.3 In the didactic novels of the back-to-Nature and Noble Savage school, the hero might resort at times to direct action against a miscreant, but not in the style prescribed by convention.4 Some straggling rays of enlightenment were finding their way even into Ireland, where Arthur Young on tour in 1780 thought that drinking and duelling were going out of fashion.5 He was too sanguine. In 1801 a visiting clergyman was much pleased with Dublin and its people, except that, he wrote to a friend, ‘the vile custom of duelling is as much in vogue among them as ever’; every gunsmith’s shop advertised duelling pistols warranted to hit their mark at any given range.6 As to Scotland, a Bishop Geddes complained in a pamphlet in 1790 that ‘the groundless prejudice in favour of duels’ was ‘very common in these times’, and easily seduced weak-minded young men. Scotland had strict laws, but they

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