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

- Ian Morton

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.