By the Sword

by Richard Cohen

  But the English Crown was itself about to be brought to heel. Civil war raged between 1642 and 1646, then for a second time in 1648. Charles I had fought and lost: within months he was tried and executed, and in 1653 Oliver Cromwell declared himself lord protector, giving him supreme power in association with Parliament and the Council of State. The following year he banned dueling in all its forms, declaring that to kill somebody in such a way was still murder. He meant to have his way and on one occasion even sent troops into the Portuguese Embassy—to the horror of the diplomatic community—to remove the brother of the ambassador, Dom Tavernes de Sà, for causing the death of a bystander during an affray in Bond Street. (Dom Tavernes was taken to Tower Hill and beheaded.) For a while the number of duels dropped, only to flare up again after Cromwell’s death in 1658 and the restoration of Charles II. It was said that the exiled Cavaliers brought back with them the French culture of dueling.

  Soon it was back to the old routine. In 1679 Charles II proclaimed that any person responsible for killing another in a duel would be tried and punished; yet during his reign there were 172 duels involving 344 individuals, of whom 69 died and 96 were wounded. The king pardoned nearly all those who survived. Seconds, who first appeared in Italy, began to take each other on alongside their principals. Samuel Pepys alludes to the prevalence of dueling in his day as “a kind of emblem of the general complexion of the whole kingdom.” Cromwell had put a stop to the whole business of public duels and theatrical entertainment, but after his death games and sports—puppet shows, circuses, cockfighting, hangings, bear baiting, tightrope walkers, wrestlers, jugglers, pugilists, conjurors—flourished again, and swordsmen were back in their element. In the 1660s Pepys—whose library contained Fencing Familiarized—recorded in his Diary:

  And I with Sir J. Minnes to the Strand May-pole; and there light out of his coach, and walked to the New Theatre, which, since the King’s players are gone to the Royal one, is this day begun to be employed by the fencers to play prizes at. And here I came and saw the first prize I ever saw in my life: and it was between one Mathews, who did best at all weapons, and one Westwicke, who was soundly cut several times both in the head and legs, that he was all over blood: and other deadly blows did they give and take in very good earnest, till Westwicke was in a sad pickle. They fought at eight weapons, three boutes at each weapon. This being upon a private quarrel, they did it in good earnest; and I felt one of their swords, and found it to be very little, if at all, blunter on the edge than the common swords are. Strange to see what a deal of money is flung to them both upon the stage between every boute. So, well pleased for once with this sight, I walked home.11

  “Ball-rooms, masquerades, theatres, the open streets, became constant scenes of strife and bloodshed,” wrote the historian Andrew Steinmetz. “Covent Garden and Lincoln’s Inn Fields became the rendezvous for deciding points of honour, and at all hours of the night the clashing of swords might be heard by the peaceable citizens returning home, at the risk of being insulted and ill-treated by the pretty fellows and the beaux of the day. Duelling was in vogue, and even physicians were wont to decide their professional altercations at the point of the sword.” Steinmetz then tells of two doctors, Woodward and Mead, who fought a duel under the gate of Gresham College over the relative merits of vomiting or purging as a cure for smallpox. Woodward slipped and fell, leaving himself open to Mead’s final thrust. “Take your life,” exclaimed Mead. “Anything but your physic,” Woodward replied.12

  A subculture grew up in which a whole section of privileged society joined clubs with names such as “Mohocks,” “Scourers,” and “Hell-fires.” These warriors went into their duels expecting to die or at the least be badly injured, with roughly the same odds on surviving unscathed as a British soldier who fought in the First World War. Other dueling clubs were slightly more sophisticated. One of these, the “Bold Bucks,” accepted members only if they had fought a duel; the president was said to have dispatched as many as six opponents. Placement at banquets and dinners reflected the number of men each member had killed: those who had only drawn blood were relegated to a side table. The club did not last long; most of its members were soon enough run through or hanged.

  Dueling as a partial substitute for ambushes, gang warfare, blood feuds, and assassinations was by now an accepted fact of life throughout Europe. No law had more than a transitory effect: it was like trying to ban adultery. One French wit adapted the adage “Divorce is the sacrament of adultery” into “Dueling is the sacrament of murder.” Yet the distillation of sudden combat into formal duel was still evolving, and in 1720 a brawl boiled up in London with more than a hundred youths having at each other with swords and canes. A troop of Horse Guards was called out and charged into the rabble, cutting many down “ere the disturbance could be stopped, and the whole of this row had arisen because two chairmen [men carrying sedans, and proverbially very strong] were fighting.”13

  By the reign of George III public brawls were going out of style and swords were drawn less frequently in gambling halls, taverns, and chocolate houses. According to Jonathan Swift, fencing was an essential part of a “good education” in the first half of the eighteenth century, but thereafter the “noble art of self-defense” went steadily out of fashion in Oxford and Cambridge, to be replaced by country sports and team games. Men’s dress had remained basically the same for almost a century; from the 1790s on swords ceased to be carried, and after 1814 trousers began to replace breeches. With the change in men’s fashion, and with weapons no longer to hand, duels assumed a more regular and civilized form. The “Bold Bucks” had had their day, replaced by a more refined cadre of gentlemen—men who had no wish to be “hell-fire rakes,” instead creating the “Crutch and Toothpicks.” It was not long before another nickname overtook them: “The Macaronis.”‖

  Fencing itself was a major form of popular entertainment. James Figg, a leading swordsman, established an amphitheater or academy of arms next to his house in Oxford Road, Marylebone Fields. Teaching small- and backsword, cudgeling, and boxing—“pugilism”—to gentlemen, he soon became so famous that he was praised in the journals from The Guardian to The Tatler. A show, or a prizefight, would include bouts with broadsword, cudgels, sword and dagger, sword and buckler, and quarterstaff.

  Members of his troupe would advertise forthcoming events by parading the streets in fancy dress, swords drawn, colors flying, and drums beating as they handed out flyers. Figg’s theater was so popular that the doors regularly opened three hours before performances began. He himself went undefeated throughout his fencing career, bar one loss to Ned Sutton, “the pipe-maker of Gravesend and champion of Kent”—but most spectators conceded that Figg had been ill at the time. In 1730 he fought his 271st public battle, cutting his opponent’s wrist to the bone. A critic of the day, one Captain John Godfrey, declared that Figg was “the Atlas of the sword, and may he remain the gladiating statue. In him strength, resolution, and unparallel’d judgement conspired to form a matchless Master.”14 Horace Walpole was an admirer, as was Alexander Pope. William Hogarth engraved his calling card for him and portrayed him in his “Rake’s Progress.”

  Before long, the boxing matches, which started as support bouts to the fencing, began to outshine the swordsmen, and Figg realized that a new popular entertainment had arisen. Changing disciplines, he became an expert pugilist and in 1720 England’s first national boxing champion. One wonders why “fisticuffs” took over from swordfights in England—as they never did in France, Germany, or Italy. Maybe, pace George Silver, fighting your man hand to hand was a more honest activity for an Englishman.

  The period is full of dueling, and journalists could not leave the subject alone. Addison, Swift, and Daniel Defoe wrote of it, and Richard Steele inveighed against what he deemed its impiety and foolishness: “Death is not sufficient to deter men who make it their glory to despise it; but if everyone that fought a duel were to stand in the pillory, it would quickly lessen the number of these
imaginary men of honor, and put an end to so absurd a practice.”15 Steele then to his horror found himself drawn into a duel against an officer in the Coldstream Guards, his own regiment. With honor at stake, he accepted the challenge and, to his alarm, nearly killed his opponent. The officer eventually recovered—to Steele’s profound relief.

  The business card designed by William Hogarth for James Figg, showing both a typical stage and the variety of weapons used. (illustration credit 3.2)

  Unlike most of his literary contemporaries, Steele was actually an accomplished fencer. So was Defoe, a campaigning political journalist who was often threatened and on three occasions beat off attackers with his sword. This did not stop him from condemning dueling. He disapproved of the public fights at the Bear-Garden, where spectators came keen to see blood. Yet he could still write, “To those who understand the art, or, as the back-sword men called it, the Noble Science of Defence, the best sight is to see two bold fellows lay heartily at one another, but to be so dexterous, and such exquisite masters of their weapons, as to ward off every blow, to parry every thrust, and after many nice closes, and fine attempts, not to be able to come in with one another, or so much as to draw blood. This shows them to be good swordsmen, and perfectly skilled in their weapons.”16 Bloodless dueling, however, was a fantasy.

  In 1772 Richard Brinsley Sheridan (who in later years would bring a duel into one of his comedies) moved from Ireland to Bath, where he fell in love with Elizabeth Linley, an eighteen-year-old beauty who was the principal singer at the Drury Lane Theatre—and she with him. Her father, a distinguished composer, did not immediately see Sheridan as acceptable, which left Elizabeth prey to other admirers, among them Captain Thomas Mathews of Bath, a married man who wanted only to bed her, and threatened to take her by force. She decided to flee to France, at first intending to join a convent. She confided her scheme to Sheridan, who joined her and convinced her to marry him. Meanwhile, a letter Sheridan had left for Mr. Linley explaining the situation infuriated Mathews, who arranged for a scurrilous article about Sheridan to appear in the Bath Chronicle, branding him “a L[iar] and a treacherous S[coundrel].” Thinking Sheridan would not return to England, he further vowed to take his life. But Sheridan did return, and learning of Mathews’s threat decided to take him at his word. The resultant duel began at Hyde Park Corner and culminated with a fight by candlelight in the parlor of the Castle Tavern in Covent Garden. Sheridan swiftly disarmed his man, who begged for mercy. A heated argument followed, during which Sheridan took Mathews’s sword, broke it, “and flung the hilt to the other end of the room.” Mathews protested bitterly but begged for his life and promised he would make a full and public apology, which he did.

  Mathews returned to his estate in Wales, and was universally shunned. But the captain had not given up, and a second duel was inevitable; it was fought on the crest of Kingsdown, outside Bath. This time the affair was bloody and unyielding. Although swords had been agreed on, the initial exchange was with pistols, Mathews apparently fearing another “ungentlemanly scuffle,” like the first encounter. When both their first shots missed, they turned once more to swords. With his second thrust Mathews’s blade broke, shivering in the middle, leaving a jagged point. He seized Sheridan by his sword arm and threw him to the ground, stabbing the playwright repeatedly with the stub of his sword. Sheridan all the while hacked away at Mathews with his own weapon. “My dear Sheridan, beg your life,” implored his second. Sheridan shouted back, “No, by God I won’t.” Eventually, after Mathews had pierced Sheridan in more than two dozen places, he was dragged off and Sheridan was “borne from the field with a portion of his antagonist’s weapon sticking through an ear, his breast-bone touched, his whole body covered with wounds and blood, and his face nearly beaten to a jelly.” Eight days later he was out of danger and celebrated by returning to London and remarrying his beloved (the first ceremony had been when they were both still under age, so it was not binding), this time with her parents’ approval.17

  Elizabeth Linley was the innocent cause of Sheridan’s duels, but the ladies were not always so blameless. Sounding a characteristically misogynistic note, Steinmetz lists as a regular contributing factor “the insinuations of artful, dangerous, and vicious females, and inflammatory mistresses, who prided themselves much in being the object of a duel.”18 It was certainly a public feather in many a woman’s cap, and even before the time of the Sun King a woman’s power of fascination could be reckoned by the number of challenges, and consequent deaths, she had inspired.

  Sexual politics could be merciless. In 1668 Lord Shrewsbury accused the Duke of Buckingham of having seduced his wife. In the resultant duel Buckingham dispatched the cuckolded husband with a thrust through the body, sustaining no more than a slight wound himself. Meanwhile Lady Shrewsbury hid in a nearby thicket, disguised as a page and holding her lover’s horse ready for him to escape. That night she joined Buckingham in his bed, where he wore, as one account would have it, “the very shirt stained with the blood from the wound he had received as her champion.” Charles II pardoned Buckingham, a favorite, but insisted this would be the last time he would do so. “It would be hard after this,” notes Steinmetz acidly, “to say who was the most infamous, the king, the favourite, or the courtesan.”19

  Women were not always spectators. The Restoration dramatist Aphra Behn gave a distaff view of dueling in her play The Rover (1678). An adventuress and spy, she never herself fought a duel. In 1792, however, a Mrs. Elphinstone disparaged Almeria Lady Braddock: “You have been a very beautiful woman. You have a good autumnal face even now, but you must acknowledge that the lilies and the roses are somewhat faded. Forty years ago, I am told, a young fellow could hardly gaze upon you with impunity.” Her ladyship replied that she was not yet thirty. Mrs. Elphinstone cited a well-known worthy who had let it be known that Lady Almeria was sixty-one. That was the finishing touch. Their duel, fought first with pistols, then with swords, ended with a bloody wound to Mrs. Elphinstone. At its conclusion the ladies curtsied to one other and “quitted the field with honor.” This was too much for the society wits. In The Grand Duke; or, The Statutory Duel, Gilbert and Sullivan devote nearly fifty lines to the duel. One stanza runs:

  When Mrs Elphinstone

  Did chaff the fading Braddock

  About her age, she had to wage

  A fight by Hyde Park paddock.

  Since nothing would atone

  Short of a desperate battle,

  The Lady B. made Mrs E.

  Regret her tittle-tattle.

  For slanders cease to be a joke

  Whene’er you find the women-folk

  Such fiery kittle cattle.

  IN HIS SHORT STORY “THE PRIVATE LIFE,” HENRY JAMES REMARKS OF the writer protagonist that he “marched … into the flat country of anecdote, where stories are visible from afar like windmills and signposts.” Even a selective history of dueling incurs the same risks: there are so many episodes—absurd, bloody, eccentric, or otherwise memorable. Goethe, for instance, took up fencing in the years before moving to Weimar because he believed it would make him more attractive to women. His most recent biographer remarks that “the riding and fencing lessons in the last months at Frankfurt bore little fruit … we hear only of one quite unserious duel.”20 When Goethe finally attained a reasonable standard of fitness, it had more to do with his sleeping regularly out of doors and giving up coffee; but he did work briefly in a swordsmiths’ and wrote about fencing affectionately in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Pope Clement XIV appointed the fourteen-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart a “Knight of the Order of the Golden Spur,” which entitled the composer to carry a sword on certain occasions.21 The young prodigy never fenced, however, although he did fight one duel—against a fellow composer, Muzio Clementi—on the piano. The Emperor Joseph served as judge, and the encounter declared a tie.

  Sir Walter Raleigh was such a keen swordsman that he was said to have fought more duels than any of his contemporaries. John Milton
wore a sword well into his sixties and despite his encroaching blindness would boast of his skill. “When my age and mode of life so inclined me,” he wrote, “I was neither unskilled in handling my sword nor unpractised in its daily use. Armed with this weapon, as I usually was, I considered myself a match for anyone, even my superior in strength, and secure from any insult which one man could offer to another.”22 George Frideric Handel fought a duel at Hamburg in 1704 and was lucky not to be run through; his adversary’s blade broke against a button on his coat. Louis Napoléon—later Napoléon III—was a frequent duelist, on one occasion fighting Comte Léon on Wimbledon Common with swords and pistols. They were separated by police.

  In Spain, Don Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, “El Cid,” was urged to avenge his father, who had been disgraced in a duel against the father of the Cid’s lover; he took up the challenge, “and the parent of his loved one fell by his hand.” In Conquest of Mexico William Prescott characterizes the great explorer, Hernando Cortés, as someone whose “graver pursuits … did not prevent his indulgence of the amatory propensities, which belong to the sunny clime where he was born; and this frequently involved him in affairs of honor, from which, though an expert swordsman, he carried away scars that accompanied him to the grave.”23 The Spanish artists Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) and José Ribera (1588–1652) are both said to have “handled the sword in perfection.”