The same was true of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order. Born into an aristocratic family from Castile, on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees, he had fiery red hair and, although just five feet one, had a “love of martial exercises and a vainglorious desire for fame.” He read avidly the adventures of El Cid, the Knights of the Round Table, and The Song of Roland (ironic, since he was a Basque, whose countrymen had killed Roland) and at seventeen enlisted in the army. He would stride about “with his cape slinging open to reveal his tight-fitting hose and boots; a sword and dagger at his waist.”24 He challenged a Moor to a duel to the death for denying the divinity of Christ, duly running him through. Other duels followed until a musketball passed through both his legs when he was part of a Navarrese garrison besieged by the French in 1517. While convalescing, he read a life of Christ and a book on the lives of the saints, and determined on a religious career. Nor was he the only swordsman turned religious: the Abbé de Rancé, founder of the Order of the Trappist Monks, was also a regular duelist before his move to La Trappe in the 1660s.
Even more formidable was Philip Latini (1605–67) of Corleone, Sicily, an illiterate cobbler turned swordsman. He learned to fence from the Spanish mercenaries based in Palermo (Spain then ruled Sicily), and became so expert that he was known as “Corleone, the best blade of the Island.” A local crime boss named Vinuiacitu (literally, “wine-turned-vinegar”) sent one of his followers, Vito Canino, to see if the man could best Corleone at swordplay. The issue was soon settled: Corleone cut off the assassin’s arm. Terrified that Vinuiacitu would wreak revenge, he took sanctuary in the local church until the coast was clear, staying there for a week, during which time he repented his swordfighting ways and in 1632, at age twenty-seven, became a Capuchin friar. In June 2001 he was canonized for his piety and good works as Saint Bernard of Corleone.
IN 1712, THERE WAS AN ENCOUNTER OF SUCH MALICE AND BRUTALITY that, although it did not stop dueling, it changed the way Britons perceived it. The man challenged was James Douglas, fourth Duke of Hamilton, a Jacobite grandee who had already seen prison for his part in an attempted invasion of Scotland. On his release, he had switched his allegiance to Queen Anne and the Tories and been rewarded with the embassy in Paris. However, his turncoat behavior had made him enemies, particularly among the Whigs, and commentators on the fight have argued that it was an attempt at political murder.a
The duke’s opponent was Charles, fourth Baron Mohun. He was forty-seven, some years older than Hamilton, corpulent and dissipated but still a seasoned duelist, variously described by contemporaries as “the bully of the Whig faction” and “the bloody villain.” Charles had been only a year old when his father was killed while seconding a duel, and by the age of seventeen he was quarreling over dice with Lord Kennedy, a fight to the death being prevented only by onlookers. Two days later he conspired with a friend, Captain Hill (“that dark-souled fellow in the pit,” as Leigh Hunt called him), to abduct an actress, the delightfully named Mrs. Bracegirdle, “the belle and toast of London,” as she left the theater after her evening performance.25 The abduction went wrong, so the two cutthroats ran off to lay in wait outside her home, swords drawn. Soon there appeared another actor, William Mountfort—her lover in the play, of whom Hill was passionately jealous. Mohun embraced him in a drunken hug, allowing Hill to step forward and run his rival through. Hill then promptly made good his escape. Mohun was perfectly happy to stand trial in the House of Lords, which he did in January 1693. The case was “the sensation of the hour,” with the king—that grim Calvinist William III—in constant attendance, and Mohun, still only seventeen, protesting that Mountfort had drawn first. On February 4 he was acquitted by 69 votes to 14, one peer remarking of the dead man that the fellow was only an actor and that all actors were rogues.26 By October of the following year Mohun, “always ready for any desperate mischief,” was dueling with a member of Parliament who had tried to stop him from murdering a coachman on Pall Mall.
For the next two years he took his homicidal energies abroad, serving with distinction with the British army in Flanders. By 1697 he was fighting again and was part of an affray in which his accomplice, Captain Hill, was killed. Two months on and he had notched up another murder, while seconding Lord Warwick against Captain Richard Coote in a nightime brawl in Hyde Park. All six men involved (two seconds on either side) had been blind drunk and slashed away at each other till Coote lay dead. Mohun and Warwick were charged with murder, but once again Mohun was acquitted, this time on the grounds that Warwick had been the provoked party. Over the next decade he apparently reformed, becoming a staunch Whig and a regular speaker in the Lords. However, when the Duke of Marlborough, a colleague, was insulted by Earl Paulett during a debate, it was Mohun who visited Paulett and invited him to “take the air in the country.” Queen Anne interceded and told Marlborough to call off his dogs.
Yet a dog of havoc Mohun remained. In 1701 he had inherited an estate valued at around £20,000. Hamilton also enjoyed claims on the property through his wife, and the two men had been wrangling over it for years, the bad blood thickening. Eventually, at a hearing on November 13, 1712, before a Master of Chancery in chambers, Hamilton cast aspersions on the integrity of a witness, saying that “he had neither truth nor justice in him.” Mohun issued a challenge.
The encounter took place in Hyde Park between six and seven in the morning, on Saturday, November 15. “It is difficult for a Londoner at this day to imagine the loneliness of Hyde Park a century ago,” wrote Steinmetz in 1886. The fringes of Mayfair were then the extreme western limit of the city. Park Lane was “a wild and desolate” region “in which dustcontractors had been permitted to carry on their business, and to accumulate mountainous cinder-heaps” stretching all the way to the Oxford Road. A few houses and one ancient roadside inn formed the village of Knightsbridge, while no one lived on the southern side of the park save an occasional cottage-dweller on the fields that rolled between Knightsbridge and Chelsea. To the north lay Tyburn, the place of execution. The ground beneath the gallows was known till the end of the eighteenth century as “no-man’s land.” In 1712 it was a fitting name for the entire area. The park itself was notorious as a haunt of footpads, a wilderness where affairs of honor could take place unobserved and undisturbed.
With the adjustment to a modern calendar (in 1752), November 15 then would be November 26 now. The weather would have been frosty, even snowy, following a cycle of intensely cold winters; it would have been dark then, probably smoggy, and extremely uninviting.
Mohun had spent the previous night carousing in Long Acre. The coachman who picked up him and his cronies was one John Pennington, who at the trial swore that he had stopped for them at the Bagnio (meaning “bath,” so probably a brothel), a drinking parlor in Covent Garden. He had been told to take them to Kensington, but once there Mohun had insisted that they press on to Hyde Park. Pennington became uneasy. Mohun asked if there were anywhere he could get mulled ale, and the coachman went off in search. The innkeeper he woke up refused to serve him, insisting that no one would be in the park so early other than to fight. When he returned, Pennington discovered that two other men had arrived, and it was obvious a duel was brewing. He ran back to the inn for help.
With all the parties assembled, Hamilton turned to Mohun’s second, Lieutenant General George Macartney, and said, “Sir, you are the cause of this, let the event be what it will.” Mohun urged that the seconds should not fight, at which Macartney demurred, while the duke, according to different sources, either looked at his own second, his cousin Colonel John Hamilton, and replied, “This is my friend, he will take a share in my dance,” or else insisted, in a more “political” vein, “Macartney should have a share in the dance.” However framed, those were words he would soon regret.
What happened next is terrifying and curiously hard to understand. With no regard for his own safety, Mohun rushed at Hamilton and the two cut and thrust away with no attempt to parry, obviously intent only
on inflicting as much injury as possible. The most vivid account of the fight comes from Jonathan Swift, creator of Gulliver and an inveterate Tory publicist. His version is colored by his sympathy with Hamilton, but his narrative is clear enough:
A contemporary oil painting of the 1712 fight between the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun, which led to the deaths of both men and a renewed outcry against dueling. (illustration credit 3.3)
The dog Mohun was killed on the spot, but while the Duke was over him, Mohun shortened his sword and stabbed him in the shoulder to the heart. The Duke was helped towards the Lake-House, by the Ring, in Hyde Park, where they had fought, and died on the grass.
Did Mohun run Hamilton through, or did he die immediately? The angle of the thrust makes it far more likely that Macartney or one of Mohun’s footmen, or both, stabbed Hamilton as he bent over his enemy. The ensuing trial revealed the horror of what a duel could do. Mohun had two main wounds: one, in his right side, was driven at an angle through his whole body and came out on his left side below the hips. The second made a large tear in his right groin, severing the great artery, which was the principal cause of death. The artery of Hamilton’s right arm was cut through, this being the immediate cause of his death, but he had also suffered a diagonal wound, three inches below the left nipple and eight inches deep, and a wound in the right leg.27 Both men’s nonsword hands were deeply lacerated where each had attempted to catch hold of the other’s blade—three of Mohun’s fingers were almost completely severed. They had simply stabbed and hacked each other until they could take no more.
The whole story shook fashionable society. A bill was introduced into the House of Commons to suppress dueling more effectively, but after two readings it was lost. In 1852, when dueling, in England at least, was almost at an end, Thackeray retold the duel in some detail in The History of Henry Esmond, in elegiac tones:
As Esmond and the Dean walked away from Kensington discoursing of this tragedy, and how fatal it was to the cause which they both had at heart; the street-criers were already out with their broadsides, shouting through the town the full, true, and horrible account of the death of Lord Mohun and Duke Hamilton in a duel. A fellow had gone to Kensington and was crying it in the Square there at very early morning, when Mr Esmond happened to pass by. He drove the man from under Beatrix’s very window, whereof the casement had been set open. The sun was shining though ’twas November; he had seen the market-carts rolling into London, the guard relieved at the Palace, the labourers trudging to their work in the Gardens between Kensington and the City, the wandering merchants and hawkers filling the air with their cries. The world was going to its business again, although dukes lay dead and ladies mourned for them; and Kings, very likely, lost their chances. So night and day pass away, and to-morrow comes, and our place knows us not. Esmond thought of the courier, now galloping on the North-Road to inform him, who was Earl of Arran yesterday, that he was Duke of Hamilton to-day, and of a thousand great schemes, hopes, ambitions, that were alive in the gallant heart, beating a few hours since, and now in a little dust quiescent.28
* The clergy encouraged the belief that God, whenever called upon, would work a miracle in favor of anyone unjustly accused. The power of deciding a person’s guilt or innocence was then placed entirely in its hands. Thus, when red-hot plowshares were placed on the ground and an accused person, blindfolded, had to avoid them to be judged innocent, a cleric had only to place the plowshares at irregular intervals to ensure a conviction; when the accused had to handle, unhurt, a piece of red-hot iron, a presiding sympathetic priest would substitute cold iron painted red—and so on.4
† There are many odd dueling stories. In 1372, a French knight, Richard Maquer, slew his friend Aubrey de Montdidier and buried him in the Forest of Bondy, near Paris. Mondidier’s dog, a huge greyhound called Verbaux, said to have been present at the killing, made its way to the house of a friend of his master called Ardilliers, dragged him to the burial place, and scratched away at the ground till the body was discovered. Later, whenever the dog saw Maquer it would attack him ferociously until the suspicious Ardilliers petitioned the king, who in turn ruled that Maquer’s guilt or innocence would be decided by his dueling the dog.
The exact details of the fight, held in the square of the cathedral of Notre Dame, are disputed: some chroniclers have Maquer wielding a lance, others have him buried up to his waist and armed with a stick and shield, while the dog was given a large barrel open at both sides in which he could take refuge. Whatever Maquer’s defenses, they were not enough: the dog seized him by the throat until Maquer promised to confess.
‡ The enthusiasm for dueling compares poorly to the “nith-songs” of the Greenland Inuit. According to an early-nineteenth-century study, “when a Greenlander considers himself injured in any way by another person, he composes a satirical song about him, which he rehearses with the help of his intimates. He then challenges the offending one to a duel of song. One after another the two disputants sing at each other their wisdom, wit, and satire, supported by their partisans, until at last one is at his wits’ end, when the audience, who are the jury, make known their decision. The matter is now settled for good, and the contestants must be friends again.”9
§ Akira Kurosawa provides a famous scene in Seven Samurai in which a wise and experienced sensei scours the town with a young protégé for fitting companions to join them. They encounter two samurai preparing to duel with fresh-cut bamboo. The more mature, slighter-built combatant slowly comes on guard. His confident, rougher opponent disposes himself more quickly, shifting his weight, fidgeting, and making feints with fierce cries. The wise old observer and his student watch as the two duelists await the first blow. Suddenly the roughneck charges, seeking an advantage through speed and surprise. His opponent makes no attempt to avoid the attack but instead, a split second before the blow falls, delivers a devastating counterattack. The roughneck claims a draw, but the other disagrees, claiming, “a real sword would have killed you.” The rough fencer is enraged, and real swords are soon bared. “How stupid,” murmurs the old samurai. “It’s so obvious.” The passage of arms is replayed, this time for life and death, and the older duelist kills his man, just as he had foretold.10
‖ “Macaroni” was simply a suitable-sounding name for anyone with Italianate pretensions. Hence the well-known ditty “Yankee Doodle went to London / Just to ride the ponies [i.e., to visit a brothel], / Stuck a feather in his cap and called it Macaroni.”
a By 1680 members of the Green Ribbon Club—who defended Parliament and Protestantism—were called Whigs, a shortened form of “Whiggamore” (literally, “horse thief”), the name of a Scots band active around 1648 against Charles I. “Tory” was an Irish word for robber, first applied to the Conservative Party by Titus Oates in 1680.
The whole art of fencing consists in just two things, to hit and not to be hit.
—M. JOURDAIN, IN MOLIÈRE’S Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, 1670
Try parrying that, Rousseau!
—REVOLUTIONARY JUDGE, SENTENCING AUGUSTIN ROUSSEAU, FENCING MASTER TO THE ROYAL FAMILY, TO THE GUILLOTINE, 1793
ONE EVENING IN DECEMBER 1725, VOLTAIRE, THEN A YOUNG bourgeois intellectual on the rise, had words at the Opera with the Chevalier de Rohan-Chabot, a well-connected nobleman and dissolute man-about-town. Some six weeks later, as Voltaire was leaving a dinner at the home of the Duc de Sully, one of the king’s senior ministers, two bystanders asked him to mount the steps of a carriage waiting in the street. He did so, expecting the carriage’s occupant to have something to say to him. Instead, he was set upon by thugs and thrashed repeatedly with a cane. “Don’t hit him on the head!” shouted a voice from the carriage. “Something good may come out of that one day!”
Voltaire recognized the voice at once: it was the Chevalier de Rohan’s. He managed to get back inside the gates and into the duke’s house, but instead of sympathy or even outrage he met only laughter. Over the next few days he bombarded the authorities with c
omplaints, but they backed off. “Like a herd of cows,” wrote Nancy Mitford in her book on Voltaire, “one of which has got into a shindy with a small, furious dog, the French aristocracy now drew together, staring sadly but inertly at the fray.” Voltaire decided he had no other recourse than to challenge Rohan to a duel. Although he had worn a sword for many years, he knew how to use it, to quote another of his biographers, “about as well as a poet of the present time knows how to box.” Since he was no swordsman, he threw himself into an intense regimen of fencing lessons.1
Suspecting that something was afoot, Rohan warned the police that Voltaire might commit some deranged act (un coup d’étourdi) and should be carefully watched. The police concurred and received permission from the King to arrest Voltaire should they deem it necessary. On April 16, 1726, four months after the run-in at the theater, the lieutenant in charge of the surveillance reported to his chief, “We have information that [Voltaire] is now at the house of one Leynault, a fencing-master, Rue St Martin, where he lives in very bad company.… It is certain he has very bad designs.… He is more irritated and more furious than ever in his conduct and in his conversation. All this intelligence determines the lieutenant to put the King’s orders into execution, if possible, this very night.”
That same evening, at last feeling confident in his dueling skills, Voltaire accosted Rohan at the Théâtre Français, and with a few well-chosen taunts elicited the challenge on which he had set his heart. A duel was arranged for nine the next morning, and Voltaire hurried back to his lodgings, unaware of the plots swirling around him. With perfect if coincidental timing, the police now acted. Shortly after arriving home Voltaire found himself borne off to the Bastille, where he was kept for fifteen days, being set free on condition that he leave the country. The chief turnkey of the Bastille was ordered “to accompany him as far as Calais, and to see him embark and set sail from that port.”*
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