There was a tacit understanding that duels were only fought between gentlemen, those of refined birth and breeding. This is probably why there was such a row about the duel fought on Wimbledon Common in 1838 between a draper and the nephew of a tavern-keeper. Many of those who expressed their horror ignored the fact that Mirfin, the draper, was shot and killed, and instead directed their indignation at the fact that people of humble origin had dared to ape their social superiors in trying to settle their differences in a duel with pistols.
Duels were sometimes fought over matters which today seem absurdly trivial such as that which took place in April 1803 when Captain McNamara met Lieutenant-Colonel Montgomery at Primrose Hill: the Captain believed that the military man had insulted his dog. As an officer and a gentleman there was only one possible way of obtaining redress. The duel resulted in the death of Montgomery. Some duels were fought over what were little more than drunken squabbles. Occasionally they were initiated by men seeking to liquidate their debts by finding an excuse to fight a duel with a creditor. What is so generally striking, however, is the politeness and punctiliousness that usually seems to have marked the proceedings and the sincere regrets that were often expressed when one duellist killed his adversary.
Duelling was against the law but juries were markedly reluctant to convict the survivor of a duel in which one of the participants died. The high-born pedigree of many who participated in duels may have had something to do with this, but until the 1780s duelling seems to have been accepted by juries as a perfectly acceptable way for gentlemen to settle their differences. It was viewed as the logical successor to the medieval idea of trial by combat and there were even those who argued that victory in a duel was always won by the participant who had God on his side. By 1800 public opinion had changed and those who fought duels were likely to receive less sympathy from the courts.
No one has computed how many people died in London as the result of duels, but the issues over which they fought had little to do with real ‘honour’ and much more to do with affronted pride, drunken belligerence and the boredom and general pointlessness of life experienced by many of those who fought them. While undoubtedly there were some real rotters who were killed, duelling led to many completely pointless premature deaths. It is perhaps a blessing that in duels fought with firearms, marksmanship was generally very poor. It was another matter where swords were used: frightful injuries and death often ensued.
Cremorne Pleasure Gardens were situated on a twelve-acre site in Chelsea between the King’s Road and the River Thames. They opened for business in 1843 and although starting promisingly, they (like many of London’s other pleasure gardens) went into a decline as they attracted disreputable visitors whose vulgar tastes and boorish behaviour deterred more discerning patrons. Cremorne gained a reputation for the daring balloon ascents that took place there. In 1874 a well-known Belgian balloonist by the name of Vincent de Groof announced that he would provide spectators with an additional thrill by not only ascending in a hot-air balloon, but also jumping from it and descending to the ground wearing an outfit with bird-like wings and a tail. To the delight of the crowd all was going according to plan until the wind suddenly changed direction and his colleague in the basket was forced to cut de Groof free. Some of the more callous onlookers cheered even more loudly as de Groof plumetted earthwards, frantically flapping his wings for all he was worth, but to no effect.
Being charitable to the spectators, perhaps they thought it was part of the show. The sexton of St Luke’s Church in Chelsea was watching and shouted to de Groof to land in the churchyard. Quite how this would have helped the stricken aeronaut is not clear, even if he had been able to act on the undoubtedly well-meaning advice. It was all in vain anyway because the intrepid balloonist and bird man crash-landed in Sydney Street, Chelsea. He died of his injuries shortly afterwards. Cremorne Gardens shut down three years later.
One of the most notable of London’s unburied must be the first wife of Martin van Butchell. The man himself was a successful dentist who became disenchanted with teeth and went on to make a second career as a truss-maker. Although a large percentage of his clients were fashionable and wealthy, he refused to visit them in their homes and insisted that they came to him instead. When not ministering to the rich, he gave his services gratis to the woebegone inmates of Newgate Prison. His first wife died in 1775 and he had her embalmed so skilfully that she looked very lifelike and almost as good as new. He put her on display in his house in Mayfair and charged visitors, of whom there were plenty, to view her. Rumours were rife about why he chose to preserve her in this way but the truth never came out. When showing his strange exhibit to visitors, he always referred to her as ‘my dear departed’. Something of an eccentric, van Butchell rode around London on a pony which he painted with either purple spots or black stripes, depending on his mood. His son inherited his mother’s cadaver but being unable to find a use for it, he donated it to the Royal College of Surgeons. There it remained until scattered to the four winds by an exploding German bomb in 1941. It never was buried.
The arm of the Grand Junction Canal which runs from Paddington to the River Thames at Limehouse is usually known as the ‘Regent’s Canal’. Work on it began when the future George IV was acting as regent while his father was indisposed. Along part of its route it skirts Regent’s Park. In the early hours of the morning of 2 October 1874 a steam tug set off from the City Road Basin not far from the Angel, Islington. It was hauling five barges, one of which, the third, was carrying five tons of blasting gunpowder. At five minutes to five, the tug and its attendant barges were passing under Macclesfield Bridge which joins Avenue Road to the circular road inside Regent’s Park. There was a blinding flash followed by an eruption of flame, smoke and sparks. Bridge and barges disintegrated. Mud, pieces of timber and lumps of iron took off in all directions. Trees were uprooted and windows were blown in as far as a mile away. People ran, panic-stricken and screaming, hither and thither around the neighbouring streets, thinking the end of the world had come. Three bargemen died and their remains were never found. Questions were asked in Parliament about the transporting of such potentially dangerous cargoes as gunpowder through densely-populated built-up areas. The immediate cause of the explosion was never established.
One of London’s most tragic citizens was Joseph Merrick, universally known as ‘The Elephant Man’. He was grotesquely disfigured by multiple neurofibromatosis and was forced to earn a demeaning living as an exhibit in a freak show. Despite having an appearance which struck those who looked at him with a mixture of revulsion and pity, he was gentle and sensitive and only wanted to be accepted and liked by his fellow humans. The story of how an eminent surgeon, Sir Frederick Treves, found him and took him under his wing and gave him a home is well-known. Merrick’s head was so huge and heavy that he had difficulty holding it up and he was obliged to sleep sitting up in bed with his head resting on his knees. One night he must have achieved what he had always wanted – to sleep in the normal fashion of other people with his head on a pillow. After a life of much suffering, but borne with a great deal of dignity, Merrick died in his sleep. His skeleton has been preserved at the Royal London Hospital.
Another famous preserved skeleton is that of Charles Byrne, the ‘Irish Giant’. This may be viewed in the Hunterian Museum housed in the building of the Royal College of Surgeons and Physicians in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Born in 1761, his parents were of normal stature and there was nothing about his appearance as an infant to suggest his future stature. Local salacious gossip, however, had it that his prodigious growth was because his parents had conceived him during a bout of frolicking on the top of an extremely tall haystack. He was bullied as a child and did not enjoy robust health. As a teenager he was exhibited first around Irish towns and villages and then in various parts of mainland Britain. In Edinburgh he caused a sensation by lighting his pipe directly from a gas street lamp. His manager was one Joe Vance who knew a good product when he saw
it and he soon headed off to London with Byrne. Here he proved to be a great draw as a human curiosity being advertised as 8 feet 4 inches tall when in fact he was probably ‘just’ 7 feet 10 inches. Although he was only twenty-two years of age, some of those who paid good money to view him noted that he was stooped and unhealthy-looking. The public were capricious and soon drifted off in search of alternative titillations. Byrne was particularly galled when he found that he had spawned imitators. One was a fellow countryman called Patrick Cotter who had the effrontery also to call himself the ‘Irish Giant’.
Byrne’s best days were soon over. The world was a cruel place for a man who had little to offer the world apart from being a giant. Known neither for his razor-sharp intellect nor his fund of witty repartee, Byrne’s health, which had never been good, now began deteriorating because of heavy drinking. By the spring of 1783 it was evident that he was a dying man. Many London surgeons were licking their lips at the prospect of obtaining his corpse – what a specimen that would be! The most determined of these was John Hunter who already had a collection of preserved human oddities and Byrne would be its crowning glory if he could only lay his hands on him. Where the advancement of science was concerned, Hunter had few scruples and he employed a man to trail around in Byrne’s wake so as to be on hand when the giant died.
Byrne was not too inebriated to be jittery about the fate that might befall him. He knew that Hunter intended to get hold of his remains and he wanted to be allowed to rest in peace and in one whole piece! It must have dawned even on Byrne’s befuddled senses that he was worth more dead than alive. He knew that Hunter and various other surgeons were in league with the resurrection men and that no resting place would be safe from their attentions. By now Byrne was a rather pathetic figure forced to spend the last of what little savings he had by making a secret arrangement with some fishermen to take his body when he died and have it buried at sea. Where serious money is concerned, secret arrangements count for little and Byrne’s wishes were soon common knowledge. There are various stories of what happened when Byrne obligingly died. The upshot, however, was that Hunter had to spend a large amount of money but he got what he wanted. Byrne’s body was delivered to his house in Earl’s Court whereupon Hunter, needing to work quickly, boiled the corpse in an enormous kettle. He disposed of the body tissue and all Byrne’s other remains because it was the skeleton he was after. To this day the skeleton shows the staining caused by the boiling.
A certain additional poignancy is lent to Byrne’s skeleton because close-by stands the skeletal remains of Caroline Crachami. She was born in 1815 and became widely known as the ‘Sicilian Fairy’. When she was born she weighed a mere one pound after a full-term gestation. At the age of nine when she died unexpectedly, she was just over 19 inches in height. Her remains too were eagerly sought after and her father was involved in an unseemly wrangle with the doctor who had been exhibiting her and was looking to obtain a good price from the anatomists. Imagine his anguish when, after a diligent search, he found his minute daughter’s body already in the process of being anatomised! A scandal blew up but the tiny skeleton eventually went on exhibition in the museum attached to the Royal College of Surgeons. Even before that it had been made the subject of a learned paper by the eminent surgeon Sir Everard Home who used it as an object-lesson in the horrible effects of what was known as ‘maternal impression’. This was the theory that some severe trauma experienced by the mother while pregnant could account for physical abnormalities in the child. In the case of Caroline, Home ‘explained’ that when her mother was four months pregnant, a monkey had secretly entered the caravan in which she was sleeping. When its movements woke her, she moved suddenly and the creature bit her. A similar explanation was offered for the appearance of Joseph Merrick: his mother while pregnant had been nearly run down by an elephant which stampeded out of control during a circus parade. The shock of this had impressed itself on the luckless unborn infant and led to the formation of his singularly pachyderm-like features, or so it was asserted.
Probably the only Londoner to die as the result of trying to stuff a dead chicken was Francis Bacon (1561–1626). He was a politician, writer, philosopher and fatally as it was to prove, an amateur scientist. One very cold, snowy morning he was riding in a coach on Highgate Hill with some friends when he abruptly ordered the driver to stop. Without offering any explanation, he jumped down and rushed into a nearby hovel and bought a chicken from its bemused occupant after giving her an offer she couldn’t refuse. Eagerly he killed and disembowelled the fowl before stuffing it with snow. Quite what his friends made of all this is not recorded but Bacon didn’t care anyway – he was a zealot in pursuit of scientific knowledge. He wanted to know whether freezing would help to preserve meat. He never did find out because he suddenly felt poorly and was put to bed with a chill. Unfortunately the bed in which he was placed was damp and unaired and Bacon caught pneumonia and died.
When it comes to malicious shenanigans and bizarre deaths among the upper crust, there can be little to beat the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1613. A scheming, ambitious but able man, he was a trusted and probably intimate friend of the vapid Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester, who himself was the favourite, and possibly a lover, of King James I. Carr was bisexual and fell for Frances Howard, the Countess of Essex. At first Overbury encouraged their passion but was greatly put out when the Countess initiated proceedings to dissolve her marriage to the husband she hated, at which point Carr revealed his own intentions of marrying her. In vain did Overbury plead with Carr that Frances was unscrupulous and ruthless, a necromancer and sexual libertarian. She was also exceptionally beautiful. The Howard family was extremely ambitious and resented Overbury’s close relationship with Carr which made him privy to much sensitive ‘insider’ information. Frances especially hated him for trying to prevent her marriage to Carr. The Howards used their influence with the King to get Overbury out of the way by securing a diplomatic appointment for him overseas. But Overbury was no fool – he knew a bribe when he saw one – and refused the job. This made Carr turn against him and he easily persuaded the King to order Overbury to be detained in the Tower of London.
Now the really nasty bit started. The Howards decided that Overbury needed to be silenced permanently. They succeeded in having the existing Lieutenant of The Tower dismissed when they found they could not corrupt him and managed to get Sir Gervase Elwes, an unprincipled crony of theirs, appointed in his place. With his connivance they had another of their creatures, Richard Weston, appointed as Overbury’s gaoler with a brief to murder him with poison. Frances had some shady associates who provided a variety of poisons with which his meals were laced. They put arsenic in his salt, mercury in his pork, catharides in his pepper and various acidic substances and metallic poisons in other meals. It did not take long for these potent ingredients to start making their presence felt and Overbury began displaying various distressing symptoms. For fear that the poisons might be discovered, they were administered in smallish doses which only prolonged Overbury’s agonies. When he realised what was being done to him he bravely, but perhaps unwisely, threatened to expose those he believed were behind the poisoning. He even hinted that he knew things about the King that would cause a sensation if he made them known. His enemies, by now extremely concerned to save their own skins, kept a close guard to prevent him receiving or despatching any messages. Overbury was tough but the poisons he had assimilated took their toll. Understandably cautious about eating and drinking, he wasted away into a human skeleton covered in sores. Still he did not die and only succumbed excruciatingly when mercuric chloride was administered with an enema.
The Howard faction decided that the evidence needed to be disposed of as quickly as possible and Overbury was interred before the day of his death was out. The Howards were jubilant and Frances got what she wanted: her first marriage was nullified on the grounds of non-consummation by a jury of middle-aged ladies of dubious probity who were easily bribed to attes
t to Frances’ virginity after they had examined the relevant parts of her anatomy. That little technicality being dealt with, Frances then married Carr who had just been made Earl of Somerset in a splendid ceremony paid for by the King. Then the rumours started. The Howards and Carr had plenty of enemies. Elwes and various minor players in this grisly drama were arrested, questioned and summarily hanged. Frances decided on pre-emptive action. She made a full confession – she was pregnant and pregnant women were not executed – and she and Carr were placed in the Tower. There were widespread calls for them to be executed for their dastardly crime and they were condemned to death but James, never one to allow justice to get in the way of his friends, let them stew for a while before ordering their release. Anyway, James had never liked Overbury, probably being jealous of his friendship with Carr. Perhaps there was divine retribution because the evil Frances, Countess of Somerset, died soon afterwards of cancer. It was an agonising death.
Edward III (r. 1327–1377) was everyone’s idea of how a king of the age of chivalry should have looked. He was a fine upstanding man around 6 feet in height, well-built, muscular and sinewy. He was an avid if sometimes reckless devotee of jousting and a formidable opponent at that sport. Inevitably he received some injuries while participating in tournaments, including head injuries, which may account for the mental deterioration that he suffered late in life. He had a happy marriage with Philippa of Hainault, but as was the way at the time, he took advantage of his social pre-eminence by taking various lovers. The most prominent of these was Alice Perrers who some accuse of giving him a venereal infection. Distraught after the death of his mother Isabella in 1369, a terminal decline seems to have set in, especially when his son, the Black Prince, developed a debilitating disease from which he died. During his last months Edward was greatly enfeebled and he died at Sheen, just outside London. He had grown a luxuriant beard and long flowing hair probably because he had simply lost interest in his appearance. A wooden effigy was made of him after his death. The face was lifelike and showed the mouth twisted with a facial paralysis. This supports the theory that the King had a stroke in his latter years and helps to explain his sudden and severe physical and mental decline. This man, so warlike in his youth, lies in Westminster Abbey and is depicted in a superb bronze effigy. His appearance is that of an old man of peace with flowing locks and beard and an expression of great serenity.
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