4. A Duel of 1807 (1)
The Practice of Duelling in the British Army
Everyone is aware that, despite of all attempts to stop it, the practice of duelling lingered on in the British Army down to the fourth decade of the XIXth century, and many will remember, as almost the last incident in its distressing annals, the scandalous trial before his peers of Lord Cardigan, for the shooting of Captain Tuckett. The leader of the Charge of the Light Brigade was acquitted, on the technical point that the indictment charged him with wounding a Captain Harvey Tuckett, while the prosecution proved that he had shot a Captain James Garnett Harvey Tuckett, and had neglected to prove that the two names connoted only one person. That the Peers could venture to join in this obvious conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice, sufficiently shows how strong was the sentiment in favour of the duellist as late as 1840.
It was only eleven years before that the Duke of Wellington himself, though he had done all in his power to stop duelling in the Peninsular Army, had yielded to the spirit of his generation, and “gone out” with Lord Winchelsea in Battersea Fields, to exchange deliberately harmless shots over the question of Catholic Emancipation.
It is, therefore, curious and interesting to find the first case of execution of a successful duellist on a charge of simple murder going back as far as the year 1807—more than 30 years before that conviction of Lieutenant Munro, for killing his brother-in-law Colonel Fawcett, which is generally quoted as the crucial case showing the final decision of public opinion on the subject. It adds to our surprise to find the condemnation taking place in Ireland, the region in the United Kingdom where duelling was most frequent and popular during its last half-century of survival, and eight years before Daniel O’Connell’s fatal duel with D’Esterre, which brought the orator nothing but credit in the eyes of his friends, though it gave him some pangs of conscience as a pious Catholic.
The story of this sad affair of 1807, a most perfect instance of morbid psychology and silly touchiness on the “point of honour”, is best told in a rare pamphlet, A Short Vindication of the Memory of the late Major Alexander Campbell, of the 21st Regiment of Foot: containing the only full and particular account of the circumstances preceding and attending his unfortunate duel with Captain Alexander Boyd, of the same Regiment, published in 1810 in vindication of her husband by the widow of the survivor of the duel, after his execution. It contains his dying statement concerning its circumstances, written down after his friends’ appeal for a reprieve had been finally refused by the King himself.
And the tale goes so far in showing that he was even more to blame for the tragedy than the ‘less unfortunate gentleman who fell by his hand”, that I think it may be taken as an honest statement of his case. So much of the altercation which led to the duel had taken place out of the hearing of any witnesses, that there was no evidence save that of the survivor for what happened. And in 1808 he could not, of course, go into the box to offer himself for cross-examination, so that his version was never given, and the sentence was passed on him on the depositions of persons none of whom had seen more than one or two episodes of the unhappy quarrel.
In June 1807 the second battalion of the Royal North British Fusiliers was quartered at Newry. It was a new unit, raised, like so many other second battalions, after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens. It had not yet seen any service, save garrison duty in Ireland, since it was first raised at Ayr in 1804. Among the senior officers of the 2/21st were Brevet-Major Alexander Campbell and Captain Alexander Boyd, both married men, and the fathers respectively of four and of three children. Each had his family residing in the town, in lodgings not far from the barracks.
Their age and rank and responsibilities should have made both of them incapable of starting a duel of a most irregular and atrocious kind, which would have been unpardonable even in the most feather-headed subalterns. Obviously the origin of it lay in incompatibilities of temper; and a trivial dispute at mess, when the wine was in and the wits were out, only let loose a dislike that must have been simmering for months. Campbell was “a Highland gentleman jealous of his honour”, and thought that Boyd was no gentleman. As the pamphlet puts it, “the Captain having raised himself, by his own merit, to the rank which he held, was more punctiliously jealous, perhaps, of his personal consideration than one to whom such a station had long been familiar: he was probably less accustomed to govern and repress his feeling than those are who have always been subjected to the restraints of refined society”.
Neither of the officers was a professional duellist of the type not uncommon in the early XIXth century; but Campbell, as the pamphlet confesses, “had once on occasion of grievous provocation lifted his hand against the life of a fellow-creature”; and Boyd “had recently been engaged in several affairs that threatened to have ended in bloodshed”, but all had been settled by the intervention of other officers—in one case, by an odd chance, by the mediation of Campbell himself. ‘Though his worth and honour were universally acknowledged, his temper was generally considered unsafe and impetuous.”
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