Can society ever really be shaken? Made to shudder discreetly, perhaps, or even, on occasion, give itself a nervous twitch, but certainly nothing more dramatic than that.
Victor Stater is probably not responsible for his book title's sub-clause because its main part - High Life, Low Morals - is perfectly accurate. The rather rackety world of post-Restoration England he describes was full of opportunists who were desperately attempting to consolidate their social and financial positions by whatever means were necessary. Those means often included duelling, a form of honour settlement just beginning to go into decline when the instance considered here occurred.
One reason for the considerable attention this duel received was because of the prominence of its two protagonists, James, Duke of Hamilton and Charles, Lord Mohun, and the fact that each managed to kill the other. On Mohun's side, there was a long history of duelling, his father having died as a result of wounds sustained in a duel with an Irish soldier; he himself, while still in his teens, had stood trial in the House of Lords on a charge of murder.
Hamilton's own career was somewhat more respectable, but not entirely without questionable incident. When they met in London's Hyde Park on Saturday, November 15th, 1712, both men were well accustomed to using violence in order to achieve their ambitions. And, as was so often the case at the time, the principal ambition for all members of society was to secure possession of land, the source and embodiment of wealth.
Accordingly, the basis of the Hamilton/ Mohun quarrel lay in a dispute over Gawsworth, an estate in Cheshire which had been fought over since the time of the English Civil War in the 1640s, when it was owned by a family called Fitton. At one stage, Gawsworth came into the possession of William Fitton, whose father had been Lord Treasurer of Ireland, but, in the complicated and constant changes of political allegiance which defined these islands throughout the 17th century, the estate was eventually owned by the second Earl of Macclesfield, who chose to leave it to his friend, Lord Mohun.
The latter had some claim on the land, since his wife at the time was a grand-daughter of the first Earl, but so too was the Duke of Hamilton's wife, and from this arose a quarrel which worked its way through the English courts for 11 years before being eventually ending in the Hyde Park duel. However, as Stater shows, there was much more to this disagreement than land ownership. Mohun was an ardent supporter of the Whigs, who had been in power until the latter part of Queen Anne's reign when the Tories, among them Hamilton, were able to form a government. In addition, the Duke was Scottish and suspected throughout his life of harbouring Jacobite sympathies; he was known to be in correspondence with the exiled James II and his son, the Old Pretender, and was considered a leader of the opponents to the 1707 Act of Union, which formally bound Scotland to England and its interests.
The duel, therefore, might be regarded as much as a fight between two opposing political groups as the chance to settle an argument between two individuals.
Inevitably, much of Stater's book is concerned with setting the scene, which requires him to venture back through much of the previous century. While there is some generalised padding - several pages, for example, are devoted to describing an early 18th century gentleman's "typical day" - he does succeed in giving an excellent impression of the cheerfully anarchic conditions prevailing in the period.
Amusingly typical, in this respect, is the letter he quotes from the widowed Duchess of Hamilton to Alexander Pope in 1717: "Sir, My Lady Duchess being drunk at this present & not able to write her self has commanded me to acquaint you that there is to be musick on the water on Tuesday next; therefore desires you to be that evening at her house."
As for the quarrel over Gawsworth, it was continued even after the deaths of Mohun and Hamilton by their respective heirs, with those of the former eventually emerging as victors thanks more to their tenacity than anything else. As has ever been the case, in the end the only real beneficiaries from of this long-running feud were members of the legal profession.
Robert O'Byrne is an Irish Times journalist