In the early hours of 20 May 1852, six weeks before polling in that summer’s general election, two MPs travelled from London to woodland outside Weybridge in a bid to settle a quarrel provoked by the unravelling of electioneering arrangements in the double-member constituency of Canterbury. Frederick Romilly, the borough’s sitting Liberal MP, had issued a challenge to his Canterbury colleague George Smythe, whose political allegiances fluctuated and who had notoriously been embroiled in four previous prospective duels. The pair, accompanied by their seconds, who were also politicians, exchanged shots before departing unscathed. None of the participants faced prosecution but neither Smythe nor Romilly was re-elected. The affair, together with Smythe’s scandalous history, reveals changing attitudes to the practice of duelling and shifting expectations about the character and behaviour of MPs.

Heir to a viscountcy, Smythe entered Parliament for Canterbury at an 1841 by-election, rising to prominence as a key member of the Young England group of Conservatives and as the inspiration for the title character of Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby. After a brief stint in Robert Peel’s government, he was re-elected in coalition with a Whig in 1847. Romilly, a former soldier, was connected by marriage to the prime minister Lord John Russell and was dogged throughout his career by accusations of nepotism. He was returned unopposed for Canterbury at an 1850 by-election, a victory Smythe later claimed was due to his endorsement, which had been requested by Romilly’s committee.

When Romilly stood alongside another Liberal candidate at the 1852 election, Smythe claimed to be surprised at this ‘schism’ in their ‘coalition’ and accused him of ‘perfidy’. He alleged that Romilly had ‘caballed’ against him in a ‘hole and corner deal’ on the ‘trumped up’ pretext of Smythe’s poor attendance record at Westminster. Refuting the charges, Romilly demanded that Smythe withdraw his ‘offensive expressions’, which exceeded the ‘fair license of a political contest’. Smythe refused and Romilly sought the ‘reparation expected of men of honour’.

Duelling was rare in Britain by 1852 but survived longer in France and Italy. In Britain a challenge to a duel was a common law misdemeanour and the killing of one’s opponent was murder, although there were few prosecutions for either. In the early nineteenth century, there were several high-profile duels between politicians, including between two cabinet ministers, Lord Castlereagh and George Canning, in 1809, over the conduct of the Napoleonic War, and between the prime minister the Duke of Wellington and Lord Winchilsea in 1829, over Catholic emancipation, and there were also cases of election candidates issuing challenges to their rivals. An increasingly vociferous campaign against the practice peaked in the 1840s. An Association for the Discouragement of Duelling was formed in 1842, with its membership including numerous MPs, and in 1844 revisions to the Articles of War introduced strict penalties for army officers engaging in duels.

Such shifts do not, however, appear to have prevented Smythe routinely threatening duels as a means of settling political disputes. He issued his first challenge during the 1841 by-election. The Whig candidate, John Wilson, had claimed that Smythe was unqualified to be an MP because, born in Stockholm to Irish parents, he was ‘not even an Englishman’. Far from being the ‘Heaven-born statesman’ trumpeted by the Tory press, he was a ‘devil-inspired orator’. In response to Smythe’s request to clarify his ‘offensive’ remarks, Wilson asked a former Canterbury Whig candidate to ‘act as his friend’. Smythe’s second insisted on an apology or ‘the alternative’, as Smythe was ‘entitled’ to ‘satisfaction’ for the ‘aspersions thrown on his character’. After much back-and-forth a conflict was averted by the desired apology.

Smythe attracted further notoriety in 1844 with his second apparent attempt to initiate a duel, this time against the Radical MP John Roebuck, who had himself previously fought a fellow MP in a duel. After Smythe made personal comments in the Commons about Roebuck apparently wasting parliamentary time, Roebuck retaliated that he would only answer accusations ‘from a more formidable corner’ and implied that Smythe’s habit of voting against the Conservative government was driven by ‘disappointment’. Roebuck later informed MPs that Smythe had demanded that he retract the suggestion of dishonourable motives or refer the matter to ‘some friend’ to whom Smythe’s second could ‘address himself’. When the Speaker asked Smythe to declare that he would not begin ‘any hostile proceedings’, he eventually promised to take things ‘no further’ and apologised for contravening any Commons ‘forms’. He was characterised by one Whig newspaper as a ‘silly young gentleman … bent on making a sensation’.

Smythe’s next challenge to a duel prompted more than a reprimand in the Commons. In 1847, two months before the general election, another MP, Lord Pollington, successfully applied to a London court for a warrant against Smythe, for sending him a letter ‘with intent to commit a breach of the peace’ by inciting a duel. Having paid a £500 bail and had two other MPs put up sureties for him, Smythe was bound over to keep the peace for twelve months. While some reports suggested that the dispute was over the chairmanship of a dinner at Eton, there were rumours that it related to Smythe’s ‘personal history’. In 1846 he caused a scandal when it was rumoured that he made Dorothy Walpole – daughter of the earl of Orford and sister-in-law to Pollington – pregnant and refused to marry her and that she had an abortion. Yet just two years after his court appearance, Smythe faced his fourth would-be duel. In 1849 he received rather than issued the challenge, from the MP Richard Monckton Milnes, who he had mocked in a newspaper article and who later labelled Smythe ‘the most perfectly vicious man he had ever known’. They each engaged seconds but, after months with no resolution, eventually announced the case ‘terminated with honour to both sides’.

When Smythe finally fought an ‘affair of honour’ it was rather farcical. According to a mocking report by The Times, Romilly, Smythe and their respective seconds, the Whig MP John Fortescue and the Liberal former MP John Cranch Walker Vivian, left London for Weybridge at an early hour, on the same train. To ‘disarm suspicion’, they disguised their pistol cases ‘into something like sketch-books’, as if to appear on an ‘artistic excursion’. Finding only one carriage available at Weybridge station and agreeing that men ‘entertaining deadly intentions’ should not be ‘cooped up’ together, Romilly sat inside with the seconds and Smythe sat atop the box. Having alighted near Lord Ellesmere’s Hatchford estate, they decided on a secluded spot, marked their 12 paces and prepared to raise their pistols. They momentarily feared detection, when they were surprised by a male pheasant, which ‘with a loud cry dashed into the adjoining wood’. When the alarm subsided, Smythe and Romilly resumed their positions and ‘exchanged shots … without effect’. Romilly declared himself satisfied, and the party returned together to London by carriage and rail, travelling in silence. They afterwards continued to trade claim and counter-claim in missives to electors.

The scene generated plenty of ridicule. The Times mocked the MPs’ ‘tomfoolery’ and advised anyone whose ‘valour’ was insufficient for a trip to France not to ‘play at “duellists”’ in the English countryside, for fear of disturbing any ‘sacred birds’. It published satirical letters signed by the ‘Cock Pheasant’ and narrating a tale of four watercolour artists arrested by a policeman who mistook them for combatants. While much of the commentary agreed that the actual proceedings were absurd, the fact of a duel taking place was seen as troubling. The Liberal Daily News argued that this ‘new Canterbury Tale’ demonstrated that, by ‘substituting pistols for arguments’, Smythe and Romilly held their constituents in contempt, expecting them to take whomever ‘thrashes his adversary’. It reminded Canterbury’s electors that they had the power to check ‘this indefensible practice’, with Parliament needing ‘men of prudence, sagacity, and self-control’. When Smythe described the duel as a ‘common formality’, the Conservative Kentish Gazette condemned him for treating it ‘so indifferently’. A meeting of Canterbury Dissenters pledged not to support either Smythe or Romilly, deeming duelling ‘opposed to the spirit of Christianity’ and anyone abetting it unfit to fulfil the ‘responsible trust of a legislator’. Newspapers also carried advertisements by the Association for the Discouragement of Duelling condemning the practice as ‘practically sinful, unlawful and irrational’ and warning against the events at Weybridge encouraging a revival.  

The duel did have significant political consequences for some of those involved. Although he defended his role as honourable, Vivian, who had been campaigning for Bodmin, recognised that it had shocked his would-be constituents and withdrew from the 1852 contest. Neither Romilly nor Smythe was re-elected for Canterbury. After Romilly polled third, his committee blamed the collapse of his support on the ‘unfortunate duel’. Smythe retired shortly before the nomination, although this was seemingly part of a behind-the-scenes deal with Disraeli, whereby, having secured his supporters’ promises to vote Conservative, Smythe would exit and leave the field open for two other Conservative candidates. In return, he would receive a diplomatic posting, but this never transpired. The 1852 Canterbury election was voided on petition and an 1853 royal commission revealed decades of bribery and corruption, in which Smythe had been a key participant.

The Smythe-Romilly duel is believed to have been the last fought between two Englishmen on English soil. Just five months later, in October 1852, two Frenchmen fought what was apparently England’s final fatal duel.

NLJ

Further reading

M. S. Millar, Disraeli’s Disciple: The scandalous life of George Smythe (2006)

M. Masterson, ‘The political art of duelling’, via https://historyandpolicy.org/opinion-articles/articles/the-political-art-of-duelling/

M. Masterson, ‘Dueling, Conflicting Masculinities, and the Victorian Gentleman’, Journal of British Studies, 56 (2017), 605-28

D. T. Andrew, ‘The Code of Honour and its Critics: The Opposition to Duelling in England, 1700-1850’, Social History 5 (1980), 409-34

S. Banks, ‘“Very Little Law in the Case”: Contests of Honour and the Subversion of the English Criminal Courts, 1780-1845’, King’s Law Journal, 19 (2008), 575-94

S. Banks, ‘Killing with Courtesy: The English Duelist, 1785-1845’, Journal of British Studies, 47 (2008), 528-58

V. G. Kiernan, The duel in European history: honour and the reign of aristocracy (2016)

W. D. Brewer, Representing and Interrogating Dueling, Caning and Fencing during the British Romantic Period (2025)

M. Mulholland, ‘The last duel – a French affair with an Irish twist’, via https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/last-duel-%E2%80%93-french-affair-irish-twist

George Cecil Weld Forester (1807-86), or Cecil Forester as he was known, was Conservative MP for the small borough of Wenlock for well over half a century, serving from 1828 until he succeeded to the peerage in 1874. An officer in the Royal Horse Guards, Forester was remembered as ‘the best looking man’ in the Commons, with a ‘handsome face and aristocratic figure’, and was a ‘favourite’ of ‘every fashionable salon’. He once appeared ‘in full regimentals … sword and all’ to cast a vote against the Whig government before heading off to a ball and, having served as groom of the bedchamber to his godfather George IV, was considered a ‘suave and polished courtier’. Objectified for his looks, Forester was mocked for his supposed lack of intellect and it was once rumoured that a junior Guardsman was willing to bet on his inability to spell. Long regarded a ‘confirmed bachelor’, his marriage later in life to the wealthy widow of one of the first MPs from an ethnic minority background, David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre, who was declared a lunatic at her family’s behest, became a cause celebre by drawing him into a protracted legal dispute with the Indian government.

This picture of Forester is in stark contrast to the one which emerges from the fallout of the notoriously corrupt 1852 general election. Aside from 1832, when he was pelted with mud and stones, Forester’s own campaigns for Wenlock were dull affairs and he went nearly three decades without facing a contest. Yet his entanglement in the murky world of electioneering, orchestrated through the Carlton Club, was revealed by evidence to a select committee which examined events in Norwich, prompted by the suspicious withdrawal of election petitions challenging the election result. This committee’s proceedings shed light on the role of London’s political clubs at elections, and on efforts by the parties to avoid the exposure of electoral corruption through a practice known as the pairing off or swapping of petitions.

The committee found that the Norwich constituency formed part of a ‘compromise’ between two solicitor agents, the Conservative Henry Edwards Brown and the Liberal James Coppock, who agreed to simultaneously withdraw eight petitions that challenged the seats of 10 MPs. When examined, Brown explained that he and Coppock believed it was a ‘waste of money’ to pursue a petition where in any consequent by-election the same party as before would emerge victorious. With a ‘very long list of petitions on both sides’, over a series of meetings each agent offered to ‘withdraw so-and-so’, to the point where it became a case of ‘batch against batch’. The committee warned that such activity, done under the ‘cover’ of the 1848 Election Petitions Act, risked a ‘public scandal’ – yet it remains something about which historians know comparatively little.

Further still behind the scenes, there was, reportedly, ‘a little coterie’ at the Carlton Club which many of those involved in the numerous electoral investigations held in 1853 assumed operated as a ‘committee’. According to Lothian Sheffield Dickson, who was defeated at Norwich and then saw his petition withdrawn without his consent, Forester and his fellow MP William Forbes Mackenzie were, together with Brown as agent, ‘known at the Carlton’ for the ‘principal management of elections’. When hauled before the committee, Forester was adamant that, far from there being a group ‘superintending elections’, he had taken it upon himself to discuss vacancies with several boroughs, maintain a list of those in need and do his best to ‘send them down’ candidates. Forester’s insistence that he was the ‘sole and responsible person’, however, seems at odds with one agent’s remark to the commission probing bribery in St Albans that it was common knowledge that ‘you go to the Carlton’ for a Conservative candidate and to the Reform Club for a Liberal or Whig.

Moreover, there had for decades been rumours that the Carlton Club administered a central election fund, possibly drawn from its membership fees. In 1852 accusations swirled that ‘Carlton gold’ had been ‘thrown about like dirt’ in the constituencies. Proving its existence was another matter, with various lines of questioning at the 1853 inquiries prompting rebuttals from witnesses. In both Cambridge and Barnstaple, the Conservative candidates, whose returns had been overturned, denied knowledge of ‘any fund whatsoever’, being raised by ‘subscription’ or used for their expenses. Forester, too, was resolute that he had ‘nothing to do with any money’, for either campaign or petitioning costs. Yet there were likewise agents who claimed to have been advised to apply to Forester at the Carlton for funds.

Also vague, and perhaps deliberately so, was the relationship between Forester and Brown. Brown was said to have advised clients that he had ‘one of those little dark rooms’ in the Carlton and various witnesses referred to having meetings in ‘Mr. Brown’s room’. However, there was confusion over whether Brown in fact shared a space with Forester, and the MP admitted that Brown – who as a non-member should not have had a separate room – had a key to Forester’s office, where he would have had access to electioneering papers. Forester throughout maintained that he personally had ‘never paired a petition, and never entered into any compromise’. He did nonetheless acknowledge that ‘people naturally will make the best bargain they can’.

During a Commons debate, the Radical MP Thomas Duncombe, who chaired the Norwich committee, urged that, with agents being ‘directed’ by the Carlton, any ‘indignation’ around a petition’s fate should be directed at ‘those who pulled the wires’. Forester’s frustration at the accusations was palpable, and, in a rare parliamentary speech, he explained that whereas Brown had ‘helped him’ with elections, Forester had never ‘consulted with him’ on or given him ‘directions’ as to the Norwich petitions. Forester doubled down on his line that he ‘had nothing to do with petitions’ and that ‘no Committee sat at the Carlton’. The controversy even threatened to boil over into a duel, with rumours in the clubs that the preliminaries had been agreed between Forester and Dickson, and that a duel was only averted at the ‘eleventh hour’ thanks to the ‘friendly intervention’ of another MP.

This scrutiny of Forester’s electoral skulduggery did not ultimately impact his parliamentary career, which ended with him holding the position of ‘Father of the House’ from March 1873 to October 1874, when he went to the Lords as the third Baron Forester. The 1868 Election Petitions and Corrupt Practices Act overhauled the process for challenging election results, handing constituency-based election judges the power to try petitions.

Further reading

S. Thevoz, Club Government: How the Early Victorian World was Ruled from London Clubs (2018)

N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1968)

C. Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales (repr. 1970)

A. Cooke and C. Petrie, The Carlton Club 1832-2007 (repr. 2015)

K. Rix, ‘The Second Reform Act and the problem of electoral corruption’, Parliamentary History, 36: 1 (2017), 64-81

Naomi Lloyd-Jones of King’s College, London writes a guest post about her recent paper given to the ‘Parliaments, politics and people’ seminar.

I spoke at the opening seminar of the summer term on ‘Deconstructing Westminster: towards a four nations history of the Irish Home Rule crisis, c.1886-93’. My paper offered an overview of my PhD research at King’s College London, on the crisis as it happened in and impacted on Britain during the period bookended by two Gladstonian Home Rule bills. It focused on my development of a methodology that I hope will paint a comprehensive, whole-island, low-politics picture of responses to these divisive proposals for Irish self-government.

Home Rule’s cataclysmic effect on UK politics has ensured its enduring fascination among historians. As I argued in my paper, rich though the scholarship on Home Rule is, it remains overwhelmingly Anglo-centric in focus. Many existing conclusions cannot be applied outside England, or in some cases, beyond Westminster. And, in spite of recent advances in regional studies – particularly in the case of England – self-consciously ‘national’ histories of Scotland and Wales persist, into which the Irish crisis is woven, with varying degrees of emphasis and success. This is doubly problematic because much of the debate on Home Rule has centred on whether it was a policy capable of generating mass interest and, ultimately, popular support.

My paper’s core contention was that we need an alternative approach to the crisis. To be ‘British’, it must be British. It must recognise the separate histories of England, Scotland and Wales and acknowledge the complications arising from their forming a larger polity, which, together with Ireland, was represented as one and governed by a united parliament at Westminster. I considered the precedents set by the ‘New British Historians’ of the 1990s and the importance of their work on the complex interactions and interrelationships of England, Scotland and Ireland (but not, incidentally, Wales) in the early modern period. They emphasised the need to place given points in history into their ‘British’ context, and to establish a new, more complete narrative.

It was perhaps natural that those interested in constructing a ‘British’ history looked to the construction of Britain for their framework. Yet what of the history of state deconstruction – perceived or otherwise? A considerable proportion of the political elite and wider political nation believed that Prime Minister William Gladstone had threatened to shake the country’s very foundations. Contemporaries were also acutely aware of the ‘British’ dimensions of the Irish question. Concerns were raised that the Welsh and Scottish (but not the English) would be encouraged to seek self-government, and the notion that Ireland ‘blocked the way’ of matters of interest to England, Scotland and Wales featured heavily in rhetoric on both sides.

Structurally, a British history of the crisis needs to deconstruct the Westminster parliament as it would have stood in the event of the successful passage of a Home Rule bill. Breaking parliament down into the three nations of England, Scotland and Wales, it needs to establish what happened within each, considering separate and shared backgrounds, and determining how and why it happened. By using the same flashpoints, we are able to take the comparative approach recommended by many early modernists. We can then ask whether, by investigating similarities and disparities between reactions to and presentations of Home Rule, we can detect what we might call ‘English’, ‘Scottish’ and ‘Welsh’ narratives, unique to each. This further begs the question of the likelihood of reconstructing a ‘British’ narrative, common to England, Scotland and Wales.

As I explained, I am also keen to ascertain the extent that Home Rule, for better or worse, galvanised public opinion and the impact this had in establishing patterns of political fortunes. I have found that newspaper reports on political and public meetings offer the best possible, and most consistent, means for recovering a record of grass-roots behaviour and attitude. In order to collate and fully analyse my material, I am compiling a fully searchable database that will allow me to test relationships between data sets and explore a range of hypotheses about the crisis. This data is being mapped onto projections of the 1885 electoral boundaries, to gauge the scale and spread of reactions. I presented some examples of my work in this area.

I concluded by discussing the ways I could describe my research and by considering its potential influence on how we practise history. The Irish Home Rule crisis, impacting on Britain as a whole and on its constituent parts, serves as the ideal vehicle for launching an alternative methodology. I suggested that, at its root, a ‘British’ or ‘four nations’ history is about retrieving contemporary opinion and the best manner of doing this. This is one of the fundamental tasks asked of an historian.

Further details of Naomi’s research can be found in her article on ‘Liberalism, Scottish Nationalism and the Home Rule crisis, c.1886-93’ which will be appearing in the English Historical Review in August. A second article on ‘Liberal Unionism and Political Representation in Wales, c. 1886-1893’ is due to be published in Historical Research in 2015.