What do you think?
Rate this book
Duke Hamilton Is Dead!: A Story of Aristocratic Life and Death in Stuart Britain
Examines the chaotic state of the British aristocracy in early eighteenth-century Britain
- GenresHistory
332 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 1999
24 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 17, 2018
It is somewhat embarrassing that most people hear the name "Hamilton" today coupled with the word "duel" and think of a pair of major political figures of our early national history (our first - and greatest - Secretary of the Treasury, and our third Vice President) facing each other on a July morning I Weehauken, New Jersey in 1804, resulting in the death of the former Cabinet Minister, and the start of the fall of the career of the Vice President. To add immense power to his lock on the joining of his name with a gun-play incident, Alexander Hamilton is also the subject of a really popular (on an international level) modern musical drama/biography, and there is even (in the early 1930s, a movie about his career, starring George Arliss. Except in Scotland itself (where the Duke's family is still a major social/political force in society) and to expert of later Stuart Dynasty politics, few people today have heard of Alexander Hamilton's distant kinsman James, 4th Duke of Hamilton, who was (in 1712) briefly the potential man of the political hour as he prepared to be sent to France on a highly important foreign mission. Had he successfully conducted it to a conclusion he would be remembered today as "Hamilton the peace maker" or "Hamilton the king maker". Unfortunately his future was destroyed by being turned into a human pin cushion in Hyde Park in London. If he had any satisfaction from this, it was he succeeded in turning his killer, Charles, 4th Baron Mohun (I believe it is pronounced "Moon") also into a dead human pin cushion. Oh, by the way, their duel is considered one of the most famous (and certainly sanguinary) ones of the 17th and 18th Centuries.
Since there is a relative lack of interest in Hamilton duel retelling lacking Alexander and Aaron as the parties concerned, the Hyde Park tragedy only merited comment in books that described (briefly) such bloody encounters. I first came onto it decades when reading the article on "Duels and Dueling" in the 1961 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Little was written in various histories of Great Britain, even those dealing with the events in the reign of Queen Anne after the 1707 Act of Union that formally "married" England and Scotland as one nation.
Oddly enough Baron Mohun did get more space due to a negative habit of his - he kept on getting involved in very messy situations and "duels" which might have not been duels. Born in the 1670, Charles father died early (ironically in a duel) and Charles was to take up swordsmanship. But he also took up drinking. So in 1692 he paid court to one of the leading actresses of the age, Miss Anne Bracegirdle. From all I have seen she never encouraged his unwanted attentions, and really disliked him. Mohun could not take a hint, and noted Bracegirdle's friendship with fellow actor Will Mountford. One evening Mohun confronted poor Mountford in the street, supposedly challenged him, and stabbed the poor man to death. Arrested, Mohun was to be tried before his peers at the House of Lords. He was lucky - this being 1692 few peers or "nice people" thought highly about actors. They were little better than vagabonds, and poor Miss Bracegirdle was looked at as an entertaining piece of fluff, but probably little better than a trollope. Odd that only a generation before Nell Gwynn was having an affair with King Charles II, and was considered one of the leading lights of his court. Actors would really not start being taken seriously until Dr. Johnson's friend David Garrick appeared in the middle of the 18th Century - about five decades after the Mountford tragedy. In any event Mohun, not quite 20, was acquitted!!
This was just the first act of the tragedy called Baron Mohun. In 1697 he had a friend named Captain Coote. Coote had an "affair of honor" with Mohun as his second. The other party died. Coote fled England for the continent. Mohun was arrested again. He was tried again. His luck held out again - since the evidence showed he was on the spot only as a witness (forget he was active as the second in a duel) it was obvious to their ludships of the House of Luds that their poor fellow member was just the victim of a legal error. He was acquitted again!!
Mohun was from a Cornish family, and his political sympathies placed him into the Whig Party of the 1690s. The Whigs gradually evolved into Britain's Liberals of the 19th Century, so we tend to think of them as the more modern party of the day. However it is a misunderstanding: Whig aristocrats were just as determined to protect their privileges as the Tory (or Country Party) were. The only real difference was that the Whigs were starting to flirt with the upper class of British merchants in the major cities (whereas the Tories rarely did so). This would enable a firm alliance of Whig land magnates and statesmen with rich merchants that would reshape British politics for the next century. Mohun was soon allied with such leading Whigs as John Churchill and his wife Sarah, Duke and Duchess of Marleborough, their close friend and collaborator Sidney Godolphin (a fiscal genius for his age), and the Earl of Shrewsbury. Mohun's violent personality was put to use - he became the "bully boy" for the Whigs to help keep the Tories in check and to keep waverers from wavering.
It helped his social position in the 1690s and 1700s that Mohun was rich. Not from his small estates out in Cornwall. Mohun had married one of the two daughters of Lord Macclesfield, who owned the "Gerard" estate - on of the richest pieces of real property in England. There was a seeming curse on this estate - people were always fighting to get control of it. Macclesfield had beaten all of the previous contenders, and nobody at this point was going to argue with him about it. Macclesfield comes down to us as the type of peer who was rare in England, but not in France, and helped (in the latter country) to cause the French Revolution. Nothing about him is appealing today. As he approached his demise he decided to use the "Gerard" Estate as a posthumous weapon against his heirs - principally his two daughters. He assigned it to one, but not in her name. He appointed her husband, Mohun, to be his heir to the estate.
Naturally the only one who liked this was Mohun. Hey, what if somebody just gave you property worth billions in the currency of 2018, and you weren't even thirty! His wife was not happy, nor was her sister, nor his brother-in-law, one of Scotland's ranking peers, James 4th Duke of Hamilton. But there was little any of them could do. With his political connections, Mohun kept the Courts of Chancery from undoing the questionable inheritance Macclesfield left him. Hamilton (while an important member of the Douglas family in Scotland) had little influence in England. So
Mohun was totally satisfied with the current situation.
Then some political changes began to shake it all apart. Queen Anne's only child (William, Duke of Gloucester) died in 1700. Her husband, Prince George of Denmark, died in 1708. It was very unlikely that she would have a second husband, or more children. The laws in Britain at the time insisted that only a Protestant could be King or Queen (Anne's father King James II was forced off his throne in 1688 for trying to re-establish Catholicism as the official faith over Anglicanism). The closest heir who was Protestant was Prince George, Elector of Hanover in Germany (a descendant of King James I of England). He appeared to have the lock on the inheritance of the throne, but he suffered from having an evil reputation. In 1694 a Swedish Count, who may have become too friendly with George's wife, vanished when he went for an appointment at the palace in Hanover. The fate of the Count remains (officially) unsolved as of 2018. George also had his wife, the mother of his son and daughter, locked up in a castle in his German estates until she died.
Whatever one thought (in England) of James I, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Richard Cromwell, Charles II, James II, William III and Mary II, and Queen Anne, their more bloodstained acts (or in Richard's case, stupid acts) were political ones - none were known for mistreating wives (not even Charles II, who behaved well to his wife Catherine of Braganza), or arranging personal assassinations of a non-political nature. You would have to go back to Henry VIII to find somebody like George of Hanover. So there were plenty of people in England and Scotland who wondered if George was fit to rule England and Scotland.
Then came the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland. Mohun supported the act (it was a Whig regime that pushed it), but he did not like one side effect. Several leading Scots peers were allowed to sit and vote in the House of Lords. They were given British titles for their seats. One, created Duke of Brampton, was James, 4th Duke of Hamilton. Mohun was not happy seeing his brother-in-law in the House with himself. On one occasion they apparently spent a debate yelling at each other (the author was unable t0 find the subject of the debate). At the same time they were pursuing that legal action over the "Gerard Estate". Mohun had used the money and his connections to become a General (one could buy a military title at that time. He was still riding high, but he did not like the appearance of his foe so close to home.
In the next few years the Whigs began to face difficulties on several fronts. Besides the issue the worthiness of the heir to the throne from Hanover, the powers of the Duke and Duchess of Marleborough over Queen Anne was slipping away. Sarah Churchill had been good in grooming Anne for her role as successor to King William III in 1702, but of hate she seemed a trace dictatorial. At this moment Sidney Godolphin died, leaving a hole in Whig leadership circles. Two rising stars, Robert Harley and Henry St. John, were technically Whigs too, but Harley and St. John agreed that the War of the Spanish Succession (1701 - 1714) was going on far too long, and proving too costly. They felt Britain and her allies, and France and her allies, really could use a peace treaty, and needed somebody safe to send for such a treaty. They also managed to find a distant cousin of Sarah Churchill named Abigail Masham to replace the Duchess in Queen Anne's favor. Marleborough and his wife, despite his long list of great victories against France, were now in disfavor. And the main bulk of the Whigs found it might pay to listen to Harley and St. John instead.
The man they favored for the diplomatic post was Hamilton. As a member of the Tory/Country party, he was just the right man to go to France and make a final treaty with the French and Spanish ending the war. Also, he could do something to solve the "George" problem. As a Scots, Hamilton was quite loyal to the claims of the Stuart family. James II's folly in 1688 began (to many people) with his marrying a second wife who was a Catholic, and having a son by her. This half-brother of Queen Anne was James Stuart, known in history as the "Old Pretender". Unlike his stupid father (more like his smart uncle Charles II), James was an intelligent and good natured person who actually might have been a good king had he got a chance. He let it be known that if he were allowed to practice his own religion by itself, he would sign a paper guaranteeing he'd never would try to end Protestantism in England or Scotland. Hamilton was to visit James Stuart while on his diplomatic mission.
Mohun was beginning to worry. The Courts of Chancery were making noises concerning his rights to the "Gerard Estate". If he lost it...well he knew his little property in Cornwall could never support his lifestyle of the last fifteen years. Also he noted that it more than likely would end up with Hamilton's possession. He couldn't stand that either.
On the eve of Hamilton leaving for France, with history waiting to see what he could do, the Duke was insulted at a legal meeting by Mohun. Seconds were later sent to Hamilton, who agreed to a sword duel at Hyde Park on Nov. 15th in the early morning hours. They met, and both men died.
One contemporary, Jonathan Swift, felt it was best to forget them as soon as possible, as both had paid with their lives for their passions. But others were not so sure. A mystery still cloaks the end of the Duke of Hamilton. Officially he was stabbed to death by Mohun while stabbing Mohun to death in their duel. But others said that Hamilton, badly wounded, was being taken to his carriage to get to a doctor. Mohun's second was a General Maccarthy, a questionable person that was typical of Mohun's entourage. Later several persons said Maccarthy stabbed Hamilton in the back while he was being taken to his carriage, and actually killed him. Maccarthy fled to the continent and hid out for several years. He returned when the effect of the duel was not as overpowering anymore as it had been, and stood trial for murder - and like Mohun twice before, was acquitted.
But many felt Mohun was sent to stop Hamilton's diplomatic trip by the use of the duel, and that Maccarthy actually saw this scheme through.
Victor Slater did a yeoman's work on looking into this three hundred year old tragedy, concluding that the two peers were victims of the need for large sums of capital to support the lifestyle they both were supposed to enjoy and share with their friends and retainers. But it was impossible in their case for both to have that lifestyle with the fight over possession of the "Gerard Estate" which Slater ends calling an evil inheritance. At the same time he shows the volatility of the society in the age of Queen Anne, and how just one or two small points could shift the universe for the players, making winners losers and losers winners. I recommend the book as a wonderful glimpse into the "Augustan" age of British letters, and it's darker and grimmer corners. Pope's "Rape of the Lock", Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe", and the "Tatler" of Addison and Steele" give you some idea of that period - but hardly everything.
Since there is a relative lack of interest in Hamilton duel retelling lacking Alexander and Aaron as the parties concerned, the Hyde Park tragedy only merited comment in books that described (briefly) such bloody encounters. I first came onto it decades when reading the article on "Duels and Dueling" in the 1961 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Little was written in various histories of Great Britain, even those dealing with the events in the reign of Queen Anne after the 1707 Act of Union that formally "married" England and Scotland as one nation.
Oddly enough Baron Mohun did get more space due to a negative habit of his - he kept on getting involved in very messy situations and "duels" which might have not been duels. Born in the 1670, Charles father died early (ironically in a duel) and Charles was to take up swordsmanship. But he also took up drinking. So in 1692 he paid court to one of the leading actresses of the age, Miss Anne Bracegirdle. From all I have seen she never encouraged his unwanted attentions, and really disliked him. Mohun could not take a hint, and noted Bracegirdle's friendship with fellow actor Will Mountford. One evening Mohun confronted poor Mountford in the street, supposedly challenged him, and stabbed the poor man to death. Arrested, Mohun was to be tried before his peers at the House of Lords. He was lucky - this being 1692 few peers or "nice people" thought highly about actors. They were little better than vagabonds, and poor Miss Bracegirdle was looked at as an entertaining piece of fluff, but probably little better than a trollope. Odd that only a generation before Nell Gwynn was having an affair with King Charles II, and was considered one of the leading lights of his court. Actors would really not start being taken seriously until Dr. Johnson's friend David Garrick appeared in the middle of the 18th Century - about five decades after the Mountford tragedy. In any event Mohun, not quite 20, was acquitted!!
This was just the first act of the tragedy called Baron Mohun. In 1697 he had a friend named Captain Coote. Coote had an "affair of honor" with Mohun as his second. The other party died. Coote fled England for the continent. Mohun was arrested again. He was tried again. His luck held out again - since the evidence showed he was on the spot only as a witness (forget he was active as the second in a duel) it was obvious to their ludships of the House of Luds that their poor fellow member was just the victim of a legal error. He was acquitted again!!
Mohun was from a Cornish family, and his political sympathies placed him into the Whig Party of the 1690s. The Whigs gradually evolved into Britain's Liberals of the 19th Century, so we tend to think of them as the more modern party of the day. However it is a misunderstanding: Whig aristocrats were just as determined to protect their privileges as the Tory (or Country Party) were. The only real difference was that the Whigs were starting to flirt with the upper class of British merchants in the major cities (whereas the Tories rarely did so). This would enable a firm alliance of Whig land magnates and statesmen with rich merchants that would reshape British politics for the next century. Mohun was soon allied with such leading Whigs as John Churchill and his wife Sarah, Duke and Duchess of Marleborough, their close friend and collaborator Sidney Godolphin (a fiscal genius for his age), and the Earl of Shrewsbury. Mohun's violent personality was put to use - he became the "bully boy" for the Whigs to help keep the Tories in check and to keep waverers from wavering.
It helped his social position in the 1690s and 1700s that Mohun was rich. Not from his small estates out in Cornwall. Mohun had married one of the two daughters of Lord Macclesfield, who owned the "Gerard" estate - on of the richest pieces of real property in England. There was a seeming curse on this estate - people were always fighting to get control of it. Macclesfield had beaten all of the previous contenders, and nobody at this point was going to argue with him about it. Macclesfield comes down to us as the type of peer who was rare in England, but not in France, and helped (in the latter country) to cause the French Revolution. Nothing about him is appealing today. As he approached his demise he decided to use the "Gerard" Estate as a posthumous weapon against his heirs - principally his two daughters. He assigned it to one, but not in her name. He appointed her husband, Mohun, to be his heir to the estate.
Naturally the only one who liked this was Mohun. Hey, what if somebody just gave you property worth billions in the currency of 2018, and you weren't even thirty! His wife was not happy, nor was her sister, nor his brother-in-law, one of Scotland's ranking peers, James 4th Duke of Hamilton. But there was little any of them could do. With his political connections, Mohun kept the Courts of Chancery from undoing the questionable inheritance Macclesfield left him. Hamilton (while an important member of the Douglas family in Scotland) had little influence in England. So
Mohun was totally satisfied with the current situation.
Then some political changes began to shake it all apart. Queen Anne's only child (William, Duke of Gloucester) died in 1700. Her husband, Prince George of Denmark, died in 1708. It was very unlikely that she would have a second husband, or more children. The laws in Britain at the time insisted that only a Protestant could be King or Queen (Anne's father King James II was forced off his throne in 1688 for trying to re-establish Catholicism as the official faith over Anglicanism). The closest heir who was Protestant was Prince George, Elector of Hanover in Germany (a descendant of King James I of England). He appeared to have the lock on the inheritance of the throne, but he suffered from having an evil reputation. In 1694 a Swedish Count, who may have become too friendly with George's wife, vanished when he went for an appointment at the palace in Hanover. The fate of the Count remains (officially) unsolved as of 2018. George also had his wife, the mother of his son and daughter, locked up in a castle in his German estates until she died.
Whatever one thought (in England) of James I, Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Richard Cromwell, Charles II, James II, William III and Mary II, and Queen Anne, their more bloodstained acts (or in Richard's case, stupid acts) were political ones - none were known for mistreating wives (not even Charles II, who behaved well to his wife Catherine of Braganza), or arranging personal assassinations of a non-political nature. You would have to go back to Henry VIII to find somebody like George of Hanover. So there were plenty of people in England and Scotland who wondered if George was fit to rule England and Scotland.
Then came the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland. Mohun supported the act (it was a Whig regime that pushed it), but he did not like one side effect. Several leading Scots peers were allowed to sit and vote in the House of Lords. They were given British titles for their seats. One, created Duke of Brampton, was James, 4th Duke of Hamilton. Mohun was not happy seeing his brother-in-law in the House with himself. On one occasion they apparently spent a debate yelling at each other (the author was unable t0 find the subject of the debate). At the same time they were pursuing that legal action over the "Gerard Estate". Mohun had used the money and his connections to become a General (one could buy a military title at that time. He was still riding high, but he did not like the appearance of his foe so close to home.
In the next few years the Whigs began to face difficulties on several fronts. Besides the issue the worthiness of the heir to the throne from Hanover, the powers of the Duke and Duchess of Marleborough over Queen Anne was slipping away. Sarah Churchill had been good in grooming Anne for her role as successor to King William III in 1702, but of hate she seemed a trace dictatorial. At this moment Sidney Godolphin died, leaving a hole in Whig leadership circles. Two rising stars, Robert Harley and Henry St. John, were technically Whigs too, but Harley and St. John agreed that the War of the Spanish Succession (1701 - 1714) was going on far too long, and proving too costly. They felt Britain and her allies, and France and her allies, really could use a peace treaty, and needed somebody safe to send for such a treaty. They also managed to find a distant cousin of Sarah Churchill named Abigail Masham to replace the Duchess in Queen Anne's favor. Marleborough and his wife, despite his long list of great victories against France, were now in disfavor. And the main bulk of the Whigs found it might pay to listen to Harley and St. John instead.
The man they favored for the diplomatic post was Hamilton. As a member of the Tory/Country party, he was just the right man to go to France and make a final treaty with the French and Spanish ending the war. Also, he could do something to solve the "George" problem. As a Scots, Hamilton was quite loyal to the claims of the Stuart family. James II's folly in 1688 began (to many people) with his marrying a second wife who was a Catholic, and having a son by her. This half-brother of Queen Anne was James Stuart, known in history as the "Old Pretender". Unlike his stupid father (more like his smart uncle Charles II), James was an intelligent and good natured person who actually might have been a good king had he got a chance. He let it be known that if he were allowed to practice his own religion by itself, he would sign a paper guaranteeing he'd never would try to end Protestantism in England or Scotland. Hamilton was to visit James Stuart while on his diplomatic mission.
Mohun was beginning to worry. The Courts of Chancery were making noises concerning his rights to the "Gerard Estate". If he lost it...well he knew his little property in Cornwall could never support his lifestyle of the last fifteen years. Also he noted that it more than likely would end up with Hamilton's possession. He couldn't stand that either.
On the eve of Hamilton leaving for France, with history waiting to see what he could do, the Duke was insulted at a legal meeting by Mohun. Seconds were later sent to Hamilton, who agreed to a sword duel at Hyde Park on Nov. 15th in the early morning hours. They met, and both men died.
One contemporary, Jonathan Swift, felt it was best to forget them as soon as possible, as both had paid with their lives for their passions. But others were not so sure. A mystery still cloaks the end of the Duke of Hamilton. Officially he was stabbed to death by Mohun while stabbing Mohun to death in their duel. But others said that Hamilton, badly wounded, was being taken to his carriage to get to a doctor. Mohun's second was a General Maccarthy, a questionable person that was typical of Mohun's entourage. Later several persons said Maccarthy stabbed Hamilton in the back while he was being taken to his carriage, and actually killed him. Maccarthy fled to the continent and hid out for several years. He returned when the effect of the duel was not as overpowering anymore as it had been, and stood trial for murder - and like Mohun twice before, was acquitted.
But many felt Mohun was sent to stop Hamilton's diplomatic trip by the use of the duel, and that Maccarthy actually saw this scheme through.
Victor Slater did a yeoman's work on looking into this three hundred year old tragedy, concluding that the two peers were victims of the need for large sums of capital to support the lifestyle they both were supposed to enjoy and share with their friends and retainers. But it was impossible in their case for both to have that lifestyle with the fight over possession of the "Gerard Estate" which Slater ends calling an evil inheritance. At the same time he shows the volatility of the society in the age of Queen Anne, and how just one or two small points could shift the universe for the players, making winners losers and losers winners. I recommend the book as a wonderful glimpse into the "Augustan" age of British letters, and it's darker and grimmer corners. Pope's "Rape of the Lock", Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe", and the "Tatler" of Addison and Steele" give you some idea of that period - but hardly everything.
February 17, 2015
This is a fascinating, engaging account of two peers whose lifelong hatred of each other burned through conflicts in the House of Lords, a decades-long Chancery court battle, and then culminated in a bloody duel that left them both dead. (No spoilers; that's revealed at the outset.)
I picked it up on a lark and I'm glad I did. As a measure of the author's skill, he made part of the conflict -- a multi-generational property dispute -- so interesting I couldn't put the book down during the chapters devoted to it. Needless to say, the more vicious parts of Lord Mohun and the Duke of Hamilton's rivalry are equally entertaining.
Definitely worth reading if you're interested in legal history (some of the court proceedings are still cited as precedent, three hundred years later), Anglo-Scottish relations, or history in general.
I picked it up on a lark and I'm glad I did. As a measure of the author's skill, he made part of the conflict -- a multi-generational property dispute -- so interesting I couldn't put the book down during the chapters devoted to it. Needless to say, the more vicious parts of Lord Mohun and the Duke of Hamilton's rivalry are equally entertaining.
Definitely worth reading if you're interested in legal history (some of the court proceedings are still cited as precedent, three hundred years later), Anglo-Scottish relations, or history in general.
January 9, 2017
should be a soap opera. talk about a society that was all about themselves.............
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews