Drawing on her research into Canterbury for the House of Commons, 1832-1868 project, our research fellow Dr Naomi Lloyd-Jones looks at the 1852 pre-election duel between the city’s MPs, Frederick Romilly and George Smythe, a notorious would-be duellist, believed to be the last political duel fought in England.
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
