From a letter to Sir Thomas Myddleton at Chirk Castle in Denbighshire, from John Wynne, dated 25 Sept 1681:
…I shall give you a true & faithfull account of the message I carryed from you to Sir John Trevor… After that I desired to have private discourse with him he went wth me to a private roome, where I imparted your buisness to him in these very words (i.e.) Sir I am come to you upon a message from Sir Thomas Middleton he is informed by a gentleman that you called his father the sonn of a traytor, he therefore desires you just now to walke out with your sword in your hand to give him satisfaction, to which Sr John Trevor replyed truely Sir I never sayd that his father was the sonn of a traytor, but that he was a person that he much honoured & respected, & more to that purpose… [I] made reply to Sir J.T. in these words, Sir since you disowne ye speaking of ye words for which I am com to question you, I will rather endeavour to make a right understanding between you then promote a quarell…
(A little background: Myddleton and Trevor were not on good terms around this time. At the beginning of 1681, they had fought it out for the county seat in parliamentary elections; there were some serious disturbances (enough to alarm the government in London) and at the end a spot of sharp practice on Trevor’s part to take the seat. At almost the same time (no coincidence, I reckon…) Trevor had involved himself in a long-running dispute about enclosures between Myddleton and his tenants near Chirk, with both direct action in throwing down Myddleton’s fences and a number of subsequent lawsuits and prosecutions. There’s much more about all that in chapter 6 of my thesis, though somehow I missed this particular letter when I was doing my PhD research.)
Another thing in the literature on duels which causes me some doubt is the tendency to assume that once a challenge had been issued, a duel was inevitable, related to a broader assumption that duelling was virtually compulsory amongst upper-class men whenever an insult was given or perceived. (One of the things I like about Peltonen’s work is that it’s showing that the situation was much more contested than that.) Here, despite the intensity of political rivalry and legal disputes between Myddleton and Trevor at the time that this challenge was issued, and whether Trevor had said the words in question or not, he was ready to back down and deflect the challenge. (And I have noted down at least one more example in the NLW archives of a challenge refused, which I’ll be taking a look at soon.)
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[…] My archival research this summer has (at last) begun to develop some sense of direction, and one of the themes is masquerading under the working title of ‘Gentlemen Behaving Badly’. And I may well be writing a lot more about this, because it encompasses a lot of tasty topics: masculinity, ‘class’ or social rank, politics, litigation, violence, rioting, drinking… [Indeed, it looks like this is going to turn into a proper little series of posts: see here and here, and this earlier post as well. Not to mention this, too. Exciting eh?] […]