Pistols at dawn

Early on the morning of 21 September 1809 two ministers of the crown in the Duke of Portland’s cabinet met to fight a duel on Putney Heath: they were George Canning the Foreign Secretary and Lord Castlereagh who was what we would now call Minister of War. Castlereagh the challenger was a crack shot; Canning had never handled a pistol in his life. As his letter to his wife settling his affairs makes clear, he believed he stood a good chance of being killed. Giles Hunt extends his account of the duel to embrace the study of the personalities of the two combatants and the political system within which they operated.

In the late years of the 18th century the ‘patriot king’ George III was struggling to wrest the prerogatives of the crown from the hands of selfish Whig aristocrats. The most important of these prerogatives was that of appointing and dismissing governments — for instance for George III any government which contained the Whig leader Charles James Fox — a prerogative long lost by British monarchs. In December 1783 he mounted what William Hague in his splendid biography of Pitt calls a political coup d’etat against his own government by appointing Pitt, aged 24 and without a majority in the House of Commons, as prime minister. Both Canning and Castlereagh were to desert the Whig opposition to serve their political apprentiship under Pitt. To Canning, Pitt was the pilot who had weathered the storms of the French Revolution and saved his country from defeat at the hands of Napoleon.

In 1807, after getting rid of the Ministry of all the Talents, George III summoned the former Whig grandee the Duke of Portland to form a ministry of Pittites, with Canning as Foreign Secretary and Castlereagh at the war office.