The duel with D'Esterre

A man who has spent his working life arguing with words sometimes finds that the law of his country requires him, on one afternoon, to argue with a pistol. The argument is shorter than any he has made at the bar, and binds him longer than any verdict. What he carries away from the field is not the question of whether he was in the right, which he knew before he set out, but the weight of the body on the snow, which he had not weighed in advance.

THE BARRISTER OF THE MUNSTER CIRCUIT

Daniel O'Connell was born at Carhen near Cahersiveen on the sixth of August 1775, into the last generation of Catholic Kerry gentry who could still remember the Penal Laws of 1695-1829 in their full vigour. Those laws had set out to dismantle the public Catholic and Gaelic identity of the Irish, to bar the Catholic from the bench, the bar, the parliament, the commission in the army, the freehold of land above a certain rent. He was schooled at Saint-Omer in French Flanders, watched the Terror in Paris from a safe distance and came home cured of revolution forever, and was called to the Irish bar at the King's Inns in 1798, the year the United Irishmen rose and were broken at Vinegar Hill. By 1815 he had been seventeen years on circuit, had appeared in something over two hundred causes, and had become, by sheer volume of work and the carrying weight of his voice, the first Catholic advocate in the country. He had founded, with others, the Catholic Association in 1804, and from 1810 he led it in fact if not in title. His weapon was speech. He had never in his life fired a pistol at a man.

THE BEGGARLY CORPORATION

On the eighteenth of January 1815, addressing a meeting of the Catholic Board at D'Arcy's tavern in Dublin, he described the Dublin Corporation, that closed and exclusively Protestant body which administered the city and sat as a affront to three quarters of its inhabitants, as a beggarly corporation. The phrase was reported in the Dublin papers within the day. The Corporation, stung in its dignity rather than its purse, looked among its members for a man who could answer for it on the field. The man it found was John D'Esterre, forty-five years old, member of the Common Council, formerly a captain of the Royal Marines, with six duels behind him and no fatalities, a fine shot at twelve paces. D'Esterre published a demand for retraction. O'Connell, by his second the surgeon Sir Edward O'Connell of Lyons, declined to retract. The form had been engaged. The day was set for the first of February, the ground at Bishop's Court near Naas in County Kildare, the time four in the afternoon.

THE GROUND AT BISHOP'S COURT

The snow had been falling on Kildare since the small hours. By three in the afternoon the field on the edge of the Bishop's Court estate, two miles east of Naas, was a flat white plate under a low grey sky, with the hedge-line marked in black against it, and the carriages drawn up in the lane. O'Connell came in a long black overcoat over a grey suit, with a tall hat; the duelling-pistols of his second, a matched pair of Rigbys in a fitted walnut case, were carried by Sir Edward across the field. D'Esterre, in a similar coat over brown, walked the ground with the Honourable Captain Hewlett of the Forty-Second, his second. The seconds paced out the twelve paces in the snow, marked each end with a heel-line. The form was given: present, and fire on the count of three. The pistols were loaded in view of both parties. The cold made the fingers slow. He noticed, as he took the pistol, that his hand was steady, which surprised him, since he had expected it to shake.

A SECOND OF TIME IN KILDARE

He stood on his heel-line and looked across the twelve paces at a man he did not know. The Corporation had pressed D'Esterre forward; the Corporation wanted him silenced; the Corporation believed D'Esterre was the instrument. He had been seventeen years at the bar of a country which still hanged men for less, and he had never lifted his hand against any of them. Emancipation was in the long war but Emancipation was in sight, on a fifteen-year horizon, no more; if he were carried off this field the Catholic interest was leaderless for ten years and the Association would scatter back into the parishes from which he had assembled it. He was the larger target by twenty pounds. D'Esterre was the better shot. There was no honourable refusal left in the form: he had been brought to the field, and the only choice now committed to his hand was the angle of the barrel. He resolved, in that interval which the watch would have shown as no interval at all, to fire low, to take the man in the hip and not the chest, to leave him alive if the lead permitted it. Captain Hewlett gave the count. One. Two. Three. The two pistols spoke almost together. He felt D'Esterre's ball go past his shoulder, the seconds afterwards said by four inches. His own ball struck D'Esterre in the right hip, fragmented the iliac crest, lodged in the bladder. The man on the far heel-line folded down onto the snow.

THE CARRIAGE TO BACHELORS WALK

Sir Edward went to the wounded man with the surgical kit. Captain Hewlett crossed to O'Connell to ask, in the form, whether the matter was now settled. O'Connell answered, by Hewlett's deposition recorded the next morning, for my part, with all my heart. I shall always regret that the gentleman has been wounded. They lifted D'Esterre into the carriage and took him back to Dublin at a walking pace through the snow, attended by his own surgeon and by Sir Edward, and laid him at his lodgings on Bachelors Walk above the Liffey. The wound mortified within the night. He suffered for two days. He died on the morning of the third of February 1815, leaving a widow and three young children. He had been, before the Corporation set him forward, a corn factor with a small business in the city and a name for plain dealing.

THE WIDOW'S PENSION

O'Connell, on the news of the death, sent five hundred pounds to the widow within the day. She refused the money. He insisted; she accepted, on the condition that the family receive in addition an annual pension of two hundred pounds from him for the rest of her life. He paid the pension faithfully for the next thirty-two years. It was the largest single private debt of his lifetime. He paid it in person, at his Dublin office, on the first of February of every year, the anniversary of the duel, until his own death at Genoa in May 1847. He never challenged, and he never accepted, another duel. At every public meeting from that February onward, and at every parliamentary session after he took his seat for Clare in 1830, he wore a black silk glove on his right hand, the hand that had fired the shot. To his Catholic confessor in 1825 he gave the only public account of the glove that is recorded: it was, he said, the penance for the man.

THE COMMONS AND THE LONG AFTER

The Catholic Emancipation Act passed both Houses of the Westminster Parliament on the thirteenth of April 1829, fourteen years and ten weeks after the snow at Bishop's Court. O'Connell took his seat in the Commons on the fourth of February 1830. The first speech he made on the floor of that House was on the abolition of duelling between gentlemen of his country. He carried the chamber more by his presence than his argument: the gloved hand was on the bench in front of him, and every member who had read an Irish paper in the past fifteen years knew what the glove was for. He spoke against the form on the ground that no man's honour was worth another man's widow. The practice did not end at his word, but it ebbed from that decade, and within a generation the duel between Irish gentlemen was a memory rather than a calendar appointment.

A man who lifts his hand once against another, and finds the other does not rise, is given by that hour a different calendar from the one he kept before. The Catholic question was won by O'Connell with the weapons he had always trusted, the speech and the petition and the assembled crowd; but the weight that he carried into every assembly after February 1815 was not the weight of those weapons. The matched pair of Rigby duelling-pistols of Sir Edward O'Connell of Lyons, one of the last pairs of formal Irish duelling-pistols still in private hands, rests today in its fitted walnut case in the museum at Derrynane House in County Kerry, on the Atlantic edge of the country he carried.