As we have seen, neither the somewhat insincere disapprobation of the sovereigns and their ministers, nor the operation of the courts, nor the appeals of the pious, sufficed to prevent influential members of the court and aristocracy from becoming infused with the values of the duel during the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. Numerically though, this represented but a small constituency, the strength of honour culture in the eighteenth, and continuing into the nineteenth, centuries was to lie in its transmission out from the court into the much broader, if ill-defined, classes of gentility. In Chapter 3 I shall consider the norms of behaviour and of honourable conduct that came to be expected by honourable gentlemen in the eighteenth century, norms the violation of which might lead to fatal consequences. However, the particular concepts of honour with which we are concerned could not have embedded themselves within society had that society not been configured in such a way as to prove susceptible to their arguments. As we shall see, in the complex web of violent relations that did so much to constitute national culture, the duel was able to find a home – so much so that some gentlemen came to quickly regard this European import as emblematic of very particular English martial virtues.

By way of explanation, one might first observe that the English society of the seventeenth and indeed later centuries was animated by a spirit of extraordinary competitiveness. Competition within the court and within the developing political establishment naturally focused not only upon placements and perquisites but also upon the need to catch the eye and to cultivate that careful self-regard fitted for the well born. Thomas Hobbes was the man who most powerfully expressed the seventeenth-century conviction that all life was a matter of self-assertion, a matter of prevailing over the interests of others. According to Hobbes, ‘Because the power of one man resisteth and hindreth the effects of the power of another: power is no more, but the excess of power of one above that of another.’