Thus far I have surveyed the distribution of duels, both geographically and socially, and said something about the disputes which led to them. However, the time has come to, as it were, take a step backward and consider the means by which honour disputes were resolved – for very many honour disputes did not, in truth, conclude in a duel. Here, then, I will examine the ways in which quarrels might be resolved, but I will also conversely consider the manner in which, where a resolution could not be found, duels might actually be conducted. Resolving disputes and refereeing combats might well appear rather different enterprises but of course in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the duties of conciliating between the parties and, if necessary, conducting the actual duel were vested in the same persons, the seconds or friends of the protagonists. As we shall see, reconciling the rather different calls upon them required not a little delicacy upon their part.

The second is a much-neglected figure in modern studies of the duel, scarcely accorded more than a few brief lines in works that invariably concentrate upon the fact of the violent encounter and the conduct of the principal protagonists. Yet contemporaries placed great value on the role that they played. Samuel Stanton declared that ‘Nothing with respect to duelling can be, or really is of more consequence than the choice of the second.’ Paolo Fambri was still contending in 1868 that ‘it is neither the sword nor the bullet that kills duellists, but the seconds’. Since they managed disputes and guided them towards peaceful resolution, or, alternatively, arranged the mechanics of duel where peaceful endeavours had failed, seconds played an absolutely indispensable role in configuring later honour culture. Without their intervention the relationship between disputants would have been irremediably altered. In discussing the progress of honour disputes and the actual mechanics of meetings on the field in this chapter, then, it is the figure of the second who for a moment will loom even larger than that of his principal.