Chapter 6 alluded to the very public nature of honour disputes, disputes that were often played out through the medium of the press. It gives one some pause for thought to reflect that by turns seconds or principals were advertising their intent to commit a criminal offence or recording in print that an offence had already been committed. Here, then, I intend to explore the relationship between honour culture and the law, but the very fact that unlawful acts were openly advertised of itself says much about the general effectiveness of the legal system in punishing duellists. Nevertheless, some have attributed the demise of duelling, at least in part, to the allegedly increasingly severe attitude taken by the courts to those who had killed during the course of a duel. For reasons that will become apparent, I shall doubt that that was indeed the case.

The common law position that to encompass the death of another in a duel was murder has already been considered in Chapter 1. There were in addition a number of statutes available to the courts which might theoretically have been deployed in this context. However, neither the Stabbing Act 1604, which dealt with fatal stabbings committed in heat, nor the Black Act 1723, which among many other things dealt with shootings, was ever intended to be and was ever applied to the penalisation of duellists. Yet in 1803 Parliament passed a further act which seemed ideally suited to application in the suppression of duelling. The so-called ‘Ellenborough Act’ made it a capital offence to ‘shoot at, stab or cut’ another, regardless of whether any injury was inflicted. In a sense, the very severity of the act might be supposed to have made some reluctant to apply it in the context of duelling, although to an extent this objection was nullified by a later reform of the act in 1837 which made the offence capital only if an injury had occurred.

In practice, however, the Ellenborough Act was not to be deployed against duellists – although lawyers and parliamentarians were aware of the possibility that it might be.