High life, low morals - Victor L Stater

EArly on the morning of 15 November 1712, two prominent members of the aristocracy, the Whig Lord Mohun and the Tory Duke of Hamilton, met in Hyde Park to fight a duel. In a flurry of brutal swordplay that lasted perhaps two minutes, both fell mortally wounded. For months afterwards Stuart society was in uproar, for the duel occured at a moment of grave political crisis. Whigs and Tories, increasingly desperate over the future as Queen Anne neared death, hurled charges of political murder and treasonous plotting at one another. The effects of this fatal encounter were to last for several generations, and over a century later Thackeray used it as the basis for his novel Henry Esmond.

In this fascinating book, Victor Stater takes the duel as a focal point from which to recreate the violent, cynical world of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century British artistocracy. He brings to life the London of Pope and Swift and Defoe, a place of huge financial gains and catastrophic reverses, of street crimes and gambling dens of the infamous Kit-Cat Club. the result is an unforgettable picture of society in upheaval verging on anarchy, and of two men driven by demons of their own making as well as by social forces beyond their control.