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The Court in the 17th Century

A new Court?
James I’s anti-duelling campaign
The Earl Marshal & reform of the court
The court under Charles I
Reay v Ramsey
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The High Court of Chivalry in the early seventeenth century

James I’s anti-duelling campaign

James I’s anti-duelling campaign of 1613-14 was prompted by a series of high profile combats between leading courtiers in the late summer and autumn of 1613. In October the king issued a proclamation ‘prohibiting the publishing of any reports and writings of duels’. This made it an offence, punishable in Star Chamber, to publicise any of the proceedings relating to the preliminaries to a duel, or the duel itself, and also offered the Court of Chivalry as a remedy to those who felt that their honour had been impugned.’ This opened the way to a considerable extension of the court’s jurisdiction. During the 1590s and 1600s it had met on an ad hoc basis to deal with a familiar range of disputes over claims to titles, displays of arms and precedence, as well as occasional misdemeanours by heralds and arms painters. Only rarely had it tackled cases relating to duelling. The effect of the 1613 proclamation was to set the court up as the principal arbiter of the quarrels and insults which caused duels in the first place.

Order of the Lords Commissioners for the Earl   Marshal, 1618

 The driving force behind this approach was Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, the leading light among the Lords Commissioners who had exercised the office of Earl Marshal since the death of the Earl of Essex in February 1600/1. Northampton, and his in–house antiquarian, Sir Robert Cotton, had been gathering documentation and reviewing remedies for the problem since 1609, when Henry IV of France had highlighted the whole problem by issuing his own anti-duelling edict. During the weeks following James’s October 1613 proclamation, Northampton worked  on a more extensive scheme which eventually produced a second proclamation ‘against private challenges and combats’ of  February 1613/14 and an accompanying Edict and severe Censure against Private Combats and Combatants, both issued in the name of the king.

The principle behind Northampton’s approach was to try to tackle the root cause of duelling by providing the gentry with a remedy for insulting words – ‘the first word upon which a quarrel is begunne’ – following the practise in Spain where, so Northampton claimed, the readiness to punish ‘ill language’ had led to the virtual eradication of the practice. Under the terms of the royal Edict, insults were to be reported to the Court of Chivalry if the parties lived in the vicinity of London, or to the Lord Lieutenant and his deputies if they lived elsewhere. It was their responsibility to inflict immediate punishment on the offender and provide reparation for the injured party. Punishment was normally to take the form of a spell in prison, banishment from court, removal from the commission of the peace (if the offender was a J.P.) and deprivation of ‘that usual and ordinarie liberties (which all gentlemen enjoy as their birth right) to weare swords and daggers.’ Reparation would usually be by means of a public apology and submission, which would not only compensate the injured party, but also act as a deterrent to others. In devising these remedies, Northampton was explicitly acknowledging a view that had become firmly established within the gentleman’s honour code, that if he allowed an insult to go unchallenged his reputation would suffer irreparable damage. What the Edict proposed was that the repair of such injuries should now be in the hands of a group of judges ‘of noble birth, of honourable reputation, of sound judgement’ who, acting in the king’s name, would have the power ‘to interprete and compound all questions of honour.’ By offering the gentry an ‘honour court’ of unimpeachable authority it was hoped that they could be weaned off the temptation to duel. Once this system was in place, the February 1613/14 proclamation explained, it would no longer be possible to make the argument that a gentleman had no remedy other than the duel when he was insulted or given the lie.

Northampton’s far reaching and imaginative scheme, however, quickly ran out of steam. His own death in June 1614, and the belief expressed by James in March 1616 that ‘we have by the severitie of our Edict, put down and in good part mastered that audacious custome of duelles’, deprived it of much of its impetus. The crown opted instead to put  most of its effort behind the approach proposed in the 1613/14 proclamations which was to use Star Chamber to punish the act of issuing or sending a challenge to duel. As originally advocated by the new attorney general, Sir Francis Bacon, this was intended as a stop gap until the whole matter could be addressed in parliamentary legislation; but the failure of the 1614 Parliament ensured that it had to serve longer term, and for the remainder of James’s reign most duelling cases were tried in Star Chamber.  Northampton’s proposals were not entirely neglected. In one of the more high profile Star Chamber cases, Darcy v Markham, Bacon himself, when giving sentence in November 1616, acknowledged that ‘the matter of reparation of honour of the Lord Darcy’ should be referred to the Court of Chivalry. But the court had to wait until the arrival of a new Earl Marshal before it began to take the initiative.

Proceed to: The Earl Marshal and the reform of the court