Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust
Wit that can creep and pride that licks the dust.”
To this apparently Lord Hervey vouchsafed no retort, so Pope was adjudged to have been the victor in the affair. But not content with this, he wrote an open letter in prose to Lord Hervey. But this was suppressed, as Queen Caroline got hold of a copy of it, and desired Pope not to publish it, as it held her dear friend and companion up to the most cutting ridicule. She hated Pope for this, but concealed her rage lest worse should come of it. But Lord Hervey’s duels were not all confined to poetry; he had one with Pulteney, and the weapons were not words but swords. This occurred in 1730. It was a squabble over the authorship of a pamphlet called “Sedition and Defamation Displayed,” which attacked both Pulteney and Bolingbroke very severely, and with the writing of which Hervey was credited, and unjustly as it turned out eventually.
The heated Pulteney, however, rushed into print, and published another pamphlet “A Proper Reply to a late Scurrilous Libel” in which he abused Walpole and Hervey, referring to the latter by his nickname of “Lord Fanny,” and depicted him half man and half woman, dragging in, as was usual, in those days with execrable taste, certain of Hervey’s infirmities.
This pamphlet created a perfect fury of anger at Court, and very naturally aroused the resentment of Hervey peculiarly susceptible, like many who indulge in cruel satire about others. He wrote to Pulteney and demanded to know whether he had written the pamphlet, and upon Pulteney replying that he would tell him, when he admitted the authorship of “Sedition and Defamation Displayed,” Hervey worked himself up into such a fury, and was so egged on by the other courtiers—he was not a fighting man—that he got at last entangled in a duel with Pulteney.
They met on a fine June afternoon between three and four o’clock in Upper St. James’s Park, just behind Arlington Street, Hervey being accompanied by Fox, and Pulteney by Sir J. Rushout.
There appears to have been some pretty sword play, and both got slightly wounded—which shows that Hervey had some pluck—“but,” writes Mr. Thomas Pelham, a witness of the affray, “Mr. Pulteney had once so much the advantage of Lord Hervey that he would have infallibly run my Lord through the body if his foot had not slipped, and then the seconds took the occasion to part them.”
Pulteney, then, in a very magnanimous manner, appears to have embraced Hervey, and expressed sorrow at “the accident of their quarrel.”
At the same time he very unnecessarily added that he would never attack Lord Hervey again either with his pen or his lips.
Hervey, however, showed his quality by not reciprocating his kindly feeling, but merely bowed and sulked.