The Duke appears to have been most unworthily angered at his loss, which has been (we suspect extravagantly) stated to have amounted to £10,000. He always declared he had been “sold.” There seems no cause for such an assertion.
This defeat proved Broughton’s ruin. The Duke of Cumberland could never speak of this contest with any degree of temper, and turned his back on the beaten man. The legislature interfered, the amphitheatre was closed, and Broughton never fought more. Previous to this battle, it is said he had grown plethoric; if so, it requires no great acumen to opine the cause of the sudden swelling which temporarily blinded him.
The best monument to the memory of Broughton is the character and description of his pupil and admirer, the gallant Captain, which eulogy, like that of Lord Byron on the “eminent” Mr. John Jackson, remain permanent answers to the slanderers of pugilists and pugilism.
“Advance, brave Broughton!” exclaims Captain Godfrey. “Thee I pronounce captain of the boxers. As far as I can look back, I think I ought to open the ‘characters’ with him: I know none so fit, so able to lead up the van. This is giving him the living preference to the rest; but I hope I have not given any cause to say that there has appeared in any of my characters a partial tincture. I have thoroughly consulted nothing but my unbiassed mind, and my heart has known no call but merit. Wherever I have praised, I have no desire of pleasing; wherever decried, no fear of offending. Broughton, by his manly merit, has bid the highest, therefore has my heart. I really think all will poll with me, who poll with the same principle. Sure there is some standing reason for this preference: what can be stronger than to say that, for seventeen or eighteen years, he has fought every able boxer that appeared against him, and has never yet been beat? This being the case, we may venture to conclude from it; but not to build alone on this, let us examine farther into his merits. What is it that he wants? Has he not all that others want, and all the best can have? Strength equal to what is human, skill and judgment equal to what can be acquired, undebauched wind, and a bottom spirit never to pronounce the word ‘enough.’ He fights the stick as well as most men, and understands a good deal of the small sword. This practice has given him the distinction of time and measure beyond the rest. He stops as regularly as the swordsman, and carries his blows truly in the line; he steps not back, distrusting of himself, to stop a blow, and puddle in the return, with an arm unaided by his body, producing but fly-flap blows, such as pastrycooks use to beat those insects from their tarts and cheese-cakes. No! Broughton steps bold and firmly in, bids a welcome to the coming blow; receives it with his guardian arm; then, with a general summons of his swelling muscles, and his firm body seconding his arm, and supplying it with all its weight, pours the pile-driving force upon his man.
“That I may not be thought particular in dwelling long upon Broughton, I leave him with this assertion, that as he, I believe, will scarce trust a battle to a waning age, I never shall think he is to be beat till I see him beaten.”[[18]]
Broughton retired into private life. In his later days he resided in Walcot Place, Lambeth. He was for many years seen as a constant frequenter of sales of private property, where he purchased out-of-the-way things, curiosities, and articles of vertu, and adhered to the costume of the period of the Second George. Of these habits the author of “Recollections of an Octogenarian,” gives us the following information:—“He appeared to me,” says the writer, “a heavy, thick, round-made, large-boned man, about the height of Humphries.[[19]] To be sure when I saw him last he was in the vale of years, and had acquired some corpulency. It might be about the year 1785, when attending a lady, to look at some household goods, which were to be sold by auction in Walcot Place, Lambeth, a catalogue could not be procured, and seeing Broughton with one in his hand, I civilly requested the favour of him to permit the lady to look at a certain article in it. The old man replied with a sullen asperity of countenance, ‘I want it myself,’ turning his back upon me. At the instant, up started a little, pert, natty, humorous Jew broker, who, with real politeness, made the lady an offer of his catalogue, and casting an arch look at the testy old champion, who was still close to us, ‘Ah!’ said he, ‘Master Broughton, then you are a bear to-day,’ alluding to the bulls and bears of Change Alley, where Broughton was well known to be daily jobbing with his property.”
The “Octogenarian” confirms the statement given below from the Annual Register:—“He (Broughton) had long before left the ring, and lived independently on the property he had saved, and on an annuity which he enjoyed from his Royal Master, the old, or Culloden, Duke of Cumberland, whom, by the bye, he used in former days to style ‘Duke William.’” Boxiana says he died January the 8th, 1789, but this can hardly be the correct date. In the Annual Register for 1789, Chronicle for January, we read as follows:—“Died, at his house, at Walcot Place, Lambeth, in his 85th year, the celebrated John Broughton, whose skill in boxing is well known, and will ever be recorded in the annals of that science. He was originally bred a waterman. His patron, the late Duke of Cumberland, got him appointed one of the yeomen of the guard, which place he enjoyed till his death. He was buried in Lambeth Church on the 21st instant, and his funeral procession was adorned with the presence of the several capital professors of boxing. He is supposed to have died worth £7,000.”
His enjoyment of his place and pension till death seems to qualify the “utter desertion” of his patron, and falsify the “ruin” which is related in Boxiana apparently to “adorn a tale,” if not “to point a moral.”
