Thomas Markle, the estranged father of Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle, has challenged Harry Windsor, Duke of Sussex, to a duel. “Man up and fly down and see me,” he told reporters last week. Doing his best Lavar Ball impression, père Markle said in another interview: “The way he’s been acting, I think he’d crouch on the ground before he gets to 10 steps. He’s a candy-ass.”
Doubtless, the former HRH will have the good grace to ignore the challenge of an admitted liar and fame-seeker. And all for the better, as I imagine it might cause some consternation at home should Harry, a 10-year veteran and captain of the British Army, shoot his father-in-law, belligerent windbag though he is.
Formal duels may have fallen out of fashion with the dawn of modernity, but the masculine impulse to “take this outside” has existed as long as our species has. Long before gladiators faced off in the Colosseum, Homer wrote his tale of bonny Achilles slaying the warrior prince Hector mano-a-mano beneath the walls of Troy. Livy’s History of Rome records the 5th-century B.C. Roman general Aulus Cornelius Cossus beheading the Etruscan king Lars Tolumnius in single combat, earning him the spolia opima (the highest spoils of war).
The most well-known duel on American shores may belong to Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, but the early republic’s most prolific duelist was none other than our seventh president, Andrew Jackson. It’s estimated that cantankerous Old Hickory took part in anywhere from 10 to 100 duels, and upon taking office in 1829, Jackson became the only president to have killed a man in a duel.
In that notorious 1806 duel with Charles Dickinson, Jackson received a bullet in the chest that was never removed. (Due to this and infections from other wounds, Jackson’s diet consisted largely of gin and water.) Dickinson was a renowned marksman, so on the day, Jackson wore a loose, oversized coat to hide his slender frame. At the command, Dickinson swiftly aimed and fired, hitting Jackson in the chest.
The bullet missed his heart “by little more than an inch.” Yet Jackson, to Dickinson’s amazement, stood his ground. “His face grim as death,” wrote historian H.W. Brands, Jackson “raised his own pistol, looked implacably into Dickinson’s stricken eyes, and pulled the trigger.” Jackson’s bullet took his foe just below the ribs; Dickinson died several hours later.
It was Jackson’s supreme strength of will, more than his skill, that carried the day. He had deliberately chosen to let the other man shoot first, so as to allow himself time to aim. “I should have hit him,” Jackson later said, “if he had shot me through the brain.”
