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Wedlock:  How Georgian Britain's Worst Husband Met His Match
Chapter 1
An Affair of Honour
London, 13 January 1777
Settling down to read his newspaper by the candlelight illuminating the dining room of the Adelphi Tavern, John Hull anticipated a quiet evening. Having opened five years earlier, as an integral part of the vast riverside development designed by the Adam brothers, the Adelphi Tavern and Coffee House had established a reputation for its fine dinners and genteel company. Many an office worker like Hull, a clerk at the Government’s Salt Office, sought refuge from the clamour of the nearby Strand in the tavern’s first-floor dining room with its elegant ceiling panels depicting Pan and Bacchus in pastel shades. On a Monday evening in January, with the day’s work behind him, Hull could expect to read his journal undisturbed.

At first, when he heard the two loud bangs, at about 7 pm, Hull assumed they were caused by a door slamming downstairs. A few minutes later, there was no mistaking the sound of clashing swords. Throwing aside his newspaper, Hull ran down the stairs and tried to open the door to the ground-floor parlour. Finding it locked, and growing increasingly alarmed at the violent clatter from within, he shouted for waiters to help him force the door. Finally bursting into the room, Hull could dimly make out two figures fencing furiously in the dark. Reckless as to his own safety, the clerk grabbed the sword arm of the nearest man, thrust himself between the two duellists and insisted that they lay down their swords. Even so it was several more minutes before he could persuade the first swordsman to yield his weapon.

It was not a moment too soon. The man who had reluctantly surrendered his sword, now fell swooning to the floor and in the light of candles brought by servants, a large blood stain could be seen seeping across his waistcoat. A cursory examination by Hull convinced him that the man was gravely injured. ‘I think there were three wounds in his right breast, and one upon his sword arm,’ he would later attest. The second duellist, although less seriously wounded, was bleeding from a gash to his thigh. With no time to be lost, servants were despatched to summon medical aid. They returned with a physician, named John Scott, who ran a dispensary from his house nearby, and a surgeon, one Jessé Foot, who lived in a neighbouring street. Both concurred with Hull’s amateur opinion, agreeing that the collapsed man had suffered a serious stab wound where his opponent’s sword had run right through his chest from right to left – presumably on account of the fencers standing sideways on - as well as a smaller cut to his abdomen and a scratch on his sword arm.
Dishevelled and deathly pale, his shirt and waistcoat opened to bare his chest, the patient sprawled in a chair as the medical men tried to revive him with smelling salts, water and wine, and to staunch the bleeding by applying a poultice. Whatever benefit the pair may have bestowed by this eminently sensible first aid was almost certainly reversed when they cut open a vein in their patient’s arm to let blood, the customary treatment for almost every ailment. Unsurprisingly, given the weakening effect of this further loss of blood, no sooner had the swordsman revived than he fainted twice more. It was with some justification, therefore, that the two medics pronounced their patient’s injuries might well prove fatal. The discovery of two discarded pistols, still warm from having been fired, suggested that the outcome could easily have been even more decisive. With his life declared to be hanging by a thread, the fading duellist now urged his erstwhile adversary to flee the tavern – taking pains to insist that he had acquitted himself honourably – and even offered his own carriage for the getaway.

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The Knife Man



Chapter 1

St George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner, London
December 1785

The patient was faced with an agonizing choice. Above the pitiful cries and moans of fellow sufferers on the fetid ward, he listened as the surgeon outlined the dilemma. If the large swelling at the back of his knee was left to continue growing, it would eventually burst, leading to certain and painful death. If, on the other hand, the leg was amputated above the knee, there was a slim chance he would survive the crude operation – provided he did not die of shock on the operating table, or bleed to death immediately after, or succumb to infection on the filthy ward days later – but he would be permanently disabled.

For the 45-year-old hackney coach driver either option would have seemed unthinkable. Since he had first noticed the swelling in the hollow behind his knee three years ago, the lump had grown steadily until it was now the size of an orange; it throbbed continuously and had become so painful he could barely walk. Extended on the hospital bed before him, the leg and foot were hideously swollen while the skin had turned an unsightly mottled brown. Once the coachman had gained admittance to St George’s, successfully persuading the governors he was a deserving recipient of their charity, the surgeon on duty had lost no time in making a diagnosis. Examining the tell-tale lump, which was ‘so large as to distend the two hamstrings laterally’, he had no doubts about the verdict. The surgeon had seen popliteal aneurysms at exactly the same spot on numerous occasions before and knew all too well the prognosis.

It was a common enough problem in the cab driver’s line of work: popliteal aneurysms could happen to anyone but appeared to occur with unnatural frequency among coach drivers, postillions and others working in equestrian occupations in Georgian London. Aneurysms could develop in arteries anywhere in the body either through injury or, more commonly, due to a medical condition in which the artery walls lose their elasticity. Coach drivers who already suffered an underlying tendency towards the condition may quite possibly have exacerbated the problem by wearing high leather riding boots which rubbed at the back of the knee. Whatever the cause, the weakened section of artery would begin to bulge and develop into a sac which eventually became filled with clotted blood; when these occurred behind the knee, in the popliteal artery, they were not only extremely painful but made walking exceedingly difficult. The outcome, in whichever case, was often an early death, if not from the condition itself then from the treatment generally meted out in remedy. To lose his leg, even supposing the coach driver survived such a drastic procedure in an era long before anaesthesia or antiseptics, would inevitably mean never being able to work again. But to carry on working, navigating his horse-drawn carriage over London’s rutted and congested roads, would be clearly impossible if the lump was left to grow. Either way, the cabbie faced destitution and the workhouse.

But there was a third choice, the surgeon at his bedside now confided on that day in early December, for a coachman sufficiently willing or desperate. In his slow Scottish lilt, redolent of his humble Lowland farming origins, the surgeon laid out his scheme for a daring and novel operation. Surrounded by the poxed, maimed and diseased bodies of London’s poorest, huddled in their beds on the draughty, bug-ridden ward, the cabbie resolved to put his life in the hands of John Hunter.

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