On the morning of November 15, 1712, two of Britain's most important peers, the fourth Baron Mohun & the fourth Duke of Hamilton, met in Hyde Park. In a flurry of brutal swordplay that lasted perhaps two minutes, both fell mortally wounded. For months afterward, the kingdom was in an uproar, for the duel had occurred at a moment of grave political crisis. Whigs & Tories, increasingly desperate over the future as Queen Anne neared death, hurled charges of political murder & treasonous plotting against one another. Charge & countercharge filled the press as the social & moral crises mounted. Using the famous Mohun-Hamilton duel as a focal point, the author re-creates the desperate aristocratic world of late seventeenth & early eighteenth-century Britain. Mohun & Hamilton stood at opposite ends of a bitterly divided political spectrum, but politics was not the only cause of their quarrel. A decade-long battle over a disputed inheritance was a crucial element, & the author shows how, amid the luxury & ostentation of the aristocratic lifestyle, something very like moral anarchy reigned. The result is a stunning narrative of life & death in a tumultuous time, an era in which incivility & moral turpitude ruled beneath a thin veneer of aristocratic manners.