Pistol duelling went out with a bang – never better said – in Spain thanks to a very controversial duel in 1904 in Sevilla involving the Marqués de Pickman and his wife’s lover.

The weapons were rifled pistols and french swords as standby just in neither could hit a barn door as the established 15 paces. They weren’t needed as the Marqués received a well-aimed bullet in the heart. This was not one of the poncy affairs that concluded with first blood draw, but only to be concluded with a serious wound or death.

The two men met, together with their seconds, on the Hacienda del Rosario on the outskirs of Sevilla at five in the afternoon -none of this uncivilised ‘at dawn’ stuff. Three shots later, it was all over; better said the duel was, but not the repercussions.

The Marqués’s name, Pickman, comes from the fact that he married the Marquesa de Pickman, who was the owner of the then famous English tyle company in Sevilla, which had moved out from Liverpool in the 19th Century.

Anyway, the Marqués, who was generous with his wife’s money, got them into financial difficulties which led him to accept a loan from a Captain of the Guardia Civil, Vicente García de Paredes. It was rumoured that the Marqués turned a blind eye to the captain’s affair with the Marquesa for this reason.

However, gossiping being the national sport of Sevilla at the time, the captain’s amourous dealings with the Marquesa on the grapevine front page, something that led to the Marqués challenging the captain to a duel – bloody silly idea if ever there was one.

And he did it publicly, by slapping his wife’s lover with his glove at the entrance to the Cervantes Theatre in Sevilla, so plenty of witnesses.

Now King Felipe V had outlawed dueling in 1716, which was included in the Criminal Law Code of 1805, punishable by imprisonment where death was involved. However, it went on quite a lot and as it normally involved miffed toffs, a blind eye was turned and deaths were put down to natural causes and nobody battted an eyelid.

The funneral was accompanied by great deal of pomp; the ebony coffin was transferred in a golden coach and the newspapers made a meal of it. So, let’s say that his death didn’t go unnoticed.

The trouble was that dead duelists, according to cannoical law, can’t be buried on consecrated ground, so the Archbishop of Sevilla, the Cardenal Spínola, stopped his burial in the city’s cementry.

Why was the Archbishop so finicky over this, if the Church and Nobility, and Army were such good buddies? Well, because the Government had approved legislation that was not exactly favourable to the Church.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. There they were outside the cementry with the impatient and holed corpse of the Marqués. The accompanying crowd were not happy and numbers carried the day against the Church’s wishes and placed the body in the family vault.

But he wasn’t there long because at three in the morning, the body was removed by the municipal police accompanied by a contingent of the Guardia Civil. It was then interred in the cementario de disidents, which was the graveyard for heretics and for people who take their own life.

This is where the smelly stuff hit the fan because the affair ended up in the Cortes (parliament) so there wasn’t much chance of ‘turning a blind eye and claiming natural causes, etc’

Protests ran rife in Sevilla with the mob stomping around in indignation over the removal of the Marqúes’s remains from the main cementry and if that were not enough, the military did a spot of sabre rattling and it came to the Prime Minister’s ears that they would not tolerate a possible incarceration of the winner of the duel. So the government ordered that the case against him shelved.

And that, Ladies and Gentlemen, was the last duel to be fought in Spain, because after all that rumpus nobody was going to look the other way when Gentlemen killed each other in public and pass it off as a ‘heart attack.’ In Pickman’s case, his heart was certainly attacked, that’s for sure.

(Feature: the last duel in Spain)