Fencing spectacle at Carlton House: d'Eon faces Saint-Georges

The Prince of Wales sat among nobles and fencing aficionados at Carlton House on 9 April 1787 as the Chevalier de Saint-Georges and Chevalier d’Eon put on a celebrated fencing display that pushed the bout far beyond a private challenge. The room was part court entertainment, part combat showcase, and the audience knew it.

That is why the surviving print matters. Victor Marie Picot’s 1789 engraving fixed the scene in circulation two years after the match, turning a live performance into an image that could travel well past the elegant rooms where it happened. The Royal Collection identifies the subject through that print, and the effect is hard to miss: this was fencing packaged for elite spectatorship, with the Prince of Wales at the center of the frame and the nobility close enough to make the bout feel like state theater.

The pairing itself made the spectacle larger than the salle. Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-Andrée-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont had lived publicly as a woman from 1777, after Louis XVI ordered her to dress according to her sex. She returned to London in 1785 and stayed there until her death in 1810, while her name gave rise to the term eonism, which kept her case in cultural circulation long after the bout ended. By 1787, d’Eon was not simply a fencer on display. She was a public figure already being read through questions of gender, conduct, and reputation.

Saint-Georges brought a different kind of celebrity. Born in Guadeloupe on 25 December 1745, Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, became a champion fencer after training in Paris, where he entered the Royal Polytechnic Academy of Weapons and Riding at 13. He had visited London earlier in 1787 at the invitation of Henry Angelo and had already taken part in exhibition matches, which placed him squarely inside the commercial fencing world that Angelo helped build. His later association with the fencing mask, alongside La Boëssière, shows how closely performance and technical innovation could sit together in this period.

The Carlton House bout also left room for satire. A later British Museum print showed the Prince of Wales and Hanger being beaten by d’Eon and Saint-Georges in a boxing scene, proof that both fencers had become recognizable enough to be used as comic shorthand. That is the real line from Carlton House: not a duel hidden from view, but a staged assault-at-arms that turned martial skill, patronage, race, gender presentation, and celebrity into public spectacle before the Revolution.