The Very Idea!
For a muzzleloading blackpowder long gun, .30 caliber is pretty small potatoes. The low velocities possible in blackpowder arms call for big projectiles to be effective; .50 caliber blackpowder rifles and muskets are in the lower end of the range. And, yes, I'm aware that famous movie, Jeremiah Johnson, had the hero taking to the mountains initially with a .30 caliber Hawken, but that's hardly the most egregious horse squeeze Hollywood has served up where guns are concerned.
Even so, .32 caliber squirrel rifles weren’t uncommon, and in that range, these old guns could be a pleasure to shoot. The sole .32 caliber long rifle I was able to handle and shoot some years ago was very easy to handle; recoil, even with a solid brass buttplate, was very manageable.
Imagine, however, firing seven .30 caliber muzzleloaders at once, with all of that coming back through a single buttstock. That’s like, 2.10 caliber. Then, imagine doing it twice, in quick succession. That’s two 2-inch guns, going off against your shoulder.
Ouch.
That’s what Thomas Thornton’s 14-barrel volley gun was set up to do, and that had to be, well, jarring, regardless of which side of the gun you were on. Granted, back in the flintlock days, if you wanted multiple shots, the easiest way to do it was with multiple barrels, making these kinds of volley guns the machine guns of their time.
Colonel Thomas Thornton’s gun, though, was something else and then some.
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The Man
Not a whole lot is known about the creator of this monster, one Colonel Thomas Thornton. We know he was born in London in either 1751 or 1752. He attended Charterhouse School, Glasgow University, and then entered Trinity College in Cambridge. He inherited his father’s estate in York and developed a fondness for hunting.
In time, Thornton was appointed as commander of his father’s militia regiment, and that’s where the interesting events begin. There was some dispute between Thornton and some of the other officers in his regiment. One thing led to another, and while details are not known, Colonel Thornton was court-martialed by his own regiment and ended up resigning from the army. While we don’t know the basis for the court-martial, there’s at least one hint; in 1802, Thornton and his wife Alicia traveled to France – then an enemy of Britain – and were introduced to Napoleon Bonaparte, who impressed Thornton enough that the former Colonel presented Napoleon with a pair of pricey Durs Egg pistols.
Could Thornton have harbored sympathies for France and Bonaparte? Could that have been one of the reasons, perhaps the main reason, for his being court-martialed and cashiered? It certainly seems possible, although records are sketchy. But he didn’t forget the insult.
The Gun
In 1800, a couple of years before meeting old Bony, former Colonel Thornton commissioned a gun from London gunmaker William Dupe. (Yes, it seems that really was his name.) This would be the volley gun described above: Two sets of seven .30 caliber barrels, wherein each set of barrels was discharged by a separate flintlock mechanism, one on each side of a relatively normal-looking stock that may well have come off a double-barreled fowling piece. The completed gun bore two engraved slogans, the first being “Perdition to Conspirators,” the second, “With this alone I’ll defend Robro Camp 1795,” both apparently resulting from events around his court-martial.
And what a volley gun it was!
The interesting part of this monster was that you didn’t necessarily have to tote around the entire 14-barrel gizmo. Thornton, when commissioning his intimidating monstery, had a second stock and lock made up to accommodate only one seven-barrel set. That would save a fair amount of time reloading, but one would also only have one explosion of seven .30 caliber projectiles at hand. That second stock is reportedly engraved with the words “A Verite Gagner,” or “Truth from Victory.” That’s an odd notion for a system of justice, but when you’re toting around something that can blast seven bullets with one trigger pull, by the standards of that time, an intimidating prospect indeed, one may be given latitude to write some of one’s own rules.It’s like a gun version of the Golden Rule: He who has the gun makes the rules.
When one is handling the full-up monster, well, you’ve got 14 barrels, each of which has to be fed a measured powder charge, each of which has to have a ball seated, and then one has two flintlock pans to prime; it’s not clear if there was anything like extra priming required to carry the fire from one pan to all those barrels. My own experience with front-stuffers indicates that this could take as long as 10 to 15 minutes, assuming one is using a single patched ball in each barrel.Once all that’s done, one trigger pull detonates one set of seven barrels, and at that, the fun isn’t over, because one has a second set to send .30 caliber lead balls flying freaking everywhere.
As far as we know, Thornton never used this beast in any kind of serious action. Volley guns were used in naval actions, though, and one wouldn’t want to be climbing a boarding line or a scaling ladder and have someone at the top point one of these things at you and send that blast your way. That could ruin a soldier or sailor’s whole day. But the best information has it that the Thornton gun remained a one-of-a-kind curiosity, if a brutal one, and we can only imagine the recoil must have been daunting.
Thornton’s monstrosity is now in the Liege Museum in Liege, Belgium, and that’s probably right where it belongs.
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What Happened Next?
Well, the advent of the percussion cap and later, the self-contained cartridge, led to developments that were easier to handle than simply wrapping 14 barrels around one stock and exploding the whole thing at an advancing enemy. Newer developments like the Gatling guns were much easier to reload, if nothing else; that 7&7 discharge (the gun, not the booze) may have been devastating, but then one had to sit and reload all those barrels, a time-consuming process.
Now, the volley gun in general and Thomas Thornton’s “Perdition to Conspirators” piece in particular are items of the past, now museum pieces and curiosities. That’s probably just as well.
