Chap­ter III – In the Mat­ter of the Hang­ing of Dun­can Jopp begins with a court­room scene that shakes young Archie Weir to the core. Watch­ing the pro­ceed­ings unfold under the com­mand of his father, Lord Her­mis­ton, Archie is con­front­ed by the sheer final­i­ty of jus­tice ren­dered with­out mer­cy. Dun­can Jopp’s guilt may be estab­lished, but it is the spec­ta­cle of his punishment—and the cold, almost the­atri­cal author­i­ty behind it—that unset­tles Archie most. He sees not only the law at work but a sys­tem that seems to glo­ri­fy its own sever­i­ty. His father’s com­posed deliv­ery of the sen­tence, void of vis­i­ble remorse, appears less like jus­tice and more like cru­el­ty mas­querad­ing as duty. Archie, over­whelmed, reacts not with silence but with open con­dem­na­tion. His out­cry in public—calling the exe­cu­tion “God-defy­ing murder”—does not just chal­lenge the ver­dict but the author­i­ty of the bench itself, and worse, the hon­or of his own father.

This protest leads to a deeply per­son­al con­fronta­tion between father and son, one that strips away all for­mal­i­ty. Lord Her­mis­ton, though a man accus­tomed to author­i­ty, is clear­ly tak­en aback by the emo­tion­al charge of Archie’s objec­tion. He does not meet it with vio­lence or dra­ma, but with some­thing sharper—disappointment, laced with anger. Archie, in turn, defends his response as a refusal to be com­plic­it in what he sees as moral decay masked as jus­tice. He does not ques­tion the law but the spir­it in which it is enforced. For Archie, the sight of Jopp’s exe­cu­tion is not a les­son in order but a moment of moral col­lapse. Her­mis­ton calls it duty. Archie calls it bar­barism. The divide between them grows not from mis­un­der­stand­ing, but from the clar­i­ty with which each sees the world. One sees prin­ci­ple in dis­ci­pline; the oth­er, prin­ci­ple in com­pas­sion.

Their argu­ment expos­es not just ide­o­log­i­cal gaps but emo­tion­al wounds left long unspo­ken. Archie reveals that his dis­il­lu­sion­ment extends beyond this tri­al. It has roots in years of observ­ing his father’s unyield­ing nature—firm in court, dis­tant at home. Her­mis­ton, for all his author­i­ty, shows flash­es of some­thing deeper—perhaps regret, per­haps weari­ness. He tells Archie blunt­ly that duty is not shaped by what one feels, but by what one must do. Archie finds this phi­los­o­phy unbear­able. He argues instead for human con­science, for the right to dis­sent when laws no longer reflect human­i­ty. The options his father presents—law or ministry—feel to him like pris­ons, built not from stone but from expec­ta­tion. In propos­ing the army, Archie seeks a life removed from the cold log­ic of legal­ism, a place where hon­or might still hold mean­ing. His father scoffs at the sug­ges­tion, view­ing it as child­ish escapism rather than prin­ci­pled rebel­lion.

As the con­ver­sa­tion draws to a close, nei­ther man yields. Archie does not apol­o­gize for his defi­ance, and Her­mis­ton does not revoke his author­i­ty. The pos­si­bil­i­ty of dis­in­her­i­tance is raised not as a threat, but as a dec­la­ra­tion of final­i­ty. A wall has been built, brick by brick, and now stands between them, unshak­able. Yet in the hard­ness of Hermiston’s stance lies some­thing more than pride. He speaks of his role as not mere­ly a father, but a pub­lic ser­vant bound to deliv­er jus­tice whether or not it bruis­es the heart. Archie hears these words, but they do not soft­en him. He walks away not crushed, but con­firmed in his resolve to choose a dif­fer­ent path, even if it leads to estrange­ment. The silence that fol­lows is loud­er than the shout­ing could have been.

This chap­ter brings the novel’s themes into sharp focus: jus­tice, moral­i­ty, fam­i­ly, and the bur­den of lega­cy. Archie rep­re­sents a new gen­er­a­tion, one that ques­tions inher­it­ed pow­er and seeks gen­tler truths in a harsh world. Her­mis­ton, though seem­ing­ly rigid, stands as a man shaped by struc­ture and sac­ri­fice, bound by the same law that iso­lates him. Their con­flict is not mere­ly per­son­al; it is soci­etal. The law as an insti­tu­tion, the fam­i­ly as a struc­ture, and the indi­vid­ual con­science all col­lide here. The exe­cu­tion of Dun­can Jopp becomes more than an event—it becomes a sym­bol of every­thing Archie hopes to resist and Her­mis­ton feels com­pelled to defend. What’s left is not res­o­lu­tion but dis­tance, not heal­ing but the promise of deep­er rup­ture. And with it, the sto­ry moves toward a future shaped as much by prin­ci­ple as by pain.