The popular account of Cardigan after the Charge
The popular account of Cardigan after the Charge has it that, when questioned of the loss of his men, Cardigan casually replied that "it is no fault of mine," rode back to his yacht, and enjoyed a bath, dinner, and a bottle of champagne. The truth is considerably different, and it provides Lord Haw-Haw with some depth of character.
For one thing, Cardigan's "no fault of mine" remark was made to his own men, when they cheerily offered to go back in against the Russian guns. Cardigan refused, saying that the charge was "a mad-brained trick, but it is no fault of mine." He visited some of the wounded, and then slept on the ground near his wounded aide Maxse. A nurse reports that Cardigan spent half an hour soothing the bugler; others who were there reported that Cardigan spent the following days in gloom and grief. And the obvious point: in the one great military skirmish of his life, and the one chance when he too might capture some of the glory that many of his peers had acquired at Waterloo, Cardigan acquitted himself surprisingly well.
There was a flash of popularity for Cardigan upon his return. Despite the increasing public skepticism of the follies of the upper classes in warfare, Cardigan was given a hero's welcome back to England. Even Punch, which had ridiculed him for so long, ran a patriotic cartoon of the Charge captioned "A Trump card . Cardigan himself told the story of the Charge to Queen Victoria and her children, but he also told the Queen of the soldiers' hardships and the inadequacies of their equipment.
Even this one victory turned sour for Cardigan, Once it was realized that the Charge was a monumental blunder, the leaders of the Crimean war broke into a blind panic of writing to the newspapers, accusing everyone else of having given the order. Suddenly, the Lord Haw-Haw image resurfaced, and Cardigan spent months defending himself in what was, for obvious reasons, a matter of high personal honor. But eventually even that controversy faded away, and Cardigan settled into life in the landed gentry, scandalizing the upper classes by marrying a woman many years his junior and of course, retelling the story of his charge at the head of the Six Hundred.