On February 16, 1837 the House of Lords convened in the former Painted Chamber of the Palace of Westminster. The Houses of Parliament, destroyed in an 1834 fire, were still in the process of rebuilding its interiors when they oversaw the first trial of a nobleman by his peers since 1776. The defendant, exercising his right to a trial by peers, was James Thomas Brudenell, the 7th Earl of Cardigan, Lieutenant Colonel of the 11th Hussars. The charge was intent to murder a fellow military officer, Lieutenant Harvey Tuckett, in one of the strangest scandals of Victorian England.

Long before the Crimean War ensured his infamy, Cardigan already won an unenviable reputation as one of the most disliked soldiers in the British Army. Having purchased his colonelcy of the 11th Hussars, one of the Army’s elite cavalry regiments, Cardigan spent tens of thousands of pounds reworking them into his own image. Their elaborate, gold-braided coats and tight red trousers earned them the nickname “Cherrypickers” or “Cherrybums,” alternately a source of awe and ridicule among the general public. His enlisted men seemed not to mind their commander’s stern ways; admiring his handsome appearance and regal bearing, they nicknamed him “Jim the Bear” and turning out on Sundays to salute him in the street (though it was said that he paid them for the privilege).

But Cardigan failed to inspire similar loyalty in his officers: career soldiers who resented his buying a commission over their heads, officers who’d served in India for whom he held a snobbish contempt. He constantly rebuked them for minor infractions of etiquette, causing no end of headaches for his superiors. Mostly recently, in the summer of 1840 he’d exploded at Captain John Reynolds for ordering a black bottle of Moselle at an officer’s dinner. When Reynolds refused to apologize for his faux pas, Cardigan placed him under arrest. The affair caused the Army high command to issue a gentle reprimand, and soon members of the 11th Hussars found themselves ridiculed as “Black Bottles” by fellow soldiers and even civilians in the streets.

One recently retired officer knew Cardigan’s foibles too well, and decided he should be held to account. Lieutenant Harvey Tuckett had recently retired from the 11th Hussars (he held an honorary rank of Captain from his service in India), where he spent years enduring Cardigan’s tyrannical rule. He recalled that “within less than a month” of Cardigan’s taking command, “His Lordship had eight courtsmartial and more than a hundred men on the defaulter’s list.” A man of wit and writing talent (he regularly wrote skits and plays for the regiment’s entertainment), Tuckett covertly needled his commanding officer with anonymous letters to the press and other officers throughout his time in the Army.

Now safely out of the Army, Tuckett published a public letter detailing the “Black Bottle” affair to the Morning Chronicle. Unsurprisingly, Tuckett castigated his ex-Colonel for hiding behind his rank and privilege. “Many a gallant officer has waived the privilege which nothing but wealth and an earldom obtained for Lord Cardigan,” Tuckett observed, demanding an inquiry into His Lordship’s conduct or else “a commanding officer may outrage every gentlemanly feeling of those under his command with impunity.” The letter also included an implication that Cardigan, who had declined an offer to duel from one enraged subordinate, was not only a bully but a coward.

His Lordship’s reaction to the letter was predictable. After ensuring the Lieutenant no longer held a commission, Cardigan sent his subordinate Captain John Douglas to demand an apology. When Tuckett refused, the Earl hastened to challenge him to a duel. Attempts by fellow offers to intercede achieved nothing; Cardigan would not forget the insult. And so, he and the aggrieved Lieutenant Tuckett settled their issues as many British officers had before.

The duel took place at the Windmill, on Wimbledon Common, at five P.M. on September 12th, 1840. With Captain Douglas providing the pistols (with rifled barrels, considered an ungentlemanly adulteration of the duelist’s artist), Colonel and Lieutenant faced off at twelve paces. The first exchange of shots resulted in no casualties; Cardigan threw his empty weapon aside and demanded a second. In the second round of shots, Cardigan shot Tuckett through the abdomen, the bullet lodging in his lower ribs. The local miller Thomas Dann, who also happened to be the constable, arrived and placed Cardigan and Douglas under arrest while Tuckett recuperated with a surgeon.

Cardigan, caught with smoking pistol in hand, made no pretense of innocence. When asked if he had dueled with Captain Reynolds, Cardigan scoffed, “Do you suppose I would condescend to fight with one of my own officers?” He posted bail for the crime and reported back to the regimental barracks at Brighton that evening, expecting at worst a slap on the wrist. Having punished one recalcitrant junior officer, he soon punished a serving lieutenant, William Forrest, for complaining about his lodgements by placing him under arrest.

There was no reason to suspect Cardigan would suffer serious consequences for shooting Tuckett. Although dueling was illegal (indeed, a capital offense) under British law, it was also “accepted as part of that separate privileged world…which existed outside the world of ordinary citizens,” Cecil Woodham-Smith observes. After all, none other than the Duke of Wellington had fought a duel with his political rival Lord Winchelsea, eleven years earlier at Battersea Fields – while serving as Prime Minister, no less. Prosecutions were rare, and serious sentences rarer still.

Even so, public opinion was turning against the practice: increasingly aggressive newspapers turned these gentleman’s affairs into tabloid scandal, an outrageous abuse of aristocratic prerogative. Two years earlier, another duel at Wimbledon had resulted in the arrest and prosecution of a participant and a sentence to a years’ hard labor. Citing this precedent, the Times of London loudly called for Cardigan’s arrest: “let his head be cropped, let him be put on an oatmeal diet, let him labour at the treadmill.” Certainly, the class difference between the noble Cardigan and the middle-class Tuckett, who’d left the Army to become a shopkeeper, heightened the evident injustice.

As Lieutenant Tuckett recuperated, Cardigan found fresh ways to terrorize his regiment. He disciplined Lieutenant William Forrest in a dispute over regimental lodging, and cashiered the Captain Richard Reynolds, cousin of John, from the Army in a rigged court martial over intemperate criticisms of his colonel. Not content with bringing his officers to heel, the Earl publicly humiliated his regiment’s junior surgeon for failing to report to the parade ground through the enlisted man’s entrance. Lord Hill, commander of the Army, complained that his “valuable time” was “occupied by regimental controversies of this painful nature” and demanded Cardigan apologize; the Earl demurred, and nothing happened.

Even so, word of Cardigan’s indiscretions continued trickling into the press, making him a household name in London. In December he attended a concert at Drury Lane, where a heckler announced his presence with “a cry of “The Black Bottle!” A crowd gathered to hiss, boo and insult the Earl, who after ignoring it for several minutes “advanc[Ed] deliberately to the front of the box, put on his great coat and making a bow, retired amidst one universal shout of disapprobation.” A week later the performance was repeated again at a Promenade Concert, where he endured “one continued uproar” where “not a note of music could be heard” for almost two hours.

Cardigan shrugged off this public disapproval; so long as he retained the friendship and favor of the military establishment, he was beyond reproach. Yet he and Captain Douglas were astonished to learn that, upon being summoned by a grind jury in Wimbledon, they were indicted on three counts of “intent to murder, maim and cause grievous bodily harm to Captain Harvey Tuckett.” His Lordship immediately asserted his privilege to avoid trial in a mere criminal court; Cardigan insisted upon a trial before the House of Lords.

The trial commenced under the stewardship of Lord Chief Justice, Thomas Lord Denman, ridiculed by one observer as “one of the feeblest Chief Justices who ever presided over the Court of the Queen’s Bench.” With considerable pomp, Lord Cardigan was led into the room by an usher, bowed three times before the assembled peers, and was conducted to a stool next to his counsel, Sir William Follett. Lord Denman read out the indictment and asked Cardigan how he pleaded.

“Not guilty, my Lord,” Cardigan responded, adding that he would be tried “by my peers.” His face was impassive, but the Earl’s words rang with the certainty that his peers understood the amour proper that led him to duel with a fellow officer.

If Justice held any hope of defeating Privilege, it rested with Attorney General Sir John Campbell. Campbell was a fussy but able lawyer (later elevated to Lord Chancellor), who in the words of Saul David “gave the impression of a bird of prey about to swoop down upon his victim.” But Campbell took pains to absolve Cardigan of charges that he had knowingly rigged the duel with his rifled pistol. His Lordship had intended “nothing but what was fair and honorable.” Campbell continued that “if death had ensued it could have been regarded as a great calamity rather than a great crime.” Having undercut the probity of his own prosecution, Campbell nonetheless insisted that the Lords “must consider what [the charge] is by the laws of England.”

No doubt Campbell felt that his case so airtight that he could afford to be generous. He called Thomas Dann, the Miller and constable who’d witnessed the duel and arrested Cardigan; he confirmed that the duel took place, but strangely failed to confirm the identity of the Earl’s opponent. Campbell’s deputy confirmed that he had received a card from Harvey Tuckett, but Dann insisted that whether Cardigan’s opponent “gave it to me, or another gentleman, I am not sure.” With the help of a few interjections by Cardigan’s counsel, Dann’s confused testimony undercut the prosecution’s case.

Follett, a former MP, future Solicitor General and veteran attorney considered “the greatest advocate of the century,” quickly jumped on this opening. When Campbell attempted to introduce Tuckett’s card into evidence, Follett objected that it was irrelevant since Tuckett was not present. He identified the fatal flaw in the prosecution: they had not called Tuckett as a witness, since he was still recovering from his wounds, and also for fear that Tuckett himself would be liable to prosecution, thus introducing a reasonable doubt – not of Cardigan’s presence, but of his opponent’s identity.

Campbell’s floundering presentation continued; Cardigan’s physician, who had examined Tuckett after the duel, refused to testify for fear of self-incrimination. Police Inspector Bustain proved more useful; he recounted how Cardigan confessed that “I have been fighting a duel, and I have hit my man” upon being charged at the station. Another gentleman, a chemist named Mr. Walthew, confirmed that one Harvey Tuckett had rented a room from him for business; but Follett objected that the Christian name of Cardigan’s opponent had not been established in court.

To cinch his case, Campbell offered to introduce Harvey Tuckett’s calling card into evidence again. This time, Follett did not object, allowing Campbell to rest the prosecution’s case. In doing so, Follett snapped shut the trap. The card identified “Captain Harvey Tuckett,” using his temporary Indian rank. However, the indictment under which the trial proceeded had charged Cardigan with the attempted murder of “Harvey Garnett Phipps Tuckett.”

Thus Follett began his presentation. With remarkable sang froid, not to mention gall, he calmly informed the assembled peers that “there is no evidence whatever,” he concluded, “to prove that the person at whom the noble Earl is charged to have shot upon the 12th of September was Mr. Harvey Garnett Phipps Tuckett.” He did not present witnesses, nor did he deny that Cardigan had shot someone at the Windmill. But without a named victim, Follett argued, Cardigan might as well have arrived alone and fired his pistol harmlessly into the air.

On such a comical legerdemain did the trial turn. Campbell had already concluded his case, and with no defense witnesses to cross examine could only complain that he hadn’t been asked to produce testimony about Tuckett’s given name. At one point, Sir John commented that Mr. Codd had stated that Tuckett “had been in the 11th Hussars, a regiment which had been commanded and is still commanded by the Earl of Cardigan.” To this, Follett responded that “there is no evidence whatever that Lord Cardigan is Colonel of the 11th Hussars.” Again, Follett could claim a technical truth – Cardigan, at the time, was merely a Lieutenant Colonel.

This hairsplitting reduced the Attorney General, heretofore the picture of self-confidence, to sputtering apoplexy. “There is no human being who…would for one moment hesitate in drawing the inference” that Captain Tuckett and Tuckett the Duelist were one and the same. “Am I obliged to call the clerk of the parish where he was baptized,” Sir John asked sarcastically, “in order to prove his baptismal register?” Follett deflated his protests by muttering “You are quite mistaken” under his breath. To summarize, he reiterated his doubt that “because a Captain Tuckett, who was formerly of the 11th Dragoons, bears a certain Christian name, he is the same Captain Tuckett who fought a duel upon Wimbledon Common.”

After this extraordinary exchange, the defense rested, not bothering to establish whom Lord Cardigan had wounded if not this Captain Tuckett. Then the Lord Steward dismissed the spectators, before calling upon the Court to deliver their verdict by voice vote. One after another, the assembled peers proclaimed that Cardigan was “not guilty, upon my honor.” The prosecution’s case, and the testimony by its witnesses, mattered less than Follett’s sleight of hand – or more likely, the Lords’ reluctance to punish one of their own over an affair of honor. Only William Henry, Duke of Cleveland registered any dissent: he stressed that Cardigan was “not legally guilty, upon my honor.”

No matter: “legally guilty” or not, Cardigan was acquitted. The press raged about the injustice, while the public made their displeasure known. The night after his acquittal, Cardigan attended another concert in Drury Lane with his wife. For nearly half an hour, the Earl was jeered by the audience with hisses, boos and shouts of “Black Bottle!” – the same scene he had endured months before. This time, His Lordship simply ignored the uproar, biographer Donald Thomas observes, while “Lady Cardigan appeared rather amused by the whole thing.” Demonstrating how well he’d learned his lesson, two months later the Earl ordered the public flogging of a trooper, accused of drunkenness, on Easter Sunday.

Still, the scandal had its effect on public opinion, ensuring that dueling would be more fiercely prosecuted. With society growing more class conscious and the press more willing to report on the scandals and crimes of the elite, killing another man for minor improprieties lost its allure. In 1844, the Articles of War were amended that any officer involved in a duel would lose their military pension, which proved a more serious blow than legal penalties that could be evaded or ignored. By the time of the Crimean War, dueling had grown vanishingly rare in the British Army; by the end of the century, formal duels were largely restricted to the European continent.

As for Cardigan, he continued scandalizing British society for the next several decades. He gained immortality for his role in the Charge of the Light Brigade, a blunder for which Cardigan, ironically, was probably the least blameworthy among the officers involved. It chagrined his old nemeses that “Jim the Bear” became a national hero for surviving a harebrained cavalry charge, then returning to his yacht for a champagne dinner while his brigade bled and shivered in their tents. Upon his death in 1868, the Earl weathered a lifetime of controversy to remain a colorful, if ever divisive figure – the walking embodiment of Victorian class privilege.

Note: This article draws upon Saul David, The Homicidal Earl (1997); Donald Thomas, Cardigan (1975); and, of course, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s classic The Reason Why (1953). For the curious, the entirety of the trial transcript can be read on Google Books.