ABSTRACT
EVERYONE is aware that, despite of all attempts to stop it, the practice of duelling lingered on in the British Army down to the fourth decade of the XIXth century, and many will remember, as almost the last incident in its distressing annals, the scandalous trial before his peers of Lord Cardigan, for the shooting of Captain Tuckett. The leader of the Charge of the Light Brigade was acquitted, on the technical point that the indictment charged him with wounding a Captain Harvey Tuckett, while the prosecution proved that he had shot a Captain James Garnett Harvey Tuckett, and had neglected to prove that the two names connoted only one person. That the Peers could venture to join in this obvious conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice, sufficiently shows how strong was the sentiment in favour of the duellist as late as 1840. It was only eleven years before that the Duke of Wellington himself, though he had done all in his power to stop duelling in the Peninsular Army, had yielded to the spirit of his generation, and “gone out” with Lord Winchelsea in Battersea Fields, to exchange deliberately harmless shots over the question of Catholic Emancipation.
