James Thomas Brudenell, Earl of Cardigan (1797–1868)
Sketch map of the charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, 25 October 1854
[Dublin, 1855–6]
MS Add. 7194/II

After Waterloo, Britain avoided involvement in European conflicts until it entered the Crimean War in March 1854, eighteen months after Wellington’s death. This long period of disengagement from continental warfare induced a degree of stasis in the Army, culminating in the Duke’s own tenure as Commander-in-Chief between 1842 and 1852, which was marked by a pronounced conservatism in matters of equipment, administration and organisation. The British force eventually dispatched to the Crimea, led by Wellington’s protégé Lord Raglan, was described by Norman Gash in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as an ‘obsolescent Waterloo army’, and the campaign was characterized by inefficiency and incompetence. This map of the war’s best-known debacle, the charge of the Light Brigade, was drawn by the Brigade’s commander, Lord Cardigan.