Newspaper accounts of the gallant charge had been given wide circulation in England by the time Cardigan's ship berthed at the port of Folkestone on 13 January 1855 and the town offered him a rapturous welcome. In London he was mobbed by an enthusiastic crowd and on 16 January at Queen Victoria's invitation he was received at Windsor to explain to her and Prince Albert the details of the battle. Victoria noted how "modestly" he presented his story, but this reticence was absent in his public appearances: on 5 February, he gave a highly exaggerated account of his participation in the charge at a banquet held in his honour at the Mansion House, London. On 8 February, at a speech in his home town of Northampton, he went even further, describing how he had shared the privations of his men by living the "whole time in a common tent" and how, after the charge, he had rallied his troops and pursued the fleeing enemy artillerymen as far as the Tchernaya river. As his biographer Saul David points out, "a more misleading account of his own exploits could hardly have been given".