At the time appointed numbers of people began to congregate on the waste ground at Coldbath Fields, and soon afterwards the speeches commenced. As soon as it became clear that the meeting was identical with that proscribed by the Home Secretary, the men of "A" division, after having been warned by Colonel Rowan to be cool and temperate in their demeanour, were ordered to carry out the instructions previously given them. At the same time a portion of the reserve was moved from the stables (where the men had been waiting) to support the first party, and it was during this advance that a collision took place at a street corner with a mob of people, who immediately began to throw stones, by which several constables were injured. Thereupon the superintendent gave the word to charge, and in the melée which followed truncheons were made use of, and three policemen were stabbed, one of them being killed on the spot. Meanwhile the crowd was incited to further resistance by the action of a man called Stallwood, who falsely representing himself to be a magistrate, harangued the police from the balcony of his house, and told them that they were acting illegally in making use of force before the Riot Act had been read. The struggle was of short duration. The people began to disperse in all directions, and numerous arrests were made by the police, who committed the error of following up their victory with too much vigour, carrying pursuit in some instances to a considerable distance from the scene of the original conflict. This first collision between the Metropolitan force and the people gave rise to a series of charges against the police, which, if they could have been substantiated, might have ended in the undoing of all the good achieved after so many years, and brought about with so much labour and difficulty. It was said that the police were intoxicated and, in that condition, had made an unprovoked assault on inoffending citizens, knocking down women and children with brutal impartiality, and then stunning them with their truncheons as they lay on the ground. Fortunately an exhaustive enquiry was held, with the result that the action of the police was satisfactorily vindicated. An unanswerable argument against the accusers was that, whereas several constables were badly knocked about, and one killed, not a single case of serious injury was to be found on the other side. Public animosity, however, did not pause to reason; and at the inquest which was held on the body of the murdered policeman Culley, the jury, sympathizing with, or intimidated by, the popular feeling, brought in a verdict of "justifiable homicide." A verdict so flagrantly in the teeth of the evidence could not be allowed to stand: the Crown applied to the Court of King's Bench, and the inquisition was very properly quashed.