The contingents, which poured in by thousands from neighbouring towns, seem to have carried no arms but sticks, and to have conducted themselves peaceably when they arrived at St. Peter's Fields, where Orator Hunt, puffed up with silly vanity, was voted into the chair on a hustings. Unfortunately, instead of attempting to prevent the meeting, the county magistrates decided to let the great masses of people assemble, and then to arrest the leaders in the midst of them. They had at their disposal several companies of infantry, six troops of the 15th hussars, and a body of yeomanry, besides special constables. The chief constable, being ordered to arrest Hunt and his colleagues, declared that he could not do so without military aid, whereupon a small force of yeomanry advanced but soon became wedged up and enclosed by the densely packed crowd. One of the magistrates, fancying the yeomanry to be in imminent danger, of which there is no proof, called upon Colonel L'Estrange, who was in command of the soldiers, to rescue them and disperse the mob. Four troops of the hussars then made a dashing charge, supported by a few of the yeomanry; the people fled in wild confusion before them; some were cut down, more were trampled down, and an eye-witness describes "several mounds of human beings" as lying where they had fallen. Happily, the actual loss of life did not exceed five or six, but a much larger number was more or less wounded, the real havoc and bloodshed were inevitably exaggerated by rumour, and a bitter sense of resentment was implanted in the breasts of myriads, innocent of the slightest complicity with sedition, but impatient of oligarchical rule, and disgusted with so ruthless an interference with the right of public meeting.