A Regimental Affair (52 page)

The End

Something was bound to give in the business of the cavalry and aid to the civil power. On 16 August 1819, at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, one of the shadowy villains of my tale held another meeting, the numbers approaching sixty thousand. The magistrates ordered the local yeomanry to arrest ‘Orator’ Hunt, but the parttime cavalrymen botched it. An antecedent troop of my own regiment was sent to rescue them and restore order, which they did apparently with restraint. But the damage was done, and ‘Peterloo’, as the press dubbed it, became a
cause célèbre
for the reform movement. But it did have a positive side, for it was a major factor in the establishment of professional police forces – although it was not for another decade that the Metropolitan Police Act was actually passed.

‘The unguarded border’ secured by the Rush–Bagot Agreement is now so much taken for granted that the war of 1812 seems incomprehensible, let alone any tension since. And yet there were occasional local disputes as the frontier moved west, often as a result of the difficulty of accurate surveying. I have a photograph
of Canadian army officers, as late as the 1920s, covertly making a reconnaissance of the border approaches in New York State. Should any reader wish to see for himself the ground over which the bitter and destructive Anglo-American war was fought, I commend Gilbert Collins’s
Guidebook to the Historic Sites of the War of 1812
(Dundurn Press, Toronto, 1998).

The 19th Light Dragoons, the only cavalry regiment of the British army to earn the battle honour
Niagara
, were disbanded in 1821 – only to be re-raised in 1861, almost disbanded again in 1870, amalgamated in 1922 and then again in 1992. The ‘War Office’ does not have many historians.