The Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India (2024)

‘Indian history has never been made interesting to English readers, except by rhetoric.’
— The Times, February 25, 1892

‘The real truth is that the public mind cannot be brought to attend to an Indian subject.’
— The Duke of Wellington, December 21, 1805

Preface

A history of modern India presents in the writing certain technical difficulties, which are mentioned, not to excuse the shortcomings of this work, but to suggest deficiencies which the reader must supply by further study and examination.

1. Without making the book a mere ‘charnel-house of facts’, it would be impossible to describe the internal history of the many semi-autonomous States, and of the Provinces, which have also developed their own characteristics. Burma, in particular, requires separate treatment. In this history the States and Provinces can only be considered in relation to the Central Government, or to India’s life as a whole. Exigencies of space, as well as a desire for unity, have enforced this limitation. Similarly, though we have tried to remind the reader continually that in British India there was an increasingly vigorous intellectual and religious life, influenced profoundly by English administration and literature, yet it was impossible to treat this with adequacy in a book whose range continually tended to make it too bulky for any but a specialist public.

2. The available sources for the period under consideration are predominantly British. Many important official documents and some recent histories were written, consciously or unconsciously, with an eye to certain criticisms which have been made in India and abroad. The growth of Indian nationalism has accentuated a bias which is often unfavourable to Indians, individually and collectively. The point is illustrated in the Bibliographical Note. It has been taken by the authors to justify a much greater use of contemporary quotation in the earlier part of this work.

3. The historian’s task has been made more difficult by the animosities which have distracted the world during the last twenty years, and by their repercussions, official and unofficial. The mischievous tendency to make historical truth subservient to administrative expediency has been increased by changes in legal practice and procedure, which operate as an effective censorship. An author may be asked to substantiate statements of fact by direct evidence, which would frequently entail collecting Indian witnesses, often illiterate, bringing them to England, and producing them before a court in which their testimony would be discounted. The freedom with which the Mutiny was discussed during the subsequent two decades would have led, under present conditions, to innumerable causes célèbres involving the financial ruin of many concerned. The authors believe that it is as necessary and no more difficult to write objectively about recent events than about those of the last century. But official secretiveness, of which there was little before the Mutiny, combined with this informal censorship, makes it almost impossible to supply the ‘penetration, accuracy, and colouring’ which Dr. Johnson demanded of the historian.

4. In the spelling of Indian proper names and names of places, and in the anglicizing of Indian words, the system in general use among scholars of all countries has been adopted. We have, however, left certain names and words in the forms familiar to those who have lived in India, and used them constantly. Thus Cawnpore is used instead of Khanpur, ryot instead of raiyat, Punjab instead of Panjab. We have eschewed marks of quantity, as we have written not for Sanscritists and Arabists but for the student of history. An arbitrary line has to be taken between consistency and pedantry.

We should like to thank Mr. J. F. Horrabin for his valuable sketch map illustrating the famines.

Note to Second Edition

This book received a generous welcome, and brought many private communications and suggestions, both from India and England. Sir William Foster, C.I.E., Sir Algernon Law, K.C.M.G., C.B., Sir Verney Lovett, K.C.S.I., Mr. S. K. Ratcliffe, Mr. K. M. Panikkar, Mr. P. C. Lyon, C.S.I. Mr. Philip Morrell, Mr. G. E. Harvey, I.C.S., Mr. H. G. Rawlinson, C.I.E., Mr. E. F. Oaten, Sir T. S. Macpherson, C.I.E., Rao Saheb Sardesai, Mr. G. C. Dutt, and Sir Richard Burn, C.S.I. are among those who provided definite criticism of fact or opinion.

Special apologies are due to Mr. B. C. Allen, C.S.I. who in 1907 was shot in the back, when District Magistrate at Dacca, an attack we called fatal. We are delighted that Mr. Allen was himself able to point out our error.

Book I

The Time of Trading. 1599-1740

‘The life of man is so precious, that it ought not lightly to be exposed to dangers. And yet we know, that the whole course of our life is nothing but a passage unto Death; wherein one can neither stay nor slack his pace, but all men run in one manner, and in one celerity. The shorter liver runs his course no faster than the long, both have a like passage of time; howbeit, the first not so far to run as the later.’
— A Discourse of Trade from England unto the East Indies; answering to diverse Objections which are usually made against the same. By ‘T. M.’; 1621.

Chronological Table

1571. Battle of Lepanto.

1579. Drake’s Circumnavigation of the Globe (1577-80). Foundation of the English Turkey Company.

1580. Portugal becomes a Spanish dependency.

1583. Sailing of the Tyger.

1588. Defeat of the Armada.

1599. Foundation of the East India Company.

1603. Death of Elizabeth.

1612. Captain Best defeats the Portuguese off Swally, Western India. East India Company’s first factory established at Surat.

1615. Sir Thomas Roe sent as ambassador to the Mogul Court.

1620. Defeat of the Portuguese by Persia and the East India Company. Capture of Ormuz.

1623. Massacre of Amboyna.

1627. Shah Jahan becomes Emperor.

1630. Indian Great Famine. Further defeats of Portuguese off Swally.

1633. William Methwold President at Surat.

1635. East India Company and Portuguese establish a truce. Charles I gives charter to Courteen’s Company.

1640. Portugal recovers independence of Spain.

1641. Foundation of Fort St. George (Madras).

1642. Permanent peace between East India Company and Portuguese. Civil War breaks out in England.

1649. Execution of Charles I.

1652-54. First Dutch War.

1657. Amalgamation of East India Company and Courteen’s Company. A new Charter granted.

1662. Sir George Oxinden President at Surat. Bombay ceded to Charles II.

1665. Bombay handed over to British.

1665-67. Second Dutch War.

1668. Bombay handed over to East India Company. Foundation of French East India Company.

1669. Gerald Aungier President at Surat.

1674. Sivaji the Maratha proclaims himself an independent king.

1680. Death of Sivaji.

1683. Keigwin’s rebellion, Bombay.

1686. War between East India Company and Mogul Empire. Temporary ruin of English factories in Bengal.

1687. Madras made a municipality under a mayor. Bombay supersedes Surat as chief Company trading station in Western India.

1690. Foundation of Calcutta. Foundation of Fort St. David (Cuddalore).

1698. Rival Company established in England.

1702. Accommodation come to between two rival Companies.

1707. Death of Aurangzeb. The Calcutta settlement is made independent of Madras.

1714. Surman’s embassy to the Mogul Court.

1726. Mayor’s courts established in all three Presidencies.

1727. Establishment of Peshwa’s power. Rise of Maratha chieftains.

1739. Maratha conquest of Malwa. Nadir Shah of Persia invades India and sacks Delhi.

Chapter I

Foundation of the East India Company

Early trade of East and West: first English attempts to gain share of Eastern trade: Thomas Stevens: sailing of the ‘Tyger’: Ralph Fitch: foundation of East India Company and Captain Lancaster’s first voyage: Edward Monox, William Adams, Richard Cocks: Captain Henry Middleton: Best defeats Portuguese off Swally: pirates: Sir Thomas Roe’s embassy: Roe on the Dutch and their policy: Roe’s overtures to the Portuguese Viceroy at Goa: Captain Shilling’s victories and death: capture of Ormuz: Dutch insolence and hostility: Massacre of Amboyna.

The commerce of East and West for millenniums moved by the Persian Gulf, across Syria, or up the Red Sea, through Egypt; in the Middle Ages Venice controlled its Western outgoings until the Turks overspread the Levant and taxed and pillaged much of the traffic out of existence. Spain at Lepanto (1571) mastered the Turkish fleet. But as the sixteenth century drew to its close, events continued to push the Eastern trade away from its immemorial routes, and increasingly into one main channel, the perilous but possible sea-way which Vasco da Gama had opened up, rounding the Cape to India (1499). Portugal had succeeded to the primacy of Venice in navigation; and when Spain annexed Portugal (1580), the Dutch, who were in rebellion against Philip II, could no longer buy through Lisbon the spices and the rich stuffs their painters have made so familiar to posterity, and the ancient if loose alliance of England and Portugal finished. Spain considered it her business to be the hammer of all heretics, an ambition which brought her to grief when Holland managed to turn ‘her despairing land-revolt into a triumphant oceanic war’.*

Between Elizabeth’s accession (1558) and Cromwell’s death (1658) a fiercely mercantile England hunted for markets, when necessary fighting for them. In 1579, Drake, circumnavigating the globe, reached the veritable Spice Islands, and set up rights of prior discovery which the East India Company, a generation later, were to try vainly to uphold against the monopolising Dutch. He was believed to have entered into treaty engagements with the King of Ternate; and his voyage was the most conspicuous of many exploits that shook his countrymen free of insularity. When he captured the San Filippe (1587), he secured papers which fired imagination with their witness to the wealth that lay in commerce with the Indies.

The year of Drake’s reaching Ternate was also the year when the first Englishman set foot in India proper. This was Thomas Stevens, the Jesuit missionary, whose letters from Goa to his father are supposed to have done much to arouse English eagerness for the eastward attempt. Stevens relates the gravity and pomp with which the fleets of Portugal went out:

‘The setting forth from the port, I need not tell how solemn it is, with trumpets and shooting of ordnance. You may easily imagine it, considering that they go in the manner of war.’

His own voyage in one of these ships of Lisbon he thought a good one, since out of a hundred and fifty sick only twenty-seven died.

But the English were to encounter even greater odds, held trespassers by Spain and Portugal, who claimed to hold the East in fee from the Pope, and in the Spice Islands persecuted to death by the Dutch, their nominal allies. Their ships were of slighter tonnage, in smaller groups; they were learners and alone, where their predecessors had stations and helpers along the route and an accumulation of knowledge:

‘The English ships, though Weatherly and heavily gunned, were small; if food and water failed, as they often did when they kept the sea for any length of time, it was chance work replenishing them; every port was armed and hostile; every ship they met was an enemy and had to be fought or run from (but the English seldom ran); to reach India was to sail into a nest of wasps; they sailed as poachers and pirates and so were without the Law, and the navigation was all sheer guess-work.’*

The right of trade with the Levant had been obtained from Sultan Amurath (Murad) II, in 1579, and a Turkey Company had been formed in England. In 1583 a ship called the Tyger was sent to endeavour to open up commerce further east still, with India. How keenly men’s eyes were straining abroad we can see from Shakespeare’s reference, twenty years later (one which his audience, aware of that sailing’s significance, took as easily as we should take an allusion to any contemporary long-distance flight or an Everest expedition to-day):

‘“Aroint thee, witch!” the rump-fed ronyon cries.
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master of the Tyger.’*

The Tyger took her merchants as near Aleppo as the sea permitted. Then five of them---John Eldred, John Newbery, Ralph Fitch, William Leeds and James Story---entered on the overland route to India, which was beset with ‘defrauding Turks, blackmailing Arabs or stealthily obstructing Venetians’. Eldred,

‘halted between Basra and Baghdad, was to be, as it were, the shaft of the spear, the other four its head thrusting forward into India. Though shaft and head came apart the thrust did in fact go home’.*

Portugal had locks at Basra and the Gulf’s entry; at Ormuz, Newbery, Fitch, Leeds and Story were arrested, and reached India as prisoners. Here their countryman Stevens befriended them---a generous deed, seeing that he himself, if in England, would have been liable to a traitor’s death. Leeds, whose craft of jeweller made him useful to decorate the numerous churches that Portuguese missionaries were building, became a monk. The other three, with a Dutch merchant’s assistance, escaped: the painter Story entered Mogul service; Newbery got to Lahore and with ‘sheer insolent courage’ set off home across Persia, and we do not know what became of him; Fitch wandered over North India and Burma, and to Ceylon, ‘walking serenely into traps and out again’,* reappearing in London in 1591. He and Eldred were present when eighty City merchants met in Founders’ Hall, September 24, 1599, to establish the East India Company; the Company’s Court Minutes contain the note (December 31, 1606):

‘Letters to be obtained from King James to the King of Cambaya, governors of Aden, etc. . . . their titles to be enquired of Ralph Fitch.’

In shadow of the imposing fabric of the British Raj these foundations appear sordid. We went honourably, thinking it no shame to be merchants. But we are attacked as a folk who came as suppliants seeking leave to trade, and by devious ways of treachery became rulers of a distracted, peace-loving, helpless land. Yet the miracle is not that commerce ultimately expanded into empire, but that for such a vast of time we were traders and nothing else. Of all the European interloping nations we were the last and most reluctant to draw the sword, even in defence. Nor was the name of merchant synonymous, as seems to be suggested, with huckster. Our merchants walked and sailed through deaths Ulysses never knew, and did it with cool good-humour.

The Tyger bore Elizabeth’s letter “To the most invincible and most mighty Prince, Lord Zelabdim Echebar, King of Cambaia’, stating frankly that trade was the aim. But no Company was formed until in 1599 the Dutch put up the price of pepper from three to six and eight shillings a pound. Even more than for gold, men were ready to risk their lives for spices:

‘The Elizabethans lived on salt meat from autumn to spring; their fresh meat was of poor quality in general; for the good of the fishermen the Law compelled them to eat fish more often than they cared about, and with all this insipid food their craving for pungent flavourings was probably and naturally much stronger than ours. They liked heavily spiced drinks, moreover, for they had no tea.’*

The East India Company was formed to traffic in the luxuries of the rich, in spices, silks, gems, bezoar stones, camphor, indigo, sulphur. Two centuries later, its wealth came through the amenities of the middle classes; tea had supplanted pepper, cookery books now contained recipes for rice. A resolution was passed ‘not to employ any gentleman in any place of charge’; and the Company requested to be

‘allowed to sort their business with men of their own quality, lest the suspicion of the employment of gentlemen being taken hold upon by the generality, do drive a great number of the adventurers to withdraw their contributions’.

There was suspicion of aristocratic disinterestedness and ability alike; and, although members of the nobility adventured capital in the Company, the influx from what used to be considered the higher classes did not become considerable until Wellesley’s time.

The first voyages were hardly towards ‘India’ at all (as we understand the term), but further eastward. A commission was granted to Captain Lancaster, January 24, 1601, to voyage for the Company ‘at their own adventures Costs and chardges as well as for the honour of this Our Realme of Englande’. The Realm’s honour was to prove a long- continuing hindrance. In accordance with the doctrine that to export specie impoverished a country, Elizabeth gave leave to take only £30,000, of which £6,000 must carry her arms and effigy,* tokens so valueless that the Company petitioned her successor James for permission to take only £20,000, with no ‘English’ coins at all. Protests to Elizabeth that her name was unknown in the Orient had been opposed with the very proper reply that for this very reason these coins must be used, to the end that her greatness might be blazed abroad.

Captain Lancaster sailed to Achin, in Sumatra, and returned, November 5, 1603, with cloves, cinnamon, lac; and 1,030,000 lbs. of pepper, whose sale was forbidden until King James’s own large private stocks* were disposed of. Alarmed and exasperated, the Company pointed out that they could not pay their mariners or risk a second voyage; and if they did not send another expedition, their factors* left with Eastern princes as hostages might be put to death. With their pepper unsold, they could not even discharge their customs dues to His Majesty. A compromise was arranged, by payment to influential persons. Captain Lancaster was knighted, and a second expedition set out under Henry Middleton, March 3, 1604. Between 1601 and 1618 nine voyages were made, mainly (at first exclusively) to the East Indies, not to India.

The exigencies of a commercial organisation working within a wide range of hazard required frankness of both employer and employed. The Company’s correspondence is of unsurpassable interest and individuality. The irascibility of the Directors’ sharp comments to their Bantam factors (March 11, 1607)---‘at which ignorance of you, to buy such spices, we conceive the Indians do rejoice’---can be matched by the criticism of their agent at Jask (Persian Gulf), in December 1617:

‘Touching the pieces and petronels you sent, you were much abused in them, for they were nothing near worth the money you paid for them per invoice. It seems also they took wet in bringing aboard, for many of them were so rusty that we were forced to work off all the damasking to make them clean.’*

After Japan was added to the Company’s far-flung bazaar (in response to a letter* from that remarkable man William Adams, sent October 23, 1611, to ‘his unknown friends and countrymen’ and to ‘the Worshipful Company’ in particular), Richard Cocks wrote from that land (1617) that he was amid a people unable to appreciate good things:

‘They esteem a painted sheet of paper with a horse, ship or a bird more than they do such a rich picture. Neither will anyone give sixpence for that fair picture of the Conversion of St. Paul.’*

The heathen’s natural recalcitrance was perhaps heightened by the fact that Japan was passing through a great artistic period.

The Company started with separate voyages, changed to a modified joint stock (three voyages being covered by one subscription, in place of new subscriptions for every voyage) in 1614, and a permanent one, 1657. In 1609 their charter was renewed and the monopoly of Eastern trade made theirs in perpetuity. More of the nobility risked capital. Profits, ‘though irregular, had been large’.* The Company on the whole were ‘gentle masters’, and their servants in return were zealous and honest in collecting and collating information. Strict cleanliness on shipboard, in which the Dutch were held up as far superior, was enjoined repeatedly, and all were warned to be watchful: ‘still expecting and fearing evil, though there be no cause’; ‘suspect all, how friendly soever they seem’.

Captain Lancaster had sold iron, tin, lead, and exchanged specie for spices; the woollen goods for which England was so anxious to find a vent, now and later, proved almost unsaleable in a tropical climate, and wasted away in godowns. In 1608 the Company’s factors in Bantam and the Moluccas wrote pointing out that the people there were big purchasers of Indian calicoes. To obtain these, to exchange for specie, a trading post in India was essential. Permission was obtained from the Emperor Jahangir, 1608, to settle at Surat, the chief port of Western India; the Portuguese, however, were still too powerful for the leave to become effectual until 1612. Sir Henry Middleton attempted to open up a Red Sea trade; was received with apparent friendliness, but enticed ashore, where his company were taken prisoners (after several had been killed). He himself and a few others presently escaped to their ships, and blockaded Mocha, whose governor received such missives as this (May 18, 1611), in reply to his efforts to placate Middleton and persuade him to sail away without recovering the rest of his men:

‘. . . If you advise the Basha, as you say you will, what is that to me? I am no subject of the Basha’s but a servant to the King of England, besides whom I will not be commanded by any king under heaven. And for the referring of matters to the hearing of our betters, as you say, at Constantinople, I know my cause so good that I hope to have remedy against you, but you dare never show your face there. You sent me by the bearer, Nahuda Mahomet, a foolish paper, what it is I know not, nor care not. In God is my trust, and therefore respect not what the devil or you can do with your charms.

At present I cease and rest
As you shall deserve
Henry Middleton.

‘This is all interpreted to the bearer right as it is written.’*

England does not yet know the quality of the seamen who in the discouraging days of James carried on the Elizabethan tradition. The Company was superbly served. Middleton revenged both his own Arabian imprisonment and the unwillingness of the Surat authorities to allow the factory for which Jahangir had given consent, by holding up traffic between Gujarat and the Red Sea in 1611. Next year Captain Best gave the Portuguese the first of several sound drubbings off Swally, close to Surat. The Mogul Empire, helpless at sea, took note of the new naval power hopefully, willing to think it a match for the Portuguese, against whom it had many grievances. The factory was established that year. In 1614 and 1615, Nicholas Downton* won yet greater victories off Swally, announcing his success in a despatch as honourable to its writer as its news:

‘The Guzerats ready to embrace a peace upon a parley with the Portugals, doubting of our success; for the force of the Portugals was great, insomuch that it would not have gone well with us if God had favoured their cause. I never see men fight with greater resolution than the Portugals; therefore not to be taxed with cowardice as some have done. . . . If the Portugals had not fallen into an error at the first they might have destroyed the Hope, and by likelihood the rest hastening so to her aid. They renew their strength again within ten days; we feared new dangers and prepared accordingly. They set upon us by fireworks. The Portugals with all their power departed from us and went before the bar of Surat. We were afraid they would set up their rest against the town; but they were wiser. Much quicksilver lost for want of good packing. The ships’ muskets break like glass; the cocks and hammers of snaphances evilly made. The false making of sold pieces hath disgraced them. The axletrees of your great ordnance made of brittle wood. The tracks must be turned when the timber is seasoned. Match too scanty. Want of iron chains to lay upon our cables to keep them from cutting. Defect in our flesh; our oil most part run out; our meal also spoiled by green casks; so of our pease and oatmeal. No scales nor weights. Much of our beer cast overboard, being put into bad casks.’*

The wrath against ‘interlopers’*---which persisted long after the Company’s solely trading days---was justified in the seventeenth century. Efforts in isolation would have been doomed, in seas swarming with enemies. Moreover, the Company were naturally held responsible for the acts of all Englishmen,* in a period when piracy was the crime commonest in these distant waters. England abounded in skilful seamen, trained in the prolonged wars with Spain and now “out of a job’, thanks to the peace King James was resolute to keep. Sir Thomas Roe, the Company’s first ambassador at the Mogul Court, warns his employers (February 14, 1618):*

‘That these seas begin to be full of rovers, for whose faults we may be engaged. Sir Robert Rich and one Philip Barnardoe set out two ships to take pirates, which is grown a common pretence of being pirates. They missed their entrance into the Red Sea (which was their design) and came for India, gave chase to the Queen Mother’s junk, and, but that God sent in our fleet, had taken and rifled her. If they had prospered in their ends, either at Mocha or here, your goods and our persons had answered it. I ordered the seizure of the ships, prizes and goods, and converted them to your use; and must now tell you, if you be not round in some course with these men, you will have the seas full and your trade in India is utterly lost and our lives exposed to pledge in the hands of Moors. I am loath to lie in irons for any man’s fault but mine own. I love Sir Robert Rich well, and you may be pleased to do him any courtesy in restitution, because he was abused; but I must say, if you give way, you give encouragement. I had rather make him any present in love than restore anything in right.’

Rich (afterwards Earl of Warwick) was too powerful an offender to be easily penalised. The seizure of his ships led to prolonged dispute; his claim to £20,000 compensation was finally referred to arbitration.

But the Company, though looking austerely on piracy they had not authorised, themselves picked up quick profits by ‘rummaging’ ships to which their Portuguese rivals had given passes; and we have seen that in their difference with the Governor of Mocha they held up ships from India.

The disadvantages of being represented solely by merchants (a profession which the Mogul Court despised) grew grievous. The Company’s first envoys to the Central Government at Agra were unable to stand against the constant objection of the Portuguese that they and their employers were men of lowly rank. The prejudice against gentlemen was reconsidered; in 1615 Sir Thomas Roe, courtier, sent as the Company’s and King James’s ambassador, entered on four years’ magnificent service at the capital of a monarch casual and drunken and on occasion indescribably cruel, who had one question only, what presents he brought or could procure in the future. Roe’s solemn, stiff demeanour invited impish treatment, such as the Empress’s prank when she sent to his bed at midnight a female slave who had offended, ‘a grave woeman of 40 years’. Jahangir when liberally inclined would send a male malefactor or a wild boar (tusks to be returned); in June 1616, Roe (whom his employers expected to be liberally rewarded by imperial munificence) noted that his accessions from this source had been ‘hoggs flesh, deare, a theefe, and a whore’.* But the Court learnt that ‘the English were not all obsequious merchants or rough sailors’. He failed to obtain the explicit contracts he worked for, a treaty on Western lines being ‘an idea utterly alien to the political system of the Moguls’;* but his chaplain, Edward Terry, claimed not unfairly, that he was ‘a Joseph in the court of Pharaoh, for whose sake all his nation seemed to fare the better’, despite the Company’s meanness:

‘frugality prescribed his allowances, his retinue, and even the present to the Mogul, with little conformity to the sumptuous prejudices of the most magnificent court in the universe’.*

He was heedless of safety, comfort or esteem, of spirit nobly disdainful as Doughty’s when he wandered poor and unfriended among Bedouins.

Roe’s Journal and correspondence show up not only his integrity but his far-sightedness. The Company were extraordinarily lucky in such a representative. He could write with high controlled indignation to the Emperor himself or his favourite son (afterwards Shah Jahan). His letter of October 19, 1615, to the Governor of Surat, is eloquent of his cruel perplexities and his character and courage:

‘The injuries you have offered me, contrary to the faith given by your King, to all civility and law of nations, being a free Ambassador, and contrary to your own honour and promise, forceth me to send you word I am resolved not to endure it. I come hither not to beg, nor do nor suffer injury. I serve a King that is able to revenge whatsoever is dared to be done against his subjects. . . . I am sorry for nothing but that ever I vouchsafed to send you any remembrance of me, of whom in love you might have received anything, but by this course, of me, nor my nation, I am resolved you shall never get one pice; assuring you I am better resolved to die upon an enemy than to flatter him, and for such I give you notice to take me until your master hath done me justice.’

He saw through the imposing facade of Mogul pomp, saying of Jahangir, in often-quoted words:

‘His greatness substantially is not in itself, but in the weakness of his neighbours, whom like an overgrown pike he feeds on as fry. Pride, pleasure, and riches are their best description. Honesty and truth, discipline, civility, they have none, or very little.’

Not least of Roe’s perplexities was his knowledge that all his proud carriage was bluff. Behind the English Company was only the cowardly foreign policy of James I.

Every year it became clearer that the Company’s destiny was restriction eastward and expansion westward. The trade with Japan amounted to very little; soon that country relapsed into savage xenophobia. The English were to be driven bloodily and ignominiously from the Spice Islands by the Dutch, whose whole Republic

‘was virtually an association for the purposes of navigation and trade; the Dutch companies were connected organically with the constitution of the States General. And since in Holland the people at large were merchants and mariners, their commercial policy was stronger, more stiffly resolute, and better supported than that of States ruled by a Court and a landed aristocracy whose aims and interests were diverse and conflicting.’*

Roe noted their errors, as viewed from his own employers’ rigid standpoint of merchants:

‘A war and traffic are incompatible. By my consent, you shall no way engage yourselves but at sea, where you are like to gain as often as to lose. It is the beggaring of the Portugal, notwithstanding his many rich residences and territories, that he keeps soldiers that spends it; yet his garrisons are mean. He never profited by the Indies, since he defended them. Observe this well. It hath been also the error of the Dutch, who seek plantation here by the sword. They turn a wonderful stock, they prowl in all places, they possess some of the best; yet their dead pays consume all the gain. Let this be received as a rule that, if you will profit, seek it at sea, and in quiet trade; for without controversy it is an error to affect garrisons and land wars in India.’

The Dutch were too strong for their nominal allies, whom they pressed steadily and ruthlessly out of Far Eastern seas. The English Company had no choice but to withdraw from a struggle for which they were not yet ready. Meanwhile, it was with the Portuguese, whose waning power Roe contemptuously and accurately assessed,* that they first came to grips, both off India and in the Persian Gulf.

European nations kept no peace east of Egypt. But (especially when he began to plan a Spanish marriage for his son), King James’s policy was peace, and at any price. Roe, under instructions from him, on October 20, 1615, sent the Portuguese Viceroy at Goa a missive which he seems to have considered conciliatory. It reminded the recipient of the repeated thrashings his people had experienced in Elizabeth’s time, and warned him that worse would come if they did not eagerly promise to amend their ways now. It was signed ‘Your friend or enemy at your own choice, Tho. Roe’; and was unacknowledged and unanswered. The year following this menacing overture, Roe persuaded the Company to open up trade in the Gulf. This involved the extirpation of the Portuguese from these regions, a task begun by Captain Shilling, another of the fine seamen England had available for exploits which the historic muse scarcely noted even in their doing. He won victories off Jask, December 16 and 28, 1620, dying of his wounds, January 6, after lingering ‘very godly and patient’;

‘Here lies buried one Captain Shilling, unfortunately slain by the insulting Portugall: but that his bones want sense and expression, they would tell you the earth is not worthy his receptacle, and that the people are blockish, rude, treacherous and indomitable.’*

The Portuguese, seeking to prevent English entry of the Gulf, had begun the actual fighting. Furthermore, the Shah made an alliance with the Company against Portugal a condition of permitting trade, and demanded naval assistance in reducing Ormuz, the island which locks the Gulf. This was provided with deep misgivings. Ralegh’s execution was a recent memory to make men wish to proceed cautiously in hostility to Spain, whose Infanta was being wooed by the Prince of Wales. It is amazing that the expedition was ever undertaken; hardly less amazing that it was carried through with impunity. The Indian factors, grumbling and disgruntled men, had some reason for their complaint:

‘Indeed (to speak truth) that enterprise was not well entertained on our parts, except upon more certain grounds and better conditions to have enjoyed the command thereof, and not to dispossess Christianity (although our enemies) to place in faithless Moors, which cannot but be much displeasing to Almighty God.’

However, Ormuz was taken, mainly thanks to the Company’s naval assistance; in one of the subsidiary actions, the capture of Kishm, the Arctic explorer William Baffin was slain:

‘Master Baffin went on shore with his Geometrical Instruments, for the taking the height and distance of the Castle wall, for the better levelling of his Piece to make his shot; but as he was about the same, he received a small shot from the Castle into his belly, wherewith he gave three leaps (by report) and died immediately.’*

Persia broke her engagements, the English foolishly handing over the fort; the partial exception in a general dishonouring of engagements was the Shah’s promise of half the customs of Gombroon (Bandar Abbas), a concession more evaded than fulfilled, causing constant friction for half a century to come, and dissatisfaction after that. The Dutch, following swiftly into the place of the dispossessed Portuguese, flatly refused to pay duties bringing benefit to their English rivals. The campaign’s profits were illusory for the Company, which had acted as the Shah’s catspaw; yet Ormuz, still a glittering name when Milton wrote a generation later, had a sheen which cost it dear, for Buckingham, Lord High Admiral, and King James (‘Did I deliver you from the complaint of the Spaniard, and do you return me nothing!’) each took £10,000 as their tenth of a mythical £100,000 loot. Moreover, this defeat, with the justifiable resentment it engendered, roused the Portuguese as the Swally skirmishes had not done. De Andrade Ruy Freire, their commander taken at Ormuz, escaped in India; he was a seaman of ability, and his exploits, during ten years of peril and not infrequent defeat, were a powerful means of turning the Company’s mind towards an enduring peace.

Nevertheless, England’s long and honourable record in the Gulf, ‘the most unselfish page in history’,* had begun.

Roe took his duties seriously, as representative of a mercantile company as well as of the King. To avoid draining specie out of England, he urged the capture of the Red Sea traffic (‘you must eat the Guzerats out of that trade’); then specie could be obtained from Egyptian merchants in exchange for spices and assorted English and Indian goods. The specie would purchase calicoes in India, which sold readily in the Indies whence spices came, and were already growing popular in England. In fine, he acted much as many think modern consuls should, as trade adviser.

This led to trouble immediately. By buying up the Gujarat calicoes the Company spoiled Surat’s Red Sea traffic; by bringing in Red Sea coral, an importation forbidden to foreigners and kept as a monopoly of Indian traders, they struck it again. This whole Middle Eastern trade was the theme of exceedingly irascible passages between Roe and the Mogul authorities, spreading prejudice in the mind of the Emperor, and still more of his son who was to succeed him as Shah Jahan. It was nevertheless persisted in, being far too valuable to be dropped.

Having demonstrated their naval importance, the Company were able to sell passes, a primitive form of insurance. This system, a source of profit to Portuguese and Dutch also, led to natural irritation when Powers warring among themselves molested shipping which had been granted passes by their rivals.

While India’s western approaches were year by year being opened up to their vessels, the Company was losing ground in the Spice Islands, their original market and aim. So long as Spain remained a menace, the Dutch needed British support. But as Spain grew pitifully helpless, the Hollanders, whose mariners were skilled and brave and whose ships were in greater force than the English, chased and sank their allies whenever they could. No doubt the English have earned their reputation for ‘imperialism’; but for imperialism at its most ruthless we must go to the Indies and the Dutch record. They beat down native chiefs into granting trade monopolies, and strove to set in force a monopoly whether a grant had been made or not; and

‘by fortifying themselves in the place wherever they settle, and then standing upon their guard, put a kind of force upon the natives to sell them their commodities’.*

Friction came to war (1618-20) so open and embarrassing that both home governments had at last to take note of it. Roe warned his employers (1618) that the Dutch

‘wrong you in all parts and grow to insufferable insolencies. If we fall foul here, the common enemy will laugh and reap the fruit of our contention. There must a course be taken at home, which, by His Majesty’s displeasure signified, were not difficult, if he knew how they traduce his name and royal authority, rob in English colours to scandal his subjects, and use us worse than any brave enemy would, or any other but unthankful drunkards that we have relieved from cheese and cabbage, or rather, from a chain with bread and water. You must speedily look to this maggot; else we talk of the Portugal, but these will eat a worm in your sides’.

The scorn and detestation manifest in these words was no mere jingoism, but throughout the seventeenth century was felt fiercely by some of the noblest Englishmen. Holland was the only enemy that stirred the magnanimous spirit of Andrew Marvell to anger.

James Mill strives to set out the imaginable justification of the crowning brutality, when in 1623 ten Englishmen and nine Japanese were arrested, tortured into alleged confession of conspiracy to seize the Dutch fort of Amboyna and assassinate the Governor, and executed with insult and cruelty. The justification amounts to nothing at all; the plot was a figment of savage imbecility and cowardice:

‘there were only twenty Englishmen all told on the island, and they unarmed civilians, while of the Dutch there were from four to five hundred, and half of them soldiers in garrison, besides eight large ships in the roadstead’.*

No redress could be hoped for under the Stuarts, but wrath smouldered until Cromwell in 1654 obtained under arbitration some belated pecuniary compensation. The outrage, coming as the culmination of years of mounting treachery and enmity, made official war inevitable whenever England found less pusillanimous rulers; as surely as any single deed ever did, it precipitated the clash of nations.

This date, 1623, serves conveniently to indicate the ousting of the English from all but precarious footing in the East Indies, and the sinking of the Portuguese star. The Mogul Empire, too, was decaying and had entered on the century and a half of gradual disintegration which was ultimately to bring English, French, and Marathas face to face as contestants for India’s sovereignty. The Company, aware of defeat eastward and with victory of doubtful value won in Persia, held in India six trading stations: Agra, Ahmadabad, Burhanpur in Khandesh, Broach, Masulipatam, Surat. Though they clung still to Malaya, with a factory established at Bantam (Java), their face was now turned to India’s mainland and away from the islands. They had won a place by the tenacity and valour of their seamen and great ambassador, and had shown the individuality and open fearless dealing which have been the strength of the English in India. Ten years of eclipse were to follow, under nerveless and hesitant men; but the virtue which had gone to their establishment was sufficient to endure until in William Methwold another man arose who could conserve what remained and rebuild the impaired foundations.

Chapter II

Era of Portuguese and Dutch Rivalry

Company’s weakness and difficulties: interference with Indian Red Sea traffic: famine in India: further victories at Swally: Dutch pressure on Portuguese: William Methwold: negotiations with Viceroy at Goa: deterioration of internal polity of Mogul Empire: civil war in England: pirates in Eastern waters: Methwold’s courage: Courteen’s Association: ‘Golden Farman’ from King of Golconda: changes in character of trade: Malabar pirates: attempts to get footing in Bengal: coffee and tea: opening up of China trade: internal discipline of Company settlements: Company begins to fortify, at Masulipatam amd Madras: foundation of Fort St, George: miseries due to English civil war: execution of Charles I and resulting embarrassments: war with Dutch: quarrels with Mir Jumla.

The factors, who had never relished either Roe’s social superiority or his stiff self-esteem, crabbed his achievement. But his insistence that to seek territory or fortify was to imitate the uneconomic methods of Portuguese and Dutch was remembered; the Company remained for over a century essentially a trading concern. Yet the seeds of inconsistency lay dormant in his other advice, that even merchants could not succeed unless respected because they could enforce respect. ‘Assure you’, he told his employers, ‘I know these people are best treated with the sword in one hand and caducean in the other’. Exercised in the naval hand, the sword entailed the minimum of expense and entanglement. He wrote (same date: February 14, 1618) to Captain Pring: ‘Until we show ourselves a little rough and busy, they will not be sensible’.

It may seem incredible that after Amboyna the English Company should have continued in ‘alliance’ with the Dutch, their executioners. Yet they did. They were so inferior that the alliance was ludicrously unequal. The factors, petty bickering men, merely grumbled; and sought to hide their loss of prestige in such consolation as the report that the Tanjore Raja

‘having heard the English to be a peaceable nation that seek not to incroach on other men’s territories, was earnest with him’---one Johnson---‘to move into us the favourable opinion he had of our nation and great desire that we should trade in his dominions. . . . The Dutch have been earnest suitors to the Naik to fortify in his country, and begun a fort at Tinegapatam; but the Naik refuseth to have them live in his country, and hath demolished what they had begun, saying he hath heard how they incroached upon other princes’ dominions and countries, and therefore should not live in his’.

So wrote President and Council from Batavia, where they had to abide under the black shadow of Dutch vigour and insolency.

It was true; the Dutch were fortifying---they were exercising all the prerogatives of sovereign power. In their Coromandel station at Masulipatam they even enforced Christian morality, beheading both parties to any irregular union of European and native. The English Company remained sojourners seeking trade alone; they frowned on factors who sought to imitate Dutch pomp and official extravagance; not until 1618 would they extend to even their representative at Surat the Dutch title of ‘President’.

The decade following Ormuz and Amboyna was one of poverty and waxing difficulty. Local governors grew more rapacious and faithless, and weaker as protectors. In 1630 came almost unprecedented famine, which did not materially lighten for nearly two years. Both from Indian and European sources comes abundant evidence of its severity:

‘an universal dearth over all this continent, of whose like in these parts no former age hath record; the country being wholly dismantled by drought, and to those that were not formerly provided no grain for either man or beast to be purchased for money, though at sevenfold the price of former times accustomed; the poor mechaniques, weavers, washers, dyers, etc., abandoning their habitacions in multitudes, and instead of relief elsewhere have perished in the fields for want of food to sustain them. . . . This direful time of dearth and the King’s continued wars with the Deccans disjointed all trade out of frame; the former calamity having filled the ways with desperate multitudes, who, setting their lives at nought, care not what they enterprise so they may but purchase means for feeding, and will not dispense with the nakedest passenger, not so much as our poor pattamars with letters, who, if not murthered on the way, do seldom escape unrifled, and thereby our advices often miscarried on the other side’.*

‘In these parts there may not be any trade expected this three years. No man can go in the streets but must resolve to give great alms or be in danger of being murdered, for the poor people cry with a loud voice: “Give us sustenance or kill us”.’*

Dutch and Portuguese were at war; but not English and Portuguese, except in the irregular fashion of the Indies. This fashion, in October 1630, resulted in a completion of the sea-victories by a land triumph behind Swally. The English pretended to disperse, ‘and marcht about the sandhills’; suddenly uniting, they attacked the Portuguese in imagined safety with their ships close inshore:

‘But ours very providently perceiving that but three of their prows could offend them, and these also so ill plied as, for fear of their own, they could not well damnify our people, they fiercely entered amongst them and in the very face of their vessels pursued them into the water chin deep; where with admirable resolution they so prosecuted their fury that even to the frigates’ sides they continued the slaughter; and having massacred the greater part, whereof many by small shot and others at handy blows with their swords and musket stocks, returned with a glorious victory and 27 Portingals brought off alive their prisoners.’

English naval prowess was known already; but this was a notable military conquest, achieved with the loss of one very fat man who died of his exertions and of some wounded who recovered---achieved, moreover,

‘in the sight of divers Moguls and other these country people, who, in admiration of so strange a manner of fight, have dispersed their letters both to the court and several parts of this kingdom, and were pleased to aver the like battle to have never been seen, heard of, or ever read of in stories’.*

These were unhappy times for the Portuguese. The Dutch were ejecting them from the East Indies, Malacca, Ceylon. Shah Jahan, the first Emperor rootedly unfriendly to aliens, succeeded Jahangir.* He began hostilities, 1631; and after three months’ siege captured their settlement at Hugli, Bengal. More than 4000 prisoners were put to death (refusing the alternative of changing their faith) with Mogul barbarity. Distracted and terrified, Portugal looked about to effect some diminution in the number of her assailants; and remembered her ancient alliance with England, from which she had been warped by annexation to Spain.

In November 1633, after years of fumbling and nerveless administration, the East India Company’s affairs again passed under a man of genuine greatness of mind and spirit, William Methwold, the greatest Englishman in India before Clive. He sounded the Jesuits, who had frequent occasion to pass through the English settlement, and they acted as intermediaries. In March, 1634, the Portuguese Viceroy at Goa replied frankly that the recently concluded Treaty of Madrid did not (he thought) apply to the Indies, but suggested an armistice pending word from Europe; should that prove unfavourable, there might be a longish interval before hostilities were resumed. Methwold then led an embassy, which was received at New Goa with gratifying courtesy, and at Goa by the Viceroy himself. Common dislike and dread of the Netherlanders had wrought to bring the belligerents together.

The truce thus made (1635), after Portugal regained her independance (1640), passed into official peace secured by treaty (1642). The new Viceroy who came in 1635 did not love the English, but explained to his master King Philip that one enemy was preferable to two. Neither truce nor peace was ever really broken; despite rubs and grievances good relations were set up. The English obtained the use of Portuguese roadsteads; the Portuguese could now transport wares not infrequently to Macao and Malacca in English ships, which were normally less liable to stoppage and search by the Dutch.

Though the Portuguese wars were over, other shadows were falling across the Company’s course. Shah Jahan, fiercely hostile to the Portuguese, was displeased at this cessation of Anglo-Portuguese bickering; the Shah, too, disapproved. Both these monarchs preferred to wage their quarrels by proxy. The Mogul Empire’s internal administration was steadily deteriorating. Company caravans were looted; Company agents were murdered without hope of redress, the reply that the robbers were rebels or Rajputs being deemed adequate defence, whether they were or not. Private trading, always persistent, was now luxuriant. When many employees served for paltry pay or none at all, irregular pickings and the excitement of the possibility of these were the main part of life. Disciplinary action was strongly and openly resented, especially by the seamen.

The Company was doing a considerable carrying trade---doubtfully sanctioned by the Committees, since it enabled Indian merchants to compete, using the Company as wings for transport and protection. When, in June, 1631, a native merchant’s goods are found marked with the Company’s name, we seem to find ourselves peering into Clive’s age. Of course traders wishing to pass their wares under foreign colour would bribe local factors or supervisors to wink at the sleight.

More disturbing yet, Charles and his Parliament were drawing into the long vortex leading to the Niagara of civil war. The King, aware that much of his opponents’ strength was in these upstart London merchants, was unfriendly to the Company. Two vessels, the Roebuck and the grimly misnamed Samaritan, in April, 1635, sailed eastward with his privateering commission. They plundered Surat Indian ships that had Company passes, and a Portuguese ship similarly insured, torturing the captain and crew of the latter to make them reveal their treasure. The French were making their first appearance (as pirates) in Red Sea and East African waters, so that when this news reached India Methwold hoped that the report of his own countrymen’s responsibility would prove false. With characteristic courage he went immediately (April 6, 1636) to the Governor of Surat, whom he found in actual durbar with the chief sufferers:*

‘I found a sad assembly of dejected merchants, some looking through me with eyes sparkling with indignation, others half dead in the sense of their losses; and so I sat a small time with a general silence, until the Governor brake it by enquiring what ships were lately arrived and from whence, what ships of ours were yet abroad and where, and what was become in our opinion of that one ship which we had so many months since reported to expect out of England.’

Methwold’s reply betrayed his ignorance; the Governor

‘told me what had happened about Aden, and instantly produced volumes of letters which did all bear witness that an English ship or pinnace had taken the Tofakee belonging to this port of Surat and more particularly to Merza Mahmud, a known friend to our nation, as also the Mahmudee of Diu. So that now the whole company (which had all this while bit in their anger) mouthed at once a general invective against me and the whole English nation; which continued some time with such a confusion as I knew not to whom to address myself unto to give a reply, until they had run themselves out of breath’.

He and his companion were imprisoned for eight weeks, broken by an interval under surveillance in his own house. The Roebuck was caught by a Company’s ship at the Comoro Islands, July 1636, but handled delicately because of her King’s commission: only part of her booty was recovered.

Charles further gave a charter to a rival group of London merchants, Sir William Courteen’s Association, in 1635. They asserted that this involved no interference with the existing Company’s trade, and that they would not settle where the latter had factories already, a promise which was very casually observed. The inconvenience and loss of prestige to the Company were immense. ‘Squire Courteen’s’ people, ignorant of the rules of the game, did things that incensed the Portuguese afresh; only Methwold’s tact and unfailing courtesy* smoothed the trouble over. It was not until 1657 that the mischievous competition was ended by a union.

Bantam in 1630 lost its primacy to Surat, but for some time longer retained control of the struggling and ill-supported stations on the Coromandel coast. These the Company sought to strengthen. In 1634 they obtained from the King of Golconda the famous ‘Golden Farman’, so named from

‘its bearing “the King’s great seal, impressed upon a leaf of gold”---possibly also with reference to the valuable nature of its contents’*

(though these were summarised by the Bantam President and Council, May 8, 1635, as ‘worthless privileges’ and their agent censured for his extravagance and pomp, ‘two flags and many pikes with pendants, and needless horses, etc.’). The Golconda monarch, ‘of his great love to the valiant and honourable Captain Joyce and all the English’, freely gave ‘that under the shadow of me the King they shall set down at rest and in safety’, an assurance repeated in 1639. Unfortunately, this was not easy to accomplish. A good deal was rotten in the state of Golconda; a typical complaint is this:

‘The loss we have sustained by these Bramons, by unrecoverable debtors fled to their protection, monies exacted from ourselves and servants, and cloth violently taken from our washers, will amount to little less than four thousand pagodas. And all the remedy our often solicitings at court and elsewhere hath procured is a firman lately come down from His Majesty, wherein the chief Kindlers of all these injuries are appointed judges of our cause: the event thereof may easily be conjectured.’*

In 1636, Aurangzeb, a boy of eighteen already deeply hostile to all foreigners, and especially Christians, became Viceroy of the Deccan, and the Mogul Empire’s steady pressure southward began. His siege of Golconda, 1656, failed, but its extinction was achieved in 1687. Farmans from Central Indian kingdoms became worthless.

Bantam was made independent of Surat, 1633, but retained control of the chief Coromandel factory, Masulipatam---where the English, doubly influenced by the Dutch (in its connection with Java, and by the Dutch Company’s presence at Masulipatam and Pulicat), were grossly extravagant and imitated the Hollanders’ overbearing manners. Fortified by instructions from home. Methwold took Coromandel under his own authority, 1636; the East India Company’s affairs in the Malayan Islands become henceforward separate from the purpose of this book.

The famine of 1630 caused a dearth of cloth, the weavers having nearly all died. Bengal, which had escaped lightly, beckoned as the only possible source of supply. From 1630 onwards, there were persistent attempts to establish factories in Orissa and Bengal, to gather up silks and cottons from this one comparatively unravaged region, and to benefit by the abnormal prices of rice, ghi, sugar. The famine thus brought the Company into the coastal trade, since communication from Surat had to be by sea, in the disturbed state of the interior. This began a new peril, and many of their ships fell to the Arab and Maratha pirates of the western shores. Both the Company and Courteen’s Association suffered losses. Small country-built ships---of which by 1640 the Company had many---were in constant peril. A typical disaster occurred in November, 1638, when the Malabar craft were enabled to draw up by reason of a dead calm,

‘insomuch they perceived our ship could not work any way with her sails, they handed their sails and immediately rew all together on board us and lashed fast, notwithstanding we placed ever shot into them and spoiled many of their people. Being lashed on board, they entered their men in abundance, the which we used all means possible to clear; but finding them so resolutely bent, and still encreasing so abundantly, I resolved to blow up our upper deck, and effected it with the loss of not one of our people, yet some hurt, and divers of theirs (namely, the Malabars) slain and maimed. This seemed little or nothing to diminish or quell their courage; but we still continued to defend the opposing enemy by murthering and wounding each other, they being so resolute that they would not step aside from the muzzle of our ordnance when we fired upon them but immediately, being fired, heave in whole buckets of water; insomuch that in the conclusion we were forced to betake ourselves unto the gundeck, upon which we had but two pieces of ordnance. They then cutting with axes the deck over our heads, and hearing the hideous noise and cry of such a multitude, we thought how to contrive a way to send them to their great adorer Beelzebub, which was by firing all our powder at one blast, as many of us as were left alive leaping into the sea, yet intercepted (some) by those divelish hellhounds. We were at that present English 23 (being all wounded, four excepted), blacks 4, and Javaes 4; slain, English 5, Javaes 3, and blacks 13’.*

The factories at Hariharpur in Orissa and Balasore in Bengal, established in 1633, struggled on, until a friendly Mogul Governor appointed Gabriel Boughton, a ship’s surgeon, his medical attendant in 1645. The tradition that this same Boughton in 1636 healed the Emperor’s daughter Jahanara after she had been burned, though mistaken, is old and respectable, as is the story that he asked no reward except trading rights in Bengal for his people. At any rate, he proved a benefactor to his countrymen, winning prestige which he exercised unselfishly.

Not only was the Company building up local traffic in foodstuffs; in the Gulf and Red Sea it entered the coffee trade, and the factors learnt the excellence of this beverage. In this, as in so many good habits, Oxford led the way; ‘a Jew named Jacob opened a coffee-shop in that city in 1649’,* a Greek following suit in Cornhill three years later. The date of the first notified exportation from India is 1658; in 1659 the Dutch East India Company ‘ordered a consignment of coffee for trial, saying that it was beginning to be in demand, especially in England’. The new drink quickly made its way, till the coffee-houses of Dryden’s age took the place of the Mermaid and other famous taverns of Ben Jonson’s age---

      ‘the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun’.

Another social change began to cast its coming shadow. Pepys, on September 25, 1660, ‘did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drank before’.

The factories were destined to become entrepôts for Far Eastern commodities as well. Peace with Portugal opened up the attractions of the China trade through Macao; and, since England was usually at least in official amity with Holland, and in any case was far stronger at sea than Portugal, the latter country’s nationals found it convenient to send merchandise on East India Company ships. The English could hardly be expected to convey the goods of others past the Dutch prowling and patrolling Malayan seas, without becoming principals in the commerce themselves. Methwold sent an expedition to Macao (April 9, 1635), to bring back gold, pearls, curios, silk, musk, lignum, aloes, camphor, benzoin; and, if there were room, alum, China roots, porcelain, brass, green ginger, sugar and sugar candy. Since the new trade must be carried on in some manner of partnership with the Portuguese, he gave instructions worth quoting as exemplifying the wisdom and tolerance which marked almost all he did. The merchants would get permission to live on shore at Macao, ‘to which purpose you shall take a house, and cohabit lovingly together’:*

‘And that no scandal may be given or taken in point of religion (wherein that nation is very tender) let your exercises of devotion be constant but private, without singing of psalms, which is nowhere permitted unto our nation in the King of Spain’s dominions, except in embassadors’ houses.’

A Chinese document exists, which notes that in 1636 Tour vessels of barbarians with red hair’ arrived from abroad.* In this description we may identify our own countrymen, new to Macao.

Almost from the first, the heads of the factories kept much state. Company employees lived and ate together; there were daily prayers; the President was supposed to admonish the younger members. It is often stated that no capital jurisdiction was exercised, either over Englishmen or foreign dependants; and it is true that each successive commission limited the scope of such jurisdiction by keeping it as strictly as possible to cases of murder and piracy. But the steady accrual of authority to Surat (after the disastrous decade following on the capture of Ormuz and the disgrace of Amboyna), and especially to Methwold himself, was shown as early as October 1636, when the master of the Mary, rather than take disciplinary action himself, reported an offence alleged against an older seaman with a youth. The President and Council went aboard, a table and bar were set up, a jury empanelled, witnesses examined. The man was convicted, and hanged at the yard-arm.*

It had become obvious that the Company must be able to defend life and goods. In 1641, to secure Masulipatam, its earliest settlement on the eastern coast, though the expense aroused the anger of the Court of Committees, the Dutch and Portuguese example of fortification was at last followed. In September a settlement was made at Madraspatam, and St. George’s Fort begun.

Here for the first time the Company acted as de jure as well as de facto rulers. Almost on their arrival they discovered that two pariahs had killed ‘a common whore for her jewels’, throwing the corpse in a river. The deed came to light nearly miraculously, and the local Raja

‘gave us an express command to do justice upon the homicides according to the laws of England; but if we would not, then he would according to the custom of Karnatte’,*

which we may assume was more unpleasant than even that of England.

He asked reasonably, who would come and trade here if report made it a resort of thieves and murderers?

‘Which being so, and unwilling to give away our power to those who are too ready to take it, we did justice on them, and hanged them on a gibbet’,

where they stayed till the Raja’s overlord visited Madras, when the bodies were thoughtfully removed lest the sight mar his pleasure. Eight months later a Portuguese swashbuckler who landed drank too much, and slew one of two Company’s soldiers sent to rescue a Dane he and companions had wounded in seven places. He was not hanged but shot (‘because he pretended to be a gentleman’), despite his people’s indignation at such severity to a hidalgo’s spirited excesses.

In 1647 the Company had twenty-three Indian stations, with ninety employees whose salaries totalled £4700 annually.

The Company had been eyed askance by the King, brushed aside as irrelevant by Parliament. The Civil War launched them on new miseries; the ship of their fortunes dragged through rocky shallows. Their only comfort was that Squire Courteen’s Association had an even grimmer time. War killed the silk demand, and made the home trade precarious in the extreme. The commander of their best ship, the John, delivered it to the King’s navy, so that Eastern seas saw it no more; it preyed on Commonwealth commerce until wrecked. With the loosening of traditional loyalties in England, Company employees grew untrustworthy everywhere; Bengal, especially, bred roguery, and brought trivial profit and mighty anxiety. Private trade proved inextinguishable. It was found advisable to sanction it---first, in such small articles as diamonds, and later, by striving to limit it. After all, sailors have always reckoned to make something for themselves ‘on the side’. Presently Company’s servants were permitted to send home goods, if shipped openly and a percentage paid for carriage and customs and insurance. These privileges proved merely palliatives in the teeming laxity of the times. Repeatedly, when a factor died it was found that he was deep in debt, either to the Company or to country merchants who claimed reimbursement from his employers.

The Company suffered, as we have seen, from the King’s dislike of the London mercantile community. Presently it suffered on an opposing count: after the ruin of his cause the Commonwealth’s thorough-going sequestrations impoverished its Royalist members. When the ‘assault was intended against the City’ the Company’s guns, meant for its ships, were requisitioned by Parliament for defence.

Both belligerents wanted ready money: and both mulcted the Company. The King, buying up their pepper (practically by compulsion), took over £63,000, not a penny of this price being ever paid. Fifteen years later (1655), a windfall came in £85,000 awarded to them by foreign arbitrators, in settlement of their long-drawn-out account with the Dutch, for Amboyna and other wrongs. They were then pressing Cromwell for a new charter and for restraint of interlopers (who had increased during the civil troubles and were some of them in close friendship with the Lord Protector). When the Company incautiously suggested that the £85,000 should be handed over, they were informed that ‘His Highness hath great occasion at present for money’. He borrowed for twelve months £46,000; the twelve months became eternity.

The Company and their more loyal servants could only draw together cautiously, and wait for the long years of national disunion to end. Even this was hard to accomplish; there was growing testiness among the factors, sharp correspondence, demands and assertions of authority by Surat or Batavia, refusals of obedience by inferior agencies. The civil troubles were sedulously made known by the Dutch, who continued to grow to overwhelming superiority and prestige, the English name sinking ever lower. The Company’s ship Endymion was boarded and robbed of her pepper in 1649; and to remonstrance the Dutch commander

‘fell into high terms and swore all Englishmen were rogues and traitors and that he could not esteem them as he had formerly, they having no king; and withal threatened to do the English all the injuries he could, and for the President and Council, he would kick them up and down if they were in his presence’.*

Even the Spaniards and Portuguese recovered a disrespectful demeanour, the offending Adam which had been whipped out of them returning. The entire abandonment of the Eastern trade was a contingency which came close to thought and resolution repeatedly.

The Company had foreseen that the King’s execution would embarrass them with Oriental monarchs. In especial, they feared the Shah would say that the Gombroon arrangement had lapsed, since made between two kings, of whom one was now dead. There is a story that he heard a traveller relate the event as an eye-witness, whereupon he cried out upon him for a traitor who had watched his lord murdered and clapped him in jail. This may be fable; and it is pleasant to know that as late as 1657 some Persians, at any rate, had not heard of the deed (the Dutch must have been culpably slack with their opportunities), for in that year a Persian merchant desiring passage to Surat in an East India Company vessel gave as his reason for preferring this to a Dutch ship, ‘that he took the English for a nation of ancient date, which a King governed (as he said); the other a bad caste, and, though powerful, yet not good’.

In 1649 the safe arrival of no less than seven ships seemed an occasion meriting a banquet of congratulation. A rhyming coxcomb, Francis Lenton, the notorious self-styled ‘Queen’s Poet’, gratuitously offered his tribute. He was awarded £3, which we can only call hush-money, for with it went the note that

‘the Court did not well relish his conceits, and desired him neither to print them nor proceed any further in making verses upon any occasion which may concern the Company’.*

The British connection with India has notoriously been no favourer of literature; but the Company could hardly be expected to welcome bad verses when their world was going wrong.

At last the English in exasperation struck back, in the Navigation Act of 1651, which forbade the bringing of goods into British territory except in English ships manned by a majority of English sailors; an exception was made when goods were of European origin and brought by the ships of the country producing them. This order meant ruin for the Dutch carrying trade.

The Dutch with a persistency that cannot be too admired had pushed unhaltingly forward towards the empire of the whole Asiatic and African seaboard. They had reduced Portugal to the extremity of distress, wresting from her one valuable hold after another, from the Moluccas to Malabar. They spread up the Gulf. Wherever they came they strained all strength to extirpate all trade but their own. Their goods were better than English goods, their home support was firm, their seamanship and shipboard sanitation were excellent, their policy was without hesitations or ruth. That they were universally detested they sensibly ignored as a small matter.

Their news service made them aware (1653) that war had broken out. Keeping this dark, they surprised the Company’s vessels, and sailed exultantly into Indian and Persian ports, their prizes in tow. They swiftly swept English commerce off the seas. Cromwell’s victories in European waters brought only immaterial compensation to set off material loss. Victory in the Channel was a doubtful tale, whereas English shipping captive in the Gulf or in Swally Roads was plain to see.

Meanwhile, the break-up of the Mogul Empire had begun. Bigotry and xenophobia ran through Aurangzeb’s administration, and foreign merchants (most of all the English, whose prestige had sunk so low) endured a waxing arbitrariness of oppression and pillage. Bribes became heavier and more constant, in addition to levies and customs duties. The harassed English looked about for some nook of refuge where their persecuted shipping might hide under the guns of fortification, and their personnel fly for safety. A name that crops up in discussions of what was clearly now a necessity is Bombay.

1657 saw the Company’s fortunes at perhaps their lowest. All through the Commonwealth years interlopers swarmed; another embarrassment was renewed in the sixties---French pirates whose actions sunk into disrepute the general European name. They were followed in 1668 by a French East India Company trading legitimately.

Interlopers at last saw the folly of ruining the whole commerce. Cromwell granted a fresh charter, and the Company and Courteen’s merchants amalgamated and entered on a surly partnership. The new concern bought up the Guinea Company, thereby obtaining gold from Africa and avoiding the drain of specie from England.

The Restoration, 1660, was hailed as setting the Company free from an equivocal position. They needed all the encouragement they could get; they were in controversy with the powerful Mir Jumla, Nawab of Bengal. Madras factors in 1656 had seized a private junk of his, as security for what was apparently a private claim. In the end the Company paid excessively for the alleged loss thus inflicted; and the interim price of his hostility was very heavy. Some madness (worse than ineptitude) was on the Company’s servants in these years. Several of them in 1660 provided the Deccan King with mortars against the celebrated Sivaji. The military prowess of English (still more, of Dutch) troops, and of gunners especially, was well recognised; warring potentates had begun the practice of demanding aid of European science and personnel, English gunners had been lent to the Shah and had kept Aurangzeb out of Kandahar. But the Maratha chief was not the man to forget or overlook a wanton addition to his enemies. Raiding Rajapur, he took its factors prisoners; they languished in hill dungeons until ransomed some years later. Since their misfortune was brought on them by their own action, their superiors, both in Surat and London, were extremely annoyed, and unwilling to pay for their release.

Ceylon was the scene of another bag of English captives in 1660. A ship’s company were enticed ashore and hospitably treated, and then seized. They too spent years in captivity. These were times when Englishmen were lightly regarded, and treated with contempt and unprovoked cruelty.

Chapter III

Era of Consolidation, 1660-1710

Cession of Bombay: Edward Winter: Sir George Oxinden: Sivaji: Second Dutch War: Henry Gary in Bombay: acquisition of Bombay by Company: Gerald Aungier and fortification of Bombay: Restoration in England and effect of Civil War out East: Treaty of Breda: treaty with Sivaji: death of Sivaji: Sir Josiah Child: growth of Bombay: interlopers: rival companies in England: Keigwin’s rebellion: Child’s war with Mogul Empire: Job Charnock and William Hedges: more interlopers: legends of Charnock: foundation of Calcutta: Hamilton the Indian Herodotus: foundation of Fort St. David: execution of Sambhaji: English and Dutch policies compared: rise of French East India Company: penal practice of English settlements; Elihu Yale: piracy: Thomas Pitt: Sir William Norris: peace between rival Companies: Nawab of Carnatic’s interest in Madras: negotiations with Mogul central government: death of Aurangzeb.

In 1662 Charles II married Catherine of Braganza,

‘an event of deep significance to Europeans in the East, for . . . it threw the shield of English protection over the Portuguese, now hard pressed by the Dutch’.*

Rumour rioted; its was obvious that if the English were to implement their new engagements, some harbour must be given them. For a time it was believed that all Portuguese India, or Goa at least, was to change rulers. Ultimately only Bombay (and Tangier) came as the Princess’s dowry.

The Viceroy, passionately supported by his people, flatly refused to hand Bombay over to Sir Abraham Shipman, sent out as Governor. Shipman settled uneasily on Anjidiv (an island fifty miles south of Goa), where he and most of his men died; it was abandoned in 1665. Charles and his Government at length were stirred to such anger that they threatened to demand the Viceroy’s head, as well as an apology. Peremptory orders came from Lisbon; Bombay became British (1665), the Viceroy giving way with this last protest:

‘I confess at the feet of your Majesty that only the obedience I owe your Majesty, as a vassal, could have forced me to this deed, because I foresee the great troubles that from this neighbourhood will result to the Portuguese; and that India will be lost the same day in which the English nation is settled in Bombay.’*

Very much less than what was understood by ‘Bombay’ was handed over, even as it was. The native population seem to have welcomed the departure of the Portuguese, in an address of convincingly sincere irascibility, which singles out their crowning folly of religious persecution:

‘None could with liberty exercise their Religion, but the Roman Catholique; which is wonderful confining with rigorous precepts.’

Many considerations move sympathy for the Portuguese, especially in an Englishman’s mind. But they deserved their eclipse.

Between 1662 and 1665, Sir Edward Winter was Agent at Fort St. George; an energetic man, as his tomb at Battersea witnesses:

‘Thrice twenty mounted Moors he overthrew
Singly on foot; some wounded, some he slew;
Dispersed the rest. What more cou’d Sampson do?’

In that adventure he received a scar that (perhaps intentionally) disfigured his looks and increased his natural extreme tempestuousness.

Like almost everyone else, Winter was more interested in private trade than in the Company’s affairs. It is clear that his masters were afraid of him; nevertheless they plucked up courage to send out in 1665 another Agent, George Foxcroft, to succeed him. Winter for a time apparently acquiesced, and then attacked Foxcroft and his Council, killing one of the latter, and arresting the former as guilty of ‘high treason’---the grounds of the accusation being remarks (denied by Foxcroft and his associates) which only in the suspicious days of the early Restoration would have been taken seriously. No one except Winter’s confederates was on his side; critics pointed out that his own career during Commonwealth times had not been conspicuously Royalist. The nearest factory, Masulipatam, was particularly hostile. Bombay was scornfully against him. Yet this ruthless man held his course until 1668, when, under overwhelming force from England, he allowed Foxcroft to be reinstated. Too powerful not to be forgiven, he retired to England in 1672. His turbulent arrogance suggests that his mind was unbalanced. He pursued the Company for compensation (apparently for the almost boundless mischief he had done them), and in 1674 Lord Shaftesbury (Dryden’s ‘Achitophel’) as arbitrator awarded him £6000.

We have entered an epoch as slightly known* as it was important. In 1662 Sir George Oxinden became President at Surat, a strong man following a weak predecessor who had allowed a quarrel with the Mogul Governor to drag on, to the damage not merely of the Company but of the Indian merchants, who took the coming of a President of sense and character as their chance to offer mediation. With them on his side, Oxinden’s firm yet reasonable and conciliatory manner won, and the difference was composed in a pleasing scene:

‘So the merchants and we rested on the Marine that night, and the next day went up to Surat in company; were received with acclamations and expressions of joy, the Governor using many expressions of kindness for the future and all the immunities and privileges that former practice could entitle our nation to; excusing himself, protesting what had passed was forced upon him by the rash and inconsiderate actions of a young man whose years were too green for so weighty an employment.’*

This happy finish was as well. ‘That grand rebel Sevagee’* and his scarcely less energetic father Shahji were ravaging India south of the Narmada, ‘the whole country being a mere field of blood’.* His wars were ostensibly with the Bijapur ruler, but challenged the Muhammadan general empire, which his race were to ruin in little more than a century. The Bombay chaplain, John L’Escaliot, has left a picture of this very remarkable man, omitting neither the valour nor the cruelty:

‘His person is described by them who have seen him to be of mean stature (lower somewhat than I am), erect, and of an excellent proportion; active in exercise, and whenever he speaks seems to smile; a quick and piercing eye; and whiter than any of his people. He is distrustful, secret, subtle, cruel, perfidious, insulting over whomsoever he gets into his power, absolute in his commands, and in his punishments more than severe, death or dismembering being the punishment of every offence; if necessity require, venturous and desperate in execution of his resolves.’

In 1664 he sacked Surat, but the stout countenance shown by the English factors dismayed his followers, after half-hearted efforts to storm their godowns and residence (threats had been flung contemptuously back). The Company’s prestige rose mightily. From now on the factors refer to Sivaji almost with affection, and certainly with amusement and admiration. He becomes ‘our neighbour Sevagee’; when he met with a bad setback, in August 1665,

‘Our old and dear friend Sevajy hath, we fear, come to some mischance, having retired his quarters as far as Singapore.’*

The Second Dutch War, 1665-1667, proved far less damaging than the previous war. But it was hard to bear the rejoicing of the Dutch merchants over de Ruyter’s Medway raid and the Great Fire of London. The Calicut factors were imprisoned by a local Raja for refusing to lend him money for his own war against the Dutch. Both nations suffered so heavily (England having somewhat the better of the argument in European waters) that the Treaty of Breda was accepted by all with thankfulness. The Dutch began to grow wary of persecuting the English, and a decline of their overwhelming strength is visible.

In Sivaji, too, a friendlier attitude appeared. He made many overtures, in 1668 going so far as to say he would make good his robberies from the English. But when he learnt that they expected reparation to take the form of ready money ‘he shook his head and said no more’. Meanwhile the Company preferred a long spoon in supping with him, and looked about to find one.

They ultimately found it in Bombay. But so long as this remained royal property, it was a hindrance rather than a help. The last King’s Governor, Henry Gary, was a strange and troublesome person; his name is variously spelled, and he was a Venetian by education. Also, ‘a Person of a Mercurial Brain, a better merchant than soldier’*---‘a polite reference to the lack of personal courage which was one of his prominent characteristics’;* ‘a sort of recognised institution whose misdoings were not to be seriously taken’, even by ‘the stately Court of Committees’,* in whose correspondence we find him figuring finally as ‘old Gary’. He claimed almost absolute powers of life and death, in exercise of which he hanged one soldier for an affray with another and shot a second for alleged sleeping at his post. According to Alexander Hamilton, he

‘condemned a Man to be hanged on a Tuesday, and the Man suffered according to Sentence; but on Friday after, the poor dead Fellow was ordered to be called before the Court, but he would not comply with the Orders’.*

Gary maintained that he alone had the right to give English passes to Indian ships, and his irascibility was a sore trial to the Company in Surat.

However, in 1668, the King, in consideration of a large loan, handed over Bombay to the Company, to be held

‘in free and common soccage, as of the Manor of East Greenwich, on payment of the annual rent of £10 in gold, on the 30th September in each year’.

He had always been indifferent to what Pepys calls the ‘poor little island’, and exasperated by his Governors’ demands for money for the garrison and expenses. Another wearying factor was the clerical influence, which was entirely pro-Portuguese and was naturally exercised against the newcomers. The Company accepted Bombay with grumbling, which may have been part dissembling. They were aware (one supposes) of the qualities and properties which in 1663 had moved Shipman to write:

‘The harbour of Bombaim is the noblest that ever I see; the air healthful, and is exceedingly well seated for trade, and would in two or three years undo Surat by bringing hither all the trade. For the marchants living at Surat are under a very great tyranny, their money being liable to be taken away when the Mogul or his Governor pleaseth, and their persons abused. The customs in short time would be great.’

Oxinden’s successor (1669) as President at Surat, the able Gerald Aungier,* advised the Court of Committees that Bombay should be his headquarters as soon as it was adequately fortified.

There were many reasons why fortification was desirable. The Dutch were driving hard for a monopoly of pepper in Malabar (the one important pepper-producing region in India) to complete a world monopoly.

The French were establishing factories on the same coast. Aurangzeb’s reckless and gloomy bigotry was growing, and Hindus were wanting sanctuary. This might have been found in Sivaji’s territories if it were not that the ‘grand rebel’, like Charles and Cromwell, ‘had many and great occasions for money’; moreover, his territories were variable, according as his guerilla warfare ebbed or flowed. The President and Council at Surat reported (1668):*

‘There are many eminent persons that have declared themselves very desirous to live amongst us with their families, might they be secure; saying, except they were assured of that, they did not think it prudent to remove, since it will certainly disoblige that prince whose inhabitants they now are’---

who, like another Prince, might some day be found straddling right across their way and swearing by his infernal den that they should go no further from his City of Destruction, but that here would he spill their soul. The natives of India, it might be thought, were by now inured to living under political systems liable to flux and disastrous reversals; yet these ‘eminent persons’ pointed out that

‘if they should be outed of Bombay’ (i.e. after settling there), ‘there would be no place of abode left them’.

Fortification of Bombay would make

‘us terrible to our enemies and acceptable to our friends, and keep those few we have more fast and firm to us; which is what you greatly want, for seeing you have hitherto had no place of retirement, or any appearance to countenance and own them, hath bin the occasion so many have deserted you and have bin carried away by the Dutch, with great reluctancy, for otherwise they abominate them, well knowing beforehand the slavery they shall be subjected to’.

Nor was Mogul persecution the only kind driving men to seek refuge in Bombay. In the very first days of their rule, the Company had declined to deliver up to the Catholic clergy alleged apostates. Now, as later, the Holy Inquisition at Goa was a mighty builder-up of the English Empire.

Governor Gary boasted of what he was going to make Bombay, and its rising walls aroused Mogul jealousy and suspicion. The Indian merchants of Surat, especially after Bombay was transferred to the Company, were alarmed lest their city should lose its pre-eminence in trade to the upstart. They protested to the local factors against the proposed removal of their headquarters to Bombay; the long and profitable connection of Surat and the Company was urged, and the friendship between them was invoked. The Company’s prowess during Sivaji’s irruption induced a dread of helplessness if the foreign merchants departed. Oxinden’s funeral, in 1669, was made the occasion for an impressive demonstration of regard, streets and housetops being crowded with respectful spectators.

The Restoration brought relief in the East, as well as in England. But frayed tempers continued, and the quarrels of the Company’s servants among themselves were bitter and incessant. The marvel is that any business got done. The grave spirit of Puritan times, which we have seen in a man so tolerant as Methwold, disappeared, and care for outward decorum also. Shem Bridges, chief factor in Bengal, flouted (1669) the instructions for daily prayers:

‘that we have divine service once on the Sunday is as much as can be expected in these hot countries; for neither a man’s spirits nor voice can hold touch here with long duties’.

He notes that many thought prayers once a week more than they wanted. Why, he asked irascibly, should they be expected to go through a form of prayer on working days, when curious spectators were watching, and all the noise of business, carpenters, cooks, porters, visitors, miscellaneous chafferers, was about them? The Court of Committees tried to exercise a minute and nagging oversight, rendered by distance both exasperating and ineffective. Thus, the St. George establishment are told (October 22,1686):

‘the Tygar you keep at the expence of a Goat a day, besides attendance, we looke upon as a superfluous vain Charge’.*

It is strange how rigidly the British administration in India has continued to run in the earliest moulds; a complaint of both British and Indians in its government right up to the present has been that the home authorities have kept, and used far too often, a power of petty interference.

The Treaty of Breda, at the same time as the English were at last obtaining a secure foothold in India, abandoned territorial possession in the East Indies altogether. Even Pulo Run* was given up, in part exchange for New Amsterdam (now New York). For forty years it had been acknowledged as belonging to the English Company, although in practice the Dutch---visiting it periodically, cutting down all fruit and pepper trees, and doing a good deal of promiscuous murder---had kept them out of it.

“That grand rebel Sevagee’, long firmly established, in 1674 enthroned himself as an independent King, the ceremony being witnessed by Mr. Henry Oxinden, a relative of Sir George Oxinden:

‘I took notice on each side of the throne there hung (according to the Moors’ manner) on heads of gilded lances many emblems of Government and dominion, as on the right hand were two great fishes’ heads of gold with very large teeth; on the left hand several horses’ tails, a pair of gold scales on a very rich lance poised equally, an emblem of justice; and as we returned at the Palace gate there was standing two small elephants on each side and two fair horses with gold bridles and rich furniture, which made us admire which way they brought them up the hill, the passage being so difficult and hazardous.’

Oxinden returned with a treaty of peace with Sivaji,

‘which if punctually observed will be of no small benefit to the Honourable Company’s affairs, both on this Island Bombay and their factories which may be settled in Sevagy Rajah’s Dominions’.

Sivaji’s friendly overtures, intermittently manifest for some time, were partly due to new naval ambitions---he even went on one not very successful sea expedition in person---and his perception that the English were useful as possible allies against the Sidi. The Sidi was the Mogul admiral, in practice a semi-independent personage of piratical habits. His custom was to spend the monsoon period sheltered by Bombay---in the language of the time and country this was called ‘going into winter quarters’.* These weeks were not, however, given up entirely to idleness; he kept his hand in by looting the Maratha mainland and cutting off its inhabitants’ noses. Occasionally his warriors would raise brawls in Bombay itself; a few years later we find them proposing to hold an exhibition of eighty heads recently removed from their owners. This John Child prevented.

Sivaji, who viewed the Sidi’s amusements distastefully, spent much time pondering the possibility of seizing Bombay. He and the Sidi did seize two small adjacent islands, Kendry and Hendry. Yet his relations with the English became definitely friendlier. The latter could no longer make any question of the ‘grand rebell’s’ extraordinary qualities---courage, deftness and mobility, to a degree never surpassed in the world’s history. The Deputy Governor of Bombay dismisses (February 14, 1678) the Mogul resolution to march to destroy him with the comment: ‘But ’tis well knowne that Sevagee is a second Sertorius and comes not short of Haniball for stratagems’.

The Company bewail (January 15, 1678) Bombay’s poor prospects of trade:

‘no considerable augmentation being made therein, nor can be expected can hold so long as the opposite main continues in the possession of so grand a destroyer of commerce as is the Rajah Sevagee; and what we would lament is that we cannot foresee any termination of his government, for he still continues victorious even to a miracle’.

When he died at last (April 3, 1680), and was sent to his reward with accompanying women, male attendants and animals, they stayed doubtful till the end of the year, writing (December 13, 1680):

‘Sevagie hath dyed so often that some begine to thincke him immortell. ’Tis certaine little beliefe can be given to any report of his death till experience shews it per the waning of his hitherto prosperous affaires.’

Even this proof did not come immediately. His son Sambhaji began vigorously, waging war on the Portuguese, whom he pushed into extremities of distress, and plotting against Bombay. The Sidi, not backward in the revels, continued his annual sojourn in Bombay harbour; and pirates swarmed up the Malabar coast and congregated in mosquito-clouds round Madagascar.

Sir Josiah Child,

‘whose appearance as a city merchant instead of as Emperor of China or the great Mogul seems an error of Providence, ascended his inadequate throne in Leadenhall Street, and reigned despotically over the East India Company for the last twenty years of the seventeenth century’.*

Until Mr. and Mrs. Strachey proved otherwise, he and Sir John Child in Surat were thought to be brothers*; they were linked in name and knavery. Josiah’s irascibility would seem to have been boundless; his letters are tempestuous, and flash into arrogant wrath. The ‘supreme gifts’ of ‘passion and imagination’ ‘by their magic raise even his knaveries and his follies into the sphere of greatness’.* The times, as if conscious of his quality, provided him with a horde of foes. In England, by bribery of superbly insolent openness (he admitted to spending £80,000, buying the Court of Charles II, the King included), he procured official discountenance of interlopers. But he could do little against them in India, where so many circumstances, some of the Company’s own creation, befriended them. The Company’s employees were so badly paid that nothing could prevent private trade beyond what was permitted, especially private trade along the coast. In their fiercely imperious mood the Court of Committees dismissed suddenly and frequently; those dismissed did not always, or even often, return submissively to England. They joined with discarded soldiers---forming a possible reserve of re-employment, a probable source of opposition and rivalry. Henry Gary, for example, when he ceased to be Deputy Governor of Bombay, settled down as a ‘planter’ (presumably of coco-palms) in the island.

When tenure was so capriciously held, it was not to the advantage of the Company’s servants to press hardly on such freelances as Gary or even on arrant interlopers. Bombay was growing fast, its security and tolerance making it an enticing refuge from Inquisition-ridden Goa and from lands ravaged by tramplings of Mogul armies and incursions of the demon Sivaji and his goblin-hosts. From 10,000 when the Company took it over from the Crown, its population grew to 60,000 by 1674. We have noted the pirates of Malabar and Madagascar; we are entering on the golden age of piracy, when freebooters from Europe, sometimes allied with Malabari and Maratha craft, prowled beside India’s western shores. The line between interloper and pirate was thin and easily crossed; and between interloper and Company’s servant there was neutrality, and sometimes collusion.

In England, too, the interlopers found sympathisers. One of the former, when his ship was seized in the Thames, declared to a committee of the House of Commons (January 8, 1694) that ‘he did not think it any sin to trade to the East Indies, and would trade thither till there was an Act of Parliament to the contrary’---an opinion in which Parliament upheld him by a resolution, eight days later, ‘that all the subjects of England have equal right to trade to the East Indies, unless prohibited by Act of Parliament’. There was anger among English artisans against import of Indian textiles. Spitalfields silk-weavers demonstrated outside Parliament (1697). The Company was the target of fierce continuous criticism; in Scotland, conscious of poverty and restricted opportunities, there was the resolution---temporarily foiled in the Darien expedition disaster---to muscle in on English monopolies of trade.

Sir Josiah Child, who ‘by his great annual presents could command, both at Court and in Westminster Hall, what he pleased’, and held that

‘the laws of England are a heap of nonsense, compiled by a few ignorant country gentlemen, who hardly know how to make laws for the good government of their own families, much less for the regulating of companies and foreign commerce’,*

applied the private arguments which Parliament most readily accepted, and in 1693 procured a new charter. But the Company’s foes ferreted out his briberies, and offered the Government a loan of £2,000,000 at eight per cent., from a proposed new Company. The offer was taken. In 1698---the Old Company having still, under their charter, three years’ margin of safety before that expired---the New English Company was incorporated.

Long before this disastrous rivalry overtook it, the Company was shaken by the Child policy. Lavish with bribes at home, the Committees---in practice, Sir Josiah---enforced niggling economy abroad. The Surat President was temporarily reduced to an Agent’s rank (1680), and salaries were cut. John Child was made Agent over the head of Pettitt, the senior and ablest Member of Council.

He fell heir to a peck of troubles. Aurangzeb had just reimposed the detested poll-tax on all non-Muslims. He anticipated Mr. J. H. Thomas’s policy against Mr. de Valera; when the Company protested and refused to pay the tax, their customs dues were raised from 2 per cent. to 3½ per cent. The Hindus were again stirred to exasperated antagonism against Mogul rule; the slumbering war awakened over Western India, most of all under the guns of Bombay itself, where the Sidi hid from the monsoon storms, and diverted himself in forays on the mainland. The Dutch, as Sir John Child observed, were “huffing and talking bigg’.

In Bombay a strong royalist tradition persisted. Its garrison came reluctantly, and with reservations, under mere mercantile rule, keeping in the mental background possibilities of appeal to the Crown. New retrenchment hit the soldiery hard. Even harder was insistence that the copper coins used in the seven-miles-long territory (known as phedeas, budgerooks, dugonies) must be reckoned against the Portuguese xeraphine---the popular currency---at far more than the exchange actually obtainable. This fiat ran nowhere outside Bombay, while it was outside Bombay that the garrison must purchase provisions and everything else. All logic, as well as quiet sarcastic contempt, was on the side of Keigwin, the garrison’s commandant, when he urged facts against the Agent’s decision. But logic from an inferior carries light guns. Certain allowances were next withdrawn from officers serving in Bombay; protest was answered by cancellation of commissions, only Keigwin (who had not joined in the protest) remaining commissioned, with instructions to work with his sergeants as officers. Patriotism reinforced the arguments of economic stress; meanness was leaving the island defenceless, putting everything in peril. The garrison took Bombay under their own control, and proclaimed it again a fortress owning allegiance directly to the King of England. Their action was to Sir John Child

‘a bitter pill that damages all our Joyes, hove us into amazed thoughts, great trouble, and very seveere perplexities’.

In Shakespearian vein he reproved them:

‘Oh, Johny Thorburne, thy Ingratitude is of deep dye. . . . Come, one, two or three of you, and looke on your Governour; I am the same that lived amongst you not long agoe,* and then had warrs with Sevajee Rajah and great disturbances from the Portuguese, yett protected you all with God’s blessing.’

But the rebels proved past the power of elegiac to move them.

We have seen that the population of Bombay had risen sixfold in seven years of Company rule, eloquent testimony to the security which the harassed people of this seaboard, where Mogul and Maratha were in the first stages of their long warfare, discerned within its borders. Keigwin, who in 1679 had defeated a Maratha armada just outside Bombay, tightened up administration and defence. In April, 1684, the Sidi arrived, somewhat earlier than usual, for annual pastime and shelter. To his horror he was ordered to go elsewhere, and had to go: neither was there any hint of reprisal from the Mogul authorities at Surat, an old bogy which had compelled the garrison to acquiesce in his mischievous abuses of the harbour’s neutrality:

‘from this moment we hear no more of Bombay as the headquarters of the Siddee’s winter sports’.*

Sambhaji also noted the new spirit and turn of affairs, and wrote off as impracticable his dreams of seizing the fort. Keigwin thus laid two ghosts simultaneously.

Ultimately he surrendered the island to a fleet sent from home under Sir Thomas Grantham, on terms of a complete indemnification---to Sir John Child, who lamented his escape from a halter, an even bitterer pill than the first rebellion. ‘Keigwin, that notorious naughty Rascall. . . as Impudent as hell gloring in his Rougery’, went off to service in other seas, and died while leading the naval attack on a West Indian isle (Basseterre, St. Christopher’s, 1690). His rebellion resulted in the Company’s headquarters being moved from Surat to Bombay.

In 1683, with the help of Judge Jeffreys, an appropriate ally, Sir Josiah Child drove into exile on the Continent a rival merchant, Thomas Sandys, who had worked to have the Company’s monopoly declared illegal. In 1687 he made his prophetic and often-quoted remark, that the Company should so proceed as to lay

‘the foundations of a large well-grounded sure English Dominion in India for all time to come’.

Events were

‘forming us into the condition of a sovereign state in India’.*

Part of a sovereign state’s prerogative is waging war. In 1686, over a quarrel about customs dues in Bengal, war was superbly declared against the whole Mogul Empire, and ten armed vessels and six hundred men were sent to effect the conquest. The first achievement was an indirect one, the temporary ruin of the Company’s stations in Bengal.

Bengal, a rich alluvial well-irrigated region, then adequately (and not congestedly) populated, was first exploited by Company settlements at Balasore, Patna, and a few smaller factories. It brought in a far-reaching change in the character of the Company’s commerce, gradually and increasingly substituting for luxuries commodities of general use---saltpetre from Patna, and silks, muslins, textiles, from Dacca and the Delta.

In 1682 the Company’s Agent was Job Charnock, a name referred to in the correspondence of the Court of Committees as no other is:

‘The tone in regard to him is quite unique in the old Court’s correspondence.’*

He was ‘honest Mr. Charnock’ (‘Among the faithless faithful only he’), ‘one of our most ancient and best servants’,

‘a person that has served us faithfully above twenty years, and hath never, as we understand, been a prowler for himself beyond what was just and modest’.

We shall see that his merits did not always seem so unspotted to those who made his acquaintance in Bengal. Yule, ‘from the fragmentary impressions which are alone available’, sums up his character cautiously:

‘an imperfectly educated, and coarse and wilful, but strong man, who had spent his life in almost isolated positions among natives, and had been deeply tinged with native habits of thought and action, but who maintained a general loyalty to the Company whom he served, though he was by no means so scrupulous as they gave him credit for being’.*

Alexander Hamilton, who pounced on any tale with a breath of scandal about it, so retelling it as to pass on his own chuckling pleasure, is the authority for the best-known tradition---how Charnock, taking his file of personal soldiers, went to enjoy a suttee, but found the widow a Brahmin girl of striking beauty whose distress worked on his feelings, so that he rescued her forcibly. They lived together lovingly---Hamilton remarks that she converted him to paganism, and that on the anniversary of her death he used to sacrifice a cock on her tomb. The story has been rejected on two unconvincing grounds---that Charnock would never have dared to rescue a widow dedicated to death, and that an unclean creature like a cock is not a Hindu sacrificial animal. But in Bihar, where Charnock spent many years, low-class Muslims do sacrifice cocks to the manes of their dead. As for what Charnock would have dared or have not dared, we have the account of a very successful minor battle which he carried through against the police and military forces of Hugli (1686) shortly before Sir Josiah Child’s official war broke out. No one who has studied the East India Company records can think that the Mogul local levies---still less any riot the Hindus might raise---had any real terrors for the bolder spirits who served the Company.

The Court of Committees all through this period were in a fever of suspicion and ill temper. In 1681 they sent out William Hedges, one of their own number, as Agent in Bengal (which he reached July, 1682), to exercise a thorough inquisition and set all to rights. His Diary shows him for a busy meddling fool, encouraging Indians to spy on the Company’s servants and to tell tales, willing to believe any evil at first hearing. He took a particular dislike to ‘honest Mr. Charnock’, whose morals he reported as faulty. Charnock had persuaded a Gentoo’s woman, whether wife or widow Hedges was not quite clear (possibly the lady saved from burning with her husband’s corpse), to run away to him. He kept as personal servant an Englishman of blasphemous and atheistical tenets, also addicted to native women and even less respectably---‘a person of a most unquiett turbulent spirritt’. To his complaints Charnock gave, Hedges said, scant attention or reply. But he may have thought a good deal, for Mr. Hedges later asks with surprise ‘why Mr. Charnock is so cross to me’.

Hedges’s temper was at explosion-point when he arrived; and everything conspired to spoil it further. Interlopers, whom he suspected (with reason) of private relations with the Company’s servants, triumphed openly, magnificent in insolence. There was Mr. Pitt (to be grandfather of Lord Chatham), ‘no better than a Pyrott’, ‘a fellow of a haughty, huffying, daring temper’. Pitt and an ally, Captain Dowsell, swung past the Agent in a sloop manned by thirty English seamen and mounting four guns. Another interloper, Captain Alley,

‘came up to Hugly in his Barge, rowed with English Mariners in coats with Badges, and four Musicians’,

proceeding to the Mogul Chief of Police (faujdar)

‘in a splendid Equipage, habitted in Scarlet richly laced. Ten Englishmen in Blew Capps and Coats edged with Red, all armed with Blunderbusses, went before his pallankeen, eighty Peons before them, and four Musicians playing on the Weights, with two Flaggs before him, like an Agent. A gawdy shew and great noise adds much to a Public Person’s credit in this Country’.

The wise East has never made laws against a man providing his neighbours with as fine and rowdy a spectacle as he can afford.

Since a factor’s salary ranged from £20 to £40, and a writer’s was £10 only (though allowances made these sums worth much more), the Court of Committees were unreasonable in expecting single-minded service. Hedges, however, in his acrimony went so far as to open letters to the Company in London from their servants in Bengal, highhandedness of a degree that Sir Josiah Child felt should be reserved for him. Though himself a Committee, Hedges was ignominiously dismissed (August, 1684).

The Company having declared war on Aurangzeb, their employees had to flee. Charnock is one of those Englishmen who have cast their shadow on Indian imagination, and attained to an existence above human. A native historian has magnified his passage down the river, ravaging as he went, with boats marching parallel and firing waterside huts and godowns, into a magician’s achievement; Job with a burning-glass roasted the whole river-front as far as Chandernagore, and with his sword cut asunder a massive iron chain drawn across to arrest his progress! The final peace is ascribed to him; he appeared majestically before Aurangzeb, who was in straits of famine in his enemies’ grip, and offered him food---generosity melting the Mogul’s heart, so that he asked how he might requite his saviour, and was told that the English wanted freedom to trade, which he granted.*

The Englishmen took refuge first at Chutanuti (part of the modern Calcutta), and then (1687) on Hijli, a malarious and deathly island at the river’s mouth, tiger-haunted. Here, out of three hundred two hundred died; nevertheless the tiny garrison repulsed far superior forces.

Captain Heath was sent from England with reinforcements and orders to seize Chittagong, which Sir Josiah thought an important city on the Ganges. Charnock incurred the Committees’ displeasure by refusing to bother about Chittagong (yet even their disapproval is expressed apologetically); and watched with disgust while Heath was ‘tripping from Port to Port without effecting anything’. The consequence

‘of the Company’s spirited war policy was the evacuation of Bengal and the loss of the results of half a century’s painful toil and effort’.*

This is too strongly put. The Company had swept Mogul shipping off the western seas and played havoc with the pilgrim traffic. Aurangzeb consented to peace, February, 1690, on condition that the English engaged ‘to behave themselves for the future no more in such a shameful manner’, to pay £17,000, and to expel ‘Mr. Child who did the disgrace’. The last-named had died a few days earlier,

‘having done more for the Company and the honour of his country than ever any Englishman did in India’,

an estimate as accurate as most official estimates. A little later in the same year, Charnock returned from refuge in Madras to Calcutta for the third time. This return is taken as the city’s foundation (August 24, 1690); we are laconically told ‘Rains falling day and night’---the marshes must have presented an unpromising spectacle. Yet the site was well, even if almost accidentally, chosen. William Hedges had noted, seven years previously,

‘God Almighty’s good providence hath always graciously superintended the affairs of this Company.’

Hamilton tells us that in Calcutta, until his death in 1693,

Channock reigned more absolutely than a Rajah, only he wanted much of their Humanity, for when any poor ignorant Native transgressed his Laws, they were sure to undergo a severe whipping for a Penalty, and the Execution was generally done when he was at Dinner, so near his Dining-room that the Groans and Cries of the poor Delinquents served him for Music’.

The D.N.B. pays an enthusiastic tribute to Hamilton as a witness. He is sometimes, however, called the Indian Herodotus:

‘Hamilton was a violent partisan and an enthusiastic gossip, and his sympathies, as became his calling, were all against the monopolist company, with the result that his book, A New Account of the East Indies, is a perfect storehouse of scandalous libels against John Child in particular and the Company’s officers in general.’*

He is, nevertheless, far and away our best and fullest source, apart from the Company’s own records, for the period 1690-1720; it is surprising how often the student will light on some unexpected outside corroboration of his ‘scandalous libels’.*

In 1696 the English were given leave by the Nawab of Bengal to fortify themselves against a rebel raja who was advancing south-east from the Burdwan district. The fort which arose, inland from the river’s present course, was in 1699 renamed Fort William, in honour of the Dutch King of England. In the same year, three villages, Chutanuti, Govindpur, Calcutta, were rented from the Nawab of Bengal; and the Company became a Zemindar, and appointed an Englishman to hold this office and title. Bengal in 1707 was made a Presidency, and independent of Fort St. George (Madras).

Calcutta was the Company’s third possession, as distinct from mere trading stations (Madras---Fort St. George---being the first, and Bombay, bought from the British Crown, the second). But Fort St. David (opposite Cuddalore) came almost contemporaneously. The Marathas (who had themselves usurped it) with a gesture of expansive generosity sold the site along with all territory ‘within ye randome shott of a piece of ordnance’. Madras sent its longest-ranging gun and instructions that ‘it lyes in the gunner’s art to load and fire it to the best advantage’. The shots were fired, September 23, 1690, and took in villages known to this day as ‘Gundu Gramam’ (‘Cannonball Villages’). The Company gave their friends the Dutch, who were established well within range on the river’s southern bank, a cordial invitation to remain and consider themselves esteemed neighbours. The Dutch, however, removed their factory elsewhere.

Sivaji’s son Sambhaji had sunk into habits of drunkenness and brutality. Betrayed (1689) to Aurangzeb, who had against him more than his political quarrel with Sivaji, Sambhaji was offered life for apostasy. Maratha courage flared up in the insulting answer that he would consent if the Emperor gave him his daughter, and in contemptuous reference to Islam. Aurangzeb, long set in morose bigotry, avenged this by an execution revoltingly cruel even by Mogul standards. Sambhaji, taken on camel-back to death, vainly besought the Rajput troopers of the imperial camp to slay him.

Sambhaji had few friends even amongst his own people. But the details of his death roused the Marathas to a flame of detestation. After all, he was Sivaji’s son. Their foe’s scorn and hatred had luridly revealed themselves. There could be only warfare now, till either Mogul or Maratha was ruined.

Lyall’s words begin to be true of the English, as well as of the Dutch, Company:

‘The great Companies of the seventeenth century were the champions and delegated agents of their respective nations in the competition for commerce and territory throughout the whole non-Christian world.’*

Yet by comparison with their vigorous and hitherto successful rivals the English Company remained eminently peaceable. On the Malabar coast they ‘were prepared to pay a higher price for pepper, and to buy it in the open market’,* while the Dutch policy

‘was governed by the single consideration of maximum pepper trade at minimum expense’.*

While the Dutch had long acted on a kind of half-cock offensive, ready to pass into active belligerence and willing to become embroiled in local warfare,

‘the English Company, in many ways more far-sighted, while keeping itself strictly outside political entanglements’,*

did not interfere in any Indian campaign that the Dutch were waging, even when England and Holland were at war, beyond supplying arms and munitions against the Dutch. We may accept Mr. Panikkar’s praise as coming from an unquestionable quarter.

Nevertheless, conditions were forcing on the English drastic revision of their policy of unprotected traffic. Their sea-power had ensured them against too high-handed interference and oppression by Mogul governors; and so long as that Empire remained reasonably strong, it gave them fair security inland. But when the Sidi was acting as an almost independent prince, when Malabar and Maratha pirates were attacking any ship weak or isolated enough to offer a chance of prey, when Sivaji and then Sambhaji were pressing the Portuguese hard and ravaging up to the walls of the Company’s factories, the Mogul Empire was growing shadowlike and remote, in comparison with these adjutting realities. Without fortification trade was merely an invitation to pillage.

It was in Madras that the Company first developed what its critics would call ‘imperialism’---trivially enough at first, and under sufficient compulsion. There were many reasons why from the first Madras was by far the most independent of the settlements, the nearest to exercise of sovereign powers. It was the first to be given by charter from England a mayor’s court and be made a municipality (1687). It was in a region hardly even nominally under the Mogul Empire, where petty rajas and a foolish and inadequate Nawab could not afford protection nor effectively resent encroachment. Thirdly, in 1674 François Martin, the real founder of French rule in India, founded Pondicherry, a station obviously destined to provide uncomfortable neighbourhood. Madras became politically alert. It was not possible that such secular foes as France and England should confront each other and not watch for occasions of offence to arise. In 1690 the two fought a drawn naval battle off the Coromandel coast.

The Company’s stations in Further India were ceasing to matter; in 1670 the Dutch expelled the English from Macassar, and in 1682 persuaded the King of Bantam to expel them from Java. But after the Revolution had made England and Holland allies against Louis XIV, Dutch animosity began to sink, partly from common interest, partly from Holland’s growing weakness against France. This was the period when first disparity of populations resulted in certain countries rising into the category of first-class powers, while others, after long and successful contention, definitely and finally fell back. As the century drew to its close, the Dutch in their relations with Indian administrations resorted (to the waxing inconvenience of the English, who found existence in India very expensive) to bribery more and more, to bullying less and less. They grew aware that such way to greatness as was left to them lay eastward, in the Malayan archipelago where they stood out as unchallenged suzerains and with only paltry chiefs to overawe. The Netherlanders shrink out of Indian affairs.

From 1660 to 1707, as we have seen, ‘the Bay’ (the Bengal and Coromandel settlements generally) was under Fort St. George. In 1687, Sir John Child, with Bombay as now his headquarters in place of Surat, was ‘General’ (hence sometimes styled by historians misleadingly ‘Governor-General’). Marathas dominated the neighbouring mainland, pirates vexed the seas, the Mogul Empire was at no great distance. In Bengal the English were driven down into deltaic swamps; and afterwards, when peace was restored, were allowed to push up-country slowly and inconspicuously.

In Madras, however, the Company had no more serious threats than those from the Nawab, and from the Portuguese at San Thomé and the French power in its beginnings at Pondicherry. San Thomé was taken by the French in 1672, and lost in 1674 to the Dutch and the Nawab acting together. Meanwhile Madras steadily consolidated its strength; by 1657 it was thoroughly fortified. Its administration acted as sovereign. By the ’eighties we find major native malefactors being hanged, and English ones whipped or burnt in the hand. The last penalty was a favourite one, as it was in Calcutta also, twenty years later. The branding of criminals was not abolished until Dalhousie’s time. In the late seventeenth century it was almost invariably inflicted on Englishmen who claimed ‘benefit of clergy’ after conviction for theft or manslaughter. A century after this it becomes monotonous in the records, especially of Calcutta, where Indians who suffered it were also expelled across the river. But neither Bombay nor Calcutta in the seventeenth century claimed powers of capital punishment, as Madras did. Still less would the English in Calcutta, even a hundred and forty years later, have dared to do what the Governor of Madras did in 1680, when he forbade a suttee which was proposed to grace the obsequies of a rich Hindu merchant.

Elihu Yale,* Governor of Fort St. George (1687-92), was the first to see the wide application of the anti-piracy laws which the dread of men’s minds, confronted by this menace grown to enormous proportions, made possible. Hamilton’s statement that Yale hanged ‘for piracy’ his English groom, a man called Cross, for absenting himself from his duties, ‘riding off two or three days to take the air’, is usually dismissed as another piece of Hamilton’s malicious gossip. We need not hesitate to accept it as fact, if we add that the groom was probably accused by his irate master of meaning to steal the horse. Under Yale’s administration courts-martial for ‘piracies’ sat continually on Indians and Englishmen. In the year of his appointment a Judge-Advocate was sent out from England, and Madras was given a Mayor and Corporation and had a new Supreme Court erected. In government, so far as government consists in machinery for repressing the wicked, Madras was far ahead of any other presidency or agency. We find the records peppered with proof: an Indian is hanged for robbery and his head stuck up in a prominent place; and English sailors who deserted, especially if they used ship’s property (a boat or pinnace) to make their get-away, plainly were ‘pirates’, which Yale seems to have interpreted to mean anyone who, while accompanied by a stitch or splinter of property not strictly his, crossed any tract of water. Yale himself generally presided over these Courts, which we need not doubt that his truant groom would find acquiescent in his master’s mood. Pirates must have literally abounded in the environs of Fort St. George! That some people were as sceptical of their ubiquity as a few nullifidians in England were of that of witches we may surmise from what happened after a trial in April, 1689, when six pirates were condemned to be branded with a P ‘at the Execution Post under the Fort point’ and another two to be executed. One of those capitally doomed was reprieved (Yale ‘being very buisy’ was absent from this particular court-martial); the other was coolly handed over to the Defence for Captain Heath to hang at his yard-arm. Heath, who as a naval man might be supposed not to be tender to actual pirates, refused this duty, saying that ‘as he had none of the live men, he would have none of the dead’. He was fined 200 pagodas for contempt of court.*

After Yale went, this administrative activity slackened, certainly not because piracy slackened. In 1698 the great Captain Kidd himself chased a Company’s ship sailing by Madagascar to Madras:

‘The Sedgwick, as going, was persued three days and 3 nights by Kidd: being calme weather, and Kidd outrowing her, she narrowly escaped by favour of a Breeze of wind in which she outsailed Kidd. But was taken in her returne near Cape Comorine by Chivers, a Dutchman, in the Algerine Gaily of 250 tons, 150 men and 28 Guns and 24 Oars, after 9 houres persuit with Sails and Oars. But the Cargo not proving for their turne, and the Captain giving the company a bowl of Punch, they let her go in a good humour, taking only Sailes, Cordage, cable, &c. Stores.’*

But Madras ended the century under the government of Thomas Pitt. Himself a notable poacher turned gamekeeper---we have seen him styled by the Company as ‘no better than a pyrott’---he held less austere views on the appropriation of other people’s property than Elihu Yale had done.

The career of this remarkable man (Pitt) is a startling example of the ease and rapidity with which Company’s servant and interloper interchanged places, an ease and rapidity helped by the readiness with which the Court of Committees in this period of bad temper and suspicion dismissed even members of council. In Bengal the Company’s officers could do nothing against Pitt; as late as January 15, 1695, only two years before his appearance as a Company’s Governor, they wrote that

‘Captain Pitt to the last made a great bouncing and have carried himself very haughtily ever since his arrivall in these parts, and has not scrupled to talk very Disrespectfully of your Honours’.

Part of his power came from his purchase of a seat in Parliament, first (1689) as Member for New Sarum, and then (1691) as one of the two Members for Old Sarum, which we may not unfairly call a mythical borough, since almost entirely without inhabitants. Neither his wicked past nor even his disrespectful talk of their Honours prevented the Committees from unanimously electing him Governor of Fort St. George in 1697; and here he remained for twelve years, to the Company’s immense advantage. While Governor, he sent home (1702) the Regent diamond,<span data-tippy=”He was known as ‘Diamond Pitt’.” class=”info-r”>* so called because it was sold by him to the Regent of France for £135,000. This handsome little fortune made possible the early success of his grandson, who also was Member for Old Sarum.

It was lucky for the Company that Pitt was in their service and not in that of the rival New Company. The latter made great mistakes, first in loaning practically all their capital to the Crown, secondly in entertaining as their agents in India men dismissed and discredited by the Old Company. Among them was Thomas Pitt’s cousin John Pitt, a poor creature beside Thomas. These agents proved incapable as well as dishonest. The New Company determined to copy the precedent set by sending Sir Thomas Roe as ambassador to the Mogul Court, hoping by direct negotiation at the centre to obtain advantages which would undermine the Old Company’s position. But the man they selected, Sir William Norris, was inexperienced, and had vague notions of even the geography of India; his assistants were men both knaves and fools. After tedious divagations he managed to meet Aurangzeb; but the aged Emperor was hard set in his ways, and in wrath against the English in especial. He demanded a guarantee that the English would patrol the seas so effectively as to kill piracy. This Norris could not give; and he died on the high seas, when returning (1702) broken-hearted at failure.

In 1702 both Companies reached a preliminary armistice, which made provisional union, finally completed six years later. They had familiarised their countrymen with the immense sinews for political corruption furnished by Indian trade; and had been a scandal by their bribery, particularly at election times.

About 1700 the Nawab of the Carnatic, newly appointed by Aurangzeb, suspecting that the Company was very rich, began to take a deep interest in Madras. On his appointment he was presented with blunderbusses, fowling-pieces, looking-glasses, foreign drink, and other commodities, but received the envoy with threats and declarations that the offering was inadequate. He appeared outside Madras (July, 1701) with 10,000 horse and foot, and rejected a second gift. Pitt landed sailors; the Europeans stood to. This sobered the Nawab, who announced that he would accept the present and also dine with Mr. Pitt. A Persian chef was procured, and a snack of some six hundred dishes provided, ‘of which the Nabob, Duan, and Buxie, and all that came with him eat very heartily’. They were also ‘diverted with the Dancing wenches’, and made so very drunk that the Nawab was unable to carry out next morning’s programme of inspecting an English ship. When the effects of the previous evening’s entertainment had somewhat passed off, he alarmed Pitt by sending word that he intended to march through Madras with elephants and a large body of troops. So the train-bands were beaten up and marines landed once more. Luckily, before he could carry out his intention,

‘the Nabob was got into a Portuguez Chappell very Drunk, and fell a Sleep: and so soon as waked (which was about 4 a clock in the afternoon), he Order’d his Camp to March towards the little Mount where he pitch’d his Tents, and sent to the Govemour to excuse his not coming to the Garden, and desired him to send him a Dozen bottles of Cordiall waters; which were sent him’.

He reappeared next year, blockading the city, for no special reason except that he wanted loot; and was bought off with Rs. 25,000.

Pitt in 1708 got into communication with the Mogul Central Government, and was granted five villages adjacent to Madras, a gift followed up by the honour of a communication from the Emperor’s Vizier couched in very gratifying terms, but drawing his attention to the fact that the Company had not yet sent a present. A list of acceptable gifts was helpfully added. It included:

‘Birds of the Sorts of Manila Parrots, Newries, Cocatores, &c., or of any sort that can speak, of a good colour and shape. Birds with Coppie crowns, and of other fashions. . . .

‘Lacker’d Vessels and Porcelane, Scrutores, Targetts and calamdanes, &c., you may send; also Lackerd Scrutores sett with Mother of Pearle.

‘China Ware, what ever is Rare and Fine of any kind or sort, the older the better. The Dishes called Ghoorees, which break when Poyson is put into them, will be very acceptable. You must by all means send some of them.

‘Boxes with clock work, China Skreens with clockwork, both Painted and with images. Images and Juncks that goe with clock work, &c. Raritys of this kind and fashion will doe.

‘Gold and Silver plate, Manilha work (Philigreen); Vessels of Silver, Gold plate enamell’d, Europe work, if to be had, will do.

‘Europe fusees; one or two small feild pieces, &c. Gunns will not be amiss. . . .

‘A Good Elephant, a Good Horse; Atcheen Horses, the best of the best, and Bengali Horses will also doe.

‘Good peices of Ambergrease will do extreamly well, and is the best of all things.

‘Clocks and watches that strike or have Chimes you must by all means send.

‘Black lead and Red lead pencils of Europe. . .

Such marks of favour called for adequate acknowledgment, which was made. The ‘Lord High Steward’ was informed by Governor Pitt that his letter had been translated, and its contents had given extreme delight. But there were difficulties in the way of answering it adequately:

‘Your Excellency writes that there must be presents for all the Princes & some of the Great men. If you mean such as are suitable to their birth and quality, ’tis impossible for us to purchase them with our Company’s Estate, who you know are Merchants that run great risques to gett a little, and who often meett with loss instead of gain. So hope, as the presents we intend are Suitable to our circumstances, they will meet with a gracious acceptance from the Great King, and princes, which putts me in mind of what we read in History, That upon many persons making very rich presents to a King there happened a poor man to come with a drop of water, which was as acceptable as any of their presents, being according to his ability. . . .’

A drop of water which included six elephants was therefore collected and sent to Delhi.

In the same month as this letter was written, the Nawab again passed by Madras with an army, drinking ‘very hard, and selldome in humour, grumbling very much at the small Amount of our Present’.

‘That his final letter to Pitt related to strong waters will occasion no surprise. In a consultation of February, 1709, we find: “Nabob Dowed Cawn having wrott a Letter to the Governour from the Kings Court desireing one thousand Bottles of Liquor; agreed that we now send him 250. And the Governour sends him two large Mastys that he got out of the Europe Ships”.’*

The last item, of course, was the old stand-by of the English in Oriental argument, from the times of Jahangir:

‘A subsequent acknowledgment of “Doggs” by the Nawab shows that mastiffs are meant.’

In 1707 Aurangzeb died. The succession to the Mogul Empire was in the cockpit of civil war for several years, an interregnum of which the Company took advantage to strengthen Fort William.

Chapter IV

Anarchy: Dissolution of Indian Political Systems

Governor Russell’s humility: Surman’s embassy: piracy: Maratha dissensions: the Angrias: the Ostend Company: rise of Nizam to independent power: the Maratha constitution: rise of Maratha chieftains: Nadir Shah’s invasion: Maratha raids over India: the carcase and the eagles.

Governor Pitt’s action in corresponding with the Mogul Court direct was followed up from Bengal by the Company’s most ambitious enterprise since Roe’s ambassadorship. Norris’s mission on behalf of the New Company had failed utterly; but the feeling persisted that the Company must get past nawabs and polygars, to the supposed fountain of authority.

In 1711 the President of Fort William addressed the Nawab of Bengal, ‘with the humblest submission’, laying at his feet ‘that life wholly dedicated to your Service’. Two years later the same suppliant, ingratiatingly describing himself as

‘the smallest particle of sand, John Russell, President of the East India Company (with his forehead at command rubbed on the ground)’,

approached the Emperor, Farakhsiyar. In 1715 an embassy was sent, under John Surman, which after two years of humble waiting procured at a total cost of over 600,000 rupees a farman which confirmed the Company’s privilege of free trade in Bengal and their old position at Surat (where they had paid, before Aurangzeb’s enhancement, two per cent. customs), on condition of a yearly fee of Rs. 10,000. They might now buy land at Surat instead of renting it; might rent two more villages near Calcutta, and were confirmed in the old grant of 1708, of five villages near Madras (from which the Nawab in 1711 had forcibly ejected them). The farman was received with rejoicings in the Presidency centres, broadsides being fired from every available gun. But when this ceremonial was over, the Madras villages had to be re-entered after six hours of bayonet fighting (1717) supported by field-guns. The casualties were slight. As to Bengal, the privileges for a long while were refused implementation.

‘Nevertheless, the embassy was a real step in advance. It legalised the whole of the English position in India. In Bengal it placed the local government technically in the wrong so long as the farman and orders of the emperor were disregarded, and it consequently furnished the English with a standing quarrel which they might take up at any time. This they at last did after the catastrophe of the Black Hole, and the withholding of the rights won by Surman was the ground put forward by Clive, when he broke with Siraj-ud-daulah and entered upon the conquest of the country. The soldier completed and more than completed what the ambassador began.’*

The Mogul, granting other privileges, was firm against that of exercising capital jurisdiction. He refused to permit the Calcutta Government to punish ‘Rogues’, by which they more specifically meant pirates, who so swarmed in one particular inlet of the Sandarbans that it was styled ‘The Rogues’ River’. Even Madras in 1718 temporarily hesitated on this head, but only as to the power to inflict death on English malefactors. A drunken mate who had murdered a lascar was

‘kept in Irons in the Cockhouse upon Rice and water till We can advise Our Honble Masters of the Particulars, and receive their orders how to proceed’.

But Madras did not hesitate as to native offenders; capital powers against them, it was held, arose out of the charter making Madras a municipality (1687), and were steadily exercised.* And in February, 1719, a Commission to try pirates came from England; the same year an Englishman was hanged under it.

Piracy had become almost the overmastering fact of these years. As a by-product of the European wars, wherever there was a wild archipelago were swarms of desperadoes sallying out to pillage and hiding from reprisals. We have seen that their favourite rendezvous was Madagascar, ‘perhaps the scene of greater continuous misery than any other spot on the surface of the globe’.* In the person of Kanhoji Angria peril prowled at Bombay’s gates; for half a century he and his successors were largely responsible for depressing the city below its comparatively unharassed compeers, Madras and Calcutta.

After Sambhaji’s execution by Aurangzeb, his brother Rajaram led the Marathas, who endured a period of disunion and persecution by the Mogul power. He died in 1700, and his widow, Tara Bai, showing the energy so frequent in the women of her race, became regent. Aurangzeb’s successor, Bahadur Shah, released Sambhaji’s son Shahu, who had been brought up at the Mogul Court and came profoundly impressed with the greatness of his late hosts and jailors, in a mood not unlike the pro-Norman one of Edward the Confessor, to wage civil war against Tara Bai. It is customary to say the Marathas lost the empire of India by their wars with the British as the century closed; they lost it no less in these internecine conflicts at its beginning.

Sivaji’s centralised administration had checked the feudalism which was the Maratha curse. This now revived, leaders espousing one side or the other, fighting for their own hand, jostling for supremacy (under nominal allegiance to whichever representative of Sivaji they acknowledged). Among the chieftains taking Tara Bai’s part was the Raja of Kolhapur. Kanhoji Angria regarded himself as a vassal of Tara Bai, and in especial, of the Kolhapur Raja. He therefore ravaged Shahu’s territory; and his victim’s family in their records concur with the East India Company in calling him ‘pirate’ tout court. This description, which English historians have taken over---‘Kanhoji Angria, the famous corsair chief’*---is not quite fair or accurate.

Kanhoji’s father, Tukoji, served in the Maratha navy originated by Sivaji; the son founded a line of hereditary naval commanders. When Shahu, much weakened, came out above his rivals, Kanhoji accepted the situation but gave up nothing, retaining his sea-post and practically independent status. He merely regularised his course, as the Maratha central government at Satara saw it. As Maratha admiral now, he concentrated his hostility against the Sidis, who were soon reduced to being rulers of the petty island of Janjira. He warred intermittently with Portuguese, Dutch and English. The Malabar rocky holds were as thronged with pirates as the Narmada cliffs are with wild bees; these had now found a leader.

Under Sivaji the Maratha armies had been catholic, offering employment to Muhammadans and even untouchables. The navy was even more catholic, being often officered largely by Muhammadans. Kanhoji was no less generously hospitable. In 1713, having captured the Governor of Bombay’s armed yacht and another vessel in the previous year, he preferred peace to the English, with restoration of his captures less their guns; for these he suggested that his opponents engage to provide him with powder and shot. He was not alone in regarding warfare in what we should think a queerly professional light. Munitions were marketable commodities; if the English understood their composition better than he did, Kanhoji saw no reason why they should not supply him with them as soon as he and they were no longer technical enemies. But he went further. European gunners were greatly valued by ‘the country powers’; deserters were particularly welcome if skilled with artillery. When question arose about restoration of gunners held as captives or as employees, Kanhoji’s replies showed that he looked on them as clever artisans entitled to sell their abilities where they wished. On occasion he acted in alliance with---Dr. Sen prefers to say, took into his service---notorious English pirates of Madagascar, Taylor, England and Plantain, with whose help he did not hesitate to ‘assail the largest East Indiaman’.* But ordinarily he had to act with only his own ‘grabs and gallivats’, small sailing craft which flocked round a becalmed boat and by sheer pertinacity and numbers strove to overcome it.

The English and Kanhoji made peace, 1713. It might have lasted, if he could have brought himself to restore with the ships whose capture caused the official breach the cargoes as well. He kept these, and both sides accumulated grievances for a new war. Kanhoji, copying precedents, not least set by his European rivals, demanded that merchants who hoped to traverse the seas with impunity must buy his permission. His complaint was that the English not only expected him to let their own ships go free without passes (to which he had consented), but ships on to which they had laden their goods. They maintained that when the merchandise far outweighed the ships in value, it gave the latter its nationality. He denied this; probably most people to-day would side with him. The final incident was his removal of timber from an indubitably English ship. Like Charles I and Protector Cromwell when they took East India Company money to their own use, he pleaded his needs:

‘As I had a great necessity for timber, when the boat came from Surat, I brought her in, in a friendly manner, believing that you observed the friendship without scruples, and what’s a little timber? . . . I . . . wrote Your Excellency to let me know the price thereof, and had for answer you wanted timber, which I took well, expecting when mine would come to repay you. In this there is no cause of difference.’

We have it on high ancient authority that friends have all things in common. Bombay, however, had not attained to the lofty high-mindedness of Socrates and Kanhoji. It rejected his contention, declared war, and launched hostilities, in an expedition which failed (1718).

The Portuguese suffered most from him; his prisoners from them he usually put to death. He fought a number of naval actions against this enemy, with varying result. But Portuguese powers of recovery had sunk very low, and this protracted warfare must be reckoned one of the main factors making for their rapid continuous decline. They made alliance with the English, who provided a royal squadron of four vessels, under Commodore Thomas Mathews; but the Maratha seaーfortress of Kolaba beat off the Anglo-Portuguese assault (1720).

In 1729 Kanhoji died, greatly respected and having been long at peace with his suzerain in Satara. He left a brood of sea-faring sons; and in 1737 yet another English attempt on his strongholds was defeated. Next year the Marathas blundered by capturing two Dutch vessels, which resulted in the following year in the arrival of eight Dutch men-of-war accompanied by lighter craft. This armament achieved nothing beyond cowing the Angrias. But the lesson was taken to heart, that the Dutch were too active and irascible to be taken on as foes.

Whatever opinion may be held of Kanhoji’s proceedings, those of his successors became practically indistinguishable from piracy. They and he have this importance for us, that they acted as blows which welded the East India Company into a deliberate instrument of war. By 1730 it had become in self-defence against its many foes one of the lesser ‘country powers’, no longer a mere mercantile enterprise. It had to be watchful to keep, as well as enterprising to gain.

We have seen that there is some colour for difference of judgment as to whether Kanhoji Angria was a simple pirate; and that we may hesitate to accept the Company’s opinion, partly because the Company, now at last after years of struggle and exasperation emerging to a place where it felt its grip becoming firm on real power, chose to confound almost any kind of opposition with ‘piracy’. It was not interlopers alone who met with high-handed repression.

‘The subject that bulks largest in the India Office records during the first thirty years of the eighteenth century is the struggle with the Ostend Company.’*

This Company arose out of the desire of the Flemish Netherlands, which had remained under the control of Spain or Austria, to get a share of the Eastern trade which so enriched their independent Dutch neighbours. In this desire, after the Peace of Utrecht (1713), they were supported by the Emperor Charles VI. Single vessels began to make the Indian journey, and a formal charter was obtained in 1722. Dutch and English deserting sea-captains, especially those of the latter who were Jacobites, joined the new Company; and English smugglers worked with them in disposing of their goods.

The Dutch and English companies were so inveterately set in the attitude and habit of monopoly, that this effort of a continental group to share in the Eastern trade was taken as an intolerable outrage. By diplomacy, pamphleteering, through Parliament, with force openly and cynically exerted against all law of nations or of decency, the Ostenders were opposed. The established companies were extolled as almost religious sodalities; if the new-comer succeeded, said a pamphleteer,

‘the commerce and riches of one of the bulwarks of the Protestant interest would be thereby transferred to augment the strength of a Roman Catholic State’.

Nothing more plainly shows the enormous strength and importance that by slow accumulation had accrued to the older companies, than the fact that for many years the question seemed certain to bring about European war. The Dutch East India Company captured Ostend ships with as little scruple as they had formerly captured English ones, even when England and Holland were supposed to be allies. In his activities directed towards kidnapping Hume, an Englishman serving the Ostend Company in Bihar, Henry Frankland, Governor of Fort William, by his own admission, in 1727 went

‘some lengths that are not so proper to be committed to Black and White’.

The Ostenders’ vessels were shut up in the Ganges, 1730, ‘so that they can never come away’, one having already been seized; and in 1733 the Fort William authorities suborned a Muhammadan attack on their lonely station at Bankibazar, which had to surrender. This ended the Ostend settlements, except for one which just existed a few years longer.

Mr. P. E. Roberts concludes* his admirable summary of what was a wretched and indefensible business, with criticisms that we shall do well to bear in mind in our study of the East India Company throughout the whole of the following century. The crippling of the Ostend Company

‘marked the triumph of the narrow policy of restriction and monopoly typical of the century, fortified, in this instance, by national jealousy. Within a few years enlightened statesmen had begun to see that England’s action in the matter was not only selfish, but of doubtful expediency. “The abolition of the Ostend Company”, said Pitt in 1742, “was a demand we had no right to make, nor was it essentially our interest to insist upon it, because that Company would have been more hostile to the interests both of the French and Dutch East India Companies than to our own”.’

The Marathas recovered after Sambhaji’s death, helped by the follies of the later Moguls, Aurangzeb among them. Aurangzeb destroyed the Muslim kingdoms of Central India, Bijapur and Golconda, which had acted as buffers between Delhi and Maharashtra; he and his successors by their bigotry and savage cruelty made Sikhs and Rajputs their implacable foes. The Empire became a mere shell empty of puissance. The Nawabs of Bengal and of Oudh were in effect independent rulers. The ablest of all the great Mogul officers of State, Asaf Jah, the Vizier, in 1724 abandoned a hopeless cause and withdrew to his own former province of Haidarabad, nominally as Subadar of the Deccan but actually a sovereign. He and his line will from now on be referred to as Nizams, from his title Nizam-ul-mulk, ‘Regulator of the State’. Under him, in a still more attenuated (if that be conceivable) vassalship to Delhi, was the Nawab of the Carnatic, to whom the Company for Fort St. George and Fort St. David owed obeisance, which also, in the political system of India---now one vast fraud and make-believe---was in little more than name.

Asaf Jah died in 1748. He was usually at war with the Marathas, or with some of the Marathas, a preoccupation of immense value to the English, whose South Indian settlements yearly grew more firmly established, havens of trade and quiet in the surrounding cockpit.

The Nizam’s dominions to some extent took the place o£ the barriers which Aurangzeb had destroyed, and kept the Marathas and the central Government at Delhi apart for a few decades longer, though in 1737 the former raided up to the very environs of the imperial city.

Sivaji used a Council, the Astha Pradhan, or Ministry of Eight. Theoretically, their chief was the Pratinidhi, the Peshwa being second. It is not clear when this Cabinet arose. Shahu, Sivaji’s grandson, as we have seen, honestly regarded himself as a feudatory of Delhi, a conception which the Maratha chieftains had no difficulty in fitting into the political scheme; two generations later, Mahadaji Sindhia himself procured for his nominal master the Peshwa a farman from Delhi, as Vakil-i-mutluq. The Astha Pradhan became hereditary officers; and the Peshwa of Shahu, Balaji Visvanath, made his position so outstanding that the Rajas of Satara, Sivaji’s descendants, became mere figureheads, treated with immense respect publicly but in fact almost powerless.

‘After Shahu the descendants of Sivaji dropped out of sight so completely that all readers of history think of the Maratha government in the eighteenth century as that of the Peshwas.’*

With Balaji began the remarkable influence of the Chitpavan Brahmins, a clan that seem to possess innate administrative and political aptitude, certainly not exhausted in our own day, as the examples of Gokhale, Ranade and Tilak show. Shahu died in 1748, the same year as the great Nizam. His importance had largely died earlier; in 1727 he granted his Peshwa, the very able Baji Rao I, son of Balaji, full administrative powers.

The usurpation of power by the Peshwas was not the only factor depressing the Satara family into impotence. In the Maratha wars and far-raiding expeditions, the great Maratha kingdoms surviving into the India of to-day were founded. The Gaekwar’s rise dates from about 1724; in 1728 twelve districts north of the Narmada were granted as a fief to Holkar. The Bhonsla family and Sindhia, the latter perhaps the most powerful of all Maratha clans in later years, though preserving an elaborate pretence of humility in their pride as hereditary slipper-bearers to the Raja of Satara, were of the same period. In 1739, after years of raiding and what we may call infiltration, the Marathas completed the conquest of Malwa, or Central India. Baji Rao, the Peshwa, asked the Mogul Emperor to appoint him as Subadar of the vast region wrested from him. The Emperor had no choice but to consent; to make assurance doubly sure, and to grapple what had been illegally gotten as legally as possible, the Emperor’s Subadar of the Deccan (and, incidentally, of Malwa), the Nizam, was asked next year to confirm the appointment. The Nizam pointed out that he himself was Subadar of Malwa, but graciously made the Peshwa Naib-Subadar, or Deputy Subadar. Malwa entered upon a process of disruption into feudatory kingdoms; Holkar, Sindhia, the Puar (a Rajput chief who allied himself with the Marathas) are still established there, in Indore, Gwalior and Dhar. The Bhonsla dynasty lost its territory of Nagpur in Dalhousie’s annexations. The Gaekwar’s territory, Baroda, is outside Malwa.

The wretched Mogul Empire was destined, broken as it was, to endure repeated shocks as the century progressed. Nadir Shah in 1739 invaded it from Persia, and sacked Delhi. “He revealed to the free-lances of the north that the power of the Great Moguls had vanished’*---a disservice only slightly offset by his letters to the Peshwa, the Raja of Satara and other Hindu princes, bidding them ‘walk in the path of submission and obedience to our dear brother’ (reinstated after very thorough pillage), and promising them that if they did not he would ‘blot them out of the pages of the book of creation’. The Marathas whom he thus exhorted, those ‘cool and insatiable robbers’,

‘the only nation of India which seems to make war an occupation by choice, for the Rajpoots are soldiers by birth’,*

proceeded to raid India even more widely than before. The Mogul’s immediate territory being temporarily closed to their attentions, in 1740 they occupied the south, ravaging right up to the gates of Pondicherry and Madras. Southern India possessed a permanent witness to former irruptions, in a Maratha kingdom in Tanjore, established as far back as the reign of Shahu, Sivaji’s father. In 1743 Bengal was invaded, the Marathas reaching Vishnupur, 120 miles from Calcutta, probably only with an advance-guard. The Vishnupuris still show where Lalmadan, a local representation of Krishna, repulsed them with firestreams from two long cannon held under his armpits. The English dug ‘the Maratha Ditch’ before Calcutta; its manning, however, proved unnecessary.

The Marathas since Sivaji’s days exacted chauth, literally a fourth (of the land revenue), and an extra tenth, called sardeshmukhi, from provinces which they overawed without actually occupying. This represented a heavy exaction, and it is not unnatural that the Marathas are generally called simple freebooters by English and Muhammadan writers. There is something to be said on the other side, which will be said in its place.

Meanwhile India’s internal strength was being ruined by war of one country power against another. Everywhere,

‘Hercules killed hart-a-grease,
And hart-a-grease killed Hercules’.

The carcase was in a condition to invite the eagles. As for the administration which cloaked this rapine and pillage and march and countermarch of armies, we have seen that it was a pretence. The Emperor sanctioned the state assumed by his Nizam and his Nawabs of Oudh and Bengal: he sanctioned the conquests of his humble servants the Marathas: the Nizam was the feudal overlord of the Nawab of the Carnatic: the Peshwa was in theory the subordinate of the Raja of Satara: Sindhia, Holkar, the Gaekwar, Bhonsla and Puar were subordinates of both Peshwa and Raja. The time’s anarchy is well illustrated by a story first told by Orme. In 1743 the Nizam marched to Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic, where he found that the designation of ‘Nawab’ had become fashionable and was no longer reserved for the military head of a sub-province, de facto ruler under himself (as ‘Subadar of the Deccan’) and that yet loftier potentate, the Emperor at Delhi. After eighteen ‘Nawabs’ had been introduced to him in one day, he ordered that the next should be scourged!*

Before another generation had passed, the English joined the stately pageant, using Nawabs of Bengal and the Carnatic and their titular overlord at Delhi to cover their own exercise of the actual sovereignty. While fate allowed, the French were Nawabs and feudal dependents. As for the wretched ordinary people of India, they

‘were becoming a masterless multitude swaying to and fro in the political storm, and clinging to any power, natural or supernatural, that seemed likely to protect them’.*

Book II

Foundation of the Indian Empire: Clive to Warren Hastings, 1740-1785

‘What enterprise that an enlightened community may attempt is more noble and more profitable than the reclamation from barbarism of fertile regions and large populations? . . . What more beautiful ideal or more valuable reward can inspire human effort? The act is virtuous, the exercise invigorating, the result often extremely profitable.’
---The Rt. Hon. Winston Churchill, M.P., The River War, 9-10.

‘The Moors, as well as Gentoos, are indolent, luxurious, ignorant and cowardly, beyond all conception; the Country itself is full of great and navigable Rivers, is very woody, enclosed by mountains with narrow passes; in short, everything conspires to render Infantry formidable, and Cavalry (in which the chief strength of Indostan consists) a meer bugbear. The Soldiers, if they deserve that name, have not the least attachment to their Prince, he only can expect Service from them who pays them best, but it is a matter of great indifference to them whom they serve: and I am fully persuaded that after the battle of Placis I could have appropriated the whole Country to the Company and preserved it afterwards with as much ease as Meer Jaffeir the present Subah now does, through the terror of the English Arms and their influence.’
---Robert Clive, December 30,1758.

Chronological Table

1742. Dupleix Governor of Pondicherry.

1744. War of Austrian Succession.

1746. Naval fighting between French and English off coast of southernCoromandel. French capture Madras.

1748. British repulsed before Pondicherry. Death of Nizam-ul-Mulk and Shahu.

1749. Peace restored by Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Madras restored to British. British interfere in succession to Tanjore State. Death of Nawab of the Carnatic. Dupleix’ intrigues and success.

1750. War breaks out in South India, for successions to Nizam and Nawab of the Carnatic. Dupleix (December) becomes titular ruler of the Carnatic.

1751. Clive defends Arcot.

1752. French abandon siege of Trichinopoli. Execution of Chanda Sahib.

1754. Dupleix recalled. Peace between French and English in South India.

1756. Seven Years’ War begins. Nawab of Bengal captures Calcutta.

1757. English take Chandernagore. Battle of Plassey. Mir J’afar made Nawab.

1758. Lally in India: he fails to take Madras. Forde overruns the Northern Sarkars.

1759. Forde routs Dutch at Biderra.

1760. Vansittart Governor of Bengal. Final defeat of French in South India, at Wandiwash. Mir Qasim appointed Nawab of Bengal for Mir J’afar.

1761. Defeat of Marathas by Afghans at third battle of Panipat. Fall of Pondi cherry. Haidar Ali becomes ruler of Mysore.

1763. Peace of Paris. End of Seven Years’ War. Mir Qasim’s massacre of Europeans at Patna. Mir J’afar restored as Nawab of Bengal.

1764. Mir Qasim defeated at Buxar.

1765. Death of Mir J’afar. Clive Governor of Bengal.

1767. War with Haidar Ali. Departure of Clive. Verelst Governor of Bengal.

1769. Cartier Governor of Bengal. Treaty of Madras ends war with Haidar Ali.

1770. Famine in Bengal.

1772. Warren Hastings Governor of Bengal.

1773. Lord North’s Regulating Act.

1774. The Rohilla War.

Governors-General

Warren Hastings

1774. Establishment of Supreme Court, Calcutta.

1775. First Maratha War. Execution of Nandakumar.

1778. War with France. French settlements captured.

1779. Convention of Wargaon. War with Mysore.

1780. Popham captures Gwalior. Haidar Ali ravages the Carnatic. Destruction of Baillie’s force.

1781. Coote wins battle of Porto Novo. Hastings and Chait Singh, Raja of Benares.

1782. Hastings and the Oudh Begums. French naval activity off Madras: de Suffren. Death of Haidar Ali. Failure of French and Spanish siege of Gibraltar: Rodney’s victory in West Indies. Resignation of North; the Rockingham Ministry.

1783. Treaty of Versailles.

1784. Treaty of Mangalore: peace with Tipu. Pitt’s India Act.

1785. Resignation of Hastings.

Chapter I

The First Anglo-French War in the Carnatic

Growth of Pondicherry: War of Austrian Succession: de la Bourdonnais: Bourdonnais and Dupleix: fall of Madras: battle of the Adyar: Robert Clive is of a martial disposition: siege of Pondicherry: character of European troops: Dupleix takes up country politics: rival Nawabs of the Carnatic: Clive’s swoop at Arcot: battle of Kaveripak: friendship of Clive and Lawrence: cautious warriors: the Trichinopoli fighting: execution of Chanda Sahib.

Within two or three years of the foundation of Calcutta, the French founded Chandernagore (Chandranagar), a few miles farther up the Hugli. At Mahé they obtained a footing on the Malabar coast, 1725; and at Karikal, 1739, a second station on the Coromandel coast, where already they had Pondicherry. Pondicherry, their first, remained their only important settlement. Their East India Company, despite its brief impressive bid for supremacy, was a stiff and hampered effort, strictly subordinated to State policies and home interests---subsidised, regulated, overruled. It never attained to the freedom of a great trading corporation, as its Dutch and English rivals were, with keen pushful shareholders flooding its activities with their energy and expectations. How wealthy the English Company (though inferior to the Dutch) had become we may judge from the fact that by 1750 it had lent or given the British Treasury no less than £4,200,000, whereas the French Company was in constant debt, and liable to pillage and supervision by Court officials.

Pondicherry owed its predominance to three able governors, Francois Martin, its founder, Dumas, and Dupleix. Up to about 1720 the settlement kept on scrupulously friendly terms with Madras, which extended a tolerant kindness in return. But a change came, a consciousness of growing strength on the one side and distrust of a rival on the other. In 1721 the English authorities at Calcutta, sharing the new feeling of their countrymen in South India, fined a pilot in their service Rs. 500 for taking a French ship up the Hugli, with a promise of a public whipping if he repeated the offence. In 1731 the Company’s records contained the first mention of names destined to become menacingly important---de la Bourdonnais and Dupleix. The latter became Governor of Pondicherry and acting Director-General of the French Indies, 1742.

The War of the Austrian Succession, which broke out in 1744, for years had been plainly coming. De la Bourdonnais, Governor of Mauritius, in 1741 urged the French Ministry to equip him to attack English shipping. He was given a squadron; but war was delayed so long that the French East India Company had time to press their objections to naval activity near India---objections largely based on their method of trade, whereby each year’s enterprise paid for itself. A temporary run of enemy seizures of their ships might ruin a whole group of adventurers.

Both Companies desired neutrality in the East, whatever happened in Europe. But war came (and continued) in such a manner that each belligerent was convinced of the other’s bad faith. Dupleix was wroth when an English fleet under Commodore Barnett, a vigorous officer, appeared at the end of 1744 and collected French shipping (and, incidentally, most of the Governor’s fortune gathered by twenty years of trade and service). Anwar-ud-din, Nawab of the Carnatic, was appealed to, and told the English the French were settled in his country and under his protection. He was brought to understand that Barnett, a King’s officer, was not amenable to Company orders. But he stuck to part of his point; Barnett must not attack Pondicherry.

In 1746 Barnett died. Edward Peyton, a poor officer, succeeded him. De la Bourdonnais came from the French islands, a seaman much superior to the English commander:

‘His knowledge in mechanics rendered him capable of building a ship from the keel: his skill in navigation, of conducting her to any part of the globe: and his courage, of defending her against any equal force. In the conduct of an expedition, he superintended all the details of the service, without being perplexed either with the variety or number of them. His plans were simple, his orders precise, and both the best adapted to the service in which he was engaged. His application was incessant; and difficulties served only to increase his activity, which always gave the example of zeal to those he commanded.’*

But the French suffered heavily in an engagement off Negapatam, 222 casualties to the English 60; fires in ships caused much destruction. Peyton, instead of pressing his advantage, continued his course to Trincomali, in Ceylon, where he repaired damages. De la Bourdonnais was allowed to slip into the shelter of Pondicherry fort. Here, luckily for the English, he conceived himself welcomed disrespectfully, and a quarrel ensued as to precedence of naval officer and Company’s servant. Ranga Pillai* noted:

‘The Governor . . . is aggrieved because M. de la Bourdonnais does not regard himself as his subordinate, maintains a guard of honour of troopers, . . . conducts everything independently, and without consultation with him; whilst M. de la Bourdonnais holds that he is on a par with the Governor, and is consequently entitled to all the honours accorded to that functionary; and that the control of military operations resting wholly with him, he is not bound to consult the Governor in matters connected therewith. . . .’

Again putting out, the French fell in with Peyton in his former haunts off Negapatam. But Peyton sailed for Bengal, refusing action. The English in Madras, thus deserted, in their turn appealed to the Nawab for protection. Both sides (but the French were quicker in waking to the facts) still thought the Nawab an effective combatant. He sent orders to the French to leave their enemies alone, but was disobeyed, which the indignant English set down to their own leaders’ unwisdom in sending too small a present. Since the word ‘present’ excited every mind, whatever its nationality, this contemporary belief was probably partly founded.

After a fortnight’s siege of sorts, Madras capitulated. The besiegers had not a man killed; and the besieged’s losses no authority puts above six, of which four seem to have been Portuguese. Orme comments:

‘From this period it is useful to contemplate the progress made by the English in Indostan, both in the science and spirit of war.’

De la Bourdonnais agreed to ransom the town for 1,100,000 pagodas and a private gift of 100,000 (88,000 were paid immediately). Dupleix repudiated the treaty, and prolonged and furious argument followed. He compelled the English to accept articles additional to the capitulation already made; de la Bourdonnais he persuaded to sail to Achin, and then quashed his engagement. ‘Dupleix thus justified his patronymic.’*

Bent on extirpation, Dupleix embarked on folly so apparent that it is hard to credit that it ever happened. He not only retained Madras, he expelled its English residents and ordered native merchants to remove to Pondicherry. Delenda est Carthago now proved a policy more harmful to practisers than victims. As in their controversies with Portuguese and Dutch, the English gained in comparative prestige from their rivals’ lack of common sense and ordinary tolerance. The French with ‘avaricious exactitude’ collected everything they could lay hands on. But merchants obtained leave clandestinely to carry their goods elsewhere than to Pondicherry, for a twenty per cent. commission on their value---which stayed in the hands that received it.

Anwar-ud-din now sent an army to eject the French. Paradis, an engineer officer, routed it in a fight as trivial in casualties as any other in these years of petty fights. Orme’s solemn reflection---that it shattered the belief that the country powers were invincibly strong:*

‘The French at once broke through the charm of this timorous opinion by defeating a whole army with a single battalion’---

has been copied by writers who might be supposed familiar with the early history of the Western nations in India:

‘All historians are careful to point out the importance of that fight as proving the helplessness of an old-fashioned Indian army against an extremely small body of disciplined Europeans.’*

What the skirmish really did was to lift Europeans from a temporary (and entirely recent) pusillanimity, and to show the enormous superiority of bayonet and musket over the antiquated pike---still more, over the toy weapons of Orientals.

The Nawab found the event a shock. He had measured

‘the military abilities of the Europeans by the great respect and humility with which they had hitherto carried themselves in all their transactions with the Mogul government’.*

While he retired to meditate on the light vouchsafed to him, his younger son, Muhammad Ali, went to assist the English at Fort St. David, against which the French now marched. Both sides behaved with excessive circumspection. But the English at least put themselves in a posture of defence. The French fell back, and entered on negotiations with the Nawab, who (1747) forgave them, received presents, and was permitted to fly his flag at Pondicherry for one week.

Dupleix’ repudiation of the Madras treaty had been reasonably regarded as releasing from parole any who could escape. Robert Clive, a young man of twenty-one, blacked his face and slipped out in Moorish dress. The Company presently record (May 2, 1747):

‘Mr. Robert Clive, Writer in the Service, being of a Martial Disposition, and having acted as a Volunteer in Our late Engagement, We have Granted him an Ensign’s Commission upon his Application for the same.’

December 4, 1747. ‘Be sure to encourage Ensign Clive in his Martial Pursuits. According to His Merit, any Improvement he shall make therein shall be duly regarded by Us.’

Both nations received naval reinforcements, which behaved so warily and inefficiently as to exasperate those they were supposed to be supporting; the French commander, as the weaker in ships, had the more excuse. Receiving a yet further accession under Boscawen, in 1748 the English attacked Pondicherry. There was also a military contingent, under Major Stringer Lawrence, a brave, energetic, experienced King’s officer. His arrival (January 1, 1748)

‘and the discipline which he at once proceeded to enforce, mark the time from which the Company’s troops became an effective military force’.*

His men were from the dregs of England, and his officers he collected largely from Fort St. George, where they were kicking their heels and whiling the days away by incessant gambling. All ranks were mercenary and freelance in spirit; it was Lawrence who first checked their habit of marketing their services where they seemed most profitable. A professional and patriotic soldier, he believed in courts-martial and exercise of what is usually called ‘terrible but necessary severity’. Three years later, when Clive stormed a post held by forty deserters to the French, he instructed him to hang their leaders out of hand; and from his first arrival in India he executed spies and informers freely. War became a serious business.

Looking back on these days from the height of his achievement and fame later, Clive told Orme:

‘If there be any officers or soldiers in India, remaining of those who were at the siege of Pondichery twelve or thirteen years ago, experience must have convinced them how very ignorant we were of the art of war in those days. Some of the engineers were masters of the theory without the practice, and those seemed wanting in resolution. Others there were who understood neither, and yet were possessed of courage sufficient to have gone on with the undertaking if they had known how to go about it. There was scarce an officer who knew whether the engineers were acting right or wrong, till it was too late in the season and we had lost too many men to begin an approach again.’

English naval and military forces moved on Pondicherry, whose siege they conducted so inefficiently that they lost at the outset Lawrence (as a prisoner, captured ‘sooner than follow the Troops in their ignominious flight’) and altogether over a thousand men by battle and sickness. The French loss was slight, but included Paradis. A week after the siege had been raised came news of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, by which Madras was restored.

This failed to bring peace in India, except temporarily. The Nizam-ul-mulk died, 1748, after having rendered to Delhi neither recognition nor tribute for a great while; two of his sons fought to succeed him. Anwar-ud-din was in poor health, and Dupleix was intriguing with Chanda Sahib, a nobleman related to the Nawab. In 1749 the English set the example of overt interference with the politics of India, not very brilliantly, in a dispute for the succession to the principality of Tanjore. Dupleix bettered the instruction almost immediately, sending Chanda Sahib troops with whose aid he routed and killed Anwar-ud-din (1749). It would be tedious to mention all the occasions when large payments were made in the India of this period. This was one; and Dupleix set a precedent which Clive later was to follow on a superb scale (with his jagir obtaining for himself, his wife, and her relations ‘a village apiece’.<span data-tippy=”Dodwell, Dupleix and Clive, 38.” class=”info-r”>* He further obtained from Muzaffar Jang, the Nizam he supported, a grant of the hinterland of Fort St. David. He and his allies proceeded to collect revenue. The Raja of Tanjore was coerced into promising seventy lakhs; most of what he paid had to be given to the French.

At the fall of Madras Dupleix had shown that he aimed at expulsion of the English, a policy which it must be believed he was ready to take up again when opportunity served. He now clearly aimed at their encirclement and isolation. They were to be pinned to their settlements at Forts St. George and St. David, while the French proceeded to suzerainty inland, over the territory where the weavers and merchants who worked for the Company lived. The war that followed was for the English one of self-preservation.

Muhammad Ali, whom we have seen with the English in their retreat at Fort St. David, challenged the nawabship against Chanda Sahib. Muzaffar Jang as subadar of the Deccan (‘Nizam’) was similarly challenged by Nasir Jang, who appeared (1750) in South India, Lawrence with 300 Europeans joining him. The allies marched against Chanda Sahib, whose French troops decamped in the night, their subaltern officers having collected a month’s pay in advance and gone (also in advance), disgruntled at being inadequately rewarded. Both French and English entered on negotiations and intrigues with Nasir Jang, who withdrew to Arcot, the capital of the Carnatic. Thereupon the ablest of the French commanders, the celebrated Bussy, stormed his strongest fortress, Ginji.

None of the four claimants for subadari and nawabi ‘had any relations but that of rebellion’ to their alleged overlord at Delhi. Nevertheless,

‘two enlightened European nations wasted their ingenuity in volumes of political controversy; rendering homage to virtue and justice, in respectively claiming the reputation of supporting the rightful cause; but adding to the numerous examples of failure in attempting to reconcile the discordant elements of politics and morals; without daring to avow the plain and barbarous truth, that the whole was a trial of strength among bands of foreign usurpers, in which the English and French had as much right to be principals as any one of the pageants whom they supported: but these nations were at peace, and they could only appear in the contest as the mercenary troops of these polished barbarians’*

Dupleix intrigued so successfully that in December, 1750, Nasir Jang was murdered. Chanda Sahib, then in Pondicherry, ran through the streets and publicly embraced the Governor. General congratulations followed, which included (as is usual) the Deity; a Te Deum was sung in all churches. Muzaffar Jang was invited to Pondicherry, which he entered in the same palanquin with Dupleix. Next day’s durbar was a riot of noise and colour, of kettledrums, elephants, flags, jewels, canopies and tapestries. Dupleix was given a robe of honour, titles, a fortress and villages, and a jagir (estate) of 100,000 rupees. He was appointed Nawab of the lands between the Kistna and Cape Comorin, with Chanda Sahib under him as Nawab of Arcot. The vast treasure accumulated during Nizam-ul-mulk’s long and profitable career was lavishly distributed to the deserving. Dupleix himself was said to have received £200,000 in cash, as well as many valuable jewels.

It was his moment of highest success. But it was a political blunder, similar in kind to that the English Company made when they accepted from Persia a half-share of the Gombroon customs. Just as then the Dutch had declined to accept their rivals as overlords of the Gulf commerce, so now the English could not accept the French Governor as titular head of the province in which they traded. Confronted with threatened extinction, they made their assistance to Muhammad Ali a vigorous reality.

In the ensuing war Bombay took no part, though the strongest of the English settlements. It was contained by the most powerful armies in India, those of the Marathas, who interposed a barrier. Moreover, now as later, Bombay was debarred by provincialism, as well as difficulties, from helping her sister settlements. This quality is the obverse side of an excellence which still sets the city apart---even to-day there is a far friendlier feeling between British and Indians in Bombay than in Calcutta or Delhi:

‘Bombay developed a spirit different from the other two Presidencies, a cosmopolitan spirit of co-operation based on mutual respect and necessity instead of a spirit of imperialism founded on military glory and the pride of possession.’*

Madras bore the brunt of the first fighting; Bengal became a battlefield later.

The ablest of the French commanders, Bussy, was out of the war that followed. He was sent to Pondicherry in 1751, with 300 Europeans and 4000 sepoys, to support the Nizam (and keep him loyal to the French). Bussy found Dupleix hard to work with, and did not respect his military policy. Haidarabad State gave him work, and him and his officers exceedingly generous pay and pickings.

A bad President, incapacitated by venereal disease and gambling mania, was succeeded, October, 1750, by a good one, Thomas Saunders,

‘a man inferior perhaps to M. Dupleix in splendour of talents, and in all that constitutes the decoration of character, but not yielding to that distinguished statesman in the possession of a sound and vigorous judgment, a clear and quick perception, a constancy of mind not to be disturbed by danger, and a devotion to the cause of his country no less ardent and sincere’.*

‘Had I anything on earth to expect or anything to fear, he is the man on earth I should dread as an enemy.’*

Lawrence was in England. The English fleet had disappeared; the Company looked what Dupleix alleged they were, a handful deserted by fortune and their country, with the victorious French closing round them. They had been plundered so thoroughly that they could not bribe any native supporter. Muhammad Ali, their candidate for the nawabship, was besieged in Trichinopoli.

Clive, now a captain (Company’s commission), proposed a reckless diversion---the capture of Chanda Sahib’s capital, Arcot, sixty-four miles south-west of Madras. Saunders agreed, and gave him 500 sepoys and 300 Europeans, which left only 100 soldiers in Fort St. David and less than 50 in Madras. Six of Clive’s eight officers were new to war; four were from the mercantile service, as he himself was. The tiny force marched to its goal. Presently astonished spies reported that they were moving steadily through a monsoon tempest; the Arcot garrison fled before such obvious demons should arrive. A sergeant with the expedition has left a diary, for soldierly scorn worthy to rank with the narrative of that other sergeant who fought ‘against Macbeth’s captivity’.* He tells us that the force entered Arcot Fort (September 12,1751) ‘without opposition through the town, amidst a million Spectators whose looks betrayed them traytors, notwithstanding their pretended friendship and dirty presents’.*

The vanished defenders had left their munitions---quantities of rockets,lead and gunpowder.

Clive won over the populous city to neutrality by forbidding pillage and insolence. Next, for it was always his habit to hunt out his enemy, he proceeded to search for the late garrison. The latter had received 5000 reinforcements, hurriedly sent from before Trichinopoli, and were considering the question of storming Arcot Fort. Clive anticipated their decision by sallying out and ‘beating up their quarters’. This operation, of which the classic example is the outbreak of Nisus and Euryalus (Æneid, ix.), Clive established as a custom. A brilliant band of officers took fire from his example, so that it was soon almost automatic with the English to make a night raid on any enemy whose straggling disorderly camp was within easy march. On this first practice of it, the troops

‘about 12 at night marched out with 3 platoons & the Seapoys, observing the most profound silence, well knowing the success of a handfull of men against such numbers entirely depended on not being discovered. The attempt succeeded to wish. . . . So great was their confusion that tho’ we went through the middle of ’em they fired very few shot amongst us, & those few to no purpose. We made no stay, but returned to Arcot immediately. So privately was this affair conducted that the Inhabitants knowing nothing of our being out upon our return imagined it to be a reinforcement for the garrison. We can no otherwise judge of the enemy’s loss than by the terrible shreiks and groans all over the camp. As our people were strictly order’d to keep their ranks less plunder was got than perhaps might have been expected from such an exploit’.

During the siege, which lasted for fifty-three days (September 23-November 14), the besieged sallied out continually, as if overwhelming force were on their side. At last Morari Rao, a Maratha freelance paid to assist Muhammad Ali, moved to admiration after long watching ‘on the side-lines’, sent word that he was coming to help Clive. This precipitated a general assault, preceded by elephants with pikes on their heads to batter down the gates. These beasts recoiled from the bullets, and dashed their own lines into disorder; the stormers were repulsed at all points. Two days later the siege was raised in confusion. Clive emerged immediately, and at Arni, assisted by the Marathas, won his first battle, the defeated army fleeing wildly: ‘except the body of French there were not above 20 or 30 of them in one place’.* The Marathas obtained much booty.

The defence of Arcot was a feat of arms immediately famous. Though it would have been impossible except against troops of the most blackguardly character, we must acknowledge the almost superhuman valour of one man. If we follow Clive’s adventures, now and afterwards, in Orme’s minutely detailed narrative, we shall exclaim that surely no man ever cared so little for his own life. A leader so generous of himself won others to a like vivacity of nobleness. When he marched against Conjeveram, which the French had recovered, the commandant ordered Glass and Revel---who had been wounded and then taken prisoners in a convoy of casualties---to warn their late leader that they would be exposed on the walls if he attacked the pagoda. They did so, ‘but added, that they hoped no regard to their safety would induce him to discontinue his operations’. Clive’s Indian troops responded to his courage, luck, and considerateness. Their part in the siege was very honourable.

Setting aside writers (still numerous) to whom any criticism of the founders of our Indian Empire is treason, we may note that historians have settled down to idolatrous regard for Warren Hastings but concede flaws in Clive. Luckily there is no need to depress either (though the former’s praise is now absurdly promulgated) to extol the other. Prejudice against Clive is hard to maintain while we read of his reckless front towards peril and his constancy in apparent defeat. It is no doubt wrong to admire valour above all things, and we must not do it. But valour such as Clive’s, exposed not in proxy but in his person, is a high moral quality.

Clive turned to relieve Trichinopoli, while Dupleix, copying his Arcot example, persuaded his native allies to strike at Madras, a menace which Saunders deflected Clive to meet. Directly Clive drew near, 400 French troops and 4500 Indians entrenched south-west of Madras broke up camp, ‘with all the appearance of people greatly alarmed’. Clive following, found them strongly posted in an orchard at Kaveripak. Early in the action he learnt that their rear was unprotected, so, stationing most of his men in a deep watercourse, he led a mixed body far enough to make their task clear: then returned, rallied his troops, who were on the point of abandoning the watercourse, and kept them with difficulty to a holding attack, their contribution to the main assault by the troops he had left. Close on midnight, news came that the enemy’s rearguard had been routed and his cannon taken. This action ‘changed the balance of French and English influence in India’.*

Lawrence returned from England, to find officers with King’s commissions and senior to Clive jealous of the young captain who was so popular. He dismissed the allegations of some who ‘were pleased to term fortunate and lucky’ Clive’s ‘uncommon success’ at Arcot, holding that it had come naturally, out of ‘an undaunted resolution, a cool temper and a presence of mind which never left him in the greatest danger.’* Between these two there was never anything but mutual trust. When we contrast their relations with the quarrels of the French leaders, we see a large part of the reason why the English Company triumphed. Lawrence later wrote to Clive in England:

‘I’m perswaded however distant we are from each other Our Friendship is unalterable.’ (November 30, 1752.)

‘For God’s sake why do you mention obligations to me, I never thought you under any and the Proof you have given me that I was not deceived in my opinion of you from the beginning affords me much satisfaction.’ (February 1753.)

Lawrence brought

‘200 European recruits, just arrived from England, and, as usual, the refuse of the vilest employments in London, together with 500 Sepoys newly raised, and as inexperienced as the Europeans. Such a force appeared very unequal to the enterprise of laying siege to strong forts; and it could hardly be expected that any officer who had acquired reputation would willingly risque it by taking the command of them; but Captain Clive, whose military life had been a continued option of difficulties,* [^32] voluntarily took them on, though in poor health.’ *

Clive could already offer the lure which was to draw the mercenary hordes over ever-increasingly ‘to leaders who always paid and usually won, and whose own countrymen did the hardest fighting.’* Yet those words are anticipating a little. At this date it had been in rapidity of retreat rather than ferocity of assault that Nordic supremacy had shown itself. A few months previously, for example, under cover of night a British force had warily approached the French posted in Covelong. Next dawn an enemy detachment surprised them with a fire that killed their officer, whereupon

‘his troops fled with a degree of determination which appeared to indicate that Madras was the point to which they were bent, and that their speed would not slacken until they arrived there’.*

While still considerably short of their goal they met Clive, hastening up with reinforcements. With ‘great difficulty and some violence’ ‘this fortunate and popular commander’ persuaded them that they had overassessed the emergency which had so stirred them, and might return with him and their comrades. The siege of Covelong was resumed accordingly. But a shot which struck a rock, so that fourteen men were hit by flying splinters, revived their terrors, and

‘it was some time before they could be brought to expose themselves to the danger of similar untoward visitations. The extraordinary regard which these troops manifested for their personal safety was strikingly illustrated in the case of one of the advanced sentries, who, several hours after the alarming incident, was found calmly reposing at the bottom of a dry well. The name of this cautious person is unfortunately not recorded’.

These were ‘the debased specimens of manhood’ whom Clive and Lawrence had the ‘misfortune to command’. The sepoys, for their part, ‘might have some advantage over their European coadjutors in point of character, but they had none in respect of experience, being newly raised and unaccustomed to a military life’.*

Luckily, the Company’s warriors frequently met with adversaries who shared ‘a community of feeling’ that battlefields were dangerous places which should be evacuated betimes.

Fighting concentrated on Trichinopoli and the Island of Sriringam, famous for its pagodas. Before long,

‘the plain of Tritchinopoly having been so long the seat of war, scarce a tree was left standing for several miles round the city; and the English detachments were obliged to march five or six miles to get firewood’.*

The detailed story may be read in Orme’s brilliantly tedious narrative. By June, 1752, the city was safe, and the French and over 2000 of their native allies were captives. Chanda Sahib surrendered, on promise of his life, to the Raja of Tanjore, and was beheaded. Mill for once speaks fairly when he says:

‘Lawrence shows an indifference about his fate which is not very easy to be reconciled with either humanity or wisdom. He well knew that his murder was, in the hands of any of them, the probable, in those of some of them, the certain consequence, of their obtaining the charge of his person. He well knew, that if he demanded him with firmness, they would have all consented to his confinement in an English fort.’*

But life was cheap; and Chanda Sahib an adventurer, though praised by Orme as

‘a brave, benevolent, humane and generous man, as princes go in Indostan. His military abilities were much greater than are commonly found in the generals of India, insomuch that if he had had an absolute command over the French troops, it is believed he would not have committed the mistakes which brought on his catastrophe, and the total reduction of his army.’

His conqueror, Muhammad Ali, was contemptible even by contemporary standards. We are destined to grow very weary of him.

Chapter II

The Conquistadores

Clive in England: returns: capture of Gheria: loss of Calcutta: the Black Hole: Clive and Watson sail for Bengal: recapture of Calcutta: Clive and Watson: King’s officers and Company’s officers: capture of Chandernagore: renewed war with Nawab of Bengal: battle of Plassey: Mir J’afar Nawab: Aminchand, and Clive’s forgery: murder of Siraj-ud-Daula: happy days in Calcutta: war in South India: Lally takes Fort St. David: Forde’s conquests in the Northern Sarkars: Shahzada invades Bihar: Clive as Kai Lung: rout of Dutch: Lally’s defeat at Wandiwash: third battle of Panipat.

Early in 1753 Clive sailed for England, where he was lionised. The Directors toasted him as ‘General Clive’ and presented him with a jewelled sword (which he declined, unless Lawrence also received one). Part of his money he spent restoring his father’s fortunes, and squandered the residue on a contested election. Disappointed of getting into Parliament, he returned to India, 1755, commissioned by His Majesty as a lieutenant-colonel, ‘in the East Indies only’.

He found the Companies at peace again. Dupleix, who had cost his employers too much, and bemused them with stories of triumphs which unaccountably closed in ruin, had been dismissed, 1754, taking defeat magnanimously, and lamented for his kindness and readiness to scatter, as well as amass, money. His only able officer, Bussy, who had criticised and advised from a distance, continued to reside at the Nizam’s Court, routing Marathas for him and doing brilliant service that in the upshot hardly helped France at all. He, as well as Dupleix, showed the English both what it was wise to do and what it was better to leave undone. He set the precedent which Wellesley followed, long after, of subsidiary alliances---for this was what the French gave the Nizam, who handed over (December, 1754), for the expenses of the French corps, the four Northern Sarkars, a district between the mouth of the Kistna and Puri, in Orissa.

Clive’s first task was to command the land attack on Gheria, the Angria stronghold, in conjunction with a sea attack under Admiral Watson. An expedition from Bombay had already (1755)

‘destroyed the timorous prejudices which had for twenty years been entertained of the impracticability of reducing any of Angria’s fortified harbours’;*

under Commodore James, Suvarnadroog, ‘the Golden Fortress’, had been taken. He secured the Marathas as allies, and the dreaded Gheria was captured with absurd ease (February, 1756). Clive’s men entered first; and this time the English collected the whole booty. Unedifying disputes followed between Clive and Watson, as to precedence of one commission and another, and the share of loot proper to be allotted to a mere lieutenant-colonel. Watson was not grasping, but he was ‘sticky’ on points of the senior service’s honour. His integrity is highly praised by English historians, and shines conspicuously against the time’s excessively murky background. It was, however, of a passive rather than an active kind. Enthusiasm for it seems to us to require a distinct effort of will.

In Bengal Allahvardi Khan, the Nawab, noted the rising strength of the English; but rejected proposals to expel them, having the sense to guess their immense reserves of power. ‘It is now difficult to extinguish the fire on land. Should the sea be in flames, who could put it out?’ But the events in South India so incensed him that

‘he threatened the French in Bengal with the seizure of their property. Incurious and apathetic as Indians may have been, the slaughter of two Muhammadan princes and the tutelage of a third by the infidel were not events to be passed over without comment at a Muhammadan court’.*

Even Orientals are not blind to the obvious. Captain Rennie, a sea-captain who wrote before the disaster to Fort William had been completely reversed at Plassey, says

‘the principal cause of the war was the knowledge of what had happened on the coast of Coromandel, for many Moors (and some of distinction among them) have come lately from thence and declared that the English and French have divided the country, while their respective Nabobs are not better than shadows of what they should be’.*

He testifies also to a growth of casualness and arrogance in the English at Calcutta, who stretched their own trade privileges and rights of asylum:

‘The injustice to the Moors consists in that, being by their courtesy permitted to live here as merchants---to protect and judge what natives were our servants, and to trade custom free---we under that pretence protected all the Nabob’s servants that claimed our protection, though they were neither our servants nor our merchants, and gave our dustucks or passes to numbers of natives to trade custom free, to the great prejudice of the Nabob’s revenue; nay, more, we levied large duties upon goods brought into our districts from the very people that permitted us to trade custom free, and by numbers of impositions (framed to raise the Company’s revenues, some of which were ruinous to ourselves)---such as taxes on marriages, provisions transferring land property, &c.---caused eternal clamour and complaints against us at Court.’

Allahvardi Khan’s adopted son, Siraj-ud-Daula, became Nawab, 1756. He was a mean ruffian, but we need not seek in original sin his reason for attacking the Company. Before his accession they had corresponded with a rival’s faction. Then they sheltered a Hindu merchant he desired to plunder, and turned his messenger ‘out of the factory and off the shore with derision and insolence’. The merchant repaid their protection by joining another merchant resident in Calcutta, the afterwards notorious Aminchand, in intriguing with the Nawab, especially in the siege which followed. Further, as we have seen, the Bengal governor had witnessed the frightening emergence in South India of alien Powers who possessed footing in his own territories. Both English and French factories in Bengal were being fortified; and while the French to his peremptory command to desist sent a conciliatory reply, the English answered:

‘That in the late War between our Nation and the French, they had attacked and taken the Town of Madras Contrary to the neutrality We expected would have been preserved in the Mogull’s Dominions; and that there being at present great appearance of another War between the Two Crowns, We were under some apprehensions they would act the same way in Bengal, to prevent which We were only repairing our Line of Guns to the Waterside.’

The tactlessness of this suggestion that there might be repetition of the Carnatic business here, and that the Nawab was powerless to protect in his own province, could hardly be improved on. He wrote back furiously that he was marching on Calcutta immediately, adding in his own hand:

‘I swear by the Great God and the prophets that unless the English consent to fill up their ditch, raze their fortifications, and trade upon the same terms they did in the time of Nabob Jaffeer Cawn, I will not hear anything on their behalf, and will expel them totally out of my country.’

He seized the Kasimbazar factory (and with it Warren Hastings), and his host swarmed across the Hugli (June 15). The English fled into Fort William; the natives fled from its vicinity. Aminchand, detected in intrigue, was imprisoned by the factors, after a resistance at his house so desperate that his chief dependent slaughtered his women and fired it after stabbing himself, though not mortally. Aminchand, ‘implacable in his resentments’,* had been made an enemy.

In Madras, in October of this year, Orme wrote from the survivors’ stories an account of the siege, from which we can recover its tenseness and terror. An immense curtain of foes moved in on a handful far from assistance and with frightened leaders. The Muslims had European gunners and a French commander. Adopting infiltration methods, they seeped in by houses surrounding the fort. The first night they received a shock, being introduced to South Indian customs by Ensign Piccard, ‘who had served on the coast of Coromandel’. Noting silence in their camp, he stole out and beat up their quarters, spiking four cannon without losing a man. The end was sure, however, though delayed by incessant hand-to-hand fighting, which flung back time after time masses of men who came pouring and pouring on, breakers from an inexhaustible sea. Within the gates arose clamour and misery of a horde of Portuguese and half-caste women. It was resolved, at a council of war held late at night, to send all women to the ships; after midnight, a second council saw that retreat on to the water was necessary for everyone. A day of indescribable fright and confusion followed. The boats were overburdened, for

‘many of the inhabitants imagined everybody was to shift for himself. . . everyone endeavoured to get on board such vessel as he could, and to be the first to be embarked. . . . Most of those who had crowded into them were drowned, and such as floated with the tide to the shore were either made prisoners or massacred; for the enemy had taken possession of all the houses and inclosures along the bank of the river, from which stations they shot fire-arrows into the ships and vessels, in hope of burning them’.

An act of desertion as impulsive as that of Conrad’s ‘Lord Jim’ followed. A ship’s captain set an example of panic, which every ‘ship and sloop’ accepted; seeing their craft deserting them,

‘many of the gentlemen on shore (who perhaps never dreamt of leaving the factory till everybody did) immediately jumped into such boats as were at the factory stairs and rowed to the ships. Among those who left the factory in this unaccountable manner were the Governor Mr. Drake, Mr. Mackett, Captain-Commandant Michen, and Captain Grave’.

Holwell was elected Governor by those who remained, who continued to resist with the desperation that might be expected from foreigners who knew the story of Shah Jahan’s extirpation of the Portuguese. Darkness gave a little respite;

‘but the night was not less dreadful on that account; the Company’s House, Mr. Cruttenden’s, Mr. Nixon’s, Doctor Knox’s, and the marine yards were now in flames, and exhibited a spectacle of unspeakable horror. We were surrounded on all sides by the Nabob’s forces, which made a retreat by land impracticable; and we had not even the shadow of a prospect to effect a retreat by water’.

About four o’clock next afternoon (Sunday, June 25, 1756), the enemy sent a flag of truce, under cover of which they presently swarmed in and began a massacre. A few survivors surrendered, and their personal effects were added to the general and indiscriminate plunder in progress.

Everyone knows what followed: how 146 prisoners were thrust into ‘the Black Hole’, a room which barely contained them standing, and spent a June night raving with heat and thirst. All but some twenty died. Next day Holwell was supported to the Nawab’s presence, upbraided for the smallness of the booty found and threatened with blowing from a gun if he did not divulge where a supposed treasure was hidden. He and his companions were then taken to Murshidabad and led through its bazars in triumph. When it was clear that nothing more was to be squeezed out of the English, whose repeated plucking, at Madras and Calcutta, goes some way to explain the extortions of which, when their own day came, they were guilty, the Nawab---who, moreover, seems to have had some confused feelings of pity, which his womenfolk worked upon---released them from actual imprisonment. They carried out of their experience a profound conviction that the real author of their miseries was Aminchand, whom Drake had imprisoned and Holwell forgot to free:

‘a circumstance which, in the heat and hurry of action, never once occurred to me, or I had certainly done it, because I thought his imprisonment unjust’.

Five ships of war under Admiral Watson, and six transports under Colonel Clive, sailed from Madras, October 16, 1756. Their journey illustrates the difference since made by man’s control of his material and of nature. The north-east monsoon was ‘tyrannous and strong’, and during twelve days drove the vessels down to Ceylon. Then they beat across the Bay to Tennaserim, and crept up the Burmese coast, straggling into unknown shoal waters at the Hugli’s mouth, December 1 and 2, even then having to leave some of their number outside. It was not until December 9 that the spring tides enabled them to go up the river; and not until six days later that they began to reach Fulta (some forty miles down the Hugli from Calcutta), where the refugees and released prisoners were dying of fever, bad water and scarcity of food.

Drake with three colleagues formed a reconstituted Council, to which Clive and Watson were joined. Clive and Watson ignored the civilians and took entire charge, Clive’s stiff wrath at his countrymen’s treatment and at their leaders’ pusillanimity showing from the first. His letters are always most vigorous when the occasion is most menacing. Manikchand, the Nawab’s Governor of Calcutta, returned a letter sent to him to forward to his master, rewritten by him into a suitably submissive style. But the days were finished when the English were ‘grains of sand’ with ‘foreheads rubbed on the ground (by command)’. Clive rejected

‘your advice in writing to the Nabob a letter couched in such a stile, which, however proper it might have been before the taking of Calcutta, would but ill suit with the present time, when we are come to demand satisfaction for the injuries done us by the Nabob, not to entreat his favour, and with a force which we think sufficient to vindicate our claim’.

However, he consented to write somewhat less belligerently; and Watson suggested to the Nawab an amicable settlement, with ‘a reasonable satisfaction for the losses and injuries’. The Nawab preferred war.

The first brush came, December 28. Manikchand attacked the now disembarked troops at Budge-Budge, received a shot through his turban, and lost 150 men. The fort, which was to be stormed at dusk, was prematurely captured by a drunken sailor, who was sent before the admiral:

‘The fellow, after having made his bow, scratched his head, and with one hand twirling his hat upon the other, replied, “Why, to be sure, Sir, it was I who took the fort, but I hope there was no harm in it”. . . .The whole company were exceedingly diverted with his awkward appearance, and his language and manner in recounting the several particulars of his mad exploit. Mr. Watson expatiated largely on the fatal consequences that might have attended his irregular conduct, and then with a severe rebuke dismissed him; but not before he had given the fellow some distant hints, that at a proper opportunity he should certainly be punished for his temerity. Strahan, amazed to find himself blamed, where he expected praise, had no sooner gone from the admiral’s cabin, than he muttered these words: “If I am flogged for this here action, I will never take another fort by myself as long as I live, by God!”’*

The navy, moving ahead, recaptured Calcutta easily. Clive’s commission as a lieutenant-colonel was not taken very seriously, since merely one granted to a successful amateur:

‘Thou art outside, and art not of the guild’.

Watson accordingly appointed Captain Eyre Coote, a King’s officer, Governor of Fort William. Clive when he arrived was indignant, and threatened Coote with arrest. Thereupon all the King’s officers fired up, and Watson sent word he would bombard Clive out of the fort, to which Clive retorted that he would not answer for the consequences, but was staying. Watson offered a compromise, which was accepted. Coming ashore, as indubitably senior to Clive he took over the keys, thereby washing out ‘a Personal Affront, & thro’ him to his Ma’ties Authority’. The keys he then handed to Drake and his Council, who officially declared war on the Nawab and put their forces under Colonel Clive. Clive was not too grateful:

‘At last the King’s troops are put under my command during the Admiral’s pleasure (or rather, during mine, if I insist upon my right). It had been better for the service they had never come and I had the like number of Company’s in their room.’*

He began to recruit from warlike alien Indian races which had come into the province with the Muslim power. This was the beginning of the Bengal Army, which before it perished in the holocaust of the Mutiny was to carry British dominion to the farthest borders of India and beyond.

Drake’s ‘Select Committee’ informed Clive (January 18, 1757) that he was to ‘recede from’ his independent powers as Commander-in-Chief, and ‘strictly comply with and follow whatever plans of military operations the Select Committee of Fort William may point out.’ Thinking Drake and his assistants had done enough mischief, he answered in terms that left no room for misunderstanding, that he should do nothing of the sort. In so far as he recognised any superior at all, it was to Pigot, President of Madras, that he reported throughout.

News came that war had broken out in Europe, and the Nawab made the French a highly advantageous offer of alliance, which they refused, dreading to be attacked at Chandernagore. The protracted skirmishing and negotiation drew to a head. The Nawab’s intention to storm Calcutta was prevented by a dawn assault on his camp (February 6, 1757), which developed into ‘the warmest service I ever yet was engaged in’ (Clive) and cost 194 casualties. Thoroughly frightened, next day the Nawab moved out of danger, leaving dead camels, cattle, elephants, and over 500 horses; his human loss was 1300. He offered Clive peace, with jewels, elephant, and robe of honour. Peace was signed, February 9, after peremptory messages from the English leader; and jewels, robes, and elephants were duly sent to Clive, Drake and Watson (and by Watson declined). The Company obtained a promise that Farakhsiyar’s farman should at last be fully implemented. There was only inadequate material compensation agreed upon, with nothing for private losses.

Clive now pressed the Nawab for permission to attack the French. As their neutrality had been of the greatest value in the recent fighting, there seems some ground for Mill’s opinion that this was shabby. Aminchand, whose property in Calcutta had been temporarily attached (in resentment of his part during the siege), continued busy in intrigue with everyone. He and Nandakumar (‘Nuncomar’), Faujdar (Military Commandant) of Hugli, were half convinced that Fortune was going to throw her glove to the English, and arranged to persuade the Nawab to stay neutral; Nandakumar was to receive a gift and English interest to keep him in his job. If the English agreed they were to tell the messenger ‘Golabke phul’ ‘Rose blossom’. ‘Rose blossom’ was said; and the English moved on Chandernagore. The Nawab, alarmed and troubled, asked Aminchand

‘if such an unprecedented act as fighting amongst the Europeans in the river had ever before been known? If any complaints were made to him, would he not have to redress them?’

Aminchand soothed him with fairy tales, drew attention to the menace of Bussy’s large disciplined force in the Nizam’s country, and stressed English integrity: ‘if a lie could be proved in England upon any one, they were spit upon and never trusted’. His information was somewhat out of date, as he was to realise in a notorious incident. However, the Nawab required the English to keep the peace, and the French begged for peace. Clive, who knew pity, reassured both, and promised peace. But Watson, who as a King’s naval officer never hesitated to ignore mere civilians, Clive included, was unwilling to leave the French alone; he held that the Chandernagore Council had insufficient authority to guarantee neutrality, and he feared Bussy would come into Bengal. Clive was indignant at being forced into what looked like a breach of faith, as well as renewed war with the Nawab.

Another complication was that Ahmad Shah, an Afghan chief who had sacked Delhi, was rumoured to intend to conquer Bengal. To purchase English help, the Nawab was inclined to throw the French over. He negotiated with Watson, who behaved badly, jealously keeping the matter to himself, apparently as not Clive’s business. Presently learning that the Nawab, who not unnaturally was looking everywhere for assistance, had written to Bussy, Watson exploded in the famous menace (which reveals also the stiff self-conceit of his character):

‘I will kindle such a flame in your country as all the water in the Ganges shall not be able to extinguish. Farewell: remember that he promises you this, who never yet broke his word with you or with any man whatsoever.’

The terrified Nawab wrote back cringingly, pointing out that the French were ‘my tenants, and upon this affair desired my protection’. Reluctantly, seeing no other way, he gave what was construed into leave to attack them:

‘You have understanding and generosity: if your enemy with an upright heart claims your protection, you will give him his life, but then you must be well satisfied of his intentions: if not, whatever you think right, that do.’

This settled the matter. The admiral’s real zest was in the war against the French, not in these country wrangles. He held that the declaration of war in Europe was a direct command from His Majesty ‘to all officers . . . to distress the enemy as far as it is in their power’. After a gallant resistance on land and water for ten days, costing the defenders 200 casualties on the last day alone, Chandernagore surrendered. The conquerors entered a shambles.

Ahmad Shah the Afghan turned his attention from Bengal, and against the Marathas. In Bengal itself a brief halt came in the war. Nandakumar collected bribes impartially from French and English, and preserved a masterly neutrality. Siraj-ud-Daula pestered Clive with letters in varying tenor, and was notified of successes against the French, with the gloss that these were due to the Almighty’s blessing and the Nawab’s favour. Clive became reckless of what he did; a hard dishonesty enters into his character. There is nothing to choose for humbug between his letters and the Nawab’s; to his closest civilian colleague, Watts, the English Agent at Murshidabad, he openly boasts that he is writing ‘haughty or submissive Letters as the Occasion required’. To Orme, a few months later, he promises an account of

‘Fighting, tricks, chicanery, Intrigues, Politics and the Lord knows what; in short, there will be a fine Field for you to display your Genius in ‘.

Ethics disappear from his conduct; we see him immersed in a scheme of things which may well strike us, as it evidently struck him, as fantastically unreal, a world of faery whence all moral distinctions had vanished.

The Nawab’s temper became hysterical.<span data-tippy=”Ghulam Husain Khan, The Seir Mutaqherin (Elliot and Dowson), 763.” class=”info-r”>* His ferocity and witlessness kept his Court in terror; and he loathed the English almost to insanity. He struck Jagat Seth, a Hindu millionaire banker, in the face and threatened him with circumcision. Through the indispensable Aminchand, Jagat Seth approached the English, and a plot was formed to make Mir J’afar, a noble, Nawab. When the plot was nearly ripe, Aminchand threatened to divulge it unless he were promised 5 per cent. of the Nawab’s treasure (estimated at forty million sterling) and 30 lakhs (£300,000). He reduced his demands to £200,000 (substantially what it had been arranged that Clive was to get). Clive drew up double agreements, one on white paper, genuine, one on red paper, fictitious. Both were to be signed by Clive, Watson and the Select Committee; and the sham paper, which embodied his conditions, was shown to Aminchand. Watson’s signature to this, however, had been forged by Clive, whose own statement is:

‘It was sent to Admiral Watson, who objected to the signing of it; but to the best of his remembrance gave the gentleman who carried it leave to sign his name upon it:---That his Lordship never made any secret of it; he thinks it warrantable in such a case, and would do it again a hundred times: He had no interested motive in doing it, and did it with a design of disappointing the expectations of a rapacious man.’*

As to whether Clive was right in supposing (if he did suppose) that he had Watson’s sanction to forge his signature, so long as he preserved him from inculpation in the sham treaty by his own hand, the evidence is conflicting. According to a captain who served on the admiral’s flagship, Watson learnt only on his deathbed what had been done:

‘The Admiral said, that he always thought the transaction dishonourable, and as there was so much iniquity among mankind, he did not wish to stay any longer among them; this was just before his death.’

The same witness deposed that the admiral ‘thought it an extraordinary measure to depose a man they had so lately made a solemn treaty with’. However, the plot was pushed forward, Watson concurring.

Clive sent the Nawab a letter summarising the Company’s wrongs, and concluding with announcement of the writer’s thoughtful intention: ‘The Rains being daily encreasing, and it taking a great deal of time to receive your answer, I therefore find it necessary to wait on you immediately’. As he neared Murshidabad, Watts and other captives escaped and joined him. Presently the last decision had to be taken. A council of war voted against action, Clive with the majority. But solitary reflection persuaded him otherwise; he crossed the river Bhagirathi, and halted his force in a large mango-grove at Plassey (Palasi, ‘the Field of the Palas-trees’ or ‘of the Ogre’, according as we take the primary or the secondary meaning of the Bengali name). The battle next day (June 23), consisted of two parts: a morning cannonade, followed by a drenching monsoon downpour which damaged the Nawab’s ammunition, then an attack precipitated by Major Kilpatrick’s keenness, and ending in complete victory at a cost of 65 casualties. Even the defeated lost only about 500 men. As a battle, Plassey was ridiculous. Mir J’afar, who vacillated during the engagement, came timidly round with congratulations and was told he was now Nawab.

At the house of the Seths, the great bankers whose hand was to be in countless intrigues to follow, Clive said to his friend Scrafton, ‘It is now time to undeceive Omichund’; whereupon

‘Scrafton said to him in the Indostan language, “Omichund, the red paper is a trick; you are to have nothing”. These words overpowered him like a blast of sulphur; he sunk back, fainting, and would have fallen to the ground, had not one of his attendants caught him in his arms.’

Aminchand was carried home, ‘where he remained many hours in stupid melancholy’, which passed into permanent imbecility. So Orme, whose heightened narrative obviously has behind it Clive’s own excited story of a sleight whose cunning and success greatly pleased him. But Clive’s own account before the Parliamentary Committee corrects this: ‘the indignation and resentment expressed on that man’s countenance bars all description’. And indignation and resentment preserved his intellect; on reflection, he smothered revengeful thoughts and decided to work again with Clive, in a more restricted and less ambitious field of knavery. In his will he left £2000 to the Foundling Hospital in London, which we may interpret as charity or irony, as we will.

The more powerful conspirators did rather better than Aminchand. The Company became zemindar of the Twenty-four Parganas, 880 square miles mostly south of Calcutta, with rents estimated at £150,000 (in practice they proved much less). Clive received £234,000. This was the occasion when, in retrospect, he was astonished by his moderation; but Clive was very easily astonished in this regard. His conviction that whatever personal advantage he collected was somehow different from, and altogether holier than, gain seized by smaller men was not quite sane in its cold firmness. Watts received £80,000, Walsh £50,000, Scrafton £20,000. Clive thought that altogether the Company and private persons netted three million sterling. To engineer a revolution had been revealed as the most paying game in the world. A gold-lust unequalled since the hysteria that took hold of the Spaniards of Cortes’ and Pizarro’s age filled the English mind. Bengal in particular was not to know peace again until it had been bled white.

We may hurry over the crowning scenes. Siraj-ud-Daula was betrayed to Mir J’afar by a man he had once tortured. Mir J’afar gave his English allies the same soothing reassurances that Muhammad Ali had given where Chanda Sahib was concerned; Siraj-ud-Daula, Clive wrote (July 2),

‘will be in the City this evening: the Nabob, who is a humane, generous and honest Prince, intends only to confine him and to allow him all the indulgence which a prison can admit of’---

comforting thoughts from which he turns immediately to the more interesting news of the loot. Siraj-ud-Daula, left to his kindly jailor’s mercies, was mangled to death with a sabre, flung across an elephant and paraded through Murshidabad streets on the same day as a flotilla bore a load of treasure down to the Ganges for Fort William:

‘As soon as they entered the great river, they were joined by the boats of the squadron; and all together formed a fleet of 300 boats, with music playing, drums beating, and colours flying; and exhibited to the French and Dutch, by whose settlements they passed, a scene far different from what they had beheld the year before, when the Nabob’s fleet and army passed them, with the captive English, and all the wealth and plunder of Calcutta.’*

The loot arrived, July 6, and was received rapturously. ‘A world of guns’ were fired, the Ladies all got ‘footsore with dancing’; and

‘a Bumper goes to your health each day in every house from the Admiral’s downwards’.*

This did not preclude the inevitable quarrels over division, when the soldiers decided that the sailors, who had gone upstream but not far enough to be in the fighting, should not share in the prize-money. This decision Clive quashed, dismissing the council of war.

Eyre Coote, a King’s officer, and one who had the misfortune to get across Clive continually, was left up-country to harry the remnants still faithful to the late Nawab and the handful of Frenchmen with them. He failed to catch them, but chased them until his own sepoys would go no further. His officers were severely rebuked by Clive for seeking extra ‘batta’, despite their allowance being already ‘beyond everything heard of in any other Service’. Clive was always very down on anything that savoured of greed.

The overwhelming victory of the English disquieted their rivals. France took steps first, sending out land and sea reinforcements, and, to command the army, Comte de Lally, son of an Irish Jacobite. Lally reached Pondicherry, April, 1758, coming to a community fissured with hatreds and fears. His arrogance did not persuade it to support him; French resources had been wasted by Dupleix’ schemes, and without money nothing effective was possible in a field so venal and corrupt as Indian politics. Lally was doomed to failure and a felon’s death. However, he was lucky in his beginnings. The British admiral, Pocock, though he inflicted losses heavier than his own in several actions, was outmanoeuvred by the French, and with naval help Lally took Fort St. David, to Clive’s immense indignation. Clive wrote to Pigot: ‘I cannot express to you my Resentment and Concern at the Infamous Surrender’.

Clive, one of the most restless, ardent, ambitious men that ever lived, would have drawn Madras under his command if possible. He was already aware that the three Presidencies should be under one, and that this one should be Bengal, ‘an inexhaustible fund of Riches’. He sought supreme authority for himself---rightly, since he so obviously towered above his colleagues that to be unaware of his pre-eminence would have been affectation. He saw clearly that nothing but their own restraint need put a limit to the conquests of the English. But he was before his time in his vision and plans; and a piecemeal battle had to continue.

This went well for the English, who were served in South India by a number of brilliant officers, as against Lally and Bussy still apart and destined to co-operate, when circumstances compelled this, only with mutual dislike. They had also brave Indian allies: a famous sepoy leader, Yusuf Khan, and the Raja of Tanjore. The latter, helped by a timely appearance of the English fleet off Karikal, repulsed Lally and did some damage to his troops when they were withdrawing. Lally effected little beyond pillage far and wide, though he came near to success in December, when he captured the native quarters of Madras. But Madras, unlike Fort William in Siraj-ud-Daula’s siege, had a gallant and able Governor in Pigot, and an experienced commander in Lawrence. After bitter and protracted fighting, the siege failed (February, 1759) when English ships again drew up; and with its failure sank the last prospects of victory for France.

Clive helped materially in Lally’s repulse. But he refused to detach at Pigot’s urgency troops he preferred to use in a campaign of diversion in the Northern Sarkars, where a chieftain called Ananda Raz had seized Vizagapatam and raised the English flag. Clive sent him Colonel Forde, as skilful a soldier as any in India. Forde at Condore defeated Bussy’s second-in-command, Conflans, who escaped with Lusitanian celerity:

‘He is determined not to be taken Prisoner, unless by a Greyhound, for he Supped at Rajamindry the night of the Engagement, which is at least fifty miles from the field of action.’*

Forde then stormed Masulipatam, where Conflans was captured. The Northern Sarkars were completely conquered; the Nizam, after his first vexation, decided to cede them to the conquerors and to begin the process of going over to the English side. These operations exercised a profound effect, moral and material, on Lally’s campaign farther south.

Meanwhile the Emperor was his Vizier’s prisoner, and his son, known as the Shahzada, little better than a condottiere:

‘the throne of the Moguls was the sport of servants and strangers, and he who was entitled to occupy it was a wanderer without a home’.*

Egged on by the Nawab of Oudh, the Shahzada invaded Bihar, whose Governor, Ramnarayan, at first submitted. But Ramnarayan’s eyes were opened when he visited the Shahzada, and found himself absurdly doing the meanest of obeisance to a State obviously in tatters. He invented a pretext for escape back to Patna, where he used evasions till they would serve no longer and then defended the city until Clive could come to his help. Clive while coming up conducted with the Shahzada a correspondence more like the courteous interchanges of Mr. Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung and his brigand captor than anything else outside fiction. First, Clive, ‘the Most High and Mighty, Protector of the Great’, is advised by the Shahzada gravely to

‘make it your business to pay your respects to me like a faithful servant, which will be great and happy for you’.

Clive, while chivying the Shahzada about Bihar’s wide confines, expresses deep respect and concern for his welfare, adding a measure of philosophical consolation:

‘It is better that one should suffer, however great, than that so many thousands should be rendered unhappy. I have only to recommend Your Highness to the Almighty’s protection. I wish to God it were in my power to assist you, but it is not. I am now on my march to the Caramnassa, and earnestly recommend you to withdraw before I arrive there.’

The Shahzada accepted his energetic well-wisher’s recommendation, and fled expeditiously. The Mogul Vizier, who had the Emperor (the Shahzada’s father) in captivity, wrote congratulating Clive:

‘The faithful services which you have performed and the pains which you have taken in the late affairs have given me great joy; nor can I sufficiently express your praises for what you have done. Continue to behave with the same fidelity; seize the rebel and send him to court. By the will of God, this service performed, the King will show you the greatest favour, and your honours shall be encreased.’

This letter led to the grant of Clive’s notorious jagir. The Emperor (under instructions) had already made him a commander of 6000 horse, for his ‘services’ in making Mir J’afar Nawab of Bengal. The appointment had of course been meant to be purely honorary, but Clive pointed out now that this rank carried a £30,000 salary. He urged the Seths to get something done about it, and they hit on the plan of making over to him the quit-rent of the Twenty-four Parganas. Clive accepted this arrangement, and never saw any hurt in this (or in any other of his acquisitions). He became the Company’s landlord, a situation in which the Company acquiesced for a while, partly because they were in fear of this all-powerful servant, partly because they felt that it would be easier to quash a payment to one of their own employees than one to the Nawab. Clive could not stay in India for ever: and he made enemies faster than almost any man that ever lived.

Macaulay thought Clive’s acceptance of the jagir justified, and many English historians agree with him. We think it necessary to say only that his enormous greed provided an example against which his severity towards others (who took smaller amounts in ways he considered irregular) was entirely ineffective. For the monstrous financial immorality of English conduct in India for many a year after this, Clive was largely responsible. We need not think him hypocritical when later on, in an outburst which has greatly impressed biographers and historians, he besought the House of Commons, while considering his honour, not to forget their own. He honestly thought of himself as a case apart. Horace Walpole (whose own extensive distraints on the public purse, as the son of a distinguished father, were even more adequately sanctioned by political custom than Clive’s in Bengal) noted caustically:

‘Though Lord Clive was so frank and high-spirited as to confess a whole folio of his Machiavellism, they were so ungenerous as to have a mind to punish him for assassination, forgery, treachery, and plunder, and it makes him very indignant.’

Other questions which Clive overlooked were his right to accept the position of a great noble under the Emperor, and his power to reconcile a double allegiance if policies ever came into conflict.

The Dutch had watched the boats laden with the plunder of Murshidabad filing past their forts with braying of trumpets and ‘country musick’---as Scrafton noted, ‘a scene far different’ from that of the Nawab’s return from the rapine of Fort William. Their thoughts had been what we can conjecture---envy, hatred, dread, and contempt. They were no more willing to accept the political predominance of their rivals than the English had been willing to accept French predominance in the Carnatic. Mir J’afar, too, found his dependence irksome. The Nawab and the Dutch at Chinsura intrigued together, and an armament arrived from Batavia, in Clive’s words ‘crammed with soldiers’. There are times when a public man (he observed later, of this episode) must act with a halter round his neck. War between England and Holland was likely in Europe, and word of it was hourly and eagerly awaited. But this, though a valued formality, was not a necessary antecedent of hostilities: ‘the course of events in India, at this period, was not marked by any pedantic adherence to the principles of international law.’* The English claimed the right to search all ships coming up the Hugli, lest they should introduce French troops into Bengal, and also as engaged to help the Emperor’s Viceroy to keep foreign soldiers out. Clive and the Council answered Dutch protests with assurance ‘that we should absolutely and religiously do our duty to the utmost of our strength and power in both capacities.’ Two months passed. Then, in November 1759, the Dutch landed troops, and Clive attacked them by land and water. Both assaults were overwhelmingly victorious. Forde, who commanded the land attack, asked to be safeguarded by a definite order. Clive received his note when playing cards, and scribbled the answer:

‘Dear Forde, fight them immediately. I will send you the Order of Council to-morrow.’

The battle of Biderra followed, ‘short, bloody, and decisive’ (Clive). The English lost a dozen men, the Dutch over 400 Europeans and many Malays. Many ghosts, from the days of the Amboyna Massacre, must have felt themselves at last avenged.

The Nawab now decided that Clive’s enemies ought to be his also, and moved threateningly against the Dutch. In their helplessness they appealed to Clive; and obtained peace and his protection on acknowledging themselves aggressors, paying damages to get their captured shipping back, and promising the Nawab never to fortify again or to keep more than 125 soldiers.

Lally was finally defeated by Coote at Wandiwash, 1760, when Bussy (who had reluctantly left his semi-princely state and security in the Deccan), was taken prisoner and well entertained by his captors, with whom he was a high favourite. In January, 1761, after a protracted defence, Pondicherry fell, and was treated as the French had treated Fort St. David. Saunders razed the forts and many of the buildings. Peace came in 1763; Lally went home, and after two and a half years’ imprisonment was sacrificed to popular wrath over the national humiliation in India, being beheaded. Voltaire, who had enjoyed commenting, on Byng’s execution, that the English shot one admiral ‘to encourage the others’, was enabled to observe that his own people had committed a murder with ‘the sword of justice’.

As Clive observed, the English had succeeded in doing to the French everything that the French under Dupleix had set out to do to them.

In 1761, perhaps luckily for the Company, the Marathas met with utter defeat at the third battle of Panipat, against Ahmad Shah, at the fight ‘of the black mango-tree’. The Hindu dead were believed to amount to nearly 200,000. The famous report to the Peshwa was:

‘Two pearls have been dissolved, twenty-seven gold mohurs have been lost, and of the silver and copper the total cannot be cast up.’

It is matter for amazement that the Marathas should have ever recovered, and have recovered so swiftly. Their nation has shown an almost unequalled resiliency. But they were kept very quiet for some years.

Clive went home, February, 1760. Only thirty-five, he had shown astounding spirit and prowess in both war and peace. Unfortunately, Eyre Coote, with whom he had been so much at odds, had spent a furlough before him; already discontent against the skilful adventurer was spread throughout the Company’s directorate and also Parliament. His conduct fostered this discontent. He was perhaps the King’s wealthiest subject; and he purchased two hundred £500 shares in the Company, which he distributed to nominees who were to vote as he bade. He entered the House of Commons and engaged in the tremendous corruption of men’s consciences that passed for politics in the eighteenth century. He had himself largely to thank that, when the storm broke thirteen years later, even his friend Pitt complained of the floods of easily (and in Clive’s case, indelicately, though not quite dishonestly) gathered wealth which had given ostentatiousness and graft an even wider scope than they had already.

Chapter III

First Shaking of the Pagoda Tree

Inadequate pay of Company’s servants: Holwell and the Nawab: Vansittart: deposition of Mir J’afar: Hastings on Mir Qasim: the inland trading claim: Mir Qasim prepares for war: various atrocities: Mir J’afar restored: mutiny of sepoys: battle of Buxar: Clive’s return to India: acquisition of the ‘diwani’: Clive’s grief at scene of moral deterioration: the Society for Trade: Clive persecuted in England: Hastings’s return to India: supervisors in Bengal: Muhammad Ali’s misrule of the Carnatic: war with Haidar Ali: Clive writes to Hastings: Ramprasad Sen.

As soon as Clive left Bengal,

‘there was a general rush of the Company’s servants, and of Europeans of all classes, towards the interior trade of the three provinces’*

of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa.

It is urged in extenuation that the Company was obstinately unwilling to pay adequate salaries. Even a Member of Council’s pay was only 300 rupees a month. When Warren Hastings was Resident at Murshidabad he was paid much less. On the other hand, we must remember that the official salary was ‘an insignificant proportion of the total emoluments of a Company’s servant’.* Even as early as 1750, Dawson, the Fort William President, in addition to Rs. 1600 salary, received Rs. 20,000 under heads of gratuity, batta, subsistence allowance, servants’ wages. Perquisites, in one form or another, have been a tenacious root of mischief in India. But the Directors would not face decent pay-sheets. They continued to prefer that their servants should recoup themselves by private trade, though they complained that this led to neglect of the Company’s interests.

Clive’s successor, Holwell, never forgot or forgave his Black Hole sufferings. Apart from this, he was untruthful and unscrupulous. He and his colleagues ‘treated as a crime’* the Nawab’s ‘poverty, which was extreme’:

‘their one notion was to grasp all they could; to use Mir Jafar as a golden sack into which they could dip their hands at pleasure’.*

When the Seths refused to provide a large ‘loan’, Holwell wrote to Hastings (who had been sent in 1758, a young man of twenty-five, to the friction-centre at Murshidabad as Resident):

‘A time may come when they may stand in need of the Company’s protection, in which case they may be assured they shall be left to Satan to be buffeted.’

But it became ever harder for the Nawab and his people to believe that any imaginary Satan could be worse than the Satan already with them. The economics of the time were as crude in theory as they were pitiless in practice. The Directors ceased to send out their ‘investment’; their representatives were now supposed to be in the midst of such inexhaustible and presumably natural abundance, flowering out of the soil, that Bengal could pay the expenses of all three Presidencies and purchase the commodities sent home for sale! The English on the spot made requisition after requisition on the Nawab’s treasury, which was in fact empty---Clive’s memory certainly exaggerated when he spoke of passing (after Plassey) through such rows of wealth that the ensuing pillage in retrospect looked to be ‘moderation’. The Company’s own finances (whatever individuals might possess) were equally exhausted. For the rapine and misery which followed, some of the blame must be borne by the ignorance and unimaginative greed of the people in London.

Holwell was succeeded in July, 1760, by Vansittart, who had come from Madras. Vansittart was a well-meaning man, honest within elastic limits, with a sense of fairness hamstrung by weakness. Mir J’afar, old, tired and lazy, was suddenly discovered to be a bad man, tyrannical, disloyal to the English, incapable. He was all this; but the disloyalty was not only natural, it had been condoned at the time (e.g. his intrigues with the Dutch before Biderra). Holwell, who started the movement for a fresh revolution, found an excuse when a number of ladies of rank, among them the begums of Allahvardi Khan, were drowned in the Ganges: ‘these are the acts of the Tyger we are supporting and fighting for’.* Hastings replied (June 21, 1760):

‘I have hitherto been generally an advocate for the Nabob, whose extortions and oppressions I imputed to the necessity of the times and want of economy in his revenues; but, if this charge against him be true, no argument can excuse or palliate so atrocious and complicated a villainy, nor (forgive me, Sir, if I add) our supporting such a tyrant.’

It is not certain that the Nawab was actually privy to the execution, which was the work of his son Miran. When Vansittart interviewed Mir J’afar, the old man submissively admitted his shortcomings, and was so humble and willing to try to be better that Vansittart was touched and shaken. However, he was compelled to abdicate; and retired to Fort William with as much treasure as he could collect and sixty begums.

His son-in-law, Mir Qasim, who had proposed to Holwell to have his father-in-law cut off, became Nawab. He had offered the gentlemen of the Council a large gift, which Vansittart high-mindedly said was not necessary. He now, however, instructed Hastings to ask for it. The Company received the zemindari rights and revenues of Burdwan, Midnapur and Chittagong, as its public reward.

Hastings, who supported the change, wrote of the new Nawab as

‘esteemed a man of understanding, of an uncommon talent for business, and great application and perseverance, joined to a thriftiness, which how little soever it might ennoble his own character was a quality most essentially necessary in a man who had to restore an impoverished state, and clear off debts which had been accumulating for three years before. His timidity, the little inclination he had ever shown for war, with which he has been often reproached, would hardly have disqualified him for the Subahship, since it effectually secured us from any designs that he might form against our Government, and disposed him the easier to bear the effects of that superiority which we possessed over him: a consequence which we soon had occasion to experience, since a spirit superior to that of a worm when trodden upon could not have brooked the many daily affronts which he was exposed to from the instant of his advancement to the Subahship.’

Mir Qasim was a genuine patriot and an able ruler, who quickly retrenched expenditure and suppressed disorders. But he was to be driven to the edge of insanity, if not over it.

In 1761 Hastings had become a Member of Council. He and Vansittart maintained (what in his heart no one doubted) that Farakhsiyar’s farman and subsequent endorsements related only to trade at seaports. As to the Company’s earlier practice, when Nawabs still had power, there was no manner of question; Hastings declared:

‘Then the trade in such commodities as were bought and sold in the country was entirely confined to the natives; they were either farmed out or circulated through the province by the poorer sort of people, to whom they afforded a subsistence. The privileges therefore claimed by the Company and allowed by the Government, were originally designed by both for goods brought into the country, or purchased in it for exportation; in effect it was ever limited to that; nor can any difference of power convey to us a right which we confessedly wanted before.’

No Indian ruler would, or could, have granted foreigners leave to wreck his whole system by a monopoly of duty-free trade along every road and river of his kingdom. But Hastings and Vansittart were voted down. Every Company employee continued to assert a right of inland trading free of customs to which the country’s natives were liable; and especially in such necessities and common commodities as salt, betel, tobacco. The youngest assistant lived like a king by selling his dustuck to Indians. Other Indians, without going to the expense or formality of purchase, merely put the English flag up. The Nawab’s revenue disappeared. So did the livelihood of the poorest and meanest classes; the English (who for so many years were to prove themselves the most expensive of all the invaders of India, and in so many ways) could ‘undersell the native in his own market’*

An incidental additional disgrace to the English name was the Council’s allowing the Nawab to arrest Ramnarayan, Governor of Bihar, who had consistently stood by the Company. The news that he was a prisoner was a deep humiliation to Clive in England. It is fair to add that Hastings thought it wrong to support Ramnarayan,

‘the Naib* of the Province and an acknowledged servant of the Nabob . . . in an assumed independency in direct violation of the treaty which we had but just ratified with him’.

In 1765 a group of Zemindars, greatly daring, sent the Council a complaint that

‘the Factories of English Gentlemen are many and their Gomastahs are in all places and in every Village almost throughout the Province of Bengal; That they trade in Linnen, Chunam, Mustardseed, Tobacco, Turmerick, Oil, Rice, Hemp, Gunnies, Wheat, in short in all Kinds of Grain, Linnen and whatever other Commodities are produced in the Country; That in order to purchase these Articles, they force their Money on the ryots, and having by these oppressive means bought their goods at a low Rate, they oblige the Inhabitants and Shopkeepers to take them at an high price, exceeding what is paid in the Markets; That they do not pay the Customs due to the Sircar, but are guilty of all manner of seditious and injurious acts, for Instance. . . .

‘There is now scarce anything of worth left in the country.’

In the same year similar witness was borne by Francis Sykes, who had succeeded Hastings at Murshidabad. His own successor, Mr. Becher, in 1769 summed up the exasperation which the few decent men all felt:

‘Since the Hon. Company have been in possession of the Dewannee the Influence that has been used in providing their Investment and under their Name, Goods, on private Account, has proved such a Monopoly, that the Chassars, Manufacturers, etc., have been obliged to sell their Commodities at any price those employed to purchase for the English thought proper to give them. They had no Choice. If any Country Merchant, Armenian or other attempted to purchase, there was an immediate Cry that it interfered with the Company’s Investment. . . .

‘I well remember this Country when Trade was free, and the flourishing State it was then in; with Concern I now see its present ruinous Condition which I am convinced is greatly owing to the Monopoly that has been made of late years in the Company’s Name of almost all the Manufactures in the Country. Let the Trade be made free, and this fine Country will soon recover itself, the Revenues increase, and the Company procure as large an Investment as they can spare Money to purchase. . . .’

Mir Qasim, finding protest and sarcasm alike unavailing, began to retreat up the Ganges. He established his court in a tiger-haunted ruin at Monghyr, and prepared for war, collecting a force ‘animated by the strongest feelings of patriotism’.* Hastings came to see him, and used his eyes as he went up-country:

‘I have been surprised to meet with several English flags flying in places which I have passed; and on the river I do not believe that I passed a boat without one. By whatever title they have been assumed (for I could only trust to the information of my eyes, without stopping to ask questions), I am sure their frequency can bode no good to the Nawab’s revenues, to the quiet of the country, or the honour of our nation, but evidently tend to lessen each of them. A party of sipahis, who were on the march before us, afforded us sufficient proof of the rapacious and insolent spirit of these people when they are left to their own discretion. Many complaints were made against them on the road, and most of the petty towns and sarais were deserted on our approach, and the shops shut up from the apprehensions of the same treatment from us.’

Ellis, the Patna Resident, was bullying the Nawab on any excuse that came to hand. Hastings wished to see him, but Ellis found business elsewhere.

The Nawab in desperation declared all trade duty-free to everyone. This ended the English monopoly; and the Council, with the two usual dissentients, told him he had broken the treaty. Hastings protested:

‘The Nawab has granted a boon to his subjects, and there are no grounds for demanding that a sovereign prince should withdraw such a boon, or for threatening him with war in the event of refusal.’

In the document which we have already quoted, he declared that ‘thus far his conduct will bear the severest examination’. Now, however, ‘the hoarded resentment of all the injuries which he had sustained in a continual exertion of patience during three years of his government, now aggravated by his natural timidity, and the prospect of an almost inevitable ruin before him, from this time took entire possession of his mind and drove from thence every principle, till it had satiated itself with the blood of every person within his reach, who had either contributed to his misfortunes or even by real or fancied connection with his enemies became the objects of his revenge’.

He executed the two Seths, and exposed their bodies. Ramnarayan was flung into the Ganges, with a bag of sand tied to his neck. By attacks on the Patna and Kasimbazar factories 200 European prisoners were made, who were butchered (October, 1763) under direction of Walter Reinhard, nicknamed Sumroo (? ‘sombre’), the most brutal of the foreign adventurers infesting India. Only Fullarton, a physician who had done many deeds of skilful kindness, was spared.

Mir Qasim was deposed and Mir J’afar brought back (with the usual presents---in which Hastings, true to his earlier habit, declined to participate). A force was despatched into Bihar, under Hector Munro, who had first to quell an attempt of his sepoys to desert. The deserters were surprised asleep, brought back, and then twenty-four were blown from guns. Major Munro’s own story has been often quoted:

‘Three of the grenadiers entreated to be fastened to the guns on the right, declaring that as they always fought on the right they hoped their last request would be complied with, by being suffered to die in the post of honour. Their petition was granted, and they were the first executed. I am sure there was not a dry eye among the Marines who witnessed the execution, although they had been accustomed to hard service; and two of them had actually been on the execution party who shot Admiral Byng in the year 1757.’

Mir Qasim, allied with the Nawab of Oudh and the Shahzada (now, by his father’s assassination, titular Emperor, Shah Alam), mustered a large army which included 5000 of the Afghans who had recently invaded India under Ahmad Shah Durrani and sacked Delhi. He had guns served by Europeans. The Company with 7000 men, of whom 857 were Europeans, routed him at Buxar in the biggest battle they had yet fought: their loss was no less than 847, but of the enemy 2000 were killed and thousands drowned in flight. A campaign in Oudh followed.

The Company had finally ceased to be a mere trading organisation, and had become in fact (whatever it continued to be in pretence) ‘the most formidable commercial republic . . . known in the world since the demolition of Carthage’.*

In 1765 Hastings went home. He found himself in bad repute in influential quarters. He had been frank in criticism of people who had powerful and greedy connections, and there was no intention of employing him again.

Appalled by the confusion, dishonesty, and military expenditure which had overtaken their affairs, the Directors felt they had no choice but to send Clive back. They ‘began to perceive with dislike’ that the huge private exactions from each puppet Nawab

‘contributed nothing to the Company’s coffers, while they served to drain the country of its resources and form a serious burden on the revenue’.*

Clive arrived in Bengal, May, 1765, with ‘covenants’ which Company servants were to sign, prohibiting them from accepting ‘presents’ or engaging in the inland trade. Mir J’afar, whose second enthronement cost him promises, supplemented by enforced and one-sided revision, that amounted to £300,000 to the Company, £530,000 to gentlemen of the Council, and £250,000 to the army and navy, in deep distress looked for Clive’s coming, but died previously to it.

Clive made peace with the Emperor, who possessed little beyond his title and was glad to grant the Company the diwani* of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in exchange for a regular payment of 26 lakhs. The diwani was held in abeyance, as Clive had no administration he could trust, and believed it better to lull Dutch and French jealousies to rest by keeping up a pretence that the Nawab was still in power. He had sometimes thought that it would be better for the Crown to take over the Company’s conquests, a point much canvassed in England also. But the British Government were unwilling to deepen their own corruption further, by coming into such immense additional patronage. The administration of Bengal was left in the hands of the Nawab’s four naibs (of whom one was Nandakumar, afterwards hanged during Hastings’s governor-generalship, and always hated by Hastings), who were paid salaries of £90,000, £20,000 (two), and £10,000.

Clive’s political aims, from which Hastings was to differ strongly, he set out in his final directions to the Calcutta Board (January 16, 1767). This document may be quoted here, as its principles applied from the beginning:

‘The first point in Politics which I offer to your Consideration is the Form of Government. We are sensible that since the Acquisition of the Dewanni, the Power formerly belonging to the Soubah of these Provinces is Totally, in Fact, vested in the East India Company. Nothing remains to him but the Name and Shadow of Authority. This Name, however, this Shadow, it is indispensably necessary we should seem to venerate; every Mark of Distinction and Respect must be shown him, and he himself encouraged to shew his Resentment upon the least want of Respect from other Nations. Under the Sanction of a Soubah every encroachment that may be attempted by Foreign Powers can effectually be crushed without any apparent Interposition of our own Authority; and all real Grievances complained of by them, can, through the same channel, be examined into and redressed. Be it therefore always remembered that there is a Soubah, that we have allotted him a Stipend, which must be regularly paid, in support of his Dignity, and that though the Revenues belong to the Company, the territorial Jurisdiction must still rest in the Chiefs of the Country acting under him and this Presidency in Conjunction.’

If the mask were thrown off, he said, ‘Foreign nations would immediately take Umbrage and Complaints preferred to the British Court might have very embarrassing consequences’.

This was Clive’s famous Dual System. An element of sham runs through all administrations everywhere; but the Indian Government has often almost seemed to have preferred that fiction should occupy the public attention, while fact (a very different fact) got the actual ruling done. Clive made Nawab a boy of eighteen, who was delighted at the prospect of ready money, and said, ‘Thank God! I shall now have as many dancing girls as I please!’ Clive also rearranged the territory of the Nawab of Oudh. The Emperor, who possessed literally nothing but an empty title (a point which Hastings was to emphasise continually, ringing the changes of scorn, ‘a Pageant of our own’, ‘a mere Idol’, and so on), was given the districts of Korah and Allahabad, a disposition of territory which was to prove important in the politics of less than ten years later.

Clive, entering on his second period of power, flew into capitals at the state of Calcutta,

‘one of the most wicked Places in the Universe, Corruption, Licentiousness & a want of Principle seem to have possess’d the Minds of all the Civil Servants, by frequent bad Examples they have grown callous, Rapacious & Luxurious beyond Conception, & the Incapacity & Iniquity of some & the Youth of others. . .’

‘Rapacity’ and ‘luxury’ are now favourite words of his. He spoke feelingly of ‘the unreasonable desire of many to acquire in an Instant, what only a few can, or ought to possess’; and discovered in his colleagues a scene ‘shocking to human nature’. All had ‘received immense sums’ for the latest Nawab’s appointment, and were ‘so shameless as to own it publicly’. His sensitive nature could hardly bear it:

‘Alas, how is the English name sunk! I could not avoid paying the tribute of a few tears to the departed and lost fame of the British nation.’

The Council maintained that to sign the new covenants immediately was unnecessarily precipitate; it could be postponed till the boy Nawab had finished making over his presents. One of them, Mr. Johnstone, was tactless enough to observe, ‘With regard to presents in general, we have the approved example of the President, Lord Clive himself’, a point he elaborated with considerable skill and felicity of illustration. Clive, who saw himself in a peculiarly noble light, as Galahad (rather than Hercules) come to cleanse the Augean stable, refuted him torrentially.

Clive’s attitude and argument were always singularly simple and plain. He thought persons in junior positions ought not to be greedy. But those in senior positions were entitled to collect a great deal:

‘My grand object, you know, is that none under the rank of field officers should have money to throw away. When they arrive at that rank, their hands are filled with such large advantages, that they may be certain of acquiring an independency in a few years.’ (February 16, 1766.)

He put down presents, so far as they could be put down; and enforced ‘cuts’, which (as has usually happened in India, when financial stringency has compelled them) were heavy on those who could least support them. Military officers, since the Directors insisted, were deprived of double batta (field allowance), which Mir J’afar had given. The result was widespread mutiny, which Clive met as courageously as he met every danger. He broke it, and dismissed some mutineers to England, where they swelled the growing band of his enemies.

The Directors were not yet willing to face proper salaries for their own servants, and Clive disobeyed them by winking at the continuance of inland trading and by establishing for the senior civil and military officers a strict monopoly in salt, calling this ‘The Society for Trade’. This the Directors failed to put down until 1768, when Clive was already back in England.

His courage and good intentions deserve the highest praise. Also, he was honest in comparison with nearly everyone else. His ‘Society for Trade’, whereby senior officers were to gain so generously (a full colonel making an extra £7000 a year, a lieutenant-colonel £3000, a major £2000), was justified in his own mind by the argument that the salt monopoly now belonged to the Company, who, if its profits went to their servants, were merely paying them properly in an indirect fashion. But in the deepest grievances of the people of Bengal, those arising out of the control of their inland trade by foreigners, Clive achieved very little, if anything, as quotations already made have shown.

This is not the place for a full explanation of the way Clive’s good and evil deeds working together brought him to ruin in England. To his chagrin, despite a reception full of flattery, he received no honours but an Irish peerage. And in 1772, Sulivan, Deputy Chairman of the Court of Directors, whose supersession had been one of Clive’s conditions before consenting to return to Bengal for his last term of service, brought forward a motion in the House of Commons for a Bill*

‘for the better regulation of the affairs of the East India Company, and of their servants in India, and the due administration of justice in Bengal’.

Clive’s actions came in for criticism, and he defended himself in a speech that was an eloquent tribute to himself. He effectively retorted on the Directors, who

‘had acquired an empire more extensive than any kingdom in Europe, France and Russia excepted. They had acquired a revenue of four millions sterling, and a trade in proportion’,

yet had encouraged the levity and greed of their least reputable servants and let maladministration and corruption proceed apace. The Bill was temporarily shelved, and a Select Parliamentary Committee investigated what had happened in Bengal. Clive was cross-examined, as he complained, like a sheep-stealer, and exclaimed:

‘Am I not rather deserving of praise for the moderation which marked my proceedings? Consider the situation in which the victory at Plassey had placed me! A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! Mr. Chairman, at this moment I stand astonished at my own moderation!’

Much of that outburst was rhetorical exaggeration.

The Report, when published, kindled contempt for the Company’s mismanagement. But sympathy was growing for Clive. The final scene is well known: certain statements of fact, as to Clive’s acquisitions, were carried in the House, but also (without a division) the resolution:

‘That Robert Lord Clive did, at the same time, render great and meritorious services to this country.’

With that decision we need not quarrel.

Clive had warned the Directors (August 28,1767) of what was coming---the jobbery, that besetting curse of Indian administration, which the astonishing evidence of India’s inexhaustible riches was to set up: ‘the great will interfere in your appointments, and noblemen will perpetually solicit you to provide for the younger branches of their families’. He feared that

‘the grasping character of the administration in England would lead to a ruinous interference in the nomination of men to India who had no recommendation but their high birth and great interest’.*

It did; and immediately. Directors and Directors’ relatives, peers, even the Royal Family, saw no reason why they should not push a young friend or dependent into a service which within an incredibly brief period would bring him back enormously enriched. English politics and morals became corrupted, English ideas of India vulgarised, to an extent and permanency which we do not yet realise. Caraccioli, spokesman of the envious and disappointed military officers whom Clive in his governorship (1765-67) checked from making such wealth as his own, appealed to a vivacious prejudice and jealousy of

‘a company of merchants, whose servants have lately exhibited in these realms the magnificence and pageantry of sovereigns to the disparagement of the ancient nobility’.*

‘The quality’ agreed that ‘one should have scarcely imagined that such wealth was destined to flow to ravenous upstarts sent at a venture beyond the eastern ocean, by obscure and indigent relations.’*

The Proprietors, seeing their employees’ gains, demanded higher dividends. The British taxpayer also desired to press up to the pagoda-tree, ‘then in full bloom’.* In 1767 Parliament held an enquiry into the Company’s affairs, and limited the dividend to ten per cent. The Company was ordered to pay £400,000 annually to the Treasury. As it was itself poverty-stricken, however wealthy its servants might be, this benevolence was raised by loans. These in turn deepened its financial distresses; and inevitably it judged, and compelled its representatives to judge, all actions from the point of view of a desperate man being driven towards bankruptcy. The enquiry had a happier result, in Warren Hastings’s emergence from obscurity:

‘Mr. Hastings being examined at the bar of the House of Commons. . . attracted general notice by his prompt, masterly and intelligent expositions.’*

He was sent back to India, 1769, as second at Madras.

In 1769 Mr. Becher, whose frank comments we have already had occasion to quote, left the Calcutta Council without any remaining excuse to pretend to be ignorant that the province’s misery was their direct work:

‘It must give pain to an Englishman to have Reason to think that since the accession of the Company to the Dewanee the condition of the people of this Country has been worse than it was before; and yet I am afraid the Fact is undoubted.’

He cites humiliating reasons

‘why this fine Country, which flourished under the most despotic and arbitrary Government, is verging towards its Ruin while the English have really so great a share in the Administration. . . . When the English received the Grant of the Dewannee their first Consideration seems to have been the raising of as large Sums from the Country as could be collected, to answer the pressing demands from home and to defray the large Expences here’.

His letter, an admirably close and moderate piece of reasoning, led to the appointment of Englishmen as ‘supervisors’ of the Indian officials and their methods of collecting revenue. The plan proved unsatisfactory, simply because so few Company employees were of any experience (Mir Qasim’s massacre had been followed by Clive’s purges of both army and civilian personnel) or of any character. A supervisorship was seen to be the best scheme devised hitherto for speedy amassing of fortune; no one cared to hold so unremunerative a post as that of Member of Council when graft unlimited might be his as a ‘supervisor’. We have Hastings’s testimony (January 6,1773):

‘As the collectorships are more lucrative than any posts in the service (the government itself not excepted---whatever it may prove hereafter), we cannot get a man of abilities to conduct the official business of the presidency without violence; for who would rest satisfied with a handsome salary of three or four thousand rupees a year to maintain him in Calcutta, who could get a lac or three lacs, which I believe have been acquired in that space, and live at no expense, in the districts?’

Nevertheless, the scheme, after modification, proved the germ idea out of which later on the Indian Civil Service was to be developed (the ‘collector’ following the supervisor). The Company, moreover, as the immediate Zemindar of the districts of Burdwan, Midnapur, and Chittagong, was coming into intimate touch with the difficulties and complexities of Indian revenue. The three Company districts were happier and better run than the rest of Bengal, because in them Englishmen were not simply invincible demons presenting demand notes, but human beings who saw village life at first hand.

Nature lightened the unhappy ryot’s problem, in 1770, when such a famine ravaged Bengal that one-third of the natives were believed ‘to have perished by sickness and famine’. This was Hastings’s own estimate; some English eye-witnesses put the deaths at one-half the population (which was probably about fifteen millions). We may cautiously accept a fifth as the true proportion. The principal Naib, Muhammad Reza Khan, collected the revenue almost fully, adding 10 per cent. (the najay cess, a recognised exaction by which the living made good revenue losses which were owing to other taxpayers having been so unpatriotic as to die); and the Company’s servants profiteered in necessities.

By the Treaty of Paris (1763), England and France acknowledged Salabat Jang as the lawful Subadar of the Deccan, and Muhammad Ali as the lawful Nawab of the Carnatic. Wilks, whose italics we have just borrowed, observes:*

‘Two European nations had thus assumed to themselves the right of conferring the official appointments, and determining the interior arrangements of the Mogul Empire.’

But a great many things were done in this period whose implications were not noted or understood. Muhammad Ali, however, understood them clearly enough. His position was solely due to English military support, and he decided that this support was capable of aggrandising it immensely further. During a stretch of nearly half a century the administration of the Carnatic was mischievous and corrupt to an even worse degree than that of Bengal in its worst period. He cajoled the Company into an unprovoked attack on Tanjore, that he might make its Raja a dependent; in 1764 he left Muhammad Yusuf Ali, Clive’s valiant comrade and the Company’s renowned captain of auxiliaries, no choice but to fight in self-defence. It was vain to fight against the Company’s protégé, assisted by British forces; and Yusuf Ali, after a gallant and protracted struggle, was executed as a ‘rebel’. Wherever Muhammad Ali managed to extend his power, his misrule and that of his polygars

‘left at an humble distance all the oppression that had ever been practised under the iron government of Hyder’,*

a contrast which the great missionary Schwartz makes of Tanjore’s new condition after conquest. When the century was in its last decade, the Nawab of the Carnatic, a dignified, plausible rascal of engaging manners and venerable appearance, beset with creditors whom he charmingly postponed, was ornamental enough to be forgiven. But in the interim we have it on the statement of a former Keeper of the Madras Government Records,* that ‘it would be difficult to name a Governor who was neither bribed nor hated by’ him. We now see him in his palmier days, when

‘the inflated ambition of this political pretender was nourished and incited by the still more absurd and corrupt counsels of his European advisers’.*

Muhammad Ali’s elder brother, deciding that there were disadvantages attendant on being in too close proximity to the Nawab, renounced the world and set out for Mecca. He took an unusually circuitous route, which brought him to Haidar Ali, the brilliant adventurer now ruling Mysore. After talk with Haidar, to whom he related in detail the mischiefs and territorial extensions which his brother was meditating, the pilgrim found the world still had claims on his services, accepted a jagir, and became a confidential adviser. A complex intrigue seethed. The Nizam, an unwilling ally of the English, was guaranteed their support against Haidar Ali and the Marathas, but found it hard to decide which side he preferred to be on; Muhammad Ali thought he would like to supplant both the Nizam and Haidar, who for their part thought his existence unnecessary; the Marathas, now rapidly recovering from the effects of their disaster at Panipat, were inclined to pillage the whole of South India. The whole business was lightened by much conscious humour, which the Marathas, who had so largely brought about the farcical state of Indian politics, seem to have enjoyed most heartily.

The best joke came when Colonel Smith, commanding a force he believed was to support the Nizam, found the Nizam and Haidar in the field against him, with the Marathas benevolently behind the confederates. Smith won a battle at the Pass of Changama (1767), but, having only 7000 men against 70,000, retired. The enemy followed him, to be again defeated, at Trinomali. Haidar then ‘rather observed than covered’* his own orderly retreat, attended by a troop of French cavalry and his retinue of picked men clad in scarlet and carrying pikes with silver spirals that shone brilliantly. The English victories were of little direct value, since at the very time of their being won Haidar’s son Tipu was plundering the Madras Council’s country houses. Their indirect value was that the Nizam entered on the course of wavering which was ultimately to make his dynasty the premier one in India, with the title of Faithful Ally of the British Government. When the Bengal Government sent a detachment under a vigorous officer into the Northern Sarkars, his wavering was confirmed into decision. He obtained peace by the Treaty of Masulipatam, 1768; the British unnecessarily agreed to pay him a tribute in exchange for the Sarkars, ‘which he neither possessed, nor had the most distant hope of ever possessing’,* and declared Haidar a rebel and usurper whose territories they meant to conquer and retain, promising the Marathas (who were not even parties to the Treaty) chauth on them when this was achieved. The Court of Directors wrote of these extraordinary proceedings:

‘You have brought us into such a labyrinth of difficulties, that we do not see how we shall be extricated from them.’

Haidar and Tipu fought on, and fought successfully. They caused Mangalore, after ‘a wretched defence’,* to capitulate; made up for defeat at Mulwagul by a series of victories presented to them by incompetence; ravaged up to the suburbs of Madras, when Haidar coolly nominated an English envoy, and ‘practically dictated peace on his own terms’.* The Company, whose commitments were now bewildering and contradictory, agreed to support him also against attack. Attack came from the Marathas, two years later (1771), and the Presidency dared not help him. They ‘earned at once the bitter animosity of a relentless foe, and incurred the discredit of repudiating their treaty obligations.’

The Directors, who had never ceased to inveigh against ‘the general corruption and rapacity of our servants’, in 1771 appointed Warren Hastings Governor of Bengal, a post he took up next year. Verelst, who had been in positions of influence all through the worst troubles, and was himself better than most in character, summed up his task thus:

‘To reclaim men from dissipation, to revive a general spirit of industry, to lead the minds of all from gaudy dreams of sudden-acquired wealth to a patient expectation of growing fortunes.’

About to enter on this heroic work, Hastings received a long letter from Clive in the role of an ‘elder statesman’, intolerably patronising and self-approving:

‘I wish your government to be attended, as mine was, with success to the Company, and with the consciousness of having discharged every duty with firmness and fidelity.’

The man who could seriously believe his government had achieved all that was no longer capable of advising the lonely, disdainful spirit he addressed. Hastings’s courteous guarded answer indicated that he meant to keep his business to himself. Between him and Clive there was always intense dislike.

We should not forget that the conquered side had a life of their own. There was interaction, and not merely of oppression. It is often cited as a reason for Dupleix’ success, that through Madame Dupleix, who had Indian blood in her veins, he had intimate knowledge of the land’s people. This advantage, however, the English were not long in sharing with him. Until the austere purging of manners from all intercourse except that of rulers with a subject folk, which followed the Mutiny (and in a less degree had already come with Cornwallis), irregular connections played a part---no doubt in lowering the tone of social life, but also in creating an intimacy of knowledge and sympathy which vanished from better times. And there was English intercourse with bankers like the Seths, with mere tools like Nandakumar and the various naibs, with brave allies like Yusuf Khan and other sepoy leaders whose names flit into Orme’s and Cambridge’s generously full stories and into the letters of Clive and Hastings.

There remained the main stream of native life, passive while war and pillage stormed and traversed the land. We have the tale as it looked to contemporary Indian historians, to Ananda Ranga Pillai in the south and the author of Seir Mutaqherin in the north, observers puzzled, watchful, seeing the emergence of new modes and different ethics, trying to adjust to known standards the ways of these incalculable strangers whose power seemed so tremendous. We have other records still, of how these years affected those too humble to take the attention of the historic muse. Ramprasad Sen, one of the noblest of lyric poets, was a contemporary of Siraj-ud-Daula and Clive. He was born in 1718, in the district of Nadiya, which is Bengal of the Bengalis, seat of their ancient independent pre-Muhammadan kings. He was a poor man, a poet at the court of the Krishnanagar Zemindars. In the time’s miseries there was passionate revival of the worship of Kali, the terrible goddess who gives to some strength and abundance and to others a trampled existence. Ramprasad, gazing at the bewildering pageant, exclaims:

‘Mother, to some you have given wealth, horses, elephants, charioteers, conquest. And the lot of others is field labour, with rice and vegetables. Some live in palaces, as I myself would like to do. O Mother, are these fortunate folk your grandfathers---and I no relation at all? . . . Some ride in palkis, while I have the privilege of carrying the shoulder-pole’.*

On his songs falls the black shadow of ever-constant oppression, and his imagery is drawn from a life pillaged and set to endless toil. ‘The Six Passions’, ‘The Ten Senses’, are like lathials, club-bearers who strike him down. He dwells in a damaged house, and is terrified of ‘those Six Thieves’ (the ‘Six Passions’) who at night come leaping into his courtyard. It is in his poetry that we find the first English word in Bengali---he will take his suit against the neglectful goddess to the courts, where he will win the ‘decree’. This brings us just into Warren Hastings’s time. His songs, of ineffable pathos and courage, show a true and brave mind kept alive in an oppressed people, waiting for better days.

He died, 1775, drowned while following in trance the clay image of Kali when on the last day of her annual festival it was cast into the Ganges. What is traditionally his last song addresses the Dark Power he had served:

‘Tara, do you remember any more? Mother, as I have lived happy, is there happiness hereafter? . . . Had there been any other refuge, I should not beseech you. But you, Mother, having given me hope, you have now cut my bonds, you have lifted me to the tree’s summit.

‘Ramprasad says: My mind is firm, and my gift to the priest is made. Mother, my Mother, my all is finished. I have offered my gift.’

Chapter IV

Warren Hastings, Governor of Bengal

‘Let me have but Existence, and Freedom from Pain, with the full Exercise of my mental Faculties, and I desire no more, till I see the last Sight of Saugur Island.’
--- Warren Hastings, November 20, 1784.

Hastings’s matrimonial embarrassments: prosecution of the naib-dewans: Nandakumar and Hastings: Hastings’s early zeal: his difficulties from lack of proper authority: his unique experience fits him for his high post: versatility of his character: Barwell won over: payments to Emperor stopped: ruinous drain on Bengal resources: Nawab of Bengal’s civil list curtailed: reforms in penal administration and laws: the Sanyasi rebellion: Rohilla War.

Hastings relieved Cartier, April, 1772, ‘in the fortieth year of his age and the fullness of his intellectual powers’,* coming to a province wasted by rapine closing in famine and to officials who saw no reason why they should fear God or regard man. He was burdened by two extra embarrassments, one of his own bringing. On his voyage out to Madras, he had fallen deeply in love with a German lady accompanying her husband, who was a portrait-painter seeking fortune in the land of rajas and nawabs. When Hastings was transferred to Calcutta, the Imhoffs settled there, living together amicably while divorce proceedings were put through in far-off Franconia. Sir James Stephen says* that when Hastings was at last able to marry her, in 1777, he bought her from her husband for £10,000; for this figure he gives no evidence, and his (unnamed) authority is not a first-class one. However, it seems likely that Imhoff’s financial position was improved by his cession of his wife. The second Mrs. Hastings* was a charming and adroitly attractive woman. Hastings’s marriage to her was one of deep, unbroken affection. But it involved him in difficulties which he overcame only gradually, by ignoring their existence. Nothing makes a man more an object of ridicule than an uncompleted sexual intrigue. The new Governor and his friends, notoriously awaiting word of divorce achieved, were for long a byword. Clive, whose dislike of Hastings increased as the latter replied with emptinesses to his gratuitous advice and exhortations, contemptuously said ‘that he had never heard of Hastings having any abilities except for seducing his friends’ wives’.* Mrs. Hastings was a bad influence on her husband’s administration. He lay so deeply under her spell that the numerous applicants for jobs knew that her kindness must be sedulously cultivated.

The other embarrassment was forced on him. The Directors instructed him that the Company must ‘stand forth as Dewan’, and take over the civil administration directly. This was probably meant to be a half-way house towards the Crown’s taking over of their conquests, a process which became arrested until the Mutiny precipitated its completion. Hastings was ordered to give proceedings an ethical colour by staging a trial whose ends were really political; he was to prosecute the Naib-Dewans, who could then be deposed for peculation and tyranny. He was further told to use Nandakumar, once a Naib-Dewan himself, but pushed out for Muhammad Reza Khan, as a tool in this monstrous business. So much of shame and mischief sprang from his action, that the despatch merits some quotation:

‘We cannot forbear recommending you to avail yourself of the intelligence which Nuncomar may be able to give respecting the Naib’s administration; and while the envy which Nuncomar is supposed to bear this minister may prompt him to a ready communication of all proceedings which have come to his knowledge, we are persuaded that no scrutable part of the Naib’s conduct can have escaped the watchful eye of his jealous and penetrating rival. Hence we cannot doubt that the abilities and disposition of Nuncomar may be successfully employed in the investigation of Mahomed Rheza Khan’s administration, and bring to light any embezzlement, fraud, or malversation which he may have committed in the office of Naib Dewan, or in the station he has held under the several successive Subahs; and while we assure ourselves that you will make the necessary use of Nuncomar’s intelligence, we have such confidence in your wisdom and caution, that we have nothing to fear from any secret motives or designs which may induce him to detect the maladministration of one whose power has been the object of his envy, and whose office the aim of his ambition; for we have the satisfaction to reflect that you are too well apprised of the subtlety and disposition of Nuncomar to yield him any post of authority which may be turned to his own advantage, or prove detrimental to the Company’s interest. Though we have thought it necessary to intimate to you how little we are disposed to delegate any power or influence to Nuncomar, yet, should his information and assistance be serviceable to you in your investigation of the conduct of Mahomed Rheza Khan, you will yield him such encouragement and reward as his trouble and the extent of his services may deserve.’

This letter (and, indeed, the whole affair) might have served as a model to the Ogpu. It disposes of Malleson’s statement, often copied: ‘That Nandakumar was the evil genius who had suggested to the Court this action is sufficiently proved’.*

Nandakumar, since his first appearance in Company affairs, as the Governor of Hugli whom Scrafton in pre-Plassey days bribed into deserting the French at Chandernagore, had continued to be a prime figure in Bengal politics. Clive particularly favoured him, and supported him in one bitter episode when Hastings was compelled to give way to him in an appointment of great financial value. Clive became disillusioned as to his character, which is described as vain, proud, selfish, but faithful to friends and allies; but he regained and kept influence in Verelst’s governorship. Hastings always called him ‘the basest of mankind’; and, thirteen years after his execution, ‘when the hate might be supposed to have been in some measure appeased’,* wrote:

‘I was never the personal enemy of any man but Nuncomar, whom from my soul I detested even when I was compelled to countenance him.’

The reference in those last words is to this episode, when two implacable foes were ordered to work together in what Hastings regarded as iniquitous. He told the Directors (September 1772):

‘From the year 1759 to the time when I left Bengal in 1764,1 was engaged in a continued opposition to the interests and designs of that man because I judged him to be adverse to the welfare of my employers, and in the course of this contention I received sufficient indications of his ill will to have made me an irreconcilable enemy, if I could suffer my passions to supersede the duty which I owe to the Company.’

There is no parallel in Hastings’s recorded writings to his savagery of detestation of Nandakumar, whom he regarded as a scoundrel to the point of being practically vermin. We need not question that a man whose whole life and employment had been spent in such scenes and temptations as Bengal furnished was in many ways as bad as Hastings thought him. On the other hand, at this distance of time we need not count it as part of his criminality that his ‘designs’ were ‘adverse to the welfare of’ the foreign adventurers.

The prosecution, distasteful in the extreme to Hastings, ended, as he foresaw, in acquittal. Of the Naib-Dewan of Bihar, Chitab Rai, he wrote, ‘Indeed, I scarce know why he was called to account’. His trial ended honourably, with complete exoneration; he was allowed to return to his home, where he died as a result of enforced residence in Calcutta. Muhammad Reza Khan was also acquitted. Hastings wrote the Chairman of the Directors a characteristically thoughtful and fair-minded analysis of the trial. Nandakumar was disappointed of the Naib-Dewanship which he thought would be his by reversion and reward, and left to brood over the contemptuous manner in which he had first been used and then flung aside. It was considered adequate notice that his son was appointed to an influential post in the Nawab’s household.

Although Hastings’s term of office marks the end of the dual system, he did not return to India with any idea of instituting the direct British-controlled administration which characterised the nineteenth century. The Company held diwani and zemindari rights---it was supreme ruler and supreme landlord---but the general policy was to farm out these rights under supervision. Hastings had at his disposal the same type of covenanted servant as had served under Clive. Seven years can have made little difference to the personnel, though their discipline was a little better, and their pay and perquisites had been placed on a more regular footing. A letter written by Hastings to the Court of Directors, in 1781, shows his preference for Indian agency in controlling the large area now under the Company’s sway.

‘The civil offices of this government might be reduced to a very scanty number, were their exigency alone to determine the list of your covenanted servants, which at this time consists of no less a number than two hundred and fifty two, and many of them the sons of the first families in the kingdom of Great Britain, and everyone aspiring to the rapid acquisition of lakhs, and to return to pass the prime of their lives at home.’*

If Hastings had wanted to build up a British administration he would have complained of the quality, but not of the number of his subordinates.

It is impossible to exaggerate the burdens which lay on one man. He wrote that ‘every part’ of the Government which had been so long clogged in so many ways was now in full current, yet ‘the channels through which the business of it should flow scarcely opened for its conveyance’. He reduced the Nawab’s stipend, and appointed native revenue collectors (1774) under a Board of Revenue sitting daily in Calcutta and hearing complaints. English officials, whom at this period he was at pains to pick for ability and character, were sent on tours of supervision. His ‘letters to individual Directors glow with indignation’* at the scene he surveyed. ‘Will you believe’, he asks,

‘that the boys of the service are the sovereigns of the country under the unmeaning title of supervisors, collectors* of the revenue, administrators of justice and rulers, heavy rulers of the people? .. . This is the system which my predecessor, Cartier, was turned out for exposing, and I will be turned out too, rather than suffer it to continue as it is.’

Of the monstrous drain of £400,000 annually to the British Treasury he writes:

‘Is it not a contradiction to the common notions of equity and policy that the English gentlemen of Cumberland and Argyleshire should regulate the polity of a nation which they know only by the lakhs which it has sent to Great Britain and by the reduction it has occasioned in their land-tax?’

He found the Mogul land revenue system in the last stage of deterioration. Under Akbar’s system the money should have been collected through ‘farmers’, who remitted the amount---based on a third of the produce---after they had deducted their commission of one-tenth. In Bengal the revenue ‘farmers’ had become a heterogeneous collection of the descendants of old Hindu chiefs, court favourites, speculators, and former officials and soldiers. These rack-rented their tenants, and were themselves continually pressed by the Nawab, who was virtually an independent ruler. By the middle of the eighteenth century the original basis of land revenue was forgotten. The Mogul revenue staff, the accountants and qanungos, had ceased to function, and had gradually disappeared. When the Company’s servants began to find their way into the Bengal districts the old village communities had completely decayed. It is doubtful if they had ever functioned to any great extent in Bengal; here, apart from a few large towns, the population was scattered in tiny clusters of huts, wherever a little rising ground lifted them above their water-logged fields. The peasants’ salvation lay in their diffusion over this fertile but impassable land, which was almost inaccessible except by the few navigable rivers. These countrymen, and the aboriginal tribes which occupied the less fertile uplands, presented a difficult problem for the rapacious invader, or his more orderly successor the tax-collector. They formed a contrast to the ryots in the dry, bare Deccan, which lies open to the invader or the Government’s emissaries. The Deccani tends to huddle for safety behind the stone walls of a village. It is comparatively easy to map out his country, assess the value of his land, and collect the revenue village by village. In eighteenth-century Bengal this would have been impossible. It was chiefly practical reasons which led the British to recognise and work through the revenue farmers or Zemindars of Bengal, while in Madras and Bombay they attempted a direct assessment of the ryot, and to collect the revenue through salaried officials.

The first British administrators naturally regarded the State as the supreme landlord. Though contrary to Hindu theory, this is in accordance with the Muslim idea that the land of the conquered infidel belongs to the conqueror.<span data-tippy=”The Hindu king claimed a portion, usually a fourth, of the produce, and the disposal of waste lands.” class=”info-r”>* The status of the revenue farmers raised a more practical difficulty. In Bengal they tended to become independent landlords, a position to which some of the Hindu Zemindars, like Vishnupur, could put forward hereditary claims. Hastings strongly objected to the Zemindar being accepted as a permanent landlord, and his ‘farm’ being converted into a fixed rent. During his term of office there was a continual struggle over this question; after his resignation, Lord Cornwallis accepted the Permanent Settlement, a change of policy for which many theoretical arguments were adduced, but which was chiefly due to the failure to operate any alternative system. Hastings had too much to contend against. His Council opposed him on various grounds; the Supreme Court,<span data-tippy=”Established 1774.” class=”info-r”>* whose powers had not been properly defined in the Regulating Act of 1773, was continually thwarting him; his European staff were ignorant about land questions, and inclined to be obstructive. Hastings failed, but his policy is important because it marks the first tentative efforts to evolve the district system and the district officer.

The ‘supervisors’, who had been appointed in 1769, had been given a roaming commission to study the revenue system in their districts, a task for which most of them had neither the training nor the inclination. The famine of 1770 finally ruined the old Mogul revenue system, and with it many of the Hindu Zemindars, In the general confusion Hastings decided to convert his supervisors into ‘collectors’, considering that if they received the revenue, district by district, they would exercise more control. In the same year, 1772, the ‘farms’ were settled for five years. Hastings himself went on tour with a ‘committee of circuit’, usually assigning the ‘farms’ to the Zemindars ,but in some cases putting them up for auction, as at Krishnanagar, ‘owing to the subtle and faithless character of the Zemindar’* The ‘collectors’, therefore, had no assessment or ‘settlement’ work to do, but they were given stringent orders to prevent the Zemindars raising rents, and Indian aumils were appointed to assist them. The experiment was not a success. If the old Mogul village staff had still been functioning, and the covenanted servants had been of better calibre, these embryonic district officers might have got directly in touch with the tenants, and intervened between them and the oppressive Zemindars. Even then the physical difficulties in dealing directly with the villagers would have been great throughout the Deltaic plain. The ‘collectors’ merely added to the confusion. The famine of 1770, the full extent of which was not appreciated by the Government, led to ‘farms’ being assessed too high, and some were bought at auction by speculators of poor standing. Defaults were frequent during the next five years, and the Presidency was then put under six Revenue Boards, which superseded the collectors.*

The Boards proved no more successful than the collectors, and Hastings, who in 1776 was at last master in his Council, instituted a Metropolitan Revenue Board of senior officials under his own supervision. This body continued to function until Lord Cornwallis took over the administration. Its general policy was to stop the auctioning of ‘farms’, and work through the Zemindars, who were assessed roughly on the fertility of their land. The land of Zemindars who defaulted was sold. This was an innovation which, combined with alterations in civil law, made land a commodity to be marketed and mortgaged. Almost unwittingly, Hastings introduced into Bengal that European conception of land which was to have such disastrous consequences throughout India. It would, however, be unfair to blame him for the failure of his revenue policy. He was not responsible for the legal chaos produced by the Act of 1773, and he had a sincere desire to protect the cultivator. But he had to satisfy the rapacity of the Directors in London, who held the usual exaggerated views about the fertility of Bengal, and this forced him to assess land too high. He also lacked any staff, Indian or English, with the knowledge, probity, and will to carry out his schemes.

Much criticism of Hastings is written with a strong bias in favour of the Bengal Zemindars. It is absurd to picture them as a group of hereditary landlords, enjoying the confidence of their tenants. A large proportion were adventurers, or the sons of adventurers, who had acquired their position during the anarchy of the early eighteenth century. Many were privy to the gang robberies carried on by dacoits and river pirates. Hastings had strong reasons for objecting to establishing these Zemindars as permanent landlords. He failed to produce an effective alternative policy, but it is doubtful whether the descendants of the Zemindars have justified the later policy of the Permanent Settlement, either by their services to the countryside or their treatment of the tenantry.

Hastings from the first pressed that all the Company’s Presidencies ought to be brought under one head, which obviously must be that of Bengal, the wealthiest of the three and the one to which the other two as a matter of course applied for any subventions which their own deficits required. Moreover, his Council was too large, although it was reduced from fourteen to nine. ‘A principle of decision must rest somewhere’, he urged. Yet during the two years when he was merely Governor of Bengal, the fact that in theory he was scarcely even primus inter pares caused no actual inconvenience, owing to his own complete ascendancy. The immediate administration, especially as regards foreign relations and relations with the Nawab, was in the hands of the Select Committee (which survived throughout the period between Siraj-ud-Daula’s capture of Calcutta and the first Governor-Generalship) of himself and two others. But all his councillors were complaisant and trustful, he himself was the Government, and it was now that he developed his masterful and solitary habits of mind and action.

Having to resist the pressure of jobbery at home, which had already crowded the services with Directors’ and Proprietors’ friends and relations, he sought to gather into his own hands as much authority as he could. He himself had to be ‘the safeguards’; in all times of transition, a man has to be a cover from the tempest, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. A Council was too diffuse and garrulous and open to influence and fears:

‘A long habit of licentiousness, strong temptations, the cursed encouragements of patronage, and the sturdiness of independence, are too great evils to combat with the weak powers of this Government, which many possess and none can exercise.’*

He submitted that the Governor’s primacy was precarious in the extreme: ‘a moment’s contention is sufficient to discover the nakedness of his authority, and to level him with the rest’.*] He insisted that all Europeans, other than those detailed for actual duty elsewhere, must reside in Calcutta, where the Mayor’s Court could enforce decent conduct.

He laboured to bring to the Directors’ realisation the fact that ‘the Investment’ was now unimportant in comparison with the happiness of a people become the Company’s subjects. The job was tremendous; the Directors knew little of Indian affairs, and were faintly interested in them, but they did know that public expectation was greedy for dividends. An eye-witness of the debates when Clive’s conduct was brought into question in Parliament noted that the whole course of events in India was treated as one undeviating wrong and criminality, but that not one word was ever said about restoring either the lands or the revenues to those who had been dispossessed. Similarly, in every discussion but Hastings’s own, it was taken for granted that India’s main reason for existence was to provide fortunes---the only point at issue was whether they should be made swiftly or during the passage of some years of service.

This extraordinary man was uniquely fitted for his tremendous task, by experience as well as by his altogether exceptional qualities of intellect, industry, and thoroughness. His had been no sudden rise to power, but a slow apprenticeship which to any less eager and vivid mind would have been insufferably tedious. He had been for long enough overseer of the Company’s warehouse and keeper of accounts at Kasimbazar. He knew Bengali and Urdu well, and Persian to an extent which was useful (though not---as biographers and historians all assert, in face of his own modest indication of his actual acquirement---perfectly). He was as insatiably curious as Akbar about everything that could interest a vivid person and brain; his friends knew that no knowledge, whether of the natural kingdom or man’s activities, was a matter of indifference to him. As one noted, whenever he visited Benares, he went ‘pundit-hunting’. In the unexampled burdens of his great service, he kept sane by taking refuge in his abounding gift of delight. He loved the people of India, and respected them to a degree no other British ruler has even equalled. For example, after Siraj-ud-Daula had taken the up-country factors prisoner in Murshidabad, Hastings’s qualities of courtesy and sympathy procured him freedom within restrictions, and he noted gratefully, long after, that he had learnt in adversity how much kindness and sympathetic consideration Indians can show. When it was asserted that his wish to see native officials trusted was unsound, because of Asiatic incapacity for exercising power decently, he said:

‘As I have formerly lived among the country people in a very inferior station, at a time when we were subject to the most slavish dependence on the Government, and met with the greatest indulgence and even respect from the Zemindars and officers of the Government, I can with the greatest confidence deny the justice of this opinion.’

His first acts were directed towards establishing general lines of firm ground in the administrative and political morass. He won over Barwell, the ablest of his councillors, to be a tower of defence in the terrible years that were to follow. Barwell, intolerably loquacious and addicted to minute examinations, was at first somewhat as Seward was to Lincoln; like Seward, he learnt how superior were his chief’s abilities, and consented gladly to a boundless admiration and service. Retiring from active interference, Barwell devoted his main attention to his own fortunes, with complete success. Meanwhile, though

‘the new government consists of a confused heap of undigested materials as wild as the Chaos itself: the Collection of the Revenue, the provision of the Investment, the administration of Justice (if it exists at all), the care of the Police are all huddled together---we have them all to separate and bring into order at once. We must work as an arithmetician does, with his Rule of False, adopt a plan upon conjecture, try, execute, add and deduct from it till it is brought into a perfect shape’---

the Directors were bent on prosecuting for offences long past, and recovering money long taken to Europe, and were harassing Hastings with a farrago of queries:

‘Are not the tenants more than ever oppressed and wretched? Are our Investments improved? Has not the raw silk of the cocoons been raised upon us 50% in price?. . . as to the expenses of your Presidency, they are at length swelled to a degree we are no longer able to support.’ (April 7, 1773.)

He turned, first, to cut down expenses. The country could not stand the drain of 26 lakhs (unpaid, however, in the famine of 1770) to the Mogul Emperor, with the drain to the puppet Nawab and people in England. Hastings had power to deal with only the two former. The Emperor sent a vakil with a peremptory demand for his money. But he was now in the hands of the Marathas, who had found in Mahadaji Sindhia an able leader. Hastings loathed ‘the unprofitable and degrading tendency of political simulation’, so esteemed by Clive and his successors in both South and North India, and was determined to clear his path of shams. Necessity was always his master; and now he knew that Bengal was close to starvation. He knew, too, that the Marathas, into whose coffers any payment to the Emperor would go, were the power most to be feared.

‘As I see no use in excuses and evasions which all the world can see through, I replied to the peremptory demand of the King for the tribute of Bengal by a peremptory declaration that not a rupee should pass thro’ the provinces till they had recovered from the distresses to which lavish payments to him had principally contributed.’

To the Directors he wrote:

‘I think I may promise that no more payments will be made while he is in the hands of the Mahrattas nor, if I can prevent it, ever more. Strange! that while the revenue of the province is insufficient for its expenses and for the claims of the Company and our Mother Country, the wealth of the province (which is its blood) should be drained to supply the pageantry of a mock King, an idol of our own creation! but how much more astonishing that we should still pay him the same dangerous homage while he is the tool of the only enemies we have in India, and who want but such aids to prosecute their designs even to our ruin.’

The facts and principles which determined his actions were simple. Everyone in India was demanding lakhs from anyone suspected of ability to provide them; the Bengal administration was considered eminent in this class, whereas it hardly possessed a rupee. Having himself to deal with masters who neither understood nor would listen to arguments of poverty, he was inevitably hard in his bargains. He disliked Clive’s Treaty of Allahabad, which had given the Emperor the only territory he owned, territory now occupied by the Marathas, whom Hastings always envisaged as the destined enemies of the English. The brigade which Clive had stationed at Allahabad, to be ready for the defence of the Wazir-Nawab of Oudh,

‘drew from Fort William in the course of five years not less than two millions sterling. This was a ruinous drain upon the circulating medium of Bengal, to which not a rupee either in bullion or in merchandise returned; and the paltry payment by the Vizier of thirty thousand rupees per month was scarcely felt as a relief, except perhaps by the officers in command of the troops, who reaped no trivial benefit to their private fortunes from the arrangement.’*

Hastings accordingly sold Korah and Allahabad to the Nawab of Oudh for fifty lakhs, at the same time as he cancelled the outgoing of twenty-six lakhs tribute for Bengal. He told the Directors:

‘I have been happily furnished with an accidental concourse of circumstances to relieve the Company in the distress of their affairs.’

He proceeded to deal with the affairs of another ‘idol’ of English creation, this time less willingly (under orders from home). The Bengal Nawab’s revenues were to be cut down to 16 lakhs; and his expenses were curtailed even further by Hastings in person:

‘To bring the whole expenses of the Nizamut within the pale of 16 lacks it was necessary to begin with reforming the useless servants of the court and retrenching the idle parade of elephants, menageries, etc., which loaded the Civil List. This cost little regret in performing, but the President, who took upon him the chief share in this business, acknowledges he suffered considerably in his feelings when he came to touch upon the Pension list. Some hundreds of persons of the ancient nobility of the Country, excluded under our government from almost all employments civil or military, had ever since the revolution depended on the bounty of the Nabob and near 10 lacks were bestowed that way. . . . The President declares that even with some of the highest rank he could not avoid discovering under all the pride of eastern manners, the manifest marks of penury and want. There was however no room left for hesitation.’

He next established civil and criminal courts of appeal in Calcutta, the Sadr Diwani Adalat and Sadr Nizamat Adalat. Calcutta had its own Mayor’s Court, whose powers were uncertain and its jurisdiction supposedly local (though in 1773 the Zemindar of Nadiya, while in Calcutta, was arrested and brought before it, to his great surprise, for a private debt to an English official). This was all that Hastings could achieve for the present, leaving Muslim criminal law in general force. It was in many ways more merciful than English law, which was in the full tide of the century of activity which crowded the penal code with capital offences. Muhammadan law, however, though in the main easygoing, ran to extremes of ferocity, such as mutilation, ‘too common a sentence of the Mohametan Courts’, which, ‘though it may deter others, yet renders the criminal a burden to the public, and imposes on him the necessity of persevering in the crimes which it was meant to repress’. Since the criminal courts remained in native hands, impalement continued for some years longer; twenty years later, an English officer demands, ‘how much longer are we to be outraged by the sight of writhing humanity on stakes?’

For dacoity Hastings had no pity. He knew, of course, how oppression had itself made robbery widespread. But part of his work of bringing tolerable conditions back was to obtain security for honest people. He decreed that dacoits should be hanged in their villages, their families made State slaves, and the villages fined. He was anxious to distinguish between ‘the ryot who, impelled by strong necessity in a single instance, invades the property of his neighbour’ and ‘professed and notorious robbers’. The Quran, which was the law-book of the native courts, forbade sentence of death unless there had been murder as well as theft. Hastings was already (and naturally, and in the main rightly) indifferent to strict legality.

‘The Mohametan Law is founded on the most lenient principle and an abhorrence of bloodshed. This often obliges the Sovereign to interpose to prevent the guilty from escaping with impunity and to strike at the root of such disorders as the law will not reach.’

For genuine dacoity, then, ‘the punishment decreed by this Government’ was to ‘be superadded by an immediate act of Government’.

The most mysterious episode of this first government of Hastings is the depredations of the Sanyasis, whoever they were. He called them ‘the gipsies of Hindostan’, one of the few instances of misinformation that he sets down. The extreme reverence of the people for them made their extirpation extremely difficult. They moved, stark naked, in bands: they won successes against isolated bodies of sepoys, and proved hard to hunt down, from the celerity with which they fled into dense jungle. The Sanyasi rebellion is obscure, and a monograph explaining it from the Indian side is needed. It furnished Bankimchandra Chatterji, the celebrated Bengali novelist, with at least part-theme of two of his stories, in which we are shown bandit-heroes who rob from a mixture of patriotic and religious motives. Bengal, especially East Bengal, in Akbar’s time, in Hastings’s time, in our own time, has always provided this mixture of motives.

Hastings, who neglected no chance of giving the Company’s territories better and more defensible borders, expelled the Bhutanese from Kuch-Behar. The same aim of consolidation was one cause of the Rohilla War. Oudh was a buffer State between Bihar and the Marathas; its Nawab ‘subsists on our strength entirely’. The province marched with country ruled by Rohillas, Muslims from Afghanistan who had possessed it for about forty years. They and the Nawab and the Marathas entered upon the counterchange of alliance and defiance usual in India, ‘all utterly unscrupulous, and each knew that no trust could be placed in either of the others’.* To-day, and for long past, Hastings’s apologists (as Mr. Roberts observes*) hold the field; because Burke’s attacks on the Rohilla War were distorted and ignorant, most historians write irritatedly as if all criticism was purely factitious. This is ridiculous, in view of Hastings’s own letters and despatches. When critics remark that Nandakumar, for example, could not be expected to be honourable, after having lived through scenes of such hardly paralleled duplicity, they forget that Hastings had lived through them also, with at least this result, that he was not very sensitive to the suffering caused by warfare (as he showed consistently). He accepted it as a necessity; you could not make omelettes without breaking eggs. When the Nawab’s projected campaign was postponed for a period, he wrote to Mr. Laurence Sulivan, in words in which we can detect the note so common since, of Indian governmental impatience that anyone should dare to criticise what seemed expedient to ‘the man on the spot’:

‘I was glad to be freed from the Rohilla expedition because I was doubtful of the judgment which would have been passed upon it at home, where I see too much stress laid upon general maxims and too little attention given to the circumstances which require an exception to be made from them. . . .

‘On the other hand, the absence of the Mahrattas, and the weak state of the Rohillas, promised an easy conquest of them; and I own that such was my idea of the Company’s distress at home, added to my knowledge of their wants abroad, that I should have been glad of any occasion to employ their forces which saves so much of their pay and expenses.’ (October 12, 1773).

Much that is sentimental or utterly beside the point has been dragged into this controversy. There has been argument whether the Rohillas were an industrious and artistic peasantry or ruffianly invaders. They were merely alien conquerors, as so many rulers in India were; and were in an unhappy position, between the Nawab of Oudh and the Marathas. In 1772 they and the Nawab made an agreement, the contracting parties’ signatures being witnessed by Sir Robert Barker, commanding on the British frontier, by which the Nawab was to receive 40 lakhs for defending the Rohillas if attacked by the Marathas (who were demanding 50 lakhs from them). The Marathas did attack them in 1773, and retreated from a threatening movement of an army which comprised a British section. The Rohillas did not pay the 40 lakhs; as a matter of fact they had not got it, and the chief who held a loose suzerainty among them failed to get any contributions from his fellow-chiefs in response to his whip-round. The Nawab had already sent Hastings an attractive offer:

‘Should the Rohilla Sirdars be guilty of a breach of their agreement, and the English gentlemen will thoroughly extirminate* them and settle me in their country, I will in that case pay them fifty lakhs of rupees in ready money, and besides exempt them from paying any tribute to the King out of the Bengal revenues.’

Hastings, who was thoroughly entangled in promises to him, lent the Nawab a brigade under Colonel Champion. His correspondence leaves no doubt that his financial straits weighed with him even more than his wish to see Oudh---‘my country is in reality the door of Bengal’, the Nawab once wrote---a really effective shield between British India and the Marathas. He was so throng with business of many kinds that he often gave imperfect attention to what was proposed, and he was veering and vacillating throughout this expedition,

‘to which I had offered my agreement on the consideration of obtaining a saving to the Company of one-third of the expenses of their whole army, and the payment of forty lacs on the conclusion of it’.

The Rohilla leader was defeated and killed, whereupon the allies quarrelled ferociously over the booty. The Nawab with much spirit and wrath insisted that the spoils were his alone, as he was paying a specified sum for the services of the Company’s troops. The British field-officers demanded as prize-money twenty lakhs, fifteen lakhs, and the most moderate (their commanding officer reported) ten lakhs, the affair coming as close to actual mutiny as anything short of mutiny could be. Alarmed and incensed, Hastings wrote supporting the Nawab.

It is customary to assert that the miseries caused by this war were no unusual matter; that the contrary belief arose out of Colonel Champion’s discontent at not being made a brigadier for the campaign, at being accompanied by a political officer (Middleton), and at the wrangling outcome of it all. It is also asserted that Hastings is completely exculpated because he wrote, on rumours of excesses, denouncing them and exhorting the Nawab to humanity.* He did all this; and Champion also expressed his revulsion strongly. Nevertheless, that hardness of heart which even Mr. Roberts admits was in Hastings appears in his own very able but somewhat cool and unconvincing defence, containing words often quoted against him:

‘I believe it to be a truth that he’ [the Nawab] ‘began by sending detachments to plunder. This I pronounce to have been both barbarous and impolitic, but too much justified by the practice of war established among all the nations of the East, and, I am sorry to add, by our own’

(he gives an example of British excesses in 1764). It is undoubtedly true, as Sir John Strachey says, perhaps not taking very seriously the sufferings entailed by war (which did not come closer than in their imaginations, to his generation), that ‘there never was an Indian war in which excesses were not committed’. He goes for a proof of this to the Mutiny, which (we at once concede) excelled the Rohilla campaign in both quantity and quality of barbarity and horror. Nevertheless, there is that indifferent strain in Hastings, which, however excusable in his difficulties, did exist and functioned repeatedly; also, Hastings knew uncommonly well what any campaign would inflict, before ever he lent British services. We may leave this subject with citation of the appeal of the Rohilla chieftain’s widow, which Colonel Champion forwarded to Hastings:

‘To the English gentlemen, renowned throughout Hindostan for justice, equity, and compassionating the miserable. Hafiz Rahmat Khan for forty years governed this country, and the very beasts of the forest trembled at his bravery. The will of God is resistless. He is slain, and to his children not an atom remains, but they are cast from their habitations, naked, exposed to the winds, the heats, and the burning sand, and perishing from want of even rice and water. . . . Yesterday I was mistress of an hundred thousand people. Today I am in want even of a cup of water, and where I commanded I am a prisoner. Fortune is fickle; she raises the humble and lowers the exalted; but I am innocent, and if any one is guilty it is Hafiz. But why should the children be punished for the errors of their father? I am taken like a beast, in a snare, without resting place by night, or shade by day.’

The Rohilla War is one of several affairs in which the pendulum has swung too far in favour of Hastings. The testimony of the British commanding officer, and of other officers with him, cannot be all explained away.

It will be said that we are judging Hastings by expectations unreasonable in the eighteenth century. This to some extent is so. It is an unconscious but impressive tribute to the admiration which he extorts, that his deeds have always been judged by standards which we should never dream of applying to his contemporaries. The Rohillas had done the English no wrong: their right to be where they were was at least as good as the English right to Bengal and Bihar: they resisted bravely, and the British commander (it may be, from ignoble motives and hypercritically) testified to the barbarity of his allies from Oudh and considered the campaign hideously cruel: their chiefs governed well and tolerantly, whereas Oudh from start to finish of its existence as a quasi-independent State was a sink of variegated mismanagement, and Rohilkhand’s new administration was iniquitous. Nevertheless, no one would be surprised at finding any other eighteenth-century European statesman sanctioning a war which was to give his country securer frontiers and a lightening of financial embarrassments. This does not alter the fact that to-day the Rohilla War should be beyond defence by any critic with principles.

Chapter V

Hastings As Governor-General: Nandakumar: Maratha and Mysore Wars

Regulating Act of 1773: Hastings Governor-General: his quarrel with Francis: execution of Nandakumar: Hastings recovers power: Bombay goes to war with Marathas: Convention of Wargaon: Popham takes Gwalior: war with Haidar All: his invasion of the Carnatic: Sir Eyre Coote’s victories.

The Company’s affairs were so miserable that in 1772, having failed in application to the Bank of England, they asked the British Government for the loan of a million pounds. This caused widespread annoyance and indignation:

‘A wealthy nabob, as the retired Indian was in those days called, never returned home without being pointed to as one who fattened on the miseries of his fellow creatures, while it was broadly hinted that the prodigious amount of treasure, which by the Company’s misrule went only to enrich individuals, might, and if properly managed would, place the whole people of England in a state of comparative affluence. It is marvellous how attentive mankind are to such as tell them of good things which they ought to possess, yet have not.’

Parliament appointed a Committee of Investigation, which discovered that between 1757 and 1766 its leading servants in Bengal alone had received in presents £2,169,665, in addition to Clive’s jagir, and that £3,770,833 had been paid in compensation for losses. The result was the Regulating Act, 1773.

Under its provisions Warren Hastings became Governor-General in Bengal, with a Council of four; his only superiority was a casting-vote in case of a tie. The Governor-General in Council had authority to supervise the other two Presidencies; exactly how far this authority extended he was left to find out by experiment. Generous salaries were granted, £25,000 to the Governor-General, £10,000 to each Member of Council. The Company was relieved from its payment of £400,000 annually to the British Treasury.

Hastings’s new colleagues were Barwell, already in Calcutta, and General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Philip Francis, sent out for the purpose. Francis, who is generally supposed to be ‘Junius’, was a man ‘not destitute of real patriotism and magnanimity’,* but malignant in his hatreds, preferring to pursue these anonymously. On the long voyage out he obtained control of his two military confrères; and six years of incredible vindictiveness, faction, and consistent bad manners followed.

The new Councillors pressed first an item of their charge which related to examination of past demeanours. This action reflected the passionate desire of the Proprietors and Directorate, but to Hastings seemed impertinence. In the notorious strife which ensued, they had a case, though no one is likely ever to take it up with enthusiasm, so completely has his ‘sultanlike and splendid character’* conquered posterity. It is worth remembering, however, that not these first Councillors only, but all their successors, found him a detested colleague and master. Thornton writes* of his ‘habitual dissimulation’, words which will shock readers to-day, but shocked no one until within the last quarter-century of ignorant apotheosis. It is justified; Hastings became incapable of giving a straightforward account of any transaction, and he wrapped all he did in maddening secrecy.

However, he was a great man, and his opponents trivial and childish men. They entered on a course of petty oversight and espionage, beginning with the Rohilla War. They had some right when they contended that he had disobeyed orders from home, in waging a campaign beyond his borders and not one of strict defence. He flatly refused to lay open his correspondence with Middleton, his agent in Lucknow, saying that much of it was private. On a rigid interpretation of his rights, he was entitled to take this line, and we can sympathise with his indignation at being treated as on trial for past actions. But ‘the majority’* felt that their darkest suspicions were confirmed, and that the Governor- General was concealing vast peculations. They recalled Middleton, hoping to get at the facts from his papers. They set themselves to control patronage and to put everywhere supporters of themselves, a course which Hastings was to copy ruthlessly when he regained power.

In January, 1775, the Nawab of Oudh died. ‘We three are king’, was Francis’s own statement; the three now forced the new Nawab to cede the suzerainty of the Benares zemindari, and to pay a subsidy of six more lakhs annually, so impoverishing him that he could not pay his troops, and had to suppress a mutiny by a massacre. His predecessor had complained to Hastings of having to deal with Presidents whose reigns were so short, and whose acts were so little binding in their successors’ eyes, that the most solemn engagement was liable to be scrapped or drastically revised. Hastings had admitted the force of this protest; he now criticised the rapacity with which men so censorious of him for having waged a war for financial considerations were acting, without even such colourable pretext as he had had. The Directors saw his point, but for the money they needed so badly were willing to wink at anything. Hastings was outvoted on almost every question that arose, and made a ridiculous figure: in Francis’s description, ‘a timid, desperate, distracted being’, ‘weary of life’.

All this was changed dramatically, by the most sinister event inBritish-Indian annals.

The Regulating Act had established a Supreme Court in Calcutta, with a Lord Chief Justice and three puisne judges under him. When this boon was only in prospect, Hastings, dreading the transplantation to India of ‘the complicated system of jurisprudence long the acknowledged and lamented curse of lawyer-ridden England’,* was not too pleased. With unwonted fervour of piety he exclaimed:* ‘If the Lord Chief Justice and his judges should come amongst us with their institutes, the Lord have mercy upon us!’ They came, however; and in 1774 the inhabitants of Calcutta, and Europeans and their servants throughout Bengal generally, were brought under an enlightened system which prescribed death for a wide range of turpitude, from murder to stealing five shillings from the person or ‘out of a shop, warehouse, courthouse or stable’. Hastings held passionately that it was the cruellest injustice to subject natives of India to laws made for far different social conditions and enforcing penalties which their own principles considered unreasonable. But in the British mood of determination to right the wrongs of Bengal, nothing (least of all the opposition of a man so under suspicion as the Governor-General) was allowed to delay the law’s majestic advent. And the Council of Dacca wrote enthusiastically (1776):* ‘As British-born subjects we revere and glory in the sublime system of English penal law’.

The Chief Justice, Sir Elijah Impey, had been a contemporary of Hastings at Westminster School and, according to Impey’s son, his closest friend. His appointment went far to lessen Hastings’s disquiet: he expressed his delight in cordial terms. Macaulay has stigmatised Impey as, after Jeffreys, the most infamous name on the roll of British judges, an opinion not invalidated by the Governor-General’s warm friendship, for Hastings’s many qualities did not include austerity in choice of associates: he accepted many poor and even base ones. In the arguments of Hastings’s worshippers Impey wears a halo of impartiality which would have astonished contemporary Calcutta. By the testimony of Hickey’s Gazette, a scurrilous (but evidential) Calcutta journal, he was regarded as dividing with Mrs. Hastings the disposal of the Governor-General’s patronage:

‘A displaced civilian, asking his friend the other day what was the best means of procuring a lucrative employment, was answered, “Pay your earnest devoirs to Marian Allypore, or sell yourself, soul and body, to Poolbundy”.’

Pulbundi, ‘bridge-builder’, was Impey’s nickname from a contract for roads and bridges which had been given to a near relation whom he had brought out and given a post in his court. The job had struck even the venal society of Calcutta as remark-worthy. Macaulay’s judgment of Impey coincides with that of Lord Cornwallis, who wrote to Dundas (December 28, 1786) after Impey’s departure:*] ‘I trust you will not send out Sir Elijah Impey. All parties and descriptions of men agree about him’; and again, January 7, 1788, during Hastings’s impeachment:*

‘Without entering into the merits of the case, I am very sorry that things have gone so much against poor Hastings, for he certainly has many amiable qualities. If you are in the hanging mood, you may tuck up Sir Elijah Impey, without giving anybody the smallest concern.’

The two sides of the Nandakumar case have been exhaustively set out, by Sir James Stephen in an extremely readable book, by Henry Beveridge in an extremely unreadable and rambling one. Both protagonists succeeded in convicting the other of a good deal of minor inaccuracy. Beveridge was biased by his conviction that Hastings was essentially base and persuaded Impey to a judicial murder; Stephen, though a master of English law, had only a skirting and superficial knowledge of Indian conditions, and indulges in a good deal of argument which in its context can only raise a smile. His case was strong where it concerned Hastings’s direct instigation, which has not been proved, and probably never will be proved; it was weak when he went farther, and tried to show that the whole affair was by no means the scandalous travesty of decency which the better class of British historians have held.

The main facts, in so far as they emerge at this distance of time and out of the confusion of controversy, are these. Hastings had many enemies, and we have seen with what detestation he and Nandakumar regarded each other. Nandakumar had been further humiliated by the upshot of the prosecution of Muhammad Reza Khan, in which he was an unrewarded tool. Now, at a time when the Governor-General’s impotence and persecution by the new Councillors was the one theme of Calcutta discussion, Hastings forbade Nandakumar his house (which exercised a hospitality open to all European, and much of Indian, Calcutta), and showed special favour to one Mohanprasad, Nandakumar’s bitter foe. Nandakumar found an ally in Fowke, an Englishman not in Company employment. Hastings’s refusal to produce his correspondence with Middleton was understood, or misunderstood, to be because that correspondence would show that he had been guilty of accepting bribes in connection with the Rohilla campaign. In his miseries he was regarded as a spent influence, and the Rani of Burdwan began the business of sending the Council accusations of corruption against him. Nandakumar then charged him with taking presents amounting to many lakhs, among them three and a half lakhs from the Mani Begum, whom by a much-criticised action he had placed in control of the Nawab’s household. Hastings had to admit that she gave him a lakh and a half when he visited her at Murshidabad, which he (and Sir James Stephen after him) considered “entertainment money’; it was certainly excessive, considering that Hastings himself had been compelled, under affecting circumstances, to cut down the Nawab’s total allowance to sixteen lakhs a year. Whether the other charges were true we shall never know. The new Councillors, crammed with suspicion and dislike, and resenting their inability to see his correspondence, jumped to the conclusion that they were. Hastings left his chair, declaring all meetings without him illegal; he refused to be treated as on trial before his own Council, with as prosecutor ‘the basest of mankind’, the man whom of all men he most hated. He was perfectly justified in this, but he was unwise not to court enquiry, if he was innocent: he never denied (or never bothered to deny) Nandakumar’s charges. We may have some sympathy with Francis when he wrote: ‘Nuncomar may have been a most nefarious scoundrel: but, by God! he spoke truth, else why were they in such a hurry to hang him?’

Nandakumar and the triumvirate proceeded to behave with a triumphant cruelty which Hastings scornfully described (March 25, 1775):

‘The trumpet has been sounded, and the whole host of informers will soon crowd to Calcutta with their complaints and ready depositions. Nund Comar holds his durbar in complete state, sends for zemindars and their vackeels, coaxing and threatening them for complaints, which no doubt he will get in abundance, besides what he forges himself. The system which they have laid down for conducting their affairs is, as I am told, after this manner. The General rummages the Consultations for disputable matter with the aid of old Fowke. Colonel Monson receives, and I have been assured descends even to solicit, accusations. Francis writes . . . Was it for this that the Legislature of Great Britain formed the new system of Government for Bengal, and armed it with powers extending to every part of the British empire in India?’

Sir James Stephen says justly: ‘It is impossible to exaggerate the haste, recklessness and violence of Clavering, Monson, and Francis’.*

Hastings and Barwell next prosecuted Nandakumar for conspiracy. Before this had gone far, Mohanprasad charged him with forgery in a will executed four years previously. Nandakumar was tried by twelve British* jurymen (after challenging eighteen others), and would almost certainly have been acquitted, the case being hardly even a prima-facie one, but for the bad impression made on the judges (who took the unusual course of themselves cross-examining the accused’s witnesses, ‘and that somewhat severely’*) by the excessive zeal of his friends, who provided a mass of perjury. The trial was not so bad as Macaulay states, nor so impartial as Stephen and the Oxford History (merely copying Stephen) assert. Nor is Stephen reasonable in dismissing the suggestion that perhaps British jurymen were not the best to consider such a case as this, a perplexing innovation. Hastings does not in any way appear in the records of the trial, and was either a man almost miraculously helped by a deus ex machina (in the shape of the Supreme Court) or else so diabolically cunning that Francis spoke without any exaggeration of malice when he called him ‘an Asiatic’, i.e. a man so steeped in the intrigues of the time that he could hide his hand even when murderously employed. Nandakumar was sentenced to be hanged, a result indecently anticipated by Hastings when it can hardly have seemed distantly possible; ‘the old gentleman’, he noted (May 18), was ‘in jail and in a fair way to be hanged’ (the committal had been late at night, May 6).

The Oxford History of India,* whose disingenuousness in handling this episode cannot be too strongly condemned, says

‘it is certain that natives of the country had been sentenced to death for forgery in accordance with the stern law of England long before Nandkumar’s case occurred. The dacoits or brigand gangs committed terrible depredations, and when convicted were punished with ruthless severity’.

The dacoits have nothing to do with the argument. Only one case of an Indian being sentenced to death (1765) for forgery, before Nandakumar, is on record; he was not executed, and his condemnation elicited a horrified protest:

‘Your petitioners beg leave to set forth the general consternation, astonishment, and even panic with which the natives of all parts, under the domination of the English, are seized at the example of Radha Charan Mitra: they find themselves subject to the pains and penalties of laws to which they are utter strangers . . . many things being, it seems, capital by the English laws which are only fineable by the laws of your petitioners’ forefathers, to which they have hitherto been bred, lived, and been governed, and that till very lately, under the English flag.’

A case has also been unearthed of an Englishman condemned (1764) for forgery---to a whipping. As to whether the English law could apply to Calcutta, Impey argued that it did, because Calcutta was a place of great commercial activity, and it was to protect business in such places that forgery had been made capital. Yet the severe law did not apply to either Scotland or British North America, neither of them regions sunk in uncommercial barterdom. Moreover, Nandakumar’s guilt (if he was guilty) went back to a period four years before the Supreme Court’s establishment.

One juryman signed an appeal for mercy, on grounds that everyone to-day would consider overwhelmingly strong, stressing ‘the very advanced age of the unfortunate criminal, his former rank and station, both in public and private life’. The Nawab of Bengal, the province’s nominal ruler, put in a petition for which Impey snubbed him heavily. It pointed out that ‘the custom of this country’ did not make forgery capital, ‘nor, as I am informed, was life formerly forfeited for it in your own country; this has only been common for a few years past’. It urged Nandakumar’s services to the English, particularly when they had needed grain and money for the campaign against Mir Qasim;* and begged that his execution might be postponed till the King of England’s pleasure might be known. Hanging was certainly a pitiful end for the man who, when the English were suppliants and merchants deserving precious little respect for either character or courage, was a great officer in the land, and who had been in so many prime affairs of State during twenty years.

Clavering, who seems to have been as pure fool as it is possible for anyone to be, having encouraged Nandakumar in the course which concluded in the hangman’s noose, simply said he would not look at a petition (presented to him during a garden-party) from a man who had been convicted of such an offence as forgery. Monson and Francis also did nothing, a baseness deeper than that which Hastings showed when his private secretary interfered against a reprieve.* Nandakumar was executed, dying with dignity and courage.

According to Macaulay, only idiots and biographers have doubted that Hastings and Impey in collusion got rid of Nandakumar by legal process. This judgment, which has been hooted out of court by writers who have not troubled to study the evidence, is more than the known facts will sustain. But no one can successfully challenge that it was universally assumed that Hastings was the real prosecutor and that Nandakumar was put to death for venturing to attack him. No writer cites any second instance of forgery being punished with death. In Calcutta in 1802, the Chief Justice expressly lamented that the crime was not yet capital. Meanwhile,

‘the offence which had not barred an Englishman’s path to a peerage was now to doom a Hindoo to the gallows’.*

Nandakumar’s fate settled in native minds the question of who was master in Bengal; Hastings had no more trouble from Indian accusation or opposition. The triumvirate looked to be baffled men, and beyond doubt were cowardly and inconsistent ones, effective only in incitement to faction, shrinking and timorous when incitement had stirred a lion. A further reinforcement of authority came to the Governor-General when Monson died, September 25, 1776. Hastings, a man dry, detached and to himself honest, never pretended regret where he felt none. He wrote immediately to Lord North, noting that this event

‘has restored to me the constitutional authority of my station; but without absolute necessity I shall not think it proper to use it with that effect which I should give it were I sure of support from home’.

But the party against him in the Court of Directors, a party steadily increasing with reports from his enemies in India, were given a weapon by his agent in England, Colonel Macleane, whom Hastings had authorised to submit his resignation if events came to extremes. Since Monson’s death Hastings was feeling happy and powerful. But Macleane, unaware of this change, produced his authorisation; and despatches reached Calcutta, June, 1777, appointing Clavering in place of Hastings, supposed to have resigned. Clavering tried to take the Governor-General’s position, and a strife ensued, in which Hastings emerged conqueror by the support of the Supreme Court, which held that he had not resigned. The discomfited Clavering died in August; Hastings remarked with quiet satisfaction:

‘The death of Sir John Clavering has produced a state of quiet in our councils which I shall endeavour to preserve during the remainder of the time which may be allotted me. The interests of the Company will benefit by it; that is to say, they will not suffer, as they have done, by the effects of a divided administration. The unsettled state of the government is a great impediment to its operations, and weakens its influence, especially in the management of the revenue.’*

When it was known in England that he refused to accept the Directors’ supersession of him, there was a great outcry, and George III wrote to North that the dignity of Parliament demanded the recall of Hastings, Barwell, and the Supreme Court judges. But Clavering died; the American War was going badly; the Court of Proprietors, which controlled the Court of Directors, had a pro-Hastings majority, as well as a diffused realisation that in him India, if no other part of the Empire, possessed a man of courage and decision and might as well keep him. So his retention of office was accepted as a fact accomplished. A new Councillor, Wheler, arrived in December, bringing out the prejudice against Hastings which was now so common and joining Francis as an ally. He had, however, less rancour and less vigour than either Monson or Clavering; and in any case, Hastings possessed a majority, with Barwell and his own casting-vote.* He had a strong friend even in Caesar’s household, in Laurence Sulivan, Chairman of the Court of Directors, with whom he maintained a full and confidential correspondence. Now, though he wrote in moods of despondency that he was ‘a pageant’:

‘I am not Governor. All the means I possess are those of preventing the rule from falling into worse hands than my own, and for these I am an absolute dependant. I came to this government when it subsisted on borrowed resources, and when its powers were unknown beyond the borders of the country, which it held in concealed and unprofitable subjection. I saw it grow into wealth and national consequence, and again sink into a decline that must infallibly end it, if a very speedy remedy be not applied. Its very constitution is made up of discordant parts, and contains the seeds of death in it’,

as a matter of fact he acted with a straightforward certainty and effectiveness, which could hardly have been greater if Francis had not continued to give a display of impotent opposition. It was well that he did, for the Company’s existence in India was to be shaken to its foundations.

Sir John Malcolm observes:

‘The history of the Mahrattas, from the time of their great leader Sevajee, to the battle of Paniput, furnished ample ground for the gratification of pride, supposing what occurred to be written in the most plain and unadorned language.’*

They began as patriots, making the cause of persecuted Hinduism everywhere in some part their own, ‘acting with the concurrence and aid of the Hindu chiefs of the empire, whose just reasons for discontent with the reigning monarch, Aurungzebe, have been noticed’.* They exacted chauth, and deshmukh but did not, ‘like more barbarous invaders’, ruin prosperity, ‘the source from which’ revenue ‘was drawn, for if they had, it could not have recovered so rapidly, as we find from revenue records that it did’.

Nor can we deny to the Mahrattas, in the early part of their history, and before their extensive conquests had made their vast and mixed armies cease to be national, the merit of conducting their Cossack inroads into other countries with a consideration to the inhabitants, which had been deemed incompatible with that terrible and destructive species of war.’*

By Hastings’s time, however, they had become a pest, like every other Power in India. Hastings, the one man who seemed aware of all that was happening and to perceive events yet unborn, with prescience almost superhuman, kept watchful eyes on their progress; and his sanction of the Rohilla War was in part due to his determination to surrender no vantage-ground for the struggle he knew was coming.

The inevitable war came in anything but an inevitable manner. The Bombay Government, isolated and exposed to attack from so many quarters, had long wanted to possess certain neighbouring points, among them the island of Salsette and the port of Bassein. Its chance came, 1775. The Peshwa had been assassinated; his uncle, Raghoba (Raghunath Rao),

‘enjoyed the reputation of having contrived his nephew’s death; a more indulgent opinion, supported by respectable authority, regards him as intending only to seize the power of his relative, and acquits him of conspiring against his life’.*

He became Peshwa for a short time. But a son was posthumously born to the late Peshwa, and when six weeks old was formally invested with the office (1774). Raghoba approached (among other Powers) the Company’s Bombay administration for support, and (more fortunate than with his own people) convinced them that he was the rightful Peshwa. He was obstinate at one point of the argument, however; he dared not, and would not, promise them Salsette and Bassein. Bombay got over part of this hitch in the discussion by taking Salsette forcibly, in an unofficial little war. Raghoba, now persuaded, by the Treaty of Surat conveyed to the Company whatever ‘right’ he may have been considered to possess in the places they coveted.

Unfortunately, his people showed themselves attached to their seaboard. They declined to lose it quietly and without fuss, and Bombay found itself at war with the Maratha confederacy. Their commander, Colonel Keating, won the battle of Aras, which was nearly a defeat. Hastings and his Council then reminded Bombay that Calcutta had come into a vaguely defined suzerainty over the other two Presidencies: they condemned the proceedings as ‘impolitic, dangerous, unauthorised, and unjust’, adjectives which Hastings elaborated in a long and able minute. One Presidency, he asserted, had involved the whole Company in an unprovoked war against a Power with whom they were even then in friendly negotiation, and on behalf of a man for whom his own people had no use; and they had done this while without even tolerable financial or military resources. His Council went still further. He himself thought that, having begun a war, Bombay must be helped to finish it successfully, but ‘the majority’ made him conclude peace over Bombay’s head, which he did by the Treaty of Purandhar, 1776, Bombay protesting against this assertion of authority by Calcutta.

The Directors with great impudence rejected the treaty. Righteously observing that

‘We utterly disapprove and condemn offensive wars, distinguishing however between offensive measures unnecessarily undertaken with a view to pecuniary advantages, and those which the preservation of our honour, or the protection or safety of our possessions, may render absolutely necessary’,

they coolly said also (Hastings complained):

‘“We approve, under every circumstance, of the keeping of all territories and possessions ceded to the Company by the treaty concluded with Ragobah”, and direct us “forthwith to adopt such measures as may be necessary for their preservation and defence”. Yet they knew that Salsette, the capital of these territories and possessions, had been taken by force, before any treaty existed that could give them a right to it. . . . And what is the treaty of Surat, with all its antecedent and consequent circumstances, but a series of offensive measures undertaken with a view to pecuniary advantages, and in direct contradiction to their orders?’

Hastings continued that, unless he was ‘greatly deceived in my opinion of the temper and dispositions of the gentlemen’ of Bombay Presidency, they would break the treaty and renew the war; ‘and a wonderful scene of intricacies we shall have opened between us’. They did as he predicted in 1778, and Hastings, with the Directors’ full consent,

‘renewed the alliance with Raghoba. On this occasion Francis seems decidedly to have been for once on the right, and Hastings and the Court on the wrong, side. The able minutes and protests of the former repay the most careful study’.*

Hastings’s motives lay in the domain of general politics. He sat loose to principles, as we use the word to-day. His place is not with the proconsuls of our orderly period, but with such men as Akbar; he was himself the government, and like most lonely men who pursue great ends out of sight of their fellows, he grew more and more detached from care for individual welfare, while anxious for the welfare of the whole. He was never much affected by thought of the miseries attendant on a war which, taken by itself, was unjust, if the upshot seemed desirable. Moreover, new complications were entering into his political problems. A French envoy was already at Poona; and news reached him, July 17, 1778, that war had broken out between England and France. The British cause was labouring in low water in America; when they heard of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, Francis (according to Hastings) urged that they should concentrate for the attack he was sure was coming in Bengal. Hastings scouted the possibility of any attack by the French, except by land, and by means of the Marathas, the only Power in concert with whom invasion ‘is at present capable of being effected’. He seems to have thought it worth while taking a chance, even one furnished by injustice, of crippling Maratha potentialities for harm to the Company.

His courage and resource were speedily tried. A Bombay army surrendered, and concluded the Convention of Wargaon, January 1779, whose terms---which included a detailed confession of ‘war guilt’ and prolonged treaty-breaking by the beaten party---‘almost made me sink with shame when I read it’: ‘The wild and precipitate expedition to Poona and the infamous surrender’ were ‘events lying beyond the reach of human foresight’. Even before he received the text of the treaty, Bombay had the insolence to send him ‘a very short letter, which said scarce more than that the army had been defeated and was returned, and that a treaty had been made which they would disavow’. The convention was repudiated.

Meanwhile Hastings decided on his own candidate for the headship* of the Maratha confederacy. This was generally conceded to the Raja of Satara, Sivaji’s descendant. But the Bhonsla Raja of Nagpur claimed a superior right, and with him Hastings negotiated, while he thrust out into Central India two soldiers of high quality, Goddard and Popham. Goddard was to march right across from Bengal, Hastings knowing well that if the hazardous adventure failed he was ruined. He was able to boast with justifiable pride that it had not failed:

‘Its way was long, through regions unknown in England, and untraced in our maps; and I alone knew the grounds on which the facility of its success depended.’

Goddard proved magnificently adequate; he reached Western India, stormed Ahmadabad (February 15, 1780) and overran Gujarat. He established friendly relations with the Gaekwar of Baroda, who was henceforth detached from all the Maratha wars against the Company.

Goddard made a mistake, however, when he tried a dash at Poona. The Maratha Central Government was under the virtual control of Balaji Pandit, the Nana Farnavis (by which name he is better known), the ablest statesman India produced during this century. Aware that the English were in desperate straits in South India, and financially pressed everywhere, so that peace was their necessity, the Nana rejected Goddard’s terms, knowing their peremptoriness to be bluff. The Peshwa, a boy of six, he sent to a place of safety, and collected armies which he flung around Goddard, aiming at a second Wargaon. Though Goddard escaped, he lost heavily in men and baggage.

This partial disaster was brilliantly covered by Captain Popham’s success, acting in alliance with a small chieftain, the Rana of Gohud, from whose country he drove the Marathas ‘with great slaughter, and fairly cleared it’.* He stormed Lahar; then by night escalade took Sindhia’s famous fortress, Gwalior, ‘the key of Indostan’, to Hastings’s intense delight:

‘This is a success which I hope will prove decisive; I look upon it as one of the best concerted and most gallant enterprises that has ever been performed in India; nearly, if not equal in its advantages to the battle of Plassey. In Europe it cannot miss of its effect. The name of Guallior has been long famous in history. In this country its effect is not to be described. Other congratulations which I have received on the many important successes of our arms were but coldly offered, but scarcely a man mentions this without enthusiasm.’*

It will be noted how widely beyond the immediate scope of the Maratha War his mind is straying. He had to think of Europe, where his country was confronted by Spain and France (and presently Holland) in arms together to support a triumphant revolution in the American colonies. And in India he was all but faced by a confederacy whose force must have been overwhelming. We have seen how Bombay treated the Governor-General; the conduct of Madras was yet more discourteous, even more imbecile.

The moral atmosphere of Madras at this time has been stigmatised by Thornton as ‘pestilential’, an adjective hall-marked by Vincent Smith* as felicitously exact. The Governor, Sir Thomas Rumbold, had

‘reached Madras in 1778, and applied himself, with much energy, to the improvement of his private fortune. The Council cheerfully followed so pleasant an example; and unwonted tranquillity prevailed within the presidency, the predominant feature being wilful blindness to the storm gathering without’.*

Thus happily united, the Council resolved to stand no nonsense from Calcutta, and sent the Nizam a Resident whom they made to propose arrangements which the Nizam ‘declared to be equal to a declaration of war’. As Madras was already involved in a terrible war with Haidar Ali, Hastings, who had ordered the Resident to keep him informed, interfered to prevent this result; thereupon Madras suspended their representative from the service, for ‘having betrayed the secrets of his trust to the Governor-General and Council of Bengal’.

Hastings, amazingly keeping his temper, replied by giving him fresh credentials as his own representative. The upshot of this variegated incompetence* on an All-India field was a confederacy whereby the two ablest Maratha chieftains, Mahadaji Sindhia and Tukoji Holkar, were to compose their mutual quarrel and to move against Goddard: the Raja of Nagpur was to invade Bengal and Bihar, the Nizam to invade the Sarkars, Haidar the Carnatic. ‘I have no doubt’, wrote Hastings, that the Nizam was ‘the projector of this alliance, and he had sufficient provocation for it’. Nevertheless, he remained passive, partly from inclination to trust the one man in India who obviously had character and the valour to pursue his conclusions to their ends in action. It is hard to resist the conviction, returning upon the mind repeatedly, that no eighteenth-century statesman was greater than Hastings or set amid such a coil and swirl of impossibilities. The threads of a hundred problems, whose hidden beginnings lay out of his control, ran back into his sole hands. The eyes of all India were being increasingly fixed on one man; and that man not only held the Nizam to practical neutrality, he largely disarmed the Bhonsla Raja’s hostility also. The war, therefore, though a tempest, was not a cyclone that destroyed.

Popham’s seizure of Gwalior had laid open Sindhia’s country. Sindhia, however, forced Colonal Camac into a retreat ending in an investment which brought his army close to starvation. In their desperation the British ‘beat up’ Sindhia’s camp, and won an astounding victory. Sindhia, doubly disheartened by losing Gwalior and by this sudden vigour in an enemy whose surrender he was preparing to accept, began negotiations. He did more; he acted as honest broker in a wide plan of pacification, which by the Treaty of Salbai (1781) brought in all the Northern and Central Indian Powers. Raghoba received a pension; the English kept Salsette and Broach but gave up other captures. Nana Farnavis and Sindhia were thoroughly roused to the inevitability of the coming struggle with the Company for the control of India, but had learnt that they were not as yet equal to it. Also, Sindhia liked and respected the Governor-General. Hastings, with his genuine affection for Indians, untouched with patronage or racial feeling, formed a friendship with the former’s vakil,* which had incalculably valuable political results. He secured what was to prove a twenty years’ invaluable breathing-space; and at the same time procured it that in prestige the British had ‘made an advance not to be calculated by words’.* Clive was ‘the engineer who levelled the ground’; but Hastings first clearly saw how far British sovereignty was to proceed:

‘There was no question in his mind as to the power upon which the mantle of Akbar must descend.’

Haidar Ali had sought an understanding with the Company. But their Nawab, whom he knew too well, as did everyone else,

‘to believe that any alliance in which he was concerned could possibly be sincere . . . notwithstanding his many perfidies, had possession of the minds of the gentlemen who represented the Company in Madras’.*

When war came between England and France, 1778, Haidar was committed at least to benevolent neutrality with the latter, which if opportunity invited would pass into open league. Madras paid no sort of attention to his warning that he meant to protect the French port of Mahé, which was in his territory and necessary to him as his channel of communication with the outside world. Mahé was taken by the English. Then, without troubling him for the formality of permission, the Madras Government marched a force through his country to seize Guntoor (which belonged to the Nizam); at the same time they forcibly stopped a payment pledged to the Nizam, doing all this ‘in violation of the treaty of 1768’* and kindling to a flame a resentment long smouldering with many grievances. Hastings promised redress, but the offending Government disobeyed him, bringing down on him, ‘in terms of great severity and almost of contempt’, the Nizam’s complaint, so common in these years, of faithlessness and, alternatively, of a good will which was ineffective and worthless. Haidar also sent Sir Thomas Rumbold a scathing characterisation of Muhammad Ali and analysis of the Company’s political record since they had first protected him. He concluded: ‘I leave you to judge on whose part engagements and promises have been broken’.

‘Incidents’ followed rapidly, some grotesque, others painful. In July, 1780, Haidar launched his war, flooding the Carnatic with immense armies which were soon a tide washing the very walls of Madras. In Burke’s famous description:

‘He drew from every quarter whatsoever a savage ferocity could add to his new rudiments in the art of destruction; and compounding all the materials of fury, havoc, and desolation into one black cloud, he hung for a while on the declivities of the mountains. Whilst the authors of all these evils were idly and stupidly gazing on this menacing meteor, which blackened all their horizon, it suddenly burst, and poured down the whole of its contents upon the plains of the Carnatic. Then ensued a scene of woe, the like of which no eye had seen, no heart conceived, and which no tongue can adequately tell. All the horrors of war before known or heard of were mercy to that new havoc. A storm of universal fire blasted every field, consumed every house, destroyed every temple. The miserable inhabitants fleeing from their flaming villages, in part were slaughtered; others, without regard to sex, to age, to the respect of rank, or sacredness of function---fathers torn from children, husbands from wives---enveloped in a whirlwind of cavalry, and amidst the goading spears of drivers, and the trampling of pursuing horses, were swept into captivity in an unknown and hostile land. Those who were able to escape this tempest, fled to the walled cities; but escaping from fire, sword and exile they fell into the jaws of famine.’

These miseries notwithstanding, the people of the Carnatic, the Oxford History admits (and it gives us the measure of the iniquity of the administration of the Madras Government and their Nawab together),

‘seem to have preferred Haidar Ali to their own Nawab, and furnished the invader with information which was refused to the British defenders of Muhammad Ali’.

What followed is almost incredible. Sir Hector Munro, victor of Buxar, when within two miles of a force under Colonel Bailie, which he was to relieve, was seized with panic, flung his guns and stores into a tank, and fled to Madras. Bailie was overwhelmed, the few survivors of a grim massacre entering into an imprisonment whose horrors were to become notorious. Sir Eyre Coote, whom Hastings sent hurriedly south with all the soldiers he could spare and fifteen lakhs of treasure, presently reported that Haidar Ali was ‘the complete and acknowledged master of the Carnatic, having taken Arcot in October’. With him were 400 Frenchmen under Lally’s son; and a French squadron was off the coast. The Madras Government was without revenue, and its sepoys panic-stricken.

Hastings was in such straits that he could not show even elementary regard for political decencies. He asked the Dutch to lend him troops, including a thousand European infantry and two hundred European gunners. He offered them, in addition to expenses, what was not his to give: the province of Tinneveli, in the peninsula’s extreme south, exclusive rights in the South Indian pearl fishery, and leave to conquer Cochin. The Dutch and he were both aware that war between their countries was daily expected; but Hastings, who by now had the absolute measure of almost every factor of the Indian situation, was prepared for every risk but those of inaction. If a rupture came,

‘so much the better. I am no casuist; but I believe that, in such an event, their soldiers would rather continue to serve us than return to their own colours, and I certainly would not force them to leave us. We, therefore, in that case should have been doubly gainers by what we had, and what our adversaries had thus lost’.

The Dutch, however, hung back, and war between England and Holland closed the negotiations.

The French squadron, despite Haidar’s frantic representations that between them they had an unexampled chance to extirpate the Company, withdrew to Mauritius. Coote* defeated immense Mysore armies at the battles of Porto Novo, Polilor and Sholinghur, victories partly offset by Tipu destroying a force of 2000, killing 500 and taking the rest prisoners. A vanished age and ended menace seemed to return when Bussy himself landed with 3000 Frenchmen; and a second French navy appeared off the coast, under de Suffren, perhaps the greatest seaman in French annals. But the British survived several indecisive naval fights, and Bussy proved old, ill, and half-hearted. And Hastings not only coaxed the Raja of Nagpur into neutrality, but sent a second force southward to help Coote. Haidar Ali died, 1782 (December); in May, 1784, Tipu and the English made peace on the basis of restoration of captures and prisoners. As Malleson observes, it was obviously a truce, reluctantly accepted by two Powers each unable to destroy the other, but both profoundly convinced that without the destruction of one there was no safety for the other.

Chapter VI

Internal Politics of Bengal during Hastings’s Governor-Generalship

Hastings’s pessimism: duel with Francis: Francis’s departure: Hastings and the Supreme Court: the Benares incident: the Begums of Oudh: gathering enmity in England: Hastings’s impeachment: his services to England and India.

Nandakumar’s death, and still more, the deaths of Monson and Clavering, had flung authority into Hastings’s hands, which he used with ruthless ability. ‘What I have done’, he writes (August, 1780),

‘has been by fits and intervals of power, if I may so express it, and from the effects let a judgment be formed of what this state and its resources are capable of producing in hands more able and better supported’.

But this exercise of power was precarious, amid the unremitting threats of the faction in his Council and attacks in England, where Lord North longed to seize the Company’s enormous patronage. Through a period of years North was foiled by Hastings’s strong party in the Court of Proprietors (who repeatedly passed resolutions forbidding the Court of Directors to pay any attention to parliamentary interference) and by the knowledge that after losing America he had better be cautious about meddling with the one man who looked like saving British interests in India.

Some of the bonds upon Hastings’s freedom were to be loosed. Early in 1780 he patched up an agreement with Francis, the most important item of which was thrust in by Hastings’s own wisdom and generosity; we need not take Francis’s disclaimer as anything more than the pious official clearance at which the Governor-General obviously rated it:

‘It was proposed by me as an additional article, for I know by dear experience how much the temper of public business is influenced by the gratification or disappointment of personal attachments on such occasions, that in the distribution of all offices and other emoluments of the service, each party shall be allowed that participation which shall be judged adequate to their respective ranks, and the degrees of weight and responsibility annexed to their respective stations, but Mr. Francis refused to listen to such a condition, lest it should subject him to the imputation of an interested or personal bias in the part which he took in this engagement. . . . I consider it, however, as an engagement on my part, and have declared as much to him.’

This released Barwell, ‘who was privy to the treaty in all the stages of it’, and he was at liberty to return home,*

‘with my free consent, and release from any engagement as binding on him from his connexion with me to remain in the service’.

Hastings sanguinely added that Francis’s new behaviour was so candid and open that he was sure the old troubles were done with. They were not, however; in July the two fought a duel, in which Hastings, grimly self-controlled, wounded Francis. Hastings’s account shows him somewhat ashamed of ‘this silly affair’, which certainly was an irregular way of conducting affairs of State. Francis recovered, and took his immense accumulation of hatred home, to be busily employed there. The once ‘timid, desperate, distracted being’ who remained wrote exultantly:

‘I have power, and I will employ it, during the interval in which the credit of it shall last, to retrieve past misfortunes, to remove present dangers, and to re-establish the power of the Company, and the safety of its possessions.’*

Looking back, four years later (September 13, 1786), in England, he wrote with excusable triumph, in words often quoted:

‘When intervals of accidental authority enabled me to act, and I never had more than intervals, I employed them in forming and setting in motion the greatest and most successful measures of my Government. When these were impeded by frequent changes of influence, I still contrived to keep them in existence, and again gave them energy when my power returned. My antagonists sickened, died, and fled. I maintained my ground unchanged, neither the health of my body nor the vigour of my mind for a moment deserted me.’

Unfortunately, his sense of towering abilities exercised in isolation against a world of opposers led him into arrogance and unscrupulousness; and his unparalleled difficulties in waging war on so many fronts and with every source of revenue exhausted fixed him in one aim---remorselessly pursued---as to where and how he could get money. He had to send it to every corner of India---to provide the Madras Government, that sink of iniquity and incompetence, with funds; to finance Bombay; to bribe the Nagpur Raja. Then there were the Court of Directors, whom he savagely but not extravagantly characterised as ‘a mine of oppressive rapacity’.

Meanwhile he had won a contest with the Supreme Court. When Hastings observed that he said the seeds of death were in the Bengal Constitution (it is doubtful whether we warp his meaning by using the capital letter), he referred to a state of things which he had foreseen from the beginning, as he foresaw most things. The Company

‘as a corporation, and its leading servants in India, both civil and military, were greatly disposed to regard the sovereignty of India as their own private property, and to resent all interference with it by Parliament as a wholly unwarrantable and tyrannical invasion of their rights. They spoke of the sacred rights of the Emperor and the Nabob of Bengal just as the mayors of the palace may have stood up for the rights of the Rois fainéants’.*

Hastings by deep-ingrained habit was a whole-hearted Company’s man. Parliament in his mind secured an extremely tenuous allegiance, and rightly; and the Supreme Court represented an obvious incursion of the British Government into the Company’s domain. Part of the multiple reason put forward by the unfortunate Nandakumar, as to why he should not be hanged under the English (not even British) law against forgery was that he was not a native of Calcutta, or even normally resident there, a plea which would have sufficed him, but for his political offensiveness (as would almost any other part of his demurrer).

The struggle for power between the Council and the Supreme Court, which we must now briefly describe, was of a dramatic nature which has tempted the earlier historians, led by Mill and Macaulay, to ascribe to the chief participants the conventional characters of the theatre. There is no longer any need to search for heroes and villains amongst the nine Englishmen who played the leading parts. Amongst the five members of Council and four judges of the Supreme Court, only two were men of an uncommon type; and in both Hastings and Francis the elements were strangely mixed. The remainder were ordinary men of their race and period, who had been placed in an absurd position by an ill-timed piece of legislation, conceived and drafted in complete ignorance of conditions in Bengal. The drafting of the Regulating Act was also bad in itself, containing vague phrases which were bound to cause disputes as to jurisdiction. Seven of the nine Englishmen had only recently come to India, with a distinct bias against the Governor and a strong belief that the whole administration was corrupt. All four judges ‘carried with them to India the most inflated ideas of the beauties and benignities of English law’.* Possibly the Directors, hoping that the Supreme Court would be a useful instrument for disciplining their servants in Bengal, did not object to the vague drafting of an Act which did not even make it clear whether the ‘ordering, management and government of territorial acquisitions and revenues of the kingdom of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa’ came within the jurisdiction of the Court. Two of the judges, Hyde and Lemaistre, began to take cognisance of cases brought against Zemindars from all parts of the province. A few educated Indians saw their opportunity and traded upon the judges’ ignorance of the country. Macaulay has left a description of the resulting confusion:

‘No man knew what was next to be expected from this strange tribunal. It came from beyond the black water. . . . It consisted of judges not one of whom was familiar with the usages of the millions over whom they claimed boundless authority. Its records were kept in unknown characters; its sentences pronounced in unknown sounds. It had already collected round itself an army of the worst part of the native population, informers, and false witnesses, and common barrators, and agents of chicane, and above all, a banditti of bailiffs’ followers. . . . Many natives, highly considered among their countrymen, were seized, hurried up to Calcutta, flung into the common gaol, not for any crime imputed, not for any debt that had been proved, but merely as a precaution till their cause should come to trial.’*

Hyde and Lemaistre, two of the Supreme Court judges, asserted that the Regulating Act ‘had transferred all judicial power from the revenue authorities to the Supreme Court’.* The Dewan of the Burdwan zemindari put the case for the landlords:

‘The inhabitants of the interior country of Bengal are totally unacquainted with the forms and customs of the English law, with the language and phrases of the English lawyers, and with the offices of sheriff and other officers, who are all English. When compulsion is offered to any person in the Mofussil, they threaten with habeas corpus and damages, but what an habeas corpus is, what are damages, what warrants, what summonses, no one of them can tell. . . . It is a custom in Bengal, whenever the farmers,* yetmaundars, and currumcherries have failed in discharging their revenue, to exercise severities upon and enforce payment from them.’

Hastings, who himself was ‘an Asiatic’, in the good as well as harmful sense, a man who profoundly understood the country system and habitually worked by it, agreed with this argument.* He stated his opinion that the Regulating Act and Charter gave the Supreme Court no jurisdiction ‘over any but British subjects, and natives who are or have been British subjects’; that Zemindars were neither British subjects nor the servants of British subjects. He pointed out that the judges themselves had taken this view, that Zemindars were not liable to their jurisdiction, and had

‘formed an early rule that no summons should issue against any native of the provinces, unless the plaintiff would swear that such native was subject to the jurisdiction of the Court, and add in his affidavit circumstances which rendered him so subject’.

Holding strongly that it was monstrous to subject Indians to alien laws, he himself bailed out the Raja of Vishnupur (whose family was on the borderline between the positions of Zemindars and genuine princes), who he found had been ‘a prisoner in the common jail’ for some months for some default, or alleged default, in revenue payment. His Government were not to

‘be parties in dragging the descendants of men who once held the rights of sovereignty in this country, like felons, to Calcutta, on the affidavit of a Calcutta banyan, or the complaint of a court serjeant. . . . I shall pay no regard to rules of construction, or to precedents drawn from the practice in England’.

The inevitable break arose on a point connected with revenue administration. Some thirty Englishmen, out of two or three hundred at most serving the Company in Bengal, acted in vague association under the name of Provincial Courts in the Mofussil. They naturally left the determination of legacies and questions of property to native judges who understood the Hindu and Muhammadan law governing their disposition. Litigation between a rich widow and her nephew in the Patna district was claimed by the Supreme Court as in its jurisdiction, on the grounds that the nephew was a ‘farmer’ of the revenue, and that disputed points in connection with his revenue-collection ultimately came to it. What this had to do with the nephew in his role as a private person seeking to dispossess his aunt of a legacy, only a lawyer perhaps could see. The Court nevertheless took the case up, and awarded the widow three lakhs damages (which the Company ultimately paid). The chief value of the case was that it showed up the incompetence of the Provincial Courts, and made reform some time or other a certainty. Parliament in 1781 definitely deprived the Supreme Court of any jurisdiction in revenue, matters, and legalised the Company’s courts.

A second case led to an openly scandalous quarrel. A native of Calcutta, failing to obtain repayment of a loan to the Raja of Cossijura, bethought himself of the Supreme Court. Since the Raja, as a Zemindar, was liable to the Court in revenue disputes, it seemed worth while trying to see if the Court would pull him in by this rope into their general jurisdiction. The Zemindar hid himself, and the Collector of Midnapur reported that the revenue (which he should have been collecting) was suffering. Hastings and his Council consulted their Advocate-General as to whether the Court was entitled to pursue private debts; the Advocate-General was very doubtful whether ‘the few remaining rights of a people to whom we have left but little’ should be thus invaded. Hastings therefore instructed the Raja to ignore the Court’s process; and when a sheriff’s officer and a large body of armed men, among them British sailors, marched and took possession of the Raja’s house, he sent sepoys and took the Court’s servants prisoners.* We may admit that the marching of troops against the officers of the Supreme Court was a disquieting spectacle; and it may be that a lawyer is right in asserting that The Council acted haughtily, quite illegally, and most violently, without any adequate reason for their conduct’.* But the morality of the proceedings seems to us to lie with Hastings. Sir James Stephen says:*

‘The explanation of the measures taken by the Council is simple. For a variety of reasons, most of which are quite natural and intelligible, they hated the Supreme Court. It represented an authority which the Company’s servants practically repudiated. It represented English law, which they hated both for its defects, which no doubt were then great, and for its merits.’

Their main grievance, he asserts, was

‘that the Ijaradars and Zemindars should be interfered with, if, in order to pay their revenue punctually, they squeezed their ryots in a way which English lawyers would describe as oppressive or extortionate’.

That comment does not seem to arise out of the facts. If the Zemindars raised revenue oppressively, the fault seems to lie with the Government which for such a long space of time supported the monstrous and unnatural system of draining ‘the surplus revenue’* of one country out into another. Hastings was expected to provide money for Madras, Bombay, the China trade, the Company Proprietors, as if he were a wishing-tree that could shower down rupees unendingly. He surely acted reasonably, as well as with characteristic courage, in rescuing his Zemindars from the new-fangled Court which understood them as little as they understood it.

Various changes relieved the immediate suffering caused by the introduction of English law and the inauguration of a Supreme Court. The judges slowly learned a little caution, and an Act of 1781,* passed after urgent petitions from India, defined and limited the powers of the Court, removing from its jurisdiction all revenue matters when collection was made ‘according to the practice of the country or the regulations of the Governor-General in Council’. The appointment of Sir Elijah Impey to preside over the chief Calcutta Court for civil appeals minimised the interference of the Supreme Court with the Indian courts which had been instituted by Hastings. Impey’s acceptance of a salaried post under the Company was ill-advised, for he had been sent out to exercise an independent controlling influence, but it was neither unprecedented nor indefensible on the score of good government. Two members of the Council, Clavering and Monson, had accepted the Company’s pay as commanders in the army, and one of the judges, Sir Robert Chambers, officiated as a Company’s judge at Chinsura. Impey may have felt it his duty to help in reforming the administration of civil justice. In a letter to Mr. Dunning he complains that Mr. Booth, ‘who gives law to the whole province of Behar’, was a man ‘of the meanest natural parts, is totally illiterate in his own and ignorant of any eastern languages, and is one of the lowest, most extravagant, dissipated young men in the country. I doubt whether he is of age’.* His action, though objectionable on other grounds, was probably beneficial to the working of the civil courts.

Looking back over a century and a half, it is possible to judge the effect of introducing into India our English law, and our legal technicalities, procedure, and traditions. As the Company absorbed province after province, High Courts were established manned by English judges, or in later days by Indians steeped in the same tradition. It is an unhappy history, recalling Mephistopheles’ description of law as a disease spreading over the land.* The disease was to affect Indian life in many ways, but never was the comparison more exact than during those early days in Bengal, when the evils of exotic legislation swept through the land with the virulence of some European malady when introduced into an island of the South Seas. The violence of the first outbreak has been described. The disease then became endemic, and spread through the country, tending always to undermine the independence of the countryman, and to place the uneducated poor at the mercy of the wealthy and literate.

The Mogul courts had not encouraged litigation. Their methods were rough and ready, their officials not over-zealous. Muslim law did not lend itself to much subtlety or chicanery, and Hindus probably avoided the courts when possible. The first activities of the English judges were terrifying and incomprehensible to every Indian, but after a year or two the better educated Hindus saw that there were definite rules guiding the apparently capricious proceedings of the Supreme Court. It was a new ceremonial, meaningless and of almost religious obscurity, but it could be learnt, and the English (whose lack of religion was a by-word) would obey the law scrupulously. A new field was open to the higher caste Hindus, whose subtle minds delighted in the tortuosities of eighteenth-century law. The Brahmin had centuries of experience in dominating his fellows by his knowledge of religious rites and by magnifying their importance. Here was a new form of magic, of immense potency because, if properly invoked, it could control even the Governor-General and that demon force, the English soldiery.*

Only the first stages of this development were seen during Hastings’s term of office. Bengal was in too much disorder for many of its inhabitants to be affected by any system of civil law. On the criminal side every consideration was overshadowed by the prevalence of dacoities and the close connection between the robbers and the Zemindars. This interdependence was abundantly proved in later days, when special departments were created to deal with thagi, or gang murders, and dacoities. In Hastings’s time it was recognised, and partly accounted for the gradual abandonment by him and by his successor of the Indian agencies for police and criminal administration outside Calcutta. Muhammad Reza Khan, who had been Naib Dewan since the time of Clive, and responsible for criminal justice in the province, had been corrupt; but his work was moderately efficient and might have sufficed for the ordinary crimes of an Indian population. Some stronger and more independent agency was needed for offences in which most of the Zemindars were involved, and about which it was impossible to collect evidence. Hastings summed up the position in 1774:

‘I am assured that the Zemindars themselves too frequently afford them protection, and that the ryots, who are the principal sufferers by these ravages, dare not complain, it being an established maxim with the Dakoits to punish with death every information given against them.’*

There was no tradition encouraging private individuals to come forward as witnesses, and this evil was to survive throughout the whole period of British administration. Several generations passed before any Government could give adequate protection against the hereditary dacoits, and by that time political terrorism had begun to interfere with the course of criminal justice.

Bengal under the Mogul administration had no police system. The more important Zemindars kept a few hired men, ‘for the most part adventurers from Upper India, Afghans and Rajputs’.* The villagers were accustomed to assign part of the crops to watchmen, who were usually members of some hereditary criminal tribe, a form of insurance well known in the East, or in any country where organised crime is stronger than the forces of order. The larger cities had their organised watchmen, and the courts had their ‘runners’, but Warren Hastings had no reliable force, apart from the military, with which to stamp out dacoity. His efforts were further hampered by ‘the regularity and precision which have been introduced into our courts’. Faced by this widespread conspiracy between landlords and robbers, he abandoned the use of purely Indian agencies for keeping the peace. The Faujdars, who were appointed in 1775 to deal with crime in each district, had proved ineffective. The difficulty was to get cases initiated, and to find Indians in the districts who would investigate robberies and apprehend criminals irrespective of their position. Hastings in 1781 dismissed the Faujdars and appointed covenanted civil servants as magistrates, with power to commit to the nearest Indian criminal court. This was an important change of policy. It paved the way for the extended use of Europeans by Cornwallis, and marked the beginning of criminal administration by district officers.

We must return to our general narrative. Pressed for money, Hastings exercised what in India is an overlord’s undoubted right, to claim exceptional assistance from dependents who have, or are suspected of having, money stored up. He was ‘well assured’, says the Oxford History,* that the Raja of Benares ‘had plenty of both men and money’; he was so assured by his own representatives, whom he had thrust out into every key position, so that the administration was becoming one vast extension of his own masterful will. Their opinions were his own, and their conclusions jumped eagerly with his, even if they sometimes slightly anticipated those which suited his policy. Hastings in 1778 had already, against his own Council, and with great harshness when the Raja asked for a period of delay, exacted an extra five lakhs, which extortion he repeated in 1779, with a half-lakh fine for hesitation. 1780 brought the same demand; the Raja could not suppose other than that his tribute had been arbitrarily and by unilateral action raised by nearly twenty per cent. Faced with the third successive demand, he offered Hastings a private gift of two lakhs. Hastings (who was in such distress for his public needs that he was raising loans, in addition to having stopped the Company’s investment for the year) refused this, but then conveyed a hint---which of course was in effect an order---that it should be again offered, when he accepted it. This money he used for the Maratha War, safeguarding himself by revealing the facts to both Sulivan and his own Advocate-General, while at first pretending it was a private contribution of his own. He thoroughly earned (whatever the apologist type of historian may say) the rebuke which the Select Committee of 1783 gave him:

‘The complication of cruelty and fraud in the transaction admits of few parallels. Mr. Hastings . . . displays himself as a zealous servant of the Company, bountifully giving from his own fortune . . . from the gift of a man whom he treats with the utmost severity, and whom he accuses in this particular of disaffection to the Company’s cause and interests. With £23,000 of the raja’s money in his pocket, he persecutes him to his destruction.’

The Raja, who had offered the money on the understanding that he would be freed from the larger requisition, was made to pay every rupee of the five lakhs, and told to raise a force of cavalry as well. He did not---probably could not---raise all he was commanded, and Hastings, beside himself with rage, swept in person up-country,

‘resolved to draw from his guilt the means of relief to the Company’s distresses. In a word, I had determined to make him pay largely for his pardon or to exact a severe vengeance for his past delinquency’.

The delinquency rankling in Hastings’s mind was the Raja’s foolish action at the time when Clavering was seeking to occupy the Governor-General’s chair; he had then intrigued with the party he thought were about to become masters. Hastings knew everything and forgave little.

He removed from Benares Fowke, son of Nandakumar’s co-accuser of him, whom he had unwillingly left there so long as Francis was in the country, Fowke being of Francis’s side; and replaced him by Markham,*a boy of twenty-one, ignorant of Persian and everything else that was relevant, but entirely Hastings’s creature. The Raja was told to pay a fine of fifty lakhs, concerning which Hastings’s biographer coolly remarks, ‘a considerable sum, doubtless, but not exceeding one year’s rental of Cheyt Sing’s zemindarry’.* Chait Singh hurried down to Buxar to meet Hastings, who declined to see him except in his own capital, where he meant to humble him before his own people. Arrived at Benares, Hastings still refused to see his suppliant, and wrote an arrogant demand. He

‘received a letter from the Raja in self-defence, which an impartial judge can only regard as perfectly respectful, and, considering the way he had been treated, extraordinarily moderate’.*

Hastings found it ‘not only unsatisfactory in substance but offensive in style’, and arrested the Raja. This was too much for the Raja’s subjects, who rose and massacred the few sepoys and their officers. Chait Singh fled in terror; Hastings escaped to Chunargarh, where he was besieged half-heartedly, and with a courage wholly admirable and an arrogance and blindness to his own folly and cruelty not admirable issued his instructions to the nearest British forces. He was relieved, and a campaign followed in which the miserable Raja was defeated and chased into Sindhia’s territory. But Hastings obtained no money; even the Raja’s treasure, which amounted to only 23 lakhs, or less than half the fine which Hastings had thought to exact, was divided up by the troops who captured his fortress of Bijaygarh. Popham excused this action, which annoyed Hastings intensely, by reference to a letter which Hastings explained he had not meant to be taken literally, and by the insistence of his officers. He ‘could not withstand the universal clamour and vehemence of his officers for the scramble’. The looters strove to placate the Governor-General by sending

‘a very elegant sword as a present to me, and a set of dressing boxes for Mrs. Hastings, all beautifully inlaid with jewels; I returned them all’,

taking refuge in dignified sulkiness. But he had written the letter which had served as cover for rapacity.

Hastings was severe on the treaty-breaking which on so many occasions disgraced the English name, once going so far as to say that nothing short of declaring this offence felony would do any good. But the Company had definitely promised the Raja of Benares (July 5, 1775) that so long as he paid his stipulated 22½ lakhs

‘no demands shall be made upon him by the Honble. Company, of any kind, or on any pretence whatsoever, nor shall any person be allowed to interfere with his authority, or to disturb the peace of his country’.

A new Raja was now appointed, and his tribute raised to forty lakhs.

Hastings, after all his violence, had been left empty-handed. He was, nevertheless, lifted up with an egoism and complacency worse than those of Clive at his worst. On the suggestion of Sir Elijah Impey, in England, who warned him that there were seditious people who might misunderstand his policy of ‘Thorough’, as this was reported by the disaffected, Hastings used the Chief Justice to collect numerous testimonials to show how delighted everyone was, including the right-thinking portion of the Benares population. He sent his agent in England a still stronger testimonial to himself, written by himself, which bears on its surface the deep pleasure its writing gave him; and observed (without any reference to anything he himself had ever done) that he feared ‘our encroaching spirit, and the insolence with which it has been exerted, have caused our alliance to be as much dreaded by all the powers of Indostan as our arms’. This was a favourite (and just) comment of his; we may quote from another letter:

‘Every power in India dreads a connexion with us, which they see attended with such mortifying humiliations to those who have availed themselves of it; and in my heart I always believe, and always did believe, that this was the secret and sole cause of the hesitation of the Government of Berar to accept of our alliance, although I had carefully worded the conditions of it so as to obviate that objection.’

Yet he never, now or later, let fall a word of doubt concerning the absolute justice of his proceedings towards the unhappy Raja of Benares: neither did he ever see that his conduct was as foolish as it was insolently tyrannical. He told Laurence Sulivan:

‘I feel an uncommon degree of anxiety to receive the sentiments of my friends upon it. I have flattered myself that they will see nothing done which ought not to have been done, nor anything left undone which ought to have been done.’

The man who so acted, and after action so thought and so wrote, was above the reach of human censure as completely as Napoleon or Caesar. He looked about elsewhere for the money which had eluded him at Benares. His glance fell on Oudh, which was in arrears with its tribute. Its Nawab was entirely dependent on the English, and his affairs

‘were, as might have been expected, in great confusion. The Nabob, cruelly wronged at the beginning of his reign, . . . sank year by year more deeply into difficulties, from which by any ordinary means escape was now impracticable . . . a more foolish person never occupied a throne: while his private vices are reported to have been as detestable as his weakness was conspicuous throughout. . . . Moreover, his English allies, whether as a government or as individuals, showed him no mercy’*

He was drawn under more stringent terms than even those inflicted on his father; and the Company’s servants ‘robbed him without scruple, by loans advanced at an exorbitant interest, and pensions and jaghires wrung from him in return’. Here, at least, Hastings stood his friend, and deserves praise. He noted, in that downright fashion of his, that

‘every Englishman in Oude was possessed of an independent and sovereign authority. They learned and taught others to claim the revenue of lacs as their right, though they could gamble away more than two lacs (I allude to a known fact) at a sitting’.

He supported the Nawab in trying to abolish this army of thieving foreigners. Then they both thought about the Begums, who had kept the bulk of the last Nawab’s treasure, instead of the one-eighth sanctioned by Muhammadan law. They were fortified by a treaty between them and the young Nawab, in 1775, when he had received £560,000 altogether, and with the Company had guaranteed to demand nothing more; but Hastings (who had been outvoted by his Council on this matter) felt no scruples, now that power had come to him, in breaking the agreement. The Begums were imprisoned, and their eunuchs put in irons and starved, and perhaps whipped. ‘By those measures, which any Hindu or Muhammadan government would have regarded as normal’,* the Begums were made to disgorge a million sterling, and the Company was put in funds by having the Nawab’s debts to it paid. Hastings had found, or believed he had found (which in his present infatuation was to him the same as complete proof), that the Begums had assisted the Raja of Benares in his resistance.* ‘These old women had very nigh effected our destruction’.

Judged by Eastern standards of the time, the episode is not one of the blackest criminality. It is, nevertheless, true that the Nawab would have hung back from such severe measures against respected ladies of his family, and that even Hastings’s own British officers did not like the job. The Governor-General, determined to have the money he needed, hounded everyone else on, as strong and as single-minded an autocrat as the world has seen.

Two last comments may finish these discussions. Hastings testified in 1775 that Chait Singh’s was ‘as rich and well cultivated a territory as any district, perhaps, of the same extent in India’; two years after his expulsion of the Raja, he revisited it, and was ‘followed and fatigued by the clamours of the discontented inhabitants’, caused (he thought) principally by ‘a defective if not a corrupt and oppressive administration’. Secondly, the English key-position in this administration was their Resident; and until Cornwallis effected a drastic change the Benares Residency held an unquestioned pre-eminence for profitable rapacity, being estimated to be worth at least £30,000 a year in bribes. As for Oudh, it is painful for an Englishman to remember its wretched history between this date and the Mutiny, which closed its long sufferings in the wildest agony of all.

During this last period Hastings worked without scruples---a statement easy to prove by the whole tenor of his correspondence, which is excessively bad-tempered. His justification, and it is one so great as to exempt, not his proceedings but his own character from severe condemnation, was his unique perplexities. We must remember all the while what was happening elsewhere. We surely cannot withhold admiration from the man who resolved that in India, at any rate, his country’s cause should not fail.

Yet it is strange that writers should express surprise and indignation that disgust, as well as misunderstanding, was accumulating in England towards his fall. Hastings had a busy faction, built up by contemporary methods; a friend tells him:

‘The Archbishop of York is an active and steady friend, and such as a man should be who is thoroughly grateful for the favour you have shown his son.’*

Another champion was Laurence Sulivan, the Chairman of the Court of Directors, to whose son, Stephen, Hastings had granted a four years’ contract for the Bengal opium, a privilege which the young man sold for £40,000 to a friend, who then sold it for £60,000. No party were busier in British politics than the Governor-General’s; their incessant meddling brought him to his impeachment. It was flattering to be told that the downfall of the short-lived Rockingham Ministry (1782) was ascribed to ‘your agents and your power,’ and that everyone called the new Government ‘Mr. Hastings’s Ministry’. But desire to get even with someone who has successfully intrigued against you is a feeling not confined to the East. It is hard to guess from a distance what your enemies are thinking; and Hastings, who was longing for a title and rewards, noting (with a hit at Clive, whom he despised) that ‘my name has received no addition of title, my fortune of jagheers, nor my person any decorations of honours’, underrated the detraction set up by the vast army of the disgruntled and the envious, and all whose sons had not been looked after. If his friends were ‘sleepless’, so were those of Francis. Moreover, his main friend, his agent Major Scott (Waring), was a fool; General Grant wrote to Lord Cornwallis in India (April 6, 1788): ‘Scott bullied Burke into the persecution which he did by taunting Burke in the House of Commons, asking when he intended to fulfil certain vague threats he had thrown out, of instituting a searching enquiry into Indian events.

France and England made peace at Versailles, 1783. Fox and Pitt then prepared rival India Bills, both unwelcome to Hastings, whose resignation was practically forced (February, 1785). He went home, where the long-gathering storm, precipitated by himself and his admirers, burst in his impeachment. It began (February 13, 1788) as a colossal show, with royalty and beauty in all their feathers. It soon staled, dragging on until April 23, 1795, when he was acquitted on all charges. Burke and Sheridan undid their cause by savagery and ignorance. Hastings steadily built up his own, by the dignity and valour of his bearing; and sympathy grew with growing knowledge of the unique service he had done his country. Less histrionic than Clive, he defended himself with bare truth when he stated that the administration of Bengal, in all its branches, was his sole creation. ‘I gave you all’, he said, ‘and you have repaid me with impeachment’. In retirement, after the fortunate issue of the trial, he was given a generous pension by the Directors, and lived to old age, happy in intellectual pursuits. In 1813, when he was called up to the House of Lords to give evidence, the assembly, moved by a unanimous impulse of reverence, rose to receive him, a tribute which deeply affected him, as it well might.

There remains the question of his services to India. As the lady who started the ‘Dyer Testimonial’ in India asked, when Indians unaccountably withheld their subscriptions, ‘Have Indians forgotten the days when they were robbed and pillaged by merciless oppressors, before the British bulldog pinned them to the earth?’ The lady’s use of ‘them’ was perhaps ambiguous; but her general meaning was clear. No; they have not forgotten. And when they talk about ‘the Drain’, though they make querulous complaint about sums paid in pensions and interest on money lent for valuable services such as railways and canals, it is likely that at the back of thought is the real rankling in memory of the decades when ‘lakhs’ were steadily and pitilessly removed from one territory after another. Miss Monckton Jones, in her eloquent appreciation of Hastings, says that

‘by unsparing labour, coupled with imaginative insight into native needs, he converted the presence of the English from a bane into a source of healing and strength’.

The labour was certainly unsparing, the insight was imaginative and backed by knowledge fuller and more sympathetic than (one is tempted to say---and surely it is true) that of all other contemporary Englishmen put together. But it was not able to effect what she claimed. Lord Cornwallis found the English still a pest, and Cornwallis’s biographer, whose study is as soundly Tory a document as anyone could desire, seems to think this fact too incontestable to need buttressing with quotation.

But we must distinguish between the effect of the English outside Bengal and within Bengal. Bengal was the only region where Warren Hastings’s influence was in some degree plenary and omnipresent; he gave this province the unique gift of peace:

‘these provinces have continued in an unvaried state of profound peace with armies surrounding them; and the only calamity which at any time threatened their tranquillity was confined to the person of the Governor-General alone, and to the scene in which it originated; and its extreme duration was but thirty-one days’.*

How great was this boon, in an India traversed by marauding armies, we can see from Calcutta’s rapid and steady growth. Also, despite all the disqualifications imposed by his constant need for money, and by jobbery forced upon him by the necessity to find supporters beside him and to placate people at a distance, Hastings laid the foundations of a better, securer regime than India had known since Akbar. His own oppressions, in certain instances (as we have seen) gross and heavy, were exercised not on the mean and poor but on nobles and quasi-princes. His place is with such great medieval kings as Henry II, who tamed the barons, that the lower orders might begin to have fewer authorities to fear. His rule was popular in Bengal; and he left such an impression as no other Englishman has ever done.

As for his services to England, which naturally pressed upon him as those with first call, and were so accepted by him, these were beyond exaggeration. It is not easy to think of any greater name in the roll of English statesmen, or of any spirit of such exalted courage and self-composure amid every kind of alarm and tumult. It is from Englishmen ‘of the left’, those most troubled by thought of injustice wrought on weaker peoples in their Empire’s mighty course, that he has won the deepest (not the most indiscriminate) admiration. Macaulay, whose essay is not far wrong in the main things, is to-day held up as a defamer; but Macaulay, ‘whose own Indian career’, as Miss Sydney C. Grier (herself a thick-and-thin extoller, with a deftly drastic way with awkward material) sees, ‘had inspired him with a sneaking kindness for Hastings’, concludes with moving praise. Mill’s tribute is perhaps the most impressive of all, emphasising how circumstantially and fully the events of his life were dragged out to public inspection, and reminding us how very few public men could have survived such a testing as well as he has done. This reflection (which applies also to the actions and motives of those of us so fortunate as to be private men) must always make us, while unable to evade frank assessment of deeds and their effects, refuse to judge the man austerely and eager to express veneration for the greatness he consistently revealed on the political plane and on occasion showed strikingly in moral ways also.

Book III

Era of Subordination of the Country Powers and Consolidation of the British Power

‘A tedium inseparable from the professional recollections of retired administrators broods impenetrably above the brightest pages of Anglo- Indian history. Besides, there are so many of them, and almost uniformly bright. . . there is a lack of vicissitudes about them that is almost distressing. That lofty destiny, those prescient forerunners, and the long roll of their inevitable victories sweep past like a political speech to its foregone conclusion. We see the goal; we note the all too steady progress; and our starved dramatic sense cries out for a hitch somewhere.’

--- Philip Guedalla, The Duke 69.

Chronological Table

Sir John Macpherson (acting Governor-General). 1785.

Lord Cornwallis. 1786.

• 1787. Reverses of Mahadaji Sindhia and Marathas.

• 1788. Impeachment of Warren Hastings.

• 1789. French Revolution begins,

• 1790. Third Mysore War.

• 1792. Treaty of Seringapatam.

• 1793. Permanent Settlement, Bengal.

• 1794. Death of Mahadaji Sindhia.

Sir John Shore

• 1795. Acquittal of Hastings. Death of Ahalya Bai. Permanent Settlement, Benares. Defeat of Nizam by Marathas at Kardla.

Lord Mornington 1798.

• 1799. Fourth Mysore War. Capture of Seringapatam anddeath of Tipu. William Carey opens Baptist Mission at Serampur.

• 1800. Death of Nana Farnavis.

• 1802. Battle of Poona. Company interferes in Maratha affairs. Treaty of Bassein.

• 1803. Second Maratha War. Battles of Delhi, Assaye, Laswari, Argaon.

• 1804. War with Holkar. Defeat of Monson. Capture of Dig.

• 1805. Siege and storm of Bharatpur fail. Lord Wellesley recalled.

Lord Cornwallis. 1805. (August and September.)

Sir George Barlow (acting). 1805. (October.)

• 1806. Vellore Mutiny.

Lord Minto. 1807.

• 1808. Malcolm sent on mission to Persia, and Elphinstone to Amir of Kabul. Travancore outbreak.

• 1809. Metcalfe’s mission to Ranjit Singh. Treaty of Amritsar with the latter. Mutiny of Madras Company’s officers.

• 1810. Capture of the Moluccas.

• 1811. Conquest of Java.

Lord Hastings. 1813.

• 1814-16. War with Nepal.

• 1817-19. Pindari Campaign and Maratha War.

• 1817. Battles of Kirki, Sitabaldi, Nagpur, Mahidpur.

• 1818. Battles of Koregaon and Ashti. First Bengali newspaper.

• 1819. Pacification of Central India. Foundation of Singapore. Rammohan Roy publishes The Precepts of Jesus the Guide to Peace and Happiness, Nawab of Oudh made King of Oudh.

• 1820. Sir Thomas Munro Governor of Madras.

Chapter I

Lord Cornwallis And Sir John Shore

Sir John Macpherson: Dundas: character of Cornwallis: Oudh and the Carnatic: beginnings of Indian Civil Service: reforms in Army: war with Tipu: condition of country powers: Sindhials foreign troops: Ahalya Bai: Sir John Shore’s characteristics: Lord Hobart in Madras: affairs of Oudh.

Hastings’s departure was followed by twenty months’ rule by John Macpherson, senior member of Council, who

‘certainly was the most contemptible and the most contemned Governor that ever pretended to govern’.*

Reaching India first as a ship’s purser, he became involved in the business of native princes, especially Muhammad Ali, ‘greatly to his pecuniary advantage’;* was foisted into Company service; dismissed by the Madras Governor, Lord Pigot; reinstated by the Directors, and sent out to Bengal as Barwell’s successor. Provided his own interests flourished, he was indifferent to what was done. Even Hastings, so casual as to the character of those who worked with him, provided they worked submissively, became enlightened:

‘a ray of inspiration very early flitted across my imagination more than once, and showed me the naked character of Macpherson’.*

Macpherson was known as ‘the gentle giant’; ‘a very good-humoured fellow’,* for a while he half-deceived Lord Cornwallis, the next pukka Governor-General after Hastings. When Cornwallis was beginning to understand him Macpherson went home, by tortuous devices evading technical resignation. In London he became intimate with the Prince of Wales and collected a party who asserted that he was entitled to have served as Governor-General for the statutory five years, and had therefore large claims on the Company. He was, he hinted, willing to pocket his wrongs, if he might pocket something financially more considerable. During these prolonged intrigues he wrote Cornwallis a letter of masterly disingenuousness and complacency, dwelling with satisfaction on the acknowledged truth that he had acted as Governor-General with general and extreme approbation. Cornwallis wrote (November 1, 1788) asking why Mr. Dundas bothered to parley with Macpherson:*

‘Why does he not tell him, when he talks of grievances and pensions, that he may think himself well off that he is not impeached?. . . that he was guilty of basely degrading the national character, by the quibbles and lies which he made use of. . . that his Government was a system of the dirtiest jobbing . . . that his conduct in Oude was as impeachable, and more disgusting to the Vizier, than Mr. Hastings’s?’

To the same correspondent (Dundas), at a later date (August 8, 1789), the Governor-General wrote:

‘Macpherson seems to expect that you are to give him a pension, besides all the ill-earned money that he has got under the head of pay and presents. His flimsy cunning and shameless falsehoods seem to have taken in all parties; believe me, that those who trust the most in him will be the most deceived.’

As for Macpherson posing at home as an authority on Indian affairs,

‘I do not believe that there is a boy in the service so grossly ignorant in every respect; he does not even know the commonest revenue terms’.

Macpherson was elected to Parliament, but was unseated and fined for bribery, a small setback to so persevering a man. He obtained a baronetcy, a pension, and another seat; and for some years served, in Parliament and elsewhere, the Nawab of the Carnatic and anyone else who would pay him.

The reader cannot remind himself too often that this half-century was the most contemptible and venal in English parliamentary history; and India was now in full enjoyment of all the advantages of close connection with British polity. The last resounding failure of the Jacobite struggles caused the Scots, that sane and realist people, to turn to make the best of their enforced position in that polity, ultimately to the Empire’s immense gain. But they brought, along with less restrictedly useful characteristics, the clan spirit of mutual assistance; and they possessed a great captain-general in Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville, who was Pitt’s Indian Manager and for many years President of the Board of Control:

‘His Indian and Scottish policies dovetailed very nicely into one another. He managed the Scottish vote at Westminster by the distribution of Government patronage among Scots. As a result, Scotland lost all control of its own destinies, but British India enjoyed this priceless boon of government by Scotsmen.’*

Certain broad principles were beginning to emerge from the prolonged disorder; even Directors and Proprietors were growing vaguely aware of them. People were seeing that it was idiotic to expect India to be administered either ably or honestly by the scum of Great Britain, or by boys shoved in by influential relatives and then set under someone they despised socially. Pitt’s India Act (1784) gave the next Governor-General enlarged powers, which experience had shown he so badly needed, to overrule the inferior Presidencies; and Earl Cornwallis, the first to wield these powers, was England’s best at last, after half a century of her worst. He came with such advantages as no predecessor ever had: he was Commander-in-Chief as well as Governor-General, and his rank set him above the necessity of truckling to anybody, however exalted. As Dundas feelingly exclaimed:

‘Here there was no broken fortune to be mended! here there was no avarice to be gratified! here there was no beggarly mushroom kindred to be provided for! no crew of hungry followers gaping to be gorged!’

But his chief advantages lay in his own character, in which he was as superior to his age as Hastings had been in ability. His surrender to Washington at Yorktown had not been his fault, and his military experience and talent, while nothing exceptional, were respectable and generally respected. He was indifferent alike to pecuniary gain and adulation, a man of sturdy courage and honesty exceptional in any century, and in his own almost a portent. There is a great deal to be said for government by the right kind of aristocrat.

Macpherson’s ‘system of mean jobbing and peculation’, ‘his duplicity and low intrigues’, had sunk ‘the national character for sincerity and honour’.* Cornwallis’s main task throughout his term was to reinstate British reputation. He succeeded

‘the first honest and incorruptible Governor India ever saw, and after his example, hardly any Governor has dared to contemplate corruption’.*

Hastings is widely credited with reforming the administration; as a matter of fact, he achieved practically nothing in this respect, after a first spurt of early promise of some success. Nearly all the esteem now given to him on this head should go to his infinitely less known successor. It is the greatest possible tribute to what Hastings at, any rate intended, as well as to the cruel reality of his limitations, that Cornwallis, who had such immense trouble undoing his jobs, always spoke tolerantly of him, and with increasing forgiveness.

Macpherson stayed on for a while, and gave the new Governor-General the advantage of his assistance---cautiously and with reservations. Presently the Governor-General decided that nothing Macpherson said was in itself credible. For example, Macpherson affirmed that he knew nothing about an arrangement by which a King’s officer (for attractive financial considerations) was lent to the Nizam, a generosity which his enemies, the Marathas, regarded as a breach of the friendliness promised by the English. Cornwallis became satisfied that Macpherson and the late Commander-in-Chief, a gentleman appropriately named Sloper, knew a great deal about the arrangement. Next, the Nawab of Oudh---whose country, as a result of Hastings’s energetic intervention in his affairs and his own imbecility, was in the deepest misery---accidentally flung up another item of Macpherson’s subterranean knowledge. His tribute of 74 lakhs was in heavy arrears; Cornwallis went to see him, and was shocked by ‘the desolated appearance’ of his land. The Nawab despairingly said he had no motives for economy while ‘uncertain of the extent of our demands upon him’; and that his authority was null, so long as hordes of European adventurers interfered continually. When Cornwallis went into details, and asked why he had not paid for a corps raised for his use, he replied that the corps was mythical. This proved to be so; General Sloper (now in England) and some of his colleagues had thriftily divided its cost. Cornwallis, probably to the Nawab’s surprise, accepted this as a valid reason why he should not pay up. More, he reduced Oudh’s tribute to fifty lakhs. He ordered that the Company’s exemption from duties in Oudh should cease, and also the exemption from duties of the goods of all Europeans residing or trading under the Company’s protection. He stopped practices in the camp bazars belonging to Company forces which spoiled the Nawab’s revenues. He forbade the Resident or any other servant of the Company to interfere ‘in any manner whatever in the internal affairs of your Government’. Even so, the land could not support its disabilities, and the Nawab could not shake off his parasites or his own infirmities of mind and character. Oudh’s debt continued to accumulate, and its people remained oppressed. When he had left India, Cornwallis, after referring to

‘the ruinous and most inhuman management of the Carnatic and Tanjore country . . . evils which have been long known to me, even to the most minute detail of them’,

wrote* that ‘the Nabob’s Government of the Carnatic, with all its vices and horrors, is at least as good as that of the Vizier’.

Nevertheless, this was a new kind of Governor-General, who, instead of pouncing on any pretext to raise his demands, listened courteously to reason, and, for reason shown, at once reduced an intolerable impost. Only a man of lofty social standing, in addition to unique strength of resolution, could have done this elementary justice, against the harpies clamouring for funds and yet more funds:

‘To anyone who has read with attention the history of Mr. Hastings’s administration, the fact is patent, that the Court of Directors thought only of income, and were not very sedulous in their inquiries as to how it was raised.’*

They continually hounded Hastings on into courses which then sometimes, as when he persecuted the Raja of Benares, proved too much for them.

Cornwallis found the Nawab of Bengal ‘as poor as a rat’; and he returned the wretched creature’s congratulatory gifts for George III on His Majesty’s recovery from mental derangement. He returned gifts for himself and everyone else, from whatever quarter they came.

He had much perplexity from two main centres of mischief left by Hastings, ‘the Augean stables of Benares and Lucknow’.* In ‘Benares . . . a scene of the grossest corruption and mismanagement’,* the Resident, ‘although not regularly vested with any power, enjoyed the almost absolute government of the country without control’.* His salary was Rs. 1000 a month; he received dishonestly at least four lakhs a year, as well as vast gains from ‘the complete monopoly of commerce’. The Raja was ‘a fool, his servants rogues, every native of Hindostan (I verily believe) corrupt’.

Cornwallis’s first duty was to deal with these scandals. Doing this, he established what has always been recognised as the beginnings of the world-famed Indian Civil Service. The Benares Resident was told he must be content with a salary of Rs. 5000 a month (£7,500 a year as the rupee then stood). The Bengal Civil Service were given enlarged salaries, in addition to a percentage on the revenue, and the principle which has ruled Indian administration to our own day was explicitly laid down---its members were placed above the excuse for peculation and were expected to abstain rigidly from it. Cornwallis had the satisfaction of writing to the Chairman of the Directors:*

‘You will see this year what never happened before---that our expenses have fallen short of our estimates . . . the splendid and corrupting objects of Lucknow and Benares are removed; and here I must look back to the conduct of former Directors, who knew that these shocking evils existed, but instead of attempting to suppress them, were quarrelling whether their friends, or those of Mr. Hastings, should enjoy the plunder.’

Unfortunately, he could not touch the internal administration of Madras, which until 1802 continued to be a swamp of misgovernment, greed, incompetence, whose

‘whole system is founded on the good old principles of Leadenhall-street economy---small salaries and immense perquisites, and if the Directors alone could be ruined by it, everybody would say they deserved it, but unfortunately it is not the Court of Directors, but the British nation who must be the sufferers’.*

Cornwallis was resolute to keep the peace, and told the Nizam and the Marathas that Macpherson had gone beyond his powers in promising to assist them in a war against Tipu Sultan (to whom we had pledged neutrality). This led to some natural vexation, but the sterling truth (honesty is too mean a word) of his character slowly, and then rapidly, won them over to confidence. We have done him wrong in suggesting that he repudiated Macpherson’s unjustifiable engagements merely from pacifist policy; he did it mainly because he thought that even Tipu was entitled to ‘a square deal’. We are writing of this admirable man with an exhilaration (after the depressing story which has been ours for so long) which we hope is being communicated to the reader.

It was wise, as well as decent, to keep out of what Cornwallis called ‘scrapes’, for the army was in as unspeakable a condition as the civil personnel. King’s officers and the far inferior Company’s officers were kept distinct; Cornwallis pressed consistently, but unsuccessfully, for them to be made into one service. The Company’s total forces amounted to about 70,000 Europeans and Indians, exclusive of Bombay Presidency’s native levies; the whole, it is interesting to note, coming to about half the Indian army of the present day. Europeans were about 11,500 (5500 King’s enlisted, 6000 Company’s). The latter were of appalling quality: ‘the contemptible trash of which the Company’s European force is composed, makes me shudder’.* H.R.H. the Duke of York gave him such consolation as was possible:

‘As for the accounts which You give of the State of the European Troops in the Service of the Company, it grieves me, though it does not in the least astonish me, as It is totally impossible that they be otherwise than the riffraff of London Streets got together by the Crimps, and the Gleanings of the different Gaols. The Officers are, in general, young men who have ruined themselves and are obliged to fly their Country or very low people who are sent out to make their fortunes, and who will therefore stick at nothing in order to gain money.’

While doing what he could to reform the Europeans, the Governor-General radically overhauled the sepoy establishment also:*

‘I have abolished their dancing about in various forms to jig-tunes, and have substituted marching to time.’

He acknowledged handsomely, however, that the native army was in far better fettle than the Company’s Europeans:* ‘A brigade of our sepoys would easily make anybody Emperor of Hindostan’.

We have seen with what austerity H.R.H. the Duke of York referred to people whose main eye was towards financial profit. His elder brother, the Prince of Wales, who presently became the First Gentleman of Europe, was less severe. He importuned his friend the Governor-General with monotonous regularity (but increasing diffidence and humility) to look after this or that young gentleman, in no single instance with success. In 1789* he pressed what Cornwallis called an ‘infamous and unjustifiable job’,* asking that ‘young Treves’ should be given the chief criminal judgeship at Benares, ‘which is now held by a Black named Alii Cann’. Cornwallis pointed out that Ali Ibrahim Khan, the Black in question, was ‘a man of great talent and universally respected’, whereas young Treves

‘is at the very bottom of the list of the Company’s servants (except those of the present year)’.

Bengal was the only Presidency financially sound. It was subsidising Bombay with 40 lakhs annually, a drain possible in times of peace only:

‘The income of Bengal exceeds its expenditure by above two millions, and although the other Presidencies are a great drain upon us, yet, on the general state of the finances throughout India, we can, without increasing our debts, send home an investment from the different settlements, which costs us £1,300,000, and which will sell in Europe for £2,400,000, which, besides at least a million of profit which the Company receives from the China trade, must I think enable them to pay off at least a million of their debt annually in England.’*

But the Governor-General viewed Bombay’s whole condition, and indeed existence, with misgiving:*

‘Of what use is the civil establishment at Bombay? I should conceive that a small factory there, and another at Surat. . . would answer every purpose. Although we have appropriated the whole surplus revenue of Benares and Bahar to the support of Bombay, we are obliged to send many lacs thither from Calcutta.’

As for Madras, under the Hollond brothers, successively governors for brief periods (‘in every manner doing infinite mischief both to the interest and reputation of the Company’*), it continued to be nothing but a skilled and experienced conspiracy for private aggrandisement.

That Tipu cherished implacable hate was known. Anyone less patient and ready to weigh his own side’s shortcomings than Cornwallis was, would have swept down on him long before war actually came. Tipu was a liar so ingrained that he seems never to have risen to perception that a distinction between true and false existed; he could not see that it might sometimes advantage him to keep his word. His letters to commandants besieging forts would instruct them to offer quarter and, when quarter had been accepted, butcher everyone irrespective of age and sex. It was impossible to ascertain what captives he held; and as a preliminary, when war broke out, he would murder any who still survived.

He was keeping British captives now, in defiance of treaty, some having been circumcised into Islam. He had British children trained as janissaries, and others dressed and instructed as Hindu dancing girls. The Nizam, who at this time settled down into his alliance with the Company, and the Marathas, especially Sindhia---who had warmly admired Hastings, and was learning, like the rest of India, to trust the new Governor-General absolutely---were eager for a concerted effort to extirpate a being with no merit but physical courage and variegated intellectual curiosity, and no excuse except that he was probably not sane in his paroxysms.

Tipu was meditating an attack on the Raja of Travancore, an ally of the Company. Told plainly that this would be taken as an act of war, he made it, and made it so badly that he was routed from ‘the lines of Travancore’, a thirty-mile rampart, December 29, 1789. Cornwallis had contributed to bringing about what he believed was an unavoidable war by stipulating, when he lent the Nizam troops, that they should not be used against the Marathas. Tipu noted the omission of any stipulation regarding himself, and in desperation precipitated the contest he looked on as at hand. ‘That mad barbarian Tippoo has forced us into a war with him.’*

Madras conducted the war with its usual inefficiency, and a tide of murder and enslavement once more overswept the Carnatic. In December, 1790, Cornwallis himself went to South India and took command. His first care was that the British should be unique among the warring hosts, Mysorean, Maratha, or Nizam’s, by being a protection, and not a terror, to the country people. In February, 1791, he hanged nine British soldiers for burning and plundering. As a result, presently, when his guns were roaring before Seringapatam, the enemy’s capital, peasants were quietly ploughing within half a mile of them.

He won victories, but the war dragged on, hamstrung by possession of a medieval transport train (and Indian at that). However, in 1792, he routed Tipu almost under his capital’s walls. The Treaty of Seringapatam followed, by which Tipu ceded to the allies half his territory, and promised to pay 330 lakhs and to surrender all his prisoners. He had already handed over much of the money and two sons as hostages, when he found that Cornwallis, sometimes a man careless in niceties of phrasing though always sure of his general intention, meant to take Coorg in the territory ceded. Tipu, who planned to make an example of the Coorg Raja and his people---driven by terrible cruelties to the side of the English---was maddened by what he thought a breach of faith. There is no question that Cornwallis would have done grave wrong if he had abandoned Coorg. It is queer that writers who refuse to censure Hastings for rupture of engagements made with cool deliberation, yet speak reprobatingly of Cornwallis’s offence, which was at worst a genuine oversight.*

The campaign was memorable for the Commander-in-Chief’s wide and searching humanity. Tipu’s young sons, the hostages, he received with fatherly courtesy and admiration of their gallant bearing. When he found that the iniquitous Madras Government provided no doolies for their native wounded, who were just pitched into blankets, and so carried away, he blazed out at ‘false and cruel economy’ and immediately altered the practice. When a court-martial leniently handled a surgeon who had neglected his wounded and an officer who had beaten a native creditor, he scarified them with a rigour which reminds us of Lord Curzon. Nothing more infuriated him than assaults committed by Europeans on people of the country. And both he and his second-in-command, General Medows, declined to take their share of the prize money when the campaign ended. Medows, whom he justly styled ‘generous and noble’, was offered the succession to the Governor-Generalship, but modestly declined it.

The Nawab of Oudh was a puppet, the Nawab of Bengal a mere poverty-stricken nobleman, their brother of the Carnatic a venerable rascal whose territory Cornwallis kept urging the Company to annex, if only for their own sakes, though they cared nothing for the people’s interests:*

‘the Nabob is anticipating his revenues and ruining his country. . . when his overstrained credit breaks, which I am much afraid will soon be the case, we must expect a very serious defalcation in our Indian resources’.

Tipu, badly hurt, was plotting vengeance, but it was beyond his reach. The Sikhs were not yet neighbours of the English, neither had they yet grown to greatness. The Emperor had been blinded in 1788 by an Afghan, Gulam Kadr, during Mahadaji Sindhia’s temporary evacuation of Delhi; Gulam Kadr was captured by Sindhia shortly afterwards, and sent to his victim in a cage and without nose, ears, hands and feet. The Nizam and the Gaekwar were in fact, and usually in form, dependents of the Company.

The Marathas, other than the Gaekwar, were in a position apart. Cornwallis noted* their essential weakness, which in the end brought about their ruin:

‘The Marathas’ power from the feudal constitution of their state can never bear any proportion to their numbers, or the extent of their possessions’,

but they ‘must always have great weight in the politics of India’. Their history in these last two decades of the eighteenth century is largely that of the rivalry between Mahadaji Sindhia and Nana Farnavis of Poona. The latter aimed at superimposing on the pious fraud whereby the Peshwa (the real head of the confederacy) was nominally merely the Prime Minister of the Raja of Satara, another fraud, whereby his family (nominally servants of the Peshwas) were the real rulers. That the jealousy between him and Sindhia kept short of active civil war we may ascribe to the fact that both men possessed patriotism, great common sense and awareness of realities, both knowing that the English were almost certainly destined to the suzerainty of the peninsula.

As for Sindhia, Grant Duff testifies that, though ‘of deep artifice, restless ambition, and of implacable revenge’, he was of habits ‘simple, his manners kind and frank, but sometimes blustering and coarse’. He was ‘of great political sagacity’, which perhaps misled him when in 1784, after his unsuccessful war against the Company, he employed a French adventurer, Count de Boigne, to train battalions on the European model for him, and began to encourage Europeans to enter his service (by the end of the century the Gwalior forces had no less than 300 of them in one brigade). The story of these foreign mercenaries is one of the most interesting lesser chapters of Indian history. Brigaded and trained on Western lines, the Marathas flung away their own natural tactics---they were the most naturally skilled guerillas the world has seen, as Sivaji proved to the Moguls early and Tantia Topi proved to the British later. They came down on to a plane unsuited to them. It is noteworthy that when war broke out afresh against the English, it was not Sindhia’s highly trained troops that did most damage, but the still largely ‘vernacularised’ forces of Holkar, his rival. But for the time being, and in campaigns against Indian opponents, Sindhia gained the advantage; de Boigne defeated for him Muslim and Rajput opponents in 1790 and 1791, and Holkar in 1792. In 1795 Sindhia launched a full Maratha confederation, the last occasion when ‘the chiefs of the Mahratta nation assembled under the authority of their Peshwa’, against the Nizam, and defeated him at Kardla. This marked the summit of Maratha greatness during an interval when the Company deserted their ally. But the inherent feudalism and separatism of the Marathas scattered them again into sticks easily broken serially.

Between 1765 and 1795 Indore was ruled by the celebrated Ahalya Bai, widow of Malhar Rao Holkar. She was a lady of deep piety, whose munificence benefited distant parts of India; even in Bengal to-day the traveller may journey gratefully for miles along roads shaded by trees that she planted when returning from pilgrimage. Her husband had been killed before she was twenty, and her only son was both wicked and insane. Spared from the funeral pyre by her people (who in this matter exercised a wide though capricious tolerance), she herself sought to banish it, as well as other hateful customs. We have a piteous picture of her anguish when her daughter-in-law insisted on dying the death of a sati:

‘Ahalya Bai, when she found all dissuasion unavailing, determined to witness the last dreadful scene. She walked in the procession, and stood near the pile, where she was supported by two Brahmins, who held her arms. Although obviously suffering great agony of mind, she remained tolerably firm till the first blaze of the flame made her lose all self-command; and while her shrieks increased the noise made by the exulting shouts of the immense multitude that stood around, she was seen to gnaw those hands she could not liberate from the persons by whom she was held. After some convulsive efforts, she so far recovered as to join in the ceremony of bathing in the Nerbudda, when the bodies were consumed. She then retired to her palace, where for three days, having taken hardly any sustenance, she remained so absorbed in grief that she never uttered a word.’*

So great was the veneration felt for her that even Sindhia never thought of attacking her territory; she was semi-deified in her lifetime, and has been exalted to the Hindu Pantheon since. Her dependent nobles, especially Tukoji Holkar, the Commander-in-Chief (who was not related to her), worked loyally as her servants.

Cornwallis held strongly that no man in the ordinary service should be promoted to the highest place. But he was swayed by gratitude to Sir John Shore* for his helpfulness; and his praise of him helped to procure his appointment as his successor.

Shore was perhaps the first typical ‘bureaucrat’; a thoroughly conventional and, indeed, excessively timid and dependent mind. A friend described him as ‘a good well-meaning man, as cold as a dog’s nose’. He was a first-rate routine worker, happy at his desk, nervous when necessity drove him into a wider and wilder field. As a young man he had been no worse than others, but for a time no better; and he shared current opinions then, as throughout his life, being indignant at the none too alarming efforts of Clive and Hastings to check dishonesty. He had been at first attached to Francis’s party; but Hastings was persuaded to give him promotion, assured him he would prove a friend, and was one. He served Hastings faithfully, and Cornwallis no less faithfully and much more enthusiastically, admiring him intensely, finding in him ‘a peace of mind which nothing alarms, being built upon a solid foundation’.* His own period of supreme power was an affliction to him, and when it was over he relinquished India as an interest as completely as Doughty in later years relinquished Arabia. Deeply religious, he devoted his retirement to correspondence with such men as Dr. Adam Clarke and to work for the Bible Society, by whom his name is still rightly revered.

As Governor-General, Shore was as scrupulously honest as Cornwallis. But his consciousness of unfitness wrung from him touching admission:

‘I sometimes doubt my judgment may not have proved erroneous on the decisions which it has adopted. Often have I wished that Lord Cornwallis were at the head of the Administration here, and that I were his co-adjutor, as formerly: all would then have been easy to him and me. . . . I am not fitted for the scenes which have lately occurred.’*

Though only a little over forty, he wrote habitually as if he were an old man, and a very exhausted old man. Yet by unswerving rectitude and a deepening conviction of divine assistance---his habit was to withdraw, as Gordon and others who have left a more heroic mark in their countrymen’s memory did, to pray alone before any important decision---he won respect and, what was more important, careful service from his subordinates. It should be added that he carried on one of the most admirable features of Hastings’s work, in a constant and sympathetic interest in Indian culture. When he entered the service, the Company’s officials did not bother to learn anything beyond a smattering of Hindustani; ‘broken English being their only medium of communication with their native servants’.* But Shore knew Persian; he encouraged Sir William Jones and other excellent Orientalists and succeeded the former as President of the Asiatic Society; he helped Roxburgh the botanist.

Jonathan Duncan, his close friend and, like him, eager for the intellectual advance of the people of India, went to be Governor of Bombay, 1796, to remove ‘the accumulated filth of’* that ‘Augean stable’. ‘Augean stable’ became a conventional (but far from meaningless) description of practically every place where the Company had held sway. Shore found himself everywhere hampered by former evil deeds whose karma was still not worked out to the full. The Company’s forces had to fight a battle against the one surviving Rohilla chief. Shore observed to Charles Grant:

‘No man can calculate the consequences of a violation of a moral principle; and there is some justness in your suspicion, that the inveteracy of the Rohillas may be traced to the injustice of 1774. Our reputation for justice and good faith stands high in India; and if I were disposed to depart from them, I could form alliances which would shake the Mahratta Empire to its very foundations.’*

He was not disposed to depart from justice and good faith; and he was deeply pacific in nature. Some historians, viewing the Marathas as inevitably the enemies of the English, and themselves not too concerned with principles of ordinary straightforwardness, have lamented that he left the Nizam to fight an isolated battle against the Marathas, resulting in his rout at Kardla (1796). But the Marathas had preserved neutrality on many occasions when their hostility would have been hurtful, and had frequently gone beyond neutrality to very valuable friendliness. Moreover, Cornwallis’s war against Tipu had been costly, and had left that ruler eager for vengeance. Shah Zaman of Kabul had captured Lahore and was threatening Oudh, which was merely a British apanage. The Emperor at Delhi was a blinded, disgraced old man. Shore faced with constant misgiving but complete courage immense clouds that seemed always likely to break in tempest.

His administration can be briefly summarised. He had to meet in late 1795 one of the worst of the periodical mutinous conspiracies of British officers. He temporised and yielded their demands for ‘double batta or field allowances, promotion by strict seniority, and other personal privileges incompatible with good administration’.* The officers had influential friends in England, who worked yet further concessions out of Dundas, President of the Board of Control. Shore’s deeply apologetic letters to his old chief in England show how conscious of his weakness he felt, and his failure led to his recall, after wrangling and delay.

He failed also with Lord Hobart, the young and energetic Governor of Madras. Hobart, the eldest son of the Duke of Buckingham, paid little attention to Shore, and gave continual proof of the absurdity of trying to run India by Governor-Generals from the middle classes, while at least one of the Governors was often a man of title and family. When Muhammad Ali died (October, 1795), Shore wanted his revenues to be taken over by the Company, as a first step towards lifting the Carnatic out of its pestilential morass of maladministration. The attempt broke down, because Hobart was precipitate and peremptory, and the new Nawab stood on his dignity. When war began between England and Holland, Hobart sent an expedition which annexed most of the Dutch East Indies (1796). He dragooned* Tanjore, the unhappy State which was the South Indian equivalent of Oudh, into a treaty foreshadowing its speedy annexation. And when the Governor-General remonstrated feebly, he said openly and often that one of them must go. Shore therefore gave in, soothing himself with the sad observation:*

‘Lord Hobart seems to me to pursue his objects without any regard to the rectitude of the means or ultimate consequences, to decide with precipitation, and to maintain his decision at all hazards.’

An expedition against Manila, which Hobart wisely stopped at Penang, to meet Tipu’s threats---Shore acquiesced in his subordinate’s action, and Tipu was overawed by the show of force---introduced to the Governor-General’s notice the future Duke of Wellington, in a letter from Lord Cornwallis:

Whitehall, June 10, 1796.

Dear Sir,

I beg leave to introduce to you Colonel Wesley, who is Lieut.-Colonel of my regiment: he is a sensible man, and a good officer; and will, I have no doubt, conduct himself in a manner to merit your approbation.’

Another event showing the expansion of the Company’s affairs was an embassy to Burma.

In February, 1797, the Governor-General made a tour up-country. In Benares he visited the Begum of the late Emperor and her two sons:

‘These poor descendants of Imperial dignity maintain the forms of royalty: and we mutually acted parts inconsistent with our real characters; I, the Representative of our Power, professing humility and submission before the dependants on the bounty of the Company; whilst they, who are the objects of charity, and feeling their situation, thought it incumbent on them to use the language of Princes.’

He went on to Oudh, and surprised the Nawab by declining to accept a present of five lakhs of rupees and 8000 gold mohurs. However, relations remained affable:

‘The Nabob and myself visit daily, and are in the best humour imaginable with each other. His disposition is naturally good, but irritated by bad advisers, mean associates, and absolute power; which, however, he does not exercise cruelly. He promotes rather than performs bad actions. A few years ago, an Englishman, for his Excellency’s amusement, introduced the elegant European diversion of a race in sacks by old women: the Nabob was delighted beyond measure, and declared, that although he had spent a crore of rupees, or a million sterling, in procuring entertainment, he had never found one so pleasing to him. So much for the amusements of Sovereignty! Every evening, almost, he stupefies himself with opium: the effects of which are often felt in the morning, in sickness, vomiting, langour, and dejection of spirits. His confidants are the meanest and lowest people: he dreads the society of men of worth, capable of controlling his conduct.’*

Failing in ‘the very disagreeable attempt of making an Ethiopian white; and I cannot flatter myself that I have made much impression on his complexion’, the Governor-General shrugged his shoulders, and turned his attention away. India was in a deplorable state, but he found refuge in philosophical musings:*

‘I am now not far from Delhi, once the capital of the largest empire in the world, Russia perhaps excepted. The present possessor of the throne, the descendant of Tamerlane, lives in darkness, surrounded with empty state and real penury, a pensioner on the niggard bounty of the Mahrattas, from whom he receives less than the Duke of Bedford does from his tenants. He supplicates me on the terms of royalty; and his son is here, a dependant on the benevolence of the Nabob, from whom he receives a comfortable subsistence. Wonderful are the dispensations of Providence, and I feel them in myself!’

Later in the year the Nawab died; Shore had to journey to Oudh again, to see about the succession. Ascertaining that he had (on inadequate information) recognised as Nawab an adopted son whose parentage was unknown and whose character was ruffianly, Shore without the least hesitation deposed him, and with calm courage did it mainly by prestige, allowing himself to dine with and meet alone the man he was ousting. He refused to let the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Alured Clarke,* share the risks of assassination. Awed by a coolness so uncanny, the dethroned Nawab did not express his hatred until 1799, when he murdered the Benares Resident and some other Englishmen. This peaceful revolution in Oudh was accompanied by the cession to the Company of Allahabad.

Shore, though only forty-six, was

‘almost worn out; and shall most gladly resign my station, either to Lord Hobart, or to any other person’.*

In March, 1798, he drifted out of the Governor-Generalship as listlessly as he had drifted through it. India was ready for a Wellesley.

Chapter II

Administrative Reforms

Cornwallis’s efforts to reform administration: Nawab of Arcot’s debts: Wellesley’s College at Fort William: the Permanent Settlement: low moral standards of Company’s servants: exclusion of Indians from higher posts; continuance of Muslim penal law: Cornwallis’s reform of police system: growth of litigation.

The forty years which followed the retirement of Warren Hastings were marked by strenuous and moderately successful efforts to reform the personnel of the service, and by a tendency to rely more and more upon European civil servants for administration. Macpherson’s short but lamentable term of office, followed by Shore’s somewhat nerveless one, confirmed the view of the authorities in England that the Governor- General and the Provincial Governors should not be chosen from the Company’s servants, and men were brought straight out from England to these posts, a policy which continued after the fear of corruption and insubordination had ceased.* Both Clive and Warren Hastings had been hampered by their previous history, and Lord Cornwallis partly owed his authority to the feeling in England that the Governor-General must be one who had ‘not graduated in chicanery or grown grey in fraud and corruption’. On his arrival in 1786 he found a new spirit amongst the civil servants in Bengal. His two advisers, John Shore and Barlow, were men of integrity with a real interest in administration. Within two years of taking office Cornwallis was writing to a friend that ‘the Company has many valuable servants; the temper of the time is changing’.* Probably the chief factor in this change was the prevention of private trading and of private loans to princes, fixed salaries being assigned and the system of commissions abolished. The new salaries were on a very generous scale, though without pensions.*

Lord Cornwallis, under Pitt’s Act of 1784, exercised far greater powers than Hastings had enjoyed, and was soon able to make his authority felt. He was master in his Council, and had the most drastic powers over the Company’s servants, including the right to make each official submit, under oath, an inventory of all his property before leaving India.* Cornwallis supplemented this by dismissing and expelling several higher officials, while he was equally strict with the ‘interlopers’, or private European traders. These, if they wished to live outside Calcutta, had to sign a bond making themselves amenable to the local court of justice. Within a few years the English population of Bengal had been brought under control. The cleansing of the Madras Settlement proved a harder task, and was not accomplished until Lord Wellesley made it his headquarters during the war with Tipu. The administration had been entirely corrupted by the gigantic swindle of the Nawab of Arcot’s* debts, in which nearly every Englishman of standing was involved. The occasional man who stood out from the ramp paid for it, even when he happened to be a Governor. (Lord Pigot, who opposed it, was arrested by his own subordinates, and died in prison.) This deplorable business must be briefly explained.

Muhammad Ali had early withdrawn from Arcot, and established himself in a superb palace in the outskirts of Madras. Here he lived out his long life, on credit (in the strictly financial sense of the word, and no other) and by roguery; ‘nearly every traveller who visited him was favourably impressed’.* Even in 1754, he possessed ‘a truly majestic countenance tempered with a good deal of pleasantness and good nature’;* in 1780, in maturity, he

‘looked on a newly arrived European with such a look of majesty blended with sorrow, as one could not behold without compassion and regret’.*

He lived lavishly and splendidly, employed Europeans about his person and in the House of Commons, and had a guard commanded by ‘a European captain, two lieutenants and six cornets’. ‘Asiaticus’, who is usually understood to be Warren Hastings’s agent, Major Scott (Waring), testifies:

‘He keeps a very splendid court, where the English meet with every mark of attention and are often preferred to very lucrative posts about his person.’*

A huge mob of creditors and alleged creditors held him in perpetual siege:

‘The Nabob receives everybody with politeness, apologizes for his want of punctuality (in paying), which he attributes to the loss of Tanjore, and repeats the hackneyed tale of the cruel treatment which he has received at the hands of Lord Pigot.’*

Burke styled him ‘a shadow, a dream, an incubus of oppression’;* and a dream he must have seemed, a dignified nightmare, too absurd to be true, too painful not to be true. He and his ‘creditors’ were ‘not adversaries, but collusive parties’; the business was

‘under a false colour and false names. The litigation is not, nor ever has been, between their rapacity and his hoarded riches. No; it is between him and them combining and confederating on one side, and the public revenues, and the miserable inhabitants of a ruined country, on the other’.Op. cit. iii. 193-4.

His ‘debts’ arose out of a long-continued series of dealings with Company’s servants, prominent amongst whom was a certain Paul Benfield, with the Nawab. They ‘advanced’ sums of money, and received tuncaws, assignments of the land revenues of the country over which the Nawab was titular ruler. What actually happened was that the ‘creditors’ skinned the inhabitants and divided the spoil. The debts, bearing nominal interest at 36 or 48 per cent., became speculative investments, dependent upon whether the Company could be persuaded to recognise their validity and assist in collection. Benfield, for example, while a junior architect in the Company’s service, had the effrontery to petition the Madras Council for assistance in recovering the sum of £230,000, which he claimed from the Nawab. From these debts grew up the corrupt ‘Indian interest’ in English politics, of which Benfield was a prominent organiser. Six Members of Parliament were believed to be in the Nawab’s pay, and many prominent politicians invested in the ‘debts’. Benfield was twice dismissed, in 1770 and 1778, but on each occasion used his wealth and influence in England to get himself reinstated.

Both Cornwallis and the Directors were anxious to end the scandal of the debts. They knew its effect on the administration, and the ruin which the absentee Nawab was causing in his territories. They were, however, hampered by sinister influences in England, and by lack of support from the two responsible Ministers, Pitt and Dundas. The Act of 1774 provided that the Directors should examine the origin of the debts. These could be divided into three main blocks. Two of these were probably legally valid, but the largest---the so-called Consolidated Loan---would never have stood examination. When the Directors set about this work they were stopped by the Board of Control, which insisted on recognition of the whole debt, and this action was supported by the Ministry. The matter was the subject of a famous speech by Edmund Burke in the House of Commons, but the ‘Indian interest’ had done its work well in that hopelessly venal Parliament. The speech was never answered. The debts, which were discussed with the cynicism of the time, continued, and the Nawab grew more deeply involved each year.

When Cornwallis came to India, he called the debts ‘fraudulent and infamous claims’, and discouraged their taking over by the Company.* He is cited in a despatch of Wellesley’s to Muhammad Ali’s successor (April 24, 1799):

‘These loans have usually been accompanied by assignments of territory to the creditors, whose vexatious management of the revenues assigned has been the continual cause of the most aggravated calamities to the inhabitants of the Carnatic.

‘In these transactions the loss has fallen on your Highness, your subjects, and your friends, and the illicit profit has enriched those who (to use the words of your respected father addressed to Lord Cornwallis) “never approach your Durbar for any other purpose than to pursue their habitual views of plunder and rapine.”’

Cornwallis could do little except prevent the further spread of this evil amongst the Company’s servants. He refused promotion to anyone who was a creditor of the Nawab, and sent Benfield and some others home in 1788. Benfield continued his activities in England, his name appearing or disappearing from the list of the Nawab’s creditors as seemed most expedient at the moment.

At last Pitt and Dundas made an arrangement by which, between 1784 and 1804, the debt was paid off by instalments of £480,000 annually. At the end of that period it was discovered that the Nawab and his English friends had quietly accumulated another debt of 30 millions sterling. This a commission of Bengal civilians, who need not be suspected of undue austerity by modern standards, examined between 1805 and 1814, and rejected over 19 millions out of 20 millions. The last of the debt was settled in 1830, with the singular conclusion that less than 3 millions of over 30 millions were found valid. Mr. Roberts remarks that the earlier debt, which had been allowed, was almost certainly no less vulnerable to detailed scrutiny, had that been permitted; and that the finish is the strongest possible

‘justification of the censure passed on this vast administrative scandal by Burke and Cornwallis . . . at a time when all other statesmen conspired to minimize and conceal it’.*

The debt which Pitt had paid was a transfer to the Company’s ‘rebellious servants’ of a ‘debt contracted in defiance of their clearest and most positive injunctions’, a ‘most enormous usury’, involving in interest alone annual charges of £623,000, ‘more than double the whole annual dividend of the East India Company, the nominal masters to the proprietors in these funds’.*

The efforts of Cornwallis were chiefly directed towards preventing further corruption and ridding India of the worst offenders. It is regrettable that so much energy, over so many decades, of men so able and noble, had necessarily to be deflected from administration and put into what can only be called sanitary work. The process continued under his successors, and a notable advance was made when Wellesley---who condemned vigorously and constantly the manners and dishonesty of officials still sent out at boyish ages to form their characters in the worst school in the world---founded the Fort William College, in which the young gentlemen were to spend three years in remedying any defects that existed in their education, by studying Indian languages, law and history. Satisfied with having surveyed the absurdities and errors of the existing system in a minute (July 10, 1800), he characteristically neglected to get the Directors’ sanction, and just went ahead. The Directors vetoed the scheme, and a long and bitter dispute followed. Wellesley managed to get support from the Board of Control---from Castlereagh in particular---and succeeded in procrastinating suppression for a few years, during which the college played a part with other activities and tendencies of the times, in raising steadily the level of British administration. The Directors, confronted by the Governor-General’s contumacy supported by the Board of Control, had the satisfaction of getting in one good shot:

‘In our opinion Marquis Wellesley would have best consulted his own dignity, and set an example to the service, at least equal in importance to any lesson it could have derived from the College, by a regular obedience to that authority under which the Law had placed the government of India.’

But such obedience was not in Marquess Wellesley’s character. The college survived until 1830; and Haileybury College was founded, 1805, to provide special education for India in England.

A special word must be given to Cornwallis’s Permanent Settlement of Bengal, Bihar, and Benares. He put this through with the help of Jonathan Duncan (placed in charge of Benares) and John Shore, especially the latter. In 1790-1 the land revenues of these districts were Rs. 34,53,000 (£420,000) for Benares, and Rs. 2,68,00,000 (£3,400,000) for Bihar and Bengal. Shore, who did most of the hard work of collecting information, wanted to substitute for annual assessments assessments lasting ten years. Cornwallis decided to make an unchangeable settlement and assessment, and to recognise the Zemindars, who were hereditary rent-collectors, the Government being the landlord, as the actual owners. This settlement, which to-day hardly anyone will defend, and Indians denounce without measure, up to thirty years ago was believed by most Nationalist writers (for example, Romesh Dutt) to be almost the only good thing the English had done; they were scolded for not having done it everywhere. Its evils were that the Zemindars were given a big property not theirs, and relapsed into a selfish, careless class; and the Government obtained a small settled revenue, which should have been an expanding one. Its main justification was that Cornwallis was faced with a country in ruins:

‘I may safely assert that one-third of the Company’s territory in Hindostan is now a jungle inhabited only by wild beasts.’ (Minute, September 18, 1789.)

His arguments were such as we hear to-day, when ‘confiscatory’ or ‘class’ taxation is inveighed against. Would a ten-years’ lease (he asked the Directors) encourage cultivation, when improvements would result in an enhanced (and uncertain) demand upon those who had made them? He was sure Bengal needed, above everything else, stability and surety; and perhaps he was right.

In this settlement, as in other arrangements which we can now see were mistaken, the English worked on false analogy with their own land. It was easy to see the Zemindars as squires.* Similarly, Cornwallis enacted that defaulting Zemindars could be sold up. This meant that a man’s whole family might lose their hereditary position for a temporary difficulty. Great landholders became ruined, including such semi-royal families as Dinajpur, Rajshahi, Nadiya, and Vishnupur, and wrong was inflicted which the people still remember, seeing their impoverished descendants. ‘The effect on the peace of the countryside was then disastrous, and probably is still felt.’*

A mass of contemporary literature makes it possible to reconstruct the life of Europeans in India during the early days of the nineteenth century. Most of them slipped easily into the lazy, dissipated habits which had already overcome so many northern invaders of the peninsula. The covenanted servants came out as boys of sixteen or seventeen, and until Wellesley’s time no arrangements had been made to train them, either at home or in India. It is sometimes contended that they understood the country better than their successors. One source of knowledge they possessed. It was customary to keep Indian mistresses, but it is doubtful whether this brought any great respect for the Indian race, or much interest in its customs.* From the time of Sir William Jones, the erudite judge who codified the law for Lord Cornwallis, the Company had at its disposal a succession of keen Orientalists, but they were men who lived apart from the bulk of their fellow-countrymen. The latter did not rapidly alter their habits or their outlook. Many had completely assimilated Hindu ideas of caste, which they combined with a strong objection to the introduction of Christianity into India. The European community bitterly opposed the earlier missionaries, like Carey, partly because they came from the poorer classes, but chiefly because they might have a disturbing effect on Indians. The Vellore Mutiny of 1807 was ascribed to their activities, and the official recognition of Christianity was attacked in language which now seems incredible.*

Sir G. O. Trevelyan, writing from India shortly after the Mutiny, has left a description of life in Wellesley’s time which can be fully corroborated from contemporary sources, and has an additional vividness because traditions of those times must have still survived. Talking of Mrs. Sherwood’s novels, he says:

‘Her pictures of a Mofussil station, of a merchant’s household in Calcutta, of an indigo factory among the jungles in the days when Lord Wellesley was Governor-General, are well worthy of careful study. Our knowledge, derived from other sources, fully bears out her vivid descriptions of the splendid sloth and the languid debauchery of European society in those days---English gentlemen, overwhelmed with the consequences of extravagance, hampered by Hindoo women and by crowds of olive-coloured children, without either the will or the power to leave the shores of India. . . . Great men rode about in state coaches, with a dozen servants running before and behind them to bawl out their titles; and little men lounged in palanquins or drove a chariot for which they never intended to pay, drawn by horses which they had bullied or cajoled out of the stables of wealthy Baboos. . . . As a natural result there were at one time near a hundred civilians of more than thirty-five years standing who remained out here in pledge to their creditors, poisoning the principles of the younger men, and blocking out their betters from places of eminence and responsibility.’*

Paradoxical as it may seem, this very degeneracy was one of the chief reasons why Lord Cornwallis and his successors tended to keep all the higher offices in the hands of Europeans. The decay of the Mogul Empire was a terrible warning, which was always in the minds of the earlier Indian administrators. Governor-Generals, coming straight from England and shocked by the habits of their countrymen, would naturally think that the only hope of saving the Empire was to bring out trained and uncorrupted men from England. As Cornwallis wrote to the Court of Directors,* ‘I think it must be universally admitted that without a large and well-regulated body of Europeans, our hold of these valuable dominions must be very insecure’. There is also some force in the argument used by Kaye, that

‘it was not so much that Cornwallis and his advisers mistrusted the native, as that they mistrusted the European functionaries. . . . He saw that the native functionary in the hands of his European colleague, or superior, might become a very mischievous tool---a ready-made instrument of extortion---and he determined, therefore, not to mix up the two agencies so perilously together’.*

It is unfortunate that the first Indians whom the Company should have taken into its service were drawn from a much-conquered race living in an enervating climate, and lacking the moral fibre which would have enabled them to stand up against individual Europeans or Zemindars, even when these should be engaged in illegal transactions. We must date from Cornwallis the definite europeanisation of all the higher posts in the administration. By the time that the two main arguments in its favour had ceased to have any force the process had gone so far that there were vested interests and much prejudice against its reversal.

In a very short time, the native inhabitants of British India were left without any worthy objects of ambition. Their only chance of rising to anything better than positions of humiliating subordination was service in Indian States, a sphere which rapidly contracted.

This change of policy can be seen clearly in the sphere of justice. Under Warren Hastings and Macpherson the criminal courts, outside Calcutta, were staffed by Muslim officers, administering Muslim law; the official language was Persian, and Oriental punishments, such as mutilation and branding, were habitually inflicted. European Collectors only acted as committing magistrates. Cornwallis, before leaving England, received certain instructions about reforming these courts, but the only alteration in his first Regulations of 1787 was to empower European Collectors to deal with minor offences, and inflict corporal punishment ‘not exceeding fifteen rattans, or imprisonment not exceeding fifteen days’. For three years the Governor-General consulted with judges and officials, and on December 3, 1790, he produced the new Regulations, which were to be the basis of criminal administration for the next forty years. The preamble explained the changes as due to ‘the numerous robberies, murders, and other enormities which have been daily committed throughout the country’. The old courts were swept away. In their place four Courts of Circuit were set up, each under two judges chosen from the covenanted civil service. By these the Company assumed criminal jurisdiction in Bengal (1790). Cornwallis told the Directors:*

‘Your possessions in this country cannot be said to be well-governed, nor the lives and property of your subjects to be secure, until the shocking abuses and the wretched administration of justice in the Foujdary department can be corrected.’

Part of this abuse was the principle of Islamic law that no Muslim couldbe capitally convicted on the evidence of an infidel:

In order that Hindoos and the classes of people not of the Mahomedan persuasion (who form at least nine-tenths of the inhabitants of your territories) may enjoy equal security of person and property with the Mahomedans, we have thought proper to abolish a distinction, the absurdity of which is too glaring to require a comment.’*

In 1793 he established four provincial Courts of Appeal, each under three judges, at Patna, Dacca, Murshidabad, and Calcutta. These judges were also Judges of Circuit; the old Courts of Circuit were done away with. He ordered that there should be two jail-deliveries in every year, and in the cities at shorter intervals still.

Muslim law was still administered, but was modified by the Regulations, in the matter of validity of infidel evidence and in other ways. Restrictions were placed upon the right of the heir of a slain man to pardon the murderer, and imprisonment was substituted for mutilation.* There was little interference with Indian customs, even where these clearly offended European susceptibilities, but it is possible to trace the beginning of a revulsion against certain Hindu rites in the evidence given some ten years later, when the working of the criminal and civil courts was reviewed by a commission. The first step in the direction was taken by Lord Wellesley, who made illegal the dedication of children to the sacred water at Saugor Point, and thus established a precedent for the abolition of ‘suttee’ by Lord William Bentinck.

Apart from minor changes, the general structure of the criminal courts remained unaltered until 1831, when the system was revised by Bentinck. It had degenerated by that time, but in these earlier years it was probably an improvement on the older methods. The Courts of Circuit held their jail-deliveries at regular intervals, and there was not the accumulation of arrears which became such an unhappy feature of the civil courts. The weakness of the criminal administration lay in the detection of crime, and Lord Cornwallis entirely reformed the police system in 1792. Each district was divided into thanas under the charge of a daroga, and these were under the direct control of the district judge. The Zemindars were deprived of all police authority. In 1808 Superintendents of Police were appointed in three districts, and in 1827 this organisation was extended throughout the province. The so-called thanadari system has survived till to-day, and is probably the most efficient basis for police work. It has not been successful in Bengal, partly because of physical conditions, partly from the lack of popular support in the eradication of dacoity. This has remained a characteristic of Bengal throughout the British occupation. In 1852 Lord Dalhousie complained that gang-robberies were increasing, and Sir Bhupendranath Basu observed to Mr. Edwin Montagu in 1918 that even in the ’eighties he knew ‘very respectable men who went the greater part of the journey stark naked in order to show the dacoits that they had no money on them’.* The prevalence of dacoity was one of the main arguments used in favour of the Partition of Bengal, and the revival of political dacoities during recent years shows how strong is the tradition. Elsewhere the thanadari system has been the basis of a cheap and fairly effective police force.

Radical changes were also made in the administration of civil law. The system as left by Warren Hastings had two defects. The Collectors who presided over the district courts were neither skilled in law nor interested in this work, which lay outside and additional to their ordinary routine. Also they might be tempted to misuse their position, either to defend their actions as revenue officials or to further their private interests. Although private trading was forbidden, it had been on too large a scale to cease immediately, and it was known that some Collectors still retained commercial interests through their friends.* The only advantage of Hastings’s rough and ready system was that it did little to encourage litigation. Cornwallis was actuated by two motives, both unimpeachable in theory. He wished to make civil law cheap and accessible, and have a well-defined law administered by disinterested judges. Accordingly in 1793 he issued a new set of Regulations, re-enacting nearly all his criminal reforms of 1790, but entirely altering the system of civil jurisdiction. He appointed twenty-eight judges in the districts, and further strengthened the four Courts of Circuit, which now became also civil courts of appeal. Below these were a number of Indian Sadar Amins and ‘Commissioners’, the Munsiffs of a later date, and these heard minor civil cases. The judges were European civil servants, entirely divorced from all revenue work, and every effort was made to give them a superior standing to the Collectors. They took over the Collectors’ magisterial work, and committed minor cases to the Courts of Circuit. At the same time Cornwallis attempted to codify the existing law and procedure into the form of Regulations, a work in which that remarkable Orientalist, Sir William Jones, was to take a leading part. It was an honest attempt to establish the rule of law by men who had an exaggerated respect for the English legal system and little knowledge of the character of the Indian population.

Lord Cornwallis’s reforms did not have the same devastating effect as the Regulating Act of 1773, but they led to a very severe outbreak of litigation, which was only partially checked by reviving the old system of the deposit-fee, which had been abandoned. By 1802, nine years after the formation of the new courts, the European district judges had heard 8298 cases, but had over 12,000 cases pending, while the Indian Commissioners and ‘Registers’ had heard 342,184 cases, and had 149,827 cases on their files. It was a period when the law’s delays were a proverbial source of misery and oppression in nearly every civilised country, but in Bengal these evils were intensified by the existence of professional informers and witnesses, by the small regard felt for perjury, and by the litigiousness of the Zemindars, who found in the law a suitable outlet for their energies. Their combativeness was not absorbed, as in other countries, by the development of their estates or by sport.* Reading through a mass of evidence given before various parliamentary committees, one gains the impression that the Cornwallis reforms in civil and criminal law were effective in checking the tyranny of the revenue collectors and preventing violence, but that they encouraged the more subtle oppression of the money-lender and the lawyer; and from their insistence upon formal evidence they increased the difficulty of suppressing organised dacoity.

Chapter III

Final Defeat of Tipu Sultan

Lord Wellesley on Sir John Shore: a solitary Governor-General: the subsidiary system: French mercenaries: Tipu’s intrigues: the last Mysore War: fall of Seringapatam and death of Tipu: the Nizam’s methods of collecting revenue: Wellesley and his honours: campaign against Dhundia Wagh: pacification of Malabar: rivalries of military and civilians: settlement of Mysore.

In May, 1798, Lord Mornington, whom for convenience, following usual practice, we will speak of by his family name of Wellesley, arrived, accompanied by his brother Henry as private secretary. He was only thirty-seven years old, and brought to his work a never-surpassed energy; a vigour and centralisation ensued, in which, as in many other features, his rule anticipated Lord Curzon’s viceroyalty. His despatches are stiff, verbose, dull, void of sympathy, humour, or imagination. But the mind behind them was merciless in pursuit of a few clear aims.

He found enough to set right, and wrote in a tempest of exasperation of ‘the folly of having placed Sir John Shore’ (now happily occupied with evangelical affairs in England) ‘in the government-general’:

‘His low birth, vulgar manners, and eastern habits, as well as his education in the Company’s service, his natural shyness and awkwardness, added to indolence, timidity, and bad health, contributed to relax every spring of this government from one extremity of the empire to the other; and at the seat of the government established a systematical degradation of the person, dignity and authority of the Governor-General. . . . The effect of this state of things on my conduct has been to compel me to entrench myself within forms and ceremonies, to introduce much state into the whole appearance of my establishments and household, and to expel all approaches to familiarity, and to exercise my authority with a degree of vigour and strictness nearly amounting to severity. At the same time I endeavour as much as is compatible with the duties imposed on me by the remissness of Sir John Shore, to render my table pleasant to those whom I admit to it and to be easy of access to everybody. I am resolved to encounter the task of effecting a thorough reform in private manners here, without which the time is not distant when the Europeans settled in Calcutta will control the government if they do not overturn it. My temper and character are now perfectly understood; and while I remain, no man will venture hiscere vocem, who has not made up his mind to grapple instantly with the whole force of government.’*

He quickly had every subordinate grovelling. We hear no more of mutinous combinations of officers, such as star the records both before and after him. Lake, his Commander-in-Chief in the Maratha War, is terror-stricken when he has to confess that he has weakly given in to his troops’ demand that the treasure taken in Agra be divided as loot. He gibbers his gratitude for a few kind words:

‘Your letter of the 30th ult. has quite overpowered me, and left me with a most grateful and feeling heart totally void of utterance. Was I to write till doomsday it would be totally impossible for me to express my sensations upon reading your letter, and can only say in return that my life will be too short to convince you by my attachment to you and yours how sincerely I partake in every circumstance that affords you satisfaction and pleasure, and if by any exertion of mine in carrying your wishes into effect, it can have in any degree proved to the world the expediency of your measures adopted upon such sound policy and judgment, I shall, to the day of my death, rejoice in the utmost that any act of mine can have added to the lustre of your high and exalted character, both public and private. . . . Your kindness has completely debilitated me, and made me shed so many tears of joy. . . . Pray excuse my saying any more, as my nerves are quite unstrung by your affectionate attention. . . .’

Wellesley himself provides the other half of the picture which such letters from the head of the armed forces suggest:

‘In the evening I have no alternative but the society of my subjects or solitude. The former is so vulgar, ignorant, rude, familiar, and stupid, as to be disgusting and intolerable; especially the ladies, not one of whom by the bye is even decently goodlooking.*

‘It is not possible to give an idea of the pleasure which I receive from your letters in this magnificent solitude, where I stalk about like a Royal Tiger, without even a friendly jackal to soothe the severity of my thoughts.’*

Though he pushed his brothers Henry and Arthur with a diligence and rapidity that the Directors (and others) thought resembled jobbery, he discouraged undue familiarity from them. The future Duke of Wellington, in particular, wrote to the Governor-General with a dry reserve contrasting greatly with his frankness to his military friends, such as Close, Malcolm and Munro. He and they grumble among themselves, like the spirits under Prospero.

It is well known that Lord Wellesley established firmly what had existed loosely before, the subsidiary system. In exchange for the protection of a British force. States accepted a Resident and general control over external activities. This force was paid for by cession of territory, which theoretically had this value for the State protected, that it became safe from vexatious interference on account of non-payment of tribute. The advantages to the British were set out by Arthur Wellesley as keeping ‘the evils of war . . . at a distance from the sources of our wealth and our power’.* The system ‘enabled the British to throw forward their military, considerably in advance of their political, frontier’.* That is, the native States became catspaws; the military frontier to an uncomfortable degree they found was the political frontier also. The discerning among their statesmen were not unaware of the virtues which the Governor-General found in the system; the Marathas in particular shied off it with a pertinacity which to the Governor-General seemed an exasperating form of bad faith, if not actual treason, a contumacy blocking his benevolent exercise of ‘general control over the restless spirit of ambition and violence which is characteristic of every Asiatic Government’.*

We have seen that the Nizam, deserted by Sir John Shore, who refused to let him use his subsidiary force against the Marathas, had been defeated by them and their French helpers in 1795. He drew Wellesley’s incensed attention by building up his own French force. France and Britain were at war; but it was French revolutionary principles that were dreaded even more than French arms. Sindhia (as we know) had numerous Frenchmen in his employment; but they were comparatively good Frenchmen, royalist and conservatively aristocratic in sympathy, commanded by the Count de Boigne, who had begun in Company service and to the end preserved friendly feelings towards his old masters. The Nizam’s Frenchmen were a ‘nest of democrats’,* or Jacobins, as the Governor-General preferred to call them; Jacobin then meant what Bolshevist means now. Wellesley achieved their disbandment, in October, 1798, by a mixture of boldness and persuasion; and the Nizam, who was beginning to get afraid of his Frenchmen, accepted an increase of his British subsidiary force.

Tipu, shorn of half his dominions, had made ‘an honourable and unusually punctual discharge’ of his huge indemnity. But he cherished an ‘inveteracy’* which ‘will end only with his life’;

‘there is sometimes a kind of infatuation about Indian chiefs who have lost a part of their dominions, which tempts them to risk the rest in a contest which they know to be hopeless’.*

Mysore had shown itself far the most formidable foe the Company had met; no subsequent wars, not even the Mutiny, were to bring them so close to ruin as Haidar’s had done. A quarrel was afoot between two adversaries who regarded each other as vermin fit only for extermination.

In 1798 Tipu sent envoys to Mauritius, who solicited French help. The Governor of Mauritius was foolish enough to issue proclamation of the fact; and 150 French and semi-French rabble went to Mysore as volunteers. Wellesley ‘was thus afforded a justification, which he eagerly accepted, for the sternest measures’.* For some months correspondence went on, of the most sweepingly dishonest cordiality on both sides. Wellesley was held up from instant war by the lack of equal zeal on the part of his subordinates and the difficulties of the Madras Government, which owed 54 lakhs and 4 lakhs of interest. The latter wrote in terms of perfunctory and conventional loyalty indicating their readiness to co-operate, but made it clear that Bengal as usual must furnish all funds:

‘Having made the most urgent and repeated applications to you, upon the state of our finances, it is unnecessary to recapitulate the subject here, but in the discussion of war, a matter of so much moment as monev cannot be omitted. It is our duty therefore to apprize you, in the most explicit manner, that we must rely solely and unequivocally, upon your Government, for supplies in specie . . . the scarcity of money here compels us to repeat, in the most unequivocal manner, that our means for equipping, as well as for paying the army, must depend upon the supplies of treasure which your Lordship in council may be able to send from Bengal.

‘We shall do ourselves the honour of enclosing, for your information, as soon as it can be prepared, a statement of the monthly expense of our own army in the field, together with a statement of the balance of cash in our treasury.’*

This spirit Wellesley crushed, in letters blazing with wrath. Presently his brother Arthur, who had been sent to coach the Madras Governor, Lord Clive,* was able to issue a satisfactory report:

‘He is a mild moderate man, remarkably reserved, having a bad delivery, and apparently a heavy understanding. He certainly has been unaccustomed to consider questions of the magnitude of that now before him, but I doubt whether he is so dull as he appears, or as people here imagine he is . . . at all events, you may be convinced that he will give you no trouble.’

Arthur Wellesley thought war unadvisable:

‘If we are to have a war at all, it must be one of our own creating; a justifiable one, I acknowledge; one which we may think necessary, not on account of any danger which we may immediately apprehend, but one which we suppose may eventually be the consequence of this alliance with the French and in order to punish Tippoo for a breach of faith with us.’*

But the Governor-General, in face of so many waverers, stuck to his plans:

‘I repeat it, I cannot, consistently with any sentiment of duty, consent to rest the security of the Carnatic, in the present crisis, on any other foundation than a state of active and early preparation for war.’

He used the enforced delay to make the conquest overwhelming:

‘Deeply as I lament the obstacles which have prevented us from striking an instantaneous blow against the possessions of Tippoo, I expect to derive considerable advantage from the success of that system, of precaution and defence which I have been compelled to substitute in place of an immediate war.’*

He ordered the Nizam and Peshwa to get ready to fulfil their engagements of alliance. The former responded, the latter procrastinated. Correspondence continued, flowery in the extreme. Tipu exhorted Wellesley to ‘gratify me continually with your messages’: Wellesley invited Tipu to share his exultation in the French defeat at Aboukir. At last Wellesley was ready. January 9, 1799, he revealed his full knowledge of the pitifully feeble intrigues of a year previously, and Tipu was warned that ‘dangerous consequences result from the delay of arduous affairs’.* He was advised, while he still had a chance, to receive Major Doveton, who would explain terms on which a lasting friendship might be established. These terms, though Tipu did not yet know this, included not only final and irrevocable dismissal of all French and the reception of an English Resident, but cession of his Malabar sea-coast and of territory to compensate Nizam and Marathas for the annoyance and expense of preparing for war. Arthur Wellesley objected to these as not merely hard, but unnecessary:

I think it will be difficult hereafter to prevail upon any French to adventure in this country when it will be known that Tippoo has sent away those whom he took into his service under the terms of the most solemn treaty. In the next place, I don’t think that we have any right to expect that he should give up territory without a war, which even the most successful war might not enable us to gain.’*

Tipu reported that he had ‘been made happy by the receipt of your Lordship’s two friendly letters’.* The news of Aboukir

‘have given me more pleasure than can possibly be conveyed by writing. Indeed I possess the firmest hope that the leaders of the English and the Company Bahauder, who ever adhere to the paths of sincerity, friendship, and good faith, and are the well wishers of mankind, will at all times be successful and victorious, and that the French, who are of a crooked disposition, faithless, and the enemies of mankind, may be ever depressed and ruined. . . . Would to God that no impression had been produced on my mind by that dangerous people; but your Lordship’s situation enables you to know that they have reached my presence, and have endeavoured to pervert the wisdom of my councils, and to instigate me to war against those who have given me no provocation.’

He goes on to his often-quoted and rather pitiful attempt to wriggle out of what had been discovered:

‘In this Sircar (the gift of God) there is a mercantile tribe, who employ themselves in trading by sea and land. Their agents purchased a two-masted vessel, and having loaded her with rice, departed with a view to traffic. It happened that she went to the Mauritius, from whence forty persons, French and of a dark colour, of whom ten or twelve were artificers, and the rest servants, paying the hire of the ship, came here in search of employment. Such as chose to take service were entertained, and the remainder departed beyond the confines of this Sircar (the gift of God); and the French, who are full of vice and deceit, have perhaps taken advantage of the departure of the ship to put about reports with the view to ruffle the minds of both Sircars.’

Colonel Wellesley was shown to have been right in maintaining that Tipu would be only too glad to get out of ‘the scrape’.* But the Governor-General ‘swept away ruthlessly and cavalierly, as disingenuous and insulting, the confused and embarrassed letters written to him by his cowering victim’.* The time had struck for swift and strong advance; in England, also, things were going splendidly:

‘As to our civil and domestic situation it is equal to the proudest wish of our hearts. . . . No democrat dare show his face---Government popular in every alehouse---Our Commerce and revenue flourishing beyond all former example.’*

The waters of Tipu’s doom sounded continually nearer. His mind settled

‘into a hopeless and fatalistic despair. He could not steel himself to make any further sacrifice of his already diminished territories. He resembles a sullen and huddled figure, passively awaiting the coup de grâce of a victorious enemy. In the vivid narrative of Wilks the form of Tippu stands out against a sombre and lurid background; the fate-laden atmosphere is almost that of Greek tragedy’.*

His adversary, exultant in having at his disposal the ‘finest army which ever took the field in India’, flung his net. He wrote to Lord Grenville (February, 1799): ‘I have had the satisfaction to succeed completely in drawing the Beast of the jungle into the toils’. In the same month two armies invaded Mysore; one under General Stuart, from the Bombay side, routed Tipu at Periapatam, the other---which the Sultan hastily withdrew to encounter---routed him at Malaveli. The latter army pressed on to Seringapatam, an extraordinarily swift movement straight to the heart. The story grows Roman in its deepening and calculated and undeviating ruthlessness; Tipu becomes a Hannibal or Jugurtha at bay. ‘The dark obstinacy of the Sultan’s mind’ grew clouded with omens, a battlefield of conflicting superstitions:

‘the moolla and the bramin were equally bribed to interpose their prayers for his deliverance, his own attendance at the mosque was frequent, and his devotions impressive, and he entreated the fervent amen of his attendants to his earnest and reiterated prayers; the vain science of every sect was put in requisition, to examine the influence of the planets, and interpret their imaginary decision. To all the period for delusion appeared to have ceased, and all announced extremity of peril.’*

Making a last appeal to his implacable hunters, he was told (April 27) that he must surrender all his maritime territories and half his dominions besides, and that half of a ruinous indemnity must be paid with the sending of his ambassadors, who must also he accompanied by four of his sons and four generals as hostages. He responded with ‘mixed indications rather of grief than rage, finally subsiding into a silent stupor, from which he seldom seemed to wake’. Wilks’s description of his council of war when the certainty of destruction could not by any exercise of imagination be any longer hidden is very moving. Crazed with humiliation, Tipu cried that it was ‘better to die like a soldier, than to live a miserable dependent on the infidels, in the list of their pensioned rajas and nabobs’. The ‘solemn air and visible distress of their sovereign’* wrought on his officers, who called out tumultuously and with tears that they would die with him. On the parapet of the besiegers’ trench appeared ‘in full, view of both armies, a military figure suited to such a scene’. It was Major-General Baird, leader of the stormers, embodiment of vengeful memories and pitiless resolution. The columns swept forward (May 4), and Seringapatam was stormed. Tipu, desperately wounded, was killed by a British soldier anxious to detach the gold buckle of his sword-belt:

‘to complete our good fortune his body was found among about 500 others piled one upon the other in a very narrow compass. All his family and treasures fell into our hands that night, excepting Futteh Hyder and Abdul Kaliz. The latter came in and gave himself up the next morning’.*

His death glutted the conquerors’ passion for vengeance, which had been raised to a fever by news that he had strangled prisoners taken in the present campaign. He was allowed honourable burial, this man who had carried into death such a vivacity of hatred that Arthur Wellesley, standing over him in the flicker of torchlight, could not believe him dead until he had felt his pulse and heart. His sons were treated by the Governor-General with kindness; there was nothing of vengeance or indiscriminate cruelty.

Arthur Wellesley, a young colonel of just thirty, who had not been in the actual fighting, was given the extremely lucrative post of commandant in Seringapatam, a cruel injustice to Baird. ‘Before the sweat was dry on my brow, I was superseded by an inferior officer.’ Arthur Wellesley described for his brother his taking over. As the fighting had been exceedingly severe, so was the final storming, a setting free of pent-up resentments:

‘Nothing therefore can have exceeded what was done on the night of the 4th. Scarcely a house in the town was left unplundered, and I understand that in camp jewels of the greatest value, bars of gold, &c., &c., have been offered for sale in the bazaars of the army by our soldiers, sepoys, and followers. I came in to take the command on the morning of the 5th, and by the greatest exertion, by hanging, flogging, &c., &c., in the course of that day I restored order among the troops, and I hope I have gained the confidence of the people. They are returning to their houses and beginning again to follow their occupations, but the property of every one is gone.’

The Commander-in-Chief (Harris) and six general officers were censured in England for their greedy over-appropriation of prize-money. The Governor-General declined £100,000 offered him, on the ground that it was due to the military; and took only a star and badge of the Order of St. Patrick, made of Tipu’s jewels. However, the Directors in 1801 gave him an annuity of £5000.

It was universally acknowledged in India that the storming of Seringapatam was a success equal to Plassey that had established the Company as one of ‘the country powers’; this made them in fact the Power paramount. It was admitted that this feat of ruthless planning and rapid execution was the Governor-General’s achievement, first of all. From perusal of the contemporary literature we get the impression (which is severely accurate) that ‘glory’ and ‘glorious’ were the most esteemed words. European literature of this period differentiated much in the varieties of homo sapiens, and ‘the man of feeling’ was a kind much praised. But the ‘feeling’ did not move beyond a turgid insincerity of response to natural sights catalogued as ‘sublime’, or such sentiments as we find in the inventor of Ossian. In all the voluminous matter which the historian of Indian affairs must peruse, only Burke (the much-abused Burke) reveals a genuine remorse for what ordinary people endured.

Tipu’s memory has been stereotyped into that of monster pure and simple. But his character was ‘perhaps unique in Oriental history’.* He had a spirit of innovation and curiosity recalling Akbar’s; a new calendar, new scale of weights and measures, new coinage, occupied his energy. But he was a bigot, whereas Akbar and his own father Haidar were examples of extreme tolerance. He was determined to extirpate intoxicants and drugs, even forbidding the growth of henna in gardens. Brave himself, he evoked the extreme of reckless loyal co-operation in others. His industry was as unremitting as that of his great opposer, his anxiety to strengthen his country with Western science and achievement was even free from religious hesitations. He was guilty, repeatedly, and against his British prisoners generally, of abominable cruelty. Yet British officers, grown accustomed to the wretchedness and servility of the peasants in their own province of Madras, were astonished by the flourishing condition of Mysore. It was usual then, as in more recent times, to dismiss poverty as self-induced; the poor are notoriously lazy, shiftless and thriftless. The poor of the East, in particular, are incapable, because of climatic rigours, of real application. Sir Thomas Munro, however, declared of the Madras ryots (May 10, 1796): ‘They owe their poverty to their government, and neither to their idleness nor the sun’. Sir John Shore testified of Tipu, on the other hand, that ‘the peasantry of his dominions are protected, and their labours encouraged and rewarded’.* Mr. P. E. Roberts supports this evidence with other evidence from men ‘whose normal sympathies would have been pre-eminently British’.*] A surprising unanimity on this point exists in his conquerors.*

There is equal unanimity about the experiences of the wretched people whom we handed over after each war to our faithful ally the Nizam. John Malcolm has left an eye-witness’s (his own) account of that potentate’s method of collecting revenue (with British assistance):*

‘The scene which presented itself to the British officer was beyond all description shocking. The different quotas to be paid by each inhabitant had been fixed; and every species of torture was then being inflicted to enforce it. Men and women, poor and rich, were suffering promiscuously. Some had heavy muskets fastened to their ears; some large stones upon their breasts; whilst others had their fingers pinched with hot pincers. Their cries of agony and declarations of inability to pay appeared only to whet the appetite of their tormentors. Most of those not under their hands seemed in a state of starvation. Indeed, they were so far distracted with hunger, that many of them, without distinction of sect, devoured what was left by the European officer and Sepoys from their dinner.’

This is the forgotten background of that never-pausing transference of lakhs to the use of the rajas’ and nabobs’ and nizams’ masters.

Tipu’s hatred of the English made his extermination their necessity, and is usually held to justify the distinction that Haidar Ali had just complaint against the Company (but for whose support of their Nawab there probably would never have been the first two Mysore wars), but that Tipu was the offender in the final quarrel. We do not propose to offer any guidance on this question; the relevant facts have been put before the reader. It is admitted that in every particular except energy and personal valour (in the latter he excelled his father*) he was inferior to Haidar Ali. Haidar first discussed a matter, and then decided; Tipu reversed the process. His was a temperament which operated by paroxysm and subsidence.

We have seen that Wellesley with a fine disdain abandoned the material spoils to the soldiers. It would have been well if he had let his achievement rest thus. But his haughty and imperious spirit, like Hotspur’s, was the most covetous of honour of any alive, and by honour his age understood the outward stars which signified it to the world. He wrote to Lord Grenville:

‘You will gain credit by conferring some high and brilliant honour upon me immediately. The garter would be much more acceptable to me than any additional title, nor would any title be an object which should not raise me to the same rank which was given to Lord Cornwallis.’*

When all he obtained was an Irish marquisate, he went almost out of his wits:

‘I cannot conceal my anguish of mind . . . I will confess openly that as I was confident there had been nothing Irish or pinchbeck in my conduct or in its results, I felt an equal confidence that I should find nothing Irish or pinchbeck in my reward.’

He signed this letter (April, 1800) ‘Mornington (not having yet received my double-gilt potato)’. The wounded mind continued, with an iteration dreadful to contemplate, to turn in and upon its own exulceration; he writes (May, 1800) of having ‘to remain a country gentleman to the end of my days, talking over Indian politics with Major Massacre and Mrs. Hastings, and the Major Majorum, not forgetting Major Aprorum’. Five months later:

‘I attribute all my sufferings to the disgust and indignation with which I received the first intelligence of the King’s acceptance of my services, and to the agonizing humiliation with which I have since learnt the effect of my Irish honours in every quarter of India. Never was so lofty a pride so abased; never was reward so effectually perverted to the purposes of degradation and dishonour. . . .’*

As this generation knows, the heart-burning which accompanies the distribution of decorations after a campaign is felt most fiercely in the breasts of the highest. Such a mind as this was easy to hurt to the quick.

Tipu’s family were removed to Vellore, where they were encouraged to occupy themselves innocuously:

‘There ought to be no restriction whatever upon the Princes taking as many women, either as wives or concubines, as they may think proper. They cannot employ their money in a more harmless way; and the consideration of the future expense of the support of a few more women, after their death, is trifling. Let them marry whom they please. Their marriages . . . only create an additional number of dependents and poor connexions, and additional modes of spending their money.’*

His Muhammadan chieftains had nearly all fallen in battle, a circumstance greatly easing the pacification.

Two minor campaigns completed the cleaning-up. The first was against a Maratha, Dhundia Wagh, whom Tipu had circumcised and then imprisoned; in the final confusion Dhundia had escaped, and was trying to establish some power of his own. He had the distinction of furnishing Colonel Wellesley with his first independent campaign, one carried through with immense enjoyment and complete success. Dhundia’s followers were refused quarter, ‘for the purpose of deterring others from similar enormities’; and after he had been slain (September, 1800) his conqueror drew this satisfying conclusion: ‘We have now proved (a perfect novelty in India) that we can hunt down the lightest footed and most rapid armies as well as we can destroy heavy troops and storm strong fortifications’.

Malabar was pacified simultaneously. The Nairs---‘I am informed, gentlemen, and probably the idlest of that character’*---Moplahs, and other turbulent inhabitants of the Wynaad and the Malabar highlands had been for many years in standing revolt against Haidar and Tipu. They now found themselves rebels against the British, and the Iron Duke ‘was unsparing in the chastisement of red-handed rebellion’:*

‘It will give you pleasure to hear from Piele of our complete success in the Bullum country. We took the Rajah on the 9th, and hanged him and six others on the 10th. . . . ’*

Chased into his own homelands, the Raja had been captured starving, when he ventured out in search of food. Three hundred of his headmen were collected for what the editor of the Duke of Wellington’s Indian papers has styled ‘the edifying spectacle of the public execution of the most guilty’, related by Colonel Wellesley ‘with grim jocularity’: ‘They witnessed the suspension of the Rajah and their brethren’.* Colonel Wellesley, however, stood out against the government of a country permanently by what is called military law:

‘I am fully aware that the military gentlemen in Malabar are exceedingly anxious to establish what they call military law. Before I should consent to the subversion of one system of law, and to the establishment of another, I should be glad to know what the new law was to be; and I have never procured from any of those gentlemen yet a definition of their own idea of military law. I understand military law to be the law of the sword, and, in well-regulated and disciplined armies, to be the will of the General.*

In all this he had the assistance of Tipu’s Hindu minister Purnaya, who showed great energy in obtaining from the Raja before execution a full inventory of his possessions of all sorts and in keeping his headmen hostages until they had paid up two and a half years’ revenue. ‘Pur- neah’s abilities have astonished me.’*

The Marathas had given no assistance against Tipu, and there is reason to believe that, if the British success had been less swiftly achieved, the Peshwa would have taken the field beside the Sultan’s armies. Wellesley, however, offered the Peshwa a share of the annexed territory, which the Poona Resident was instructed to intimate in the following terms:

‘You will proceed to inform him that it is my intention, under certain conditions, to make a considerable cession of territory to him, provided his conduct shall not in the interval have been such as to have rendered all friendly intercourse with him incompatible with the honour of the British Government.’

The conditions amounted to an abrogation of independence. He was to accept absolutely the Company’s arbitration of all his disputes, present and future, with the Nizam; to promise the perpetual exclusion of the French, and to make a defensive alliance against any French invasion. A subsidiary force was pressed upon him, but as yet not actually commanded. With this offer Nana Farnavis would have closed, but his master, after ‘vexatious and illusory discussion’, ‘faithless conduct’, ‘temporizing policy and studied evasion’,* which pained the Governor-General intensely, refused it. The Nizam took his share of annexed Mysore, but with grumblings stigmatised as manifestations of ‘the illiberal, rapacious, and vindictive spirit of which I have perceived so many disgusting symptoms at Hyderabad, even since the fall of Seringapatam’.*

Arthur Wellesley advised his brother

‘not to put the Company upon the Mahratta frontier. It is impossible to expect to alter the nature of the Mahrattas; they will plunder their neighbours, be they ever so powerful. . . . It will be better to put one of the powers in dependence upon the Company on the frontier, who, if plundered, are accustomed to it, know how to bear it and to retaliate, which we do not’.*

The Company accordingly took the whole of the Mysore sea-board and big eastern strips. A much shrunken, but still large, Mysore was restored to the Hindu dynasty which Haidar had deposed, and became a vassal State. Purnaya as Dewan governed it vigorously and ably, and strengthened Arthur Wellesley’s excellent opinion of him. When the latter left India he sent Purnaya his portrait and an exceedingly cordial letter.

Cornwallis, when he annexed half of Tipu’s dominions, was hampered by the almost entire absence of officials conversant with any Indian language; Madras possessed not a single one. The soldiers were better, in every way; and he had used Read and Munro, two admirable men. Yet when Munro later applied to be made permanent in the work he had begun so ably, Cornwallis at first answered ‘that he could not venture to interfere, for it would bring all the civilians on his head’.* Wellesley, however, resisted the civilians, fortified by his brother Arthur’s objection to ‘the Madras sharks’:

’I intend to ask to be brought away with the army if any civil servant of the Company is to be here, or any person with civil authority who is not under my orders, for I know that the whole is a system of job and corruption from beginning to end, of which I and my troops would be made the instruments.’*

The affairs of Mysore were accordingly settled by a band of Commissioners whose brilliance equalled that of the famous band who settled the Punjab fifty years later. They included Arthur and Henry Wellesley---the Governor-General’s persistent pushing of his brothers into one first-rate job after another excited the jealousy of officers less fortunately connected, and was one of the causes which roused in the Directors such disapproval and distrust that they finally recalled him---Colonel Barry Close, whom Arthur Wellesley styled ‘the ablest man in the diplomatic line in India’,* and, as secretaries, Munro and Malcolm. India was at last attracting the services of the best class of British; the growing arrogance of the conquerors, which in the next twenty years was to set such deep estrangement between the races, was for a long while mitigated and its results in certain regions postponed, by the labours of men whom both India and Britain should always remember with gratitude. Such men as Malcolm, Metcalfe, Close, Munro, Elphinstone, Tod were the very crown of all that any country in the whole history of empires can show, and their service was unselfish and filled with respect and understanding of the countries they administered. Several of them began their work in these formative and important years.

Chapter IV

Campaigns of Assaye and Laswari

Nana Farnavis: Arthur Wellesley on Maratha affairs: Maratha dissensions and wars: the Peshwa re-established by the Company: death of Farnavis: Sindhia and the Bhonsla Raja: Lake’s and Arthur Wellesley’s campaigns: war with Holkar: Nana Farnavis’s widow well deserving of a pension: misfortunes in campaign against Holkar: failure before Bharatpur: the Mogul Emperor and Delhi.

During the century’s last half-decade most of the great leaders of native India passed away, and relationships changed rapidly. The Nizam, after his humiliation in the brief period of his desertion, emerged as the Company’s dependent, by his helplessness promoted to, and held rigorously in, a firm alliance very distasteful to him. Ahalya Bai died 1795; her commander-in-chief, Tukoji Holkar, died 1797. Mahadaji Sindhia, who had formed such a queer friendship (if that be the word) for Warren Hastings, died 1794. The new Sindhia, Daulat Rao, was a lesser man, and Jeswant Rao, the Holkar who succeeded in establishing himself, a reckless guerilla who boasted that his fortune was on his saddle-bow. A new Peshwa, who was to prove a monster of duplicity and cruelty, Baji Rao II, succeeded in 1796.

The greatest Indian statesman of the eighteenth century, Nana Farnavis, through perilous decades had kept his nation, the Marathas, from falling under the Company’s all-conquering sway. Courteously and without giving offence adequate for war, he had put by numerous invitations to walk into the parlour where Nizam, and Nawabs of Oudh, Bengal, the Carnatic, and several smaller rulers, were being entertained. Even when the Nizam excited Wellesley’s indignation by flirting with the French, the Governor-General noted approvingly:* ‘Nana has too much wisdom to involve the Mahratta Empire in such desperate connections’. The Nana, however, was imprisoned by Sindhia, and released only after ten lakhs had been squeezed out of him. He came out broken in spirit and health, to take office under a Peshwa who hated and distrusted him. There was a complete slump in Maratha character at this time, an anarchy and desperate wickedness such as followed Ranjit Singh’s death in the Punjab, 1839. As in that instance, it led to the coming of the British.

Wellesley had wished to ensure a moderate, but not excessive, enhancement of the Nizam’s and Peshwa’s strengths, as a counterpoise to Tipu. We are to-day sensitive about the charge that in India we act on the high Roman maxim, divide et impera. In the eighteenth century it was statesmanship’s normal aim, and no one saw any hurt in it. Arthur Wellesley notes---and his attitude may be taken as that of everyone else, and the reader saved from wearisome iteration:

‘There may be some who imagine that the best thing that could happen to us would be to see the Mahratta government crumble to pieces, and upon its ruins the establishment of a number of petty states. With those who think thus I differ entirely. Not only we should not be able to insure the tranquillity of our own frontiers, and could not expect to keep out our enemy, but we should weaken the only balance remaining against the power of the Nizam. This, it is true, is contemptible at present, but in the hands of able men might be turned to our disadvantage . . . we ought to have such a balance as would always keep the Nizam’s state in order. With this view the Mahratta power, as it stood prior to Lord Cornwallis’s war, ought to be preserved if possible, and we ought with equal care to avoid its entire destruction and the junction in one body of all the members of the Mahratta empire.’*

There are ideas in these words which later fuller knowledge caused the writer to abandon---for example, the belief that ‘the Mahratta government’ was in any way a unitary State on the lines of such governments as European States. Also, Arthur Wellesley was to come entirely over to his brother’s frankly annexationist attitude, and to scoff at the notion that Indian States were independent Powers such as those that spent the eighteenth century rearranging the European chessboard; they both later concurred in an entirely reckless and high-handed disposal of their ‘allies’ and semi-allies.

Historians darken counsel by angrily stressing the wickedness of the Marathas at this time. There is usually, however, some degree of precedence in scoundrelism; and, as we have seen, the Company possessed a flair for supporting the more villainous of rival claimants. They did so now, in Wellesley’s incessant meddling with the Marathas; and did it without the excuse of ignorance. In the despatches and correspondence of everyone, the Governor-General included, ‘imbecility’ in conduct and ‘duplicity’ in character are the words automatically ascribed to his Highness the Peshwa. From first to last there is no expression, even of the vaguest, to indicate that anyone was ever so hardy as to hope to find in him a glimmer of ability or elementary decency. Nor was it easy as yet for the people of India to distinguish the Company from the other predatory Powers belabouring them. The Company’s administration had known a noble interval under Cornwallis; but so had even Indore, home of the robber Holkar, during the far longer rule of Ahalya Bai. We need not take into account questions of moral turpitude, then, except where they definitely influence the course of events.

The biographer of Elphinstone, who was to be the main instrument of British business with the Marathas during so many years, says of Wellesley’s Maratha transactions: ‘Our interference in their quarrels must be admitted to have been openly aggressive’.*

When Nana Farnavis died (March, 1800), ‘with him . . . departed all the wisdom and moderation of the Mahratta government’.* He had private virtues equal to his public abilities: ‘a man of strict veracity, numane, frugal and charitable’. He died with a mind filled with foreboding for the ruin he saw coming on his people. It came swiftly. By treachery Baji Rao obtained the person of Jeswant Rao Holkar’s brother, and amused himself watching him being trampled to death by an elephant. This deed broke up what little chance there might have been of a united Maratha front. Jeswant Rao swept up to Poona (October, 1802), and routed Sindhia and his brother’s murderer. The Peshwa fled to Bassein and applied to the British for assistance (December). Colonel Close negotiated the Treaty of Bassein (1803); the Governor-General had found the pretext for interference which he had sought so long and assiduously:

‘This crisis of affairs appeared to me to afford the most favourable opportunity for the complete establishment of the interests of the British power in the Mahratta empire, without the hazard of involving us in a contest with any party.’*

Wellesley had only one quality of greatness---tremendous driving power and concentration towards an end. He went through his time in India without picking up a single new idea, acting throughout on the analogy of the European governments which he knew before coming out. From first to last remote from the truths of the Indian situation, he judged aloof in doctrinaire fashion, so rigorously repressing any approach other than servile and subordinate, that enlightenment could come to him only within strict limits. Holkar, the most vigorous of all the Maratha chiefs, was of illegitimate birth; therefore Wellesley thought ‘Holkar’s accidental power’ something which could be easily set aside. Holkar was in open revulsion from the Peshwa, Sindhia was mainly exercised far outside his home territories (in a prolonged effort to make himself the actual overlord of the Mogul Empire); both were usually rivals. The Gaekwar had long acquiesced in tepid friendship with the Company; the Bhonsla Raja was wavering between Peshwa and Sindhia, and himself claimed the legal headship of all Marathas; the Peshwa theoretically was merely first minister of the Satara Raja. Yet Wellesley writes of ‘the constitution of the Mahratta empire’, as if the field of concepts covered by the word ‘constitution’ were one in familiar Indian use, and as if this loosely feudal congeries were an ‘empire’! When war became likely, he stressed the urgency of shattering ‘the French state erected by M. Perron on the banks of the Jumna’---as if a gang of mercenaries, cut off by the Revolution from France and without access to the sea, and in any case anxious only to make their plunder safe (which could only be, as they well knew, by the Company’s protection), really were part of Napoleon’s strength and effort! Everyone but the Governor-General knew the facts, but none dare tell him:

‘The more I see of the Mahrattas, the more convinced I am that they never could have any alliance with the French. The French, on their arrival, would want equipments, which would cost money, or money to procure them; and there is not a Mahratta in the whole country, from the Peshwah down to the lowest horseman, who has a shilling, or who would not require assistance from them.’*

In point of fact, the Marathas were the least dangerous enemies of the Company in India. Referring to Nizam and Zaman Shah (ruler of Kabul, and now in possession of Lahore, and a great bugbear to the British), Arthur Wellesley wrote: ‘I am convinced that, were the Mahrattas to overturn both the Mohamedan powers, we should be more secure than at present’.

All India knew that the Company had not a single willing ally, except the petty Raja of Coorg; that even the Nizam, even when helping to break Tipu, was sullen:

‘they all do hate him
As rootedly as I’.

Yet the Governor-General, though unable to help seeing, by the Peshwa’s ‘long and systematic course of deceitful and evasive policy’, that his new dependent was irked by the bonds of friendship, nevertheless continued to press the other Marathas, Sindhia most of all, ‘to partake the benefits of the defensive alliance’, the ‘improved system’ which by the Treaty of Bassein now included their nominal master. Next, Colonel Wellesley, under no illusions---

‘there can be no doubt but that the establishment of our influence at Poonah will be highly disagreeable to the majority of the Mahratta chiefs, and that it will interfere materially with the interests of some and the objects of ambition of all’---

escorted the Peshwa back to Poona, and had opportunity of noting the ravage wrought by Holkar; his description we may accept as holding true of every region occupied by Sindhia, Holkar, or the Peshwa:

‘They have not left a stick standing at the distance of 150 miles from Poonah; they have eaten the forage and grain; they have pulled down the houses, and have used the materials as firewood; and the inhabitants are fled with their cattle. Excepting in one village, I have not seen a human creature since I quitted the neighbourhood of Meritch.’*

He goes on to say, as he said repeatedly, that sooner or later Holkar was bound to invade the Nizam, if only for subsistence. Indeed, the Maratha War was inevitable, if only because the Company’s immense sweep forward had so circumscribed the territory within which that people could levy toll. The Nizam’s dominions were their ancient hunting-ground, and now neither furnished chauth any longer nor plains for pillage. The robber-State, whose original ‘constitution’ had been forced on it by necessity and approved by Hindu India suffering under Aurangzeb’s bigotry, was in the position of a strong man forced to bay by a far stronger.

Nevertheless, the Governor-General did not wish for a Maratha war. He longed to gain certain advantages, the destruction of ‘the French state’, the retreat of Sindhia out of Hindustan (which would give the Company a wide connecting band of territory between Bengal and Oudh), a similar retreat of the Bhonsla Raja from Orissa (thereby connecting Bengal and the Sarkars and Carnatic), and the definite recognition of the Company as entitled to settle all disputes between Marathas and Nizam. The queer thing is that he thought he could persuade the Maratha feudal chiefs to enter into these desirable arrangements voluntarily, and that his political thinking was so stereotyped and rigidly bound within European precedents that he believed that a treaty negotiated solely with the detested Peshwa would be meekly accepted by his ‘subordinates’. His brother Arthur, writing to his fellow-officers with a freedom that he never ventured upon with ‘My dear Mornington’ (latterly, far more stiffly, ‘Sir’ and ‘Your Excellency’), very soon had the right sow by the ear:*

‘The greater experience I gain of Mahratta affairs, the more convinced I am that we have been mistaken entirely regarding the constitution of the Mahratta Empire. In fact, the Peshwa never has had exclusive power in the state: it is true, that all treaties have been negotiated under his authority, and have been concluded in his name; but the chiefs of the Empire have consented to them; and the want of this consent, on the part of any one of them, in this case, or of power in the head of the Empire, independent of these chiefs, is the difficulty of this case at the present moment.’

The Peshwa was ‘a cipher, without a particle of power’. General Wellesley had

‘long been accustomed to view these different Mahratta governments as powers not guided by any rational system of policy, or any notion of national honour, but solely by their momentary fears or loss or hope of gain.’*

There was, however, no question of their universal distrust of the Company, especially since Tipu’s fall; and no question of the anger felt by even the smallest jagirdars at the Peshwa’s treason in concluding the treaty making him a subsidiary. Resentment of that treaty was the direct cause of war; and it came because Sindhia made the mistake of thinking too much of former successes of the Marathas, in Hastings’s time, and under-assessing the Company’s enormous advance in strength.

Colonel Collins, a pertinacious but not tactful negotiator, warned Sindhia not to consult with the Bhonsla Raja, who had approached within eighty miles of his camp. Sindhia replied with insulting negligence:*

‘Dowlut Rao. . . said that he could not at present afford me the satisfaction I demanded without a violation of the faith which he had pledged to the Rajah of Berar. He then observed, that the Bhooslah was distant no more than forty coss* from thence, and would probably arrive here in the course of a few days; that, immediately after his interview with the Rajah, I should be informed whether it would be peace or war. These words he delivered with much seeming composure. I then asked him whether I must consider this declaration as final on his part, which question was answered in the affirmative by the ministers of Dowlut Rao Scindiah. . . . Neither Scindiah, nor his ministers, made any remarks on the treaty of Bassein, nor did they request a copy of it.’

The Governor-General was naturally indignant; but his considerable patience with Sindhia contrasts with his ruthlessness towards Tipu. But there was no trace of the irreconcilable hatred that both parties to the Mvsore War had cherished. British and Marathas had on the whole been humane foes, and the Marathas had been sometimes casual yet sufficiently useful allies. War, however, was plainly inevitable, and soon followed, between the Company and Sindhia and the Bhonsla Raja. Holkar held aloof, sulky and conceited; the Gaekwar gave some help to the Company, and the Peshwa, after much procrastination, furnished 3000 men (without any funds to pay them).

The Company sent out four different armies. Those from Bombay and Bengal easily overran Gujarat and Orissa. Lake’s army in the north defeated Perron at Aligarh, August 9, and the much-dreaded French officers came tumbling in, as fast as they could escape, and surrendered. Sindhia had to fight on without them, with that army of which Munro said:* ‘Its discipline, its arms, and uniform clothing, I regard merely as the means of dressing it out for the sacrifice’. The Aligarh ‘battle’ had been a ridiculous affair, and the operations which ended in Aligarh’s capture (September 4) cost altogether only 265 casualties. But the battles of Delhi (September 11) and Laswari (November 1) cost 478 and 824 casualties respectively; of the latter action, Lake wrote:*

‘These battalions are most uncommonly well appointed, have a most numerous artillery, as well served as they can possibly be, the gunners standing to their guns until killed by the bayonet, all the sepoys of the enemy behaved exceeding well, and if they had been commanded by French officers, the event would have been, I fear, extremely doubtful. I never was in so severe a business in my life or any thing like it, and pray to God I never may be in such a situation again; their army is better appointed than ours, no expense is spared whatever, they have three times the number of men to a gun we have, their bullocks, of which they have many more than we have, are of a very superior sort, all their men’s knapsacks and baggage are carried upon camels, by which means they can march double the distance. . . . These fellows fought like devils, or rather heroes.’

After his victory before Delhi, Lake had secured one of the main objectives of the Govern or-General, the person of the Emperor, who is regularly listed along with territories, etc., as if he were an inanimate piece of loot. He found him, a poor blind old man, seated under a tattered canopy. This was the ‘Shahzada’ to whom Clive and Hastings had paid such ostentatious respect.

Agra fell without a storm, October 17. Compelled to surrender to his army 24 lakhs taken with its fort, Lake wrote abjectly to the Governor-General:*

‘The army certainly expected the money, or I would not have given it them, and I think they had deserved it. I hate all money concerns, and sincerely wish I had nothing to do with this; I have ever held money in most sovereign contempt, and shall I am sure do so to the end of my life. I have only to hope I have done nothing which can displease your Lordship, as that would take from me all the satisfaction I have received from our late successes.’

It must be remembered that anything found in a city taken by storm was held to compensate the victors for their perils and exertions; Agra had not been stormed, but these Indian armies were desperate men (the Duke of Wellington has left his opinion on record) and different from the Marathas and other ‘free companies’ only in discipline of valour. Mutinies were frequent, even among the officers, and provoked quickly, especially by anything that touched what were considered legitimate perquisites.

Meanwhile, the southern army, under Arthur Wellesley, on August 11 stormed Ahmadnagar, and on September 23 won the hardest fight of the combined campaigns, at Assaye, with a loss of 2070 men, the stiffest fight in British-Indian history before the Sikh Wars. There was not much strategy about it:

‘Somebody said, “Sir! that is the enemy’s line”. The General said, “Is it? Ha, damme, so it is!” (you know his manner) and turned. . . . The 74th (I am assured and convinced) was unable to stop the enemy; and I know that the sepoys were huddled in masses, and that attempts which I saw made to form them failed; when “the genius and fortune of the Republic” brought the cavalry on to the right. They charged the enemy, drove them with great slaughter into the Joee Nulla, and so saved the 74th . . . the cavalry, which had then crossed the nulla, charged up its bank, making a dreadful slaughter but affording a most delightful spectacle to us, who were halted on the side nearest the field of battle unable to cross on account of our guns. . . . The General was going to attack a body of the enemy (from their left, I believe), who, when we had passed them, went and spiked our artillery and seized our guns, and recovered some of their own, and turned them all against our rear, which annoyed us a good deal. When the General was returning to the guns there was a heavy fire, and he had his horse killed under him . . . the General oassed the night, not in “the pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war” out on the ground, close to an officer whose leg was shot off, and within five yards of a dead officer. I got some curry and bloody water, which did not show at night, and lay down and slept without catching cold.’*

A triumph so overwhelming softened the Governor-General into brotherly cordiality:*

‘My dear Arthur,

You will conceive the pride and delight with which I received the details of your most splendid victory’;

and General Wellesley, having vaguely arranged a suspension of hostilities with Sindhia, proceeded to complete his work by scattering the Bhonsla Raja’s forces at Argaon (November 29), where Sindhia’s cavalry joined in a half-hearted resistance:

‘I had no narrow escapes this time, and I felt quite unconcerned, never winced, nor cared how near the shot came about the worst time; and all the time I was at pains to see how the people looked, and every gentleman seemed at ease as much as if he were riding ahunting.’*

War was passing into the knightly amusement which only the Sikh and Gurkha campaigns were to mar with roughness: ‘I stopped to load my pistols. I saw nobody afterwards but people on foot, whom I did not think it proper to touch’.* Gawilghar was stormed (December 15). The Bhonsla Raja sued for peace, and then Sindhia. The Company gained an immense accession of territorial solidity, the Marathas being driven right off the Orissa coast and the Ganges valley. Both Maratha rulers became subsidiary princes.

Sindhia’s overwhelming defeat had been largely due to his wars with Holkar, which had much weakened him; still more, to the Western training he had given his troops, which had resulted in a strengthening of his infantry at the expense of his cavalry. In the wars of this period cavalry were the determining arm. Arthur Wellesley with accustomed accuracy says:*

‘Scindiah’s armies had actually been brought to a very favourable state of discipline, and his power had become formidable by the exertions of the European officers in his service; but I think it is much to be doubted whether his power, or rather that of the Mahratta nation, would not have been more formidable, at least to the British government, if they had never had an European, as an infantry soldier, in their service, and had carried on their operations in the manner of the original Mahrattas, only by means of cavalry.’

He therefore thought (in this, as in an increasing number of questions, differing from the Governor-General) that Sindhia should be allowed to keep European assistance and advice; and ‘they should be encouraged to have infantry rather than otherwise’.* For the present, the British had routed Sindhia and the Bhonsla, and saved their excellent Peshwa:

‘It is proper that the Peshwah should be informed, that, from the highest man in his state, to the lowest, there is not one who will trust him, or will have any connexion or communication with him, excepting through the mediation, and under the guarantee, of the British government.’*

He ‘has no public feeling, and his private disposition is terrible’; was without subjects,* except when a British force was actually at his back; and had no desires except money for sensual pleasures, and that what he called ‘rebels’ should be caught by his protectors and handed over to his vengeance. The Deccan, after ten years of depredation, was in a famine, ‘which, in my opinion, will destroy half its inhabitants’,* for which famine Holkar, ‘the most formidable of the three supposed confederates’, was mainly responsible.

De minimis non curat lex, and Mars cares as little. Before the campaign against Sindhia, the Governor-General had ordered British subjects in his service to leave him. Some had then served against Sindhia, and the local knowledge and guidance of one in particular had been extolled loudly by both Commander-in-Chief and Governor-General. Holkar forbade his British officers to leave him, and gave them the choice between serving him against their countrymen (which meant military execution if they were captured or he were defeated) and death. They chose death, and were beheaded. Even in watching the fate of kingdoms we may spare a thought to those so pitifully placed, and record the names of men both gallant and unfortunate: Captains Todd, Ryan and Vickars.

This was in December, 1803. Holkar proceeded to drift into a war in which he proved what General Wellesley knew already, that the natural Maratha warfare was far more dangerous than the acquired methods; that acute observer added that Holkar showed further that there was ‘no frontier’ in India, especially against Marathas. Lake wailed, of the drawn-out hesitations that preceded actual warfare:

‘I never was so plagued as I am with this devil; he just, nay hardly, keeps within the letter of the law, by which means our army is remaining in the field at an enormous expense.’

General Wellesley noted the necessity in all Indian wars (and again, particularly against Marathas) of having a part of the people on your side. Lake, too, looked longingly towards their late enemy: ‘Sure I am that the only mode of meeting this reptile would be some decisive measure on the part of Scindiah’. Sindhia, however, smarting under recent humiliation and perfectly aware that the effective part of a campaign against Holkar (and the price exacted by that reptile) must fall on him, though he sent a body of horse did not help very cheerfully or earnestly.

‘I do not think’, General Wellesley wrote to Malcolm (August 24, 1804),* ‘that the Commander-in-Chief and I have carried on the war so well by our deputies as we did ourselves’. Holkar’s war, which ought not to have been ‘more than a Polygar war’,* developed into a series of nasty reverses. Wellesley’s deputy and Lake’s deputy, Colonels Murray and Monson, were both afraid of Holkar,* and both ‘fled from him in different directions’. ‘Monson advanced without reason, and retreated in the same manner.’ He had followed Holkar through the territory of Rajput princes who desired British protection; had stormed a few hill forts, and then, finding himself in the heart of Central India with only two days’ provisions, fell back, was pursued, lost his rearguard, held his ground against an attack before Mokandara ghat, moved north again through black cotton country bogged with the heavy rains of July, spiked and abandoned his guns, and concluded a much-harassed retirement by reaching Agra, August 30. General Wellesley’s cool analysis of the episode and its ‘important military lessons to us all’ moved Sir Robert Peel to say that he considered it ‘the best military letter he had ever read’ and its author ‘the most powerful writer in the English language’. He may not have been quite that; but his despatches and letters at this period show that he understood perfectly all that there was to know about Indian warfare. He was much more, but he certainly was what Napoleon called him, a sepoy general---the best sepoy general that ever lived. The inept campaigns of Murray and Monson, in the latter’s case the disastrous campaign, went far to undo all that the campaigns of Assaye and Laswari had achieved. The Governor-General showed a noble magnanimity:

‘I trust that the greater part of the detachment is arrived at Agra, but I fear my poor friend Monson is gone. Whatever may have been his fate, or whatever the result of his misfortunes to my own fame, I will endeavour to shield his character from obloquy, nor will I attempt the mean purpose of sacrificing his reputation to save mine. His former services and his zeal entitle him to indulgence; and however I may lament or suffer for his errors, I will not reproach his memory if he be lost, or his character, if he survive.’

Lake, meanwhile, was almost in despair, following ‘this monster’ (his usual name for Holkar). Lord Wellesley refused to admit that Holkar had any right to rank as a prince, or anything but a bandit to be hunted down and hanged if caught; and during 1804 there was much talk about supporting ‘the just rights’ of his legitimate brother, Kasi Rao, who (if we may take Arthur Wellesley’s opinion as reasonable) would have made a worthy addition to the Company’s protégés:

‘He is an infamous blackguard, despised by everybody, full of prejudices, hatred, and revenge, and without one adherent or even a follower. By adopting his cause we shall burthen ourselves with the defence and support of another weak and helpless power, we shall disgust Scindiah’s government, and we shall not give satisfaction to the followers and adherents of the Holkar family. The act will be abstractedly generous; but considering that Cashee Rao was concerned in the murder of his brother, it will be to support usurpation founded on murder, and, for the reasons I have above mentioned, highly impolitic.’

General Wellesley found time, amid his greater affairs, to call on Nana Farnavis’s widow (according to Lord Valentia, ‘really a very pretty girl, fair, round-faced, and apparently seventeen years of age’*), in the remote fortress where she had taken refuge; and on his recommendation she was given a pension. ‘She is very fair and very handsome, and well deserving to be the object of a treaty.’* He offered his escort back to Poona, which was respectfully declined; and wrote her letters which, nearly fifty years later, then a little old woman living in semi-squalor, she brought out proudly, to show to a Governor of Bombay’s lady.*

The Governor-General had to moderate his private feelings about Holkar. His energy was flagging; he was not ‘inveterate’ (to use the current term) against Marathas, not even against Holkar; and the Directors were writing letters* which, while coldly congratulating him on his successes, made it plain that they understood the Maratha chiefs’ want of enthusiasm for the Peshwa. But it is easier to start a war than to end it properly. The unlucky Monson was able presently to send word that he and his immediate superior, General Frazer (who died of wounds received in the action), had managed to bring Holkar to bay under his fortress of Dig (November 13, 1804) and rout him. There was also a cavalry victory at Farakhabad; a glance at the map will give some notion of the way that Holkar was ranging over an enormous extent of Northern India, queerly enough with the support of the populations by whose pillage he subsisted. But Monson, having won a great victory, found force of habit too much for him, and fell back ‘for supplies’:

‘He might have spared a battalion or two to have fetched them. . . . It is somewhat extraordinary that a man brave as a lion should have no judgment or reflection. . . . It really grieves me to see a man I esteem, after gaining credit in the extreme, throw it away in such a manner immediately.’*

Sindhia, too, was discontented; and he had an accumulating tale of grievances. In February, 1805, he sent the Governor-General a long and unusually frank communication:*

‘As the war with Holkar, in consequence of the officers of your Excellency’s troops thinking too lightly of it, has now run to a great length, and my territory has been exposed to the last degree of devastation, and as . . .’

He and the Bhonsla Raja were thinking that if they had only sunk their differences with Holkar, instead of first being beaten in detail and then serving as catspaws, they might have escaped being thrust into the position of subsidiary rulers. The Raja of Bharatpur had already decided to join the successful freebooter, news which was received with an outburst of rage and contempt. Lake added a ‘P.S.’ to a letter to General Wellesley: ‘The Bhurtpore Rajah has behaved like a villain, and deserves chastisement; a very short time would take his forts’. The Governor-General ordered the annexation of his State. And Monson, though his supersession had been commanded, was allowed to lead assaults on Bharatpur Fort, which after repeated failure cost over 3000 casualties. Bharatpur acquired, and kept for a quarter of a century, a reputation as impregnable.

In April, 1805, Lake made peace with the Bharatpur Raja. But Sindhia grew more and more threatening. His father-in-law, Sarji Rao Ghatkay, ‘the worst scoundrel of those evil days’,* who lived till 1809, when a Maratha chief ‘transfixed him with his spear, and thus rid the world of a being, than whom few worse have ever disgraced humanity’, obtained a complete ascendancy in his counsels, and in his detestation of the British launched Sindhia on what the Governor-General with reason styled a course of ‘menace and defamation’. Sarji Rao was in intimate collusion with Holkar:

‘There is no vile act these people are not equal to; that inhuman monster Holkar’s chief delight is in butchering all Europeans, and by all accounts Serjie Rao Ghautka’s disposition towards us is precisely the same.’*

It came close to renewal of war. The Governor-General replied to Sindhia’s long letter of complaint with counter-charges, couched in terms of sternest severity, and instructed Lake to prepare for hostilities. Sindhia took fright just in the nick of time; Sarji Rao’s influence underwent an eclipse.

An increasing tiredness showed in the Governor-General’s writings, and an increasing tolerance and even gentleness in his communications with native princes. His arrangement with the Mogul Emperor was humane and generous, and we may dwell upon it with pleasure. This unfortunate monarch, though indigent and powerless in the extreme, was consistently treated with unique respect. He alone was ‘His Majesty’, and not merely ‘His Highness’; by the eighteenth century, tenaciously holding to the titles of legitimacy and transmitted monarchy, he was scrupulously held to be apart from the temporary tribe of freebooting Marathas and usurping Mysoreans. Wellesley carved out a small kingdom surrounding Delhi for him, and allotted him and his family revenues. The British Commissioner at Delhi was responsible for administration and collections; but both were to be done in His Majesty’s name, and Muhammadan courts were to be instituted. It should be noted that events had, as a matter of fact, caused the British to suspect a deeper resentment and enmity in the Mussulman part of India, than in the Hindu. By depressing Mussulman viceroyalties in Bengal and Oudh and the Carnatic, by extirpating Mysore’s strong Muslim rulers, they had upset what balance of power existed in India and sunk the Mussulmans towards that decline and dependence which the Mutiny completed, and from which their recovery has been so recent. Wellesley’s action in giving the Emperor (who previously possessed nothing) at least revenues and a name of majesty was conciliatory and did something to restore the balance, at least of repute and self-respect. The royalty thus established was deeply cherished by the Muhammadan population. It meant something to be able to see in their midst a court, however idle and merely specious, which recalled their vanished greatness.

Let us note, too, that in his instructions for the new Mogul State Wellesley inserted this explicit clause, from the law of British India:

‘No criminal must in future suffer the punishment of mutilation, under sentences of the courts to be established in the assigned territory. When a prisoner shall be sentenced under the Mahomedan law to lose two limbs, the sentence must be commuted for imprisonment and hard labour for the term of fourteen years; and when the sentence shall adjudge the prisoner to lose one limb, it is to be commuted for imprisonment and hard labour for seven years.’

Chapter V

Peaceful Annexations and Political Readjustments

Tanjore: Surat: Duncan’s settlement of Kathiawar: Wellesley and Oudh: annexation of the Carnatic: Wellesley’s asperity in despatches to native States: his wisdom in the matter of the Company’s trading monopoly: Wellesley recalled.

It was Wellesley’s ‘conscientious conviction, that no greater blessing can be conferred on the native inhabitants of India than the extension of the British authority, influence and power’. Dundas, however, wrote (March 21, 1799) of the States which had enjoyed longest the advantages of intimate supervision of their affairs, with a studied moderation which should not deceive us as to the thorough contempt entertained, even in late eighteenth-century England, for the Company’s administration and morals:

‘The double Government existing in the Carnatic has long been felt as a serious calamity to that country. It enfeebles the natural resources of the country, and, above all, tends to continue that system of intrigue and consequent corruption which has been imputed to the Madras Government so much more than to our other settlements. It is singular to remark, that the country of Oude is the other part of India, where the purity of the Company’s servants has been most suspected, and that the same circumstance of a double government has always been assigned as the cause. . . . Tanjore. . . is exposed in a certain degree, to the same inconveniences which have been injurious to the government of the Carnatic.’

In the case of Tanjore, it would be depressing to recall even a few of the events that justify Mr. Roberts, who never exaggerates, in his conclusion that ‘our connection with the country had not, on the face of it, been particularly creditable either to our statesmanship or our good faith’.* To take the story up in its closing chapter, in 1786 the Company, acting by the advice of pundits, chose a villainous lunatic as Raja. He was deposed after some years of mischief, and Wellesley inherited a disputed succession:

‘After a most tedious enquiry, I brought the several contending parties to a fair discussion (or rather to a bitter contest) in my presence; and after an argument which lasted three or four days, I proceeded to review the whole case. . . . At length the contending parties unanimously concurred in the expediency and justice of the treaty’,*

which ended Tanjore’s existence as even nominally a sovereign State (October 25, 1799) and pensioned the candidate formerly passed over in the madman’s favour.

Earlier in the same year the Nawab of Surat died. The Company, by arrangement, since 1759 had defended Surat Fort. So Wellesley annexed the State under a justification anticipating Dalhousie’s ‘lapse’ doctrine; he ruled that, when the Company displaced the Mogul Empire in any district, it acquired the right to settle the fate and successions of principalities formerly under Delhi.

The Governor of Bombay, Jonathan Duncan, carried out the annexation unwillingly. His own practice went to the other extreme; by recognising as ‘princes’ all Zemindars, however petty, who paid tribute to the Mogul, he studded Kathiawar with the multitude of kinglets that are one of the most striking anomalies in the princes’ question to-day; His Highness of Bikaner is reported to have stated that one of the Kathiawar ‘princes’ is sovereign of nothing but a well. Historians condemn Wellesley’s action:

‘The whole proceeding was characterised by tyranny and injustice’;* ‘the most unceremonious act of dethronement which the English had yet performed as the victim was the weakest and “most obscure”’;* ‘the procedure was certainly high-handed’.*

But it was justified by results, and also by the situation of Indian affairs. When maintenance of a legal right means the community’s abiding disadvantage, the paramount Power does well to act illegally.

Oudh was a more complex problem. Its defence was a Company liability; and in India, as the Duke of Wellington observed, there was no frontier. In Wellesley’s early despatches, the threat of Zaman Shah, ruler of Kabul, recurs frequently. He established himself in Lahore, 1796; returned to Afghanistan the next year, but in 1798 reappeared and notified the Nawab of Oudh and the Governor-General that they were to assist him in restoring the Emperor and rescuing him from the Marathas:

‘he should consider our not joining his royal standard, and our not assisting him in the restoration of Shah Allum and in the total expulsion of the Mahrattas, in the light of an act of disobedience and enmity’.*

Insurrections in his rear caused this hectoring gentleman to retreat again; and in 1800 he was dethroned and blinded by his brother, and became a refugee in British India. Ranjit Singh, later famous as The Lion of the Punjab’, presently succeeded to more than his power.

Meanwhile Oudh compelled attention from Wellesley. For years it had been drained of ‘the maximum tribute which it could afford’;* it was overrun by rascally Europeans, and ‘behind the all too powerful screen of British bayonets’ was oppressed and pillaged. The subsidiary system ‘meant the sacrifice of independence, of national character, and of whatever renders a people respectable’.* But Wellesley’s main concern was not for the misery of the people of Oudh; hardly any statesman of the period bothered about the flesh and blood actuality which the abstract maxims of statesmanship concealed. His main concern was the menace from Afghan invasion, to which the rabble which formed the Oudh army was a first line of defence. Therefore, though Oudh was bled white by what it had to pay already---for

‘the subsidy demanded from Indian rulers was totally out of proportion to their revenue. In the subsidiary armies the scale of pay was lavish, and the cost of quarters and equipage high’*---

he demanded that the Nawab entertain a much larger body of Company’s troops, sufficient to be ‘at all times adequate to your effectual protection’, whose charges could be easily met: ‘nothing further is requisite than that you should disband the numerous disorderly battalions at present in your service’.*

The cool, breath-taking ignorance behind that advice justifies a minute’s pause. All the Nawab had to do, to settle all his difficulties finally, was to ‘sack’ all his own retainers! The Governor-General’s brother Arthur, on the other hand, comments continually on what was notorious to every intelligent inhabitant of India, British or Indian---the hardships and harms following from Indian loss of all honourable or lucrative employment:

‘Conceive a country, in every village of which there are from twenty to thirty horsemen who have been dismissed from the service of the state, and who have no means of living except by plunder. In this country there is no law, no civil government. . . . This is the outline of the state of the countries of the Peishwa and the Nizam.’ (1804).

Even the Governor-General in less lucidly self-complacent moods could see something of the undercurrents of resentment, as when he writes to the Directors (April 22, 1799), on a conspiracy nipped in time at Benares:

‘You will observe that the persons concerned in this treason are almost exclusively Mahommedans, and several of them of high rank. It is a radical imperfection in the constitution of our establishments in India, that no system appears to have been adopted with a view either to conciliate the good will or to controul the disaffection of this description of our subjects, whom we found in possession of the Government, and whom we have excluded from all share of emolument, honour, and authority, without providing any adequate corrective of those passions incident to the loss of dignity, wealth, and power.’

What ‘adequate corrective’ could be applied, and what thought (if any) lies behind such verbose and confused lucubrations as these (so characteristic of authority when its attention is vaguely drawn to some stirrings of dissatisfaction in the administered sections of mankind), it would be idle to stop to enquire.

By 1799 Wellesley’s mind was set on annexing Oudh. Unfortunately, the Nawab somehow or other managed to keep up his huge payments of tribute, and, though endowed with every possible fault from his subjects’ side, was embarrassingly loyal. Wellesley therefore merely badgered him to accept ‘an improved system’ of government; the proposer’s power and pertinacity made this suggestion an order, though the Nawab knew it meant additional costs for ‘protection’. In November, 1799, he said he wished to abdicate---he meant, in favour of one of his sons. Wellesley was delighted. His Excellency, he told the Directors,*

‘appears to have adopted the resolution . . . upon the maturest deliberation. Your honourable Committee will observe that his Excellency declares this resolution to have originated in the reciprocal aversion subsisting between himself and his subjects (an aversion, which, on his part, he declares to have grown into absolute disgust), and in his sense of his own incompetency. . . .’

If His Excellency ‘should ultimately persevere in this declared intention’---and

‘it is my intention to profit by the event to the utmost practicable extent; and I entertain a confident hope of being able to establish, with the consent of the Vizier, the sole and exclusive authority of the Company within the province of Oude and its dependencies, or at least to place our interests in that quarter on an improved and durable foundation’---

then ‘it must be deemed entirely and absolutely his own voluntary act’. The Company had long been past-masters of the art of making some vacillating Indian potentate, anxious only to evade decision, sign the order for his own execution. But that Governor after Governor should be capable of such contradictory tangles of argument, and while plainly flaunting his own vivacity of pursuit and inflexibility of will should nevertheless assert that everything was done by the victim’s free will, so that his after-wrigglings were arrant treason and ‘Oriental’ duplicity, helps us to understand why our dealings on the imperial stage have so often been misunderstood by foreigners as hypocritical. What followed was a repetition of earlier pages in Company history. The Nawab was offered a treaty; he pointed out that nothing was said about his successor; he was informed that there would be no successor, whereupon he ‘formally withdrew his offer of abdication’,* and the Governor-General was ‘extremely disgusted at’ his ‘duplicity and insincerity’. The delinquent received a letter remarkable even from the most arrogantly sure of his rightness of all Indian Governor-Generals. Waterloo, no doubt, was won on the Eton milling-grounds; but the Empire’s administration was certainly learnt in a less public but even more terrible place. Wellesley, in letter after letter, ruffles like the indignant headmaster about to flog a boy after scathing exposure first of his sinfulness:

‘The duty imposed on me by my public station, and the concern which I take in your Excellency’s personal honour and welfare, as well as in the prosperity and happiness of the inhabitants of Oude, compel me to communicate to you, in the most unqualified terms, the astonishment, regret, and indignation which your recent conduct has excited in my mind.’

The reader will note that nothing of the time-honoured formula is omitted; the castigation is for the castigatee’s good, and is obviously going to hurt the castigator worse.

‘The conduct of your Excellency . . . is of a nature so unequivocally hostile . . . that your perseverance in so dangerous a course will leave me no other alternative than that of considering all amicable engagements between the Company and your Excellency to be dissolved, and of regulating my subsequent proceedings accordingly. I am, however, always inclined to hope that your Excellency may have been inadvertently betrayed into these imprudent and unjustifiable measures by the insidious suggestions of evil councillors, and being ever averse to construe your Excellency’s actions in such a manner as must compel me to regard and to treat you as a Prince no longer connected with the Company by the ties of amity and of a common interest; I trust that my next accounts from Lieutenant-Colonel Scott may enable me to view your Excellency’s conduct in a more favourable light, but lest my wishes in this respect should be disappointed, it is my duty to warn your Excellency in the most unreserved terms. . . .’

His Excellency was urged to see to the two really important matters:

‘namely, the reform of your military establishment, and the provision of funds for the regular monthly payment of all the Company’s troops in Oude.

‘The least omission or procrastination in either of those important points, must lead to the most serious mischief.’

The troops, at any rate, he was to have, whether he wanted them or not. They were sent, ‘and he was simply ordered to find money for paying them’.* He was told that he could not alter this decision, though he might

‘present reasoned objections, to which he replied, not without dignity: “If the measure was to be carried into execution, whether with or without his approbation, there was no occasion for consulting him”.’*

This, the reader will see, was impertinence; and he completed the offence by pointing out that the disbandment of his own army threw the soldiers out of employment, and was ill-advised enough to reinforce his argument by appeal to his treaty with Sir John Shore. Wellesley found this behaviour ‘highly deficient in the respect due to the first British authority in India’. The culprit was accordingly hauled back to the headmaster’s study, and told to be very, very careful. If

‘in formally answering his lordship’s letter, his Excellency should think proper to impeach the honour and justice of the British Government in similar terms. . . the Governor-General would consider how such unfounded calumnies and gross misrepresentations . . . deserve to be noticed’.

In such documents as these (a good many of them exist) the paramount Power does not condescend to anything so essentially base as argument. The conduct in question is always 'unjustifiable', objections are 'calumnies', and of course 'unfounded'. 'If the party injured', observes Mill,<span data-tippy="*" class="info-r">*

‘submits. . . his consent is alleged. If he complains, he is treated as impeaching the honour and justice of his superior, a crime of so prodigious a magnitude as to set the superior above all obligations to such a worthless connection’.

The upshot of a prolonged and tortuous business, in which the Nawab showed surprising spirit and a hunted animal’s sense of territory where he stood some chance of safety, was that in November, 1801, he had to cede the territory that Oudh had obtained by the Rohilla War:

‘By a singular reverse of circumstances the Company were able, after having pocketed the price, to seize the territories, and thus obtain possession both of price and subject’,*

‘extremely rich and valuable territory . . . known henceforth as the Ceded Provinces’, which Henry Wellesley was sent to govern, an appointment which the Directors considered nepotism, though we can believe that the Governor-General’s aim was not merely to give his brother a lucrative post, but to be himself in specially intimate touch with the district. The remainder of Oudh became a State more abjectly vassal than any other in India; but there was this gain, that the subsidy ceased. The Company’s gains were immense, in security of financial advantages, in strategy, in quietness.

No serious writer has ever pretended that the episode was from first to last anything but a bullying exercise of overwhelming strength. Wellesley did what little was possible to make things easy for the dispossessed soldiery, and even for the Nawab, to whom he had written so insultingly. But it is hard to follow Mr. Roberts when he says that the Governor-General

‘looked through the immaterial barriers of treaties and agreements to the wretched condition of the administration of Oudh, which he so eagerly desired to rectify’.*

It is true that he refused to regard Indian States as genuinely independent Powers, and with some reason. But there is no justice in yourself ‘looking through the immaterial barriers of treaties and agreements’ when you explode with fury at every divagation of others from the rigid letter of any and every promise; and as to the ‘eager desire to rectify’ the miseries of Oudh---after the richest regions had been carved off and added to Company territory:

‘The scandalous and shameless misgovernment of the country continued unabated without the slightest improvement until 1856, when the authorities in England insisted on annexation.’*

Wellesley’s conduct would have been both more honourable and more profitable to both the Company and the people of India (whose interests still had to wait some time before they were considered by the high contending parties) if he had acted straightforwardly on his convictions and made annexation more sweeping and thorough, instead of trying to persuade himself and others, and to assert---with prohibition of any contradiction by the Nawab---that he was keeping promises and engagements.

On July 25, 1801, the Carnatic at last passed to the Company, one- fifth of the revenues being settled on the Nawab as a pension. The annexation was overdue, and justified by every moral consideration; even Mill thinks that, done frankly, it would have been an excellent action:*

‘we should have deemed the Company justified, in proportion as the feelings of millions are of more value than the feelings of an individual, in seizing the government of the Carnatic long before; and on the same principle, we should rejoice that every inch of ground within the limits of India were subject to their sway’.

But it was not done frankly or decently. At the taking of Seringapatam Wellesley, to his intense glee, secured documents which he held proved treacherous collusion between the Nawab and Tipu. They proved nothing of the sort, and were merely flowery compliments; and the Nawab was so inconsiderate as to die while his conduct was under discussion. This evasion, however, did not disconcert the Governor-General; his son had

‘succeeded to the condition of his father, which condition was that of a public enemy . . . consequently . . . the British Government remained at liberty to exercise its rights, founded on the faithless policy of its ally, in whatever manner might be deemed most conducive to the immediate safety and to the general interests of the Company in the Carnatic’.*

Wellesley’s despatches form what must be the most question-begging and self-righteous body of literature in existence. ‘Rights’ ‘founded on’ what? On alleged behaviour strenuously denied by the accused and at this very time under alleged investigation. Clause follows clause, every phrase specious and opposed by pleading protest; the protest is not even noticed, the doubtful statement rises instantaneously into a principle established and beyond query, and deductions or supports to it are thrust forward---in the same infallible and unfaltering fashion!

He put round the Nawab’s palace a ring of troops, and on the very day of his death demanded that his successor, a boy under age (who ‘had succeeded to the condition of a public enemy’), should abdicate the sovereignty. Himself always loud in denunciation of the impropriety he found in the conduct of Indian princes, he acted consistently as if they were blocks of unfeeling wood, queerly warped into wickedness, but having no other semblance of response or responsibility. It is better to drop a matter so depressing to remember.

There remained the ever-overhanging cloud of the Nawab’s ‘debts’, which we have examined in Book III, Chapter II.

To continue to quote the Governor-General’s missives to inferior Powers will only exasperate the reader. It was not easy for the Resident at Haidarabad to carry out his orders (June, 1799) to rebuke ‘in the most public and pointed manner’ a noble who had spoken disrespectfully of the Company’s government. Wellesley thought that the culprit should perhaps be deprived of his pension. The Nizam was commanded to be awakened ‘to a just sense of the extensive advantages’ his connection with the British had brought him. His enemies had been destroyed at little expense to him, and ‘from a weak, decaying, and despised state, he has recovered substantial strength . . . and resumed a respectable posture among the princes of India’. His dominions, ‘formerly the most vulnerable’, were now secure. All true; but hardly tactful. Fortunately, the Residents at the two courts most subject to the Governor-General’s asperity were men whose revulsion from the duties so overbearingly inculcated upon them would induce them to soften his speech in deliverance. Major Kirkpatrick at Haidarabad lived and acted as an Indian; Colonel Palmer at Poona constantly condemned the scorn of Indians, which was now the rule. They were treated, he said (1802), ‘with a mortifying hauteur and reserve’; ‘in fact, they have scarcely any social intercourse with us’.

When he moved out of the domain of the Company’s relations with Indian States, Wellesley could show a detached wisdom in advance of his time. He tried, without success, to persuade the trading concern who employed him, to abandon a spirit of narrow monopoly that was extremely harmful to British interests. A very small proportion of India’s trade with the West was by means of Company vessels; foreign countries, and America in especial, were thrusting into it. English traders, forbidden to do what traders of any nation but their own could do, worked through this foreign shipping. So did Company employees, secretly. Wellesley and Dundas urged that the Company should set aside some vessels for the use of non-Company British trading, to keep immense sums now being lost to aliens. Thus might ‘that pre-eminence of wealth and power’ (in India) ‘which has proved so important to the general interests of the British Empire’ be preserved and increased. But selfish views prevailed, especially those of the shipping interest, ‘under a most false and erroneous idea that it is prejudicial to their interests’. His far-sighted policy offended the Directors almost more than the expense of his wars did.

Warren Hastings, watching with mixed feelings while Wellesley did all that he had desired to do but for which he had lacked the means and personal position, noted the unwisdom of the latter’s habitual scorn of the Company Directors: ‘If I was in his confidence I would tell him that civility costs little’. England has never been able to regard India as a matter which came close to her own necessities, except in 1857; and the British Government, occupied with the Continental struggle, could not bring itself to believe that large armies and glorious wars were necessary in India. Assaye faded before the sun of Austerlitz: even Tipu was not the Corsican: the defeat of French men-of-war off Malacca by merchantmen that they intended to plunder, though gratifying to national pride, was not Trafalgar. These Indian wars were costly. These princes that we engaged to support seemed more deserving of being left to such fate as the devious twist of events might bring them. Wellesley was recalled (1805) under a cloud, even amid mutterings of impeachment. But no one wanted to renew the idle show which the persecution of Hastings had provided. The Directors concurred in his observation that ‘the disturbances occasioned by Jeswunt Rao Holkar and his adherents have proved a vexatious and painful interruption of tranquillity’;* saw through his half-hearted assurances that that matter was now practically settled; and were weary of the whole business. Lord Cornwallis was sent back, though in age and failing strength, King Log in place of King Stork.

Chapter VI

Lord Minto’s Administration

Death of Lord Cornwallis: Sir George Barlow’s administration: abandonment of Rajput chiefs to Marathas: death of Krishna Kumari: character of a ‘bureaucracy: Vellore Mutiny: Lord Minto’s arrival and character: some ‘little wars’: Metcalfe’s embassy to Ranjit Singh: conquest of Java: a missionary controversy: ecclesiastics and dacoits: the Governor-General’s establishment: Sir Charles Metcalfe: the ‘white mutiny’.

Lord Cornwallis, whose return had been fitfully imminent ever since he left, and whom Pitt ‘regarded as an infallible cure for all ills’,* governed for two months, dying October 5, 1805, at Ghazipur, where he was buried in accordance with his injunction, ‘Where the tree falls let it lie’. An excessively sick man, he sought only peace, for which it is the custom to censure him. But the man who has himself seen the squalor and ugliness of war, how wretched in defeat, how melancholy in triumph, is less enthusiastic about it than the man who knows it merely as a sequence of exciting rumours and happy intrigues. The old warrior was so weary of pomp and the trappings of regality, that he rejected the titles of ‘Excellency’ and ‘Most Noble’, and all the grandeur of Wellesley’s time.

The charge of pusillanimity is brought against him and his immediate successor, Sir George Barlow (who had been senior member of his Council), for abandoning the Rajputs to the Marathas (as Cornwallis and Sir John Shore had formerly abandoned the Nizam, and for the same reasons). It is a shameful enough story; yet these inevitable recoils follow on policies of aggression and vigour beyond a Government’s power to sustain. In essentials it does not differ from such later abandonments as those of Assyrians or Druses, after they had been encouraged to show friendliness to British effort in the World War. Wellesley had sown native India with distrust, and piled up indebtedness. It is generally overlooked that it was actually in his time that the process of withdrawal began, in those last days when there was a distinct flagging of energy and outward thrust. When the Maharaja of Jodhpur did not choose to accept the Governor-General’s conditions of protection, Sindhia had received what looked uncommonly like a direct invitation to handle him in his own way---the Raja being delivered over to Satan, that he might be taught not to blaspheme:

‘The British Government has no intention to interfere in any manner between your Highness and the Rajah of Jodepore. . . . Your Highness will act according to your pleasure towards that Raja.’*

His Highness did.

Even more did Holkar and his Pathan ally, Amir Khan, act according to their pleasure towards the Rajput chiefs. Holkar, after being harried into the Punjab---the Sikhs neither helped his pursuers nor molested him, but watched the double incursion, and drew conclusions which kept peace between Ranjit Singh and the Company until his death (1839)--- was given generous terms by Barlow. His persecutors withdrew to their own territory, leaving the Marathas, hemmed in between Sikhs and Company, to pour out their profligacy of pillage on the confined Rajput area. The oppressed openly put up the plea that the Company had in fact succeeded to the paramountcy of the Moguls, and were under obligation to succour the weak. But the plea went unheeded. Inward decay worked with outward pressure, as commonly in such circumstances. The Rajput rulers were degenerates, and all the barbaric cruelty miscalled Rajput chivalry---such as widow-burning, often on a terrific scale (the saner and humaner Marathas disdained while not actually prohibiting the rite)---was allowed to keep this attractive race on a childishly savage level.

There is generally some one incident, when the affairs of any nation have sunk into squalor, which to men’s imaginations seems to fling a torch up against the truth. It came now, in the death of Krishna Kumari, the lovely Udaipur princess, in 1807. When internecine war, fomented by Sindhia and Amir Khan, broke out about the hand of the girl-princess, her father accepted the suggestion that she should drink poison and in that fashion bring his people peace. Her patience and valour and the pity of her passing---though to us this will seem a merciful anticipation of death on some warrior’s funeral pyre---have never ceased to stir Indian memory.

Sir George Barlow, after some vacillation, was not permanently appointed. He is usually considered (and was considered at the time) to prove once more the utter unfitness of any Company man to take up the supreme authority. A Governor-General of these antecedents was apt to be ill served, from the jealousy of his late equals above whom his new authority had raised him. Also, the Company’s administration was already shedding---except in ‘frontier’ regions, such as the annexed parts of Mysore and Malabar (as, later, in the Punjab of the Lawrences)---its earlier improvised and vigorous character, and was accumulating all the merits and shortcomings ascribed to ‘bureaucracy’. The Company man now, said Thomas Munro,

‘learns forms before he learns things. He becomes full of the respect due to the court, but knows nothing of the people. He is placed too high above them to have any general intercourse with them. He has little opportunity of seeing them except in court. He sees only the worst part of them, and under the worst shapes; he sees them as plaintiff and defendant, exasperated against each other, or as criminals; and the unfavourable opinion with which he too often, at first, enters among them . . . is every day strengthened and increased. He acquires, it is true, habits of cautious examination, and of precision and regularity; but they are limited to a particular object, and are frequently attended with dilatoriness, too little regard for the value of time, and an inaptitude for general affairs, which require a man to pass readily from one subject to another’.*

Barlow had willingly seconded Wellesley’s imperial schemes; he was equally ready to support the Directors’ new opposite policy of retrenchment and retreat.

The main event of his brief administration was the Vellore Mutiny. The Madras Commander-in-Chief ordered the sepoys to wear a special and obnoxious turban, trim their beards as directed, and give up caste marks. These ‘ill-judged regulations’* were considered important enough to risk empire for; Munro told the Governor, Lord William Bentinck:*

‘However strange it may appear to Europeans, I know that the general opinion of the most intelligent natives in this part of the country is, that it was intended to make the sepoys Christians.’

To us, conscious of our absolute impartiality in religious matters, this general opinion seems silly in the extreme. But in a country which remembered Tipu Sultan’s measures to make Hindus Mussulmans it spread easily. A regiment declined to obey the new orders; and when two ringleaders were awarded 900 lashes apiece, the sepoys rose and massacred two European companies. Gillespie raced in with his galloper guns, stormed Vellore, and rescued the besieged survivors.

The inevitable crop of executions followed. In every detail the episode is a little rehearsal of the Mutiny of 1857, and it thrilled British India with a horror unparalleled until that later event swept it into oblivion. Since Tipu’s family and the concomitant swarm of hangers-on of Indian royalty and semi-royalty resided at Vellore, their complicity was suspected, and they were certainly an aggravating factor in what was partly a Hindu revolt.

Lord Minto, the new Governor-General, passed through Madras when the business was finishing. Like most men who have ever come to India fresh from the outside world, he was surprised by the atmosphere which he found:

‘The mutual ignorance of each other’s motives, intentions, and actions, in which Europeans and natives seemed content to live, had forcibly struck Lord Minto during his short residence in Madras in 1807. “I do not believe that either Lord William or Sir John Cradock had the slightest idea of the aversion their measures would excite. I fully believe that their intentions were totally misapprehended by the natives.”’*‘[^144]

He considered that the Directors made a mistake in recalling the Governor and his Commander-in-Chief; since the chiefs of army and administration were dismissed, the sepoys executed under their orders would be regarded as justified, and be made into martyrs. Here, again, we hear a familiar argument; and are reminded that in every period of British-Indian history all strata of opinion have been simultaneously present, the ‘diehard’ and the ‘bolshy’, the modern and the medieval.

A devoted friend of Burke, Minto had been one of the managers of Warren Hastings’s impeachment. He was a quiet, humane, experienced man: “of as courtly manners as Lord Wellesley; but though he is less lively, he is far more finished and elegant’.* His term was one of steady progress. He modified the policy of non-intervention carried to extremes, but never resumed Wellesley’s high-handedness. When Amir Khan, in 1809, invaded Berar, he observed, with that dryness and cool lack of emotion which make his despatches such a welcome change from Wellesley’s:

‘It has not perhaps been sufficiently considered that every native State in India is a military despotism; that war and conquest are avowed as the first and legitimate pursuit of every sovereign or chief, and the sole source of glory and renown; it is not therefore a mere conjecture deduced from the natural bias of the human mind, and the test of general experience, but a certain conviction founded on avowed principles of action and systematic views, that among the military states and chiefs of India the pursuits of ambition can alone be bounded by the inability to prosecute them.’

After what may be felt to be this ‘glimpse into the obvious’ he goes on to note that British interests should be the factor deciding

‘whether it was expedient to observe a strict neutrality amidst these scenes of disorder and outrage which were passing under our eyes in the north of Hindostan, or whether we should listen to the calls of suffering humanity’;

and referred to the Directors, who replied that they thought non-interference could be carried a great deal too far, a change from their feeling of only a year or two back. Minto had meanwhile chased Amir Khan out of Berar, and occupied his homelands and capital. The Company then relaxed its grasp, and the freebooter was left at liberty to harry people not actually its allies.

Minto’s rule was marked by a number of ‘little wars’, reducing turbulent chiefs in Bandalkhand, and punishing a Travancore outbreak (due to offended religious susceptibilities) in which thirty European soldiers were murdered. He had next to give some attention to Ranjit Singh, who had established a Sikh State in the Punjab and, after conquering the smaller Sikh chiefs north of the Satlej, was threatening those on its southern bank. Charles Metcalfe was sent to him to negotiate an understanding. Metcalfe, in the last Maratha War, when only nineteen, had been General Lake’s political officer. Now, at twenty-four,* he had won golden opinions, including Lord Minto’s: ‘he really is the ugliest and most agreeable clever person---except Lady Glenbervie---in Europe or Asia’.

The Sikh Power was regarded as an extension into India of the block of great Central Asian States, vaguely known and distrusted, Afghanistan, Persia, the Turkestan khanates. Russia was beginning to emerge as the main foreign bugbear, but had not yet ousted France from this position, despite Napoleon’s naval disasters. The Company kept nervously looking towards Persia and the frontier lands. Malcolm was twice sent to Persia, the first time making a good impression, the second time erring by arrogant demands that the envoys of France and Russia (the latter obviously in a far better position to damage Persia than the far-off Indian Government) be dismissed. It is only fair to remember that in his second visit he was hampered by the presence of a rival embassy, sent direct from England; the Shah not unreasonably kept asking which embassy he was to attend to. Elphinstone (who was one of the great four who are England’s glory in the next twenty years---Malcolm, Metcalfe, and Munro (who belonged to an earlier generation) are the other three) was sent to Kabul, 1808, but merely reached Peshawar, where he set up with Shah Suja, the Afghan Amir, who was dethroned shortly afterwards, cloudy but friendly relations which had a deplorable sequel in Lord Auckland’s time.

Metcalfe’s embassy proved the most difficult and most successful of all. Ranjit Singh was jealous and suspicious; it was true that his aggrandisement had been swift and great, but it was nothing to the progress he had seen made by the Company. Though the young envoy impressed him, he plainly hinted that he did not want him. Metcalfe followed the Sikh ruler about; and his patience and firmness, seconded by Minto’s firmness, won, after immense delay. In December, 1808, when Ranjit Singh was sunk in a prolonged debauch, he sent him a severely worded warning that the British Government insisted on taking under their protection the Cis-Satlej Sikh States---Nabha, Jhind, Faridkote, Patiala. Reading it, the Raja staggered as from ‘sudden shock’; the dreaded foreigners were henceforward camped on his doorstep. He spoke humbly to the bearer, Metcalfe’s confidential munshi; but immediately fled from politics to a Mussulman dancing-girl, conduct which so pained the priests of the Golden Temple at Amritsar that they laid the shopkeepers under an interdict (hartal): ‘There was a great strife between the Temporal and the Spiritual power; and the former was worsted in the encounter’.* Ranjit fled to Lahore, followed by the pertinacious young envoy. Ranjit grew ‘careworn and thoughtful’; Hindus were sitting dharna* [^147] at his gates, his people were beseeching a peaceful settlement. His ministers

‘tried to reconcile Metcalfe to the eccentricities of their chief; but the English gentleman had answered with becoming firmness that, although the eccentricities were sufficiently apparent, he could not admit that they furnished any justification for his conduct’.*

Brought to bay, Ranjit demanded why he should have to give up places he had already captured. Metcalfe told him, because the British Government intended to protect them. After a final interview, Metcalfe to his astonishment saw the Raja, with ‘surprising levity’, a phrase which indicates the psychological dullness which went with such high qualities in so many Company’s men, riding his favourite horse, round and round his courtyard. The Times, in December, 1839, gave this incident the proper journalistic picturesqueness by making him gallop madly over the confined space; Metcalfe said ‘prancing’. Ranjit Singh by his body was trying to expel the demons of anger and perplexity. More interviews followed. Then Metcalfe lost temper and prepared to leave. General Ochterlony appeared on the Satlej; other troops were moving up in support of his contingent. Again Ranjit Singh turned to his courtesans, from which ‘pleasant forgetfulness Metcalfe roused him by a missive, which flashed the sunlight into his sleeping face’:*

‘The Maharajah is revelling in delight in the Shalimar gardens, unmindful of the duties of Friendship. What Friendship requires is not done, nor is it doing.’

He demanded his dismissal. Ranjit replied humbly ‘that the delights of the garden of Friendship far exceeded the delights of a garden of roses’, and Metcalfe got his treaty, a treaty of immense value, since it kept the peace over so many years between the two greatest armies in India.

In 1765 Clive had put down a mutiny of the officers of the Bengal army; since then ‘scarce a decade had passed without an open struggle between the military and the civil power’.* Mutinies were periodic, and the mutineers usually won, which ‘justified the belief that representations made by numbers and supported by clamour would not fail’.* In 1808 the Bombay officers almost mutinied because it was found that a cavalry regiment might be more conveniently raised at Madras. In Madras next year the Government, driven by the Directors, who ‘threatened to take the pruning knife into their own hands’,* asked their Quartermaster-General to draw up a report on a system which gave the commanding officers of regiments tent allowances for their men, whether they were in the field or in cantonments. He found the system was regularly abused, whereupon the officers called on the Commanderin-Chief to bring him ‘to a court-martial for aspersions on their character as officers and gentlemen’* The Commander-in-Chief complied; but Barlow, who had gone to Madras as Governor, countermanded his action. Then the former, whose soreness at his exclusion from a place on the Council made him unwearied in forming a party for himself, confronted Barlow with a mutiny. The officers in many large stations

‘talked of fighting against a tyrannical Government in defence of their rights to the last drop of their blood. Seditious toasts were given at the mess tables, and drunk with uproarious applause. From day to day tidings went forth from one excited station to another---tidings of progressive insubordination which fortified with assurances of sympathy and support the insane resolves of the scattered mutineers. . . . The moral intoxication pervaded all ranks from the colonel to the ensign’.*

At Masulipatam the officers put their commanding officer under arrest and seized the fort; Seringapatam followed suit. Malcolm, sent to Masulipatam, wrote back

‘that there was not a Company’s corps from Cape Comorin to Ganjam that was not implicated in the general guilt---that is not pledged to rise against Government unless what they call their grievances are redressed’.

Haidarabad next rose. ‘All concealment was thrown off’, and 30,000 men, it was threatened, would march on Madras. Public funds were seized, correspondence interrupted---‘in a word, civil war had commenced’. Then Barlow for once acted with some approach to vigour. He demanded from all officers a signed pledge of obedience, on pain of being sent inland if they refused. When not one-tenth consented to sign, he appealed to the sepoys to stand firm to their allegiance; they did so, and though Sir James Mackintosh wrote to John Malcolm that* ‘were he asked whether the deposition of a Governor by military force or an appeal to private soldiers against their officers be the greater evil, I am compelled to own that I must hesitate’, the sepoys’ loyalty left the mutineers stranded. They had never allowed themselves to doubt that they would have their regiments with them. Lord Minto on going to Madras received ‘a penitential letter’. As every decade proved, there was a wide difference in the punishment meted out to mutineers, according to whether they were sepoys or British officers; only a handful of ringleaders were now court-martialled, having first been offered their choice of trial or dismissal. The courts-martial resulted in several being cashiered. Much bitterness remained, and the Company officers sent to Coventry the King’s officers, who held them ‘mighty cheap’.* Barlow’s handling of the episode was considered unsatisfactory. It finished whatever chance he had had of being appointed Governor-General, and he went home in 1812.

Inside India, Minto’s regime was one of quiet consolidation, with vigorous action against turbulent chieftains. The ablest of these, Jeswant Rao Holkar, went mad in 1808, and for three years was kept bound with ropes and fed with milk, dying October, 1811. Outside India, Lord Minto’s government was one of brilliant conquest. As part of the war with Napoleon, he captured the islands of Bourbon and France (Mauritius). Whenever Napoleon compelled a European State into his system, England ‘took charge’ of that State’s foreign possessions. Thus she possessed for a few years the Moluccas and Java, the Governor-General himself accompanying the latter expedition and being present at the Dutch rout at Fort Cornelis, near Batavia. Gillespie of Vellore led the storm, which Minto describes (August 28, 1811):*

‘It really seems miraculous that mortal men could live in such a fire of round, grape, shells, and musketry long enough to pass deep trenches defended by pointed palisades inclining from the inner edge of the ditch outwards, force their way into redoubt after redoubt, till they were in possession of all the numerous works, which extend at least a mile. . . . The slaughter was dreadful, both during the attack and in the pursuit. . . . We have upwards of 5000 prisoners, including all the Europeans left alive.. . . There never was such a rout.’

Java passed into British keeping, and the great Stamford Raffles was appointed lieutenant-governor. These dark slavery-ridden East Indian regions certainly needed cleaning up. Minto abolished execution by torture, and the brutal custom of compelling the families of the condemned to witness the malefactor’s death, and afterwards selling them into bondage. Java entered on a period of prosperity and humane administration. It was returned to the Dutch when general peace was made, at the end of the Napoleonic wars.

Lord Minto’s most criticised action was that which he took against missionaries. The Company’s territory being closed to them, they were established in the Danish settlement at Serampur, whence they issued pamphlets which were distributed in British India. Minto forbade propagandist preaching in Calcutta, and William Carey, the great Baptist leader, agreed to a censorship of their publications. In the latter demand Minto was not as unreasonable as clamour in London represented. To the Chairman of the Directors he wrote:

‘Pray read especially the miserable stuff addressed to the Gentooes, in which, without one word to convince or to satisfy the mind of the heathen reader, without proof or argument of any kind, the pages are filled with hell fire, and hell fire, and still hotter fire, denounced against a whole race of men for believing in the religion which they were taught by their fathers and mothers, and the truth of which it is simply impossible it should ever have entered into their minds to doubt. Is this the doctrine of our faith?. . . If there are two opinions among Christians on this point, I can only say that I am of the sect which believes that a just God will condemn no being without individual guilt. . . . The remainder of this tract seems to aim principally at a general massacre of the Brahmins of this country. A total abolition of caste is openly preached. A proposal to efface a mark of caste from the foreheads of soldiers on parade has had its share in a massacre of Christians. . . .’

As that last sentence reminds us, Vellore had gone deep and into bitter remembrance.

In 1808, when England and Denmark were at war, Serampur was occupied by the Company. The Serampur missionaries were Baptists, and the Governor-General found them easier to persuade to be reasonable than he found the Rev. Claudius Buchanan, one of his own Presidency chaplains. Buchanan printed a memoir urging:

‘An archbishop is wanted for India---a sacred and exalted character, surrounded by his bishops, of ample revenue and extensive sway. . . . We want something royal in a spiritual and temporal sense for the abject subjects of this great Eastern empire to look up to. . . . When once our national Church shall have been confirmed in India, the members of that Church will be the best qualified to advise the State as to the means by which from time to time the civilisation of the natives is to be effected.’

So firmly did Mr. Buchanan believe in the efficacy of the mere sight ofhis sacred and exalted characters, that he was said to have exclaimed,‘Place the mitre on any head. Never fear, it will do good among theHindoos!' Clearly, long before Keble's sermon on "National Apostasy'gave a date for the start of the Oxford Movement, there was a widespreadpreparatio evangelica.

Minto dealt also with characters whom no one has called sacred orexalted. In Mogul times, in Warren Hastings's time, in Lord Curzon'stime, in our own time, dacoity---robbery with violence---had been rifein Bengal, especially in East Bengal, where natural conditions make italmost ineradicable. Dacoits are people who need not excite our pity:

‘It is impossible to imagine, without seeing it, the horrid ascendancy they had obtained over the inhabitants. . . . They had established a terrorism as perfect as that which was the foundation of the French republican power, and in truth the sirdars, or captains of the band, were esteemed and even called the hakim or ruling power, while the real Government did not possess either authority or influence enough to obtain from the people the smallest aid towards their own protection. . . . Men have been found with their limbs and half the flesh of their bodies consumed by slow fire, who persisted in saying that they had fallen into their own fire, or otherwise denying all knowledge of the event that could tend to the conviction or detection of the offenders. They knew, if they spoke, they would either themselves or the remaining members of their families be despatched the same evening. By these measures such a vigorous efficient government was erected by the banditti in these districts, that they could send a single messenger through the villages with regular lists of requisitions from the different houses and families---some to furnish grain, some forage, some horses, some two sons to join the gangs, some labourers to carry the plunder, or to bear torches, or to act as scouts; some were to send a wife or daughter to attend the gangs.’*

Governor-Generals occupied with disposal of patronage or with vast imperial designs had been too busy to be vext. But Minto

‘was not a little shocked, and could not help feeling some shame, when I became fully apprised of the dreadful disorders which afflicted countries under the very eye of Government; and for many months past it has been one of the principal objects to put this monstrous evil down. . . . I am happy to say that hitherto the success has even exceeded my expectations. In Nuddeah, which was the principal seat of this evil, there has not been a single dacoity during the last months; and it is in that one district that the computed average of persons put to death in torture was seventy a month. Nine sirdars have been executed at one spot, and the impression of that example was remarkable. The people had come to think it impossible that the leader of an established gang should be punished, or at least capitally punished, and they looked on with fully as much awe as satisfaction on this proof of the supreme power of Government’.

The ‘gangster’ operates very similarly in East and West, and requires the same conditions for success and impunity.

This quiet, unassuming man has had much less than his due of praise. He was firm when firmness was wanted: he tightened up Government when it had been rendered intolerably lax, and yet there was no return to the bullying arrogance of Lord Wellesley. He was amused by the pettifogging pompousness which he found enwrapping his position, and ‘in the log kept for the benefit of the family circle at home’ (who, we may hope, were worthy of it) he ridicules it with the mild ribaldry it merits:

‘The first night I went to bed at Calcutta I was followed by fourteen persons in white muslin gowns into the dressing-room. One might have hoped that some of these were ladies; but on finding that there were as many turbans and black beards as gowns, I was very desirous that these bearded handmaids should leave me. . . which with some trouble and perseverance I accomplished, and in that one room I enjoy a degree of privacy, but far from perfect. The doors are open, the partitions are open or transparent also, and it is the business of a certain number to keep an eye upon me, and see if I want the particular service which each is allowed by his caste to render me. It is the same in bed; a set of these black men sleep and watch all night on the floor of the passage, and an orderly man of the body-guard mounts guard at the door with Sepoys in almost all the rooms, and at all the staircases. These give you a regular military salute every time you stir out of your room or go up or down stairs, besides four or five with maces running before you. I have gradually got rid of this troublesome nonsense, but enough remains and must remain to tease me and turn comfort out of doors. . . .’

An ease and informality of intercourse came into Government correspondence, between the Governor-General and his higher officers. Government House became a habitable region: ‘no other circle in Calcutta contained prettier women or abler men’.*

Young Charles Metcalfe, in April, 1811, entered on his great work as Resident at Delhi, where he found the Mogul’s family a heavy trial. As with Tipu’s family at Vellore, there were rumours that the young bloods committed murder and robbery; they were reported to have killed an old woman behind the walls of what Kaye calls ‘that great sty of pollution’,* and we are given this glimpse of what must be called their amusements:* ‘oiling their naked persons, then rushing with drawn swords among the startled inmates of the Zenana, and forcibly carrying off their property’.

Ought the palace to be allowed to continue the slave-trade, which Metcalfe had prohibited in Delhi (where also he prohibited suttee)? ‘The truth struggled out but dimly from the murky recesses’ of the labyrinth of buildings where a swarm of several generations of the royal family co-existed, plotting and fighting among themselves. Blind old Shah Alam was dead, and his successor complained that ‘the tribute’ paid him by the Company was insufficient. The young Englishman who had to reconcile his responsibility for a great city with his anxiety to respect fallen majesty found support in an administration so cordial and so full of common sense and sense of the absurdity of the whole Indian scene (that comforting reflection which has kept the wiser Indians and wiser British alike sane). When Metcalfe lost two valued assistants, promoted elsewhere, Minto answered his protests by a ‘ragging’ which showed how complete was the confidence in the Resident who was left to carry on with new and raw help:

‘You will perceive that I entertained none other’ [intention] ‘than that of promoting the views in the service of two young gentlemen, whom, without knowing either personally, I esteemed and admired extremely. . . . With regard to the Resident at Delhi, I may as well confess that, having always had a very mean opinion of his abilities, and thinking him a very unamiable character and dull companion, I did entertain a secret wish to bring him into disrepute, by depriving him of his most able and experienced coadjutors. . . .

‘As the whole ship’s company of the Hussar are your slaves, I may venture, without consulting them, to send you everything that is kind from the whole, of all ages, and both genders.

‘Believe me ever, my dear Metcalfe
(being entitled to this familiarity by the contract),
Faithfully and affectionately yours.’

It is less than a decade since Lord Wellesley’s rule finished, yet we seem to have moved forward a whole century! Minto’s achievement was that he came to a government militarised and still medieval, and gave it the amenities of a civilised administration.

Chapter VII

The Nepal War

Racial relations: treatment of Eurasians: condition of native India: the Nepal War.

The Earl of Moira, whom, anticipating a little, we will call by his better-known name, Marquess of Hastings, was nearly fifty-nine when he became Governor-General. Hitherto distinguished chiefly for being ‘on terms of the closest and most expensive intimacy with the Prince Regent’,* he departed from all the probabilities by rendering over nine years’ service of a quality which has been underrated. He was shrewd, patient, independent, holding his opinions modestly and under continual revision; from his diary, as from his actions, emerges the image of a man experienced and humane. He proved once more that an astringent despair, if accompanied by rigid views of duty, can achieve almost as much as hope itself:

‘I feel a bond that will never allow me to relax in effort as long as my health will suffice. I at times endeavour to arouse myself with the hope that I may succeed in establishing such institutions, and still more such dispositions, as will promote the happiness of the vast population of this country; but when the thought has glowed for a moment it is dissipated by the austere verdict of reason against the efficacy of exertion from an atom like me. The Almighty wills it: it is done without the mediation of an instrument. The notion of being useful is only one of those self-delusions with which one works oneself through the essentially inept vision of life’.*

He attacked his own ignorance by at once undertaking an extensive tour up-country, during which he comments repeatedly, in the strongest, most contemptuous terms, on the racial estrangement which was to run its deepening course until the tardy improvement in our own post-War world. But he was unable to do more than by example confirm in courtesy those who had no temptation to fail in it, thereby staving off the worst insolence on one side and the worst humiliation on the other, for a few years longer. He could not re-establish friendly intercourse. He and his wife, Lady Loudoun, managed to do a little for the self-respect of Eurasians. Learning that the ablest freelance in India, the celebrated Captain Skinner---who, after quitting Sindhia’s service in 1803, had served the Company, and ‘much distinguished himself by his enterprise, his intrepidity, and his judgment’,* qualities much to seek in the conduct of military affairs at this time---was again in the market for any native State, disgruntled at being liable to ‘find himself under the orders of possibly a very inexperienced youth’, Hastings ‘requested’ him to ‘assume the honorary title of Lieutenant-Colonel’, and

'apprized him of my intention to propose to Government that such a rankin the Irregulars should entitle the officer holding it to rank asyoungest field-officer of the line, and to command accordingly allcaptains and subalterns'.* The veteran was extraordinarily moved bythis act of consideration.

‘To understand this warmth of feeling, one ought to know the excessive depression in which the half-castes are held by the Company’s servants. Till Lady Loudoun gave a private hint that colour never would be noticed, half-caste ladies, though of the best education and conduct, and married to men in prominent stations, were not admitted to the Government House.’

Yet (whatever might be done for a Skinner) the lot of Eurasians, who did the immense mass of the actually indispensable work of administration in the uncovenanted services, remained what it has been to our own day---the most inexcusable stain in even the records of Anglo-Indian snobbery. A Governor-General’s sister exclaims, twenty years later:*

‘The “uncovenanted service” is just one of our choicest Indianisms, accompanied with our very worst Indian feelings. We say the words just as you talk of the “poor chimney-sweepers”, or “those wretched scavengers”---the uncovenanted being, in fact, clerks in the public offices. Very well-educated, quiet men, and many of them very highly paid; but as many of them are half-castes, we, with our pure Norman or Saxon blood, cannot really think contemptuously enough of them.’

During his tour Lord Hastings was shocked by repeatedly discovering men rotting in jail for ancient offences which seemed to him long over-expiated. This resulted in an important reform in procedure. Believing that the Company’s personnel could now be trusted to wield magisterial as well as administrative functions, he joined the offices of magistrate and collector. Thus British India for minor offences was given something of the ‘non-regulation’ methods which obtained in such regions as Delhi, the most effective in newly annexed districts, the most popular with those who administered and in the main liked by those who were administered unto---swift and summary, and dispensing with much formality and highly paid roguery.

Had it been possible, he would have done away with the whole legal hocus-pocus. He wrote (November, 1817):

‘Nothing can more strongly mark the prematurity of our attempt to force upon the Indian population our judicial system than the abhorrence which every man of family among the natives entertains against being summoned, even as a witness, into one of our courts. On this account, it is almost impossible to obtain the testimony of any of them in criminal cases, where they have been present at the perpetration of the act. They will, in the preliminary examination, admit their having been present, but will stoutly swear that they did not happen to notice what was going forward, and can say nothing on the subject. With the lower classes the system is equally unpopular. The security which they enjoy in person and property is duly estimated by them; but that they refer entirely to the principle of Government. The inconvenience, the expense, and the delay which they experience in our civil proceedings, make them unreservedly lament that they are not subjected to military decisions.’*

But the contrast between the abundance of wisdom wrested from experience and the slight prevalence of that wisdom in human affairs, despite the many enlightened men in influential places, is one of the most powerful reasons for pessimism. It remains mildly mysterious how the legal system, so condemned by the wisest and noblest of the conquerors, became securely fastened down on India. To-day, when the unemployed Indian lawyer is so abused that the uninstructed reader might judge---does judge, in fact---that he wilfully ate of poisonous fruit and is suffering in his person the proper penalty of foolishness, it is worth remembering how reluctantly India accepted Western justice. We are told that during Lake’s Laswari campaign, whole populations fled in terror, not from ‘the brutal and licentious soldiery’, but from the ‘High Court’ which was believed to be accompanying them!

In language strangely prophetic,* Lord Hastings, who saw ‘around me the elements of a war more general than any which we have hitherto encountered in India’, immediately diagnosed the almost universal hatred of the Company. It was useless to pretend that native States were sovereign Powers so long as the British kept in them subsidiary forces. These subsidiary forces made tyranny safe, and constantly had to put through dirty jobs for contemptible rulers; those rulers hated their over- lord, and oppressed their subjects. With every year Hastings’s certainty of the Misgust and estrangement’ set up by these relations deepened. Whatever the princes had been when Wellesley began his vigorous dealings with them, they were now---except Ranjit Singh and the Gurkha Maharaja, who were both outside the Company’s sphere--- vassals in fact, and vassals in a condition of smouldering disaffection. Most of Lord Hastings’s time was occupied with the wars he foresaw, and with efforts to set on to some plane of logic and honesty the Company’s relations with such States as survived. He sought opportunity to bring them all where they would accept control of their armies, and submit their mutual quarrels to British arbitration. Before he succeeded, there was to be desperate kicking against the pricks.

Looking over India, he surveyed a dreary scene; and in his despondent conclusions the best British opinion concurred. Sir John Malcolm found in Haidarabad* (1817)

‘a broken and oppressed race. I am, indeed, disposed to believe that no country was ever more miserably governed. What, indeed, can be expected when the prince is a melancholy madman, and the minister a low Hindoo, who owes his power to the support of our Government, and pays the price of subservience to our Resident for continuance in office? Where power is without pride there can be no motive for good government. I am told it is impossible to maintain our connexion on a better footing. I can only reply, it is impossible there can be a worse. . . .’

Metcalfe was urging the Governor-General to abolish the mischievous fiction of ‘the King’ in Delhi; the Mogul establishment, whose pomp was as inflated as their importance was small, were abominable neighbours to his authority. Lord Hastings acknowledged that

‘nothing has kept up the floating notion of a duty owed to the imperial family, but our gratuitous and persevering exhibition of their pretensions--- an exhibition attended with much servile obeisance in the etiquettes imposed upon us by the ceremonial of the court’.*

But he had his hands too full to handle a problem so intricately bound up with questions of legal and historical right. Never can Governor-General have felt more distracted, as he listened to the representations of his ablest servants, each convinced that his particular trouble was the one most desperately needing settlement. Munro was pleading for drastic reorganisation of India’s internal polity, and in a long letter* lamented the subsidiary system’s

‘inevitable tendency to bring every Native state into which it is introduced, sooner or later, under the exclusive dominion of the British Government. . . . Even if the prince himself were disposed to adhere rigidly to the alliance, there will always be some amongst his principal officers who will urge him to break it. As long as there remains in the country any high-minded independence, which seeks to throw off the control of strangers, such counsellors will be found. I have a better opinion of the natives of India than to think that this spirit will ever be completely extinguished; and I can therefore have no doubt that the subsidiary system must everywhere run its full course, and destroy every government which it undertakes to protect’.

‘This very Peishwah will probably again commit a breach of the alliance. The Nizam will do the same; and the same consequence, a farther reduction of their power for our own safety, must again follow.’

‘The usual remedy of a bad government in India is a quiet revolution in the palace, or a violent one by rebellion, or foreign conquests. But the presence of a British force cuts off every chance of remedy, by supporting the prince on the throne against every foreign and domestic enemy. It renders him indolent, by teaching him to trust to strangers for his security; and cruel and avaricious, by showing him that he has nothing to fear from the hatred of his subjects. Wherever the subsidiary system is introduced, unless the reigning prince be a man of great abilities, the country will soon bear the marks of it in decaying villages and decreasing population.’

Readjustment of relations had to be postponed, however, for in 1814 border raids and boundary disputes passed into a war with Nepal. This for a time was ‘regarded as a mere affair with a troublesome Raja of the frontier’.* When its magnitude emerged, the Governor-General himself organised four distinct attacks ‘on a frontier of about six hundred miles. . . . But, unfortunately, four out of five generals employed displayed extraordinary incompetence in different fashions’.* The first to so distinguish himself was General Gillespie, of Vellore and Java fame, who on October 30 was killed trying to storm the Kalunga stockades. At a second attack on them (November 27), the troops hung back and sacrificed their leaders. The two attempts cost 740 casualties, ‘considerably more than the entire number’ of the defenders of ‘this petty fortress’.* It was invested and cut off from water, and its confined space subjected to intensive bombardment, measures resulting in its evacuation three days after the repulse of November 27. The Gurkha commander and the seventy unwounded men of his ‘defiant garrison’* slipped unnoticed through the besieging lines, leaving Kalunga ‘in a shocking state, full of the mangled remains of men and women killed by. . . our batteries’.*

It is pleasant to remember that this terrible campaign was marked not only by great suffering but by mutual kindness. The Gurkhas were such an enemy as the Company had never encountered:

‘None ever displayed so much bravery in action or so much system, skill, and conduct, so much prudent caution, and so much well-timed confidence. None other ever possessed a country so easily defended, and so difficult to the invader.’*

They gave, as well as extorted, respect. Burial of the dead was ‘a courtesy they never refused . . . and not the only one we experienced at their hands’.*

The invaders fought blind, while all the eyes were with their foes, who moved easily round them in the dense forests and towering hills. Gillespie’s rout was followed by others. On December 25 a European storming party was chased from Jaituk, and the sepoys following them even outstripped them, fleeing so expeditiously that they were back in their camp, the whole force having lost 500 men, by ten o’clock in the morning.* General Wood was defeated at Jitgarh. Yet another army lost two detachments amounting to over a thousand men, the Gurkhas rushing their camp and burning the tents, and pursuing the fugitives in every direction. The loss of officers was unprecedented; they were so often left unsupported. Only the fourth army, General Ochterlony’s, by sheer caution, building roads and bringing up heavy guns, had escaped serious humiliation, and its leader

‘was steadily pursuing his plan by slow and secure manoeuvres, but had yet gained no brilliant advantage over his equally cautious antagonist’.*

The impression made in India was deep and wide. Metcalfe, than whom no one was now more influential with the Governor-General, wailed (January 15, 1815):

‘We have met with an enemy who shows decidedly greater bravery and greater steadiness than our troops possess; and it is impossible to say what may be the end of such a reverse of the order of things. In some instances our troops, European and Native, have been repulsed by inferior numbers with sticks and stones. In others our troops have been charged by the enemy sword in hand, and driven for miles like a flock of sheep. In a late instance of complete rout, we lost more muskets by a great number than there were killed, wounded and missing. In short, I, who have always thought our power in India precarious, cannot help thinking that our downfall has already commenced. Our power rested solely on our military superiority. With respect to one enemy, that is gone. In this war, dreadful to say, we have had numbers on our side, and skill and bravery on the side of our enemy. We have had the inhabitants of the country disposed to favor us, and yet overawed, notwithstanding our presence and partial success, by the character of our enemy.’

One division (Gillespie’s, and then Martindell’s) had lost a third of the numbers with which it had set out from Meerut. The failures were instantaneously reflected in the attitude of the Maratha chiefs and Ranjit Singh’s armed watchfulness at Lahore. It was now that the seeds of the next Maratha War were sown.

The British, for whom “an uninterrupted course of easy victory’ had bred ‘precipitancy and want of caution’,* set themselves to learn from their brilliant teachers. The Gurkhas, on their part, erred by being satisfied with a successful defensive war. Pushing home no advantages, they ‘were abundantly satisfied with repulsing an attack or cutting off an outpost’. When the British themselves erected stockades, the war became one of ‘continuance, that is . . . length of the purse’, and of strong points.

Ochterlony, who changed all this, received no help from his brother commanders. Gillespie’s successor, in particular, had managed to infect his whole army with his own imbecility, thereby reinforcing the enemy’s decisive individual superiority. A distressing incident took place at Chamalgarh, where two hundred Gurkhas, being surrounded by two thousand irregulars, resolved to die fighting. This heroic expedient proved unnecessary: the mere sight of the stout countenance which they showed caused their besiegers to flee precipitately, ‘this unlooked-for result of their intrepidity’ giving the victors

‘so much confidence, that they never afterwards failed to attack a post of irregulars, whenever placed within their reach: and even when stockaded, they generally succeeded’.*

But Ochterlony plodded on, despite minor defeats, and did well enough to overrun Kumaon; and in May, 1815, the Gurkhas made overtures for peace. Negotiations failed on the Company’s demand to have a Resident at Khatmandu; and an intercepted letter from the Gurkha leader to his prince showed why he was willing to risk everything rather than this. He insisted---and this attitude is one of the reasons why the independence of Nepal survived, when that of other kingdoms, also formidable in battle, went down---that if a treaty were made, it must be honourably kept. ‘Lands transferred under a written agreement cannot again be resumed’, though ‘if they have been taken by force, force may be employed to recover them’. It was better to make no peace, he argued, but to let the war sleep for two years, while the British, in temporary possession of the malarious Terai, were steadily weakened by climatic ravages. The prayers of Brahmins, if these were bought by promises of jagirs in the event of victory, would be weakening them still further. Then the war could be strongly reawakened.

The writer of this letter was thinking along lines now common to all native India:

‘After the immense preparations of the enemy, he will not be satisfied with all these concessions, or if he should accept of our terms, he would serve us as he did Tipu, from whom he first accepted an indemnity of six crores of rupees in money and territory, and afterwards wrested his whole country. If we were to cede to him so much country, he would seek some fresh occasion of quarrel, and at a future opportunity would wrest from us other provinces. . . . When our power is once reduced, we shall have another mission, under pretence of concluding a treaty of alliance and friendship, and founding commercial establishments. If we decline receiving their mission, they will insist; and if we are unable to oppose force, and desire them to come unaccompanied with troops, they will not comply. They will begin by introducing a company; a battalion will soon after follow, and at length an army will be assembled for the subjection of Nipal. You think that if for the present the lowlands, the Doon, and the country of the Satlej were ceded to them, they would cease to entertain designs on the other provinces of Nipal. Do not trust them!. . . if you had in the first instance decided upon a pacific line of conduct. . . the present contest might have been avoided. But you could not suppress your desire to retain these places’ (Butwal and Sheoraj), ‘and by murdering their revenue officer excited their indignation, and kindled a war for trifles. . . . In this place I am surrounded, and daily fighting with the enemy. . . . I must gain two or three victories before I can accomplish my object of attaching Ranjit Singh to our cause. On his accession . . . the chiefs of the Deccan may be expected to join the coalition, as also the Nawab of Lucknow. . . . If we are victorious, we can easily adjust our differences; and if we are defeated, death is preferable to peace on humiliating terms. . . .’

Fighting was resumed early in 1816, and Ochterlony won important victories. The Gurkhas hurriedly made peace, at the price of loss of territory and acceptance of a Resident. A more valuable result yet was the lasting character of the agreement. The contending parties had learnt mutual respect, and understood the limits to which each could be pushed with safety. Even during the last stages of the actual fighting Gurkhas began to enter the British army. Now their Government allowed such recruiting; and ‘Johnny Gurk’ began the career which was to bring him fame in such distant lands.

Chapter VIII

Financial Problems

Financial difficulties: demands on the Bengal revenues: land problems: salt and opium: public works and education: Metcalfe as Machiavelli: the Company has recourse to an old and tried friend: His Majesty of Oudh.

Lord Hastings on arrival had found the Bengal Governmentin one of its periodic states

‘of great pecuniary embarrassment. The Directors were so urgent with me to send home treasure that I overcame the reluctance of my colleagues, and we remitted gold pagodas to the amount estimated by ordinary exchange of £300,000. Should the price of gold in England be still what it was when I left Europe, this bullion will be sold by the Directors for not less than £450,000. We have, however, in consequence been on the brink of great distress.

‘The Embassy in Persia, though wholly appointed by the Crown, is entirely supported by the Government of Bengal; such being the arrangement made by ministers with the Directors, or rather imposed on the latter. Without any means of curbing the prodigality of the ambassador, or of determining the propriety of expenditures quite unconnected with the interests of India, we are bound to answer the bills drawn upon us by Sir Gore Ouseley. Of course they come both heavily and unexpectedly. The Governor of the Isle of France and the Governor of Ceylon have both had the privilege granted to them of drawing upon us, furnishing us in return with bills on the English Treasury, which we often cannot negotiate. Java is a still worse drain than the others. Instead of the surplus revenue which, for the purpose of giving importance to the conquest, was asserted to be forthcoming from that possession, it could not be maintained without the treasury as well as the troops of Bengal. Just now, in the height of our exigencies, we receive an intimation from the Lieut.-Governor that he cannot pay his provincial corps unless we allow him 50,000 Spanish dollars monthly in addition to the prodigious sums which we already contribute to his establishment’.*

The China tea investment also had to be financed from Bengal.

This crisis makes a convenient pause, to consider the principles of East India Company finance, a subject so intricate that only a cursory survey can be attempted. Until the Charter Act of 1813 no attempt was made to separate political and commercial accounts, and further complications arose from repeated additions of new territory, from military operations which were partly debited to the British Exchequer, from continual changes in the method of keeping accounts for the three Presidencies, and from the lack of a uniform currency.* This last problem was a continual embarrassment to the earliest settlers, for in Mogul times each prince had his own coinage, and none of these circulated throughout the peninsula. There were three mints in Bengal in 1765. These the Company abolished, and began issuing rupees from a mint in Calcutta, and after 1773 produced a ‘sicca’ rupee of standard weight but bearing the name of the Mogul Emperor, Shah Alam, and the date 1779.* Their rupees gradually ousted other rupees from Bengal, and replaced the copper coinage which was current outside Calcutta. In other parts of India the position was equally complicated, and was further confused by the recognition of such gold coins as the Madras pagoda and the Bombay mohur. It was not until 1835 that a uniform silver currency was established throughout India.

Until 1833 the Governor-General had to serve, financially, two masters. He was responsible to the Directors of a large trading company carrying on business under difficult circumstances. He was also a colonial administrator in charge of mixed forces, the King’s and the Company’s, always liable to be involved in wars with neighbouring princes, or with representatives of some European Power. The latter character predominated from the time of Cornwallis. Each successive Governor-General had financial disputes with the Directors, and in 1805 these were so acute that, apart from questions of general policy, they must have led to Wellesley’s resignation. The Company’s insistence that part of the revenue should be expended on goods for export is an example of this conflict of interests. The matter has also some theoretic importance because it raises the question of ‘tribute’ and the ‘financial drain’, which were the subject of later controversies.

On taking over the zemindari rights of Bengal the Company had incurred certain financial responsibilities to the British Exchequer. Parliament insisted that territorial acquisitions belonged to the Crown, and the yearly payment of £400,000 demanded from the Company represented a form of rent. At that time the acquisition of land was considered a certain source of revenue, an idea which has led to confusion of thought even up till to-day. A government is not a landlord, and in extending its territory it increases the cost of its administration and its liability to be drawn into a war. These items may easily convert an apparently prosperous area into a ‘deficit province’. The eighteenth-century English had not learnt that lesson. When taking over the reputedly fertile area of Bengal it was felt that the revenues should supply a surplus which could be remitted home. The Company arranged that this should take the form of goods to be sold in order to meet interest charges on home debts and the Exchequer demands. Each Governor-General was expected to devote a portion of his revenue to the purchase of commodities, which would be sent to England as part of the ‘Investment’, the early name for the cargoes which were exported to be sold for the benefit of the Company. About twelve million pounds were expended in this way between 1766 and 1780, and as part of the money realised by the sale of these commodities was paid to the British Exchequer it formed a kind of ‘tribute’, though only indirect. The demands of the Exchequer ceased in 1773, but the system of investing part of the surplus revenue in commodities for export was revived, after the lapse of some years, as a purely commercial transaction. Between 1793 and 1813 some twenty-five million pounds worth of goods were sent to England in this way, and the money was used to meet the interest on the growing ‘home debts’ of the Company.* Wellesley and his successors protested against the system, and it was finally abandoned in 1813.

This is the only time when anything which could be correctly described as ‘tribute’ was taken from India by the British Treasury, and it is important to differentiate two periods. Until 1780 the need for surplus cargoes was partly due to the demands of the Exchequer, but during the second period, from the ’nineties onwards, the extra commodities went to defray the interest on debts incurred during the French war. The Directors were not yet reconciled to the modern idea of raising loans to meet war-time expenditure, and the complicated system described above was really due to this hesitation. Almost exactly the same result would have been obtained if the home debt had been reckoned as an Indian debt, bearing interest at about eight per cent. The surplus cargoes would have represented interest charges. Force of circumstances brought about this change, against the wishes of the Directors. The period from 1793 to 1813 covered the Mysore and Maratha wars of Cornwallis and Wellesley, and deficits piled up until the Government debts in India had risen to over thirty millions in 1814, an increase roughly equivalent to the Indian revenue spent on buying extra goods for export. From 1813 onwards trade relations between British India and England began to assume a more modern form. The balance of trade was no longer strongly in India’s favour, and this checked the steady flow of bullion from Europe eastwards which had characterised the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. An important factor in this change was the raising of Indian loans for war expenses and then for productive purposes, such as railways and canals. At first these were taken up almost entirely in England, though by the time of the Mutiny Indian investors had begun to purchase them. Other home charges steadily increased during the first half of the nineteenth century, as the British administration spread over the whole peninsula, and became more complicated and expensive. In the time of Cornwallis this process was only just beginning, and it will be convenient to study the financial system while there was still only the bare framework of an administration, and before the series of internal wars which we connect with the names of Wellesley and Lord Hastings.

A rough budget worked out for British India in, say, 1790 will make it easier to appreciate the interaction of financial policy and administration.* Cornwallis had had four busy years, but the war with Tipu was still to come. The revenue was made up of four main items. The land revenue was by far the most important, bringing in some four million pounds, of which over three-quarters came from Bengal. The salt monopoly produced about half a million, the opium trade £80,000, and customs perhaps half that amount. A police tax was collected and employed locally, and the beginnings of the Excise department appear in the abkari regulations laid down by Cornwallis for taxing the sale of liquors. The complete dependence of the Government upon the land revenue remained a feature of British India for many years. It was recognised as an evil, but it is difficult to see what alternative was possible, and it is worthy of note that the two other practical sources of income---salt and opium---have been the subject of bitter attack up to the present day. Apart from customs, the chief resources of a modern government are income tax and death duties, both of which present special difficulties in India because of the Hindu joint family system. In the eighteenth century there was little ascertainable income apart from land, and another fifty years were to pass before Peel, in 1842, tentatively and experimentally introduced an income tax into England. The first Indian income tax was to follow still later, in 1860, but even under far more settled conditions it has been found very difficult to bring the moneylender and trader within its meshes. Death duties have never been imposed.* In 1857, the last year of the Company’s rule, land revenue made up half of the Government’s receipts, and salt, opium, and customs brought in more than two-thirds of the remainder.*

The incidence and collection of land revenue are bound up with peasant life, and import duties with the prosperity of the craftsmen. They will be discussed in a later chapter. The salt and opium monopolies have had long and controversial histories, with certain points of resemblance. Both commodities had been taxed under Muslim rule, and these taxes were retained by the British when other inland duties were abolished. The method of direct collection proving unsatisfactory, Warren Hastings in each case assumed the monopoly, and farmed out the right of manufacture. This led to the abuses usually connected with the farming system. Large profits were made by speculators, the actual salt-makers and poppy cultivators were oppressed. In 1780 Hastings instituted a salt office, with agents who arranged for the manufacture of salt, and sold it to wholesale dealers at prices fixed from year to year. In 1799 Wellesley abandoned the contract system for opium, and substituted a single agency under a covenanted civil servant. Both monopolies became part of the permanent revenue system.

Much nineteenth-century criticism of the salt and opium policies was based on the idea that any State enterprise which makes a profit is tyrannous, and was especially objectionable in the case of a ‘foreign’ government. There is to-day less belief in the virtue of free competition, especially in the production of articles in which purity is of great importance. The real charge against the Government’s salt policy was that too much profit was taken on supplying an essential to life, and against the opium policy that the Government was engaging in an immoral business. At the end of the eighteenth century neither criticism had very much force. The salt monopoly ensured a plentiful supply of good quality, and the profit up to 1788 was under Rs. 1 as. 8 for 80 lb.* As the average yearly consumption per head was under 12 lb., the charge was not a very heavy burden, and there is no reason to believe that salt would have been retailed cheaper under a system of open competition. Subsequently the salt trade became more complicated. From 1817 there was a small import from England, the salt being loaded as ballast, and private manufacture was allowed under licence. Later governments were tempted by the elasticity of this source of revenue to raise their charges to meet unexpected calls, and the duty was as high as three rupees per 80 lb. during the first Afghan War. After the Mutiny the salt duties were open to far greater objection. The imposition of income tax in 1860 had shown the possibility of differentiating taxation so as to fall chiefly on the rich, and thus provided a strong argument against continuing a tax on an essential food. Opium was on a different footing. It was at best a luxury, and was intended chiefly for export to China. The Government made very large profits on the trade, but the high price was mostly paid by Chinese, and was virtually a luxury tax upon them. The moral aspect was hardly considered. It was not an age much given to interfering with other people’s domestic habits, and opium-eating---as contrasted with the exotic indulgence in opium-smoking---has never been considered in India as a dangerous vice. Both Indians and English would probably hold it less baneful than alcoholism.

The expenditure side of the 1790 budget would have been under two main heads, military and civil. Attempts were made to keep the expenses of the army, then about 70,000 strong, to a million and a half pounds, but the struggle with Tipu Sultan upset these plans, and by 1793 the army had risen to nearly ninety thousand men, and the cost to three million. During Wellesley’s time expenses rose immediately, and by 1813 the army had a strength of about two hundred thousand.* A considerable part of these military expenses were not paid out of revenue, but in peace or war the army must have absorbed about two-thirds of the total receipts. Civil expenditure came under very few heads, for it was only about the middle of the nineteenth century that governments, even in Europe, began to develop the ‘social services’. The main item was salaries for officials, but the expenses of revenue collection were usually deducted before remittance, and it is almost impossible to estimate the amount of this charge. It is certain that the immediate effect of Lord Cornwallis’s judicial and other reforms was a heavy increase in these expenses. The old system, whereby the Company had paid its servants small salaries, but had connived at irregularities, had at least been cheap. With a very inelastic revenue each successive Governor-General was continually hampered by financial difficulties, even before the Mysore War, and the police system was rendered ineffective by the very small amounts available for salaries.

The other branches of Government activities were still in an embryonic state at the end of the eighteenth century. The first public works were military, but Lord Cornwallis was interested in the repair of the many minor irrigation works of Bengal, most of which had been allowed to degenerate during the anarchy of the past century. Local committees were appointed, and pressure put upon Zemindars to undertake this work. The Marquess of Hastings was one of the first statesmen to emphasise the importance of better communications, and from about 1820 there was considerable activity in the maramat department, while the trunk roads were put in hand after the Charter Act of 1833. There was at that time little knowledge of hydraulic engineering, and the effort made under Lord Amherst to revive the old Mogul Jumna canal only proved that the original alignment had been wrong.

Mass education was at that time not considered the duty of a government. In England it was entirely in the hands of the Churches, and it was not until 1833 that the first Government grant of £20,000 was given to the two leading societies engaged in this work. ‘Free and compulsory’ education did not, of course, follow till after 1870. A few European countries were earlier in recognising governmental responsibility, but most were later. It is an anachronism to imagine that in 1790 any Indian or Englishman would have thought it to be the Government’s duty to undertake or even assist the work of the little temple and mosque schools which existed in many of the villages. Higher education was considered in a different light. Government interference was justified by the need of men trained for Government service. The Calcutta Madrasa was founded in 1781, and a Sanskrit College was founded in Benares in 1792, but little more was done until after 1813. Under the Charter Act of this year the sum of £10,000 was appropriated yearly for the ‘revival and improvement of literature and the improvement of the sciences’, the wording of which shows clearly that it was intended to assist in higher education. The amount remained unappropriated for some years, though in 1816 the Hindu College was founded in Calcutta, chiefly through the energies of David Hare and the Chief Justice, Sir Hyde East. The grant was, however, the basis of the struggle which took place under Bentinck between the ‘Orientalists’ and the English school, and which finally settled the future of higher education in British India.

The Nepal campaign heavily deepened the Government’s financial distress, to which we return. The Directors noted (October, 1815)

‘with extreme concern that the effects of the Nepaulese war are so strongly felt in your financial department as to induce the apprehension that the advances to be issued to our European investment will be reduced to a very small sum indeed. . . . If the advances for the investment are to be withheld, the sales at this House for India goods will soon be brought to a stand’.

The Company’s administration therefore had recourse to the Nawab of Oudh, their old and (in every sense of the phrase) much-tried ally. His government ‘since the forced cessions of 1801, had been conducted systematically on a principle of selfish avarice, which aimed to draw as much as possible from the country, at the smallest possible charge’.* It is perhaps not easy to explain how his aim differed from the Company’s; but Anglo-Indian writers are so sure that there was an immense difference, that we may take it that there must have been, and that the passage of time has blurred our chances of perception of it. Possibly part of the difference lay in his wasteful expenditure of what he wrested from his people, whereas the Company built up an admirable military machine; Metcalfe, whose mind was as clear as the Governor-General’s own, and whose advice was very congenial to Hastings, wrote that they ought:

1st. To make it the main object of all the acts of our Government to have the most efficient army that we can possibly maintain, not merely for internal control or the defence of our frontier, but also for those services in the field which our army is perpetually called on to perform on emergencies when we have not time to increase it to sufficient strength.

‘2nd. If our resources should, at any time, be unequal to the maintenance of an ample force, not to cripple our strength by attempts to reduce our force within the limits of fixed resources at the imminent peril of our dominion; but to endeavour to raise our resources to meet the demands on us for force.’

If the revenues of British India proved inadequate,

‘we ought to draw forth new resources; and if these be impracticable within our own dominions, we must look to increase of territory by conquest over our enemies in the interior of India. There is no doubt that opportunities will arise for effecting such conquests, for with the utmost moderation and justice upon our part, misunderstandings and wars in the course of time will be occasionally unavoidable’.

As the further aims of British policy, Metcalfe listed:

‘To enlarge our territories in the interior of India on every occasion of war as much as possible consistently with justice and policy, moderation to our enemies, and due attention to our allies.

‘4th. To apply the net revenues of conquered countries to the maintenance of additional force, and the acquisition of additional force to the achievement of new conquests, on just occasions---thus growing in size and increasing in strength as we proceed, until we can with safety determine to confine ourselves within fixed limits, and abjure all further conquests. . .’

No one in any country at this date considered that the revenues of conquered countries belonged to those who paid them.* They were at the conqueror’s free disposal, to spend---as Metcalfe urged---on bigger and better armies, which were to conquer bigger and better lands, which in turn were to pay for bigger and better armies again---or else to put into the annual investments (as the Directors urged), and send home thus as a disguised tribute. And the Nawab himself, whatever we may think about his subjects’ case, was undoubtedly deeply beholden to the Company, as without outside support Oudh could never have gone on and on being scandalously misgoverned for decade after decade, and by Nawab after Nawab. He had won additional security by removal of the menace of the Gurkhas at his doors, and it was not unjust (as justice went in the India of those days) that he should pay towards that war.

His administration, moreover, needed improvement, even as seen from the distance of Calcutta. As far back as 1810, he had been urged to

‘assimilate the administration of Oudh to that of the British provinces . . . dividing the territory into districts, with revenue and judicial officers, acting under separate controlling authorities at the capital’.*

He betrayed as his chief characteristics ‘extreme folly and timidity’, which were heightened by his Resident, Major Baillie, who interfered high-handedly and continually. In 1814, while Lord Hastings was on his way to a personal meeting, the Nawab died; when the Governor-General reached Lucknow, he found that Baillie had zealously forced on the new Nawab the reforms desired, and that ‘all the most lucrative appointments . . . were filled by the Resident’s own moonshees and dependents’.* Full conviction of what had been happening did not come to Hastings till a year later, when he immediately removed Baillie. Meanwhile, in October., 1814, His Excellency of Oudh was privileged to contribute a large loan to equip the Company’s armies against Nepal. In the Governor-General’s absence from Calcutta, his Council used part of this in an unauthorised fashion, which led to a second application to the Nawab, ‘the financial officers being unable to devise any other remedy’.* His Excellency was slack in response, offering only fifty lakhs, which was refused, his offer being ‘assumed to be made from an imperfect acquaintance with the extent of the embarrassment for which we sought relief’. The gaps in his knowledge were repaired, and an additional crore collected from him. In recognition of his helpfulness the Nawab was allowed to take the title of King, thereby outraging Muslim loyalty to the Mogul dynasty:

‘“His Majesty” of Oude makes me sick. If the King of Delhi was in fact an absurdity or a mockery (I do not admit it was either), it had its root in a wise conformance to usage, in a generous consideration of the feelings of fallen greatness. It was the veneration of a great power that had passed away; and the superstition that continued to give homage to the shrine which we had addressed to propitiate our rise, was sanctioned by the example of the wisest among nations. There was little except goodness in it. The expenditure was duly repaid in the return of impression.. ..’*

Chapter IX

The Pindari and Maratha Wars

The Governor-General’s dealings with the Maratha States: influence of Metcalfe: three types of native State: destruction of the Pindaris: murder of Gangadhar Sastri and imprisonment and escape of Trimbakji: the Peshwa’s attack: battles of Kirki, Yeraoda, Koregaon, Sitabaldi: war with Holkar: battles of Mahidpur and Ashti: settlement of Central India: changing racial relations: administrative changes: the Palmer scandal: suttee.

The Maratha States deserved the eclipse about to overtake them. Their original revolt against Mogul tyranny and bigotry was so successful that even to-day its victories are written on the map, in great Maratha principalities far outside the Deccan, which is ethnically Maratha territory. But these principalities, so valued an element in modern India, could not be established as we know them, except on the ruins of the system which preceded them and was their beginning. That system in 1817 was solely rapacious, except for the Gaekwar’s dominions (which had settled into an administration more or less of the kind we know now as an Indian State). Holkar’s and Sindhia’s ‘States’ were merely the range within which they normally pillaged; their boundaries were liable to sudden extension or retraction, according as the pillagers’ armed power waxed or waned.

For exemption from their attentions, these chieftains claimed tribute from many princes who had moved into the British sphere. Sindhia had claims on Bhopal, whose Nawab had assisted Goddard’s march in Warren Hastings’s time and thereby set up connections with the Company. By Maratha political notions, the claims were good ones; Sindhia

‘having been in the habit of . . . levying contributions on this territory as his peculiar and exclusive prey, he conceived no one else had any right to interpose. This is the meaning he attached to the word dependency’.*

The Nepal War and the Burmese threat seemed to provide a good occasionfor reasserting rights of pillage. But, warned by Lord Hastings, hewithdrew (December, 1814); and the Nawab, whose conduct had been markedby double-dealing, was effectively protected.

It became increasingly clear that a new Maratha war was pending. Relations became strained in 1815, when, following on its interference for Bhopal, the paramount Power took charge of differences between the Nizam and Peshwa, the latter having claimed chauth as due under an agreement concluded after the Nizam’s defeat at Kardla. Two sets of circumstances brought about the final break. The first was the continual application of the miserable Rajput kingdoms to be taken under Company protection. The granting of this request was precluded by the unnecessary treaty of 1805, whereby Sir George Barlow had pledged the British not to come between Sindhia and his prey in this quarter. The second precipitating factor was the inroads of the Pindaris, a name loosely applied to those banditti-cavalry which reinforced all Indian armies. Hordes of these swarmed in Central India, and their numbers had been augmented by the successive annexations of the Company, driving into the continually contracting region of native India those who had found employment as soldiers of Tipu or the Nizam. The Pindaris, Malcolm noted, were now ‘what the Mahratta power was in the decline of the Mogul Empire of India. Let us take warning, and save the British Empire from the downfall which its predecessor sustained, chiefly from the hands of the predecessors of the Pindarrees’. As those words show, the political possibilities were remarkably well understood. Such Pindari leaders as Amir Khan were themselves almost established as independent princes inside the territory of Holkar or Sindhia, and seemed at the start of a career very like that of these chieftains themselves, not so long ago. There was, however, much obscurity as to their relationship with the leading Maratha States. They certainly appeared in the field with Sindhia and Holkar, and in varying degrees obtained protection from them; yet Sindhia and Holkar exercised little, if any, authority over them.

From contemporary documents, and the tradition preserved by men who, like Kaye, had talked with officers who passed through this last great Maratha war, we can recover the intense excitement with which the British anticipated the hoped-for conflict. But the immediate move was against the Pindaris only, whose depredations into Bengal, and still more, into the Northern Sarkars, were increasing, and were accompanied with terrible cruelty. They forced bags of hot ashes over the faces of those they suspected of concealing riches, and carried off young girls, tied on horseback ‘like calves’,* three or four together. Whole villages committed suicide to escape them. At last Hastings, in defiance of the Directors’ veto (while urging them to remove it, which, in consideration of his horrible evidence, they did), prepared his wide net to sweep this curse out of being. He gathered two armies amounting to 120,000 men, the northern under himself, the southern under Sir Thomas Hislop, with Malcolm as the latter’s principal political officer. The Gwalior Resident was told to make Sindhia ‘sensible to the benefits’ he would ‘derive from frank co-operation’, and the Maratha chiefs were ordered to allow free movement through their territories and to assist in every way this drive against general nuisances. Sindhia’s Minister ‘shrugged up his shoulders and said, “The weakest must obey the stronger” ‘, which the Governor-General thought ‘a curious avowal of incapacity for effectual resistance’.* Hastings with justice (he was not a man to cherish illusions) noted that the Maratha leaders were in correspondence together, and ‘We must not look to the security of honourable pledges from them, but be satisfied with carrying point by point through gentle intimidation’.* Sindhia was made to yield up for temporary occupation two forts. Hastings was not a Wellesley, and he felt compunctions over the humiliation he felt bound to impose:*

‘He subscribes to all the conditions which I dictated, and has swallowed a bitter drench in so doing. I should have thought myself oppressive had he not been so thoroughly false a fellow. The engaging to co-operate in the extirpation of the Pindarries, whom he has fostered---to whom he has plighted protection, and who really have hitherto constituted a material part of his strength, must be deeply mortifying’.

But he hardened his heart, determined to ‘rivet such shackles upon Scindiah and Holkar as that all the treachery they are at this moment meditating will be impotent. In fact, the downfall of the Mahrattas is achieved’. A fact so patent as that last was not lost on the Marathas themselves. Nor on anyone else.

‘Let the reader place before him any map of India, and contemplate the expanse of country lying between the Kistnah and the Ganges rivers. Let him glance from Poonah in the south-west to Cawnpore in the north-east; mark the positions of the principal Native Courts, and think of the magnificent armies---the very flower of the three Presidencies---which were spreading themselves over that spacious territory, closing in upon Hindostan and the Deccan, and compassing alike the Pindaree hordes and the substantive States in their toils. The sportsmen of the day, indeed, regarded it as a grand battue of the princes and chiefs of India; and we cannot be surprised if those princes and chiefs looked upon the matter in the same light, and thought that the Feringhees, after a long season of rest, were now again bracing themselves up for vigorous action, and were putting forth all their immense military resources in one comprehensive effort to sweep the native principalities from the face of the earth.

‘The Mahratta was roused. He had been uneasy. He was now alarmed. The whole history of our connexion with India shows that for a native prince to apprehend danger is to precipitate it by his own conduct. He is more often ruined by his fears than by anything else. . . . He commits himself to hostility before he is aware of it; and when all is over---when, prostrate and helpless at the feet of his conqueror, he declares that he had no intention to provoke the war which has destroyed him, there is often more truth in the words than we are wont to admit. It is said, in such cases, that our diplomatists are duped and over-reached, because they have not perceived hostile designs before they were formed, and known more about the future movements of our enemies than was known, at the time, to themselves. It is not a want of good faith, so much as a want of consistent counsel and steadfast action, that has brought so many of the princes of India to the dust.

‘So it was, it appears to me, with the Peishwa and the Rajah of Berar. They were alarmed by the gathering and the advance of our armies. They did not believe that these immense military preparations had been made simply for the suppression of the Pindarees. They thought that whatever the primary and ostensible object of the campaign might be---a campaign conducted by the Governor-General himself in person, at the head of the Grand Army---it would eventually be directed against the substantive Mahratta states. And this was no baseless suspicion. The probability of another Mahratta war, as the sequel of the Pindaree campaign, was the subject of elaborate State papers and the small gossip of our camps. Statesmen solemnly discussed it at the council-board, and soldiers joyously predicted it at the mess-table. Had the whole scope of our policy been fully understood at the Mahratta Courts . . . they would not have suffered their fears to hurry them into aggression. But they only knew that we were putting our armies in motion from all points, and that in every cantonment of India the talk was about the probability of another war with the Mahrattas. . . .’*

When Mr. P. E. Roberts remarks* of Lord Hastings’s dealings with native Powers, ‘Full justice has not perhaps always been done to the moderation of British policy throughout this epoch. Seldom have forbearance and firmness been more happily combined. Those bad rulers, the Peshwa and Apa Sahib, were again and again given chances to reform’, we must wonder that so judicious a historian should write with what appears unconscious irony. The Peshwa, it may be said in passing, was where he was at all only because we had seen to it that he was there, whether his own people wanted him or not. Lord Hastings’s treatment of native princes looks moderate and courteous, because we remember Wellesley’s extreme of high-handed contemptuousness. For what he did, there was justification in the facts of the Indian situation----which were that all Central India was in anarchy, and the rulers with whom he dealt so rigorously were silly or wicked (the Peshwa was both). But this does not alter the fact that the princes near enough to feel the weight of British might were rounded up like wild beasts---that rebellion (if it was rebellion) was made humanly certain, and then punished. Malcolm thought the Maratha chiefs

‘had at least as good a right to prepare for contingencies as we had. If, when the British Government first took up arms, and calculated the scale on which it would be expedient to conduct its military operations, the contingency of a Mahratta war was duly provided for, and that provision is to be considered demonstrative only of wisdom and forethought, we must surely be blinded by our national self-love, if we would denounce as treachery, or as folly, a like provision on the part of the Mahrattas, who were in much greater danger than ourselves. We surely cannot expect all the world to dismount their guns whilst our own are loaded and primed, and the portfire is burning in our hands’.*

It is often said that Britain acquired her World Empire in a fit of absent-mindedness; the epigram has served to support our useful reputation with foreigners for stupid stolidity, but has been overworked. From Clive’s time onwards, British India never lacked minds seeing and planning far ahead. There was no trace, even momentary, of absent-mindedness in such rulers as Warren Hastings, Wellesley, Lord Hastings, or Dalhousie.

Metcalfe had the Governor-General’s ear to an exceptional degree; and his influence, so inadequately noted by historians, outweighed the representations of men who desired to see the native States given more, not less, independence. As Resident in Delhi, he saw only the abundant seamy side * of these country regalities, beginning with the dilapidated Mogul ‘Empire’ at his door; his increasing scorn of them worked with Hastings’s own desire to sweep away the whole system of outdated pretence. They had discussed Central India together during the Governor-General’s original tour up-country; and in a memorandum Metcalfe divided existing States into three classes:

‘Substantive states, ardently desiring our overthrow, and ambitious to aggrandise themselves. . . .

‘military powers not substantive states . . . living by plunder and devastation---the enemies of all regular governments, more especially hostile in spirit to us. . . .

‘petty states . . . subject to the continual plunder and oppression of the two former classes, who in consequence look up to us for protection, and are, therefore, well-disposed towards us.’

The division, though admirable, presented difficulties. Holkar and the Nagpur raj, both ranking with Sindhia as ‘substantive states’, were so reduced that they were in danger of splitting into predatory fragments; Amir Khan and others were partly of the freebooting class, partly dependents of Sindhia or Holkar, partly on the point of themselves emerging as ‘substantive states’.

The preliminaries of the Pindari campaign were pushed forward. The petty States, mostly Rajput, whose protection was desirable both for their own sake and for the revenues they would afford to prosecute the war which was bound to come against the Marathas, were taken into the British system, Hastings announcing to Sindhia and Holkar that the treaty of 1805 was abrogated. The Maratha Powers were told again that no neutrality in the drive would be permitted. If they hung back to the extent of themselves becoming enemies, so much the better:

‘The war in this case would require greater exertions, but would also be attended with better prospects of solid advantage. The territories of Scindiah, Holkar, or the Rajah of Berar, would afford a recompense for the expenses of the war, and an increase of resources for the payment of additional force.’

So Metcalfe to the Governor-General; and Metcalfe’s biographer surmises that ‘perhaps the expectation entertained that some previous reluctance or some subsequent infidelity would embroil us with the substantive states in such a manner as to enable us to make certain new distributions of their territory was not, in some quarters, much unlike a hope’.*

The Pindaris most vigorous leader, Chitu, routed by a surprise attack, was chased into jungle where he was, appropriately enough, eaten by a tiger. Other leaders surrendered. The worst, Amir Khan, who had been a fiend for twenty years, made his peace before operations commenced, and became an orthodox chieftain. An admitted sirdar of Holkar, he was given a principality sliced out of his feudal superior’s domains, and recognised as Nawab of Tonk.

A Maratha War was almost simultaneous, but was partial, not general, Sindhia being immobilised by the effective severity of the Governor-General’s arrangements and Holkar---who had the best casus belli of any, in the cool generosity to Amir Khan at his expense---entering it with characteristic belatedness. It came first with the Peshwa, and out of a long-standing trouble. The Gaekwar had sent to Poona as ambassador Gangadhar Sastri, a europeanised and tactless Brahmin: ‘though a very learned Shastree, he affects to be quite an Englishman, walks fast, talks fast, interrupts and contradicts, and calls the Peshwa and his ministers “old fools” and “damned rascals”, or rather “dam rascal”’.* The Peshwa, who alternated his time between debauchery of the obscenest description and steady pursuit of political aims, had fallen completely under the influence of Trimbakji, a base creature. By Trimbakji’s instructions, with the Peshwa’s connivance, Gangadhar Sastri was murdered in open street (July 14, 1815), at Pandarpur, most sacred of Maratha places of pilgrimage. Indian opinion was outraged by a Brahmin’s slaughter, especially there; the British Government was indignant that an envoy, and, moreover, an envoy representing one of its extremely few really faithful dependents, had been murdered. Elphinstone, Resident at Poona, was told to demand Trimbakji’s surrender. After long evasion, this was obtained. But Trimbakji, ill-guarded, escaped by a mixture of daring and cunning which delighted his own people and went far towards removing the odium which had attached to his criminal actions:

‘The principal agent of communication was a Mahratta horse-keeper, in the service of one of the officers of the garrison, who passing and repassing the window of Trimbukjee’s place of confinement, when in the act of airing his master’s horse, sang the information he wished to convey, in an apparently careless manner, which the Europeans, for want of sufficient knowledge of the language, could not detect. The difficulties of this escape were exaggerated into an exploit worthy of Sivajee.’*

His late jailors, who did not share the popular enthusiasm, forced on the sullen Peshwa a new Treaty of Poona (May, 1817). This was a hard one, as even the following statement (which might serve as a model of how many question-begging assertions could be crammed into little space) half admits: ‘The rights of war are proverbially severe. The Peshwa’s conduct gave us unquestionable right to exact penalties for acts of scarcely disguised hostility, as well as to demand security for the future’.* It had not yet come to war; nevertheless, the Peshwa was treated as a beaten foe, commanded to close down abruptly all correspondence with other States, release all dependent rajas from submission, acknowledge complete subservience to the Company, abandon his claim to titular headship of the Marathas, acknowledge in set terms his belief in Trimbakji’s guilt, and cede territory to support the subsidiary force. His resentment smouldered, five months later, into an attack which excites indignation and surprise in orthodox historians. We may admit that he was ‘a perjured, vicious coward’, whose ‘usual game’ was ‘perfidious intrigue’.* But even a Washington or John Nicholson, supposing such characters capable of emergence in Oriental races, might have been restive under such terms as had been ‘riveted’ on him in face of watching India. The truth is, we see in Anglo-Maratha relations the jarring of opposite codes of ethics and conduct. One side is swift in severity of judgment and punishment of vacillation and duplicity, even if it were duplicity arising out of humiliation and conscious helplessness---the other is still on a childish level of caprice and casualness, and a sub-childish level of silliness and cruelty. To the Marathas the British seemed ruthless, to the British the Marathas seemed contemptible. We may pity those who, like Gokla, the Peshwa’s general, had to throw away their lives out of loyalty to a master whose follies they saw yet could not prevent, while they thought his independence worth even the supreme sacrifice, now that all India was rapidly sinking into servitude.

Elphinstone remained serene in the heart of the gathering storm; playing cards with lady friends, reading and confiding to his diary his ‘reactions’ to Sophocles and Thucydides and Walter Scott, rising at four and, after two hours Greek, riding out to the Briton’s pastime of slaying; inflexibly just as he saw justice; aware of peril but above it; watchfully equable, though the clouds that gathered concealed lightning that might strike with death. Grant Duff, his only companion through it, has left an unforgettable picture * of the last night of watchfulness (October 28, 1817):

‘The British cantonment and the Residency were perfectly still, and the inhabitants slept in the complete repose inspired by confidence in that profound peace to which they had been long accustomed; but in the Peishwa’s camp, south of the town, all was noise and uproar. Mr. Elphinstone had as yet betrayed no suspicion of the Peishwa’s treachery, and, as he now stood listening on the terrace, he probably thought that, in thus exposing the troops to be cut off without even the satisfaction of dying with their arms in their hands, he had followed the system of confidence, so strongly recommended, to a culpable extremity: but other motives influenced his conduct at this important moment. . . . Apprised of the Governor-General’s secret plans and his intended movements on Gwalior, which many circumstances might have concurred to postpone, Mr. Elphinstone had studiously avoided every appearance which might affect the negotiations in Hindoostan, or by any preparation and apparent alarm on his part, give Sindia’s secret emissaries at Poona reason to believe that war was inevitable. To have sent to the cantonments at that hour would have occasioned considerable stir; and in the meantime, by the reports of the spies, the Peishwa was evidently deliberating; the din in the city was dying away; the night was passing; and the motives which had hitherto prevented preparation determined Mr. Elphinstone to defer it some hours longer. Major J. A. Wilson, the officer in command of the European regiment on its march from Bombay, had already been made acquainted with the critical state of affairs, and was hastening forward.’

If anyone wonders why the British passed to the supreme control of India, this scene, happily preserved by the vivid memory of one of its two participants, should remove his difficulty---Elphinstone listening from his veranda to the mad tumult of the city close to which his handful of troops slept unwarned, risking their lives and his deliberately on the chances of peace and lest he should mar the train of action which his Governor-General was laying elsewhere.

Next day, after ascertaining that attack was a matter of hours, Elphinstone stationed 250 men at the Residency, and moved out the rest of his tiny army to Kirki, four miles away. His sepoys stood fast against seduction and threats; and after further fruitless negotiations, on November 5 the Company’s troops, which had been reinforced, were invested. Again the scene is preserved by an eye-witness:*

‘Those only who have witnessed the Bore in the Gulf of Cambay, and have seen in perfection the approach of that roaring tide, can form the exact idea presented to the author at sight of the Peishwa’s army. It was towards the afternoon of a very sultry day; there was a dead calm, and no sound was heard, except the rushing, the trampling and neighing of the horses, and the rumbling of the gun wheels. The effect was heightened, by seeing the peaceful peasantry flying from their work in the fields, the bullocks breaking from their yokes, the wild antelopes startled from sleep, bounding off, and then turning for a moment to gaze on this tremendous inundation, which swept all before it, levelled the hedges and standing corn, and completely overwhelmed every ordinary barrier as it moved.’

The Peshwa’s heart failed him, seeing the enemy standing firm in the floods that swept around them. The attack, launched by his gallant general Gokla, failed miserably; 2800 men, of whom 800 were Europeans, with a loss of 86 killed and wounded, repulsed 18,000 horse and 8000 foot, with a loss of 500. The Peshwa vented his rage and disappointment on the Residency, which was gutted, not one stone being left upon another. He had shot his bolt; after Kirki he ‘never rose above the character of a heartless and desperate fugitive’.*

A relief force advanced swiftly on Poona, and routed the Peshwa on the 16th at Yeraoda, since famous as the site of Mahatma Gandhi’s periodic ‘retreats’ in jail. Poona fell, and the chase of the Peshwa began. He caught Captain Staunton’s 800 at Koregaon, ‘the Indian Thermopylae’,* where for eight hours, frantic with thirst, they held out against attack after attack by thirty times their number. ‘Their situation towards evening was very hopeless.’* But the Peshwa withdrew, and in the darkness Staunton evacuated the shattered mud hovels, carrying off as many of his wounded as he could. The Marathas, a magnanimous people, lost heavily, but ‘have the generosity, on all occasions, to do justice to the heroic defenders of Korygaum’.

Meanwhile, the Peshwa’s secret ally, the Raja of Nagpur, had attacked his own Resident, Jenkins, in the first of a series of events that were almost exact repetition of those at Poona. In fighting which began on the evening of November 26, 1817, and lasted for eighteen hours, the Marathas were repulsed from Sitabaldi, two hills near Nagpur, with a ridge yoking them. The victory cost the defenders 333 killed and wounded, more than a quarter of their number. On December 16, a battle took place in front of the capital, which presently surrendered.

Holkar’s durbar had continued in ‘everlasting turmoil’, the normal condition of that turbulent court. Its real ruler was Tulsi Bai, who had been a concubine of Jeswant Rao Holkar---a woman profligate but intelligent and educated, of exceptional beauty and endowed with the vigorous qualities that have so often showed in the women of her blood. She offered secretly to place herself and the young Holkar, a minor, under British protection. Her own people, discovering this, put her to death; and presently Indore, in the indeterminate casual manner of most of its wars, found itself in hostilities with the British southern army. On December 20 Sir Thomas Hislop forded the Sipra, and defeated the Marathas at Mahidpur. Again, Holkar’s troops showed themselves the most dangerous of all Maratha adversaries. The victory cost 778 men, including 38 British officers; and though Holkar lost 3000 men, mainly in the pursuit, many of his infantry managed to retreat in good order, despite the enemy’s cavalry strength. Mahidpur

‘is the only action in the third Maratha war in which there was any considerable European element in the British forces engaged. Other battles, such as Kirkee, Sitabaldi, and Koregaon, were won almost entirely by native troops under the command of trusted British officers’.*

The war was now nearly over. Gokla, aware that all was lost, died fighting in the last battle, the cavalry skirmish of Ashti (February 20, 1818). A number of fortresses remained to be captured, the last, Asirgarh, surrendering in April, 1819.

The Governor-General’s comprehensive settlement left Holkar and Sindhia with approximately the territories they have to-day, but now definitely and finally part of the British system, with powers and limits plainly indicated. The Bhonsla Raja was deposed, and lost his lands north of the Narmada; he fled to the Sikhs, and a minor took his place, with the British in real control. The Peshwaship was abolished; Baji Rao, by Malcolm’s precipitate generosity, was given a large pension, the refusal to continue which was the action which gave mortal offence to his son, ‘the Nana Sahib’. At Ashti, the Raja of Satara was among the captives; rescued from the Peshwa’s control, he was re-established in his kingdom, with additional sanction from the all-powerful Kompani Bahadur. Elphinstone, as Commissioner, seated him on his throne ‘with great pomp’ (April, 1818); and the Raja ‘published two proclamations, the one announcing his connexion with the British Government, the other making over entire powers for the arrangement and government of his country’ to Captain Grant (Grant Duff), the future historian of his people. In 1817 the Rajput States, in quick succession, were formally made protectorates. In 1819 the Rao of Kachchh (Cutch), who had also

‘been caught in the wide sweep of the net of treaties’,* kicked against the meshes, and after a brief war was deposed for an infant. The Company thus reached the Indus mouth, and only the Punjab remained independent.

Hastings encouraged Stamford Raffles in founding Singapore, 1819. The Dutch were exceedingly vexed, but were placated, a few years later, when the Company exchanged its Sumatran settlements for the Dutch possessions still left in India.

Probably peace has never descended anywhere more gratefully than on the wasted regions of Central India. Sir John Malcolm, who played so prominent a part in the ending of tumults, wrote shortly afterwards:*

‘With the means we had at our command, the work of force was comparatively easy; the liberality of our Government gave grace to conquest, and men were for the moment satisfied to be at the feet of generous and humane conquerors. Wearied with a state of continued warfare and anarchy, the loss even of power was hardly regretted: halcyon days were anticipated, and men prostrated themselves in hopes of elevation. All these impressions, made by the combined effects of power, humanity, and fortune, were improved to the utmost by the character of our first measures. The agents of Government were generally individuals who had acquired a name in the scene where they were employed: they were unfettered by rules and their acts were adapted to soothe the passions, and accord with the habits and prejudices of those whom they had to conciliate or to reduce to obedience. But there are many causes which operate to make a period like this, one of short duration; and the change to a colder system of policy, and the introduction of our laws and regulations into countries immediately dependent upon us, naturally excite agitation and alarm. It is the hour in which men awake from a dream. Disgust and discontent succeed to terror and admiration; and the princes, the chiefs, and all who had enjoyed rank or influence, see nothing but a system dooming them to immediate decline and ultimate annihilation. . . .

‘The same classes of men do not fill the same places in society, under our government, as they did under a Native prince; nor are men actuated by similar motives. Our administration, though just, is cold and rigid. If it creates no alarm, it inspires little, if any emulation. The people are protected, but not animated or attached. It is rare that any native of India living under it can suffer injury or wrong; but still more rare that he can be encouraged or elevated by favour or distinction. Our rules and regulations constitute a despotic power, which is alike imperative upon the governors and the governed. Its character impels it to generalize, and its forms, as well as principles, are unyielding.’

The Governor-General’s own observations in Bengal and his enlightening tour through the up-country corroborated Malcolm’s testimony from Central India. ‘Our people’, he wrote, ‘are too dry with the natives, who give us high credit for justice, but I fear they regard us in general as very repulsive’.* When Munro from Madras pleaded passionately* with him against the now settled policy of granting no employment but the most mechanical and trivial to even the ablest Indians, we seem to be listening down a prolonged lapse of time, to Henry Lawrence’s criticism, on the eve of the Mutiny, of the absurdity of expecting men endowed with feelings and ambitions to rest content with a clerkship in administration or a corporal’s authority in the field; or to the complaint of Rabindranath Tagore* in our own day, that his country’s Government had become like patent foods, something ‘untouched by hand’. But the generation whose memory went back to an era when British and Indians met on terms of equality and often of friendship was passing fast. Munro’s course was nearly run; he and others like him were growing into survivals, venerated as having been fine men in their prime but recognised as now not quite up-to-date.

We come to the one really perplexing and distressing part of Lord Hastings’s career. We have seen how heartily historians reprobate the misgovernment of ‘those bad rulers, the Peshwa and Apa Sahib’. Unfortunately, the countries of princes meritorious enough to retain the paramount Power’s support were no happier than theirs. Haidarabad was

a great congeries of diseases. Nothing seemed to flourish there except corruption . . . the wretched people were dragooned into submission, and the required payments extorted from them at the bayonet’s point or the sabre’s edge’.*

Monotonous iniquity, unchecked, unmitigated, reigned. Outside the swing of the sword was mere banditry. The ‘State’ was as little of an ordered system as any Maratha one, the only difference being that it was more steadily and pitilessly pillaged, and for the benefit of aliens. The Nizam’s contingent were so highly paid that employment in his service, civil or military, was eagerly sought ‘by the officers both of the King’s and the Company’s army. The Resident was importuned with applications for these comfortable staff appointments, and large sums passed annually into the pockets of our own people’.* The joyous catchword was, ‘Nizzy pays for all’. At last a firm of money-lenders, William Palmer & Co., came to the distracted ruler’s help. They lent him, mainly to pay his costly troops, £20,000 a month, in return for assignments of £300,000 a year on his revenues, that is, at 25 per cent. interest. The system was that used with the Nawab of the Carnatic; and the Nizam dealt with rascals even more impudent.

Throughout these transactions the Governor-General showed ‘strong domestic attachment and excessive vanity’.* ‘Influenced by the fact that one of the partners was married to a ward of his, a young lady whom he regarded as his daughter’,* he sanctioned without enquiry all that the Palmer combination (a firm ‘without office or establishment’*) did, and displayed a ferocity and tenacity of rage at opposition, which are explicable only on the supposition that India and age had worn down his principles and mental soundness. In saying this, we give due weight to the possibility that he may at first have thought the arrangement justified as making the contingent’s pay secure; no administration was ever so incubus-ridden as the Company’s, with black financial care seated behind the horseman, while on every wind that blew from England the clamorous voices of Directors and shareholders cried out that dividends, whatever happened, must be safe.

Sir William Rumbold, husband of the Governor-General’s ward, was adventurer pure and simple, and ‘had accompanied his Lordship to India with the not very rare or unintelligible design of making as much money as he could’.* Too old to make it by soldiering or in administrative service, he had toured native India in quest of a centre for operations; had looked longingly at Oudh, but it was oversupplied already with people like himself---at Delhi, but with Metcalfe there he decided it was no good---at Mysore, but it was too close to the recently purged Carnatic. Haidarabad therefore secured the advantages of his presence. His firm soon had a stranglehold on the State, when a piece of cruel ill-luck befell it, in Metcalfe’s arrival as Resident (1820).

Metcalfe came at a time when all of even his valour and honesty were to be hardly strained. Lord Hastings, entirely cynical where Nizzy’s plucking was in proposal, forced the Resident to insert in a revised treaty imposed on the Nizam the following article, which he brought in the Governor-General’s own handwriting:

‘His Highness the Nizam, contemplating the great benefits which he has reaped from the late military operations, in the security of his dominions, and in the advantages accruing to his revenue, is anxious to manifest his sense of such a boon by a gratuitous contribution. In this view his Highness desires that he may be allowed to furnish sixteen lakhs of rupees (payable at the rate of four lakhs yearly till the amount be completed) for public purposes connected with the city of Calcutta or its vicinity . . . the sum shall be applied in such portions and for such objects as the Governor-General in Council may direct.’

The European quarters of the British capital were to obtain from the gratitude of the Company’s one Faithful Ally lights, water and roads. A graceful gesture, but the Directors disallowed it---Lord Hastings thought, because they paid undue attention to what seemed to them ‘the inconsistency of exacting from the resources of the State such a sum when we represent its finances to be embarrassed in such a degree as to require the aid of a British house of agency’. It may have been so.

Metcalfe succinctly summarised Sir William Rumbold’s ambition as ‘to make a large and rapid fortune in the style of the old time, by other means than his own personal labour’. It is an ambition which society everywhere considers entirely respectable, if achieved along accepted lines and within the law. The Palmers’ only misjudgment was in underestimating Metcalfe’s courage. He was appalled to discover everywhere ‘decay and depopulation’, and to find foreign financiers exercising control superior not only to the Nizam’s, but to the paramount Power’s. He quickly came to suspect that he was understood to be bribed into complicity; ‘fruits, dinners, &c., &c.’, were sent to the Residency, he reported, ‘in such quantities as to give them the appearance of regular supplies, instead of being merely complimentary’. His predecessor’s entire household had been in collusion with the Palmers and the Nizam’s officers, and his own servants, of whatever race, expected Metcalfe to continue the arrangement. Recusancy was assumed to be unthinkable, with the Governor-General’s son-in-law by adoption at the head of the enterprise; and Metcalfe’s duty was excessively hard, to one who had been in such intimate friendship with Lord Hastings. Moreover, he had had close relations with the Palmers themselves. William Palmer was brother of one of his dearest friends, and son of General Palmer; Sir William Rumbold had been his guest in Delhi, and nursed by him through serious illness. Nevertheless, when in 1820 the firm proposed to the Nizam a sixty lakhs loan, he pointed out that the loan would be ‘a mere fiction’, made up by a transference of the existing debt, with eight lakhs commission to the lenders for their kindness added to it. It was true that interest on this swollen sum was being reduced to 18 per cent. But as to further accommodation, the Palmers ‘went on with confidence lending afresh at their usual rate of interest, above 25 per cent’.* Sir William instructed him to keep quiet, and to use his influence to keep the Governor-General’s Council quiet. As he very reasonably asked,

‘What can the Government care whether the arrangement be more or less beneficial to us, provided it bestows upon the Nizam’s Government the great advantages that have been held out?’

The firm represented that the Resident was backing the proposal, and Lord Hastings was fooled (it must be admitted, fooled very easily) into what looked like Government guaranteeing. ‘The accumulation of wealth’ in the firm’s books, ‘from the immense interest which they charged, seemed to be boundless’. European officers eagerly put their money into so splendid a ramp, and these resources, combined with the Nizam’s payments for his mainly mythical loan, ‘was such as to supply the most wasteful expenditure on the part of the members of the firm, and was nevertheless overflowing’. Happy days had come again in Haidarabad.

But Metcalfe was miserable and indignant. In 1821 he proposed to open in Calcutta a loan at 6 per cent., to liberate the Nizam, though at enormous cost, from meshes that meant ruin. He was deeply concerned also for what always was close to his heart, the credit and dignity of his own people and Government. The Palmers replied with effrontery on a scale that moves into the region of musical comedy. They pretended to acquiesce, but claimed 6 lakhs ‘compensation’ for being paid: ‘the sudden liquidation of the loan to the Nizam would inflict a very serious injury on the firm’.* Racked with unhappiness---he repeatedly said that if he had suspected what was happening, nothing would have induced him to come to Haidarabad---and anxious to close a business so humiliating, Metcalfe agreed to this. Rumbold nevertheless wrote the Governor-General an urgent private representation (or rather, misrepresentation) of the Resident’s hostility. The Governor-General’s wrath was hot and implacable. But Metcalfe stuck to his guns. Few letters so stiff and unyielding, while perfectly respectful, have ever been written to a Governor-General; and the writer’s integrity throughout this intensely painful episode cost him Lord Hastings’s friendship, and furnished him with a host of unscrupulous foes at home as well as in India. It probably kept him out of the Governor-Generalship later on. We may excerpt a few of his ‘laments’. As to the Palmers, he says,

‘I lament their connexion with some of the most profligate and rapacious of the governors of districts, through whom their character, and what is of more consequence, the British name, become involved in detestable acts of oppression, extortion and atrocity. I lament the power which they exercise in the country, . . . enforcing payment of debts, due to them either originally or by transfer, in an authoritative manner not becoming their mercantile character; acting with the double force of the Nizam’s Government and the British name. . . . I lament the monopoly established in their favour by the sanction and virtual guarantee of the British Government, because it deprives the Nizam’s Government of the power of going into the European money-market, where, with the same sanction, it might borrow money at less than half the rate of interest which it pays to Messrs. Palmer and Co. I lament the political influence acquired by the House through the supposed countenance of your Lordship to Sir Wm. Rumbold, because it tends to the perversion of political influence for the purposes of private gain.’

He scouted the accusation that his opposition was due to personal spite. But Lord Hastings, whose administration in his last years went all to pieces, took the side of the Palmers.

Metcalfe became an object of ridicule in Haidarabad. But he was not the man to accept such a position. The Resident, he meant to be recognised as such; and to protect the people and British reputation. He found a cautious but convinced sympathiser in John Adam, the senior member of the Governor-General’s Council; Adam was particularly shocked by Metcalfe’s proof that the officers of the Residency, in his predecessor’s time, had been in the gang, even if the Resident was not (and he probably was). Hastings himself, having incurred the Directors’ censure for the affair, resigned, 1821, lingering listlessly in India until the end of 1822. Though a reconciliation was patched up between him and his brilliant and too fearless servant, after his return to England he kindled enmity against Metcalfe.

The Palmer controversy rose to heights of scurrilous partisanship unequalled since the time of Warren Hastings’s trial; ‘Sir William Rumbold’s levies’* beating up all the prejudice they could. John Adam, who acted as Governor-General for seven months, until Lord Amherst arrived in August, 1823, disallowed the more flagrantly dishonest items of the Palmer claims. The firm were paid to the extent of eighty lakhs, a sufficient tax on Indian resources; and withdrew, a year later, by the simple process of going bankrupt,

‘not from any run . .. but merely from want of funds to meet ordinary demands’ (Minute in Council, C. T. Metcalfe, December 11, 1828).

But their affairs haunted India for long enough, and Sir William Rumbold remained active and dissatisfied.

The episode lowered Metcalfe’s opinion of human nature, as he sorrowfully recorded, but gave him that contemptuous assessment of the worth of popularity (of which no man won more, and by entirely worthy means) which accompanied his courage to the end. The uncomplaining gallantry with which he supported through years the cancer which killed him is a story too deep for tears; but his stand against his own countrymen, and his friend the Governor-General in particular, called for no less of character, and should be gratefully remembered by all who love the memory of brave men.

Lord Hastings’s attitude is almost inexplicable, unless we take into account the influence exercised by a woman loved as a daughter and roused to hard anger and greed. Even so, it remains difficult to understand, for he himself was incorruptible to almost a prudish degree. Indeed, if anyone doubts that there was justice as well as urbanity in Lord Minto’s partial recantation of his earlier severity of judgment:

‘The loose principles which formerly prevailed amongst the Company’s servants . . . deserved . . . a little more indulgence perhaps than, as one of its sworn enemies and persecutors, I was disposed to show it. Peculation and abuse were not merely tolerated; they were in a manner established and authorised by the parsimony of the Company in the regular remuneration of its servants’---

and, we may add, established and made almost inevitable by the pestilential sycophancy of the country---let him read Lord Hastings’s Private Journal, with its reiterated narration of the way enormously valuable gifts were pressed upon him, despite his firm, courteous, and continued refusal. He and Lady Loudoun never took a thing; and it was almost superhuman to stand out when the donors were so unwearyingly silly in their determination to put the all-powerful British in their debt.

Lord Hastings refused to abolish suttee, and made the mistake, in 1813, of ordering that a police officer must be present at a widow-burning. This regulation was interpreted as giving official sanction to the cowardly and detestable rite; and Hastings himself finally admitted that it had increased ‘these sacrifices’. As against 378 suttees officially reported in Bengal in 1815, 839 were reported in 1818. It was about this time that British notice was widely and often drawn to the seamy side of Hinduism, which in practice had become thoroughly decadent and degraded. The contempt engendered was an increasingly powerful factor making for ruthlessness in the attitude of the stronger towards the weaker people. The impartial historian, whatever his race, must admit that much of the scorn entertained for the practices and thought of the people of India at this time was deserved. The Governor-General brought out with him the European mind, jaded from experience of world-shaking revolutions followed by the dragging Napoleonic wars and from the Prince Regent’s disillusioning friendship. He was perhaps unfortunate in having his closest contact with Bengal, whose inhabitants, sunk in centuries of oppression, had not yet begun their striking mental recovery. He regarded them with pity, but also with contempt; and there are periods in the history of every nation when both are merited:

‘Every day more and more satisfies me that I formed a just estimate of those who inhabit Bengal at least. They are infantine in everything. Neat and dexterous in making any toy or ornament for which they have a pattern, they do not show a particle of invention; and their work, unless they follow some European model, is flimsy and inadequate. Their religious processions constantly remind me of the imitation of some public ceremony which English children would make. One sees seven or eight persons gravely following a fellow who is tapping on a kind of drum that sounds like a cracked tin kettle, and though nobody looks at them they have the air of being persuaded that they are doing something wonderfully interesting. The temples they build are just such as would be constructed by schoolboys in Europe, had they the habit of dealing in brick and mortar. The edifices are rarely above four feet high, exclusive of two or three steps on which they are raised, and contain some rude and shabby carving or delineation of their gods. If this be the rate of the men, one may easily conceive what that of the women must be. Never enjoying even female society, their lives are passed in the extreme of listlessness. It is this which produces so many instances of women burning themselves.’*

As for suttee, though the Government of Bengal dared not suppress it, Metcalfe in Delhi, following the discountenancing of it by its Muslim rulers, prohibited the rite. The Marathas also, who exercised---this is one of the paradoxes attaching to these freebooters---a genuine if capricious humanity, were in advance of the British administration:

‘The Mahomedan rulers endeavoured, as much as they could without offending their Hindu subjects, to prevent it; and the Mahrattas, since they acquired paramount power in this country, have by a wise neglect and indifference, which neither encouraged by approval, nor provoked by prohibition, rendered this practice very rare. In the whole of Central India there have not been, as far as can be learnt, above 3 or 4 Sutties annually for the last 20 years.’*

Only in Rajasthan and Bengal did this cruelty persist on a large scale within the British sphere of influence; and in both countries the men had lost their natural heritage of independence, and were at the mercy of oppressors.

Book IV

Pre-Mutiny Paramountcy: Era of Reforms and Suppression of Inhumanities

‘If I do well I shall be blessed, whether any bless me or not.’
--- John Selden.

Chronological Table

Governor-General:

John Adam (acting). 1823. (January-July.)

Lord Amherst 1823. (August.)

• 1824. War with Burma. Barrackpur mutiny.

• 1826. Sack of Bharatpur. Treaty of Yandabo ends Burmese War.

• 1827. Death of Sir Thomas Munro.

Lord William Cavendish-Bentinck 1828.

• 1829. (December.) Abolition of suttee in Bengal. Beginning of suppression of thagi.

• 1830. Abolition of suttee in Madras and Bombay.

• 1831. Raja of Mysore deposed, and State taken over in trust. Burnes’s journey up Indus. Meeting at Rupar of Governor-General and Ranjit Singh.

• 1833. Renewal of Company’s charter.

• 1835. Macaulay’s minute on education.

Sir Charles Metcalfe (acting).

• 1835. Dost Muhammad Amir of Kabul.

Lord Auckland 1836.

• 1837. Accession of Queen Victoria. Colonel Low prevents revolution in Oudh. Famine in Hindustan.

• 1838. Tripartite treaty between Shah Suja, the Afghan pretender, Ranjit Singh, and the Company.

• 1839. New treaty forced on Sind Amirs. Death of Ranjit Singh. Invasion of Afghanistan and capture of Ghazni (July) and Kabul (August). Raja of Satara deposed.

• 1840. Surrender of Dost Muhammad.

• 1841. Murder of Burnes and Macnaghten.

Lord Ellenborough

• 1842. Retreat from Kabul. Sale’s defence of Jalalabad. Pollock’s advance; reoccupation of Kabul. Restoration of Dost Muhammad.

• 1843. Conquest of Sind. Defeat of Gwalior troops at Maharajpur and Panniar. Suppression of slavery.

Chapter I

Lord Amherst and Lord William Bentinck: The Opening Up of the North-West

John Adam and the Press: Lord Amherst Governor-General: first Burmese War: the Barrackpur mutiny: sack of Bharatpur: Oudh: the Noozeed case: Lord William Bentinck Governor-General: Bird’s Land Settlement of the North-West Provinces: charter renewal, 1833: Bentinck and native States: British travellers in Central Asia: Avitabile: Alexander Burnes,

John Adam’s brief sway was remarkable only for his action against the Press. There had been Calcutta English journals since 1780. In Warren Hastings’s time they were scurrilously personal, revelling in the wide range of material afforded by a settlement as non-moral as any cinema-crazed community of to-day. Checks were supplied by duels, assaults on editors, or vigorous executive action whenever Mrs. Hastings or her friends got too annoyed. In Cornwallis’s time the Press was fairly well behaved; no one wanted to libel a Governor-General so respected and so respect-worthy. Wellesley and Minto maintained a thorough oversight; and under them

this dread of the free diffusion of knowledge became a chronic disease, . . . continually afflicting the members of Government with all sorts of hypochondriacal day-fears and night-mares, in which visions of the Printing Press and the Bible were ever making their flesh to creep, and their hair to stand erect with horror. It was our policy in those days to keep the natives of India in the profoundest possible state of barbarism and darkness, and every attempt to diffuse the light of knowledge among the people, either of our own or the independent states, was vehemently opposed and resented’.*

Lord Hastings followed, holding opinions liberal in the extreme and completely contemptuous of misrepresentation; he thought that India should be educated, and the Press left free to say what it liked. Munro for once was on the illiberal side, considering a free Press incompatible with despotic government.

It must be remembered that the British community in India was below the level of responsibility of even the eighteenth-century public in England. It was not a question of whether seditious lawyers and ‘babus’ should be allowed to write at large, but of whether every attempt of Government to cut down perquisites or economise on administration---and every personal grievance against executive action or merely against some individual---should be open to the imaginative letters of disgruntled anonymity. ‘“Brutus” was, not improbably, a rising member of the Civil Service’*---some junior civilian who found the pagoda-tree a little higher than his friends had led him to suspect; ‘and “Cleophas” a liberal-minded major on the general staff’, who remembered better times before these jacobins came to ruin everything. These gentlemen, in Mr. Winston Churchill’s admirable phrase, ‘stood no nonsense from facts’, and lived in a society which saw no reason why anyone should stand any nonsense from them.

Adam’s action, however, was stupidly taken, on narrowly bureaucratic grounds. The editor of the Calcutta Journal, James Silk Buckingham, had brought out with him a sense of absurdity; and India had increased his natural light-heartedness. Madras had been unfortunate in its Governors, with the fine exception of Munro; a gentleman who occupied this position, ‘to the regret of the public’,* was given an extension of his term. Buckingham announced the news inside a black border, to Adam’s exceeding wrath. Government had a fervent partisan, one Bryce, a Church of Scotland minister; Bryce started a rival journal, trouncing Buckingham in a manner which the Supreme Court, appealed to by the trouncee, decided was libellous. When Bryce was consoled with the lucrative post of Clerk to the Stationery Department, Buckingham was amused, and said so; he pictured the reverend gentleman entangled in tape and envelopes when he should be pondering sermons. Thereupon Adam, ‘one of the old oligarchy of Calcutta---an honest, uncorrupted, good-hearted and very able man, with a mind warped by the chronic condition of bureaucracy, to which he had been so many years condemned’,* rose from his desk, and ‘smote heavily’, in regulations ‘which took all the pith and manhood out of the journals of the day’. Buckingham’s licence to reside in India was cancelled; he was ‘deported, ruined, and became for years a continual running sore in the flesh of the East India Company and the British Parliament’. He got into the House of Commons, 1832, and the Company found it wise to allow him a pension of £200 a year.

Metcalfe disapproved of Adam’s action. But this was the one period when Metcalfe did not matter.

Between the Company and Burma unsatisfactory relations had persisted for over thirty years. When Burma conquered Arakan, 1784, there was an influx of refugees into the Bengal delta, which already swarmed with pirates, mostly Portuguese and Mugs (mixed Bengalis and Arakanese). Burmese troops made no scruples about following them up, and Sir John Shore for the sake of peace surrendered their prey on condition that they retired with it. In Wellesley’s time there were armed clashes, but he was too occupied with bigger wars to attend to the business. Fugitives continued to pour in, begging piteously not to be sent back; the Burmese continued to chase them in British territory. The Court of Ava informed the Company, in 1817, that if they did not return to their doom ‘the vagabond Mugs . . . the Lord of the Seas and Earth would be obliged to reassert his authority over such places as Dacca and Murshidabad---undoubted apanages of the crown of Arakan’.* Lord Hastings was the wrong person to address such a menace to. However, war did not come until Lord Amherst’s time.* It broke out in 1824.

To-day it seems strange to read, in the Life of Henry Lawrence,* thatthere was ‘a panic that the Burmas had taken Chittagong, and were pushing up to Calcutta in their war boats’. But after years of overrunning their neighbours the Burmese were filled with conceit, and had conveyed their good opinion of themselves to others. The encounters between them and the Company’s troops, though trivial, had been numerous, and the latter had generally got the worst of them. The Burmese were now checked in Kachar (February, 1824), but their most famous general, Maha Bandula, annihilated a detachment at Ramu in May.* The eastern frontier seemed threatened, and Bandula carried a set of golden fetters for the Governor-General. But the British struck from the sea, occupied Rangoon (May, 1825), and proceeded to win victories. It was an absurd war, against an enemy who did much tom-toming, and tattooed his body with ferocious beasts to make himself invulnerable, but also dealt skilfully in underground pits behind stockades. It was a cruel war also. The Burmese refused to grant or accept quarter. When they took prisoners---and there were some British reverses, whose repercussions in India were important---they executed them, the British frequently coming upon the sight of the hung-up bodies. Maha Bandula, recalled from the Bengal frontier to meet the invaders, was struck by their care of wounded prisoners. Savagery was seen to be not a law of nature; the campaign grew tolerable in consequence. Sickness wrought great mortality, so that both sides were glad when peace was made (Treaty of Yandabo, February, 1826); the British were then getting uncomfortably near the Burmese capital. Maha Bandula, a genuinely remarkable man, though with barbarous methods of instilling courage into his men, had been killed by a rocket a year previously. No one will grudge the Burmese Court its official version of events:*

‘White strangers of the west fastened a quarrel upon the Lord of the Golden Palace. They landed at Rangoon, took that place and Prome, and were permitted to advance as far as Yandabo; for the King, from motives of piety and regard to life, made no preparation whatever to oppose them. The strangers had spent vast sums of money in their enterprise, so that by the time they reached Yandabo their resources were exhausted, and they were in great distress. They then petitioned the King, who in his clemency and generosity sent them large sums of money to pay their expenses back, and ordered them out of the country’.

The large sums of money were an indemnity of one million sterling. Assam, Arakan, and the Tenasserim coast were annexed.

‘Exaggerated reports of the strength and ferocity of the Burmese troops’* had swept through India:

‘The peasants on the frontier fled in dismay from their villages; and every idle rumour was magnified so industriously by timid or designing people, that the native merchants of Calcutta were with difficulty persuaded to refrain from removing their families and property from under the very guns of Fort William’.

It was just such a disquiet as some of us remember on a smaller scale, when the Emden was working havoc among Indian shipping and shelling Madras. It brought about at Barrackpur, the Governor-General’s place of residence near Calcutta, another rehearsal of the Great Mutiny. We are told that the sepoys had got above themselves, by reason of ‘their pride in the successes that had been achieved in the campaigns against Pindaris and Marathas’,* which ‘bred a spirit of insubordination’, such as perhaps their more observant members noticed from time to time in their European comrades, particularly the officers. Moreover, an attempted invasion of Burma through Arakan was accompanied with pestilence and appalling mortality. The sepoys, high caste men, were furnished with precisely the same grievance that had repeatedly been held to justify mutinous behaviour of Company’s officers, a heavy financial loss. Coolies, carriers, drivers, were offered higher pay than the infantry, to induce them to enlist for service which was dreaded; sepoys were told they must continue on the lower rates for which they had contracted. They ‘also had a real material grievance owing to the impossibility of obtaining land transport, which had to be provided by the men themselves under the rules then in force’, while the requirements of Government had gathered up most of the available beasts.

Vincent Smith remarks: ‘As usual, the genuine grievance was made the occasion for raising the cry of religion in danger’.* The grievance, at any rate, was seen and admitted by many regimental officers, who tried to help the men from their own pockets. But ‘strait-laced officialdom at headquarters was inflexible. . . . The men were under engagement to provide their own carriage, and government declined to relieve them of the responsibility’.* The 47th Native Infantry refused to move or to ground arms, and remained on the Barrackpur parade-ground,

‘as described by some who witnessed the scene . . . dazed by excitement . . . men not so much bent on mischief as possessed by some fatal infatuation . . . “with ordered arms in a state of stupid desperation, resolved not to yield, but making no preparation to resist”’.*

After warning, guns were opened on them, making the parade-ground a shambles. The survivors

‘fled in all directions, and were instantaneously dispersed. Above 800 muskets and uniforms were found in the adjacent fields and roads. The Court-martial sat immediately. The ringleaders (six) were hanged the next morning. Many hundreds since have been found guilty and sentenced to death, but this was commuted to hard labour for fourteen years on the public roads. Five other ringleaders were executed afterwards, and one man whom the mutineers regarded as their Commander-in-Chief was hung in chains in front of the lines. . . . All the officers (native) were dismissed the service and their guilt proclaimed at the head of every regiment in their native language. . . .

‘. . . our situation was awfully alarming. Lord Amherst resolved not to leave the house, and I determined not to quit him. Sarah behaved heroically, and, though ill, declared she would remain, and kept up her spirits, as we all did as well as we could.’*

It is generally considered that the episode should be judged retrospectively, through the lens of what happened thirty years later:

‘It did not appear that the Sepoys had contemplated active resistance, for though in possession of ball-cartridge, hardly any had loaded their muskets. Sir E. Paget was much blamed for resorting at once to the extremest measure; but the events of 1857, which began at the same station of Barrackpore, throw a truer light on the gravity of the crime of military mutiny.*

‘The punishment was just, but the fate of the regiment was unspeakably pathetic. . . the name of the regiment was effaced from the list of the army. . . . Those who blame the rigour shown in 1824 may, perhaps, ask themselves whether lenity might not have been misconstrued. No one felt more keenly than the Governor-General the pain of the spectacle’,*

though he did not obtrude himself too closely upon it. However, ‘nothing cheered and pleased him more than the proof he was hereafter to receive of the return of a better feeling among the soldiers . . . the 39th Native Infantry and the 60th Native Infantry volunteered services to go anywhere that Government ordered them’.

In 1826 took place the one considerable military action of Lord Amherst’s administration inside India. The Bharatpur Raja died, 1825, perhaps without assistance; his nephew murdered the regent and took prisoner the new prince, who was six years old and, but for the swift interposition of Sir David Ochterlony, Commissioner at Delhi, would probably have joined ‘the long list of Indian princes born too near a throne to escape death by a poisoned opiate, or the dextrous hand of an athlete’.* He was not delivered up when Ochterlony demanded; the long-desired casus belli, aggravated by much vaunting defiance, was furnished against the grim fortress which India believed impregnable. This time the British commander, Lord Combermere, before storming blasted a tremendous breach: his men rushed in through the smoke and terror. The enemy suffered a loss of 8000, cut off by the cavalry almost to a man; the British casualties were 600. Lord Combermere’s enthusiasm for financial gain attracted some comment; Metcalfe observed that, while he was ostensibly acting as the young Raja’s protector, that child was plundered of even his brass pots. The General awarded himself 6 of the 48 lakhs of treasure found, which has been censured by even recent historians as overstepping proper bounds.* But to a Government generally moving from one triumphant campaign to another, the army had long been all-powerful; experience had proved repeatedly the danger of coming between it and its captures. And we who live on the wrong side of the World War can surely be happy in the spectacle of bygone jollity, of men happy and victorious, women gay and unbothered:

‘It may cheer the present generation to hear of past illuminations and rejoicings which are almost like those in a fairy tale, in which everyone is victorious and comes home unharmed. On the king’s birthday, April 24, there is a grand entertainment at Government House; Combermere and Bhartpur in lamps on the right, Campbell and Ava in coloured lamps on the left, wreaths round the pillars, George IV in the centre also in lamps, with the appropriate accompaniments of star and crown. In the great ballroom were transparencies representing Lord Combermere leading the young Raja into Bhartpur, followed by his staff, while a figure of Victory waved a laurel wreath. Also Sir Archibald Campbell on horseback with his steamer in the background, the Dagon Pagoda, and a nymph-like figure scattering olive branches,---India, Peace, Victory and other appropriate inscriptions were liberally scattered about, and the company danced till 3 o’clock morning.

‘Rejoicings, alas, do not last for ever. . .’*

We must turn to finance. ‘“Adapt your revenue to your ruling requirements” was the contention of Sir Charles Metcalfe. “Adapt your military requirements to the exigencies of economical finance” was the unceasing burden’* of those mean-spirited men, the Directors. ‘And in a sense the Directors were right. The disaffection created by excessive or inappropriate imposts is no whit less dangerous than weak battalions, and the problem of finance pressed very heavily on the minds of those responsible.’ Luckily the King of Oudh again proved a very present help, in 1825 and 1826 providing a million and a half sterling, thereby ‘soothing the anxieties of the conscientious but impecunious John Company’.* Another helper was the Maharaja of Gwalior. Daulat Rao Sindhia died, 1827; and his wishes as regards an adopted child and his favourite wife’s regency were respected, in consideration of a loan of eighty lakhs, whose interest was to be spent on a British subsidiary force.

His Majesty of Oudh had monetary anxieties of his own, Oudh having continued for forty years the prey of European harpies. As far back as 1798 Sir John Shore had refused to include in a treaty a clause making the Company the guarantor of alleged loans, which in the usual manner---dishonesty and 36 per cent. usury---had ‘swelled to an amount calculated to excite a feeling of astonishment at the vast amount of rank vegetation springing from so inconsiderable a seed’* as the alleged original assistance. Successive Nawabs, harassed by pimps, pandars, dancing girls, and ‘conscientious but impecunious John Company’ ever busy with new wars, had accepted the aid of generous-minded Europeans; and in return had dispensed bonds ‘with truly oriental magnificence. Had these securities been satisfied in due course, the Vizier would have set an example altogether new in India’. But, as Thornton observes, finding a theme adequate to his vivacity of ironical meiosis, the Wazir ‘did not thus violate the principles upon which Eastern rulers ordinarily administer their pecuniary affairs’. Each Wazir (later, King) knew that he was dealing with venomous crooks, and he himself was usually a crook in his own fashion. Oudh for close on a century resembles a still living carcase on which thousands of bloated insects were battening.

The ‘creditors’, decade after decade, pressed for settlement of their steadily mounting claims, which no amount of such piecemeal composition as was progressively obtained could wipe out. The nature of these claims was by now pretty generally understood, and a Committee of the East India Company recorded (May 31, 1822) that ‘loans at such an exorbitant rate of interest cannot justly be considered in any other light than as gambling transactions’. But better times were coming for the creditors. As one by one the men who remembered when there were still native States not without qualities that called out respect---when a Gurkha war was a frightening campaign, and Bharatpur a still unconquered fastness, when Englishmen and Indians met as foes but as foes who still had hours of friendly equality---as Munro, Scotland’s noblest gift to India, died, as an Elphinstone and then a Malcolm went, as Webbe and Graeme Mercer died, and Metcalfe was withdrawn into the Calcutta Secretariat, already a man touched with mortal disease and lingering on only until his place could be filled, a certainty of immeasurable superiority settled on British minds. It was felt that Indians had no particular rights beyond that of accepting the government provided for them, without demurs as to cost or kind. That this cost was immensely swollen by the voracity of unofficial Europeans troubled the best officials, and made them (Metcalfe was here an exception, for entirely liberal reasons) steadfast against lifting the licence on non-Company personnel or allowing ‘colonisation’ on any scale. But most took it in the light-hearted spirit of the old saying, that ‘Nizzy pays for all’: ‘this was a period when the good fortune of those who were desirous of preying upon the people of India was in the ascendant’.* Nevertheless, the Oudh creditors received a series of checks in 1834, when Lord Ellenborough, supported by the Duke of Wellington (who was exceedingly well informed as to what lengths adventurers habitually went to, and held strong views about what he called ‘these gentry’), asked a number of questions which were resented but not satisfactorily answered. Ultimately, ‘after much tedious argument’, during twenty years---and with this we may dismiss an unsavoury topic---‘political influence procured a decision more favourable to the claims of the European money-lenders, against various native debtors in Oude, than was consistent with the honour of the British government’.*

The partial check which rapacity experienced in 1834 was due to some extent to its victory in 1832, a triumph so astounding that it set men thinking. During the worst times of the Madras corruption, various officials trumped up claims against the Zemindar of Noozeed, some based on bonds given by him, when in prison, to his jailor, Mr. James Hodges. The claims were so obviously worthless, even in those days, that they were left alone, after the zemindari’s affairs had been finally settled in 1803, for thirty years. Nevertheless, the House of Lords in 1832 accepted them, though opposed at every stage by the whole power of the East India Company. The connoisseur of malversation should look into this once-notorious case; it would teach him something of the possibilities of really skilful dishonesty.

Opposition to acceptance of the whole claim (a million and a half sterling) against Oudh was due also to slowly growing perception of the value of Oudh as an unofficial treasury whenever the Company needed special subventions. Its annexation was always an event hovering more or less close to materialisation; and, referring to this possibility, Sir Robert Peel in 1834

‘solemnly deprecated . .. the commencement of the exercise of sovereignty, by appropriating eleven hundred thousand pounds sterling of the property of the territory to the liquidation of a claim, for which it did not appear that the British State had ever made itself in the slightest degree responsible’.*

The Nepal War had acquainted British officers with the pleasure and health of Himalayan sojourning. Lord Amherst in 1827 started the custom of summering at Simla, which perhaps is his strongest title to remembrance. The three Governors-General who followed Lord Hastings were less powerful than the brood of vigorous soldiers with ‘the knack of executive success’, whose valour and spirit of conquest were within a quarter of a century to make the Company’s dominion into an empire as superb as any the world has seen. There might be discontent beneath the surface, but it was discontent absurdly helpless. Courage, enterprise, physical and moral strength, were all on the rulers’ side.

Lord William Cavendish-Bentinck arrived, July 4, 1828, and began with unpopularity, having to enforce stringent economies. These were of course accompanied with threats of mutiny by the military personnel, but had far-reaching administrative results, and after a considerable interval were saving half a million sterling in civil affairs and (rather more quickly) a million in the army. He abolished the Provincial Court of Appeal and Circuit, ‘which had become proverbial for their dilatoriness and uncertainty of decision’,* a gain financially and judicially. He licensed the direct passage of opium from Central India (where then, as now, certain States grew it largely) to Bombay, diverting it from Karachi; the British Government secured the profits which the Amirs of Sind lost. This action ‘practically ensured a valuable contribution, paid for by the Chinese drug-taker, to take the place of the alleged payment to the Company by the English tea-drinker’.* R. M. Bird put through the Land Revenue settlement of the North-West (the modern United) Provinces, Allahabad being given a separate Board of Revenue. Most important of all, the urgency of economy led to the extension of ‘the uncovenanted services’, already begun by Lord Amherst, a wide devolution of important administrative and judicial duties to an Indian personnel, as far less costly than a solely European one.

The Company had lost its monopoly of the Indian trade in 1813. Another twenty-year period closed in 1833, and opinion in England was setting steadily and increasingly against renewing the charter. Probably the charter would have gone, if it had not been that by 1833 Lord William Bentinck’s immense reforms in moral and social practices had made a very different and far better impression abroad than the surfeit of victories which in the dawning of modern thought and modern ethics were wearying and even disgusting people. The Company’s activities put up ‘a better show’, and what would probably have been denied to a Wellesley or Hastings was granted to Bentinck. The China trade monopoly, however, went the way of the old Indian one. It had been grudgingly continued, and as the Burmese operations opened up the Far Eastern trade increasingly, and its profits were seen to be ‘far in excess of its dimensions’,* the demand that it be thrown open proved too strong to be resisted. China has disappointed the West in recent years, but in 1830 its people were satisfactory beyond their neighbours; ‘the capacity of the Chinese for consuming opium and paying silver then seemed to be unlimited’. Moreover, the East India Company was accused of profiteering in tea, a commodity which bulked largely in their annual profit of over a million sterling from the Chinese trade.

It is interesting to note that practically all the items which make up the present-day controversy (or, rather, the controversy of a yesterday that is only just finished) were established by 1830. The home remittances amounted to three millions sterling, which the Company covered by the profits of Chinese and Indian goods sold in London. Five years of Lord Amherst’s administration had seen average annual deficits in the Indian revenues of close on the same sum; and the rule of Lords Hastings and Amherst together had resulted in a total deficit of nearly nineteen and a half millions. Bentinck turned the deficits into what was a two millions surplus when he left, showing what was possible if wars were avoided and revenues used for the ordinary administrative routine.

The Company had done England service, immensely augmenting commerce, adding to national pride, weakening and humiliating France and Holland. It drew dividends from its possession of India, and would have to be bought out if deprived of India. The Act of 1833, passed after discussion before ‘empty benches and an uninterested audience’ of the House of Commons and a less languid treatment by the House of Lords, reprieved the Company for twenty more years. The Proprietors’ dividends became definitely chargeable on Indian territorial revenues, but were backed by collateral British Government stock.

The Calcutta Gazette (October, 1833) hailed the charter’s renewal by calling for ‘a general illumination and a display of fireworks’, which were granted, and brought much satisfaction to a populace always agreeably avid for tamashas. The new regime came into force in the spring of 1834.

Bentinck’s orders, arising naturally out of the need and demand for economy, were to leave native States alone. This he could not altogether do. In suppressing thagi he obtained the help of Oudh, Haidarabad, and Gwalior, the Maratha durbars behaving much more amicably than during Lord Hastings’s drive against the Pindaris. He failed in his attempts to apply pressure on the Central States over the opium trade, however, and had to fall back on the arrangement whereby the Malwa opium was sent through British Indian ports. Mysore since Purnaya’s retirement in 1811 had been robbed and terrorised till a peasants’ revolt came in 1831; the Company suppressed this, and took the country over in trust,* almost certainly the only possible course. An Oudh minister who tried to reform administration was unsupported by the Power whose citizens were largely responsible for that kingdom’s drawn-out wretchedness, and he was driven out. The Raja of Coorg, a murderous ruffian who refused to hold any relations with the British, was deposed after considerable fighting, in which the Governor-General acted as Commander-in-Chief, and Coorg was annexed. The Political Commissioner in Delhi was murdered, and the culprit, a chieftain, hanged, to the menace of a rising. Jaipur, after disturbances amounting to civil war, the murder of a British officer and the wounding of the Resident, and the child-raja’s death, possibly by poison, was given a Council of Regency for a new child-king. Gwalior broke into internecine quarrels, Indore sank into disorder, Baroda became truculent and hostile, Udaipur drifted towards the condition which was presently to stir Henry Lawrence’s contempt and his scepticism of Tod’s rose-coloured pictures of the Rajputs.

All this completed the working out of the modern relationship of princes and paramount Power in its main technique, except for Haidarabad, which (as befitted its long and practically unbroken alliance) was treated as a case apart. Haidarabad sank now into chaos of the worst kind, left to its ruler’s devices, which tended only towards show and luxury.

The peninsula and all Hindustan conquered, the Company looked earnestly to their western borders. Ranjit Singh, ‘the Lion of the Punjab’, was sinking fast to decrepitude. In October, 1831, Bentinck drew him into a camp of several days’ duration, at Rupar, on his marches; ‘those sons of glory, those two lights of men’, displayed themselves on an Oriental counterpart of ‘the Field of the Cloth of Gold’,* and concluded a treaty of perpetual amity, which, as a matter of fact, was to last for another seventeen years---a long period for such treaties.

It was in Bentinck’s time that the major bugbear of the century entered Indian politics. Russia, steadily encroaching on Persia and Turkestan, made the Indian Government cast roving eyes abroad, seeking fresh alliances with buffer States, pondering annexations which would provide a better frontier. Cutch was theirs already; and in 1825 Sind had been awed by the presence of ‘a hostile demonstration’* on its frontiers. In journeys, sometimes open, sometimes in disguise, the Company’s agents assiduously collected geographical and military information concerning their neighbours. There had been Elphinstone’s mission to Kabul, Malcolm’s two missions to Persia. Central Asia was not as bigotedly closed to British infiltration as it afterwards became (thanks, mainly, to the two Afghan Wars). From 1819 to 1825, Moorcroft and Trebeck, two men not in any covenanted service, but spurred by adventurous courage and curiosity, explored (as horse-dealers and merchants, predecessors of Kipling’s Afghan in Kim) Ladakh, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Balkh, Bokhara. Moorcroft died in the vast snowy loneliness behind the Hindu-Kush, disappointed that he had not stirred the Indian Government to overcome their apathy and fear of annoying the Sikh Power. He wrote to Metcalfe, who as Resident in Delhi had helped him and sympathised:

‘It is somewhat humiliating that we should know so little of countries which touch upon our frontier; and this in a great measure out of respect for a nation that is as despicable as insolent, whose origin was founded upon rapine, and which exists by acquiring conquests it only retains by depopulating the territory.’

His view of the Sikhs was largely coloured by the prejudice he found in Afghanistan. Ranjit Singh, after rising to supreme power among his people, had steadily pushed back the border tribes and their suzerain in Kabul, in 1834 wresting from them Peshawar. He was aided by soldiers broken in the downfall of Napoleon, most prominent being Avitabile, ‘he ferocious Neapolitan’, whose methods revolted Henry Lawrence, his guest during some of the Afghan War:

‘All that can be said in his favour is, that he has savages to deal with---but why should he deal with them as a savage? He might be as energetic and as summary as he pleased, and no one would object to his dealing with a lawless people in such manner as would restrain them in their practices; but he might spare us the scenes that so frequently occur in the streets of Peshawur, equally revolting to humanity and decency.’*

Avitabile blew from guns, impaled, flayed alive, left men naked and honey-smeared in the sun to die. Yet Lawrence thought him, though ‘just the picture of one of Rubens’ Satyrs, one of the world’s master-minds’; and to his wife he added, ‘Remember . . . that I have eaten of his salt, and that he has been civil to me. We must therefore, in telling the truth, do so in mercy’. But the Sikhs added, to cruelty ruthless as their foes’, fighting qualities which make Moorcroft’s adjective ‘despicable’ ring queerly in our modern knowledge of them.

Moorcroft was before his time, but only a few years before it. The time came suddenly, bringing with it the man. Alexander Burnes at the age of sixteen arrived in Bombay, 1821; and ‘at a period of his career when the majority of young men are mastering the details of company-drill, and wasting their time in the strenuous idleness of cantonment life’,* was a noted linguist, and while yet in his teens the official Persian translator to the Sudder Court. In 1831 he was sent up the Indus, from the ‘enlightened desire’ of Lord Ellenborough, President of the Board of Control, ‘to ascertain’ that river’s ‘commercial possibilities’. The Sind Amirs were told that they were to throw open their river. Burnes’s ostensible mission was to take a present of fine English horses to ranjit Singh.

Metcalfe, in a Minute of Council (October, 1830), contemptuously called the camouflaged expedition ‘a trick unworthy of our government, which cannot fail when detected, as most probably it will be, to excite the jealousy and indignation of the powers on whom we play it’. The Amirs watched with dismay; one spectator at the riverside lifting his hands and crying ‘Sind is gone, since the English have seen the river, which is the road to its conquest’. But Burnes went on, and was received honourably by Ranjit Singh, who was delighted with the horses. Returning, at Ludhiana he met a former Amir of Afghanistan, Shah Suja, whom his own people had driven out in 1809 and repulsed twice in attempts since; Shah Suja spoke warmly and longingly of the joy it would be to him to be back in Kabul, with an English Resident and the English using his country as a high-road between Europe and India. Full of enthusiasm, Burnes obtained passports from the Indian Government for an overland journey ‘to England’, a journey which took him over Afghanistan, the Central Asian khanates, Persia, and by sea back to Bombay. In justice to the man who was destined to play so prominent a part in the silliest and most unjust war ever waged by the Indian Government, it is fair to say that he stated emphatically that Shah Suja lacked both energy to recover his throne and tact to keep it, while he found the ruling Kabul chief, Dost Muhammad, a far superior man, and his people ‘simple-minded, sober’, ‘of frank, open manners, impulsive and variable almost to childishness’.

Burnes’s travels made a tremendous impression. In India, and then in London, he was lionised excessively; fashionable ladies besought him to honour their gatherings, statesmen and scholars listened eagerly to him. Special missions to Sind (1835) and Kabul (1837) followed. All this he enjoyed immensely. The rest of his career will emerge in the course of narrative. Kaye observes pityingly:

‘It was the hard fate of Alexander Burnes to be over-rated at the outset and under-rated at the dose of his career.’

Chapter II

Racial Estrangement and Changing of Hindu Thought and Ambitions

The widening gap: fears of old-time officials: Metcalfe and intelligent and influential native gentlemen of Calcutta: William Carey: Rammohan Roy: Henry Vivian Derozio: Dr. Richardson: the Brahmo Samaj: the Bengal Renaissance: Michael Dutt: the education controversy: introduction of travel by steam: Malcolm and the Bombay Supreme Court: Metcalfe as acting Governor-General,

Bentinck’s entertainments were magnificent; and ‘he achieved fame by permitting Indians to drive to the Governor-General’s house in carriages’,* at a time when superiority on one side, and timidity on the other, had grown to such lengths that

‘on going to a station no Englishman thought of calling on the notables of the district, as was once done as a matter of course; instead, certificates of respectability were required of the notables before they could be guaranteed a chair when they visited the officer. . . . In Calcutta many writers expected every Indian to salute them.’

Lord William did something, by precept and example, to mend matters. But it was a passing improvement only; and racial relations in Bengal continued what they are still---the amazement of the society of India’s saner regions. Elphinstone was scornfully aristocratic even among his own people. But he knew well that India had its own aristocracy, whose friendship was worth regarding. He told Malcolm (May 24, 1819):

‘The picture you draw of the state of India, as it is likely to be for the next four or five years, makes me regret that you are likely so soon to leave it. It has sometimes struck me that the fault of our younger politicians---who have never seen the Indian states in the days of their power---is a contempt for the natives, and an inclination to carry everything with a high hand.’

Towards the end of Lord Hastings’s time, he wrote what many felt about conditions in Bengal:

‘Sir Henry Strachey, in his report laid before Parliament, attributes many of the defects in our administration in Bengal to the immeasurable distance between us and the natives, and afterwards adds that there is scarcely a native in his district who would think of sitting down in the presence of an English gentleman. Here every man above the rank of a hircarra sits down before us, and did before the Peshwa; even a common ryot, if he had to stay any time, would sit down on the ground. This contributes, as far as the mechanical parts of the society can, to keep up the intercourse that ought to subsist between the governors and the governed: there is, however, a great chance that it will be allowed to die away. The great means of keeping it up is for gentlemen to receive the natives often, when not on business.’*

Admitting the degradation, and in many things depravity, which had overtaken the native populations, there was, nevertheless, in Bengal a stratum of Indian life where liberal sentiments were cultivated, and modern enlightenment was beginning to marry with ancient culture and courtesy. There is pathos in the Address given to Metcalfe in 1835, when he was preparing to close his superbly beneficent career, ‘signed by more than five hundred of the most intelligent and influential native gentlemen resident at the capital’; and in the understanding and sympathy of his reply:

‘Our opportunities of estimating the private qualities that have earned you the love of your countrymen have necessarily been few. But it would be a reproach to our hearts and understandings, if we did not come forward to proclaim our sense of the inflexible regard for equal justice, and utter contempt for abuse, corruption, and chicanery, which have uniformly marked your official career.’

‘I greatly lament that a difference in religion and customs should operate, as it does, in a great degree, to prevent the benefits of social intercourse between the native and European communities in India; and consequently to preclude that personal intimacy, and that knowledge of private character, which are the chief cements of mutual attachment. You can neither share in our convivial enjoyments nor take an interest in our amusements; and it is much to be regretted that nothing has yet been devised, which, being suited to the habits and tastes of both parties, might lead naturally to that frequency of intercourse, which is so much to be desired, as tending to unite all in the bonds of affection. I trust that time will effect this desirable result, and remove the obstacles which retard it.’

The process Metcalfe prayed for had already achieved notable (though by Government unsuspected) progress. William Carey, ex-cobbler and Baptist missionary, settled at Serampur in 1799, finding in Danish territory the toleration refused in lands under Company control. For over forty years he laboured with a practical wisdom and a catholic enthusiasm for every kind of enlightenment, which both recall John Wesley. He and his colleagues introduced printing; and Bengali prose saw its birth in the translations and treatises of pandits working under their direction. Bengal itself also produced a great man. Rammohan Roy (1774-1833), while yet a boy, saw the unwilling death of his brother’s widow on her husband’s pyre; emotional and intellectual revolt stirred together, and he found himself driven out on a path as lonely as any ever trodden by a valiant spirit. To his knowledge of Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, he added English, Greek, Hebrew, that he might read the Bible; and he sought out such European acquaintance as was possible to a native of Bengal. In 1820, he published The Precepts of Jesus the Guide to Peace and Happiness, and was soon involved in a controversy with the Serampur missionary Dr. Marshman, to whom his rejection of Christ’s deity was a heresy outweighing his close approach to Christianity in other matters. But he found allies in the Unitarians of England, and gathered a band of Bengalis theistically minded like himself, who formed the nucleus of the Brahmo Samaj; he ravaged orthodox Hinduism with his attacks on suttee, idolatry, and the manifold mischiefs and errors of contemporary religion. There are noble strains in Hindu thought, and India has never lacked saints and mystics; but Hinduism was passing through a most unhappy phase, and countenanced a multitude of revolting practices. Rammohan Roy’s courage by 1820, or even earlier, ‘raised such a feeling against me that I was at last deserted by every person except two or three Scotch friends, to whom and to the nation to which they belong I will always feel grateful’. He thought Bentinck’s prohibition of suttee premature and inexpedient. But his support of the action in England (which he visited in 1830, and where he died, 1833), in private and before the Select Committee of the House of Commons examining Indian affairs, was invaluable in procuring the rejection of the appeal of over five hundred leading Bengalis to the Privy Council, against the prohibition.

Elphinstone in 1822 noted

‘the wonderful improvement of the natives that begins to be discernible, in Bengal especially. There is a Bengalee newspaper, which discusses all subjects, and is interesting even to English readers, though of course often puerile and often mistaken.

‘Ram Mohun Roy, wisely retaining the name and observances of a Hindoo, is writing books in favour of Deism, and many natives begin to discover curiosity and interest about the form of their government as well as its proceedings, together with a strong spirit of reform as applied to the science, religion, and morals of their nation. Amidst all this there is a great deal of cant, affectation, and imposture, Bengalees talking about liberty and philanthropy, and declaiming against the efforts of the Tories to crush the infant liberty of the press . . . but even to use this sort of language without understanding it is a wonderful advance, and from admiring the sound, people must come to relish the sense.’

No more finely gifted a man than Elphinstone ever went to India. But he could not guess how great a thing was beginning.

Bengal had other spirits swift and brave, and filled with intellectual fire. A half-caste Portuguese, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, in 1826, at the age of seventeen, joined the staff of the Hindu College, Calcutta (now the Presidency College). Derozio’s life flamed out quickly. To him truth and beauty were a passion, and their attainment worth infinitely more than the keeping of life. His own verse, a flood romantic, flushed, luxuriant, was valueless; but his enthusiasm and selflessness swayed his students wildly. Such an emancipation seemed to be coming to intellectual Young Bengal that the orthodox compelled his dismissal. His defence, though unavailing, was noble:

‘Entrusted as I was for some time with the education of youths peculiarly circumstanced, was it for me to have made them pert and ignorant dogmatists by permitting them to know what could be said upon only one side of grave questions? . . . I never teach such absurdity.’

He started a daily paper, The East Indian, but before he could make a new career, cholera killed him, December 23, 1831.

The Hindu College had found another remarkable teacher, Dr. Richardson. Thanks to such men as these, Bengal not only gained the intellectual primacy of India, but possessed it so firmly established that even to-day the largest half of current literature in such a language as Gujarati is translations from Bengali; there is no Indian vernacular which does not still exist in a state of considerable dependence on this the most vigorous of them all. The Derozio school cared nothing for nationalism, despising everything Indian, awake to one fact only, that at last intellectual freedom had come, and that nothing else mattered. Movements long spent in Europe found renewal here: the French Revolution and its ideas, the late eighteenth-century philosophers, such poets as Shelley and Byron. More than vigorous, they were often reckless, against superstition; students would fling beef-bones into the houses of the orthodox, would go round shouting, ‘We have eaten Mussulman bread’, would stage ceremonies of mock-conversion to Islam. They showed great earnestness for social reform; and when Dr. Alexander Duff founded in 1845 what is now the Scottish Churches College, he won swiftly from the highest Hindu families a group of converts whose after-career proved them of outstanding ability and character. Among them were Lalbihari De, whose Folk Tales of Bengal and Bengal Peasant Life enjoyed a long spell of use in schools; and Kalicharan Banerji, Registrar of Calcutta University, one of the founders of the National Congress (circa 1885), a man influential in Bengali literature. Krishnamohan Banerji, another man destined to matter greatly in his country’s life, in 1833 left the Derozio group, with their scorn for all religion as superstition, and was baptised. For a while it looked as if Bengal, led by its young intelligentsia, was at the start of a mass movement into Christianity recalling the early centuries of Christian missions in Europe. Macaulay’s belief that enlightenment would kill Hinduism and bring in Christianity, so derided now, in its context was a reasonable guess. But as with the Oxford Movement, that contemporary drift of Anglicanism towards Rome---one stirring similar hope, alarm, and rage---a Dr. Pusey was found in Hinduism, in Debendranath Tagore, father of the poet, and the consolidator, practically the real founder, of the Brahmo Samaj. ‘Wait a bit! I will stop all this’, he said, when he heard of Duff’s success. In his Autobiography he tells us how he went from house to house cementing opposition. The Brahmo Samaj did what orthodox Hinduism was powerless to do; providing a half-way house where men could worship without idolatry and the cruelties which passed for religion, it stayed the exodus. The Brahmo Samaj to-day is a dying institution. But for seventy years its influence was all-pervading in every higher walk of Bengali life, and it produced a succession of men for whom the only adequate adjective is ‘noble’. Without them, Bengali intellectual and spiritual life would have been almost negligible, whereas with them it was a beacon to the rest of India, which Bengal saved by her example, as she was saving herself by her exertions. The great house of the Tagores, in their more influential members, were Brahmos, a galaxy of genius and accomplished talent; they were supported by a society intensely individual, highly and variously cultured, energetic in effort, upright in conduct. Christian missions continued to win an occasional convert who mattered, notably Madhusudhan Datta, better known by his baptismal name of Michael---the greatest poet of nineteenth-century Bengal, author of the epic, The Death of Meghnad, introducer of blank verse and the sonnet. But the Brahmo Samaj provided what awakened consciences asked, without compelling an absolute break with Hindu society.

With these spiritual movements secular reforms were also working. The early ’thirties, the period of the working of renewed revolutionary activity in Europe and of the beginning of electoral democracy in England, saw the passing from the Indian scene of the great figures, alternately soldiers and statesmen, moving at ease amid the frightened (yet with them trustful) princes of the land, self-confident, happy, athletic, preferring the saddle to the Councillor’s seat, when on campaign hunting in the intervals between battles. A very different man was about to appear. The 1833 Act provided for an additional member of the Governor-General’s Council, to codify the laws. As this, Mr. Thomas Babington Macaulay came, in 1834. He had thoughts on other than legal matters, and is perhaps best remembered in connection with India by his famous Minute on Education.

We must retrace our steps a little. The idea of State-controlled, State-organised machinery for universal education was as foreign to the English civil servants of his day as it would have been to the group of Indians like Rammohan Roy, Dwarkanath Tagore, and others who led the reformist movement. It is true that a system of that kind had been instituted in Prussia after 1806, but in almost every other country the primary responsibility for bringing up a child lay with the parent and the Churches. Government participation in England was confined to grants-in-aid, and these, which were on a small scale, did not involve any State control until 1856, when the Vice-President of the Council of Education was made responsible to Parliament. Forster’s Education Act was to follow fourteen years later, but this did not destroy the dual system. A considerable part of English elementary education is still in Church schools. State interference is small both in the Public Schools and Universities. The English certainly did not bring to India any predilection for a unified secular educational system, yet this was what was actually developed during the twenty years preceding the Mutiny and was defined in the Directors’ despatch of 1854, which determined the organisation of education throughout British India. Looking back over nearly a century of educational effort, the evils of a State system are sufficiently obvious, the failure of a secular Westernised education is writ large over India, but it is difficult to see what alternative lay before Bentinck and those who worked with him and after him. The Government entered unwillingly into the field of elementary education because the existing facilities were inadequate and there was no other body with the necessary driving force to undertake this work. It decided to support a modern Western type of higher education, but only after a long controversy, in which many English opposed and many Indians supported the view which Bentinck finally adopted. Both decisions followed inevitably from the decay of Hinduism and the disordered state of the country.

The state of education in India before the British occupation is, unfortunately, a favourite subject for political dissertations. This has led to a certain confusion of thought about the various types of indigenous teaching, of which three were of importance in the eighteenth century. The ideal training for the Brahmin youth is of great antiquity, and represents an extremely high standard of education. After assuming the sacred thread at the age of eight, the boy would spend fourteen years away from his home under the personal supervision of his guru, or in the forest asram. Such an upbringing was always confined to a very small and highly privileged class, and was probably only common in the hey-day of Brahminism, before the spread of Muhammadanism. This was not a type of education in which the Government could take part, though the traditional relation between guru and chela might be an inspiration to University teachers, as it has been to Rabindranath Tagore in his asram at Santiniketan. Two other institutions catered for a wider but still limited range of boys. These were the Muslim and Hindu schools which were commqn in the towns and larger villages. Both suffered during the eighteenth century from the continual disorders which disturbed most parts of the peninsula, but they were found in many districts when they came under British rule, and their work and scope are described in early reports. Most of them were of a very primitive nature, being usually attached to a temple or mosque. This meant the exclusion of the lower castes and the primitive tribes, and it is typical of the early attitude of the Government towards elementary education that almost the first elementary State schools were for the children of Bhils, Khonds, and of criminals whose parents could not send them to religious schools. The Muslim schools taught the Quran and some Persian to a few elder boys, but there is little evidence about the standard of teaching. In the Punjab, which was annexed later, indigenous education was surveyed with a more modern eye.

‘The Hindu schools were rare, being either colleges in which Brahmin boys learnt Sanskrit and received a half-religious, half-professional training, or elementary schools where sons of Hindu shop-keepers were taught to keep accounts and read and write the traders’ scripts. The few Gurmukhi schools that existed were of a purely religious character. The best feature of the indigenous schools was that they were not confined to the religious and mercantile classes, but were open to the few agriculturists who cared to attend them.’*

These schools continued to function, and some of them have survived till to-day. They had the usual weaknesses of isolated religious schools, and they only reached a very small proportion of the population. In 1835 Bentinck instituted an enquiry into the state of indigenous education in Bengal and Bihar, and found that under five per cent. of the male population attended these schools, but that ‘certain classes of the native population, hitherto excluded by usage from vernacular instruction, have begun to aspire to its advantages.’* The more accurate survey of the North-West Provinces some ten years later showed that ‘of a population which numbered in 1843 23,200,000 souls, and in which were consequently included more than 1,900,000 males of a school-going age, we can trace but 68,200 as in the receipt of any education whatever’. In all the recently acquired territory adult literacy was proportionately far lower than amongst the young.

The evidence does not suggest any widespread system of what would now be called popular education, but a fair amount of local effort by Hindu pandit or Muslim maulvi, and this would be supported, here and there, by grants from local princes. The training of elder Hindu boys, confined to a small section of the population, was obscurantist and ineffective.

‘The ancient scriptures of the country, the famous records of numerous Hindu sects, had long since been discredited. The Vedas and Upanishads were sealed books. All that we knew of the immortal Mahabharata, Ramayana, or the Bhagavad Gita, was from the execrable translations into popular Bengali, which no respectable young man was supposed to read.*

Persian, Sanskrit, and Arabic were taught, all of which were, from the Indian standpoint, ‘dead’ languages, though Persian remained the language of the courts until the time of Lord William Bentinck. Vernacular learning and vernacular literature were at a very low ebb, and were not considered a suitable medium for instruction.

‘Though the past had produced very much that was noble and popular in vernacular literature, such as the Hindi work of Tulsidas or the Marathi of Tukaram, the existence of which the opponents of vernacular ignored, it was certainly true, as they urged, that very little was being produced at the time.’*

Such, roughly, was the position which confronted the Committee of Public Instruction which had been set up in 1823, and to which Bentinck looked for advice on education, and it was in this body that the struggle took place between the ‘Orientalists’ and the ‘Anglicists’ which culminated in Macaulay’s famous minute, and the initiation of a policy which was to have such a profound effect on the future of India. Two points were in dispute---the type of education to be given in such colleges as received public assistance, and the best method for encouraging popular elementary education. The dispute which took place over the first question has rather obscured the importance of the policy adopted for the second.

The battle between ‘Anglicists’ and ‘Orientalists’ was fought out over the allocation of the Government grant to a few colleges in Bengal. Some of these had been founded under European initiative---such as the Muslim Madrasa at Calcutta, which was founded by Warren Hastings, and the Sanskrit College at Benares, which owed much to Jonathan Duncan. All of them, however, except the Vidyalaya, the Hindu College, were definitely Oriental in character. The Vidyalaya, which finally became the Presidency College, was founded in 1817 by a group of reformist Hindus, led by the English secularist watchmaker, David Hare. These Hindus, of whom Rammohan Roy was the most prominent, were anxious for a new type of education. They believed that the teaching of science would help to abolish certain social evils in the Hindu system, that it would make it easier for Indians to take their part in Government service, and that practical and engineering training would help to make their country prosperous. The Committee of Public Instruction was divided, but not along racial lines. Several Europeans were keen Orientalists, including Wilson, the principal of the Hindu College; others took the line, which was ultimately adopted by Bentinck, that if the Government contributed money it should be invested in some form of ‘useful’ training. The discussion was closely connected with the ‘suttee’ controversy, and the Orientalists suffered a severe blow because Wilson had doubted the wisdom and practicability of abolishing the practice. Bentinck finally gave his decision that the ‘object of the British Government should be the promotion of English literature and science’.* The ‘Anglicists’ had won the day. As a foretaste of the expected revolution in Hindu mentality, the Medical College was opened to Indian students in 1837, and the orthodox Hindus heard to their dismay of Brahmins dissecting human bodies ‘with even more than the indifference of European professional men’.*

Once it had been decided to encourage a modern type of education in the colleges, the use of English as a medium of instruction followed inevitably. The choice lay between English and either Sanskrit or Arabic. There was at the time a strong prejudice amongst educated Hindus against the use of the vernaculars for higher education, an attitude which had an exact parallel in medieval Europe. William Arnold, writing in 1840, notes the Punjabi scholar’s strong objection to the use of Urdu.* Bentinck was guided solely by practical considerations. He believed that science would be the subject most taught, and, as between English and a ‘dead’ language, he preferred the former. He certainly had no feeling against the vernacular languages, and he gave a great impetus to their study when he abolished Persian in the law courts and substituted the vernacular as the official language in all except the highest courts. He was, however, anxious to foster the growth of a small educated class, who would know English and through that knowledge bring Western ideas to India. There was much talk at that time of what has been called the ‘filtration’ theory. Macaulay emphasises this idea in his minute of February, 1835. ‘It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.’ These ideas held the field for some twenty years, and led, especially in Bengal, to an excessive concentration on a modernised higher education. Looking back after a century of it, it is easy to see why Bentinck and his officials were too optimistic. The Hindu system divides the population into water-tight compartments, most unsuitable for filtration. The educated Zemindar did not return to his village and educate his tenants, or even undertake scientific farming. Science has not taken the place in education which was expected in 1830, and the higher castes have shown an overwhelming preference for literary and legal studies, which they are not likely to impart to others. The reformist movement amongst the educated classes was based on the Brahmo Samaj, and almost disappeared in the revival of Hindu orthodoxy, of nationalist sentiment, which followed the Mutiny. Yet Macaulay’s forecast* has come partly true. We have formed a definite English-speaking ‘class of persons’, though they have no desire to act as interpreters for the Government. The vernaculars have become of greater relative importance, but it is the vernacular Press rather than the text-book which has penetrated into the villages. The dialects may not have been ‘refined’, but they have certainly been ‘enriched’ by the assimilation of foreign words and foreign idiom.

Steam was an event almost more revolutionising than education itself. In August, 1830, Bentinck decided in favour of the Red Sea route over the slow Cape one, for letters and tidings. After his governor-generalship, giving evidence in 1837 before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, he brought forward an argument for steam communication by the shortest route, which reads now like a prophecy which has been ironically fulfilled:

‘It is through the means of a quite safe and frequent communication between all India and England that the natives of India in person will be enabled to bring their complaints and grievances before the authorities and the country; that large numbers of disinterested travellers will have it in their power to report to their country at home the nature and circumstances of this distant portion of the Empire. This result I hope will be to rouse the shameful apathy and indifference of Great Britain to the concerns of India; and by thus bringing the eye of the British public to bear upon India it may be hoped that the desired amelioration may be accomplished.’

In every way the West made it clear that it had come to remain. From 1830 onwards the Government possessed a summer capital in Simla, which had been in part annexed after the Gurkha War and in part purchased from the Maharaja of Patiala. Darjeeling was bought from the Raja of Sikkim in 1835. Bentinck also established the hill station of Ootacamund, in the Nilgiris of South India.

The mood and methods of the old brigandage were changing into those of modern industrialism and capitalism. The process of readjustment proved painful, as every such process must in intensely conservative circles. When in 1835 the five chief mercantile firms of Calcutta failed, the financial dislocation, following on the Palmers’ failure in Lord Amherst’s time, hit the Company’s servants specially hard. It was difficult to know how money could be safely kept, in a country where commercial morality had been so low during so many decades.

Chapter III

Administration Under Lord William Bentinck

Bentinck and the new spirit in England: reaction against Hinduism: Bentinck’s reforms: judicial changes: police: suppression of thagi and suttee: effect of these campaigns on administration: Sir Charles Metcalfe.

The arrival of Lord William Bentinck marked the beginning of a new era in numerous ways. His seven years’ rule proved a peaceful interlude between two periods of severe and costly campaigning, and thus made it possible to achieve reforms which were long overdue. Helped by his previous experience in Madras and a more efficient staff of officials, he consolidated and reorganised the administration which since the time of Cornwallis had been hastily adapted to the newly conquered countries. His own instincts were those of a Liberal reformer. He believed in peace, retrenchment, and reform, in free competition, free trade, and a strictly limited sphere of State action. In Sir Charles Metcalfe he had an admirable chief of staff who supplied the local knowledge and some of the driving force behind the reforms. These touched nearly every side of Indian life and formed the basis of the paternal government of the Victorian era. Bentinck initiated new policies in the spheres of finance, justice, and education. Freedom from war gave him a larger European staff and greater confidence in taking unpopular measures. He was able to turn his attention to the civilisation of savage tribes and the abolition of certain religious and social customs, such as suttee and female infanticide.

This epoch is important from another point of view. Bentinck and the younger officials who came out in the ’twenties brought with them some of the new spirit which was causing a religious and social revival in England. For some years Wilberforce and Fowell Buxton had been exposing the horrors of slavery, and Sir James Mackintosh had been inveighing against the barbarities of the criminal code. They were beginning to have their effect. By 1830 over a hundred felonies had been removed from the category of capital offences, and English law became little more bloodthirsty than Muslim. In 1834 slavery was abolished throughout the British colonies. The Poor Law of 1834 helped to restore the working man’s self-respect. In 1833 also, Keble preached his sermon on National Apostasy, and Newman published the first of the Tracts for the Times, They started a movement which was to have considerable influence upon many of the pre-Mutiny officials. A new leaven was working within the small English community in India, a new school of officials and officers began to make its influence felt. It was to show itself in a revolt against the lax morality common amongst Europeans in the East, against the patronage of idolatry by the Government, and against certain Hindu customs.* The English began to believe that they had a moral mission in India, that they represented a higher civilisation, a better religion. The younger men came out to India and received an impression of a country where crime flourished, and the mass of the people were steeped in a form of savagery which they connected with the Hindu religion.

Trevelyan, writing in the middle ’thirties on Indian education, talks of ‘suttee, Thuggee, human sacrifices. Ghaut murders, and other excrescences of Hinduism and expressly enjoined by it’.* This was the view of many contemporaries, and the moral was only emphasised by the horrid example of the older generation of Englishmen, with ‘their black wives running about picking up a little rice, while their husbands please them by worshipping the favourite idol’.* Evangelical activities in England were beginning to have their repercussions in India. Phrases like ‘churchwarden to Juggernaut’ and ‘wet-nurse to Vishnu’ embarrassed a Government which held that the policy of complete impartiality required the attendance of the Company’s officers at Hindu and Muslim religious festivals. Government offices were still closed on such days, but open on Sunday, and a cocoanut was officially broken at the beginning of the monsoon. The question was to become still more acute under Lord Auckland, when Sir Peregrine Maitland, the Commander-in-Chief at Madras, resigned his post rather than punish a British soldier who refused to take part in a ceremonial parade in salutation of a Hindu deity. These ideas were beginning to affect the expatriated Englishman when Bentinck came to India. They had their counterpart in that reformist movement amongst certain sections of educated Hindus of which Rammohan Roy was the leader. Hinduism at that moment was at a low ebb, and the more enlightened Indians turned Westward for inspiration. Many Englishmen of that period would have subscribed to Macaulay’s view, written in 1836, that ‘if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence’. The revival of orthodox Hinduism did not become vigorous or widespread* till after the Mutiny. When Bentinck arrived, nearly thirty years were still to pass before that catastrophe. His reforms started an era of great administrative activity, somewhat marred by the secularist complacency of the early Liberalism.

One of Bentinck’s first tasks was both dangerous and unpopular. Since the Charter Act of 1813, which separated the Company’s political and trading activities, there had been a rapid increase in the expenditure under the former head. By 1827 this had risen from about sixteen million yearly to over twenty-five million, and the difference was only partially covered by receipts from the newly added territories. There was a deficit of a million in the last year of Lord Amherst’s term of office, and Bentinck sailed for India with definite instructions to cut down civil and military salaries and allowances, and reduce expenditure generally. The army was mulcted of half its batta, the extra allowance which the officers had come to regard as a permanent addition to their pay. Special committees examined and reduced the expenditure of each Presidency, cutting down the irregular military forces and part of the civil establishments. The work required great tact and firmness. These Bentinck possessed, but he never recovered from the odium engendered by those early years and to most Englishmen he remained ‘the clipping Dutchman’ until he retired.

The judicial system had been little altered since the time of Cornwallis, and the Provincial Courts of Appeal were showing signs of deterioration. The administrative side of the civil service has usually attracted the ablest men, and this tendency was especially marked when new areas were being brought under control. The Courts had become, in Lord William Bentinck’s words, ‘resting-places for those members of the service who were deemed unfit for higher responsibilities’. The general standards of administration had improved, but the Courts remained hopelessly in arrears, both with the civil appeals and also their gaol-deliveries. The Courts were now abolished, and their criminal jurisdiction transferred to the Commissioners of Revenue. This experiment was a failure, and the Sessions duties were then allotted to the civil judges, who were instructed to hold a monthly gaol-delivery, and thus became the forerunners of the present District Judges. Their magisterial powers had, of course, to be transferred, and were given to the District Collectors, a ‘blending of Somerset House and the Old Bailey’ which survives in spite of obvious theoretical objections. The main features of district administration---the District Magistrate, who is also collector of revenue and head of the police, the Sessions Judge with criminal and civil jurisdiction---were thus established. The concentration of power in the hands of the European District Magistrate was originally justified by the difficulty of initiating cases against gang-robbers, many of whom were protected by Zemindars, and by the need of a single authority in times of disorder. The system received a new lease of life in the Mutiny, and has continued since, though the revenue work is more stereotyped, and the District Magistrate has become more like a French Préfet, co-ordinating in each locality the many activities of a modern government.

Bombay, after Elphinstone’s departure, saw a temporary revival of that struggle between a High Court, created in 1823, and the Executive, which had so disturbed Bengal forty years earlier. The Court claimed jurisdiction over every person in Bombay territory, then extended far beyond the port and adjacent islands. On October 6, 1828, the Presiding Judge told the world where, in his opinion, the Governor stood:

‘Within these walls we own no equal, and no superior but God and the King. The East India Company, therefore, all those who govern their possessions, however absolute over those whom they consider their subjects, must be told, as they have been told ten thousand times before, that in this court they are entitled to no more precedency and favour than the lowest suitor in it.’

Malcolm, the Governor, was properly determined not to be beaten down, ‘not by honest fellows with glittering sabres, but quibbling, quill-driving lawyers’, and won support from the Governor-General and Lord Ellenborough, President of the Board of Control. The latter wrote from London, in February 1829, that ‘their law is considered bad law; but then their errors in matters of law are nothing in comparison with those they have committed in the tenor of their speeches from the bench’. The dispute was temporarily settled by the appointment of Malcolm’s own Advocate-General as Chief Justice, a timely reminder that patronage still went to those who supported the Company, and the Privy Council rejected the claims of the Supreme Court. The controversy aroused much talk, because Malcolm’s indiscretion allowed a private letter of the Board of Control’s President to get into the Press, with the result that ‘Lord Ellenborough, of whom little before had been known in India, suddenly became famous’.* But the Privy Council’s action settled the trouble for the time being; and Malcolm, whose qualities were better fitted for a solely Oriental stage than for one systematised and in process of modernisation, was able to leave the cares of his governorship, and pass to activities in which he was perfectly at home, riding through Kathiawar to Cutch, where he harangued Rajput chiefs and dewans on the horrid custom of infanticide. He was respectfully listened to; and returned, hunting and slaying by the way,* in the manner of the old joyous times when even a campaign had been for its leaders more than half play, with battle and the chase alternating and easily passing into one another. Meanwhile, the establishment of the ‘rule of law’ had suffered a temporary setback, from which there was a quick recovery. Malcolm was typical of a vanishing age, and even he knew that his beliefs and principles were doomed to defeat:

‘I have tried to deal some heavy blows at these costly and dangerous fabrics yclept Supreme Courts; but they are too essential for the objects of power and patronage, and to feed the rising spirit of the age, for me or any man to prevail against them.’ (October 19, 1828.)

A weakness of the Cornwallis Regulations had been the very cautious and limited use of Indian judges for civil cases. From time to time their jurisdiction had been slightly increased, but the first real extension was made in 1827, when more subordinate judges were appointed and Sadar Amins were empowered to try suits involving double the former amount. In 1831 Lord William Bentinck established a superior type of Indian civil judge authorised to try cases involving property to any amount, and with salaries rising to £720 a year. The principle of appointing more Indians to positions of importance was discussed before the Parliamentary Committee of 1832-3, many witnesses arguing that this was the only method of keeping down arrears of work, and avoiding a more expensive administration. The next ten years saw the appointment of Indian deputy-collectors in 1837, and deputy-magistrates in 1843. In the latter capacity they were able to pass sentences of imprisonment up to three years. In this way some real recognition was made of the principle contained in the famous 87th clause of the new Charter Act of 1833. ‘Be it enacted that no native of the said territories . . . shall by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, color, or any of them, be disabled from holding any place, office, or employment in the said Company.’ Up to the time of the Mutiny the employment of Indians was being extended at a moderate rate. In 1857 there were some 256 Indian officials drawing over £360 a year, and 2590 held various appointments of a lower grade. Nearly every civil case was by this time being tried originally before an Indian judge.

The tracking and apprehension of criminals has always proved a more difficult task than the organisation of criminal justice. Cornwallis had taken the management of the ‘police’ into Government’s hands, and introduced the thanadari system, with Indian darogas in charge of each police district, but the rank and file of the police force were the village watchmen, ‘an enormous ragged army who eat up the industry of this province’.* The idea of an organised disciplined body of men had hardly been conceived in any part of the world. It was considered a great innovation when Sir Robert Peel reorganised the London Metropolitan Police in 1829, the year after Lord William Bentinck had become Governor-General, and England had her first ‘Peelers’. In 1830 few governments thought it their duty to provide a ‘patrolling’ police force with recognised stations, any more than they would have thought it incumbent upon them to provide universal juvenile education. Regular policemen were first found necessary in the large cities, but in other countries, as in India, the expenses were entirely defrayed by the residents. The extension of this system into country districts, and the co-ordination of the various forces, has proved a very slow process which is far from complete even in countries like the United States, where a sheriff may still have to summon a posse of fellow-citizens to pursue a criminal. Bentinck did not alter the thanadari system, but he organised what might be described as a ‘flying squad’ to deal with the specific crimes of thagi and dacoity. His successor, Lord Auckland, improved the pay and standing of the darogas, but the village watchmen remained dependent upon the other villagers for their support, and shortly before the Mutiny it was recognised that, while the special department was doing excellent work, the thanadari system was functioning very badly. The matter was under discussion in 1856, when a minute by the Governor of Bengal sketched out a policy which would have turned the watchmen into regular Government servants.

The suppression of thagi was a notable achievement of the pre-Mutiny era. The Thag, or more accurately phansidar, was a member of one of those hereditary criminal castes which have always been a feature of Indian life. Some of these, like the Chapperbunds, and the haran shikaris, still survive to worry the police officer by their cunning thefts. The phansidar, or ‘noose-holder’, was unusual because his invariable method of procedure was to murder before robbing. Working in gangs, which were bound together by strict religious vows to the goddess Kali, the phansidars would ingratiate themselves with travellers, and then strangle them and bury them. They formed a powerful confederacy operating over the whole of the north of India, and supported by many landowners, through whom they disposed of their booty. For some years after the British occupation their activities were screened by the Maratha and Pindari Wars, but the existence of the professed Thag had been established by Lord Hastings’s administration, and in 1829 a special department under Colonel Sleeman was appointed to deal with them. The methods by which these gangs were finally dispersed, and a description of their habits and curious mentality, have been recounted in two classic works.* Some idea of their depredations can be gathered from Sleeman’s report of 1840, when the number of ‘ascertained well known and bloody Bhils’ in Oudh alone was given as 274, and of the twenty approvers one confessed to 931 murders in 40 years, and another to 508 in 20 years. Over 1500 Thags were apprehended in the first six years.

In 1837 Colonel Sleeman was also entrusted with the suppression of dacoity, but here the task was much more difficult. Many Indians of all classes must have known about the operations of the Thags, and in some cases assisted them and profited by them, but a far larger and more influential section of the population were accessary to the dacoities. There were parts of India where dacoity was as much a national pastime as bull-fighting in Spain. It was considered by its participants as an honourable profession.

‘Whilst talking over their excursions . . . their eyes gleamed with pleasure, and beating their hands on their foreheads and breasts, and muttering some ejaculations, they bewailed the hardness of their lot, which now ensured their never being able again to participate in such a joyous occupation.’*

They could not be hunted down with the ruthlessness employed against the Thags, and for some years they were protected by the insistence of the law courts upon proof of specific offences, when all that could normally be proved was that a prisoner belonged to a gang of dacoits. This was partially corrected by an Act of 1843, but the difficulty of obtaining evidence still proved a great hindrance, and the professional dacoits learnt to operate near the borders of Indian States, where their pursuit was made harder by questions of jurisdiction. In Western India the most persistent robbers were the Bhils, whose settlement and reclamation by Outram was a wholly admirable work.

The Government’s duty was clear in the case of thagi, and also of dacoity. It was impossible to justify murder for the sake of robbery, even though the perpetrators might claim to be religious devotees. Other savage customs presented greater difficulties. The religious element was stronger, the element of gain was less. As our officials spread over the country, they were brought into touch with new sides of Indian life, about which their predecessors had been ignorant or indifferent. Some of these offended strongly against all European ideas of civilisation. The three most important, not only in themselves but in the way they affected the Englishman’s idea of India, were the meriah human sacrifices in Orissa, the prevalence of female infanticide, and the custom of ‘suttee’ or widow-burning, which was common throughout Bengal and Northern India. The first was confined to certain backward sects, but the other two were practised by the highest castes, and the last was enthusiastically approved by all classes.

The meriah sacrifices of Orissa were first noticed in the report of an official (Russell), May 11, 1837. Their suppression was a slow business, not completed until the end of Lord Dalhousie’s time, if then. The main work was done by General Campbell. The sacrifices were to the spirit of natural fertility, a sanguinary form of the Iti or Itu worship still existing in rural North India. At Chinna Kimedy she took the form of an elephant, at Gumsur and Boad of a bird. The Khonds who practised the rite sometimes allowed meriah girls to live until they had had children by Khond fathers. These children were reared for sacrifice, and were well treated. Before being put to death they were exchanged for similar children in another village, apparently because their own village had ties of affection with them. The sacrifices were always in public. They took varying forms, all inexpressibly cruel, consisting of the cutting of the flesh off the living victim.

Campbell was away on the Chinese War, 1842-7, and had to take up the work of suppression afterwards with renewed vigour. His task was pursued with immense patience and kindness. In Chinna Kimedy the oeople were suspicious, since it was rumoured that he himself was collecting meriahs to sacrifice to the water-spirit, because a tank he had made had dried up; also, that hiS elephants needed periodical meals of human beings. He began by giving cotton cloth and strings of bright beads to those who had female children (he was simultaneously trying to extirpate infanticide), and threw open his tent to full examination. (‘It is the house of a god!’ his astonished visitors exclaimed.) He tried also, with scant success, to introduce vaccination. In 1853, towards the end of his long campaign, he discovered that this formula was being used in the now meriah-less worship:

‘Do not be wrathful with us, O Goddess, for giving you blood of beasts instead of human blood! Vent your anger on this gentleman, who is well able to bear it. We are guiltless.’*

Between 1837 and 1854,1506 meriahs were rescued.

The killing of girl babies was commonest amongst the warlike castes in Central and Western India, and is a natural development of a primitive civilisation in which an unmarried woman is considered as unchaste, and a fair proportion of the men are killed in war. Some castes carried the habit to extreme lengths. The Rajkumars kept very few of their female children, and the custom was prevalent throughout Rajputana. It was extremely difficult for the early administrators to deal with this problem. The systematic murder of children was an affair of the zenana. The mother was usually the executioner. She either did not feed the child, or ‘rubbed a little opium on the nipples of her breasts’. Considering the extreme privacy of the zenana, it was impossible to deal with specific cases, and the only practical method was to bring Government pressure to bear upon the leaders in areas where the very small proportion of female babies showed that the custom was in force. One economic reason for female infanticide was the high dowries demanded amongst certain castes, such as the Mairs. In Kathiawar the Political Agent, Willoughby, instituted an ‘infanticide fund’ from which presents were made to members of the Jharijah tribe who preserved their daughters, while maximum sums were fixed for dowries. As the country became more settled it was possible to keep better registers of births, and infanticide became more and more localised, and even before the Mutiny had tended to disappear amongst all except a few castes.

‘Suttee’ presented a more difficult problem, and the subject has had far more publicity outside India. Sahamarana, the ‘dying in company with’ one’s husband, is a very ancient Indian rite. The Anglo-Indian word ‘suttee’ is from sati, the woman who performs the rite, usually by immolating herself on the funeral pyre. It seems to have been confined to the higher castes of the Hindus, though the weavers of Tippera practised a still more objectionable variant in burying their widows alive. The Moguls attempted to discourage the custom whenever it came under their notice. Tavernier says that ‘the Governors, who are Mussalmans, hold this dreadful custom of self-destruction in horror, and do not readily give permission’.* Manucci describes a case at Agra, in which the woman was rescued, and the Brahmins complained, whereupon Aurangzeb ‘issued an order that in all lands under Mogul control, never again should the officials allow a woman to be burnt’.* It was discouraged in the neighbourhood of Delhi, where Metcalfe when Resident was able to prohibit it, but was common amongst the Brahmins of Bengal and throughout the Hindu States. When a prince died there was something approaching a holocaust. In 1780 sixty-four women burned at the death of Raja Ajit Singh of Marwar. As late as the middle of the nineteenth century, during the anarchy of the last days of Sikh rule in the Punjab, such wholesale ‘suttees’ were frequent. Wives and concubines were burnt in numbers after the deaths of Kishari Singh and Basanta Singh. Suchet Singh’s death was reputed to have been followed by the burning of ten wives and three hundred concubines. For some years the various Europeans who came to India noticed and disapproved of the practice, but could not prevent it except in small compact areas. The French prohibited it at Chandernagore, the Danes at Serampur, the Portuguese at Goa.

From the Hindu point of view sahamarana was an extremely popular semi-religious spectacle. It was attended by large crowds, and redounded to the credit of the deceased husband and his family. There was no opposition to the practice from Indians until about 1820, when a few educated and Westernised Hindus, led by Rammohan Roy, started a reformist movement. The higher Muslim officials disapproved of ‘suttee’, but, like the earlier British servants of the Company, they had no police force at their disposal and no means of preventing such occurrences. Occasionally English officials would interfere when a case came to their notice. Mr. Brooks, Collector of Shahabad, forcibly prevented a suttee in 1789. The Collector of Gaya, in 1805, stopped the burning of a girl of twelve. It was only when the administration became better organised, and more Englishmen began to move about the country, that the extent of these and other practices was fully understood. William Carey, the missionary, brought the subject of widow-burning before the Bengal Government by carrying out an unofficial census of ‘suttees’ occurring within thirty miles of Calcutta. He placed the figures---there were 438 in 1803---before Lord Wellesley, who had already forbidden one religious practice, that of exposing children at Saugor Point, and was disposed to take the same action about widow-burning. Unfortunately he referred the matter to the Nizamat Adalat, the court of appeal in criminal law.

The Nizamat Adalat displayed its accustomed pedantry, and advised the Government to be guided by ‘the religious opinions and prejudices of the natives’, and for the next twenty-five years a vacillating policy was followed. The Government took the advice of leading Hindu pandits, who replied that the practice was ‘recognised and encouraged by the doctrines of the Hindoo religion’, and for some years attempts were made to regulate the ‘suttees’, and ‘to allow the practice in those cases in which it is countenanced by their religion, and to prevent it in others in which it is, by the same authority, prohibited’.* The effect of this action was to legalise the purely voluntary immolation of a widow who was over sixteen and not pregnant, and in pursuance of this policy the police were ordered to get early information of an intended ‘suttee’, and to see that the widow was neither drugged nor forcibly burned. It was a lamentable procedure, for the police officer would almost invariably be a Hindu or a Muslim of the poorer classes, and in either case would not be too critical, while his presence would give an impression that the Government’s approval had been obtained. This official sanction had one good effect. As more European officers came out to undertake magisterial and police work in the districts, they began to investigate these cases, and to discover the sordid economic reasons as well as the sheer love of cruelty which formed the background to so many cases of sahamarana.

By the ’twenties there was a strong move for prohibition amongst the officials in the more settled areas. The evidence of Mr. Ewer, the Superintendent of Police in Lower Bengal, had great weight. It may be quoted at length as a fair description of most ‘suttees.’

‘There are many reasons for thinking that such an event as a voluntary Suttee very rarely occurs; few widows would think of sacrificing themselves unless overpowered by force or persuasion, very little of either being sufficient to overcome the physical or mental powers of the majority of Hindoo females. A widow, who would turn with natural instinctive horror from the first hint of sharing her husband’s pile, will be at length gradually brought to pronounce a reluctant consent because, distracted with grief at the event, without one friend to advise or protect her, she is little prepared to oppose the surrounding crowd of hungry Brahmins and interested relations. . . . In this state of confusion a few hours quickly pass, and the widow is burnt before she has had time to think of the subject. Should utter indifference for her husband, and superior sense, enable her to preserve her judgment, and to resist the arguments of those about her, it will avail her little---the people will not be disappointed of their show; and the entire population of a village will turn out to assist in dragging her to the bank of the river, and in keeping her on the pile.’*

Bentinck’s Regulation prohibiting widow-burning was not issued until 1829. Both Lord Hastings and Lord Amherst had considered this step, but had deferred action, partly from fear that such an order could not be made operative, but chiefly because they thought it might lead to disaffection in the sepoy army, then on active service, and to disturbances in the recently ceded districts. Nothing of the kind actually occurred, but men like Sir Charles Metcalfe, while concurring in the prohibition, believed that it might ‘produce a religious excitement, the consequences of which, if once set in action, cannot be foreseen’.* Rammohan Roy himself considered that the order was premature.*

In Bengal and Bihar there was opposition to the Regulation, but it took only a legal form. An appeal was made to the Privy Council, and after many delays heard and dismissed. The enforcement of the Regulation was made effective throughout the provinces within a year or two. It took another generation before the practice was abolished in all the Indian States. In Southern India sahamarana would seem to have been dying out before the Regulation was made, but over Bengal, Bihar, and parts of what are now the United Provinces the prohibition was directly contrary to public sentiment, and the tradition in favour of the rite has survived even until modern times. The not infrequent cases when widows commit suicide in their own homes are commented upon with approbation in the Indian Press, and the occasional cases of widow-burning which have occurred in the last thirty years have always aroused great popular enthusiasm. In the last recorded case, in August, 1932, events seem to have followed very much the course described by Mr. Ewer, over a century before.*

This long campaign to suppress certain types of indigenous crime had a notable effect on British administration. The English officials of the early Victorian period were convinced that they had to deal with a degenerate race, and this impression was only intensified when, passing beyond the old Mogul Empire, they came into contact with the savage hill chieftains of the Himalayan foothills. There is no more need to pass final judgments on early Hindu morality than upon, say, the mercantilist theory. Able apologists have from time to time defended the sahamarana rite,* and future generations may hold that female infanticide is a lesser evil than the unchecked growth of population which has characterised these later years. The point which must be emphasised is that from about 1830 onwards English officials were imbued with the idea that they were, in Macaulay’s phrase, undertaking the ‘stupendous process’ of reconstructing ‘a decomposed society’. They expressed their contempt for the older type of Company’s servant by saying they were ‘Hinduised’, and this attitude developed into a kind of racial aloofness which became more marked as English women began to settle in India with their husbands. There is a definite change of outlook between the earlier administrators, like Munro, Elphinstone, and Malcolm, and their successors who in 1849 set to work in the newly annexed Punjab. The latter were more ruthless, more spiritually arrogant, and less disposed to delegate any real responsibility to Indians. The tendency to isolate themselves from the Indians was to become still more marked after the Mutiny. This new attitude was visible in every department of our administration. The annexationist policy of Lord Dalhousie was largely inspired by the difficulties which he encountered when urging the abolition of ‘suttee’ and female infanticide in the Indian States. Part of the opposition to using Indians in an executive capacity was due to a fear of weakening the administration in its struggle against such barbarities. Men like Elphinstone and Munro had envisaged an India in which the British did little more than keep the peace. Leaving the administration in Indian hands, they would have trusted to education to cure such evils as they believed to exist. The next generation of officials was conscious of the clash between two civilisations, one of which they believed to be improving, and the other to be in the last stages of degeneration.

On Lord William Bentinck’s going, in March, 1835, Sir Charles Metcalfe acted as Governor-General for a year. He abolished the Inland Transit Duties, a great assistance to commerce, and removed the restrictions on the Press. The latter action aroused the Directors to boundless indignation, and settled all question of his confirmation as Governor-General, which had long been canvassed with much vacillation. He stuck to his opinions with characteristic courage; and though the objection to officials being appointed to the supreme place was upheld (when for once it might wisely have been waived), he was considered good enough for two colonial governorships, of Jamaica and Canada.

Chapter IV

First Afghan War

Miss Emily Eden: a popular potentate: and an attentive creature, his Majesty of Oudh: Low suppresses a revolution: Shah Suja: Eldred Pottinger and Herat: the Tripartite Treaty: the Sind Amirs: the Khan of Khelat: occupation of Kandahar: death of Mehrab Khan: growing perplexities: surrender of Dost Muhammad: murder of Burnes and Macnaghten: retreat from Kabul: our Sikh allies: Sale and Pollock: Lord Ellenborough Governor-General: Roman proclamations.

Lord Auckland, the new Governor-General, a bachelor, was accompanied by his sisters Fanny and Emily. The latter was to write a commentary, witty, vivacious, skilled in perception of all that lay on the surface, the best book ever written by any foreigner merely visiting India, perhaps the best journal of any kind in our language. It shows us a great Whig noble---a languid, gracious, punning gentleman---completely unaware of anything that passed beneath the ludicrous aspect of absurd rajas, queer peoples outlandishly dressed and quaintly mannered, little pushing officials and their scheming flirting womenfolk. He and his sister are revealed in their intimacy of amusement at the bourgeoisie and bureaucracy surrounding them. Miss Eden’s political views are all ‘snap judgments’, based on what those nearest to the Governor-General (and, necessarily, often farthest from the scene involved) told him. When in the second phase of the Afghan War disasters come thick and fast, ignorant jauntiness gives way to reckless fierceness eager for vengeance.

Auckland, however, began well enough, with, the usual long leisured tour up-country. He was away from Calcutta from October, 1837, to March, 1840, a stretch of time which brings home the slowness and difficulty of travel even after steam had come in, and the reality (and on occasion, the value) of ‘the time-lag’ which has so completely disappeared from modern politics. He was enabled to mix freely with English society and selected natives; his sister reports that he came away

‘in a great state of popularity in the Upper Provinces; all these people talked of him with such regard and admiration.’*

Less satisfying was the fact that the huge entourage passed through ghastly famine. Auckland gave freely from his private purse, and instituted an enquiry into preventive measures; the Indian Government’s beginnings of famine policy, which were to grow slowly into effectiveness, date from this time. It is significant of the way Governor-General and sister moved throughout in a rose-hued mist, that Miss Eden tells us they rejected experienced officials’ advice to stop the tour, lest their horde of followers deepen the land’s distress. Her characteristically Whig reply was that these followers were a blessing, since good for trade! Neither of them ever came to suspect the extent to which those curses of India, officialdom’s dependents, pillage countries through which their masters pass.

The Governor-General was much beset by the King of Oudh, an ‘attentive creature’,* as he had reason to be. Three months before the tour began, close on midnight of July 7, 1837, the Lucknow Resident, Colonel Low, was waked and told that the King was dying. He wrote to the Brigadier commanding the Oudh subsidiary force, to hold a thousand men in readiness to march at a moment’s notice; and went to the palace. He found the King’s body still warm, blood flowing freely when the Residency surgeon opened a vein; but there was no other sign of life. Part of Low’s force was already present, and he placed seals on the treasures, and guards everywhere. The night, a very dark one, was studded with torch-bearers. For the new King, an uncle of the just-deceased monarch, a statement was drawn up, ‘that he was prepared to sign any new treaty for the better government of the country that the British Government might think proper to propose’.*

The late King had assured Bentinck that his putative son was not his. ‘The Padshah Begum’, mother of this putative son, now installed him, and made a furious assault on the palace. Low, an intrepid man, demanded to see her, and pushed through a dense crowd witnessing the installation of ‘the pretender’. Dancing-girls were swaying and chanting; swords, spears, matchlocks, muskets were being flourished in a forest of torches. The excited mob, ‘more like demons than human beings’,* a menacing ‘dance of the imps’, closed round Low and two companions, shouting angry and obscene abuse, threatening them with swords and guns thrust in their faces, firing muskets. The Begum haughtily refused to withdraw her candidate. Low was seized by the neckcloth, dragged forward, and commanded to congratulate the new King on pain of instant death. He remained steadfast through insult and imminence of murder; and the Begum’s vakil, who had the sense to look ahead to what would follow if the Resident were killed, shouted loudly that the Begum’s order was that Colonel Low should be allowed to withdraw; and himself led him out. Low, going out, was passed by Colonel Roberts, a brigadier in the Oudh service, who presented his offering to the boy and ‘then went off and hid himself, to wait the result of the contest’. For contest there clearly must be; and there was as much reason for pusillanimity as there ever is, seeing that Oudh furnished so large a proportion of the Company’s sepoys.

The subsidiary force arrived, and Low told its commander the work was ‘now in his hands’. The palace gates were blown in, and sepoys stormed the halls. The late King’s favourite wife, ‘a modest, beautiful, and amiable young woman, who had been forced to join the Begum, in order to give some countenance to the daring enterprise’, was let down from a height of twenty-four feet, on a rope of clothes made by a female attendant whose arm was shattered by grapeshot as she followed. By nine o’clock the palace was cleared of insurgents, the King officially sanctioned brought out of hiding, ‘and the Resident exerted himself to soothe and prepare him for the long and tedious ceremonies of the coronation, while the killed and wounded’, in all over a hundred, were removed, and the palace cleaned for the ceremonial.

After forcing Oudh to accept a new and harder treaty, Lord Auckland betrayed his gravest fault. He was incompetent and casual, and his administration has been more generally condemned than that of any other Governor-General. But all this is trivial beside his habit of suppressing and garbling documents. The treaty was rejected by the Directors, but Auckland told the King merely that one clause, that saddling Oudh with 16 lakhs for an additional subsidiary force, had been disallowed. By what Mr. Roberts generously calls ‘an inexcusable piece of carelessness’,

‘the treaty was actually included in a subsequent government publication and was referred to as still in force by succeeding Governor-Generals. Upon Lord Dalhousie was thrust the invidious task of explaining to the King that the treaty, which he and former Governor-Generals had believed to be in force since 1837, had really been abrogated two years after that date, and of expressing a tardy regret that the communication of this fact had been inadvertently neglected. Such miserable and unpardonable mismanagement obviously gave too much ground to those who held that the annexation of Oudh was “a gross breach of national faith”.*

‘Neither Lord Hardinge in 1847 nor Colonel Sleeman in 1854 knew that the whole treaty had been annulled. It was left for Lord Dalhousie to discover the truth, as confirmed by Low himself, then a member of his Council, and to acquaint the India House with the extent to which Lord Auckland had evaded their commands.’*

When Auckland visited Oudh, the King, a rheumaticky, almost bedridden creature, hovered round him, seeking release from the more onerous clauses of the treaty. The Governor-General regarded his attendance as a boring jest, and played with him languidly. There was, for example, a magnificent breakfast at Lucknow, on Christmas Day, 1837, when ‘G.’ (George Eden, Baron Auckland)

‘sugared and creamed the Nawab’s tea, and the Nawab gave him some pilau. Then he put a slice of buttered toast (rather cold and greasy) on one plate for me, and another for F., and B. said in an imposing tone, “His Royal Highness sends the Burra lady this, and the Choota lady that”, and we looked immeasurable gratitude. At the end of breakfast, two hookahs were brought in, that the chiefs might smoke together, and a third for Colonel L., the British resident, that his consequence might be kept up in the eyes of the Lucknowites, by showing that he is allowed to smoke at the Governor-General’s table. The old khansamah wisely took care to put no tobacco in G.’s hookah, though it looked very grand and imposing with its snake and rose-water. G. says he was quite distressed; he could not persuade it to make the right kind of bubbling noise.’*

Superb presents (which by law now went into the Company’s resources, when they could not be declined) and the usual round of fights between elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers, followed.

Kaye puts it down to Simla, ‘where our Governors-General, surrounded by irresponsible advisers, settle the destinies of empire without the aid of their legitimate fellow-counsellors, and which has been the cradle of more political insanity than any place within the limits of Hindostan’,* that Auckland, who is credited with being a pacific man, ever launched the first Afghan War.

The Durani Amir of Kabul, Shah Suja, lost his throne, 1809, and after many adventures, which included two attempts to reconquer it, had settled down as a Company’s pensioner at Ludhiana. Lord William Bentinck would have been glad enough to see him re-established, but explained that it was not the British habit to interfere in other States’ affairs. His supplanter, Dost Muhammad, when Lord Auckland reached India, sent his congratulations:

‘The field of my hopes, which had before been chilled by the cold blast of wintry times, has by the happy tidings of your Lordship’s arrival become the envy of the garden of paradise. . . . I hope that your Lordship will consider me and my country as your own.’

On this Kaye allows himself the comment: ‘He little thought how in effect this Oriental compliment would be accepted as a solemn invitation, and the hope be literally fulfilled. Three years afterwards Lord Auckland, considering Dost Mahomed’s country his own, had given it away to Shah Soojah.’*

We have seen that a sprinkling of officers brilliant and daring, with a disinterested love of enterprise that of itself would have sent them forward, were moving, sometimes openly, more often disguised as Muslim devotees, horse-copers, and the like, beyond the Punjab. One of the most gallant, Lieutenant Eldred Pottinger, in 1838 encouraged the Afghans of Herat, when in despair of holding out against a Persian army, and saved the city. British prestige stood high in Afghan regions. Dost Muhammad himself was eager for a British alliance, and for a great while refused to make terms with Russian envoys. But Burnes, who was sent to Kabul, could effect nothing because his hands were empty, both literally and metaphorically. His presents were of slight value. Nor could he offer anything of political worth. Dost Muhammad was sore over Ranjit Singh’s capture of Peshawar (1833), and wished the British to press for its return. This Auckland rightly refused to do. But there was nothing else that the Company would or could offer, beyond the distinction of fighting their battles against the Russian Empire as well as his own. Inevitably, after long reluctance, Dost Muhammad had to begin to compose his differences with Russia and Persia, now acting together on his borders.

This natural course of self-preservation served as sufficient excuse for hostility. Macnaghten, secretary to the Indian Government, was sent to Lahore, and on June 26, 1838, the Tripartite Treaty between the Sikhs, Shah Suja, and the Company was signed. The British intention was that they should hover as a vast menace, at Shikarpur on the Indus, while Shah Suja, supported by the Sikhs, entered Afghanistan amid the welcome of a delighted nation. Ranjit Singh, further sunk in physical than in mental decrepitude, in the end managed to reverse the method entirely; it was the Sikhs who contemptuously held the passes for a remnant of the shattered British forces to straggle back. For the present he visualised (without enthusiasm) the only kind of attack on the Khyber he thought possible---a thrusting forward of Sikhs, and yet more Sikhs, over the bodies of those first slain, until sheer weight of casualties and numbers bought the passage.

Miss Eden’s exultant pages tell how in the autumn ‘G.’ himself, with a huge attendance, came to Ferozpur, close to the Sikh borders, where tremendous junketings took place. Amid a wild tumult of clanging weapons under the fiercer crash of massed artillery and the skirl and blare of military music, the elephants of Maharaja and Governor-General were brought alongside;

‘and Lord Auckland, in his uniform of diplomatic blue, was seen to take a bundle of crimson cloth out of the Sikh howdah, and it was known that the lion of the Punjab was then seated on the elephant of the English ruler. In a minute the little, tottering, one-eyed man, who had founded a vast empire on the banks of the fabulous rivers of the Macedonian conquests, was leaning over the side of the howdah, shaking hands with the principal officers of the British camp, as their elephants were wheeled up beside him. Then the huge phalanx of elephants was set in motion again’*

towards the Durbar tent, where presently ‘the imbecile little old man’ (imbecile only in the physical sense) was tottering between the support of the Governor-General and the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Henry Fane, a superb giant of a man, an undesignedly cruel contrast.

As yet the British had no intention of fighting themselves. ‘England was to remain in the background jingling the money-bag.’ But the money-bag had to be filled first with something to jingle; and it was not reasonable to expect England to find this metal. The Sind Amirs were cast for the part of providers, Oudh being penniless and Bengal fully occupied with financial performances. Their country had once been in (exceedingly loose) dependence on Afghanistan. It was decided that they should pay Shah Suja twenty lakhs, which he was to divide with Ranjit Singh. When Ranjit Singh demanded more than ten lakhs, this was arranged by the easy expedient of raising the Amirs’ contribution to twenty-five lakhs, of which he was to have fifteen.

The Amirs at this juncture did what in some phases of British rule might have been awkward. They objected to the revival of financial claims by a man exiled from his throne thirty years previously, and produced his formal renouncement of these claims. Colonel Henry Pottinger, the Company’s political agent in Sind, submitted that the ‘question’ of the Amirs being fleeced for the Afghan pretender’s benefit was

‘rendered very puzzling by two releases written in Korans, and sealed and signed by his Majesty, which they have produced. Their argument now is, that they are sure the Governor-General does not intend to make them pay again for what they have already bought and obtained, in the most binding way, a receipt in full.’

The Governor-General and his advisers, however, had got beyond such pedantry. Pottinger was told to warn the Amirs that

‘the interests at stake are too great to admit of hesitation in our proceedings; and not only they who have shown a disposition to favour our adversaries, but they who display an unwillingness to aid us in the just and necessary undertaking in which we are engaged, must be displaced, and give way to others on whose friendship and co-operation we may be able implicitly to rely’.

The treaty by which they had been cajoled into opening the Indus to navigation, in consideration of the Company’s solemn promise to convey no military stores along it, was to be set aside ‘while the present exigency lasts’. As the Amirs began to betray a sullen reluctance, Pottinger was ordered to assure them that ‘neither the ready power to crush and annihilate them, nor the will to call it into action, were wanting, if it appeared requisite, however remotely, for the safety of the Anglo-Indian Empire or frontier’.

Macnaghten afterwards complained

‘that no civilised beings had ever been treated so badly as were the British by the Princes of Sindh. If it were so, it was only because no civilised beings had ever before committed themselves to acts of such gross provocation. . . . The Ameers . . . viewed all our proceedings . . . with mingled terror and indignation. Our conduct was calculated to alarm and incense them to the extremest point of fear and irritation; and yet we talked of their childish distrust and their unprovoked hostility’.*

As the huge British armies moved through Sind, devastating and eating up, the wealthiest group of the Amirs, in particular those of Haidarabad, became openly disgruntled, almost hostile. Their recalcitrance was eagerly seized upon, and part of the army was detached to bring them to a better sense of their privileges and duties:

‘Down the left bank of the Indus went Cotton with his troops, glorying in the prospect before them. The treasures of Hyderabad seemed to lie at their feet. Never was there a more popular movement. The troops pushed on in the highest spirits, eager for the affray---confident of success. An unanticipated harvest of honour---an unexpected promise of abundant prize-money---was within their reach.’*

But Macnaghten, appalled to see a tremendous military invasion about to degenerate into a freebooting expedition against puny folk, wrote frantic letters to Burnes, to Colvin, to Sir Willoughby Cotton, to Auckland himself. Just in time the Haidarabad Amirs, terrified at the majestic vengeance marching their way, accepted a fresh treaty, by which they were to pay annually three lakhs for the subsidiary force which it was at last to be their privilege, as it had long been that of other Indian States, to support. Cotton, ‘to the extreme disappointment of his troops’,* abandoned ‘a pretty piece of practice for the army’ and returned to the main business.

The Amirs, to whom it was pointed out that ‘friendship, alliance, and unity of interest’ with the Company were far better than the independence to which they were so foolishly attached, and that their mulcting, though grievous, was trivial when it was considered what ‘vast advantages’ they would obtain (arrival of trade and traders, employment for thousands of their meaner subjects, increased demand for grain, etc.), were told further ‘that henceforth they must consider Scinde to be, as it was in reality, a portion of Hindostan, in which the British were paramount and entitled to act as they considered best and fittest for the general good of the whole Empire’.*

These arguments, coming from a Power which was daily giving proof (as it pointed out) of ‘moderation and disinterestedness’, carried conviction; the Amirs answered that

‘their eyes were opened. They had found it difficult to overcome the prejudice and apprehension of their tribes, who had always been led to think the only object of the British was to extend their dominion. Now they had been taught by experience English strength and good faith.’

It is not to be supposed that there had been no misgivings, no protests. On the contrary, every reputable authority outside India was aghast at what was afoot. Wellesley and his brother, the Duke of Wellington, Elphinstone, Bentinck, all condemned it. Alexander Burnes, whose life was to go in the enterprise, and whose share in the business has been considerably misjudged, had urged that

‘it remains to be considered why we cannot act with Dost Mahomed. He is a man of undoubted ability, and has at heart a high opinion of the British nation; and if half you must do for others were done for him . . . he would abandon Russia and Persia to-morrow. . . . I think there is much to be said for him. Government have admitted that he had at best a choice of difficulties; and it should not be forgotten that we promised nothing, and Persia and Russia held out a great deal.’

Moreover, London had persuaded the Russian Government to withdraw their envoy, who returned to St. Petersburg and blew his brains out; and Persia raised the siege of Herat (September 9, 1838). There remained, therefore, no shadow of an excuse, ethical or political, for persisting in the enterprise. But Lord Auckland in October issued a minute, in which ‘the views and conduct of Dost Muhammad Khan were misrepresented with a hardihood which a Russian statesman might have envied’.* Burnes was told that his job was merely to go ahead through the Amirs’ country, making requisitions for the army that was following and aweing the people by threats of their destruction if they were backward in assistance.*

Diverted from passage through the Punjab, by Ranjit Singh’s objections, the British moved through Sind and entered Baluchistan by the Bolan Pass, March, 1839. The Khan of Khelat, who had formerly been generous fool enough to protect Shah Suja, was made another unwilling accomplice. ‘An able and sagacious man’,* Mehrab Khan talked reasonably to Burnes (who was now merely a subordinate tool), and told him what others kept on telling the invaders, that Shah Suja was detested and despised and that, though Dost Muhammad could no doubt be conquered, ‘we could never win over the Afghan nation by it’.* Burnes told Macnaghten that the Khan’s country had been swept, as by a razor, clean of grain and greenstuff, some of its inhabitants being reduced to ‘feeding on herbs and grasses gathered in the jungle . . . the small quantities we have procured have been got by stealth’.*

Kandahar was occupied in April, the Afghans with deepening resentment watching this restoration of their oft-rejected monarch by a host of Kafirs. A clash came at Ghazni, which was stormed in July. Dost Muhammad fled from Kabul, which was occupied in August. The Ghazni carnage was dreadful; and Shah Suja butchered fifty Ghafi prisoners. From this incident dates the abhorrence of him which soon became intense, and was understood, if not shared, by many of his British supporters. ‘The day of reckoning came at last; and when our unholy policy sunk unburied in blood and ashes, the shrill cry of the Ghazee sounded as its funeral wail.’*

When Shah Suja entered Kabul, ‘it was more like a funeral procession than the entry of a King into the capital of his restored dominions’.* His public acknowledgment in Kandahar had been a similar failure. Macnaghten had set apart a large space ‘for “the populace restrained by the Shah’s troops”. But the space remained almost empty, and ‘no Afghan of repute came forward to pay his reverence to the popular idol of Macnaghten’s fancy’.*

In Simla, however, things were seen in a far more encouraging light. In May ‘G. got the official accounts of the taking of Candahar, or rather how Candahar took Shah Soojah, and would have, him for its King. There never was anything so satisfactory’.* Presently ‘G.’ became an earl, Sir John Keane, the Commander-in-Chief of the Indus army, a baron, Macnaghten a baronet, and ‘a shower of honours fell upon the civil and military services’.

Meanwhile the punishment of the wicked had continued steadily. Raging because the march of such a host had not been a picnic, and unable to see ‘that the army of the Indus was at least as much the cause, as it was the victim, of the scarcity in Beloochistan’,* British Indian opinion had fallen into ‘the fashion’ of attributing ‘to the wickedness of Mehrab Khan all the sufferings’ which accompanied the campaign. His friendly offices had made possible the passage of the Bolan Pass; and, while he pointed out that no one wished the return of Shah Suja, nevertheless he himself had sheltered the latter, five years previously, when he fled from his rout at the battle of Kandahar. On the morning of November 13, a British-Indian force appeared before Khelat, and stormed it---news which was received with delight. Macnaghten heard it when dining with General Avitabile, Commandant of Peshawar. All rose and gave ‘the “three times three” of a good English cheer’.* On December 3 Miss Eden saw an aide-de-camp ‘fidgetting about behind G.’s chair with a note in his hand’:

‘it turned out to be an express with another little battle, and a most successful one. The Khan of Khelat was by way of being our ally and assistant, and professing friendship: did himself the pleasure of cutting off the supplies of the army when it was on its way to Cabul; set his followers on to rob the camp; corresponded with Dost Mahomed, &c.

There was no time to fight with him then, and I suppose he was beginning to think himself secure; but G. directed the Bombay army, on its way home, to settle this little Khelat trouble. . . . It was all done in the Ghuznee manner---the gates blown in and the fort stormed---but the fighting was very severe. The Khan and his principal chiefs died sword in hand, which was rather too fine a death for such a double traitor; and one in six of our troops were either killed or wounded, which is an unusual proportion.. . . Also there will be a great deal of prize money.’*

A better authority than Miss Eden sums up the humiliating story:

‘For former hospitality, and for protection from sanguinary pursuers, the gratitude of Shah Shooja, under British influence, awarded to Mehrab Khan the loss of his poor capital and a soldier’s death. After his honourable fall documents were found which proved the manner in which the Khan had been betrayed and his endeavours to negotiate frustrated; nevertheless it was thought advisable to consummate the threat formerly made, and to place Shah Nawaz Khan, to the exclusion of the son of the fallen chief, upon the masnad of Khelat.’*

The day after the battle a British officer (Lieutenant Loveday) looked on pityingly as

‘a few of Mehrab Khan’s servants brought the body of their master for burial---a fine-looking man. There was one little hole in his breast, which told of a musket-ball having passed through. He had no clothes on, except his silk pyjammahs. One of his slaves whispered me for a shawl. Alas! I had nothing of the kind, but lucidly remembered a brocade bed-cover, which I had bought in my days of folly and extravagance at Delhi. I called for it immediately, and gave it to the Khan’s servants, who were delighted with this last mark of respect, and wrapping up the body in it, placed their deceased master on a charpoy, and carried him to the grave.’

The army had reached Kabul, only because Macnaghten lavishly corrupted those Afghans he could reach. The campaign ravaged Indian finances. Withdrawal, however, was impossible; for repression, for punitive measures, for all the abundant dirty work, British officers were indispensable. So the troops were brought in to the capital, and cantoned for winter on an open plain. Meanwhile, Burnes wrote: ‘Bad ministers are in every government solid grounds for unpopularity; and I doubt if ever a King had a worse set than Shah Soojah’. At their head was the Wazir, a man ‘old and enfeebled by age. His memory was gone; so were his ears. For some offence against his Majesty in former days, he had forfeited those useful appendances.’* Such vigour as remained to him was concentrated into two channels, oppression of the people and loathing of the British. With this valuable assistant the latter had wrought what was almost a miracle, an immense revolution in Afghan feeling, hitherto divided but now become one flaming patriotism. British officers sent for their wives from India.

The Tripartite Alliance was about to lose all but nominal adherence of its Sikh component. Ranjit Singh’s body, which had been so long rotting for death, ceased to breathe, June 27, 1839; and a handful of enthralled Europeans watched his barbaric obsequies. Miss Eden, appalled, exclaims:*

‘Those poor dear ranees, whom we visited and thought so beautiful and so merry, have actually burnt themselves. . . they were such gay young creatures, and they died with the most obstinate courage.’

Her brother instructed his representative at Lahore to express horror. Horror could be notified only ‘unofficially’, and was rebutted with polite hint that it was an impertinence.

We descend fast into the shadows of the most sombre and terrible years India has ever known; the terrors of the Afghan slaughters and the Sikh anarchy begin the tale which the violation of Sind, the clash of British-Sikh arms, and the Mutiny are to continue and conclude. Miss Eden’s delightful vivacious commentary is soon to be as irrelevant as the piping of linnets in a bombardment. If, contemplating the straightforward wickedness of Lord Auckland’s Afghan policy and its dreadful close, we marvel that so inept and recklessly unscrupulous a Power should yet have survived, we may keep faith in an ethical governance of the world (should we desire to keep such faith), by turning our eyes upon the cruelty and cowardice of native India.

But our immediate interest is that Ranjit Singh ‘was the only man in the Sikh empire who was true at heart to his allies, and all genuine cooperation died out with the fires of his funeral pile’. From now on, the British were in the position of a man who has a wolf by the ears and dare not relax hold. What troops could be withdrawn were withdrawn; it became increasingly plain that no others could be withdrawn. Afghanistan was in for a military occupation whose finish no one could see. British money-bags were emptying; the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Jasper Nicolls, experienced old soldier of another unsuccessful war, that against the Gurkhas, at the Governor-General’s board kept on stressing the impossibility of endlessly spending at the rate of a million and a quarter sterling a year, on such an enterprise and such a ruler. The rest of the Council seconded him. Lord Auckland, gentle but disinclined for descent into serious controversy with common mortals, shirked and evaded the issue. Sir Alexander Burnes, growing daily wise with a mournful knowledge, a male Cassandra, and like Cassandra doomed to share the ruin he foresaw, remained in Kabul, as he complained ‘in the most nondescript of situations’:*

‘It appears to have been his mission in Afghanistan to draw a large salary every month, and to give advice that was never taken. This might have satisfied many men. It did not satisfy Burnes. He said that he wanted responsibility; and under Macnaghten he had none. . . . He probed, deeply and searchingly, the great wound of national discontent---a mighty sore that was ever running---and he felt in his inmost soul that the death-throes of such a system could not be very remote.’*

Macnaghten, meanwhile, was becoming lost to all ethical considerations, and moral blindness was bringing its inevitable companion, intellectual obsession. Exasperated because he saw questioning in the faces of all but himself, as the hazards and follies of the excursion grew appallingly apparent, he blamed Government’s attention to reports of people afflicted with ‘the imposthume of too much leisure’, who cursed the enterprise, as keeping them away from delectable India, ‘in a land not overflowing with beer and cheroots’. He plotted wilder adventures yet, and urged that ‘we have a beautiful game on our hands if we have the means and inclination to play it properly’. That game was to attack Herat and bring it under Shah Suja’s immediate sway; and to annex the Punjab, an action of whose necessity and righteousness men were freely talking, for the Punjab was the only considerable source of revenue still outside British control. Lord Auckland was to ‘insist’

‘upon the concession of our rights from the ruler of the Punjab. . . .In addition to the demands already made upon the Sikhs, they should be required, I think, to admit unequivocally our right of way across the Punjab, and in the event of their denying this right, they should be convinced that we can take it.’

Dost Muhammad remained at large, a figure intangible and almost immaterial, flitting through the wild scattered borders of his land. His supporters (‘rebels’ Macnaghten called them) inflicted petty galling defeats on the invaders; the invaders sometimes routed some trivial detachment of his troops. But while the defeats of the British grew ever more menacing, and each time their prestige shrank visibly, their enemy’s defeats were unimportant. ‘I am like a wooden spoon,’, he said; ‘you may throw me hither and thither, but I shall not be hurt’. On September 18, 1840, Macnaghten despondently wrote: ‘At no period of my life do I remember having been so much harassed in body and mind as during the past month. . . . The Afghans are gunpowder, and the Dost is a lighted match. Of his whereabouts we are wonderfully ignorant.’ He talked of hanging Dost Muhammad ‘as high as Haman’, of ‘showing no mercy to the man who was the author of all the evil now distracting the country’. Shah Suja, long checked from aweing his subjects in complete Afghan fashion, was delighted, yet surmised, ‘I suppose you would, even now, if I were to catch the dog, prevent me from hanging him’.

The dog, however, was not yet caught, and his teeth were presently fastened in his pursuers’ flesh. On November 2, on a clear crisp morning of autumn, Dost Muhammad turned at bay. He and his men were poorly mounted, but they were desperate. From his blue standard the native levies fled; and the Afghans charged home on the British cavalry. It was a precursor, in pitiful and useless gallantry, of the Khyber and Maiwand. But the ex-Amir, left victor on the battlefield, knew himself no match for these powerful interlopers. Victories such as this could only stir the Feringhis to such an effort as would crush him and his people beyond rising again. He rode through night and the following day, twenty-four hours in the saddle; and, the day after the battle of Parwandara, Macnaghten on his evening ride outside Kabul was hailed by a horseman, who told him Dost Muhammad was behind, to surrender. Dost Muhammad himself then rode up; dismounted, cool and debonair as if from his bed; saluted the British envoy and gave him his sword. Macnaghten, who had desired to hang him, was moved and deeply respectful. He returned the sword, and they rode side by side, the ex-Amir asking eagerly about his family. He remained about ten days in Kabul, conversing freely with Macnaghten, who was stirred to chivalrous esteem and admiration by the Afghan’s story of his life as a fugitive and his undaunted bearing. His own people, who had remained aloof from His Majesty Shah Suja, crowded to the prisoner’s tent burning to show their affection and respect. Shah Suja refused to see him, since he was not allowed to hang him; he ‘would not be able to bring himself to show common civility to such a villain’. But Macnaghten delighted to honour ‘the dog’; and when the Dost was sent to India, wrote, in almost the only words of candour that emerge from the self-deception with which he had enmeshed his mind:

‘I trust that the Dost will be treated with liberality. His case has been compared to that of Shah Soojah; and I have seen it argued that he should not be treated more handsomely than his Majesty was; but surely the cases are not parallel. The Shah had no claim upon us. We had no hand in depriving him of his kingdom, whereas we ejected the Dost, who never offended us, in support of our policy, of which he was the victim.’*

Lord Auckland received the captive generously and respectfully, “and burdened the revenues of India with a pension in his favour of two lakhs of rupees’.*

The British increasingly established themselves. Bungalows were built, gardens were laid out. The Afghan climate suited Feringhi energy. There were race-meetings, jackal and fox hunting, shooting parties, fishing, amateur theatricals. We are told of the ‘infinite astonishment’ of the people when they saw British officers skating on their lakes. With resentment they noted all the signs of a permanent occupation. This energy was wonderful, and boded no good, conjoined with such ambition; ‘the manliness of the Feringhee strangers quite put them to shame’. It put them to shame also in perilous fashion, shame which ‘for two long years’ burned ‘itself into the hearts of the Caubulees’.* Afghans of highest family had their harems raided and their women dishonoured.

Then the country cause was given a martyr. Akram Khan, a chieftain who refused to come in, was betrayed for a price, and by Macnaghten’s instructions, exercised through nominal Afghan authority, blown from a gun as a rebel.

All through 1841 the storm gathered. Khelat had been recovered from the puppet khan; Duranis, Ghilzyes, and other formidable tribes were rising in revolt. Macnaghten for his services and success was appointed Governor of Bombay, and prepared to leave, rejoicing that everything was ‘quiet’. The British, who had occupied a line on the Bala Hissar, the famous fortress overlooking Kabul, gave up their barracks to the aged King’s harem and established themselves in an indefensible ‘sheep-pen’ on flat plain, by a refinement of stupidity putting their arsenal elsewhere. Lord Auckland, having in General Nott an adequate soldier to his hand, preferred to make commander-in-chief in Afghanistan, on Sir Willoughby Cotton’s retirement, General Elphinstone, of whom Miss Eden reports (February 6, 1840): ‘He is in a shocking state of gout, poor man! one arm in a sling and very lame, but otherwise is a young-looking general for India’.*

Macnaghten, happy in promotion and preparing to go, made light of the warnings from every outpost. At the very time when a formidable conspiracy was meeting constantly in Kabul, he wrote (of a grim little fight which came close to disaster) that he ‘hoped the business . . . was the expiring effort of the rebels’, and accepted Burnes’s congratulations on ‘my approaching departure at a season of such profound tranquillity’. The congratulations must have been ironic; to a native agent’s disclosures of peril about to break, Burnes ‘stood up from his chair, sighed, and said he knows nothing but the time has arrived that we should leave the country’. That very evening (November 1, 1841), at the house of a chief whom Burnes had called a dog and threatened with the loss of his ears, the conspirators made their plans. Next day Kabul was in commotion, and among the first whom the mob murdered was Burnes.

A massacre followed, of British officers and their families, caught in their pleasant homes. The insurgents were in terror that retribution would come at any moment, and slew and plundered with their eyes watchful for a way of escape. But a British-Indian army remained unmoving, half an hour’s march away. Towards evening General Elphinstone wrote to Macnaghten: ‘We must see what the morning brings, and then think what can be done’.

Hereafter hardly one act of the British fell below an almost incredible level of imbecility. No disgrace, no humiliation, was wanting. Elphinstone and his troops looked on while the Afghans stormed the fort where the commissariat was stored. The rank and file and junior officers---who hitherto had kept their morale---when they saw their supplies being looted by enemies not four hundred yards away, carrying off their prize ‘as busily as a swarm of ants’, begged to be allowed to prevent their own starvation. General Elphinstone considered the effort too dangerous, and to Macnaghten (who at least pressed for energetic action) pointed out that his men ‘have been all night in the works, are tired, and ill-fed’. On November 13 came a solitary gleam, when Macnaghten took the responsibility on himself and overcame the General’s reluctance so far that a detachment attacked a force which was cannonading their cantonment, and rendering it almost untenable. A desperate fight came close to overwhelming disaster; for the first time the British soldiery showed that panic terror which was to make this campaign unique in our annals. Called on to advance, as one of their own officers witnesses,* ‘with a few gallant exceptions, they remained immovable, nor could the Sepoys be induced to lead the way where their European brethren so obstinately hung back’. At the action’s outset, their bayonets had been charged down by the impetuous Afghan cavalry, and ruin had shaken them by the throat. Lady Sale, watching, felt ‘her very heart’ ‘as if it leapt to my teeth when I saw the Afghans ride clean through them. The onset was fearful. They looked like a great cluster of bees, but we beat them and drove them up again.’* One enemy gun was spiked and another smaller one brought back; and the day closed with the keening of Afghan women, and the hillsides dotted with the flitting torches of the burial-parties. This ‘was the last success, even of a doubtful and equivocal character, which the unhappy force was destined to achieve’.*

On December 11 Macnaghten concluded a treaty, whose preamble with humiliating blandness observes:

‘Whereas it has become apparent from recent events that the continuance of the British army in Afghanistan for the support of Shah Soojah-ool- Moolkh is displeasing to the great majority of the Afghan nation; and whereas the British Government had no other object in sending troops to this country than the integrity, happiness, and welfare of the Afghans, and, therefore, it can have no wish to remain when that object is defeated by its presence . . .’

Shah Suja was to be given his choice of accompanying the British or remaining on a pension; Dost Muhammad was to be released; the Army of Occupation was to become immediately an Army of Evacuation.

Macnaghten began trying to set one group of chieftains against another, using the weapon of corruption which had formerly served so well. Akbar Khan, Dost Muhammad’s son, enticed him to a conference, and shot him with a pistol given by Macnaghten the previous day and accepted with profuse gratitude: The Envoy has deeply paid for his attempt to outdiplomatize the Affghans’.* As the price of safe-conduct to Peshawar, the British were compelled to accept a new and even worse treaty: surrendered hostages: paid individual chiefs large sums: and promised to order the evacuation of Jalalabad and all forts held inside the Afghan border.

The Afghans, however, kept no treaty. Demand upon demand was added, as each was yielded. In the end, all coin in the treasury, all surplus muskets, all the guns except six, ammunition, waggons, stores, all were given up. Afghan insolence rose, British depression deepened. Pottinger, who had succeeded Macnaghten as ‘Political’, was overruled in Council when he ‘would have snapped asunder the treaty before the faces of the chiefs, and appealed to the God of Battles’.* A rejoicing and fiendish rabble pillaged and insulted and haunted ‘a herd of broken-spirited slaves’, who on January 6, 1842, set out through the snow.

Sale, who at Gandamak controlled the eastern passes, under Elphinstone’s peremptory instructions withdrew to Jalalabad, where presently he was conducting a second ‘Defence of Arcot’. Sale, in his own words later, having to choose ‘between the alternatives of being bound or not by the convention, which was forced from our Envoy and military commander with the knives at their throats’, chose rightly. He and his force had been no party to the compact, and they saw no signs of the Afghans keeping any scrap of the faith they pledged. For the sake of his wretched brethren in Kabul, he deemed it his duty to stay at this advanced post, to succour them as early as possible.

Meanwhile 4000 fighting men and 12,000 camp-followers were enduring the miseries of frost-bite, starvation, and constant attack. The retreat was a mere movement of deer into whose midst wolves kept rushing, picking off a weakling here, striking down another there. Akbar Khan from time to time appeared on the flanks, and demanded (and obtained) more hostages for Sale’s evacuation of Jalalabad. The entry of the Kabul Pass was marked by a massacre. Here Elphinstone ordered a halt, and would not stir from his decision. Eldred Pottinger, a prisoner spending the night under a roof, thought of the wretches camped without cover, fire, or food, and persuaded Akbar Khan to promise to take over the British women and children who still survived, and convoy them safe to Peshawar. Akbar Khan, whose own family were in British India, agreed, for he wanted the ladies as hostages. Accordingly, eleven women passed into his keeping, their husbands and children accompanying them. The retreat continued (January 10); at the close of that day, one prolonged butchery, only 450 Europeans remained alive. All baggage was lost, every sepoy was dead, of the 12,000 camp-followers a raving, clogging mass of over 3000 lived.

From these, under cover of night, the fighting men plotted to escape. But the wretches heard them move on, and ‘in the wildness of their fear’ surged after them, drawing a massed Afghan fire. Next day the remnant almost reached the Pass of Jagdalak, where they cowered behind ruined walls. The last three bullocks were taken from the camp-followers and killed, the European soldiers devouring the flesh raw, slaking it down with handfuls of snow. Two days of desperate fighting, with intervals of negotiation, followed. Generals Elphinstone and Shelton, with a third officer acting as interpreter, were received by Akbar Khan round a blazing fire, and given hot tea, being afterwards kept as hostages.

Akbar Khan probably wished to save the few survivors. But the hillmen, beasts of prey then as now, were determined none should escape. The retreat continued into the Jagdalak Pass, where nearly all of the 150 fighting men who lived were killed. Next day, 25 officers and 45 men reached Gandamak, and were all but about twenty massacred while entering upon invited negotiations. Sixteen miles from Jalalabad, six, all officers, were alive. On January 13 the Jalalabad garrison, straining their eyes from the ramparts, saw one reeling pony in the distance, stumbling forward, with a rider bowed on its neck. It was Dr. Brydon. So closed in ‘awful completeness’, ‘sublime unity’, the most terrible disaster that ever overtook a British force.

When the truth, after preliminary rumour, came home in all its certainty, Auckland knew one spasm of courage, in his Proclamation of January 31, 1842:

‘. . . A faithless enemy, stained by the foul crime of assassination, has, through a failure of supplies, followed by consummate treachery, been able to overcome a body of British troops, in a country removed, by distance and difficulties of season, from the possibility of succour. But the Governor-General in Council, while he most deeply laments the loss of the brave officers and men, regards this partial reverse only as a new occasion for displaying the stability and vigour of the British power, and the admirable spirit and valour of the British-Indian army.’

The flash went out, and he sank into such despondency that many who received his letters at this period out of pity destroyed such a revelation of a spirit crushed and despairing. One good thing, at any rate, was done. The crisis called for the best soldier, not the most senior; and General Pollock, though a Company’s officer, was preferred to the King’s officers, and placed in command of the troops at Peshawar. In their distress the British called on the Sikhs to implement their part in the Tripartite Treaty, by which their allies were entitled to call on them for help in case of need. They hung back. And on January 10 a sepoy battalion mutinied, demanding increased allowances and coats and gloves before advancing through the cold to Kabul. The other troops fell in, and everything was set for another Barrackpur massacre. Fortunately there was in Peshawar a man as humane as he was intelligent:

‘It was so dark we could hardly distinguish one another. There was a general hum and whisper. We stood there in a great suspense. An order came for the portfires to be lighted. We could just see Lawrence on horseback, dark and prominent against the sky, vehemently urging, and riding here and there. At length we were ordered back. Lawrence had shown the madness of firing on the regiment at such an hour, when we could not discern the different corps, and of exposing to the Sikh army our internal discords. . . .

‘The following day the matter was arranged under Lawrence’s counsel, and the Sepoys accepted their pay. I have heard Sir Henry dwell on the dangers of that night, and the difficulty he had to prevent Wild from the suicidal measure of ordering the other Sepoy regiments to compel the 64th. There may have been a deeper danger than we knew; for there is little doubt that all the Sepoys were equally averse to the advance.’*

Pollock arrived in Peshawar, February 5; and quietly settled down for two months, while he infused his own confidence and serenity into men who had been handled with imbecility for so long. On April 5 and 6 he forced the Khyber by flanking methods, seizing commanding points instead of merely thrusting through its terrible jaws. On the 16th he relieved Jalalabad. On the 20th he moved forward again, and on September 8 he crowned lesser victories by a resounding one in the Jagdalak Pass; five days later, at Tezin, sepoy and Briton, at last reknit into terrible comradeship, so defeated Akbar Khan that he knew his cause was doomed. Meanwhile, Nott also was fighting his way towards Kabul. Ghazni was recaptured, September 6. Pollock reoccupied Kabul, September 16, Nott joining him next day. On October 9 and 10 the great bazaar was destroyed, ‘an inexcusable act of vandalism’;* perhaps it was, but the consideration which decided its blowing up was the fact that Macnaghten’s mutilated body had been exultingly exposed there. Far worse was the deliberate sacking of Kabul, not in the heat of entry, but as a last-minute policy:

‘Guilty and innocent alike fell under the heavy hand of the lawless retribution. . . . Many unoffending Hindoos, who, lulled into a sense of delusive security by the outward re-establishment of a government, had returned to the city and reopened their shops, were now disastrously ruined. In the mad excitement of the hour, friend and foe were stricken down by the same unsparing hand.’*

Having covered their name with detestation everywhere, on October 12 the British evacuated the shattered capital. Lord Ellenborough, an exuberant orator and a writer of the high Roman kind, who had succeeded Lord Auckland, February 28, 1842, on October 1 issued his paean:

‘. . . Disasters unparalleled in their extent, unless by the errors in which they originated, and by the treachery by which they were completed, have, in one short campaign, been avenged upon every scene of past misfortune; and repeated victories in the field, and the capture of the cities and citadels of Ghuznee and Caubul, have again attached the opinion of invincibility to the British arms.

‘The British arms in possession of Afghanistan will now be withdrawn to the Sutlej.

‘The Governor-General will leave it to the Afghans themselves to create a government amidst the anarchy which is the consequence of their crimes.’

In England Lord Ellenborough had been opposed to the policy of this War. It is strange that he was capable of the impudence and mixed reasoning of this outburst. Both qualities persist to the end:

‘To force a sovereign upon a reluctant people would be as inconsistent with the policy as it is with the principles of the British Government, tending to place the arms and resources of that people at the disposal of the first invader, and to impose the burden of supporting a sovereign, without the prospect of benefit from his alliance’---

truths as self-evident as those with which the American Declaration of Independence opens. Now that they are recognised, late though it be and after unexampled punishment for blindness:

‘Content with the limits nature appears to have assigned to its empire, the Government of India will devote all its efforts to the establishment and maintenance of general peace, to the protection of the sovereigns and chiefs its allies, and to the prosperity and happiness of its own faithful subjects.

‘The rivers of the Punjab and Indus, and the mountainous passes and the barbarous tribes of Afghanistan, will be placed between the British army and an enemy approaching from the West, if indeed such an enemy there can be, and no longer between the army and its supplies.

‘The enormous expenditure required for the support of a large force, in a false military position, at a distance from its own frontier and its resources, will no longer arrest every measure for the improvement of the country and of the people.’

In those last words the brazen countenance at last shows some signs of almost shame. The long-delayed internal improvement of much-pillaged India was postponed further by this iniquitous campaign. Hardly anything, and certainly nothing adequate, could be done until after the Mutiny; and then that outbreak crippled Indian finances for many a year longer:

‘It is upon record, that this calamitous war cost the natives of India, whose stewards we are, some fifteen millions of money. All this enormous burden fell upon the revenues of India, and the country for long years afterwards groaned under the weight. The bitter injustice of this need hardly be insisted upon.’*

The war, moreover, had been waged for solely British purposes, a wild parrying of an imagined stroke by Russia, that dread of statesmen in London and Calcutta.

This was all silly and humiliating enough. But on November 16 the Governor-General issued what the Duke of Wellington styled a ‘Song of Triumph’, his notorious Address to ‘All the Princes and Chiefs’, ‘My Brothers and My Friends’, congratulating them because General Nott had torn away from the tomb of ‘Sultan Mahmud, that victorious Lord’,* the gates which in his lifetime (it was alleged) the victorious Lord had brought from Somnath, in Gujarat. The tomb’s guardians wept and protested; but no one else was destined to care:

‘Our victorious army bears the gates of the temple of Somnauth in triumph from Afghanistan, and the despoiled tomb of Sultan Mahomed looks upon the ruins of Ghuznee.

‘The insult of eight hundred years is at last avenged. The gates of the temple of Somnauth, so long the memorial of your humiliation, are become the proudest record of your national glory, the proof of your superiority in arms over the nations beyond the Indus.

‘To you, Princes and Chiefs of Sirhind, of Rajwarra, of Malwa, and of Guzerat, I shall commit this glorious trophy of successful war.

‘You will yourselves, with all honour, transmit the gates of sandal-wood through your respective territories to the restored temple of Somnauth.

‘The chiefs of Sirhind shall be informed at what time our victorious army will first deliver the gates of the temple into their guardianship, at the foot of the bridge of the Sutlej.’

The ‘People of India’, also ‘My Brothers and Friends’, received their own separate Address.

These Proclamations at first were thought to be a hoax, but were discovered to be genuine. As for the ‘gates’, they were found to be modern, and not those of Somnath at all; and were finally left to repose in the armoury at Agra.

Lord Ellenborough in December staged a colossal military show at Ferozpur. This was meant partly as a warning to the Sikhs, whose help was ‘crabbed’ and whose reluctancies were angrily discussed, that their turn would come next if they were not careful. All was noise, excitement, flutter---fine dresses, fine warriors, fine horses---elephants decorated, caparisoned and painted---triumphal arches, gigantic marquees, tinsel, bright-hued cloths, festoons and awnings, ‘polyglot emblazonments’ of the victorious army’s battles, field-days, banquets, speeches and applause. Forty thousand troops and a hundred guns were manoeuvred under the eyes of the Governor-General, the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Jasper Nicolls, Pertab Singh the Sikh heir-apparent, Dhyan Singh the Sikh Prime Minister, and a host of happy ladies. The year which began in disaster ‘opportunely closed in gaiety and glitter---in prosperity and parade’.*

The Governor-General had intended that Dost Muhammad should witness this display of power. But when it was represented to him that this would seem like Roman insolence to a captive, he abandoned the idea. Dost Muhammad was allowed to pass quietly out of India, and reached Lahore. January 20, 1843, where the Sikh durbar received him with genuine honour. He rejoined a people in whom he found ‘scarcely a family . . . which had not the blood of kindred to revenge upon the accursed Feringhees. The door of reconciliation seemed to be closed against us; and if the hostility of the Afghans be an element of weakness, it seemed certain that we must have contrived to secure it’.* He was enthusiastically welcomed back, and proceeded to give his country again a government wise by contemporary standards, and less ruthless by far than that of its neighbours of the Punjab and the Central Asian khanates.

So ended an episode whose

‘one consolation---if indeed it can now be called a consolation---was that we had learned a lesson which we could never need to be taught again’.*

Unfortunately for the prophet, history, which as a matter of fact rarely ‘repeats itself’, did so with tragic closeness in the second Afghan War of 1878-80.

Chapter V

The Conquest and Pacification of Sind: Suppression of Gwalior Army

The Amirs’ candle burns at both ends: Napier and Outram: battles of Miani and Daba: various comments on the war: Napier settles the new province: the last Maratha War: battles of Maharajpur and Panniar: dismissal of Lord Ellenborough: Lord Ellenborough on future relations with native States.

‘The conquest of Sind followed in the wake of the Afghan War and was morally and politically its sequel’*---in Sir Charles Napier’s expression, ‘the tail of the Affghan storm’. Part of the story has already come in the narrative of that campaign. The rest can fitly come mainly in the conqueror’s own words.

Lord Ellenborough had reprobated in advance the mischievous activities of anyone who should rob India of peace, and warned such that the full majesty of British strength would move against them. In 1841 the Company, having ‘acquired by degrees that secondary moral force which belongs to utility irrespective of abstract justice’,* by virtue of that secondary moral force decided that it should annex Shikarpur, on Sind’s northern border and its largest city. The Amirs reluctantly assented. As the British had already seized and kept Karachi, Sind’s only port, in the extreme south, ‘the Ameers’ candle was burning at both ends’. The Amirs were suspected of still harbouring ungrateful feelings, so Sir Charles Napier, recalled from Europe, ‘a small dark-visaged old man . . . with a falcon’s glance’,* ‘always more under the influence of excitement than of reason’,* in September, 1842, was sent to Sind, with the widest possible powers of war and peace. He was a veteran trained under the Duke of Wellington, and imbued with all the master’s love of discipline and promptitude; and Lord Ellenborough, when sending him, warned the Amirs, in these ‘explicit and honourable’ terms, ‘stimulated by the lofty ambition of saving India from ruin’:*

‘On the day on which you shall be faithless to the British Government sovereignty will have passed from you; your dominions will be given to others, and in your destitution all India will see that the British Government will not pardon an injury received from one it believed to be its friend.’

The dark-visaged old man with a falcon’s glance carried these instructions:

‘If the Ameers, or any one of them, should act hostilely, or evince hostile designs against the British forces, it was the Governor-General’s fixed resolution never to forgive the breach of faith, and to exact a penalty which should be a warning to every chief in India.’

Major Outram, ‘the Bayard of India’, who acted as his ‘Political’, after cherishing natural enough resentment and suspicion from his memories of a certain lack of enthusiasm in the Amirs’ co-operation during the Afghan War had come to feel that their offences were trivial in face of their provocation and the wolf’s obvious intention first to charge them with muddying his springs and then to devour them. In February, 1843, he wrote to Napier that he was

‘unable entirely to coincide in your views, either as respects the policy or justice of, at least so suddenly, overturning the patriarchal government to which alone Sind has been accustomed . . . I say patriarchal, for, however we may despise the Amirs as inferior to ourselves, either in morality or expansion of intellect, each chief certainly lives with, and for, his portion of the people:, and I question whether any class of the people of Sind, except the Hindoo traders . . . would prefer a change to the best government we could give them. . . .

‘It grieves me to say that my heart, and the judgment God has given me, unite in condemning the measures we are carrying out for his Lordship as most tyrannical---positive robbery. I consider, therefore, that every life which may hereafter be lost in consequence will be a murder. . . .’*

However, Outram was instructed to force on the Amirs a new treaty. They argued that, ‘having never broken the old agreements into which they had entered with the British Government, there was no necessity to impose upon them new and objectionable terms as punishment for an offence they had not committed’. Napier held otherwise, and so did Ellenborough. ‘Certain vague charges of disaffection . . . based on evidence now generally recognized to have been unsatisfactory’,* had been brought against them, the only serious item being a letter which some good scholars considered was probably a forgery but which Napier, who had the advantage of total ignorance of any Indian language, decided was genuine.* The main proof, of course, was in the Governor-General’s declared conviction that the Amirs could not possibly be genuinely devoted to the Company---a conviction which must be admitted as based on sound reasoning. Napier’s own standpoint was disarmingly honest. He wrote in his Diary: ‘We have no right to seize Sind, yet we shall do so, and a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality it will be’.* Outram’s testimony, to which he stood throughout, despite his first prejudice which made him willing to support considerable tightening of the treaty so long as the Amirs were left sovereigns, was:*

‘The information I obtained during my voyage up the Indus, and my previous knowledge of the chiefs of Sind, satisfied me that the reports of their warlike preparations were unfounded, probably promulgated by themselves, in the hope that our demands would be less stringent, if we supposed them in any way prepared for resistance. . . . I well knew that they themselves were quite conscious of their inability to oppose our power; that they had no serious intention of the sort; and that nothing but the most extreme proceedings and forcing them to desperation would drive them to it.’

Napier destroyed the Amirs’ magazines and grain stores, and their fortress of Imamghar. All these actions he considered peaceful arguments. The Amirs, terrified, gave way to Outram’s persuasions, and signed a treaty promising to abandon the right of coining money (which was to be issued by the Company henceforth and to bear on one side the effigy of the British sovereign), and to fuel Company steamers on the Indus. But they implored him to leave Haidarabad, before their people got out of hand. The outbreak came, three days later (February 15, 1843), when Outram escaped to a steamer. On February 17, at Miani, Napier routed a horde of Baluchis:

‘Thick as standing corn, and gorgeous as a field of flowers . .. they filled the broad deep bed of the Fillaillee, they clustered on both banks, and covered the plain beyond. Guarding their heads with their large dark shields, they shook their sharp swords, beaming in the sun, their shouts rolled like a peal of thunder, as with frantic gestures they rushed forwards . . . with demoniac strength and ferocity. But with shouts as loud, and shrieks as wild and fierce as theirs, and hearts as big and arms as strong, the Irish soldiers met them with that queen of weapons the musket and sent their foremost masses rolling back in blood’,*

while the guns swept the river-course diagonally, tearing the dense crowd with an appalling carnage. Napier’s courage and generalship were both admirable. A desperate fight ended in complete victory, at the cost of 275 casualties; the enemy lost 6000.

‘The ferocity on both sides was unbounded, the carnage horrible. The General, seeing a 22nd soldier going to kill an exhausted Belooch chief, called to him to spare: the man drove his bayonet deep, and then turning, justified the act with a homely expression, terrible in its truthfulness accompanying such a deed: “This day, General, the shambles have it all to themselves”.’

Napier next summoned Haidarabad to surrender. Vakils sent to ask his terms were told: ‘Life, and nothing more. And I want your decision before twelve o’clock, as I shall by that time have buried my dead, and given my soldiers their breakfasts’.* Haidarabad was yielded in haste; its booty, a star drawing envy ever since Alexander Burnes brought British India the report that the Amirs had twenty millions sterling hoarded, proved disappointing. The Khairpur Amir was routed at Daba (March 24), a repetition of the previous battle, the losses of both sides almost exactly as before. The nullas and hamlets were crammed with dead and dying: ‘All the fallen Beloochs were of mature age, grim-visaged men, athletic forms: the carcass of a youth was not to be found’.* But, ‘contrary to all expectation’, thirteen unwounded prisoners were taken, as against three at Miani; ‘and this slight approach to mildness gave the General infinite satisfaction, for the ferocity on both sides had pained him deeply’.*

Napier continued to roar up and down. His voice became a bellow:

‘If you come in and make your salaam, and promise fidelity to the British Government, I will restore to you your lands and former privileges, and the superintendance (sic) of the dawks. If you refuse, I will wait till the hot weather is gone past, and then I will carry fire and sword into your territories, and drive you and all belonging to you into the mountains; and if I catch you I will hang you as a rebel. You have now your choice. Choose!’

The chief so exhorted chose to make his salaam. But ‘his barbarian pride would not bend’. He came with six attendants, and his demeanour was reported by the colonel who received him as haughty. He was accordingly told to come in again, with proper humility: ‘Come here instantly. Come alone and make your submission, or I will in a week tear you from the midst of your tribe and hang you’. ‘Had he hesitated, the General would have been upon him within the time specified.’

Sind was annexed, the Amirs exiled; Napier received £70,000 prize-money, and the Governor-General strained even his throat of eloquence in crowing over what had been achieved:

‘The army of Scinde has twice beaten the bravest enemy in Asia, under circumstances which would equally have obtained for it the victory over the best troops in Europe

‘To have punished the treachery of protected Princes; to have liberated a nation from its oppressors; to have added a province, fertile as Egypt, to the British empire; and to have effected these great objects by actions in war unsurpassed in brilliancy, whereof a grateful army assigns the success to the ability and valour of its general; these are not ordinary achievements, nor can the ordinary language of praise convey their reward.’

Outram refused his £3000 prize-money; told Napier, for whom he cherished warm affection (which was returned): ‘I am sick of policy; I will not say yours is the best, but it is undoubtedly the shortest---that of the sword. Oh, how I wish you had drawn it in a better cause!’; and went home to plead for the Amirs. Mr. Gladstone afterwards revealed* that Sir Robert Peel’s Cabinet, of which he and the Duke of Wellington were both members, disapproved, he believed unanimously, of the conquest. ‘But the ministry were powerless, inasmuch as the mischief of retaining was less than the mischief of abandoning it, and it remains an accomplished fact.’ Even Napier once wrote in his Diary: ‘My present position is not, however, to my liking: we had no right to come here, and are tarred with the Afghan brush’. In England, Elphinstone’s contemptuous comment was:* ‘Coming after Afghanistan, it put one in mind of a bully who has been kicked in the streets, and went home to beat his wife in revenge’. The conqueror’s ‘sardonic pun’,* ‘Peccavi’ (‘I have Sind’), is one of the few things in connection with British-Indian history that have lodged in the common mind. The pun, however, was not his; it was made by Punch.

Having conquered Sind, Napier entered on its pacification. Like many great soldiers, he regarded ‘the frocks’ with scorn. ‘Having fixed notions of government’ (as of most matters) he rejected the civilian element and its opinions, observing that

‘the mercantile spirit weakens if it does not altogether exclude noble sentiments. . . . The bravery and devotion of the troops . . . have expanded the original small settlement on the Hooghly to a mighty empire; and yet on every accession of territory the soldier has been treated as unfit to govern what his sword had won; on each new acquisition a civil establishment has been fastened, incongruent with the military barbarism of the people to be governed but fulfilling the conditions of patronage and profit. . . . For those civil servants have much higher salaries and allowances than the military servants have. . . .

‘In this manner a vicious circle of policy is completed, and a solution furnished of that seeming paradox, that while the instructions issued by the directors for the government of the East have always been moderate and opposed to aggrandizement by war, their empire has been continually augmented by arms and little or nothing has been affected for the welfare of the people.’

The civil servants he styled ‘ignorant of great principles, devoid of business habits’, wasteful and greedy for jobs and ease, run by nepotism, grossly overpaid and demanding swollen costly establishments. They

‘have worn out originally vigorous appetites and feeble minds while enjoying large salaries and the adulation of black clerks. . . . Despising and avoiding the society of the natives, they yet pretend to know the characters of those natives, and call themselves the Statesmen of India!’

He set up a cheaper administration than the bureaucracy considered proper. The Court of Directors he dismissed as ‘but cunning fools, and I am a man whose daily occupation is to deal with the lives of my fellow-men’. To the administration of India generally he called ‘Hands off Sind!’; and he set the model which the world-famed Punjab Tradition was to copy and amplify a few years later. To the chiefs and nobles he restored their swords, ‘with this stern though flattering admonition’:*

‘Take back your sword. You have used it with honour against me, and I esteem a brave enemy. But if forgetful of this voluntary submission you draw it again in opposition to my government, I will tear it from you and kill you as a dog.’

He had absolute powers of life and death without trial, and did a deal of hanging, justified by the region’s profligacy of murder. Felons were suspended bearing labels in three languages (as in an ancient example) explaining the reason for their doom. Lord William Bentinck had abolished flogging in the native army; Napier ignored this change, flogging freely, as a sane alternative to shooting or dismissal, the penalties lavishly meted out in those hard times. He held that ‘the human mind is never better disposed to gratitude and attachment than when softened by fear’; and he used to observe: ‘It will not do to let their barbaric vanity gradually wipe away the fear cast on them by the two battles’. The properly behaved were sometimes allowed to salaam to Queen Victoria’s picture, which was kept ‘covered with a curtain from the gaze of private men and retainers’.* It is no marvel that the Conqueror of Sind has been so long the hero of boys’ stories, and his simple philosophy that of all those who ‘know how to deal with Orientals’. His nickname with the tribes was ‘Shaitan-Ke-bhai’, ‘Satan’s brother’.

The civil service were chagrined, not unnaturally. Nevertheless,

‘if we would speak true,
Much to the man is due’.

He waged energetic war against slavery. The occasional suttees of Sind (mainly a Muslim region) were peremptorily stopped. When the Brahmins protested that the burning of widows was a religious custom, he replied cheerfully that in that case they must prepare the pyre, of course. But

‘my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs’.

No more widows were burnt. When a chief interceded for a man who had merely killed his wife, a trivial fault, Napier replied that she had done her husband no wrong. ‘No! but he was angry! why should he not kill her?’ ‘Well, I am angry’, said Napier. ‘Why should I not kill him?’ ---and did kill him. There is something to be said for a despot whose hand is heavy on cowardly savagery. He did a magnificent work; and Providence, as the Sindis were quick to note, approved him, by sending abundant showers at the very beginning of his rule.

Moreover, the moralities are mixed. Utterly indefensible as the conquest of Sind was, when the argument got away from legality and international ethics a deeper defence revealed itself (as Napier felt, and sometimes expressed in his rough, roaring fashion). The Amirs’ rule was hard on minorities not of their faith; and it was as barbarous as any other of these childish Eastern administrations. Napier found one wretch a prisoner in a cage, where he had been so long that he could not live in any other way. It is interesting to remember that within the last half-dozen years a similar case was discovered in Sind, the victim of an ecclesiastical sentence, whose promulgators were defended by a much-admired Muslim nationalist lawyer. Outram, like Henry Lawrence, was apt to see one side only, that of native potentates who liked and trusted him and impressed him with their charm; a side of their activities, one deeply diabolical, lay necessarily out of the sight of the courteous, fair-minded English gentleman to whom his own country’s reputation for good faith was a passion. Napier also saw one side only, being impatient of princely rights. A time will come when the historian of British India will be able to take both sides into account.

Sind’s revenues proved insufficient; but that was because a large army was kept in the province, ready for the expected Sikh War. Watching at the Punjab marches, and convinced that a Punjab War must come, Napier compared himself to Cato with his ‘Delenda est Carthago’.

Towards the close of 1843 Lord Ellenborough achieved another war, the last Maratha one. This arose out of the political situation, which drove all independent and martial spirits into what was the only State, outside Nepal and the Punjab, with any genuine autonomy left. Gwalior, a scene of confusion, had an army of 40,000 men and a strong artillery force. The Governor-General’s interference was justified by expediency only, and was precipitated by his anticipation of war with the Sikhs, whose friendly Maharaja, Sher Singh, was assassinated, September, 1843. Fearing a possible junction of Sikh and Maratha troops, in a minute (November 1) he took occasion to proclaim that the British Government could not tolerate ‘the existence within the territories of Sindhia of an unfriendly government nor that those territories should be without a government willing and able to maintain order’.* He suddenly remembered that Wellesley’s treaty with Sindhia in 1804 provided for a subsidiary force in Gwalior. The provision had been allowed to lapse; but the British Government was about to surprise native India by discovering a tender regard for treaties. Two British armies marched on Gwalior, the Governor-General accompanying the larger one under General Sir Hugh Gough, the Commander-in-Chief. This on December 23 crossed the Chambal, and thereby invaded Gwalior. Queerly enough, it was taken for granted that the matters at issue would be settled peacefully, the mere presence of British arms disposing the Marathas to kindly thoughts. The Gwalior army was not taken seriously. Lord Ellenborough, relating the event in a letter to the Duke of Wellington (January 21, 1844), begins: ‘I little expected ever to have to write to you about a battle in which I had myself been present---however, so it is’.

The Marathas under cover of night moved from the place where they were known to be, and entrenched at Maharajpur, with their batteries before them. The Commander-in-Chief regarded them as a rabble, and his Adjutant-General observed that all he needed was a horse-whip. Ladies accompanied the ‘promenade’, on horseback and on elephants. The gay party was about to breakfast, when masked batteries opened on them; later, from the long millet and sugarcane, ‘literally, batteries were put up like covies of partridges’. A hugger-mugger haphazard battle followed, of 12,000 Company’s men against slightly more Marathas. The British had left their heavy guns behind, and their field pieces were soon silenced; so ‘the troops were, according to the usual tactics of Sir Hugh, launched on the batteries, which were served with desperation as long as a gunner was left’.* The Company lost 800 killed and wounded, and the enemy about 3000. On the same day (December 29, 1843) General Grey won a battle of a less arduous kind, at Panniar.

Gwalior was not annexed, but passed under British rule for the next tenyears, the prince being a minor. Gwalior Fort was put in control of aCompany contingent, which in the Mutiny cast off their officers andjoined the rebellion. The State army was reduced to 3000 infantry, 6000cavalry, and thirty-two guns.

Lord Ellenborough returned, rejoicing, and reached Calcutta in March. On the 15 th of June, 1844, to his astonishment, he heard that the Court of Directors had revoked his appointment, and dismissed him. This was their retort to his consistent contempt for them: to the absence of respect in his communications: to his gasconades and histrionics: to his scorn of the civil service and exclusive affection for the army (he often mourned that he was not a soldier): and to his military obsession generally. ‘His administration presented only a succession of battles.’* His exuberance and verbal intoxication had undone him; the man of the Gates of Somnath Proclamation, and many others only less ridiculous because less prominent, was regarded as a dangerous mountebank. The army was intensely annoyed, and emitted a number of speeches and addresses which from Indians would have been held wickedly seditious. The Fort William officers gave him a feast, which the Duke of Wellington refused to censure:

‘I who am thus called upon to notice this affair as a serious offence against discipline and a breach of military orders, have served the public now for nearly half a century, and I believe I may safely say that neither in these times nor in any other did there ever exist an officer half so feasted and “festivated”, or who received half the number of testimonials from those under his command that I have.’

Lord Ellenborough had excellent qualities, a freedom from nepotism unusual in office-holders of any age and particularly of that, ‘patriotic distribution of his patronage’, immense energy. But excitability had its usual effect, of disguising genuine powers of mind. These on occasion could find conspicuously wise and independent utterance, as in his letter to Queen Victoria (January 18, 1843):

‘The anomalous and unintelligible position of the local government of India excites great practical difficulties in our relations with native chiefs who in an empire like ours have no natural place, and must be continually in apprehension of our design to invade their rights and to appropriate their territories. All these difficulties would be removed were your Majesty to become the nominal head of the empire. The princes and chiefs of India would be proud of their position as the feudatories of an empress; and some judicious measures calculated to gratify the feelings of a sensitive race, as well as to inspire just confidence in the intentions of their sovereign, would make the hereditary leaders of this great people cordially co-operate with the British Government in measures for the improvement of their subjects and of their dominions.

‘Lord Ellenborough can see no limit to the future prosperity of India if it be governed with due respect for the feelings and even the prejudices, and with a careful regard for the interests, of the people, with the resolution to make their well-being the chief object of the Government, and not the pecuniary advantages of the nation of strangers to which Providence has committed the rule of this distant empire.’*

The measured criticism underneath those closing words should be noted; like many who came to India from outside---and this detachment is the clinching argument for having a Viceroy from England, instead of a ‘man on the spot’, for the best man on the spot cannot escape that strangling loop of prejudices and stock opinions which besets Anglo-India---Lord Ellenborough was disquieted by tendencies which seemed to him unethical in their brutally direct selfishness.

However, the British civilian community viewed his supersession ‘as an act o£ unquestionable wisdom’,* while recognising that he had merits.

Book V

From The Sikh Wars To The End Of The Mutiny

‘Though Justice against Fate complain,
And plead the ancient rights in vain---
(But these do hold or break,
As men are strong or weak).’

— Andrew Marvell, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland,

Chronological Table

Sir Henry Hardinge 1844.

• 1845. Sikh army crosses Satlej. First Sikh War. Battles of Mudki, Ferozshah, Aliwal, Sobraon.

Lord Dalhousie

• 1848. Second Sikh War. Battles of Chilianwala and Gujarat.

• 1849. Punjab annexed. Moplah rising. Annexation of Satara.

• 1852. Second Burmese War.

• 1853. Sir John Lawrence Chief Commissioner of the Punjab. Bombay-Thana railway opened. Annexation of Nagpur. Renewal of Company's charter.

• 1855. Sonthal rising.

• 1856. Annexation of Oudh.

Lord Canning

• 1856. War with Persia.

• 1857. Treaty with Amir of Afghanistan. Outbreak of Mutiny at Meerut (May). Delhi recaptured (September). Havelock reaches Lucknow (September). Sir C. Campbell finally relieves Lucknow (November).

• 1858. Storming of Jhansi (March). Proclamation on Oudh (March). Reduction of Oudh. Proclamation of peace (July). Government of India transferred to Crown.

Chapter I

First Sikh War

Annexationist trend of thought: the Punjab during the Afghan War; anarchy after Ranjit Singh’s death: the Sikhs cross the Satlej: battles of Mudki, Ferozshah, Aliwal, and Sobraon: a noble ‘sati’: Gulab Singh: beginning of ‘the Punjab Tradition’: John Lawrence’s methods and views: Henry Lawrence on native States under British tutelage.

The new Governor-General, Sir Henry Hardinge, came when men were much exercised over what seemed the inevitable unification of India. The best, as well as the crudest, minds played with annexationist dreams. Henry Lawrence, Resident in Nepal, wrote* in 1845 that 30,000 men could take that ‘magnificent country’ in two months, without chance of failure:

‘We should then have a splendid frontier in the snowy mountains, and a line of sanataria from Darjeeling to Almora.

‘I see the advantage to us of taking the country whenever the Goorkhas oblige us to do so; but I have no wish to hasten the measure, for it is only justice to them to say that, bad as is their foreign and Durbar policy, they are the best masters I have seen in India.’

The contradiction in Lawrence’s conclusion, one implicit in Indian affairs, was to impress him increasingly, until he became the despairing but resolute foe of the time’s popular policy.

The Sikhs had watched the Company over a long period steadily, and often rapidly, advancing. In the Afghan campaign British troops surged across the Punjab, and used it as lines of communication. It could hardly be unknown that British high officers had freely advocated annexation or partition of the Punjab, on grounds of military convenience---which, if the Kabul occupation had proved permanent, would have become necessity.

Ranjit Singh and his successors had been repeatedly warned off countries whose integrity and independence the Company alleged it important to preserve, only to see these annexed afterwards. It was Russia’s provocation to Japan when she kept her out of Port Arthur, to take it herself. Ferozpur, once regarded as definitely in their sphere, was now an extensive cantonment, where British manoeuvres had twice taken place on an elaborately and menacingly magnificent scale. Shikarpur, which Ranjit Singh had vainly tried to obtain as reward for help in the Afghan War, was British, as was the whole lower Indus, to which this important mart formed a gate.

It was the Afghan War---from which so many vivid contemporary pictures have come down, of the Sikhs contemptuously and half-heartedly protecting the retreat of an army convicted of inefficiency unexampled in British annals, while continuing to use the Punjab high-handedly for its purposes---which made war a certainty sooner or later. According to Colonel Steinbach,* after the Kabul disaster the Sikh sirdars were all for attacking the British, but were restrained by Maharaja Sher Singh. Every British statesman and soldier was watching for this eventuality; Sir Charles Napier, whose iron blows at Miani and Daba were deeply remembered, was massing on Sikh marches, making no secret of his expectation of war. When the disorder of the Punjab increased, the British strengthened frontier posts and prepared for emergencies---measures explicable but misinterpreted as preludes to invasion. Last of all, Major Broadfoot, who had been prominent in the Afghan War and in 1841, obsessed by conviction that he was moving through a populace intent on destruction of him and his troops, all but precipitated war* in the Punjab, was sent to Lahore as British Agent, November, 1844, to the people he had irritated and alarmed. ‘The Sikh authorities did not derive any assurance of an increasing desire for peace, from the nomination of an officer who, thirty months before, had made so stormy a passage through their country.’*

Broadfoot began by taking under Company protection the remaining Cis-Satlej possessions of the Sikhs, as liable to formal incorporation when the present Maharaja died or was deposed. Without the preliminary of announcing what he had done, he proceeded to act as if the districts were British territory. Finally, when a small body of Sikh horse crossed the Satlej without his permission, on their way to a town belonging to their Government, he ordered them to recross:

‘and as he considered them dilatory in their obedience, he followed them with his escort, and overtook them as they were about to ford the river. A shot was fired by the English party, and the extreme desire of the Sikh commandant to avoid doing anything which might be held to compromise his government, alone prevented a collision.’*

His actions, and similar activities on the Sind-Punjab frontier by SirCharles Napier, were held by the Sikhs to amount to war.

Since Ranjit Singh’s death the Punjab’s condition had beggared description. A succession of Maharajas and pretenders died suddenly and violently. The Rajas of Jammu (southern Kashmir), a Rajput family who had risen from being ordinary foot-soldiers to be Ranjit Singh’s most influential officers, by assassination or battle lost Dhyan Singh, his son Hira Singh, and his brother Suchet Singh. Gulab Singh, who survived, was intent on establishing the virtual independence his clan had founded in the north, and carefully kept out of the war with the British.

The Sikh army frankly usurped the State. They had their committees, much like Cromwell’s army, and were pretorian in behaviour, making and unmaking Maharajas. Many of their leaders, now and during the war, were in traitorous correspondence with the British. Among these was the Wazir, Jawahar Singh. The army panchayats sentenced him to death, summoning him to appear before them (September 21, 1845). When he came, he was told to stand aside from the boy Maharaja, and a file of soldiers shot him. The act ‘partook of the solemnity and moderation of a judicial process, ordained and witnessed by a whole people’.

Rani Jindan, his sister, who was Regent, in a passion of grief and indignation drove his wretched women, two wives and three slave-girls, on to his pyre. The army forced them to march in procession between its ranks, snatching from their trays of distribution the jewels and gifts which are held sacred from a sati, even ripping out their earrings, answering their entreaties with jest and ribaldry. After the pyre was burning, soldiers tried to rescue the gold fringing of the victims’ trousers. In her agony one of the satis rose amid the flames and predicted that within a year the Khalsa would ‘be overthrown, and the wives of the men of the army would be widows’.* A sati’s last words are prophetic, and these were terribly fulfilled: ‘For a crime so terrible and open, the slaughter of the Khalsa a few months later seemed a just retribution’.* The sympathy which otherwise we might give to the Sikhs for their patient endurance of forty years’ pressure and the valour of their last tremendous stand, dies when we contemplate such savagery. Their religious brotherhood had become admirable only in war; and its destruction was a feat morally desirable.

Rani Jindan and other Sikh leaders became terrified of the army which arrogated powers of summary execution of its nominal chiefs. Foreign war is a well-known expedient of desperate Governments. If the army of the Khalsa crossed the Satlej, like Croesus it would ‘destroy a great kingdom’, whether its own or another Fate’s enigmatic lips declined to say. A very little persuasion would precipitate this consummation, in either possible form welcome; especially since the Sikhs were convinced that war, undeclared but in being, already hovered on their frontiers. The soldiery assembled round Ranjit Singh’s funerary memorial, and vowed fidelity in the battle they were about to wage. Then, half in tumult and half in awe, they surged forward: and on December 11, 1845, commenced to cross the Satlej, taking by surprise the British, who had never visualised a beginning so overt, but rather a dragging civil war upon which the Company would at last interfere, in magisterial manner imposing order. The Sikhs were absurdly underrated, ‘called a “rabble” in sober official despatches’.* Nothing worse than a steady counter-thrust, pausing for a few unstrenuous battles, was anticipated.

The Sikhs, for their part, having taken up a position close to Ferozpur, halted, in solemn dread at their own daring. They had immense advantages, of enthusiasm which made every Sikh consider ‘the cause as his own, and he would work as a labourer as well as carry a musket; he would drag guns, drive bullocks, lead camels, and load and unload boats with a cheerful alacrity, which contrasted strongly with the inapt and sluggish obedience of mere mercenaries, drilled, indeed, and fed with skill and care, but unwarmed by one generous feeling for their country or their foreign employers’.* But they were now face to face with the Power that had struck down mighty empires, their coevals when it reached this land. They waited, therefore, an army listening in silence to the beating of its own heart.

All India paused from every other occupation to watch the clash between the aliens and the last surviving kingdom (except Nepal). In Nepal, Henry Lawrence’s Diary notes (October 2), when war was regarded as a certainty, awaiting only the formalities of declaration, that the Maharaja ‘has ordered all the Pundits to examine their books, and inform him whether the British will be victorious’. ‘Much anxiety’, he reports, eighteen days later, ‘is expressed as to the expected fall of Lahore, when Nepaul will be the last free State in India’.*

At Mudki, twenty miles from Ferozpur, a Sikh detachment of probably 2000 foot and perhaps 10,000 cavalry, supported by 22 guns, assailed two British divisions (December 18). They were repulsed, but less decisively than Indian armies usually were. The Sikhs were practically deserted by their commanders, Lal Singh and Tej Singh, who were both in correspondence* with the enemy. John Lawrence’s biographer makes the observation* which in this war was to become a commonplace, that if the issue had depended on the sepoys, who ate the Company’s salt, and fought for no other reason, Mudki would have been a defeat. The British lost 872 men, among the killed being Sir Robert Sale of Jalalabad:

‘The last two hours of battle were a series of dogged stands and skirmishing retreats on the part of the Sikh troops, of sharp struggles, gun captures, and pursuits by the British, over five miles of the worst ground that ever two armies fought for. Night closed the contest, or rather the pursuit, and the British army was left in possession of the field and nineteen of the enemy’s guns.’*

The British troops effected a junction with Sir John Littler’s Ferozpur division, and attacked the Sikhs at Ferozshah, just before sunset, December 21. The most terrible battle of British-Indian history ensued. ‘The resistance was wholly unexpected, and all started with astonishment. Guns were dismounted, and their ammunition was blown into the air; squadrons were checked in mid-career; battalion after battalion was hurled back with shattered ranks.’* Sir Hugh Gough, the British commander, had chosen the year’s shortest day and its last hour of daylight, for his favourite (and only) plan of attack, the frontal assault. ‘Cold steel’ was his prescription for every emergency, and he sent the troops to the muzzles of the Sikh guns. A very little of the enemy line had been captured, when darkness closed on what was named ‘this night of terrors’. The British were

‘half outside and half within the enemy’s position, unable either to advance or retreat. Regiments were mixed up with regiments, and officers with men, in the wildest confusion’:*

‘generals were doubtful of the fact or of the extent of their own success, and colonels knew not what had become of the regiments they commanded, or of the army of which they formed a part’.*

Sir Henry Hardinge (who had commanded at Albuera) testified that he had ‘never known a night so extraordinary as this’. He spent it, like another Henry, moving through his disheartened troops, scattering

‘A little touch of Harry in the night';

and when day dawned on the full extent of ruin, he exclaimed, ‘Another such victory, and we are undone!’ He and Gough collected a broken division, and attacked the Sikh batteries in reverse, capturing them. The enemy were withdrawing, when a second Sikh force appeared, under Tej Singh, from whose front Sir John Littler’s force had slipped away. This opened a cannonade, ‘which at once dismounted our feeble artillery’, and then mysteriously withdrew from before men ‘drooping from hunger, not having tasted food for thirty-six hours’ and having ‘fired away almost their last round of ammunition’. The Sikh cause was doomed, having traitors in command.

The British loss was 2415, among the slain being Major Broadfoot. Heavy material damage had been sustained also, and Hardinge sent John Lawrence, Collector at Delhi, an urgent note in his own handwriting, to send up all the transport he could. The British were short of ammunition, heavy guns, food; and dared not fall back. Exaggerated fears were felt for Delhi’s safety, which Cunningham compares to ‘the nervous dread of Augustus when he heard of the defeat of Varus and the destruction of his legions’. The extent of the shock may be gauged by the Governor-General’s issuing a Proclamation inviting Sikhs to desert, promising rewards and pensions, and ‘the immediate decision of any lawsuits in which the deserters might be engaged in the British provinces’.

Sir Harry Smith at Aliwal (December 28) drove a Sikh force back across the Satlej, with the loss of 67 cannon and many drowned as well as slain, the British losing only 589. Then the end came, February 10, 1846. The British stormed strong entrenchments resting on the Satlej, at Sobraon. The treacherous Sikh commander, Tej Singh, fled early, and managed to break the bridge of boats, ‘accidentally or by design’. His troops were thereby hampered in following him. But for a long while few sought to follow him. They ‘everywhere showed a front to the victors, and stalked slowly and sullenly away’,* like Socrates after Delium; or, emulating the white-haired Sham Singh, rushed on death. He, the noblest of the sirdars, had hated the dreary course of wickedness which led his nation to disaster, and like Falkland before Newbury, was resolute to be out of it by nightfall. He had sworn on the Granth not to leave the field alive. Dressed in white, and on his white mare, he rode everywhere, encouraging the waverers. When all was lost he led some fifty of his men against the 50th Regiment, and was killed.

Fighting every inch of ground, the Sikhs were forced back upon their bridge, which gave way; and the river, which was in flood, was filled with a struggling mass. The British artillery crashed down on the swollen waters; and as the triumph ‘became full and manifest’, the victors,

‘defiled with dust and smoke and carnage, stood mute indeed for a moment, until the glory of their success rushing upon their minds, they gave expression to their feelings, and hailed their victorious commanders with reiterated shouts of triumph and congratulation’.*

The British loss was heavy, over 2400; that of the Sikhs was immense, at the lowest computation 5000, and usually estimated at several thousands more.

After the battle, Sham Singh’s servants obtained permission to search for their master’s body, and found him ‘conspicuous by his white dress and long white beard . . . where the dead lay thickest’.* They placed it on a raft, and swam with it across the river, reaching his home on the third day. His widow, as soon as she heard that a battle had been fought, had already burnt herself. This high-hearted act of valour out of an antique and barbaric world, the rite at its noblest, fitly concluded the story of martyred wives in the Punjab. Debarred from her lord’s body, still on its journey, the heroic woman, a bride for ever, had died clasping the clothes he had worn at their wedding. This, says Griffin,* followed by the Oxford History of India, ‘was the last sati in the Punjab,* and the pillar which marks the spot where it took place is still standing outside the walls of Attari’.

By the treaty of peace the Sikhs lost all their cis-Satlej lands, as well as the Jullundur Doab. Their army was reduced to 20,000 infantry, 12,000 cavalry. Since their treasury was empty, half the million and a half indemnity imposed was secured by annexing Kashmir and selling it to Gulab Singh, who had remained neutral to see which way victory would go. Suggestions were made of colonising Kashmir, the only part of India climatically fitted for European residence. But this would have been impossible unless the Punjab also were permanently occupied.

Of Gulab Singh John Lawrence wrote: ‘Well known as he is, both in Jullundur and Lahore, nobody has ever yet been heard to say a word in his favour’. Henry, holding ‘an embarrassingly low opinion’* of this man whom he had to support, mourned over his duty of ordering the Sikh durbar ‘to make over, inthe most marked and humiliating manner, the richest province in the Punjaub to the one man most detested by the Khalsa’. Herbert Edwardes, ‘who was closeted with him daily’, looking back later, testified that he was ‘the worst native I have ever come in contact with, a bad king, a miser, and a liar’. All that can be said in justification of the transaction is that Gulab Singh was already in effective occupation of the Jammu part of the dominions now cynically sold to him, and that the Indian Government needed money, and at no time has been squeamish about how it obtained it.

The doctrine that human beings have rights, even the right of choosing their rulers, was still in the region of mischievous radicalism; and the historian cannot afford to be too critical of transactions dictated by

‘Necessity, the tyrant’s plea’.

Yet this selling of a Muslim people to a family extravagantly Hindu has resulted in rebellion even in our post-War world, which British power had to suppress; and the scandal of the Kashmir transfer was felt even at the time, in an uneasy subconscious fashion.

Its first-fruits also were rebellion. The writing of Indian history is overrun with cant. The Kashmir Muslims, ‘who looked forward with horror to the rule of Golab Sing, declared like one man in favour of’* revolt; and the Oxford History expresses astonishment that the British force which put revolt down ‘was actually supported by a contingent of 17,000 Sikhs who had been fighting in the campaign just concluded’.* The facts can be gathered from the men who did the job. Henry Lawrence, who ‘trusted to carrying the thing through by expedition, and by the conviction that the British army was in our rear to support and avenge us’,* never forgot

‘that ticklish occasion when I took the Sikh army to Cashmere, and when I was obliged to tell Lal Sing’s vakeel that if anything happened to me, John Lawrence was told to put Lal Sing in confinement’.*

This is, the Resident took forward a deeply reluctant force, while his brother stood by with a pistol pointed at the chief minister’s head, comforting his conscience with reflection that the Muslim Governor of Kashmir, who was leading the rebellion, was little better than the new Maharaja: ‘If Golab Sing flayed a chief alive, Imamuddin boiled a Pundit to death; they are certainly a pair of amiables’. Henry Lawrence and Herbert Edwardes put the affair through.

The campaign over, a regency was established in Lahore, under Henry Lawrence, ‘in peaceful possession of viceregal authority over the province’.* For assistants he had the most celebrated company of British officials and soldiers that the Empire has ever produced. The ‘Punjab Tradition’ began.

‘What days those were! How Henry Lawrence would send us off to great distances; Edwardes to Bunnoo, Nicholson to Peshawur, Abbott to Hazara, Lumsden somewhere else, etc., giving us a tract of country as big as half of England, and giving us no more helpful directions than these, “Settle the country; make the people happy; and take care there are no rows!”’*

The men who with powers of life and death quieted a kingdom long given over to turbulence, suppressed suttee, strove against infanticide, hunted down the robber and murderer, exulted now and always, and naturally enough, in their strength and freedom, and despised the men of tamer India, who had to abide by ‘the Regulations’. Their work was superb; and in the days of the Mutiny, enforced by a terrific rigour, it stood. They were, almost without exception, profoundly religious, in a manner compounded of Cromwell, the Thirty-Nine Articles and the public schools of England. It has been remarked that it was almost an accident whether Dr. Arnold’s pupils entered the Church or the Army. The muscular Christian whom Kingsley and others were holding up to admiration was to be increasingly triumphant in this new vigorous India; men like Edwardes, Montgomery, John Lawrence, did whatever they did to the glory of God. Nevertheless, there remained still a few who clung to old ethics. The Mutiny had not yet touched righteousness with exalted hysteria, and, so long as Henry Lawrence remained in the Punjab, the native nobles received consideration.

Yet how great the work was! And it was such as only men imbued with deep evangelical religion, convinced that they were there to fill their hasting day from dawn to sunset with service to an ever-watching King, could have carried through with such unflagging passion. No wonder that they were impatient of trammels on their activity---that they brushed aside as irrelevant the surmise that even fallen chiefs had feelings! Inevitably, when States or dynasties tumble, those who stand highest in them must share their fortunes. You cannot impose a fresh administration, and continue nobles and military leaders in positions that conciliate their self-respect. Henry’s business kept him much outside Lahore, and John wa