CHAPTER VI.

1773-1774.

"THE new Government of the Company consists of a confused heap of undigested materials, as wild as the chaos itself." So wrote Hastings to his colleague, Barwell, in July, 1772. We have seen how far in the next two years his government had succeeded in evolving order out of that chaos. If his efforts to improve the Company's revenues had borne but little immediate fruit, he had done his best at any rate to keep down the public debt, to encourage thrift in every department, and to increase the balances in the Calcutta exchequer. In retrenching the military outlay, he found himself engaged in "a violent squabble" with the general commanding the Bengal Army, Sir Robert Barker,* a brave but hot-tempered officer of the Royal Artillery, who had served

* Stubbs's "History of the Bengal Artillery," Vol. 1, Ch. i.' note A.

HASTINGS' FOREIGN POLICY.

141

It need

with credit against Lally in 1758. hardly be added that the violence of the squabble was all on one side. Sir Robert's angry remonstrances against economies which seemed to him. unwise were met by Hastings with courteous answers, regretting the strong language provoked

his reduction of three hundred black troopers, and pleading his earnest desire to "live in peace with all men."

In the midst of his peaceful labours, the Governor's attention was continually called away to matters of foreign policy. In the troubles brewing outside the Bengal frontier he saw signs of danger to the peace of his own provinces. The restless Maráthas had already recovered from the blow inflicted on their power at Pánipat. Alike in Southern and Northern India their successes and their ambition seemed to foretel the establishment of an empire wider than that of the Moghals. In 1769 Mádhu Rao, the Peshwa of Puna, sent forth a mighty army to despoil the princes and ravage the populous plains of Hindustan. After levying black mail on the Játs and Rajputs, the invaders swept over Rohilkhand, threatened Oudh, and, driving the Moghals before them, entered Delhi in the winter of 1770.

The new masters of that imperial city, at once invited Shah Alam thither from his temporary capital of Allahabad. That weak but ambitious scion of the house of Bábar, caught with pardonable eagerness at the prospect of revisiting the home whence he had fled, in 1757, to escape the murderous clutches of the ruffianly Ghazi-uddin.* In spite of the dissuasions of the Calcutta Council he set forth, in 1771, with his little army from Allahabad; and Christmas Day of that same year saw him escorted into Delhi by Sindhia's horsemen, and installed on the throne of Akbar by the men whose fathers had so rudely shaken the empire of Aurangzíb.

Early in the next year, he set out, in company with his new allies, to reconquer some of his ancestral domains lying to the north of Delhi. The campaign finished to their common satisfaction, he returned to his capital at the beginning of the rainy season. But the burden of his new alliance sat heavy on the restored monarch, who found, or deemed himself a mere cipher in the hands of his overbearing patrons. The booty

which they had promised to share with him, they

*The Vizier, and afterwards the murderer of Shah Alam's father, Alamgir II.

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kept entirely for themselves. They fomented disturbances around his capital, and attacked the forces which he sent against the insurgents.* His best general, Mirza Najaf Khán, was beaten by the hosts of Túkají Holkar; before the year's end, Delhi was entered by the booty-laden victors; and the helpless monarch was forced to purchase a brief rest from trouble, by agreeing to surrender into Marátha hands those provinces of Korah and Allahabad, which Clive had made over to him in 1765.

The English, however, were not prepared to see these provinces, which linked Bengal with Oudh, pass into the hands of their most formidable foes. On this point, Hastings and his Council were soon of one mind. If the Company were strongly set against any further enlargement of their possessions, might not these provinces be restored for a handsome money payment to the Nawáb-Vazir of Oudh, from whom they had once been wrested by our arms? Of late years the Nawab had shown himself our firm ally, while Shah Alam had not only flung himself into the hands of our enemies, but had even intrigued against his English friends by sending an envoy * Keene's "Fall of the Moghul Empire," Book 2, Chap. iii.

to the King of England, to treat for the transfer of Bengal from the Company to the Crown.* This, and some other acts of unfriendliness, may have been provoked by the recent failure of the Bengal Government to pay Shah Alam his yearly tribute, on account of the losses entailed by the famine of 1770, and of his own withdrawal from Allahabad. Hastings himself, at first, made light of the danger which threatened his own provinces from the arrangement made between the Emperor and the Maráthas. Narayan Rao, a youth of nineteen, had just succeeded his brother, Mádhu Rao, as Peshwa, and the Maráthas, reduced in number, were "sick of a long "sick of a long campaign." In the first days of 1773, Hastings saw "no good cause to interfere." But the Council voted promptly for interference, and Hastings clinched his adhesion to the policy thus ordained with the utterance of a wish that "it could with honour and safety have been avoided."

The Company's troops were at once ordered to occupy Korah and Allahabad. These provinces the Governor would still have held for Shah

* Major John Morrison, formerly a Company's officer, who afterwards took service with Shah Alam. Gleig's "Warren Hastings," Vol. 1, Chap. viii.