CHAPTER II.

1774-1775.

IF Hastings had by nature a quick temper, his self-control must have been sorely tried by the council-meetings which came off under the new rules twice a week. At these meetings every act of the late Government would be reviewed in a spirit more or less unfriendly by his three opponents, whose zeal for redressing wrongs and discovering abuses seemed to spend itself on their President alone. Whoever else was right, he at least was always held to be in the wrong. "We three are king," said Francis, and very loudly did the fact proclaim itself to the astonished citizens of Calcutta. The new Chief Justice complained bitterly to Lord Thurlow of "the hauteur, insolence, and superior airs of authority, which the members of the new Council use to the Court."* Hastings fought them as he best could in speeches, "Memoirs of Sir E. Impey," Chap. iii.

INSOLENCE OF THE TRIUMVIRATE.

171

minutes, and earnest letters to the Court of Directors, to Lord North, and his own friends on the India House Board. When the violence of his colleagues passed all bounds of endurance, Hastings and Barwell would save their dignity by leaving the council-chamber for that day. But nothing could shame or check the rampant insolence of the triumvirate. They never lost a chance of wounding the President's pride, ignoring his authority, or undoing his work. His management of the revenue-his dealings with the ruler of Oudh-his commercial and fiscal reforms, every detail of his past policy, was brought up against him as a crime or a blunder by the men who had been specially enjoined to work harmoniously for the and well-being

of the Company's dominions.

peace

The extent of their rancour against the Governor-General' may be gathered from their mode of pressing the inquiry into the circumstances of the Rohilla war. If they could not undo the conquest of Rohilkhand, they might yet succeed in branding their President with lasting infamy, for his share in that awkward-looking business. Officers of Champion's force were invited to bear witness against the man who had

sold their services to a ruthless tyrant. Colonel Leslie, however, declined to answer for the opinions of the army as to the moral character of the late war. Baffled at one point, the inquisitors attacked another, but always more or less in vain. There was no evidence of the cruelties alleged against Shuja-ad-daula. Of the Rohillas, their history, and their real character, they learned many things which ought to have shamed them out of conclusions founded on utter ignorance of the facts. But no amount of facts could stay them in their wild career. They even fastened on the liberal present which the Nawab-Vazir had bestowed on Champion's troops, as if that was another of Hastings' crimes. And, in spite of all evidence, they proceeded to denounce him as one who had waged war with an "innocent nation," and covered with ruin the smiling valley where the people had hitherto dwelt in peace under their noble Afghan masters.*

To Shuja-ad-daula the recal of Middleton seemed like the rending of all the ties that bound him to his English friends in Bengal. For some years past he had shown himself a faithful ally of the power to which he owed the retention of his * Auber's "British Power in India," Vol. 1, Ch. ix.

DEATH OF SHUJA-AD-DAULA.

173

dominions after the peace of 1765. For Hastings he had conceived a strong personal attachment, which reflected itself in his intercourse with Hastings' confidential agent at Lucknow. When Middleton showed him his letter of recal, the Nawab-Vazír burst into tears over an act which seemed to betoken a hostile purpose towards himself. It is said that his death was hastened by this and the subsequent measures of the Calcutta triumvirate.* Be that as it may, he died in January of the following year, leaving behind him a letter in which he implored the GovernorGeneral to extend to his son the friendship he had always shown for his father.

With these last wishes of the dying prince Hastings tried his best to comply. But the foreign policy of the Government had wholly passed out of his control. Francis and his colleagues hastened to set aside the existing treaties with Oudh, and to force new and harder conditions upon the new Nawab-Vazír, Asaf-ad-daula. Their agent, Bristow, with whom they carried on the same kind of secret correspondence which

* Mr. Keene ("Moghul Empire," Book 2, Ch. iii.) refers without accepting it to a story current in those days, that Shuja-ad-daula died of a wound inflicted with a poisoned knife by a daughter of Hafiz Rahmat Khan.

they had condemned in the case of Hastings, threw himself with unquestioning zeal into all their plans. In vain did Hastings and Barwell plead for fairer treatment of the young Nawab, in accordance with the treaties of Allahabad and Banaras, and with his obvious rights as heir to his father's throne and property. In vain did the young Nawab protest against the injustice of conditions which involved his State in fresh burdens, and robbed him of the very means of carrying on his government. Before the end of May, 1775, he had signed a treaty which transferred to the Company the revenues of Banaras, and which raised by Rs. 50,000 a month the subsidy his father had agreed to pay for the British troops quartered in Oudh.

At the same time he bound himself to make good with all due speed the balance of his father's debts to the Company. In the face of these exactions and demands, with his own army clamouring for long arrears of pay, the helpless young prince was forced to surrender to the Begam, his father's widow, nearly the whole of the two millions which Shuja-ad-daula had stored up within his palace, as a fund on which he or his successors might draw in time of need. It was