BATTLE OF PANIPAT.

55

recognise Mir Kásim as Subhadár of Bengal, Bahár, and Orissa; and tempting offers were made to his new friends, if they would only help to replace him on the throne of his murdered father. For various reasons these offers were unwillingly refused; but when, soon afterwards, the Emperor set out from Patna to try and recover his capital with the aid of his own feudatories in Oudh and Rohilkhand, Carnac escorted him with all honour to the banks of the Karamnása, beyond which the Nawab of Oudh lay waiting to receive and shelter his ill-starred suzerain.

The same events which opened to Shah Alam the road to Delhi, had freed Bengal itself from one source of constant trouble. In the great battle fought on the plains of Panipat in January, 1761, between the famished Marátha hosts and the allied Afghan and Moghal armies, led by the victorious Ahmad Shah, the far-reaching power of the still young Marátha League received in the hour of its greatest triumphs a blow from which it could never quite recover. Pánipat was the Flodden Field which broke the heart of the great Peshwa, Bálaji Ráo, and left all Mahá

* Alamgir II. was murdered in 1759 by his Vizier, the infamous Gházi-ud-dín.

ráshtra wailing for the loss of her foremost leaders and stoutest sons. For some years to come the imperial cities of Delhi and Agra saw no more of their late despoilers; and the villagers of Bengal could reap their harvests without fear of a visit from the active freebooters, who made plundering a fine art, and coveted nothing which they did not carry away.

All this time Warren Hastings seems to have been watching the course of events from his "bungalow" in the suburbs of Murshidábád.* Hitherto he had played an useful, but still subordinate part in the Company's affairs; but the time was now come when his abilities and experience were to be tested in a higher sphere. The dismissal of three members of the Calcutta Council, for their bold remonstrance to the Court of Directors against the jobbery and injustice which these had prompted or connived at, took place in August, 1761; and one of the vacant seats in the Council was bestowed on Hastings, who entered on his new duties at a moment specially unfavourable to "the making of splendid

names."

*("Suburbs of Murshidâbâd).' The suburb in which Hastings lived was Moràdbàgh, on the opposite side of the river to Murshidabad.

CHAPTER VI.

1761-1764.

"THERE is no page in our Indian history so revolting as the four years of the weak and inefficient rule of Mr. Vansittart." So speaks Sir John Malcolm in his "Life of Clive," and the evidence of known facts seems to bear out that dismal verdict. Macaulay himself did not overstate the truth in declaring that the interval between Clive's first and second administration "has left on the fame of the East India Company a stain not wholly effaced by many years of just and humane government." Had all Vansittart's colleagues been like Warren Hastings, that page of our Indian history might have brought no blush of shame to the reader's cheek. But before Hastings entered the Calcutta Council, the first step had already been taken in that course of blundering, extortion, and high-handed violence, which ended only with Clive's return to

power.

In the spring of 1761 Mir Kásim began to find himself in want of money. Rajah Rámnarain, the Hindu Governor of Patna, was reported to have amassed such heaps of treasure as a needy Nawáb, following the practice of his time and country, might easily be tempted to claim for his own use. It was easy also to find a pretext for an act of spoliation which Mir Kásim, for all we know, may have honestly regarded as fair payment of monies due to the State by one of its chief officers. Rámnarain, of course, like every native of rank, had his enemies who charged him with plotting against the Nawáb. He had however, or should have had, a powerful friend in the East India Company, if treaties with the English and repeated promises of protection were worth more than blank paper and wasted breath. Mir Kásim ordered him to account for the revenues of his province during the past three years. The Governor of Patna shirked compliance with this demand, pleading that the cost of defending a province overrun with hostile armies had swallowed up all his receipts, and asking for time to complete the balancing of accounts which, in their present state, could not well be laid before his master.

FALL OF RAMNARAIN.

59

Both parties appealed to Calcutta. On Rámnaráin's side were Carnac and Coote, who succeeded Carnac in command of the Company's troops at Patna. Both of them had been tempted by large bribes to betray the Governor, but both to their honour stood firm against all temptation. Vansittart also shrank at first from gratifying the Nawáb's thirst for revenge or plunder at the cost of a subject whose guilt, if any, was yet to prove. But his opponents in the Council sided with the Rajah's friends, and Vansittart's sense of justice was clouded by distrust of the colleagues who for once seemed ready to back him against his usual supporters. There must, he argued, be something wrong in a cause thus strangely defended. His mind thus biassed, he soon lent an easy ear to the tales which Mir Kásim's agents kept pouring into it; and Ramnarain's doom was hastened by the Nawab's assurance that the balance of his own debt to the Company should be cleared off out of the Hindu's forfeit wealth. Before the end of June Coote and Carnac were both recalled from Patna. Rámnarain and all his treasures, real or imaginary, fell into the hands of a prince whose anger was not allayed by his failure to find the booty of which he had dreamed.