Adams; many of the sepoys deserted to the enemy, and whole platoons of French, Germans, and Swiss, who had taken service under our colours, marched off to Benares, with their arms and accoutrements. Thus Major Carnac, who arrived to take command, deemed it prudent to fall back on Patna, where the mutinous spirit was fostered by the scarcity of provisions, and where his camp outside the walls was suddenly attacked, on the 3rd May, by an overwhelming force of the enemy's best disciplined infantry, led by the devil Sumroo." But the spirit of disaffection had vanished at the sight of the enemy; the sepoys in English pay rivalled in steadiness the native British troops; attack after attack was repulsed, and the battle, which began at noon, was ended at sunset by the defeat and rout of the assailants. Almost immediately after this reverse, the Nabob of Oude opened up a correspondence with Meer Jaffier, the restored nabob, and offered to support him in Bengal and Orissa, "if he would cede to Oude the whole country of Behar."

In the true Indian spirit of falsehood and intrigue, the Emperor Shah Alum sent a message to Major Carnac, offering to abandon both the Nabob of Oude and Meer Cossim, in barter for our alliance and protection. These proposals came to nothing for the present, for Major Carnac, as a preliminary, demanded the surrender of the murderers, Cossim and Sumroo, so the two nabobs and the emperor retreated from Behar into Oude.

In May, Major Hector Munro reached Patna at the head of his Gordon Highlanders, just as the spirit of mutiny was appearing again, and he took sterner and prompter measures than his predecessors to crush it, and in this, says General Stewart, he was well supported by his own regi. ment. In front of the line, he blew twenty-five of the discontented from the mouths of his cannon, and from that day forward every clamour ceased. These twenty-five-one account says fifty-were selected by lot out of a whole battalion of sepoys who, after threatening to murder their European officers, were marching off by night to join the enemy, but were surrounded and taken in their bivouac. They were tried by a drum-head court-martial, and found guilty by their native officers. When four had been blown to atoms, the sepoys tumultuously declared the executions should stop there; but the resolute Highland officer ordered the artillery to load with grape, and turn their guns upon them, while he drew up the Gordons and the English corps between the wheels, and ordered the sepoys to ground their arms. They obeyed, and these

terrible executions went on to the end.

As soon as the rainy season was over, Major

Munro, now in command of the whole, led his reformed army once more against the enemy. On the 15th September, his entire strength was 857 Europeans, 5,279 sepoys, 918 black cavalry-in all 7,054 men, with twenty guns.

On that day he crossed the Sone, where some earthworks had been thrown up; these he captured, and after suffering considerable annoyance from the native cavalry who hung upon his flanks, on the 22nd October he reached the town and fort of Buxar, situated on the right bank of the Ganges, in the province of Behar. The fort is small and square, having a high rampart, cased with smooth green turf, with a lower fort extending to the river. The town is large, with several handsome mosques and bazaars, and there before it ensued a battle by which Hector Munro confirmed the British in possession of Bengal and Behar.

The Vizier Sujah Dowlah and Meer Cossim occupied an entrenched camp, with their combined forces, amounting to 40,000, some say 60,000 men. The details of the battle are given with the brevity that is characteristic of a soldier, by Major Munro, in his letter of the 26th October, to John, Earl of Sandwich, then Secretary of State.

"I have the pleasure to acquaint your lordship that His Majesty's troops and the India Company's, which I have the honour to command, have gained a complete victory over the King and the Vizier of Hindostan, the 23rd of this month. Their army consisted of 50,000 men at least. Enclosed I have the honour to send your lordship a return of ours. They had 6,000 men killed on the field of battle, and we took 130 pieces of cannon from them, besides several stores of different kinds.

"On the 22nd I encamped so near the enemy's camp, as to be just out of range of their shot. On the morning of the action, at daylight, I went out with some of the principal officers to reconnoitre their situation, intending to attack them the following day; but finding the whole army under arms, returned to camp, ordered in our advance posts and grand-guards (ie., guards commanded by a field-officer), the drums beat to arms, and in less than twenty minutes after, the line of battle was formed, having made my disposition for it the day before. They began to cannonade us at nine in the morning, and in half an hour after, the action became general. We had a morass in our front which prevented our moving forward for some time, by which means—as the number of cannon they had well-levelled, and equally well-disciplined, galled us very much-I was forced to order a battalion of sepoys from the right of the first line, to move forward to silence one of their batteries which

incompetent and unsteady, and occupied to the full by their usual occupations of plunder and oppression, knew not what course to take now, for Bengal was nearly ruined. The minds of all men there had been unsettled by successive revolutions; trade and industry had disappeared. "The Council and the native rulers had, by their unprincipled ambition,

turned it into a vast Aceldama. The directors in London knew all this, and sought and found a remedy."

This remedy was Lord Clive, whose landing in India we have already related, and the effect that his presence and menaces had upon Mr. Johnstone and other members of the Council.

AFTER his arrival, Clive found that old Meer Jaffier was dead, and that there had been appointed a new nabob in the person of Nujeem-ud-Dowlah, his son, but that the Council had placed the whole management of his affairs under the control of an agent appointed by themselves.

Covenants which interdicted all the servants of the Company from accepting presents had reached India in the preceding January, a short time before the death of Meer Jaffier, and consequently were in possession of the Council, when those remarkable individuals openly set them at defiance by accepting bribes on the accession of Nujeem-ud-Dowlah, on the shallow pretext of leaving the said covenants unsigned, and that they could not think of settling anything finally until the arrival of Lord Clive.

After that, one of the first resolutions of the select committee was, that the covenants should be signed instantly. Delay was still urged; but the Council were told that they must sign at once or quit the service. It was but too evident that Oriental luxury, corruption, and the desire for amassing large fortunes in a little time, had so universally infected the Company's servants, that nothing less than a total reform could avert impending ruin.

"Fortunes of £100,000," said Lord Clive, "have been acquired in the space of two years; and individuals very young in the service are returning home with a million and a half."

It has been thought worthy of notice that when the covenants were transmitted to the officers of the army for signature, General Carnac, though commander-in-chief, and a member of the select committee, declined to sign; but this was on special grounds. He had received a gift of 80,000 rupees, from Bulwunt Sing, the chief of Benares. The

covenants bore a date antecedent to that of the gift, but as he had not been aware of their existence, he refused to sign till the date was altered, so that he might not lie under the charge of having violated them.

Soon after his arrival at Calcutta, Lord Clive, on the 24th of June, 1765, proceeded to the northwest, to negotiate in person with the emperor and the Nabob of Oude, who, having lost all hope of successful contention with us, had come to the camp of General Carnac, and thrown himself upon the generosity of Britain. On the 16th of August, a treaty was signed at Allahabad. By this it was agreed that Shah Alum, the Mogul, was to be satisfied with the possession of Allahabad and Korah, and that all the rest of Oude should be restored to Sujah Dowlah, who was to continue vizier to the emperor; never, on any occasion, were they to consort with, or give shelter to, Meer Cossim or Sumroo; and they were to oppose the Mahrattas and defend the frontier of Bengal; while the British bound themselves to assist the Mogul in all cases of invasion. In right of his imperial authority, which would have been but a name without the presence of our troops, the Mogul ceded to Britain the dewannee, or collection of the revenues in Bengal, Behar, and Orissa, in return for which he was to receive, in addition to the revenues of Allahabad and Korah, twenty-six lacs of rupees per annum.

In short, along with this dewannee, which in effect constituted the Company lords and masters over the vast and fertile regions named in the grant, the young Mogul confirmed the right of the Company to every other acre they possessed in India.

Though this treaty was a master-stroke of Clive, it was the beginning of a connection with Oude

1765.]

which, to the present hour, has been a fruitful source of trouble to Britain, and the end of which we cannot yet foresee.

On the accession of Nujeem-ud-Dowlah, a spiritless youth (who desired us to take the whole military defence of the country into our own hands), to the nominal musnud of Bengal, the Council had named Mohammed Reza Khan, a Mussulman, a man of honour and ability, to the post of naib, which the new nabob wished to be held by Nuncomar, one of the worst of the Hindoo chiefs; but Clive on his arrival concluded that Nujeem was as unfit to be nabob as Nuncomar was to be naib, and compelled the young man to retire from the occupation of royalty on a pension of thirty-two lacs of rupees.

Lord Clive had always disapproved, even when at home in England, of the first revolution effected by the Company, in the deposition of old Meer Jaffier; and he considered that the violence and rashness of most of the Council, and the excessive licence permitted to the junior servants of the Company, and to their still more rapacious native agents, "had precipitated the revolution against Meer Cossim, who," in his opinion, "having been once elevated to the musnud, and made to pay for that elevation, ought to have been maintained upon it, and kept in the right way by a mixture of conciliatory and restrictive measures."

Though he was totally without confidence in the faith or honour of the native chiefs and princes, he conceived the possibility of managing them, and deemed it most injurious to Britain that the Company should be perpetually making and breaking treaties with them, and keeping the whole of Bengal in a state of change and uncertainty. Before his departure from Europe he had assured the Court of Directors that by this kind of conduct we had lost the confidence of the people of India.

"To restore this ought to be our principal object," he continued, "and the best means, in my opinion, will be by establishing a moderation in the advantages which may be reserved for the Company, or allotted to individuals in this service. During Mr. Vansittart's government all your servants thought themselves entitled to take large shares in the monopolies of salt, betel, and tobacco (reserved by treaty to the nabob), the three articles, next to grain, of greatest consumption in the empire. The odium of seeing such monopolies in the hands of foreigners need not be insisted on. But this is not the only inconvenience; it is equally productive of another, quite as prejudicial to the Company's interests-it enables many of your

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"At every one of these revolutions the new prince divided among his foreign masters whatever could be scraped together in the treasury of his fallen predecessor. The immense population of his (Meer Cossim's) dominions was given up as a prey to those who had made him a sovereign, and could unmake him. The servants of the Company obtained—not for their employers, but for themselves—a monopoly of almost the whole internal trade. forced the natives to buy dear and sell cheap. They insulted, with impunity, the tribunals, the police, and the fiscal authorities of the country. They covered with their protection a set of native dependants, who ranged through the provinces, spreading desolation and terror wherever they appeared. Every servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of his master, and his master was armed with all the power of the Company. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while thirty millions of human beings were reduced to the extremity of wretchedness. They had been accustomed to live under tyranny, but never tyranny like this. They found the little finger of the Company thicker than the loins of Surajah Dowlah. Under their old masters they had at least one resource-when the evil became insupportable the people rose and pulled down the government. But the English government was not to be so shaken off. That government, oppressive as the most oppressive form of barbarian despotism, was strong with all the strength of civilisation. It resembled the government of evil genii rather than the government of human tyrants. Even despair could not inspire the soft Bengalee with courage to confront men of English breed-the hereditary nobility of mankind-whose skill and valour had so often triumphed in spite of tenfold odds. The unhappy race never attempted resistance. Sometimes they submitted in patient misery. Sometimes they fled from the white man, as their fathers had been used to fly from the Mahratta; and the palanquin of the English traveller was often carried through silent villages and towns, which the report of his approach had made desolate. The foreign lords of Bengal were naturally objects of hatred to all the neighbouring powers; and to all, the haughty race presented a dauntless front."

This was the state of affairs to which Clive had