India Through the Ages Part 34

But Nadir left Delhi something which, possibly, it might have done better without; for ere leaving, he solemnly reinstated the puppet-king, and swore fearful oaths as to the revenge he would take on the n.o.bles when he returned in a year or two should they fail in allegiance. But he never did return; he really never meant to return.

He was a robber _pur et simple_, and he had got all that he had any hopes of getting.

So he disappeared northwards again, to die a violent death ere long.

For despite his success, something of remorse had come to him, uninvited, with the spoils of ravaged Delhi. He became cruel, capricious, tyrannical; finally, he grew half-mad, until one night the n.o.bles, whose arrest he had decreed, the captain of his own body-guard, the very chief of his own clan, entered his tent at midnight. Then from the darkness came the challenge in the deep voice which had so often led them to victory.

"Who goes there?"

For an instant they drew back, uncertain; but only for an instant.

They went for him with their sabres as they might have gone at a mad dog, and Nadir, their hero, their pride, their tyrant, their horror, ended his life.

How had he affected India?

First of all it had for the moment checked Mahratta aggrandis.e.m.e.nt.

The appearance of this unknown, hitherto almost unheard-of foe, who traversed with such ease the country he had hoped to annex, and did the things he had meant to do, seemed to paralyse Baji-Rao. His first impulse was to aid in a general defence of India. "Our domestic quarrels," he wrote, "are now insignificant; there is but one enemy in Hindustan. The whole power of the Dekkan, Hindu and Mahomedan alike, must a.s.semble for resistance."

And even when Nadir-Shah had retreated without further progress southward, Baji-Rao, free-booter, as all the Mahrattas were at heart, must have felt himself frustrated. What use was there in reaching a city desolate utterly, still infected by the stench of unburied bodies; a city whose treasury doors stood wide open, empty, deserted; a city, briefly, which an Afghan had pillaged? So he and his Saho retired southwards.

As for the effects which Nadir's sudden swoop on the interior of the plum-cake had on the nibbling mice upon its circ.u.mference, there is little to be said. It must have been a surprise to the civilised communities which were so rapidly coming into existence at such centres as Calcutta, Madras, Bombay; centres in which life went elegantly, and people began to talk of the latest news by mail from England. Still, the mere brute-force of the invasion cannot have shocked them much, for Europe itself was a prey at this time to wars and rumours of wars. The 1715 rebellion was over in England; the 1745 had not yet begun. In France affairs were working up towards the Revolution. Spain and Germany were alike, either at the beginning or the end of disastrous struggles.

Yet the mere fact which must have filtered through to the seacoast--_that thirty millions worth of solid plunder had just been filched away from the treasury of India by foreigners_--cannot have been pleasing news. The East India Company, however, seems to have made no great efforts at aggrandis.e.m.e.nt during the years between the special granting to it of lands by Farokhshir and 1746, when it formally entered into grips with the French East Indian Company, which about this time began that dispute for supremacy in India which virtually ended with the taking of Trichinoply in 1761.

In truth we have very little information indeed regarding the doings of John Company during this period. All we know is that British imports into India fell from 617,000 in 1724 to 157,000 in 1741, which, taken with a corresponding decrease in dividends, would seem to show some depression, some check to trade.

One thing is certain. The Const.i.tution of the Company was not satisfactory. An attempt had been made to avoid a monopoly of large shareholders by ruling that, no matter what the share held might be, it should only, whether 500 or 50,000, carry one vote for the election of the Court of Directors. But this ruling could be, and was, easily evaded. All that had to be done was to split the 50,000 into a hundred 500 shares, registered in the names of confidential agents, who--in consideration of an honorarium, no doubt--voted according to direction. It was not very straightforward, of course; on the other hand, the original ruling was silly in the extreme, since it prevented those who had a real interest in the Company from exercising their due share of influence.

Unfortunately, this f.a.ggot-voting brought with it a corrupt atmosphere. Appointments under the Company were a common bribe, and as the Court of Directors had to be reappointed every year, there was endless opportunity for jobbery.

So, after a time, opposition to the monopoly of the trade began once more to take form. Proposals for yet a new company were floated.

Parliament once more took up the matter; which was finally settled by the existing company offering 200,000 to Government, and a reduction of 1 per cent. on the rate of interest payable on the previous loan of some three-and-a-half millions (that is to say, a yearly income of 35,000), as payment for the extension of their monopoly till 1766.

This offer was accepted, and in 1744 the term of monopoly was still further extended until 1780, in consideration of a further loan to Government of 1,000,000 sterling at the low rate of 3 per cent.

Coming as it did in the middle of a very expensive war, the temptation of this pecuniary a.s.sistance must have been potent; but there can be but little doubt that, publicly at any rate, the trade of India suffered considerably from the exclusion of private enterprise.

Certain it is that while the English East India Company found themselves forced to reduce their dividends to 7 per cent, the Dutch Company was dividing 25.

Altogether, then, it is not surprising that, until the French, by a.s.suming the aggressive, forced the East India Company to bestir itself, it did nothing of importance in the way of progress.

THE GAME OF FRENCH AND ENGLISH

A.D. 1742 TO A.D. 1748

The eye of France had been on India for a century and a half, for it was in 1601 that a fleet of French merchant ships set out from St Malo for Hindustan, but failed of their destination.

The first French East India Company was formed in 1604, the second in 1611, a third in 1615; a fourth was founded by Cardinal Richelieu in 1642, yet a fifth in 1664, and finally a sixth, made up by the co-ordination of various older ventures, began in 1719 to trade under the name of "Compagnies des Indes."

There was thus no lack of organisation; of action, there had been, up to 1742, comparatively little. They had secured a factory at Surat, they captured Trincomalee from the Dutch, and they had occupied Pondicherry, which they still hold. Aurungzebe had ceded Chandanagore to them, and they had also obtained Mahe and Karikal, which they bought from the Rajah of Tanjore.

This, then, was the position of France in India when, in the year 1742, the office of Governor was bestowed on one Joseph Dupleix. He had spent his life in India, had ama.s.sed a huge private fortune by private trade, but at the same time had done his duty by the company of which his father had been a director.

He was thus saturated, as it were, with the methods and manners of the East, and in addition he had the advantage of a clever wife, who, though European by birth, had been born and bred in India.

Incited, it is believed, by her, he evolved a plan by which he hoped to gain supremacy for France. Compet.i.tion in fair trade with both the English and the Dutch had failed, but he hoped to gain that by diplomacy which had been denied by commerce. The Moghul dynasty was tottering to its fall. On all sides the petty governors of provinces were aspiring to feeble power, and the balance of parties was often so nearly equal, that a very little support thrown into the scale would determine failure or success. Here Dupleix saw his opportunity, and he set deliberately to work, using Madame Dupleix as his go-between, to make friends for France in this welter of conflicting interests. The work was going on secretly and surely, when in 1744 the war of the Austrian Succession broke out in Europe between England and France.

Dupleix was evidently unwilling that this secret work of his should be interrupted by any outbreak of hostilities in the East, and some little time previous to the open declaration of war, both the French and English Companies had taken steps to provide for peace at any price. But a new factor had arisen on the French side in the person of Admiral Labourdonnais, the Governor of the Isle of France and the Isle of Bourbon.

His had been an adventurous life, and he had often been in and out of favour with those who had employed him. His government of the two contiguous islands was a case in point. He had found a plentiful crop of abuses, he had rooted them out, and in consequence of this, when he returned on private affairs to France, was pursued with unscrupulous enmity and bitter detraction.

In endeavouring to right himself he gave to the Ministers of State and the directors of his Company a full exposition of his views on the Eastern question. It commended itself to the authorities, and he found himself setting sail for the Isle of France in April 1741, backed by a fleet which, with care and training, should be able to secure to his country supremacy in the Eastern seas.

But disappointment awaited him. Long before the declaration of war which he expected, the French Company, who thought it had been made to bear more than its fair share of the cost of fitting out the fleet, sent for their ships, and Labourdonnais was left at a disadvantage. A British squadron was now cruising about the Bay of Bengal, taking the place which he had hoped to fill, and making many French prizes. But he was not a man of discouragements, and the situation having been saved on the Coromandel Coast by the diplomacy of Dupleix, who induced the Nawab of Arcot to claim Pondicherry as his territory and so save it from occupation by the English, he managed somehow to sc.r.a.pe together sufficient ships and men to try conclusions.

Fortune played a stroke in his favour by the inopportune death of the English captain, by which the command devolved on one who erred on the side of prudence, and who, after the two squadrons had been engaged at long distances until nightfall off the coast, thought it wiser to cut and run under cover of darkness, in consequence of a leak springing in one of his largest vessels.

Labourdonnais, who had suffered far more, and who, in truth, had been anxiously cogitating his best move during the night, thus found himself, as the grey dawn showed an empty sea, a complete victor, and full of relief and pride set sail for Pondicherry. But here a cool reception awaited him, for Dupleix had no notion of having his aims achieved by any one but himself. So the commander by land and the commander by sea were mutually obstructive, and continued to be so; a course which eventually ruined both, destroyed French hopes in India, and for the present saved those of England from almost certain annihilation.

For the British squadron was nowhere. After a month of shelter in the harbour of Trincomalee, it reappeared, only to disappear once more.

Labourdonnais therefore put back to Pondicherry, and prepared seriously to take Madras; which he did, without the least trouble, in September 1746. It was, in truth, incapable of defence.

The French admiral brought eleven ships, two thousand nine hundred European soldiery, eight hundred natives, and adequate artillery against a small fort manned by two hundred men. For the Black Town and the White Town, together with the contiguous five miles of sea-coast, in which were gathered over two hundred and fifty thousand souls, lay absolutely unprotected, at the mercy of all and sundry.

It is said that the English relied for security on the Nawab of Arcot, who had promised to claim Madras as he had claimed Pondicherry; but, doubtless, Dupleix had been beforehand with them.

This much it is pleasant to record, that the siege, which lasted no less than seven days, was the most bloodless on record. The death-roll was only one Frenchman and five English.

The terms of capitulation were severe. All goods, stores, merchandise, etc., pa.s.sed to France; all English were prisoners-of-war. A ransom was suggested, but Labourdonnais, while intimating that he was prepared to receive the proposal reasonably, stipulated for previous surrender. Indeed, throughout the whole affair he appears to have behaved honourably and liberally. Not so Dupleix, who, when the subsequent negotiations had commenced, roughly interfered, denied the power of Labourdonnais to dictate terms, claimed Madras as standing in his territory, and generally brought about a dead-lock, during which three more French ships-of-war, with over one thousand three hundred men on board, arrived at Pondicherry.

With this addition to his fleet Labourdonnais could have swept the seas, and Calcutta and Bombay must have shared the fate of Madras; but--alas, for France!--her sons were quarrelling amongst themselves.

And before they could settle their differences the weather intervened.

Truly, Great Britain scores something of tenderness from the breezes that blow, by being "set in the steely seas," in the path of the north and the west and the east and the south winds! They saved her once from the Spanish Armada, and now the monsoon rolled up along the coast of Coromandel, and broke in the Madras roads, foundered a French ship of the line, and drove five others dismasted, disabled, out to sea.

It was a crushing blow, one from which France never recovered, and by which poor Labourdonnais, who had consented to be tied by the leg simply from a sense of honour, a determination to stand by his word at all hazards, met with early and disappointed death; for the French Government, filled up with the able lies of Dupleix, sent him to the Bastille, where he lingered for three years, dying soon after his contemptuous and unsympathetic release of poverty and a broken heart.

Dupleix, however, flourished like the proverbial green bay tree. He repudiated ransoms and restorations alike, and seemed likely to remain in possession, when the Nawab of Arcot intervened, a.s.serting--and no doubt with truth--that the French governor, in order to prevent aid being sent to the English, had promised to make over Madras to him as a reward for quiescence. The intervention was followed by an undisciplined army of ten thousand men. And here, however much the character of Dupleix may arouse dislike, credit must be given to him for showing indubitably the inherent strength of his claim, that European methods should be the weightiest factor in Eastern politics.

He met this horde of ten thousand with a body of four hundred half-disciplined native troops--barely half-disciplined--and he literally wiped his enemy out. Henceforward a new element entered into the Eastern problem, for it was abundantly demonstrated that to conquer India it was not necessary to import a whole army. There was that of valour, that of sheer soldiership, amongst the natives themselves, to make them, when properly led, the finest troops in the world. It is hardly too much to say that India practically changed rulers in 1746, when the Nawab of Arcot was repulsed from Madras.

Out of this repulse (necessary in order to enable Dupleix--despite the promise without which Labourdonnais had refused to budge--to carry through his treacherous intention of repudiating the negotiations, refusing ransom, and holding Madras for the French) arose much. The Nawab, disgusted, broke with Dupleix and a.s.sisted the English at Fort St David, a smaller factory some miles further down the coast. Here the appearance of the undisciplined troops just as the French, imagining themselves secure of victory, were refreshing themselves in a garden, produced such a scare that the victors were across the river again, and on their way back to Pondicherry before they could be rallied.

Dupleix, greatly enraged at his failure, and knowing to a nicety how to deal with natives, now commenced to make the Nawab of Arcot's life a burden to him by reason of petty raids, until, wearied out, he once more threw the weight of his support into the French scale.

It cannot have been a clean business; it certainly was not an edifying spectacle to see two civilised European communities vieing with one another in their efforts to secure an Oriental potentate, but this much may be said in English extenuation--the French began it.

The case of the English along the Coast of Coromandel now seemed quite desperate. They had lost their only ally, and though an attack by boat on Cuddalore had been repulsed--once more by the aid of Neptune, who always seems favourable to Britain, and who on this occasion swamped half the enemy in the Coromandel Coast, and sent them dripping, half-drowned, with wet powder and soaked magazines, back to sea--they could not hope to avert the renewed a.s.sault on Fort St David, which took place in 1747.

But this game of French and English was a series of surprises, a perfect melodrama of dramatic coincidences; for no sooner were the French once more comfortably ensconced in the old garden than--Hey presto!--sails appeared to sea-ward, and in less than no time--hardly long enough for Monsieur's hurried escape--there was a British fleet at anchor in the roads!