Daulat Rao Sindhia — Thomas adopted by Appa Khandi Rao — Revolution at Sardhana — Begam Sumroo attacked but delivered — Begam Sumroo becomes a wiser Woman — Movements of Afghans — De Boigne retires — General Perron — Musalman intrigues — Afghans checked — Succession in Audh — War of "The Bais" — Afghans and British — Rising of Shimbunath — Thomas independent — Revolt of Lakwa Dada — Holkar's defeat at Indor — Power of Perron.
1794. — THE powers and dignities of the old Patel were peaceably assumed by Daulat Rao, the son of the deceased's youngest nephew, whom he had, shortly before his death made preparations to adopt as a son. This new minister was only in his fifteenth year, but the chiefs of the Deccan soon becoming involved in war with their Musalman neighbours, and Takuji Holkar shortly afterwards becoming imbecile both in mind and in body, the young man had leisure to consolidate his power. He retained eight battalions always about him, under the command of a Neapolitan named Filose, and continued to reside at Punah; the Begam Sumroo and her new husband were at Sardhana; de Boigne at Aligarh; and Thomas still engaged in conquering the country which had been nominally conferred upon him by a chieftain who had no right to it himself. Nothing can better show the anarchy that prevailed than such a state of things as this last mentioned.
The news of Madhoji's death, and the short suspense that followed on the subject of the succession, caused some little confusion at Dehli, and led Appa Khandi Rao to visit the metropolis, on which occasion Thomas attended him. Here they received investiture to their several fiefs from Sindhia's local representative, Gopal Rao Bhao; but it was not long before this chief, stirred up, says Thomas's biographer, by the Begam and her husband, begam to tamper with the fidelity of Appa Khandi's men, who mutinied and confined their chief. Thomas retaliated by plundering the Begam's estates to the south of Dehli, and loyally escorted his master to Kanaund. On this occasion Appa (who seems not to have been destitute of good impulses) adopted him as his son, made him some handsome presents, and conferred upon him the management of several contiguous tracts, yielding in all an annual revenue of one lakh and a half of the money of those days.
One cannot wonder at the faith in the pagoda-tree which formed so prominent an article of the English social creed of those days, when we thus find a common sailor, at forty years of age, attended by a body-guard of chosen cavaliers, and managing districts as large and rich as many a minor kingdom. No doubt the price paid was high. Thomas's exertions were evidently prodigious and ceaseless; while his position — nay, his very existence — was extremely precarious. On the other hand, his prospect of realizing any part of his good fortune, and retiring to enjoy it in his native Tipperary - which must have sometimes presented itself to his mind — was certainly not hopeful. To the degenerate Europeans of the present day, whose programme involves constant holidays in a mountain climate, occasional furloughs to England, and, when resident in India, a residence made endurable by imported luxuries, and by every possible precaution against heat, there is something almost incredible in this long life of exile, where the English language would not be heard for years, and where quilted curtains and wooden shutters would be all the protection of the most luxurious quarters, and an occasional carouse upon fiery bazaar spirits the chief excitement of the most peaceful intervals of repose. Such intervals, however, were very rare; and the sense of constant struggles in which one's success was entirely due to one's own merits, must have been the chief reward of such a life as Thomas was now leading.
Foremost among the difficulties with which he had to contend was the uncertain character of his chief: and he was at the time of which we are treating — 1794 — strongly tempted by Lakwa Dada to enter the service of Sindhia, in which he was offered the command of 2,000 horse. This temptation, however, he manfully resisted, and continued true to Appa, even though that chief was neither true to his follower nor to himself. Whilst thus engaged in a cause of but small promise, he was once more exposed to the machinations of the Begam, who, influenced by her husband, marched into Thomas's new district and encamped about three marches S.E. from Jhajar, at the head of a force of four battalions of infantry, twenty guns, and four squadrons of horse. Thomas made instant preparations to meet the invasion, when it was suddenly rolled away in a manner which presents one of the characteristic dissolving views of that extraordinary period.
The ruffianly character of most of the officers in the Sardhana service has been already mentioned. With the exception of one or two, they could not read or write, and they had all the debauched habits and insolent bearing which are the besetting sins of the uneducated European in India; especially when to the natural pride of race are added the temptations of a position of authority for which no preparation has been made in youth. Among these men (whom Le Vaissoult, not unnaturally, refused to admit to his dinner-table) was a German or Belgian, now only known to us by the nickname of Liegeois, probably derived from his native place. With this man it is supposed that Thomas now opened a correspondence by means of which he practiced on the disaffection of his former comrades. The secrecy which the Begam continued to preserve on the subject of her marriage naturally added to the unpopularity of Le Vaissoult's position; and the husband and wife hurried back to Sardhana on learning that the officers had commenced negotiations with Aloysius the son of the deceased Sumroo, who resided at Dehli with the title of Nawab Zafaryab Khan, and had carried over with them a portion of the troops. Finding the situation untenable, they soon resolved on quitting it and retiring into the territories of the British with their portable property, estimated at about two lakhs of rupees. With this view they wrote to Colonel McGowan, commanding the brigade at Anupshahar; and finding that officer scrupulous at participating at the desertion of an Imperial functionary, Le Vaissoult, in April, 1794, addressed the Governor General direct. The result was that Sindhia's permission was obtained to a secret flitting; and Le Vaissoult was to be treated as a prisoner of war, allowed to reside with his wife at Chandarnagar.
Towards the end of 1795, Zafaryab, at the head of the revolted soldiery set out from Dehli; determined, by what judicial stupidity I cannot tell, to cut off the escape of that enemy for whom, if he had been wise, he ought to have paved the road, had it been with silver. The intelligence of this movement precipitated Le Vaissoult's measures; and he set out with his wife — the latter was in a palankeen, the former armed and on horseback — with a mutual engagement between them that neither was to survive if certified of the death of the other. The troops who still remained at Sardhana, either corrupted by the mutineers, or willing to secure the plunder before the latter should arrive, immediately set out in pursuit. The sequel is thus told by Sleeman, who gathered his information from eye-witnesses on the spot: — "They had got three miles on the road to Meerut, when they found the battalions gaining fast upon the palankeen. Le Vaissoult drew a pistol from his holster and urged on the bearers. He could have easily galloped off and saved himself, but he would not quit his wife's side. At last the soldiers came up close behind them. The female attendants of the Begam began to scream, and looking into the litter, Le Vaissoult observed the white cloth that covered the Begam's breast stained with blood. She had stabbed herself, but the dagger had struck against one of the bones of her chest, and she had not courage to repeat the blow. Her husband put the pistol to his temple and fired. The ball passed through his head, and he fell dead to the ground." This tragedy is somewhat differently detailed in the account furnished by Thomas to his biographer, which is made to favour the suspicion that the Begam intentionally deceived her husband in order to lead him to commit suicide. Thomas says that Le Vaissoult was riding at the head of the procession, and killed himself on receiving a message from the rear attested by the sight of a blood-stained garment borne by the messenger: but it is hard to see why a man in his position should have been absent from his wife's side at such a critical moment. Thomas was naturally disposed to take an unfavourable view of the Begam's conduct; but the immediate results of the scene were certainly not such as to support the theory of her having any understanding with the mutineers. She was carried back to the Fort, stripped of her property, and tied under a gun. In this situation she remained several days, and would have died of starvation but for the good offices of a faithful ayah, who continued to visit her mistress, and supply her more pressing necessities.
The new Nawab was a weak and dissolute young man; and the Begam had a friend among the officers, Saleur, whom the reader may recollect as one of the witnesses of her marriage. She was ere long released, and M. Saleur lost no time in communicating with Thomas, whose aid he earnestly invoked. The generous Irishman, forgetful of the past, at once wrote strongly to his friends in the service, pointing out that the disbandment of the force would be the only possible result of their persisting in disorderly conduct, so detrimental to the welfare of the Emperor and his minister. He followed up this peaceful measure by a rapid march on Sardhana, where he surprised the Nawab by dashing upon him at the head of the personal escort of horse, which formed part of the retinue of every leader of those days. The troops, partly corrupted, partly intimidated, tired of being their own masters, and disappointed in Zafaryab, made a prisoner of their new chief. He was plundered to the skin, and sent back to Dehli under arrest; while the Begam, by the chivalry of one she had ill-used for years, recovered her dominions, and retained them unmolested for the rest of her life. The secret of her behaviour is probably not very difficult of discovery. Desirous of giving to her passion for the gallant young Frenchman the sanction of her adopted religion, she was unwilling to compromise her position as Sumroo's heir by a publicly acknowledged re-marriage. She had large possessions and many enemies; so that, once determined to indulge her inclinations, she had to choose between incurring scandalous suspicions, and jeopardising a succession which would be contested, if she were known to have made a fresh and an unpopular marriage.
M. Saleur was now appointed to the command of the forces; but the astute woman never again allowed the weakness of her sex to imperil her sovereignty; and from the period of her restoration by Thomas (who spent two lakhs of rupees in the business), to the date of her death in 1836, her supremacy was never again menaced by any domestic danger. Having, as far as can be conjectured, now arrived at the ripe age of forty-two, it may be hoped that she had learned to conquer the impulse that sometimes leads a female sovereign to make one courtier her master, at the expense of making all the rest her enemies. The management of her extensive territories henceforward occupied her chief attention, and they were such as to require a very great amount of labour and time for their effective supervision: stretching from the Ganges to beyond the Jamna, and from the neighbourhood of Aligarh to the north of Mozafarnagar. There was also a Jaigir on the opposite side of the Jamna, which has formed the subject of litigation between her heirs and the Government in recent times. Her residence continued to be chiefly at Sardhana, where she gradually built the palace, convent, school, and cathedral, which are still in existence. Peace and order were well kept throughout her dominions; no lawless chiefs were allowed to harbour criminals and defraud the public revenue; and the soil was maintained in complete cultivation. This is considerable praise for an Asiatic ruler; the reverse of the medal will have to be looked at hereafter.
Death soon relieved her of all anxiety on the score of her undutiful stepson, who drank himself to death in his arrest at Dehli, leaving a daughter, who married a Mr. Dyce, and became the mother of Mr. D. O. Dyce-Sombre, whose melancholy story is fresh in the memory of the present generation. Zafaryab Khan was buried like his infamous father at Agra. But his monument is not in the cemetery, but in a small church since secularized.
Thomas was now, for the moment, completely successful. The intrigues of his Mahratta enemy Gopal Rao ended in that officer being superseded, and Thomas's friend Lakwa Dada became Lieutenant-General in Hindustan. Appa Khandi, it is true, commenced a course of frivolous treachery towards his faithful servant and adopted son, which can only be accounted for on the supposition of a disordered intellect; but Thomas remained in the field, everywhere putting down opposition, and suppressing all marauding, unless when his necessities tempted him to practise it on his own account.
About this time we begin, for the first time, to find mention of the threatening attitude of the Afghans, which was destined to exercise on the affairs of Hindustan an influence so important, yet so different from what the invaders themselves could have anticipated. Timur Shah, the kinsman to whom Shah Alam alludes in his poem, had died in June, 1793; and after a certain amount of domestic disturbance, one of his sons had succeeded under the title of Zaman Shah. The Calcutta Gazette of 28th May, 1795, thus notices the new ruler:—
"Letters from Dehli mention that Zaman Shah, the ruler of the Abdalees, meditated an incursion into Hindustan, but had been prevented, for the present, by the hostility of his brothers. . . . . We are glad to hear the Sikhs have made no irruption into the Doab this season."
This Zaman Shah is the same who died, many years later, a blind pensioner of the English at Ludiana; and for the restoration of whose dynasty, among other objects, the British expedition to Kabul in 1839 took place.
To this period also belongs the unsuccessful attempt to revive Musalman power in the South of India, in which the Nizam of the Deccan engaged with the aid of his French General, the famous Raymond. The battle fought at Kardla, near Ahmadnagar, on the 12th March, 1795, is remarkable for the number of Europeans and their trained followers who took part on either side. On the Nizam's side, besides a vast force of horse and foot of the ordinary Asiatic kind, there were no less than 17,000 infantry under Raymond, backed by a large force of regular cavalry and artillery. The Mahrattas had 10,000 regulars under Perron, 5,000 under Filose, 3,000 under Hessing, 4,500 under du Drenec and Boyd. An animated account of this battle will be found in Colonel Malleson's excellent book, The Final Struggles of the French in India, in which, with admirable research and spirit, the gallant author has done justice to the efforts of the brave Frenchmen by whom British victory was so often checked in its earlier flights. The power of the Musalmans was completely broken by Perron and his associates on this occasion. It is further remarkable as the last general assembly of the chiefs of the Mahratta nation under the authority of their Peshwa (Grant Duff, ii. 284-8). The Moghul power in the Deccan was only preserved by the intervention of the British, and has ever since been dependent on their Government.
Early in 1796 a change was perceptible in the health of General de Boigne, which time and war had tried for nearly a quarter of a century in various regions. He had amassed a considerable fortune by his exertions during this long period, and entertained the natural desire of retiring with it to his native country. Sindhia had no valid ground for opposing his departure, and he set out for Calcutta somewhere about the middle of the year, accompanied by his personal escort — mounted upon choice Persian horses — who were afterwards taken into the British Governor's body-guard. In the profession of a soldier of fortune, rising latterly to almost unbounded power, de Boigne had shown all the virtues that are consistent with the situation. By simultaneous attention to his own private affairs he amassed a fortune of nearly half a million sterling, which he was fortunate enough to land in his own country, where it must have seemed enormous. He lived for many years after as a private gentleman in Savoy, with the title of Count, and visitors from India were always welcome and sure of being hospitably entertained by the veteran with stories of Mahratta warfare. On the 1st February, 1797, he was succeeded, after some brief intermediate arrangements, by M. Perron, an officer of whom we have already had some glimpses, and whom de Boigne considered as a steady man and a brave soldier. Like Thomas, he had come to India in some humble capacity on board a man-of-war, and had first joined the native service under Mr. Sangster, as a non-commissioned officer. De Boigne gave him a company in the first force which he raised, with the title of Captain-Lieut. On the absconding of Lestonneaux, in 1788, as above described — when that officer was supposed to have appropriated the plunder taken by Gholam Kadir on his flight from Meerut — Perron succeeded to the command of a battalion, from which, after the successes of the army against Ismail Beg, he rose to the charge of a brigade. He was now placed over the whole regular army, to which the civil administration, on de Boigne's system, was inseparably attached, and under him were brigades commanded by Colonel du Drenec and by other officers, chiefly French, of whom we shall see more hereafter. De Boigne, while entertaining a high opinion of Perron's professional ability, seems to have misdoubted his political wisdom, for both Fraser and Duff assert that he solemnly warned Daulat Rao Sindhia against those very excesses into which — partly by Perron's counsel — he was, not long after, led. "Never to offend the British, and sooner to discharge his troops than risk a war," was the gist of the General's parting advice.
Sindhia remaining in the Deccan, in pursuance of his uncle's plan of managing both countries at once, the ax-Sergeant became very influential in Hindustan, where (jealousies with his Mahratta colleagues excepted) the independent career of George Thomas was the only serious difficulty with which he had to contend.
For the present the two seamen did not come in contact, for Thomas confined his operations to the west and north-west, and found his domestic troubles and the resistance of the various neighbouring tribes sufficient to fully occupy his attention. Scarcely had he patched up a peace with his treacherous employer, and brought affairs in Mewat to something like a settlement, when his momentary quiet was once more disturbed by the intelligence that Appa had committed suicide by drowning himself, and that his son and successor, Vaman Rao, was showing signs of an intention to imitate the conduct of the deceased in its untruthful and unreliable character. With the exception of a brief campaign in the Upper Doab, in which the fortified towns of Shamli and Lakhnaoti had rebelled, Thomas does not appear to have had any active employment until he finally broke with Vaman Rao.
The rebellion of the Governor of Shamli (which Thomas suppressed with vigour) seems to have been connected with the movements of the restless Rohillas of the Najibabad clan, whose chief was now Bhanbu Khan, brother of the late Gholam Kadir, and an exile among the Sikhs since the death of his brother and the destruction of the Fort of Ghausgarh. Profiting by the long-continued absence of Sindhia, he re-opened that correspondence with the Afghans which always formed part of a Mohamadan attempt in Hindustan, and appealed, at the same time, to the avarice of the Sikhs, which had abundantly recovered its temporary repulse by Mirza Najaf in 1779. The grandson of the famous Abdali soon appeared at Peshawar at the head of 33,000 Afghan horse. But the Sikhs and Afghans soon quarrelled; a desperate battle was fought between them at Amritsar, in which, after a futile cannonade, the Sikhs flung themselves upon Zaman's army in the most reckless manner. The aggregate losses were estimated at 35,000 men. The Shah retreated upon Lahor; and the disordered state of the Doab began to be reflected in the only half-subdued conquests of the Viceroy of Audh in Rohilkand.
At this crisis 'Asaf-ud-daulah, the then holder of this title, died at Lucknow, 21st September, 1797, and it was by no means certain that his successor, Vazir 'Ali, would not join in the reviving struggles of his co-religionists. It must be remembered that, in virtue of its subjugation to the Sindhias, the Empire was now regarded as a Hindu power, and that Shia and Sunni might well be expected to join, as against the Mahrattas or the English, however they might afterwards quarrel over the spoil, should success attend their efforts. Furthermore it is to be noted that in this or the following year the Afghans, under Zaman Shah, were known to be advancing again upon Lahor.
This state of things appeared to the then Governor-General of the British possessions sufficiently serious to warrant an active interposition. The calm courage of Sir John Shore, who held a local investigation into what, to most politicians, might have appeared a very unimportant matter — namely, whether the heir-apparent was really 'Asaf-ud-daulah's son or not; the grave decision against his claims (the claims of a de facto prince); his deposition and supersession by his eldest uncle, Saadat 'Ali the Second; and Vazir 'Ali's subsequent violence, when, too late to save his throne, he contrived, by the gratuitous murder of Mr. Cherry, the British resident at Benares, to convert his position from that of a political martyr to that of a life-convict, are all amply detailed in the well-known History of Mill, and in the Life of Lord Teignmouth by his son. Shore, at the same time, sent an embassy to Persia under Mahdi 'Ali Khan, the result of which was an invasion of Western Afghanistan and the consequent retirement of the Shah from the Panjab. The events referred to only so far belong to the History of Hindustan, that they are a sort of crepuscular appearance there of British power, and show how the most upright and moderate statesmen of that nation were compelled, from time to time, to make fresh advances into the political sphere of the Empire.
About this time died Takaji Holkar, who had lately ceased to play any part in the politics, either of Hindustan or of the Deccan. He was no relation, by blood, of the great founder of the house of Holkar, Malhar Rao; but he had carried out the traditionary policy of the clan, which may be described in two words — hostility to Sindhia, and alliance with any one, Hindu or Musalman, by whom that hostility might be aided. He was succeeded by his illegitimate son Jaswant Rao, afterwards to become famous for his long and obstinate resistance to the British; but for the present only remarkable for the trouble that he soon began to give Daulat Rao Sindhia.
1798. — The latter, meanwhile, as though there were no such persons as Afghans or English within the limits of India, was engaging in domestic affairs of the most paltry character. His marriage (1st March) with the daughter of the Ghatgai, Shirji Rao, put him into the hands of that notorious person, whose ambition soon entangled the young chief in the obscure and discreditable series of outrages and of intrigues regarding his uncle's widow, known as the War of the Bais. The cause of these ladies being espoused by Madhoji's old commander, Lakwa Dada, whom the younger Sindhia had, as we have seen, raised to the Lieutenant-Generalship of the Empire, a serious campaign (commenced in May) was the result. Sindhia's army (nominally the army of the Emperor) was under the chief command of Ambaji Inglia, and in 1798 a campaign of some magnitude was undertaken, with very doubtful results.
The ladies first retreated to the camp of the Peshwa's brother, Imrat Rao, but were captured by a treacherous attack ordered by Sindhia's general, and undertaken by M. Drugeon, a French officer, at the head of two regular brigades, during the unguarded hours of a religious festival. This was an overt act of warfare against Sindhia's lawful superior, the Peshwa, in whose protection the ladies were, and threw the Peshwa into the hands of the British and their partizans.
Sindhia, for his part, entered into negotiations with the famous usurper of Mysore, Tippu Sultan, who was the hereditary opponent of the British, and who soon after lost his kingdom and his life before the Mahrattas could decide upon an open espousal of his cause.
1799. — The glory of the coming conquerors now began to light up the politics of Hindustan. The Afghans retired from Lahor in January, and were soon discovered to have abandoned their attempts on Hindustan for the present. But it was not known how long it might be before they were once more renewed. The celebrated treaty of "subsidiary alliance" between the British and the Nizam (22nd June, 1799), occupied the jealous attention of Sindhia, who had accommodated matters with the Peshwa, and taken up his quarters at Punah, where his immense material resources rendered him almost paramount. Still more was his jealousy aroused by the knowledge that, as long as the attitude of the Afghans continued to menace the ill-kept peace of the Empire, the British must be of necessity driven to keep watch in that quarter, in proportion, at least, as he, for his part, might be compelled to do so elsewhere. To add to his perplexities, Jaswant Rao Holkar, the hereditary rival of his house, about this time escaped from the captivity of Nagpur. to which Sindhia's influence had consigned him. Thus pressed on all sides, the Minister restored Lakwa Dada to favour, and by his aid quelled a fresh outbreak in the Upper Doab, where Shimbunath, the officer in charge of the Bawani Mahal, had called in the Sikhs in aid of his attempts at independence. Shimbunath was met and repulsed by a Moghul officer, named Ashraf Beg; and, hearing that Perron had sent reinforcements under Captain Smith, retired to the Panjab.
At the same time the Mahratta Governor of Dehli rebelled, but Perron reduced him after a short siege, and replaced him by Captain Drugeon, the French officer already mentioned in reference to the war of the Bais.
Thomas was for the present quite independent; and it may interest the reader to have a picture, however faint, of the scene in which this extraordinary conversion of a sailor into a sovereign took place. Hansi is one of the chief towns of the arid province curiously enough called Hariana, or "Green land," which lies between Dehli and the Great Sindh Deserts. When Thomas first fixed on it as the seat of his administration, it was a ruin among the fragments of the estates which had belonged to the deceased Najaf Kuli Khan. His first care was to rebuild the fortifications and invite settlers; and such was his reputation, that the people of the adjacent country, long plundered by the wild tribes of Bhatiana, and by the Jats of the Panjab, were not slow in availing themselves of his protection. Here, to use his own words, "I established a mint, and coined my own rupees, which I made current (!) in my army and country . . . . cast my own artillery, commenced making muskets, matchlocks, and powder.....till at length, having gained a capital and country bordering on the Sikh territories, I wished to put myself in a capacity, when a favourable opportunity should offer, of attempting the conquest of the Panjab, and aspired to the honour of placing the British standard on the banks of the Attock."
His new possessions consisted of 14 Pargannas, forming an aggregate of 250 townships, and yielding a total revenue of nearly three lakhs of rupees, — Thomas being forced to make very moderate settlements with the farmers in order to realize anything. From his former estates, acquired in the Mahratta service, which he still retained, he derived nearly a lakh and a half more.
Having made these arrangements, Thomas consented to join Vaman Rao, the son of his former patron, in a foray upon the Raja of Jaipur; and in this was nearly slain, only escaping with the loss of his lieutenant, John Morris, and some hundreds of his best men. He then renewed his alliance with Ambaji Sindhia's favourite general, who was about to renew the war against Lakwa Dada in the Udaipur country.
This new campaign was the consequence of Lakwa having connived at the escape of the Bais, a trait of conduct creditable to his regard for the memory of Madhoji Sindhia, his old master, but ruinous to his own interests. For the moment, however, the Dada was completely successful, routing all the detachments sent against him, and taking possession of a considerable portion of Rajputana.
Thomas did not join this campaign without undergoing a fresh danger from the mutiny of his own men. This is a species of peril to which persons in his position seem to have been peculiarly open; and it is related that the infamous Sumroo was sometimes seized by his soldiers, and seated astride upon a heated cannon, in order to extort money from him. In the gallant Irishman the troops had a different subject for their experiments; and the disaffection was soon set at rest by Thomas seizing the ringleaders with his own hands, and having them blown from guns on the spot. This is a concrete exhibition of justice which always commands the respect of Asiatics; and we hear of no more mutinies in Thomas's army.
1800. — In 1800 the sailor-Raja led his men once more against their neighbours to the north and northwest of his territories, and gathered fresh laurels. He was now occupied in no less a scheme than the conquest of the entire Panjab, from which enterprise he records that he had intended to return, like another Nearchus, by way of the Indus, to lay his conquests at the feet of George the Third of England. But the national foes of that monarch were soon to abridge the career of his enterprising subject, the Irish Raja of Hansi. For the present, Perron marched into the country of the Dattia Raja, in Bandelkhand, and entirely defeated Lakwa Dada, who soon after cried of his wounds. His success was at first balanced by Holkar, who routed a detachment of the Imperial army, under Colonel Hessing, at Ujain. Hessing's four battalions were completely cut up; and of eleven European officers, seven were slain and three made prisoners. This event occurred in June, 1801. But it was not long before the disaster was retrieved at Indor (the present seat of the Holkar family), by a fresh force under Colonel Sutherland. Holkar lost ninety-eight guns, and his capital was seized and sacked by the victors, about four months after the former battle.
The French commander of the regular troops was indeed now master of the situation. Victorious in the field, in undisturbed possession of the Upper Doab, and with a subordinate of his own nation in charge of the metropolis and person of the sovereign, General Perron was not disposed to brook the presence of a rival — and that a Briton — in an independent position of sovereignty within a few miles of Dehli. The French sailor and the English sailor having surmounted their respective difficulties, were now, in fact, face to face, each the only rival that the other had to encounter in the Empire of Hindustan.
NOTE. — Thomas describes the Begam as small and plump; her complexion fair, her eyes large and animated. She wore the Hindustani costume, made of the most costly materials. She spoke Persian and Urdu fluently, and attended personally to business, giving audience to her native employee behind a screen. At darbars she appeared veiled; but in European society she took her place at table, waited on exclusively by maid-servants. Her statue, surmounting a group in white marble by Tadolini, stands over her tomb in the Church at Sardhana.