I have the Satisfaction to see Peace and Abundance flourish around me, and to think that in these Blessings we have the Advantage of every other Part of the British Empire.1 I fear that this is the only One that can boast of either.

I refer you to Major Scott for other Matters. Adieu my dear Brother and Sister believe me ever yours most affectionately W. HASTINGS.

The 'Bengal Gazette' is no longer available for purposes of comparison, since its brief and stormy career had been terminated by the seizure of the types by authority in March of this year, and the incomplete copies of the 'India Gazette' in the libraries of the British Museum and the India Office both fail us at this point. Side-lights are, however, thrown on the illness and on Mrs Hastings' voyage from one or two other quarters. In a letter to Anderson in 1786,2 Hastings seems to ascribe his breakdown to overwork. "From the month of February, 1772, to the 23rd of August, 1782," he says, "I had enjoyed so uninterrupted a state of equal health, though with a constitution by no means robust, that I had never had cause to postpone the meeting of Council, or other appointed applications of business, and scarce allowed. myself an hour of indulgence from it. Even in the severe sickness which then seized me, many hours were still devoted to my duty, and I dictated from my bed what I could not write at my desk." The letters which follow testify to his motives in refusing to allow Mrs Hastings to be informed of his illness, the fear that she would imperil her health by returning to nurse him, and the excessive delicacy which could not endure that she should see him ill and helpless. How the news reached her it

"We have lost the Command at Sea, of course many of our Islands in the West Indias, and Pensecola," writes Sir Francis Sykes early in 1782. "All America except the Port of New York is lost, and a Capital army under Lord Cornwallis captured, in short disgrace upon disgrace." 3 See infra, p. 305.

2 Gleig, III. 305.

is impossible to discover, but as she was again Cleveland's guest at Bhagalpur, the letters, papers, and visitors he would receive from Calcutta must have conveyed it sooner or later. From her husband's reference to the smallness of the boat in which she embarked, and the extraordinary speed of her journey, it appears that she travelled in the Feelchehra instead of a budgerow. The site of the disaster which might so easily have had a fatal ending is sufficiently identified in his letters as in the neighbourhood of the Rocks of Colgong.1 Hodges painted a picture of the scene for him afterwards, which was one of the treasures of Daylesford, and is now in the possession of Miss Winter.

The aide-de-camp in attendance on Mrs Hastings during this journey was Captain Mordaunt, of whom Thompson says that he would rather travel from Lucknow to Calcutta in the hottest weather to ask a question than write even a few lines about it. One letter from him is, however, to be found in the Correspondence, written from Lucknow in 1784. Like most of Hastings' correspondents, he needs help. "It is not my wish," he writes, "to bring to your memory what you said, when you lay Ill, on your bed, when I arrived from Bogalpore, with Mrs Hastings. After our arrival you sent for me, before her, and took me by the hand, telling me how much obliged you was to me, for the care I had taken of Mrs Hastings, that you would serve me, and that I should be handsomely provided for, In short I should have what I asked, saying at the same time how much obliged you was to me that even when you went home you never could, or would forget me, after which you sent me up with Mr Bristow, which was of no service to me." Hastings had recommended him to the Minister, Haidar Beg Khan, for the command of the Nawab - Vizier's cavalry, but to hold the post to advantage, money was 1 See infra, pp. 340, 357.

* Not Turner, as stated on insufficient evidence in 'The Great Proconsul.'

needed, and it was for the means of attaining this that Mordaunt asked. It seems that some post was found for him, for when he died in 1790 he was at Cawnpore.

It appears that it was to George Nesbitt Thompson, who was then unknown to her and her husband, that Mrs Hastings owed her deliverance from shipwreck. "To Mrs Hastings we are indebted for our mutual friendship,” writes Hastings in 1801;1 "or rather to Providence, which made her personal danger the means of calling. forth your humanity, and my gratitude for its exertion, when we were unknown to each other. You may have forgot this. It is fresh in my remembrance."

The friendship thus begun continued to the end of Hastings' life.

1 Gleig, III. 381.

176

CHAPTER I.

JANUARY, 1784.

Mrs Hastings' Return to England.

"I INFORM you of an event likely to happen in my own. family, to which I already look, though yet distant, with anguish," writes Hastings to Scott in October, 1783.1 "Had affairs gone on but indifferently, it was my resolu tion to leave India in January next. But as my presence may be a kind of check on Macpherson, . . . I cannot in honour depart. . . . In the mean time, as Mrs Hastings' constitution visibly declines, though not subject to the severe attacks which she used to experience, she will depart at the time which I had fixed for mine with her, and I shall do all that I can at this early period to make the resolution irrevocable." In January, 1784, he writes from Saugur Roads, whither he has atten led her to see her on board, “Mrs Hastings's declining health required her instant departure. She was not afflicted with any severe attack of sickness in the last rainy season, but I was alarmed with daily symptoms, and could only attribute her escape to the weakness, not to the strength of her constitution. I was told too, that another season might prove fatal to her. I consented to part from her, nay, I urged her departure, nor even in the painful hour of trial do I repent it."

Mrs Hastings seems to have suffered rather from a

Mrs

general debility than from any specific disease. Kindersley, in her 'Letters from the East Indies,' says that the English ladies in Bengal had a better chance of life than the men, because they were more temperate and went out less in the heat, but that they suffered much from weakness of the nerves and from slow fevers, and this was no doubt her case. Each hot season brought on an attack of illness, and when she joined her husband at Benares late in the autumn of 1781 a short visit to Chanar was followed by an alarming indisposition. There were no hill-stations in those days, and it is a standing marvel how the English in India managed to attain long life in their adopted country without them and with no system of short leave to England. An officer or civil servant invalided home vacated his position ipso facto, unless he were entrusted with despatches, and could only return to India by the express permission of the Court of Directors, which was very difficult to gain. As a consequence, a youth going to India regarded himself as almost certainly an exile for life, and his interests became permanently fixed "east of Suez." To such an extent was this the case that at one time, when the government at home was more than usually inept in its handling of Indian affairs, it was actually suggested that the English in India should form a republic of their own, on the model of the revolted American colonies, with Hastings as President.

An extraordinarily large proportion of Europeans married native wives, and the whole course of life resembled that of the natives far more closely than is at present the case. The construction of the houses and the comparative absence of furniture, together with the adoption in private life of a cool and loose style of dress, must have made for health, but in some ways our ancestors were less wise than their descendants. Their huge and frequent meals were arranged on English rather than native lines, and the large consumption of wine and

M