man, pocketed a fee of £50,000, Holwell £27,000, and two other members of council £25,000 each. The bold Colonel Caillaud, fresh from routing the troops of Sháh Alam, refused at first his share of the common plunder; but the £20,000 allotted to him was remitted to his agents in England after his own departure from Bengal. Two other gentlemen received £13,000 each[1]. And these were the men who had just been denouncing the folly which led Mír Jafar to waste so much money on worthless or greedy favourites.
Such were the means by which many Englishmen amassed the fortunes which secured them place, power, or social advancement on their return home. Mír Kásim entered on his rule with an empty treasury and no clear prospect of replenishing it by other methods than violence and extortion. Hastings, who had done his best to keep Mír Jafar straight and himself clear of crooked practices, remained a few months longer at Murshidábád, until the order dismissing Holwell and two of his colleagues from the Company's service reached Calcutta in August, 1761. These gentlemen had signed the farewell letter in which Clive boldly rebuked his honourable masters for sundry acts of jobbery, corruption, and arbitrary injustice. One of the vacant seats in the Calcutta Council was reserved for Warren Hastings, whose worth Vansittart had already learned to estimate aright.
The first year of his new office closed or opened important epochs in the history of India. In January,
- ↑ Broome's History of the Bengal Army
