with every month. He desired to prosecute the war with redoubled energy, so as to break the power of France; but in these designs he was checked, not merely by the more distant influence of the King, but by the immediate pressure of his superior, the Duke of Newcastle, who now began to act with greater regard to his position as Prime Minister. Pitt had still the support of Parliament, and of a large part of the nation; but the secret coalition against him was very strong. Parliament was dissolved on the 21st of March, 1761, and at the same time several changes in the Ministry were announced in the Gazette. Adherents of the Scottish favourite were promoted to higher offices, and, four days later, Bute himself was appointed to the Northern Secretaryship, from which the Earl of Holderness was removed.

The new Parliament was elected by the most disgraceful arts of corruption, and the result was a House of Commons blindly subservient to the King. The desire of George, and of his counsellor, Lord Bute, to conclude a separate peace with France, was encouraged by a corresponding wish on the part of the French Government, which had suffered too much by the war to desire its continuance. Proposals were made by the Ministry of Louis XV. on the 25th of Marchthe very day on which Lord Bute became the Northern Secretary. Pitt, however, was still strong enough to infuse into the Government a spirit of determined opposition to any terms which should not be entirely advantageous to England. He delayed the conclusion of peace, that further triumphs might be obtained over his antagonist. His manner became imperious to an extent which no nation of spirit could tolerate; and the war blazed out again with redoubled fury. Some of the great Minister's own colleagues-notably the Duke of Bedford and Earl Granville-opposed his policy, as being at once vindictive and dangerous; and the capture of Belleisle, on the coast of Bretagne, led to that family compact between France and Spain to which allusion has been made. Pitt, who seems by this time to have become almost frantic with the love of power, and with the extraordinary successes of which he had certainly been the principal author, rejected with scorn the terms of peace suggested by France in the middle of September, 1761. He desired to enter into a contest with the allied courts of Paris and Madrid, and conceived that he might destroy the power of France in the West Indies, and

dence on Great Britain. But the opposition to his schemes, on the part both of his own colleagues and of the King, became at length so great that his resignation followed as a matter of course. We have seen that Pitt's absence from the Ministry did not prevent the breaking out of war with Spain in 1762; but it removed the chief incentives to a belligerent policy, and it is probable that peace would not have been concluded in 1763, had Pitt continued in his former position.

The war between England and Spain called attention to the kingdom of Portugal, of which little had been heard for several years, but which, as we have observed, was now protected by England against the dictation of her powerful neighbour. The Portuguese throne was at that time occupied by Joseph I., who, in 1750, while still a minor, succeeded his father, John V. Until he came of age, the young prince was under the guardianship of his mother, an Austrian princess, and both were greatly influenced by a Portuguese nobleman named Sebastian Joseph of Caravalho and Melo, afterwards known as the Marquis of Pombal. For several years, indeed, the affairs of Portugal were entirely in the hands of this remarkable Minister, who instituted many needful reforms in Church and State, but carried them out with an arbitrary sternness which equalled the worst of despotisms. The dungeons of Portugal were filled with prisoners who had ventured to resist his innovations. The ends at which he aimed were in themselves admirable, but the methods by which he enforced them constituted an abuse of power which only a people accustomed to the caprices of despotism could tamely have endured. When, after the appalling earthquake of 1755, which destroyed the city of Lisbon, numbers of persons took advantage of the confusion to commit acts of rapine, he hanged, without trial, all who were found with property about them for which they could not satisfactorily account. On the other hand, it is to the honour of Pombal that he abolished autos da fe, and diminished the power of the Inquisition. He procured the banishment of the Jesuits from Portugal, although the King himself was deeply devoted to the Order. To the same vigorous Minister were due certain reforms in the Portuguese army; but little could be effected in this respect amongst a people who had lost all sense of honour, of manliness, and of decency. Pombal encouraged manufactures and commerce, promoted printing and agriculture, improved the course of education at the University of Coimbra, established an efficient police throughout the kingdon, and introduced into

reforms may here be briefly mentioned. It was after the peace of Neustadt, in 1721, that the Czar assumed, both for himself and his successors, the superior title of Emperor, and it was then that Peter directed his mind towards that internal development of trade, manufactures, and art, which he justly regarded as necessary to the prosperity of the realm. He therefore united several of the navigable rivers by canals, erected mills, opened hospitals, founded colleges, academies, libraries, and printing-offices, established a uniformity of weights and measures, and organised a system of police. The ancient capital of Moscow shared his favours; yet it was he who established the present capital of St. Petersburg on newly-acquired terri

Elizabeth was mainly directed by a succession. of favourites; but the foreign events of the reign, as we have had occasion to record, added to the grandeur of Russia as one of the great European Powers. The Empress Catherine II., who succeeded her weak husband, Peter III., in 1762, was a daughter of the Prince of Anhalt-Zerbst, a petty German sovereign; but her character speedily took the true Russian type, and harmonised with all the aspirations of the country. aspirations of the country. Her marriage with Peter III. was productive of nothing but unhappiness, and soon after the accession of that sovereign she determined on seizing power for herself. the 8th of July, 1762, Catherine left the palace of Peterhof, where for some time she had been living

On

in retirement, proceeded to St. Petersburg, and induced one of the regiments of the Guards to declare in her favour. Other portions of the army immediately followed this example, and Catherine was proclaimed Empress before nightfall. Peter signed an act of abdication on the following day, and was sent a prisoner to Ropscha, a small palace twenty miles from the capital. About a week later he was dead, having, while engaged in a drinking bout, been strangled by Alexis Orloff, a man of gigantic stature and enormous strength, who is said to have afterwards boasted of the crime he had committed in association with other Russian noblemen. The reign of Catherine was long and important; but in the present connection we take note only of its commencement.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, India was approaching one of the most remarkable crises of her fortunes the foundation of the British power by Clive. The progressive decay of the Mogul Empire has been related on an earlier page; but its actual fall has yet to be described. On the death of Nadir Shah, the sovereign of Persia, who was assassinated in his tent near Meshed in 1747, one of his generals, named Ahmed Abdallah, seized on Afghanistan, together with the neighbouring provinces of India, which had been ceded to his predecessor by the Mogul Emperor, Mohammed Shah. Having proclaimed himself King of the Afghans, under a title signifying "the Pearl of the Age," he subdued Candahar, Caubul, and Lahore, and in 1748 advanced to Delhi, but, owing to a misadventure, was obliged to retreat from the vicinity of the Imperial city. The old Emperorthe last representative of the Mogul line who had any considerable power-died immediately after, and was followed by his son, Ahmed Shah. The reign of this monarch did not last more than five years, and they were filled with misfortune and disgrace. His dominions were rapidly curtailed, and the Mahrattas, though called in as allies, possessed themselves of much valuable territory. In 1753, Ahmed Shah was seized by an enemy, blinded, and deposed. His successor endured numerous degradations, and was assassinated, in 1759, by his own Vizier. From that time forth, the Great Moguls can scarcely be said to have existed.

It was in the interval between the War of the Austrian Succession and the Seven Years' War that the celebrated Robert Clive first came forward as the great assertor of English power in India. Clive was the son of a lawyer, of no great ability or large practice, living near Market Drayton, in Shropshire, where the family had been settled for many centuries. Young Robert was a boy of a daring,

In

| spirited, and quarrelsome nature, inordinately fond of fighting, extremely disinclined to study, and so little fitted for a regular life, that his father thought he could do no better than accept for him, when he was in his eighteenth year, a writership in the service of the East India Company. the distant settlement of Madras, he laboured wearily at his desk, bickered with his companions, grew sick for home, and on two occasions attempted to commit suicide. Twice did the pistol miss fire; the second time, he threw aside the weapon, exclaiming that he was surely reserved for something great. Curiously enough, one of his schoolmasters had made a similar prophecy of the boy, though there was little in his youth to indicate the possession of extraordinary powers. The man, however, was simply awaiting an opportunity for the development of his genius; and this came with the wars between France and England in the latter years of George II.

On Clive's arrival in India, about 1744, that vast and populous land was in a state of general disruption. The trading companies of the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and English, held considerable portions of the country, and regarded each other with jealous distrust. One of the principal settlements of the English was at Madras, in the Carnatic-a province lying on the south-eastern or Coromandel coast of Hindoostan. Bombay, on the western coast, had, however, a nominal superiority; and Calcutta, the capital of Bengal, situated near the mouths of the Ganges, was likewise an important city. Each of these possessions was called a Presidency; but there was not much cohesion of the several parts. The chief settlement of the French was at Pondicherry, about eighty miles south of Madras, and therefore in dangerous proximity to that place; the Portuguese were at Goa, on the western side of India; while the Dutch had established themselves in Malabar, the Carnatic, Ceylon, and the Moluccas. The Danes also had a trading-post at Tranquebar, on the Coromandel coast; but it made no great figure, and was finally sold to the English in 1845. In addition to Pondicherry, the French had acquired valuable dependencies in the Mauritius, or Isle of France, and the Isle of Bourbon; and all three possessions were controlled by the two Presidencies of Pondicherry and the Mauritius. The native States were for the most part the wrecks of the Mogul Empire. In many cases, it was difficult to say whether these territories were really dependent, or absolutely separate. They were ruled by Nizams, Subadars, Nabobs (more properly, Nawabs), and Zemindars-all of them

A.D. 1744.]

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At the outbreak of the war between England and France, in 1743, the French Presidencies of India were governed by La Bourdonnais in the Mauritius, and Dupleix at Pondicherry-men of genius and experience, animated by a constant desire to increase the power of their country in those Eastern regions. The former conducted an expedition to the Indian continent, evaded an English squadron which had been sent out to guard our possessions, and, appearing before Madras, obliged the town and fort to capitulate. He does not appear to have contemplated the permanent retention of that place, for he promised to deliver it up, on payment of a moderate ransom. Dupleix, however, did not approve of this engagement, and, asserting the superior power which undoubtedly resided with him, declared that Madras should be destroyed. The Governor of that city, and several of its principal inhabitants, were taken under a guard to Pondicherry, and treated with considerable insolence. Clive escaped in the disguise of a Mussulman, and found refuge at the small English settlement of Fort St. David. While there, he obtained an ensign's commission in the service of the Company, and now began to display those mental qualities which afterwards carried him triumphantly through a striking and brilliant career. About a year after this change in his position, which took place in 1747, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle brought the war to a conclusion. Madras was restored to the English, and for a little while Clive resumed his clerkly duties.

Before this time, La Bourdonnais had returned to France, where he died from the effects of imprisonment in the Bastille, and Dupleix had now no French rival to interfere with his ambitious projects. He conceived the idea of founding a vast Indian Empire, and expelling the English from the Carnatic; and, in order to carry out this project with the greater readiness, he formed alliances with some of the native princes, and proposed to raise an army of Indian soldiers, who, after being subjected to the military discipline of Europe, would probably form as good fighting material as any that the Western kingdoms could produce. The death of the Nizam al Mulk, in 1748, furnished Dupleix with the opportunity which he sought. Al Mulk was nominally Viceroy of the Deccan, where he represented the authority of the Mogul; but in reality he was an independent prince, ruling over a large and splendid territory. A question arose as to who should be his successor. Several claimants entered the field, and two of these

of Dupleix, one of them, named Mirzappa Juy, obtained the Viceroyalty, and the representative of the French Company was gratefully honoured with the command of seven thousand Indian cavalry, and rewarded with a present of £200,000. Trichinopoly, in the Carnatic, remained in the possession of the Nabob of Arcot, Mohammed Ali, who represented the hereditary Viceroy, Nazir Jung, a son of the Nizam al Mulk.

The French and their native allies were now masters of nearly all the Carnatic; but it was still necessary to reduce the Nabob of Arcot. Trichinopoly was accordingly invested by the French and Indian forces, and Clive, then scarcely twenty-six years of age, proposed to his superiors to relieve the threatened city by an enterprise which might well have appeared desperate in its character. 1751 he was occupying the position of Commissary to the troops, with the rank of Captain, so that his functions were partly commercial, partly military. The strength of the French Company was advancing with rapid strides; that of the English Company was dwindling to a shadow. The native Indians, always disposed to side with the stronger, looked with contempt upon the representatives of British power, and joined the forces of Dupleix in great numbers. The managers of the English settlement were alarmed at the aspect of affairs, which, indeed, seemed to threaten nothing less than complete ruin. Yet the older heads were devoid of any plans for the rescue of the English dependencies. It was the young Shropshire gentleman, not yet in the full maturity of life, and quite inexperienced in the realities of warfare, who now came forward with definite suggestions for meeting the peril of the hour. Arcot had been conferred by Dupleix on a native adherent of his cause, one Chunda Sahib, son-in-law of a former Nabob of the Carnatic. Chunda Sahib and Dupleix were besieging Trichinopoly, and it occurred to Clive that if an attack were made on Arcot-the capital of the Carnatic, which Chunda Sahib claimed as his own-it might have the effect of drawing off the investing force from before Trichinopoly, and thus save the Nabob whose cause was supported by the English. The plan being approved, Clive was provided with a force consisting of two hundred British soldiers, and three hundred Sepoys who had received the discipline of European armies. Four out of the eight officers had until then occupied commercial positions in the Company; but they were animated by the spirit of Clive, and were willing to share his fortunes in the perilous attempt.