TWO:Turning to answer Larry, the detective hesitated.The preparations for invasion turned the attention of the British Government to ports where it was supposed the troops would be embarked. Ostend was regarded with particular suspicion, and Sir Home Popham was sent in May with a small squadron, conveying a thousand men, under Colonel Coote, to destroy the ships and sluices of the Bruges canal there. The troops were landed, and did their work, but found themselves unable to regain the ships from the violence of the wind and the surf, and were surrounded and compelled to surrender. In the autumn of this year Admiral Duckworth sailed for Minorca, and landed eight hundred men, under Sir Charles Stuart, who readily made themselves masters of the island.
FORE:Following his words by acts, he set off himself, attended only by a few score sepoys, for Benares. Cheyte Sing came out as far as Buxar to meet the offended Governor, and paid him the utmost homage. He continued his journey with the Rajah in his train, and entered the Rajah's capital, the great Mecca of India, the famed city of Benares, on the 14th of August, 1781. He then made more enormous demands than before; and the compliance of the Rajah not being immediate, he ordered Mr. Markham, his own-appointed resident at Benares, to arrest the Rajah in his palace. Cheyte Sing was a timid man, yet the act of arresting him in the midst of his own subjects, and in a place so sacred, and crowded with pilgrims from every part of the East, was a most daring deed. The effect was instantaneous. The people rose in fury, and pouring headlong to the palace with arms in their hands, they cut to pieces Markham and his sepoys. Had Cheyte Sing had the spirit of his people in him, Hastings and his little party would have been butchered in half an hour. But Cheyte Sing only thought of his own safety. He got across the Ganges, and whole troops of his subjects flocked after him. Thence he sent protestations of his innocence of the meute, and of his readiness to make any conditions. Hastings, though surrounded and besieged in his quarters by a furious mob, deigned no answer to the suppliant Rajah, but busied himself in collecting all the sepoys in the place. But the situation of Hastings was at every turn becoming more critical. The sepoys, sent to seize Cheyte Sing in the palace of Ramnuggur, were repulsed, and many of them, with their commander, killed. The multitude were now more excited than ever, and that night would probably have seen the last of Warren Hastings, had he not contrived to escape from Benares, and to reach the strong fortress of Chunar, situated on a rock several hundred feet above the Ganges, and about seventeen miles below Benares. Cheyte Sing, for a moment, encouraged by the flight of Hastings, put himself at the head of the enraged people, and, appealing to the neighbouring princes as to his treatment, declared he would drive the English out of the country. But troops and money were speedily sent to Hastings from Lucknow, others marched to Chunar from their cantonments, and he found himself safe amid a sufficient force commanded by the brave Major Popham, the conqueror of Gwalior, to defy the thirty thousand undisciplined followers of Cheyte Sing. From the 29th of August to the 20th of September there were different engagements between the British and the forces of Cheyte Sing; but on every occasion, though the Indians fought bravely they were worsted, and on the last-named day, utterly routed at Pateeta. Cheyte Sing did not wait for the arrival of the British troops; he fled into Bundelcund, and never returned again to Benares. Hastings restored order, and set up another puppet Rajah, a nephew of Cheyte Sing, but raised the annual tribute to forty lacs of rupees, or four hundred thousand pounds a year, and placed the mint and the entire jurisdiction of the province in the hands of his own officers.Atley, she told the millionaire, we are getting nowhere. For my part I believe that the emeralds have already been destroyed!
FORE:All these causes of unpopularity were rendered more effective by the powerful political party which now assailed him. Pitt led the way, and the Dukes of Devonshire, Bolton, and Portland, the Marquis of Rockingham, the Earls of Temple, Cornwallis, Albemarle, Ashburton, Hardwicke, and Bessborough, Lords Spencer, Sondes, Grantham, and Villiers, James Grenville, Sir George Savile, and other Whigs, presented a formidable phalanx of opponents in both Houses. The measures, too, which he was obliged to bring forward, were certain to augment his discredit. The funded debt had grown to upwards of a hundred millions, and there were three millions and a half besides unfunded. It was necessary to raise a new loan, and, moreover, to raise a new tax, for the income was unequal to the expenditure, even in time of peace. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Dashwood, was not a man likely to make these new burdens go down easily. He issued the new loan to the public with so little advertisement, that the friends of the Ministers secured the greater part of the shares, and they soon rose to eleven per cent. premium, by which they were enabled, at the public cost, to make heavy sums. The tax which Sir Francis proposed was one on cider and perry, besides some additional duties on wines. There was at once an outcry in the City against this tax, led on by the Lord Mayor, Alderman Beckford, a great friend of Pitt. The cry was only too sure to find a loud echo from the cider-growing districts. Bute and his Chancellor were quickly compelled to reduce the proposed impost from ten shillings a hogshead, to be paid by the buyer, that is, by the merchant, to four shillings, to be paid by the grower. The tax thus cut down was calculated to produce only seventy-five thousand poundsa sum for which it was scarcely worth while to incur so much odium.
FORE:It was very short, but he held it a long time before he gave it back.
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THREE:On the Continent the struggle against the French was renewed. The King of Naples and the Emperor of Austria, in alliance with Russia, determined to free Italy of them in the absence of Buonaparte; but without waiting for the arrival of the Austrians and Russians, Ferdinand mustered nearly forty thousand men, badly disciplined, and worse officered, and set out to drive the French from Rome. General Mack, still in high repute, was sent from Vienna to command this army, and Ferdinand, a most self-indulgent and unwarlike monarch, was advised to march with them in person. Nelson was employed, with an addition of some Portuguese ships, to land a division of five thousand men of this army at Leghorn. Mack, in true Austrian style, then divided the remaining thirty-two thousand men into five columns, and marched them by different routes towards Rome. Nelson had narrowly watched the man?uvres of Mack, and pronounced him incompetent, and that the whole would prove a failure. This was speedily realised. Ferdinand, with a portion of his forces, entered Rome in triumph on the 29th of November; but Championnet, the French general, who evacuated Rome to concentrate his forces at Terni, soon defeated the other divisions of the Neapolitan army in detail, and Ferdinand fled from Rome back to Naples. But there was now no security for him there. Championnet was marching on that capital with twenty thousand veteran soldiers, and Ferdinand availed himself of Nelson's fleet to get over to Palermo. The lazzaroni defended the deserted city for three days with incredible bravery against the French, but they were betrayed by a republican party in the city, which hoisted the tricolour flag, surrendered the forts to the enemy, and fired on the defenders from the Castle of St. Elmo, which commands the town. Championnet took possession of Naples on the 23rd of January, 1799, and proclaimed a republic under the title of "Respublica Parthenopea."Lord Howe, when he had collected his ships after the storm which separated him from D'Estaing, again made for Boston, in the hope of being able to attack the French Admiral in the harbour; but he found him too well protected by the batteries to be able to reach him. He therefore returned to New York, and, as his leave of absence had arrived, he surrendered the command to Admiral Byron, and took his leave of America on the 26th of September, and reached Portsmouth on the 25th of October. Byron now had a very good fleet, consisting of ships of one size or other to the number of ninety-one sail. Such a fleet assembled on the American coast at a proper time would have intercepted and destroyed the fleet of D'Estaing, and have cleared all those waters of French and American privateers. Byron no sooner came into command than he also made a voyage to Boston, to see whether he could not come at D'Estaing's fleet; but his usual weather attended him, his ships were scattered by a tempest, and D'Estaing took the opportunity of sailing to the West Indies, according to his orders. Notwithstanding the agreement of the French to assist America, they were thinking much more of recovering Canada or seizing on the British West India islands for themselves.
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