Page:A Comprehensive History of India Vol 1.djvu/678

 G44

IlISTOllY OF INDIA.

[liooK III.

A.D. 1761

Trial of Lally.

His con <luiiiiiation.

He is

beheaded.

before the pu})lic, doubtless with the view of exciting antipathy if it couM not estaltlish guilt. After lying eighti^en months in the Ba.stile, Lally was confronted with his accasers, but betrayed his old haughty and intractable spirit t/j such a degree as not only to exasperate the witnesses, but to prejudice the judge appointed to report on the case. Under such circumstances the result could not be doubtful. Then, as now, a trial in despotic France, when political end.s were to be gained by a conviction, was a mere mockery. After the lapse of other eighteen months, the case was ripe for decision, and the parliament of Paiis were subservient enough to do what the court expected of them. They found the accused guilty of having betrayed the interests of the king, the state, an<l the East India Company, and condemned him to be attainted and beheaded Before the sentence was made known he was taken before the court, de<n"aded from his military rank, stripped of his military (jrders, and then removed, not to the Bastile, which was now coiLsidered too honourable a place for him, but to the common criminal jail. When the sentence was read to him he threw up liis hands to heaven, and exclaimed, " Is this the reward of forty-five years' ser-ice!" and snatching up a pair of compasses which lay with some maps on a taljle, lie made an attempt to pierce his heart. He failed, and was doomed to drink the bitter cup to the di'egs. . That veiy afternoon he was taken out of prison with a large gag in his mouth, to prevent him from addressing the spectators, carried in a common cart to the Place de Greve, and there beheaded. He was in the sixty-fifth year of his age. Three men of note — Labom-donnais, Dupleix, and Lally — had thus been judicially murdered in order to divert the public hatred from the incompetent and corrupt ofiicials of the French East India Company. Can it be doubted that an institution which called for such monstrous saciifices more than deserved all the calamities which had fallen upon it?

In following out the com'se of events in the Camatic, we have been led awa}- from the not less important events which, during the same period, had occuired in Bengal, and were beginning, after the fii'st excitement was over, to unfold their true character.

Masula Boat, IJaeiJ OD the coast of Coromandel, more especially at Mudras and Pondicherr>-. for traDsporting light goods and passengers

across ilie Dars and through the surf.