Page:A history of the military transactions of the British nation in Indostan, Volume 1.djvu/56

48 refused to serve him in this cruel commission, excepting one, whose wife Subder-ally had formerly debauched: this man, a Pitan, having engaged some Abyssinian slaves, led them at midnight to the Nabob's apartment, where the few servants who attended the Nabob were asleep round his bed. They were immediately seized, and prevented from making resistance. The Nabob himself, instead of taking up his arms, attempted to make his escape through a window. The leader of the assassins seized him before he could pass through it, and upbraiding him with the injury of his adultery, and exulting in the revenge he was taking, killed him with several stabs of a poniard.

Meer-assud the Duan was in the fort, and the inviolable attachment which this minister was known to bear to his master, suggested to Mortiz-ally the intention of destroying so dangerous a witness of the murder which he had committed. The orders were given to put him to death, when some of Mortiz-ally's officers represented to him the necessity of preserving the life of a man, from whom alone he could obtain that knowledge of the affairs of the Carnatic, which would be necessary for his own conduct, as soon as he should be declared Nabob. These representations were dictated by reverence to the character of Meer-assud, whose virtues preserved him in this instant of imminent danger from the destruction to which he had been doomed.

The gates of the fort of Velore were strictly guarded during this night of terror, and those only who produced a particular permission were suffered to pass out the ensuing day. So that the news of Subder-ally Khan's death was carried the next morning to the army encamped near Velore, by emissaries employed by Mortiz-ally himself, who represented it as an accident in which their master had no part, and imputed it to the sudden resentment of some of the principal officers, of whom the Nabob had treated several with ignominious language, and had affronted one by a blow. But such was the general opinion of Mortiz-ally's character, that the soldiery immediately flew to their arms, and cried out in tumult, that their Nabob had been assassinated by the governor of Velore. The principal officers of the army were absent celebrating the