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H don, keeping himself before the India House with a view to speedy re-employment. In the meantime his active mind had struck out the project for the improvement of the minds and habits of Indian civilians, afterwards realised by the East India College at Haileybury; and he (also without immediate success) endeavoured to bring about the foundation of a professorship of Persian at the university of Oxford. He occupied his leisure in study and literary society, and made the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson, with whom he afterwards occasionally corresponded. In sending Johnson's letters to Boswell, Hastings speaks of his ‘veneration for your great and good friend’ (, Boswell, ii. 66). The first of these, dated 30 March 1774, is to introduce ‘my dear Mr. Chambers,’ then going to Calcutta as a puisne judge of the newly constituted supreme court [see ]. In 1766 Hastings appeared as a witness before a committee of the House of Commons, and gave evidence on Indian affairs, which appears to have attracted the favourable notice of the court of directors. Early in 1769 he was sent out to Madras as second in council, but so low were his resources that he had to borrow the money required for his passage and outfit.

Among his fellow-passengers on board the Duke of Grafton were the Baron and Baroness von Imhoff. The baron, who had been an officer in the army of a minor German state, had obtained the recommendation of Queen Charlotte, and was proceeding to Madras, ostensibly to seek employment in the local army, but with some view to portrait-painting. An intimacy sprang up between Hastings and the baroness, favoured by the husband's neglect, and also by a severe illness, through which Hastings was nursed by the wife. Next year Imhoff went on to Calcutta, leaving the lady at Madras. At the end of 1771 Hastings was appointed governor of Bengal, in the room of Mr. Cartier, who was retiring, and in February 1772 he arrived in Calcutta. Baroness Imhoff had preceded him in October 1771 (, The Trial of Nanda Kumar).

Great changes had taken place in Bengal. Nand Kumar had been discovered in a treasonable correspondence, had been deprived of his post at Murshídábád, and sent in a kind of open arrest to Calcutta. Clive had returned to the government and command of the army; the unmanageable council had been superseded in practical concerns by a committee of three; there had come an end to the corruption, spoliation, waste of public money, and abuse of private trade. The relations of the presidency with the emperor and the Nawáb Vazir of Oudh had been settled, the emperor having been provided for, and an alliance made with the nawáb; no restraint was imposed on his independence, and a defensive alliance was agreed on between him and the East India Company, on the condition that whenever he should require the aid of the company's troops he should pay their expenses while so employed (House of Commons' 3rd Rep. App. 446). Vested with the beneficiary collection of the revenues of the three provinces, the British rulers had found it necessary to make the collections themselves instead of merely accounting with the nawáb's officials, although they did not clearly perceive how this was to be done. Meanwhile the entire administration was in confusion. In 1770 the country had been scourged by famine. It was about the time of Hastings's first appointment as governor that the company at last determined to ‘stand forth as diwán,’ in other words to sweep away all native agency in the control of revenue and finance administration. The deputy diwáns of Bengal and Bihar were to be dismissed and brought to trial for malversation, Rája Nand Kumar being employed in the prosecution. The revenue appeared incapable of increase, but the debt was growing. The company was threatened with insolvency, while the ministers of the crown were looking to it for loans and testing its right to exist by its financial prosperity. Such were some of the problems which were to occupy Hastings and trouble the remainder of his life.

One of the first matters which the directors commended to the attention of the new governor was the inquiry into the conduct of Shatáb Rai and Muhamad Raza Khán the two deputy-governors, by whose agency the collections and fiscal administration had been formerly carried out. Rája Nand Kumar was engaged in the preparation of the evidence against them, and possibly expected to be put into the place of one or both of them on their conviction. The directors never contemplated this. The court took care to remind Hastings of Nand Kumar's character as a reason for excluding him from power. Indeed from the facts given by Elphinstone, who refers especially to the House of Commons' 3rd Report, it is abundantly clear that during Hastings's absence the rája had been constantly condemned by Clive, by Vansittart, and by Colonel John Carnac [q. v.] In the end the rája was unable to bring forward any good evidence; the deputies were acquitted, and Nand Kumar got nothing. Hastings thus disappointed this unscrupulous native statesman, and increased the feeling of hostility which the rája entertained for him, while he was unable under his orders from