Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/224

 178 THE COMPANY AND THE KING negotiated with Spain and Holland on its behalf, offered to send an envoy to the Great Moghul, and was he to get nothing for his pains? By some such casuistry Charles seems to have felt justified in allowing his courtiers and their City friends to experiment in the Indian trade. The records of the Company during his reign are full of the ignominious struggle which ensued. The king commenced cautiously by compelling the Company in 1630 to find a passage for the Earl of Denbigh, who had been seized by a desire to visit India and Persia; not altogether without an eye to business, as, on his return, he was reported to have landed sixty bales of indigo and other goods secretly at Dover, and conveyed them in carts to Southwark. Four years after Denbigh's return, Prince Rupert, aged eighteen, appeared as the figurehead of a court clique for colonizing Madagascar, then regarded as a half-way house to India and within the limits of the Company's charter. This is proved by manuscript entries in the Court Book, under the date March 20, 1637. The Company's protests might have availed lit- tle; but the young adventurer's mother, the Queen of Bohemia, laughed at the scheme as a Quixote's isle of Barataria, " neither feasible, safe, nor honourable." So, in spite of a servile poem by Davenant, Prince Rupert, or " Prince Robert " as he appears in the Company's records, went off to the siege of Breda instead. Lord Arundell, who succeeded to the leader- ship of the project, not only proposed to plant a colony