Page:History of India Vol 7.djvu/305

 APPENDIX I THE COMPANY AND THE COMMONWEALTH 1649 - 1660 The preceding chapter ends with the various English settlements that grew finally into the British Indian Empire, as will be explained more fully in the next volume. As an appendix, however, I include here Sir William Hunter's valuable discussion of the relation of the Common- wealth under Cromwell to the affairs of India. a. v. w. j. INT 1650 the East India Company, by command of the Council of State, effaced the king's arms still re- maining on one of its ships. After the Restoration in 1660, it sought in like manner to hide the memorials of the Commonwealth, and the great charter of Crom- well disappeared from the India House. Its official historiographer, Bruce, the only annalist who has made a careful use of its archives, holds up the events of the intervening period as " an awful example " of a king and government " subverted by factions," 11 duped " by a " Usurper," and the " victim " of 11 guilty ambition." To the general historian those years appeared as a disastrous " scramble for the trade of India." Cromwell's own life was so full of great English interests, and so crowded by European events, 261