Page:History of the French in India.djvu/617

 APPENDIX A. 591 of the ransom of Madras ; but after a trial extending over three years (1748-51), was fully acquitted and set free. He died broken-hearted in 1755. His acquittal by his own Government, which was inspired by the deepest resentment against him, is a strong fact in his favour ; and Colonel Malleson, a soldier as well as a historian, should at least have himself read the records of the case, not only in the India Office but in the French Admiralty, before reviving so scandalous a charge against one of the noblest ornaments of the French Navy. La Bour- donnais acted with the gravest indiscretion, and that sufficiently accounts for his strange, and in a political sense, culpable conduct. That he was a traitor is, for anyone who is acquainted with his charac- ter, an impossible assumption. He was a brave, ardent, and adventur- ous sailor, whose only idea, in fitting out his expedition from Bourbon and Mauritius, was to harry the English trade in Indian waters, and exact war prizes. Dupleix, on the contrary, was a calculating, prescient statesman, with a constitutional contempt for fighting (which, he used to say, " confused his thoughts "), whose far-reaching policy was directed to the complete expulsion of the English from India, and the raising of a great French Empire on the foundations we had laid. From the moment, therefore, that these two men met they were in direct antipathy with each other, and in all these transactions at Madras in the autumn of 1746, La Bourdonnais's perverse part from the first was to withstand and disconcert Dupleix's political plans. He acted after the manner of all French leaders in India in the last century, and it is the commonplace moral of history that it was in this manner they lost India. " But to return to the evidence offered by Law Case, No. 31, of the 3rd March, 1752. Colonel Malleson merely refers to it without quot- ing it. I will now quote every material passage bearing on La Bourdonnais's alleged bribery and treason ; premising that the case arose from the objection of the Court of Directors of the East India Company to meet the bonds on which the sum required for the ransom of Madras was raised, on the ground that, in part at least, the bonds had been given, not to save the Company's property, but the private property of the Governor and his Council. Morse and the rest, excepting Fowke, examined by the Court, were really on their own defence, and it may be said that the only impartial evidence incriminating La Bourdonnais to the extent of his receiving a complimentary gratification (dusturi) is that of Fowke. " Folio 3. — Mr. Morse, late Governor of Fort St. George, in a letter to a Committee of the Court of Directors (18th January, 1748) .... says, 1 1 take this occasion to advise you, apart, that in that transaction (ransom of Madras), we were under the necessity for applying a further