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232 nominal head, could scarcely maintain his authority against the turbulent chiefs who were struggling for supremacy. The dominions of the other were also ill-organised, and his troops quite undisciplined. His chief military strength lay in the French corps trained after the European manner by Raymond, that had been raised before the commencement of the war in which that prince was engaged, in conjunction with the English and the Peishwa, against Tippoo Sultan. Its original strength did not exceed fifteen hundred, but in a few years it had increased to eleven thousand; and, at the period of the Earl of Mornington's arrival in India, it consisted of thirteen regiments of two battalions each, amounting in the whole to upwards of fourteen thousand men. Its discipline had latterly been greatly improved: a commencement had been made of a body of cavalry to act with the corps; and, besides field-pieces to each regiment, there was a park of forty pieces of ordnance; chiefly brass, from twelve to thirty-six pounders, with a well-trained body of artillerymen, many of whom were Europeans.

But this corps, so long the source of annoyance and apprehension to the British Government, was now doomed to dispersion. The Nizam had long been anxious for a closer connexion with the British Government than that which subsisted between them; and the Earl of Mornington concluded a new subsidiary treaty with him, by which it was agreed that the latter should supply a British force of six thousand men, to defend his territories; on the arrival of which at Hyderabad, the whole of the officers and sergeants of the French party were to be dismissed, and the troops under them "so dispersed and disorganised that no trace of the former establishment should remain."

The British subsidiary force from Bengal having arrived at Hyderabad, and a detachment from Madras having joined them there, on the 10th of October, 1798, Captain Kirkpatrick, the acting British Resident, de-