Page:Warren Hastings (Trotter).djvu/107

Rh equally unknown to Philip Francis, whose zeal for redressing wrongs seemed but to make him the more implacable, and who wrote to Clive as if he alone could be trusted to save Bengal from ruin. Clavering and Monson might seem to stand forth as leaders in the strife now raging, but they were really as clay in the hands of a potter who knew how to mould them for the furtherance of his own ends.

Before the close of 1774 the Council-room in Fort William — the new Fort which Clive had begun to build a little lower down the river in 1757 — was become the scene of bitter and prolonged dissensions, which reminded Hastings of his unpleasant experiences in the days of Vansittart's rule. The insults he had to put up with rankled deep in a nature at once proud, sensitive, and kindly. Sometimes he thought of leaving the field to his pitiless opponents. But his sense of duty to his employers, a proud consciousness of his own deserts, and a clinging belief in Lord North's apparent friendliness, decided him to remain at his post pending the issue of his appeals to the Directors and their friends.

Meanwhile his temper, naturally quick, must have been sorely tried at the Council-meetings, where every act of his government was reviewed in a captious spirit by colleagues whose zeal for reforming abuses seemed to spend itself on their President alone. Whoever else was right, Hastings was always found to be in the wrong. 'We three are king,' said Francis; and