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104 befitting parade. Between the first and the second meeting of the Council the members were left 'in the most anxious, not to say disgraceful, situation .' This careful harping on small grievances, most of which were groundless and all alike frivolous, marks the temper in which the Clavering faction entered on their official tasks.

To Shujá-ud-daulá the new policy of the Calcutta Council seemed like a rending of all the ties that bound him to his English neighbours. For some years past he had stood firmly by his alliance with the power which had spared him in 1765. For Hastings he had conceived a strong personal attachment, which reflected itself in his intercourse with the British Resident at Lucknow. When Middleton showed him his letter of recall, the Wazír burst into tears over a step which seemed to betoken some hostile purpose towards himself. There are some grounds for thinking that his death, in the following January, may have been hastened by the sudden change of policy in Calcutta. He left behind him a letter imploring the Governor-General to extend to his son the friendship he had always shown for the father.

With these last wishes of the dying prince, Hastings strove hard to comply. But the foreign policy of his Government had wholly passed out of his control. Francis and his colleagues hastened to brush away all existing treaties with Oudh, and to enforce their