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132 the Bath, and no special honour was conferred upon Hastings, this looked to Macleane like a breach of treaty on Lord North's part, and he counselled Hastings not to resign without clear assurance of a baronetcy or an Irish peerage. And yet, only a few weeks later, Macleane had laid his patron's resignation before the Court of Directors, on the strength of certain instructions which Hastings had very soon afterwards withdrawn, and which all his letters during the past twelvemonth had implicitly disavowed. However honestly Macleane himself had acted in this matter, the Directors must have been fully aware of Hastings' resolution to leave his post only at the command of those who had placed him there. But now they hastened, after brief enquiry, to accept an offer which would save them from the appearance of a direct surrender to Lord North's dictation.

In their eagerness to throw over their best servant, they assumed that Hastings would confirm his agent's act, an assumption as ill founded as Hastings' belief in Lord North's friendliness, or as Macleane's conviction that his employer would gladly accept of any compromise which offered him a safe retreat from a position no longer tenable. And underneath the assumption lay the wish to be rid of a Governor, whom many of the Directors had come to regard as a secret enemy to their interests, because he aimed at bringing the country powers into closer relations with the British Crown.