enormous fortune; but he was not
content. The lapse of the pension, to which he was not entitled,
rankled in his breast, and when all his efforts to get it restored
to him proved of no avail, he became thoroughly disgusted and
disaffected. After failing to obtain in India a reconsideration of
the decision of the Government on the subject, he sent to England
as confidential agent a Mahomedan of the name of Azimula Khan, who
remained three years in Europe, residing for the most part in London;
but he also visited Paris, Constantinople, and the Crimea, arriving at
the latter place when we, in alliance with the French, were besieging
Sebastopol. He was a man of no rank or position in his own country, a
mere agent of the Nana's, but he was received into the best English
society, was everywhere treated as a royal Prince, and became engaged
to a young English girl, who agreed to follow him to India to be
married. All this was revealed by the correspondence to which I have
referred as having been found in the Nana's palace of Bithur. The
greater number of these letters were from people in England--not a few
from ladies of rank and position. One elderly dame called him her dear
eastern son. There were numerous letters from his English _fiancee_,
and two from a Frenchman of the name of Lafont,[3] relating to some
business with the French settlement of Chandernagore, with which he
had been entrusted by Azimula Khan, acting for the Nana. Written, as
these letters were, immediately before the Mutiny, in which the Nana
was the leading spirit, it seems probable that '_les principales
choses_,' to which Lafont hopes to bring satisfactory answers, were
invitations to the disaffected and disloyal in Calcutta, and perhaps
the French settlers at Chandernagore, to assist in the effort about to
be made to throw off the British yoke. A portion of the correspondence
was unopened, and there were several letters in Azimula's own
handwriting which had not been despatched. Two of these were to Omar
Pasha at Constantinople, and told of the sepoys' discontent and the
troubled state of India generally. That the Nana was intriguing with
the King of Delhi, the Nawab of Oudh, and other great personages, has
been proved beyond a doubt, although at the time he was looked upon by
the British residents at Cawnpore as a perfectly harmless individual,
in spite of its being known that he considered himself aggrieved on
account of his having been refused the con