, and the condition of affairs in India was too grave to
make the {265} dismissal of Hastings wise or politic. The Government
bore Hastings little love, and the King in particular was much incensed
at his refusal to resign, and was all for his recall and the recall of
Barwell who had abetted, and the judges who had supported him. But the
struggle with the American colonies absorbed the attention of the
Administration too closely to allow them to interfere so markedly in
the affairs of India at a moment when interference might perhaps have a
result not unlike the civil war.

[Sidenote: 1702-82--Haidar the bitter enemy of the English]

English opposition was not the only difficulty that Warren Hastings had
to contend with. Like the monarch in the Arabian tale who discerns
armies marching against his capital from every point of the compass,
Hastings found enemies rising up against him in all directions. A
league of three native powers menaced the safety of the British
possessions. The Mahratta states combined with the Nizam of the
Deccan. Both again combined with a new power whose rise had been as
rapid as it was alarming, the Mohammedan power of Haidar in Mysore.
When Warren Hastings arrived in India the second time Haidar was in his
sixty-seventh year. He was born in 1702 as the son of a Mogul officer
in the Punjaub. At his death Haidar held a rank somewhat similar to
that of a captain in the service of the Emperor of Delhi. Haidar
deemed, and rightly deemed, that there was little or no opportunity for
his ambition in that service, and his eyes seeking for a better chief,
found the man in Nunjeraj, the nominal vizier and real ruler of the
Rajah of Mysore. In 1750 Haidar persuaded the troops under his command
to leave their Mogul prince and take service with the sovereign of
Mysore. Under that sovereignty he rose rapidly to distinction. Though
he was little better than a robber chieftain, the ablest and most
daring robber of a horde of robbers, his power grew so rapidly that in
time he was able to supplant Nunjeraj, and in the end to usurp the
sovereignty of Mysore in 1761.

Haidar had his bitter grudge against the English. In 1771 he had been
badly beaten by the Mahrattas and had appealed to the English to help
him, as they had {266} undertaken by treaty to do. But the help was
refused to the defeated prince, and the defeated prince swore an oath
of vengeance against the English, and when the time seemed