ees. He made a final demand for no less
than fifty lakhs, or half a million pounds, and set off himself for
Benares to compel the Rajah to obey.

Hastings never wanted courage, but his Benares expedition was certainly
the most daring deed of his whole life. He entered the sacred city of
Benares attended by an escort of a mere handful of men, and in Benares,
in the midst of a hostile population, and practically in the power of
the Rajah, he acted as if he were the absolute master of prince,
people, and city. He insisted upon his full demands being complied
with, and as the Rajah's reply appeared to be unsatisfactory he
immediately ordered his assistant, Mr. Markham, to place the Rajah
under arrest. The audacity of the step was so great as to suggest
either that Hastings was acting with the recklessness of despair, or
had formed no thought as to the not merely possible but probable result
of his action. The Rajah accepted the confinement to his palace with a
dignified protest. Two companies of sepoys were placed to guard him.
These sepoys had no ammunition; they were surrounded by swarms of the
Rajah's soldiery raging at the insult offered to their lord. The
Rajah's men fell upon the sepoys and cut them {270} and their English
officers to pieces. The Rajah lowered himself to the river by a rope
of turbans, crossed the Ganges, and shut himself up in his stronghold
of Ramnagar. Hastings's life was in imminent peril. Had he remained
where he was he and his thirty Englishmen and his twenty sepoys would
have been massacred. He fled in the darkness of the night to the
fortress of Chunar, about thirty miles from Benares, where there was a
small garrison of the Company's troops.

[Sidenote: 1781--The Vizier of Oude and the Begums]

However rash Hastings might have been in provoking the conflict with
the Rajah, once it was provoked he carried himself with admirable
courage and coolness. Shut up with a small force in a region blazing
with armed rebellion, menaced by an army of forty thousand men, he
acted with as much composure and ability as if he were the unquestioned
master of the situation. He declined all offers of assistance from the
Vizier of Oude, rejected all Chait Singh's overtures for peace, and
issued his orders to the forces that were gradually rallying around him
with rare tact and judgment. In a very short time the whole aspect of
affairs changed. The Company's forces under Major Popham defeated the