flung down the pistol which
baffled him, with a conviction that he was reserved for higher things.

[Sidenote: Dupleix.]

A change came at last in the shape of war and captivity. As soon as the
war of the Austrian Succession broke out the superiority of the French
in power and influence tempted them to expel the English from India.
Labourdonnais, the governor of the French colony of the Mauritius,
besieged Madras, razed it to the ground, and carried its clerks and
merchants prisoners to Pondicherry. Clive was among these captives, but
he escaped in disguise, and returning to the settlement, threw aside his
clerkship for an ensign's commission in a force which the Company was
busily raising. For the capture of Madras had not only established the
repute of the French arms, but had roused Dupleix, the governor of
Pondicherry, to conceive plans for the creation of a French empire in
India. When the English merchants of Elizabeth's day brought their goods
to Surat, all India, save the south, had just been brought for the first
time under the rule of a single great power by the Mogul Emperors of the
line of Akbar. But with the death of Aurungzebe, in the reign of Anne,
the Mogul Empire fell fast into decay. A line of feudal princes raised
themselves to independence in Rajpootana. The lieutenants of the Emperor
founded separate sovereignties at Lucknow and Hyderabad, in the
Carnatic, and in Bengal. The plain of the Upper Indus was occupied by a
race of religious fanatics called the Sikhs. Persian and Affghan
invaders crossed the Indus, and succeeded even in sacking Delhi, the
capital of the Moguls. Clans of systematic plunderers, who were known
under the name of Mahrattas, and who were in fact the natives whom
conquest had long held in subjection, poured down from the highlands
along the western coast, ravaged as far as Calcutta and Tanjore, and
finally set up independent states at Poonah and Gwalior.

[Sidenote: Arcot.]

Dupleix skilfully availed himself of the disorder around him. He offered
his aid to the Emperor against the rebels and invaders who had reduced
his power to a shadow; and it was in the Emperor's name that he meddled
with the quarrels of the states of Central and Southern India, made
himself virtually master of the Court of Hyderabad, and seated a
creature of his own on the throne of the Carnatic. Trichinopoly, the one
town which held out against this Nabob of the Carnatic, was all but
brought to surrende