rnment of Bengal would return to the
sister Presidency the troops lent to her by the latter in the hour of
the former's need to recover Calcutta.

Clive felt all the urgency of the request; the possible danger of
refusing to comply with it; the full gravity of the situation at
Madras. He also was one of those who had been lent. If the troops
were to return, it was he who should lead them back. But he felt
strongly that his place, and their place also, was in Bengal.
Especially was it so in the presence of the rumours, already
circulating, of great successes achieved by Lally, and by the French
fleet. Such rumours, followed by his departure, would certainly
incite the nobles of Bengal and Bihar, with or without Mir Jafar, to
strike for the independence which they felt, one and all, he had
wrested from them.

Matters, indeed, in the provinces of Bengal and {121}Bihar had come
to bear a very threatening aspect. The treasury of Mir Jafar was
exhausted by his payments; his nobles were disaffected; the moneyed
classes bitterly hostile. Threatened on his northern frontier by a
rebellious son of the King of Delhi and by the Nawab-Wazir of Oudh,
Mir Jafar was in the state of mind which compels men of his stamp to
have recourse to desperate remedies. For a moment he thought
seriously of calling the Marathas to his assistance. Then the
conviction forced itself upon him that the remedy would be worse than
the disease, and he renounced the idea. At last, when the army of the
rebel prince had penetrated within Bihar, and was approaching Patna,
he resigned himself to the inevitable, and besought abjectly the
assistance of Clive.

Clive had resolved to help him when affairs in Southern India reached
a point which required his immediate attention. A letter from the
Raja of Vizianagram reached him, informing him that the effect of the
recall by Lally from Aurangabad of the troops under Bussy had been to
leave the Northern Sirkars[11] without sufficient protection; that he
and other Rajas had risen in revolt, and urgently demanded the
despatch thither of some English troops, by whose aid they could
expel the few Frenchmen left there. It was characteristic of Clive to
seize the points of a difficult situation. Few men who had to meet on
their front a dangerous invasion, would have dared to despatch, to a
distant point, the troops he {122}had raised to repel that invasion,
remaining himself to meet it from resources he would improvise.