nder the Regulating
Act; and the defeated members of the Council, finding that the sense of
the whole settlement was against them, acquiesced in the decision.

About this time arrived the news that, after a suit which had lasted
several years, the Franconian courts had decreed a divorce between
Imhoff and his wife. The Baron left Calcutta, carrying with him the
means of buying an estate in Saxony. The lady became Mrs. Hastings. The
event was celebrated by great festivities; and all the most conspicuous
persons at Calcutta, without distinction of parties, were invited to the
Government House. Clavering, as the Mahommedan chronicler tells the
story, was sick in mind and body, and excused himself from joining the
splendid assembly. But Hastings, whom, as it should seem, success in
ambition and in love had put into high good-humor, would take no denial.
He went himself to the General's house, and at length brought his
vanquished rival in triumph to the gay circle which surrounded the
bride. The exertion was too much for a frame broken by mortification as
well as by disease. Clavering died a few days later.

Wheler, who came out expecting to be Governor-General, and was forced to
content himself with a seat at the council board, generally voted with
Francis. But the Governor-General, with Barwell's help and his own
casting vote, was still the master. Some change took place at this time
in the feeling both of the Court of Directors and of the Ministers of
the Crown. All designs against Hastings were dropped; and, when his
original term of five years expired, he was quietly reappointed. The
truth is that the fearful dangers to which the public interests in every
quarter were now exposed made both Lord North and the Company unwilling
to part with a Governor whose talents, experience, and resolution enmity
itself was compelled to acknowledge.

The crisis was indeed formidable. That great and victorious empire, on
the throne of which George the Third had taken his seat eighteen years
before, with brighter hopes than had attended the accession of any of
the long line of English sovereigns, had, by the most senseless
misgovernment, been brought to the verge of ruin. In America millions of
Englishmen were at war with the country from which their blood, their
language, their religion, and their institutions were derived, and to
which, but a short time before, they had been as strongly attached as
the inhabitants of Norfolk and Leic