and she was united to
Walter Reinhard, when very young, by all the forms considered
necessary by persons of her persuasion when married to men of
another.[4] Reinhard had been married to another woman of the
Musalman faith, who still lives at Sardhana,[5] but she had become
insane, and has ever since remained so. By this first wife he had a
son, who got from the Emperor the title of Zafar Yab Khan, at the
request of the Begam, his stepmother; but he was a man of weak
intellect, and so little thought of that he was not recognized even
as the nominal chief on the death of his father.

Walter Reinhard was a native of Salzburg. He enlisted as a private
soldier in the French service, and came to India, where he entered
the service of the East India Company, and rose to the rank of
sergeant.[6] Reinhard got the sobriquet of Sombre from his comrades
while in the French service from the sombre cast of his countenance
and temper.[7] An Armenian, by name Gregory, of a Calcutta family,
the virtual minister of Kasim Ali Khan,[8] under the title of Gorgin
Khan,[9] took him into his service when the war was about to commence
between his master and the English. Kasim Ali was a native of
Kashmir, and not naturally a bad man; but he was goaded to madness by
the injuries and insults heaped upon him by the servants of the East
India Company, who were not then paid, as at present, in adequate
salaries, but in profits upon all kinds of monopolies; and they would
not suffer the recognized sovereign of the country in which they
traded to grant to his subjects the same exemption that they claimed
for themselves exclusively; and a war was the consequence.[10]

Mr. Ellis, one of these civil servants and chief of the factory at
Patna, whose opinions had more weight with the council in Calcutta
than all the wisdom of such men as Vansittart and Warren Hastings,
because they happened to be more consonant with the personal
interests of the majority, precipitately brought on the war, and
assumed the direction of all military operations, of which he knew
nothing, and for which he seems to have been totally unfitted by the
violence of his temper. All his enterprises failed--the city and
factory were captured by the enemy, and the European inhabitants
taken prisoners. The Nawab, smarting under the reiterated wrongs he
had received, and which he attributed mainly to the counsels of Mr.
Ellis, no sooner found the chief within his grasp, than he determin