THE NEGOTIATIONS FAIL. 413 to Dupleix: and they produced several patents granted chap. to the latter, and a letter from the Great Mughal con- IX firming all that Salabat Jang had granted in favour of 1754, Dupleix. The English to this replied, that Muhammad Ali had received his appointment from Nasir Jang, and afterwards from Gahziu-d-dm, but that the patents were at Trichinapalli ; the letter from the Great Mughal they treated as a forgery. Something more was said, but little to any purpose. That meeting was the last held by the conference. Finding it impossible to agree even upon preliminaries, the English commissaries left on February 5 for Madras ; the French, three days later, for Pondichery, Dupleix was the less inclined to abate any of his pre- tensions on this occasion, for whilst the conference was sitting he received from Bussy the intelligence of that gift of the four Sirkars to the French Company, the his- tory of which we have already recorded. 1 he possession of these rich provinces rendered him quite independent of English wishes. Better, he argued, to maintain war than to give up one iota of his just claims. He opposed no obstacle, therefore, to the breaking up of the confer- ence, but throughout the written communications which followed, he adhered, without renouncing a single article, to the rigid programme he had dictated to his agents at that assembly. When Saunders even yielded so far on his side as to concede in substance every claim of the French, with the exception of that which referred to the Nawwabship of the Karnatik ; when even he agreed so to modify his claims in this respect, as to leave that office vacant, on the understanding that Muhammad Ali should be appointed to it, under the protection of the two Companies, by Salabat Jang, whom the English would then acknowledge, Dupleix haughtily rejected the proposal, and insisted only the more strenuously on the validity of his own titles. In the course of our history Ave have had many occa-
