Coorg was equally faithful to the English alliance, and equally useful in the campaign. "The Rajah of Coorg," wrote Lord Wellesley in 1799, "has seconded my views and the exertions of the Company's servants on this occasion, with a degree of spirit, energy, and fidelity which confirm the high character he had justly obtained in the late war." He and his brother and successor were, in fact, our firm and steadfast friends; and, on the demise of the latter prince, his son succeeded to the musnud.
And here our difficulties commence; for there never was, perhaps, a prince of whose disposition and moral qualities such opposite and conflicting accounts have been given: historians of high credibility representing him as a monster whose career has been rendered extraordinary by a series of crimes so extravagant as to seem the result of insanity, if such a state of mind can properly be inferred from the perpetration of acts of atrocious wickedness;[1] while other writers maintain that he is an ill-used prince, exemplary in all the relations of life, and quote, in support of their assertion, the following extract from a minute recorded by Lieutenant-Colonel Carpenter, Agent to the Governor-General of India, and dated Benares, January the 1st, 1848: –
"The period for my departure from Benares and return to Europe having arrived, I cannot part with his Highness the Rajah of Coorg without giving him a testimonial of the sentiments with which he has inspired me.
"Since the Rajah quitted his palace at Coorg, in April, 1834, he has been under my charge, and I have infinite satisfaction in recording the quiet, peaceable, and exemplary behaviour of his Highness, during the long period of nearly fourteen years that I have been a constant observer of his conduct, and which has been several times favourably noticed in my various reports to the Supreme Government.
- ↑ Thornton, vol. v., p. 204.
