Page:The Earl of Auckland.djvu/38

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32
LORD AUCKLAND

Benares, while his brother Sháhji was enthroned in his stead.

The Government had not yet heard the last of the exiled prince. His English agents, of whom he had several in each of the Presidency towns and even in England, worked the local press busily and perseveringly on his behalf, forwarded petitions, letters, and statements of his supposed wrongs to Leadenhall Street, Cannon Row, and Westminster, and induced some eager politicians to fight their patron's cause in the House of Commons. The Rájá's wrongs and the injustice of the Indian Government were paraded for several years before the British public, and became the text for some indignant oratory both in Parliament and the India House. In 1845 Mr. Hume's motion for a parliamentary inquiry into the ex-Rájá's case was thrown out after brief debate by a majority so crushing, that any further appeal to the Commons would have been impossible, even if the Rájá had not died two years afterwards. There was no use, indeed, in stirring anew a question which, as Sir James Hogg put it, had been decided one way by three successive Governments in Bombay, by Lord Auckland's Government in Calcutta, by the Court of Directors, and by three successive Presidents of the Board of Control[1].

On his way back from Simla, in January, 1840, Lord Auckland spent a few days at Gwalior, exchanging courtesies with the young Mahárájá, Jankoji

  1. Thornton; Hunter's Imperial Gazetteer; Allen's Indian Mail.