Bihár had come to bear a very threatening aspect. The treasury of Mír Jafar was exhausted by his payments; his nobles were disaffected; the moneyed classes bitterly hostile. Threatened on his northern frontier by a rebellious son of the King of Delhi and by the Nawáb-Wazír of Oudh, Mír Jafar was in the state of mind which compels men of his stamp to have recourse to desperate remedies. For a moment he thought seriously of calling the Maráthás to his assistance. Then the conviction forced itself upon him that the remedy would be worse than the disease, and he renounced the idea. At last, when the army of the rebel prince had penetrated within Bihár, and was approaching Patná, he resigned himself to the inevitable, and besought abjectly the assistance of Clive.
Clive had resolved to help him when affairs in Southern India reached a point which required his immediate attention. A letter from the Rájá of Vizianagram reached him, informing him that the effect of the recall by Lally from Aurangábád of the troops under Bussy had been to leave the Northern Sirkárs[1] without sufficient protection; that he and other Rájás had risen in revolt, and urgently demanded the despatch thither of some English troops, by whose aid they could expel the few Frenchmen left there. It was characteristic of Clive to seize the points of a difficult situation. Few men who had to meet on their front a dangerous invasion, would have dared to despatch, to a distant point, the troops he
- ↑ The districts of Ganjám, Vizagapatam, Godávari, and Krishna.
