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under James, fell the apprentice years under Charles I and Oliver Cromwell. It was a time of probation for the country, and for the Company. The design on the Indies and the East could grow only very slowly towards full stature, and on hard and frugal fare. Yet the Company did not perish; if it had to contract, it managed to consolidate, its methods and its efforts. We could wish,' wrote the President and Council at Surat, we could wish,' echoed back, in 1638, the Governor and committees from London, 'that we could vindicate the reputation of our nation, and do ourselves right. . . but we must bear the burden, and with patience sit still until we may find these frowning times more auspicious to us and to our affairs.' Their whole policy, from 1638 or thereabouts to 1660, is expressed in these words. Yet there did take place, during the reign of Charles I, on the Indian mainland, in a territory hitherto comparatively unfrequented and unexplored, but to be hereafter the rallying ground of commercial and political expansion, a tentative movement. On what was known in Anglo-Indian parlance as 'the Coast' that is the coast of Coromandel-and towards what was known as the Bay'-that is the Bay of Bengal -roots were driven and feelers pushed forth towards factories which should also be forts. What was tentative soon became deliberate, and we date from 1639 the first definite act of seisin in India, the first grasp of the English at property and possession on the continent of Asia. It is the year before the meeting of the Long Parliament, it is on the very eve, at home, of the great Civil War, of the greatest national disturbance in our history. In 1639, in the very last year of the Peace of King Charles, and in the name of the patron saint of his kingdom-so some contemporary churchman or cavalier might have read the signs of the times-was Fort St George founded, to be governed and garrisoned from England, to inaugurate a fresh chapter in Anglo-Indian annals.

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The English House at Surat stands for the policy of the Company till about the year 1640. From, say, 1640 to 1690 Fort St George symbolises and represents that policy. There had been some previous discussion whether Arma

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*Cf. Bruce, Annals of the East India Company,' i, 349, and A History of British India,' ii, 65, and note.

gaon or Masulipatam or Madras was best suited to be a place of arms and of stores from whence to control and command the traffic on the Eastern shores of the Indian peninsula. As in the first quarter of the century among the Spice Islands, so during the second quarter of the century on 'the Coast'-from Cape Comorin up towards the Ganges delta-the English factors, now advancing, now receding, had spied out the land, studied the temper of the inhabitants, sought a permanent and defensible foothold. Pathfinder-in-chief, and then successful city-planter-little else is known of him-was a Mr Francis Day. He helped to found the factory at Armagaon in 1625, he founded Madras, or Fort St George, in 1639, he revived the factory at Balasor in 1642.

To sum up the years, indeed the century, which ensued: through the whole period of the Long Parliament, of the Great Rebellion, of the Civil War, of the Restoration, of the Revolution, of the settlement of the succession, the government of the East India Company could not but shift a good deal away from exact dependence on, or clear subservience to, Leadenhall Street. Much had to be left, much was left, to the discretion of the agents abroad, at Surat, Bantam, and Masulipatam, and then, as later stations grew into importance, at Fort St George, or Bombay, or Kásimbázár. The Company needed all their craft to be able to transfer authority and to disclaim responsibility, were they to weather the times of Cromwell, of Charles II, of James II, of William III, of Anne, of the first two Georges. The seasons changed, as it were, and the dangers, with each new ruler; but the dangers never diminished, and, though the storm-cloud veered from one point on the horizon to another, it never dispersed. In 1653, Fort St George became the seat of a Presidency. Mr Francis Day had handed on his gift for scrutiny and acquisition. We find the Presidency examining-at the moment negativing -the practicability of an overland India trade right across country between Madras, Goa, and Surat. Always we have the outposts maintained, the approaches multiplied, in the direction of Bengal, of the delta and valley of the Ganges.

With the restoration of the Stewarts and the return, in 1660, of Charles II to Whitehall, there set in, along with the magnificence of a court modelled on that of Louis Quatorze, a steady revival of trade, a growing demand for

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luxuries and curiosities, not least for the gems, the gauzes, and the spices of the East. Charles II and his brother took a keen interest in mercantile affairs. Their policy was propped on the secret alliance with France; they hoped to win personal popularity by offering every encouragement to the spread of distant colonies and conquests; it was their cue to proclaim against all comers and to assert at every opportunity their sovereignty of the seas. They desired to put an end to the power and the pretensions of the Dutch Republic, its theory of the state, and its organisation of commerce. Cromwell had been a kind of 'Stadtholder' in Britain, a Protector of the genius of a nation much after the Dutch pattern, a William the Silent on the most impressive and extensive scale. As we know, it was to be the fate of the whole system of the Stewarts to be ultimately recast by another Stadtholder,' the third William as stadtholder of Holland, the third William as king of England. Meanwhile, though there was a marriage in Charles II's reign of his niece the Duke of York's elder daughter with this very Prince of Orange-as there had been in Charles I's reign of the then Princess Mary with the then Prince William of Orange-the two Stewart brothers were in sentiment and sympathy absolutely and entirely antiDutch; and, with regard to business, if not with regard to politics and religion, they had the merchants of London with them. The final issues we have already hinted at. The principles of freedom, which after all were identical in Holland and in England, prevailed at Westminster, were recombined, assimilated afresh, were finally Englished and nationalised. There was a kind of momentary personal triumph of the Dutch, of the spirit of de Ruyter, of the policy of the House of Orange. On the other hand, the ordering and regulating of the commerce of the world passed from the United Provinces and from Amsterdam to the British Isles and to the City of London.

But we are hastening on too quickly to the close of the seventeenth century. Let us pause on some such date as the year 1674. The third quarter of the century has all but expired. It is the year of the peace between England and the States-General. It divides fairly well the reign of Charles II into two parts. Down to 1674 the history of foreign complications is what most interests

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the student of the reign; from 1674 onwards the history of the reign is that of plot and counterplot at home, with regard to the succession, and with regard to the controversies of the creeds. In 1674, moreover, Pondicherry was founded, and French rivalry came definitely into view on the Coast'; as, a couple of years later, the founding of the French settlement of Chandarnagar disclosed it on the Hugli and in the Bay.' It is in the year 1674 that Josiah Child first becomes a director of the East India Company. It is the year in which Thomas Pitt is first mentioned as an interloper. Child, afterwards Sir Josiah Child, baronet, inspired the councils of the Company at home till the end of the century. He died in 1699. At the end of the century Thomas Pitt was governor at Fort St George. He was still governor when his grandson William Pitt-the first Earl of Chatham-was born. The tales of a grandfather' which the Great Commoner might remember would be tales of adventurous voyages in the Persian Gulf and in the Bay of Bengal, of the 'Pitt' diamond, of the siege of Madras by Daoud Khan, of the campaigns of Aurangzeb. The career of Clive-which again and again commenced and recommenced from Fort St George-must have had a quite peculiar interest for William Pitt. The year 1674 marks, further, a very large increase in the shipping and stock sent out from England as the nucleus of the commerce with Asia. The merchants and factors abroad were made aware that capital and intelligence at home were engaged as never before in the affairs of India. We note the question arising in 1676 as to whether the trade with Persia could be most effectively re-established by the employment of force or by treaty. In 1676 the Surat Presidency was still in favour of pacific measures. But nine years later, when a similar question arose with regard to outlying provinces of the Mogul's dominion, the Bay of Cambay and the Bay of Bengal, the verdict was for open war. That is the year 1685, in which James II came to the throne, in which Sir John Child, Sir Josiah's brother, was made a baronet, and was in authority at Surat, or rather at Bombay-for that is the moment, too, when Bombay, instead of Surat, became the seat of the Western Presidency, to be for a while indeed factory and fortressin-chief of the whole English adventure in India.

It was the day of many great designs as well as of what, in the Anglo-Indian history of the seventeenth century, goes by the name of the Great Design.' The King himself had a hand in it. Inconsistency is a Stewart characteristic; in some of the Stewarts it becomes an altogether baffling quality. It is hard to explain the inconsistencies of Charles I; it is harder still to explain the inconsistencies of James II. He narrows his views-and narrowness is far too weak a term-where and when we should least expect him to do so; again, when we least expect it, his policy soars to skilfully planned and even highly imaginative flights. We see him listening to Penn when America is in debate, and in India giving a free hand to Sir Josiah and Sir John Child. Sir Josiah Child was the ruling spirit in Leadenhall Street. At Surat and Bombay he relied on his brother, Sir John, who was captain-general and admiral in the regions and harbours to which the English resorted, and had directions to proceed, if necessary, to Fort St George, and even to Bengal, in order to bring the whole under a regulated administration.'* On the other side of India, up the Hugli and on the Ganges, Sir Josiah Child's confidant, correspondent, spy, and chosen captain and chief, was Job Charnock, the founder and father of Calcutta.

They must have been nearly if not quite contemporaries, Josiah and Job; their names seem to indicate a Puritan stock; one could fancy them to have been boys together, companions in obscurity and poverty, in daydreams, at their start in life. They rose from the ranks, the one to be the foremost British merchant of his times, the other to fix the site and begin to build the city from whence the Anglo-Indian Empire is governed. Child was born in 1630, and died in 1699. Charnock's name first meets us in India in 1655 or 1656: he died in 1693. They were born under Charles I: they passed away towards the end of the century under William III. Each might have changed places with the other-so it strikes us as we study what remains in the way of record of each: Charnock might have been the great head of the Company in London, Child the letter-writer and explorer on the Lower Ganges. Charnock is about our earliest specimen of the

*Bruce, ii, 568.

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