The story of Nand Kumar comes into the history as the result of an organic change in the composition and administration of the East India Company. North's {260} Regulating Act of 1773 made many changes in the administration of English India. The changes that most directly concerned Hastings converted the Governor of Bengal into a Governor-General, and reduced his Council to four members. The Governments of Madras and Bombay were placed under the joint control of Governor-General and Council. Hastings was appointed, naturally enough, to be the new Governor-General. His four councillors were Richard Barwell, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Philip Francis. Barwell was the only one who was a member of Hastings's old Council. The three others were in England; they had been chosen expressly to guide Indian policy in accordance with the views of the home Government. Clavering and Monson had already earned some distinction of a soldierly kind; Francis was by far the ablest of the three. The author of the "Letters of Junius" was much of a scholar and something of a statesman, but he was a man of a fierce and unbending temper, prompt to quarrel, hotly arrogant in argument, unrelenting in his hatred of those who crossed his purposes. These were not the kind of men with whom Hastings was likely to get on, and from the moment of their landing in India, where they complained that they were not received with sufficient ceremony, they and Hastings were furiously hostile. The meetings of the Governor-General and his Council became so many pitched battles, in which Hastings, aided only by Barwell, fought with tenacity and patience against men whose determination appeared to be in every possible instance to undo what he had done, and to oppose what he proposed to do. They treated him as if he were little better than a clerk in the Company's service; they acted as if their one purpose was to drive him out of public life. [Sidenote: 1775--Charges against Hastings]