However rash Hastings might have been in provoking the conflict with the Rajah, once it was provoked he carried himself with admirable courage and coolness. Shut up with a small force in a region blazing with armed rebellion, menaced by an army of forty thousand men, he acted with as much composure and ability as if he were the unquestioned master of the situation. He declined all offers of assistance from the Vizier of Oude, rejected all Chait Singh's overtures for peace, and issued his orders to the forces that were gradually rallying around him with rare tact and judgment. In a very short time the whole aspect of affairs changed. The Company's forces under Major Popham defeated the Rajah's troops, captured fort after fort, drove the Rajah to take refuge in Bundelcund, and brought the city and district of Benares under British rule again. Hastings immediately declared that the fugitive Rajah's estates were forfeited, and he bestowed them upon the Rajah's nephew upon tributary terms which bound him faster to the Company, and exacted double the revenue formerly payable into the Company's exchequer. But the money which Hastings so urgently needed, the money for which he had struck his bold stroke at Benares, was still lacking. All the booty gained in the reduction of Benares had been divided among the victors; none of it had found its way into the Company's coffers. The Vizier of Oude was deeply in the Company's debt, but the Vizier of Oude was in desperately straitened circumstances, and could not pay his debt. Knowing Hastings's need, the Vizier exposed to him certain plans he had formed for raising money by seizing upon the estates of the two {271} Begums, his mother, the widow of the late Nawab, and his grandmother, the late Nawab's mother. The Vizier may have had just claims enough upon the Begums, but it was peculiarly rash and unjustifiable of Hastings to make himself a party to the Vizier's interests. Hastings, unhappily for himself, lent the Vizier the aid of the Company's troops. The Begums, who were quite prepared to resist their feeble-spirited relation, did not go so far as to oppose the Company in arms. Their palace was occupied, their treasure seized, their servants imprisoned, and they themselves suffered discomforts and slights of a kind which constituted very real indignities and insults in the eyes of Mohammedan women. This was practically the last, as it was the most foolish, act of Hastings's rule. It had the misfortune for him of stirring the indignant soul of Burke. {272} CHAPTER LIX. THE GREAT IMPEACHMENT. [Sidenote: 1785--Burke's knowledge of India]