Hastings was also taken prisoner, but most fortunately did not get into the Black Hole, and he appears to have been set at large on the intercession of the chief of the Dutch factory. During the period which followed his partial release--for he was still under surveillance at Moorshedabad--he made his first essay in diplomacy, or what would perhaps be more correctly described as political intrigue, with the result that the city got too hot for him, and he fled to Fulda, an island below Calcutta, where, as has been pithily said, the English fugitives from Fort William “were encamped like a shipwrecked crew awaiting rescue.” The rescue came in the shape of the combined naval and military expedition, commanded by Admiral Watson and Robert Clive, which was destined to end in the triumph of Plassey, and Warren Hastings, as Macaulay aptly suggests in his brilliant but singularly misinformed essay, doubtless inspired by the example of Clive and the similarity of their entrance on to the stage of Indian affairs, like him exchanged the pen for the sword, and fought through the campaign. But Clive saw “that there was more in his head than his arm,” and after the battle of Plassey he sent him as resident Agent of the Company to the Court of Meer Jaffier, the puppet-nabob who had been set up in the place of Surajah Dowlah. He held this post until he was made a Member of Council in 1761, and was obliged to remove to Calcutta. Clive was at home now, and the interregnum of oppression, extortion, and general mismanagement was in full swing; but the man who was afterwards so grossly wronged and falsely impeached, and who passed through the most celebrated trial in English history charged with just such crimes, had so little taste for them that three years later he came back a comparatively poor man, and the fortune he had he either gave away to his relations or lost through the failure of a Dutch trading-house. After a stay of four years, during which he renewed his intimacy with his old schoolfellow, the creator of the immortal John Gilpin, and made the acquaintance of Johnson and Boswell, he found himself so reduced in circumstances that he not only had to ask the Directors of the Company to give him more employment in India, but when he got it he was forced to borrow the money to pay his passage out again. It is quite impossible to form any just and reasonable judgment of the work which Warren Hastings now went out to do unless one first gets an adequate idea of the condition of things obtaining in India before the English went there, and of the conditions that would have obtained, if men like Clive, Hastings, Cornwallis, and Wellesley had not by one means and another--some good, some bad, but all just what were possible under the circumstances--succeeded in imposing the _Pax Britannica_ upon the rival and constantly warring potentates who governed the native populations.