One of the most influential personages in the court of Oudh during this period was that stormy petrel of politics, Nawab Hakim Mehndi. He had been the right-hand man of the Nawab Sa'adat Ali, and on the accession of his son Ghazi-ud-din Haidar in 1814 he was dismissed on the ground that he had incited the King to protest against interference in Oudh affairs by the Resident, Colonel Baillie. The King at the last moment became frightened at the prospect of an open rupture with the Resident. Nawab Hakim Mehndi was deprived of all his public offices and of much of his property, and he was imprisoned for a time. On his release he retired into British territory, and in 1824 he was living in magnificent style at Fatehgarh. In that year Bishop Heber visited Lucknow and received a courteous letter from the Nawab inviting him to his house at Fatehgarh. He gave the Bishop an assurance 'that he had an English housekeeper, who knew perfectly well how to do the honours of his establishment to gentlemen of her own nation. (She is, in fact, a singular female, who became the wife of one of the Hindustani professors at Hertford, now the Hukeem's dewan,[2] and bears, I believe, a very respectable character.)' The authoress makes no reference to Hakim Mehndi, nor to the fact that she and her husband were in his employment. The cause of her final departure from India is stated by W. Knighton in a highly coloured sketch of court life in the days of King Nasir-ud-daula, _The Private Life of an Eastern King_, published in 1855. 'Mrs. Meer Hassan was an English lady who married a Lucknow noble during a visit to England. She spent twelve years with him in India, and did not allow him to exercise a Moslem's privilege of a plurality of wives. Returning to England afterwards on account of her health, she did not again rejoin him.'[3] The jealousy between rival wives in a polygamous Musalman household is notorious. 'A rival may be good, but her son never: a rival even if she be made of dough is intolerable: the malice of a rival is known to everybody: wife upon wife and heartburnings'--such are the common proverbs which define the situation. But if her separation from her husband was really due to this cause, it is curious that in her book she notes as a mark of a good wife that she is tolerant of such arrangements. 'She receives him [her husband] with undisguised pleasure, although she has just before learned that another member has been added to his well-peopled harem. The good and forbearing wife, by this line of conduct, secures to herself the confidence of her husband, who, feeling assured that the amiable woman has an interest in his happiness, will consult her and take her advice in the domestic affairs of his children by other wives, and even arrange by her judgement all the settlements for their marriages, &c. He can speak of other wives without restraint--for she knows he has others--and her education has taught her that they deserve her respect in