said, ‘never did such things before, why do they do so now? These are but new devices for the domination of their will, and are aimed at the destruction of our national faith, caste, and customs. What was it all to come to? Was India to be like England? The earlier Company’s servants were simple but wise men, and we respected them; we understood them and they us; but the present men are not like them; we do not know them, nor they us.’ No one cared, perhaps, very much for such sentiments, and few--very few--English heard them; but they will not have been forgotten by those who did.”[333] The Directors of the East India Company had, prior to Dalhousie’s time, rigidly enforced on their servants a policy of benevolent neutrality to the religious beliefs and social prejudices of India. The government of the Company in its best days might have been bad. But it was successful because it was, on the whole, popular, and it was popular because it was intensely conservative. Ardent progressive officials were repressed, whereas under Dalhousie their passion for innovation had free scope and disastrous encouragement. Nor was Oudh the only centre of Court intrigues against the British _raj_. The question of settling the position of the Royal Family of Delhi, the last representatives of the old Emperors of India, had been much debated in Dalhousie’s reign. When Lord Canning went to India, in 1856, it was again taken up, and a final decision given on the points raised. The heir-apparent, Prince Fukhr-ood-deen, who had agreed to evacuate the Palace, died on the 10th of July, 1856, and it was supposed he had been poisoned. The Queen, Zeenut Mahál, immediately began to intrigue for the purpose of procuring the recognition of her son as heir-apparent, and the King of Delhi petitioned the Government of India to this effect. But the petition could not have been granted without a breach of the Mohammedan law, and so Mirza Korash, the next in legal succession to Fukhr-ood-deen, was recognised as heir to the throne. But whereas, in the case of Fukhr-ood-deen, the recognition of the Government was the result of a compact or bargain between independent authorities, in the case of Mirza Korash it took the form of an Imperial decree, conferring rank and dignity on a vassal prince. The Royal Family of Delhi resented the whole arrangement. “Remembering the old relations between the Company and the Empire, the immense benefits originally conferred on them, and the admitted position of the Company as servants of the State, it was,” writes Colonel Taylor, “only natural they should now be accused of perfidy. The efforts and intrigues of the spirited Queen and several of the princes were now redoubled, locally as well as in foreign quarters; and India, especially the North-West Provinces, became filled with the most alarming rumours.”[334]