CHAPTER XLVI.
The Sultaun was not humbled by the issue of the campaign, though for a time his resources were straitened. On the contrary, he burned with revenge for the indignity which he had suffered, superadded to the fierce hate for the English which he had ever retained, and which rose now to a degree of ferocity he could hardly restrain. The demand of three millions and a half sterling made for the expenses of the war—for which, and the relinquishment of the territory he had agreed to resign, his children were held as hostages—he met partly by a payment from his own treasury, partly by a demand upon his army and his civil officers, and the residue was directed to be raised in the provinces, where means were employed for the purpose at which humanity shudders. Mild as had been his civil administration previously, and flourishing as was the cultivation of his whole country under the admirable administration of Purneah, his finance minister—often in marked contrast to the desolation of the English provinces, where the rule of Englishmen was not understood, nor their information as yet equal to the complexity of revenue affairs—there now ensued a remarkable contrast. As the oppression and forced contribution proceeded with horrible rigour, thousands fled into the English possessions, where they were received and protected; and this, while it did not check the infatuated persecution of many of his people, in whose welfare lay his own safety, added fresh cause for his hatred of those from whose protecting sway he could not withdraw them.
Meanwhile his restless mind embraced every subject which came, or which he fancied could come, within his grasp; astrology and magic, with all their absurd and debasing rites, were studied with greater avidity and attention than ever under the guidance of some who had pretensions to those sciences, both Brahmins and Mahomedans. From them he drew the most magnificent auguries of his future brilliant destiny; the past, he said, was but a cloud which, as he had ascertained from the stars, had hung over him from his birth; it was now dissipated, melted into thin air before the bright beams of the rising sun of his destiny. Physic, too, absorbed his attention; to perfection in which he made vast pretensions by aid of a thermometer, the true use of which he declared he had discovered by a revelation from the angel Gabriel, with whom he seemed to have established in his dreams a perfect confidence. It is only necessary, he would say, for a sick man to hold the bulb in his hand, and then, as the mercury rose or fell, so was the disease hot or cold; and according to its scale of progression, so should the remedies, differing in potency, be applied. Often he would, in his caprice, remark upon the altered look of any one present in his court; and in spite of their protestations of perfect health, apply the test, and administer a remedy upon the spot, which it would have been death almost to refuse.
The news of the revolutionary movement of 1789-90 in France, also, for which he had been gradually prepared by the adventurers in his service, infected him with a restless desire of imitation, which ran into the most ludicrous and often mischievous channels. As the French names of years and months were altered, so were his. A new era was instituted; and this being in direct opposition to the precepts of the Koran, which direct an implicit observance of them, he had recourse to his dreams and visions once more, by which it was for the while established.
In all departments of finance, of the army, of agriculture, of justice, there were perpetual alterations, sometimes undoubtedly with good effect, at others the most puerile and absurd. Words of command, invented from the Persian language, were given to his army, and new orders for their regulation and discipline constantly promulgated. He contemplated a fleet to exterminate the English one; which, having before defeated the French, had prevented them from sending such succour to his aid as he had expected. One hundred ships of immense force was to be the complement; of these, forty were directed to be commenced at Tellicherry, Mangalore, and his other ports on the western coast; and officers were appointed to them, commanders and admirals, who had never even seen the sea, had no conception what a ship was, save from the descriptions of others. Some of these men were sent to superintend their completion, others retained at court for instruction in the science of navigation and naval warfare; in which, as in his military pretensions, his dreams, visions, and assumed revelations, alone assisted him.
He was merchant and money-lender by turns; and huge warehouses, which still exist in the Fort of Seringapatam, long open rooms in the palace, capable of containing vast quantities of merchandise, were filled with every description of goods, which in time he forgot entirely, and so they remained till his death. By his system of banking, and of regulating, as he imagined, in his own person the exchanges of his dominions, he put a stop to the operations of the bankers of his capital, by whose assistance alone he was able to administer his affairs; nor would they resume their business until he agreed to abandon this one of the thousand schemes which were on foot for fame and aggrandisement.
New and perplexing laws were for ever being coined in the fertile mint of his own brain; new interpretations of the Koran, which he pretended to receive by inspiration, when in reality he understood not a word of its language, and very indifferently Persian, in which the commentaries upon it were written. The penal enactments against the lower classes of his Hindoo subjects were horrible; the meanest offences, the wearing of any scrap of green, the sacred colour of Mahomed, about their persons, or the transgression of any one of his arbitrary rules, was punished with death, or obscene mutilations, to which death would have been far preferable. These were often done in his own presence; and with Jaffar Sahib, Madar (who had once been his servant, but who had risen in rank), and many others, he was at no loss for instruments to carry them into execution. He would call himself the Tiger of the Faith—the beloved friend of Mahomed; and while he arrogated to himself the last title, the impiety of which shocked the religious among his officers, he acted up to the first not only in words, but in deeds, such as we have alluded to cursorily, by dressing his infantry in cotton jackets printed in tiger’s stripes,—by sitting on the effigy of one for a throne, and by having two large ones chained in the courtyard of his palace, who were often made the executioners of his terrible will.
Many are the tales, too, even now very current in the country, of the ludicrous effects of his inspirations regarding particular people, whom, for some fancied lucky termination or commencement of their name, or some meaning he chose to attach to it, a fortunate horoscope, or even from lucky personal marks, he would select from the meanest ranks, to fill offices for which they were alike unfitted by education, talents, or acquirements, and who, when their incapacity was detected, were mercilessly disgraced. It has been said of him by an eminent historian,[[59]] whose account of the period is a vivid romance from first to last, that ‘his were the pranks of a monkey, with the abominations of a monster’; and indeed it is impossible to give an idea of his character in juster terms.