Major Hodson writes, from India, in 1857:—“The next day I got permission to go and bring in the king (of Delhi) and his favourite wife and her son. This was successfully accomplished. I then set to work to get hold of the villain princes. I started for the tomb of the Emperor Humayoon, where they had taken sanctuary. After two hours of wordy strife, they appeared, and I sent them away under a guard…. I then went to look after my prisoners, who, with their guard, had moved towards Delhi. I came up just in time, and seizing a carbine from one of my men, I deliberately shot them one after another. I then ordered the bodies to be taken into the city and thrown out on the Chiboutre, in front of the Kotwallu. In twenty‐four hours, therefore, I had disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar.” This narrative is published without the least expression of regret by a clergyman of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Fourteen years more have passed away, and we have now a Republic established in France, professing, of course, universal philanthropy, benevolence, and kindness. And what is one of its latest acts? It has tried deliberately, and has deliberately sentenced to death, a Paris litterateur, for writing seditious articles in a newspaper!
And yet our great king is to be stigmatized as “vindictive” and “cruel,” because he sent to the scaffold a deceitful rebel, on whom he had conferred many favours, and who had attacked a castle, slaying its defenders;—a marauder, who had ravaged two English counties, “sparing neither sex nor age;” and a knot of Scottish traitors, who had assassinated the first noble in Scotland in a church, because he stood in the way of their treasonable purposes.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Lives of Archbishops, vol. iii., p. 401.
[2] Oxford Hist. Society, 1864, p. 322.
[3] History of England, vol. i., p. 406.
[4] Campbell’s Chancellors, vol. i., p. 159.
[5] Parker’s Gothic Architecture, p. 161.
[6] Archæologia, vol. xxix., p. 174.