After the death of Le Vaisseau, the command devolved on Monsieur Saleur, a Frenchman, the only respectable officer who signed the covenant; he had taken no active part in the mutiny; on the contrary, he had done all he could to prevent it; and he was at last, with George Thomas, the chief means of bringing his brother officers back to a sense of their duty.  Another battalion was added to the four in 1787, and another raised in 1798 and 1802; five of the six marched under Colonel Saleur to the Deccan with Sindhia.  They were in a state of mutiny the whole way, and utterly useless as auxiliaries, as Saleur himself declared in many of his letters written in French to his mistress the Begam.  At the battle of Assaye, four of these battalions were left in charge of the Maratha camps.  One was present in the action and lost its four guns.  Soon after the return of these battalions, the Begam entered into an alliance with the British Government; the force then consisted of these six battalions, a party of artillery served chiefly by Europeans, and two hundred horse.  She had a good arsenal well stored, a foundry for cannon, both within the walls of a small fortress, built near her dwelling at Sardhana.  The whole cost her about four lakhs of rupees a year; her civil establishments eighty thousand, and her household establishments and expenses about the same; total six lakhs of rupees a year.  The revenues of Sardhana, and the other lands assigned at different times for the payment of the force had been at no time more than sufficient to cover these expenses; but under the protection of our Government they improved with the extension of tillage, and the improvements of the surrounding markets for produce, and she was enabled to give largely to the support of charitable institutions, and to provide handsomely for the support of her family and pensioners after her death.’[33]

Sombre’s son, Zafaryab Khan, had a daughter who was married to Colonel Dyce, who had for some time the management of the Begam’s affairs; but he lost her favour long before her death by his violent temper and overbearing manners, and was obliged to resign the management to his son, who, on the Begam’s death, came in for the bulk of her fortune, or about sixty lakhs of rupees.  He has two sisters who were brought up by the Begam, one married to Captain Troup, an Englishman, and the other to Mr. Salaroli, an Italian, both very worthy men.  Their wives have been handsomely provided for by the Begam, and by their brother, who trebled the fortunes left to them by the Begam.[34] She built an excellent church at Sardhana, and assigned the sum of 100,000 rupees as a fund to provide for its service and repairs; 50,000 rupees as another [fund] for the poor of the place; and 100,000 as a third, for a college in which Roman Catholic priests might be educated for the benefit of India generally.  She sent to Rome 150,000 rupees to be employed as a charity fund at the discretion of the Pope; and to the Archbishop of Canterbury she