In the incapable hands of Aurungzeb’s successors, whilst the Delhi palace became a hotbed of squalid and often sanguinary intrigue, disintegration proceeded with startling rapidity.  Revolt followed revolt within, and the era of external invasions was reopened.  Nadir Shah swept down from Persia and, after two months’ carnage and plunder, carried off from Delhi booty to the value of thirty-two millions, including the famous Peacock Throne.  Then the Afghans again broke through the northern passes.  Six times in the course of fourteen years did Ahmed Shah Durani carry fire and sword through Northern India.  One service, however, the Afghan rendered.  From the Deccan, where a great Mahratta confederacy had grown up under the Poona Peishwa, the Mahrattas slowly but surely closed in upon Delhi.  Another great battle was fought at Panipat between the Afghan invaders from the North and the flower of the Mahratta army.  The Mahrattas endured a crushing defeat, which, together with treachery within their own ranks, broke up the confederacy and prepared the downfall of their military power, which British arms were to complete.

For whilst the Moghul Empire was rapidly breaking up, the oversea penetration of India by the ocean route, which the Portuguese had been the first to open up at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was progressing apace.  Of all those who had followed in the wake of the Portuguese—­Dutch and Danes and Spaniards and French and British—­the British alone had come to stay.  After Panipat the wretched emperor, Shah Alam II., actually took refuge at Allahabad under British protection, and stayed there for some years as a pensioner of the East India Company, already a power in the land.  Well for him had he remained there, for he returned to Delhi only to be buffeted, first by one faction and then by another.  Ghulam Kadir, the Rohilla, blinded him in the very Hall of Audience which bears the famous inscription, “If a paradise there be on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here”; and when the Mahrattas rescued him he merely exchanged jailers.  He was already an old man, decrepit and sightless, when in 1803, in the same Hall of Audience, he welcomed his deliverer in Lord Lake, who had routed the Mahratta forces, almost within sight of his palace, between Humayun’s tomb and the river Jumna.  Then, perhaps for the first time in her history, India knew peace; for though two more descendants of the Moghul Emperors were still suffered to retain at Delhi the insignia of royalty, Mahomedan domination was over and her destinies had passed into the strong keeping of the British, who have sought to fulfil, on different and sounder lines, the purpose which had inspired the noblest of Akbar’s dreams.