Lord Dalhousie had been only a short time in India when he took up this question, and he could not properly have appreciated the estimation in which the Natives held the King of Delhi, for he wrote in support of his proposals ’that the Princes of India and its people had become entirely indifferent to the condition of the King or his position.’  But when the decision of the British Government on the subject reached India, he had been more than two years in the country, and although his views as to the desirability of the measure remained unchanged, the experience he had gained enabled him to gauge more accurately the feelings of the people, and, with the advice of his Council, he came to the conclusion that it would be wiser to let affairs remain in statu quo during Bahadur Shah’s lifetime.  The royal family were informed accordingly, and an agreement was drawn up, signed, sealed, and witnessed, by which the Heir Apparent accepted the conditions to be imposed upon him on the death of his father, who was to be allowed to remain in Delhi during his lifetime, with all the paraphernalia of royalty.

However satisfactory this arrangement might be to the Government of India, to every member of the Delhi royal family it must have seemed oppressive and humiliating to the last degree.  Outwardly they appeared to accept the inevitable quietly and submissively, but they were only biding their time, and longing for an opportunity to throw off the hated English yoke.  The war with Persia in 1856 seemed to offer the chance they wanted.  On the pretence that the independence of Herat was threatened by the Amir of Kabul, the Persians marched an army to besiege that place.  As this act was a violation of our treaty with Persia made three years before, Her Majesty’s Government directed that an army should be sent from India to the Persian Gulf.  The troops had scarcely left Bombay before the Lieutenant-Governor of the North-West Provinces was warned by a Native correspondent that the King of Delhi was intriguing with the Shah of Persia.  At the same time a proclamation was posted on the walls of the Jama Masjid (Shah Jehan’s famous mosque at Delhi), to the effect that a Persian army was coming to relieve India from the presence of the English, and calling on all true believers to rise and fight against the heretics.  Reports were also diligently circulated of our being defeated on the shores of the Persian Gulf, and the people were made to believe that their opportunity had arrived, and that the time was now favourable for a successful rebellion.

Of the three principal movers in the events which immediately preceded the Mutiny, the Nana Sahib was by far the most intelligent, and had mixed most with Europeans.  He was the adopted son and heir of the last of the Peshwas, the Chiefs of the Mahratta confederacy.  His cause of dissatisfaction was the discontinuance to him of a pension which, at the close of the Mahratta war in 1818, was granted to the