Peshwa, on the clear understanding that it was to cease at his death.  The Peshwa died in 1851, leaving the Nana an enormous fortune; but he was not content.  The lapse of the pension, to which he was not entitled, rankled in his breast, and when all his efforts to get it restored to him proved of no avail, he became thoroughly disgusted and disaffected.  After failing to obtain in India a reconsideration of the decision of the Government on the subject, he sent to England as confidential agent a Mahomedan of the name of Azimula Khan, who remained three years in Europe, residing for the most part in London; but he also visited Paris, Constantinople, and the Crimea, arriving at the latter place when we, in alliance with the French, were besieging Sebastopol.  He was a man of no rank or position in his own country, a mere agent of the Nana’s, but he was received into the best English society, was everywhere treated as a royal Prince, and became engaged to a young English girl, who agreed to follow him to India to be married.  All this was revealed by the correspondence to which I have referred as having been found in the Nana’s palace of Bithur.  The greater number of these letters were from people in England—­not a few from ladies of rank and position.  One elderly dame called him her dear eastern son.  There were numerous letters from his English fiancee, and two from a Frenchman of the name of Lafont,[3] relating to some business with the French settlement of Chandernagore, with which he had been entrusted by Azimula Khan, acting for the Nana.  Written, as these letters were, immediately before the Mutiny, in which the Nana was the leading spirit, it seems probable that ’les principales choses,’ to which Lafont hopes to bring satisfactory answers, were invitations to the disaffected and disloyal in Calcutta, and perhaps the French settlers at Chandernagore, to assist in the effort about to be made to throw off the British yoke.  A portion of the correspondence was unopened, and there were several letters in Azimula’s own handwriting which had not been despatched.  Two of these were to Omar Pasha at Constantinople, and told of the sepoys’ discontent and the troubled state of India generally.  That the Nana was intriguing with the King of Delhi, the Nawab of Oudh, and other great personages, has been proved beyond a doubt, although at the time he was looked upon by the British residents at Cawnpore as a perfectly harmless individual, in spite of its being known that he considered himself aggrieved on account of his having been refused the continuance of the pension, and because a salute of guns (such as it is the custom to give to Native Princes on entering British territory) had not been accorded to him.