But this wonderful prosperity was not uninterrupted.  Towards the close of the reign of Charles the Second the Company began to be fiercely attacked from without, and to be at the same time distracted by internal dissensions.  The profits of the Indian trade were so tempting, that private adventurers had often, in defiance of the royal charter, fitted out ships for the Eastern seas.  But the competition of these interlopers did not become really formidable till the year 1680.  The nation was then violently agitated by the dispute about the Exclusion Bill.  Timid men were anticipating another civil war.  The two great parties, newly named Whigs and Tories, were fiercely contending in every county and town of England; and the feud soon spread to every corner of the civilised world where Englishmen were to be found.

The Company was popularly considered as a Whig body.  Among the members of the directing committee were some of the most vehement Exclusionists in the City.  Indeed two of them, Sir Samuel Barnardistone and Thomas Papillon, drew on themselves a severe persecution by their zeal against Popery and arbitrary power.162 Child had been originally brought into the direction by these men; he had long acted in concert with them; and he was supposed to hold their political opinions.  He had, during many years, stood high in the esteem of the chiefs of the parliamentary opposition, and had been especially obnoxious to the Duke of York.163 The interlopers therefore determined to affect the character of loyal men, who were determined to stand by the throne against the insolent tribunes of the City.  They spread, at all the factories in the East, reports that England was in confusion, that the sword had been drawn or would immediately be drawn, and that the Company was forward in the rebellion against the Crown.  These rumours, which, in truth, were not improbable, easily found credit among people separated from London by what was then a voyage of twelve months.  Some servants of the Company who were in ill humour with their employers, and others who were zealous royalists, joined the private traders.  At Bombay, the garrison and the great body of the English inhabitants declared that they would no longer obey any body who did not obey the King; they imprisoned the Deputy Governor; and they proclaimed that they held the island for the Crown.  At Saint Helena there was a rising.  The insurgents took the name of King’s men, and displayed the royal standard.  They were, not without difficulty, put down; and some of them were executed by martial law.164

If the Company had still been a Whig Company when the news of these commotions reached England, it is probable that the government would have approved of the conduct of the mutineers, and that the charter on which the monopoly depended would have had the fate which about the same time befell so many other charters.  But while the interlopers were, at a distance of many thousands of miles, making war on