This promise was not kept. The unfortunate prince had preferred to
surrender to the Rajah of Tanjore, who had several times intrigued
secretly with him, rather than to Muhammud Ali or the English, whom he
regarded as his implacable enemies. Had he placed himself in our
hands, his life would have been safe. He was murdered, by the
treacherous rajah, within twenty-four hours of his surrender.
With the fall of Seringam terminated the contest for the supremacy of
the Carnatic, between the English and French, fighting respectively on
behalf of their puppets, Muhammud Ali and Chunda Sahib. This stage of
the struggle was not a final one; but both by its circumstances, and
by the prestige which we acquired in the eyes of the natives, it gave
us a moral ascendency which, even when our fortunes were afterwards at
their worst, was never lost again.
Muhammud Ali had, himself, gained but little in the struggle. He was,
indeed, nominally ruler of the Carnatic, but he had to rely for his
position solely on the support of the English bayonets. Indeed, the
promises, of which he had been obliged to be lavish to his native
allies, to keep them faithful to his cause, when that cause seemed all
but lost, now came upon him to trouble him; and so precarious was his
position, that he was obliged to ask the English to leave two hundred
English troops, and fifteen hundred of their Sepoys, to protect the
place against Murari Reo, and the Rajahs of Mysore and Tanjore.
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