from Nasir-ud-din Haidar, who was quite willing to remit the money
of contract direct to England instead of settling the matter with the
British Resident at Lucknow'. It is not clear what this exactly means. It
may be that the King of Oudh, thinking that annexation was inevitable, may
have been inclined to attempt to secure some private arrangement with the
East India Company, under which he would remain titular sovereign, paying
a tribute direct to the authorities in England, and that he wished to
conduct these negotiations without the knowledge of the Resident at
Lucknow. There does not seem to be independent evidence of this mission of
Mir Hasan 'Ali, and we are told that it was, as might have been
expected, unsuccessful.

No mention is made of his wife in the official records, and I have been
unable to trace her family name or the date and place of her marriage.
Mir Hasan 'Ali and his wife sailed for Calcutta, and travelled to
Lucknow via Patna. She tells little of her career in India, save that she
lived there for twelve years, presumably from 1816 to 1828, and that
eleven years of that time were spent in the house of her father-in-law at
Lucknow. In the course of her book she gives only one date, September 18,
1825, when her husband held the post of Tahsildar, or sub-collector
of revenue, at Kanauj in the British district of Farrukhabad. No
records bearing on his career as a British official are forthcoming.
Another Lucknow tradition states that on his arrival at the Court of Oudh
from England he was, on the recommendation of the Resident, appointed to a
post in the King's service on a salary of Rs. 300 per annum. Subsequently
he fell into disgrace and was obliged to retire to Farrukhabad with
the court eunuch, Nawab Mu'tamad-ud-daula, Agha Mir.

With the restoration of Agha Mir to power, Hasan 'Ali returned
to Lucknow, and was granted a life pension of Rs. 100 _per mensem_ for his