This was the moment that Ellis decided to hatch a plan to seize Patna by force. He had long regarded Hastings and Vansittart as weak and supine in the face of what he called Mir Qasim’s ‘pretensions’. Now he decided to take matters into his own hands. But Mir Qasim’s intelligence service had managed to place spies with the Patna factory, and the Nawab soon came to hear some details of what Ellis was planning.
