70 THE MALACCA SULTANATE. 
city where every other law was broken daily there was one rule 
that was kept inviolate: no man, whatever his wrongs, dared 
lift his hand against the King. 
It was a strange feeling, this loyalty of the ancient Malays. 
A man might murder a hero or saint, or betray a relative or 
friend, or abduct an innocent girl: if he did it in the interests 
of a royal intrigue it was a noble act of self-sacrifice according 
to the ethical code of the day. And strangest of all was the 
spirit in which tyranny was met. The chief of the King’s 
Ministers, the “Uncle Mutahir’’ to whom allusion has been 
made, had so much love for a favourite daughter that he kept 
the report of her beauty from reaching the ears of the Sultan 
lest she should become the victim of his caprices. The girl 
married her cousin. The Sultan came later to a knowledge of 
the truth. He slew the girl's husband and carried her off to his 
palace; he slew the girl’s father and all her family; he sent 
men also to carry off the wealth of the house. Yet when the 
dying Uncle Mutahir” saw his own indignant son destroying 
property rather than let it reward the iniquity of the tyrant, he 
stayed him: “Is the Sultan to be impoverished and my death 
to profit him nothing?” lHven a protest against royal ingrati- 
tude had to be driven home by self-sacrifice. A Malay noble 
who had grown grey in his ruler’s service and had risen to be 
War Minister and Commander-in-Chief once saw an enemy’s 
fleet approaching and felt that resistance was vain. He said 
little. He drew up a list of the few gifts that he had received 
from his master in the course of his long years of work—a plate 
or two of chipped china and a pot or two of worn brass—and 
sent the list, emphasizing its poverty and meagreness, with a 
farewell letter of thanks to the donor. The King was profuse 
in his penitence. But the old man would take no further 
reward: he named the spot at which he was destined to die and 
went down to meet death for a cause that he saw was lost 
and a master whom he knew to be worthless. Conduct of this 
sort was ideal loyalty, as the Malays of the time understood it. 
Such loyalty degrades a royal caste. The self-made 
early princes of Malacca, the Paramisura and his son, were men ° 
of business and intelligence. The conqueror-kings, Mudzafar 
Shah and Mansur Shah, were men of ambition. But the later 
Kings of Malacca, born when the wealth had been acquired and 
the ambition realized, were gloomy, capricious and jaded 
tyrants who found more interest in destroying than in building 
up. Sultan Mahmud Shah, the last of the Malacca rulers, was 
a rov fainéant. He plundered, and violated; but he was wise 
enough to leave all the real work of administration to his 
Ministers. Foremost among them was the Bendahara who was 
destined to so tragic an end; next came the Bendahara’s son 
Tun Hasan, Minister of War, and the Laksamana Hang Nadim 
who commanded the fleet. Even at this distance of time when 
Jour. Straits Branch 
a a 
