Madhavrao II

Madhavrao II was made Peshwa forty days after he was born, reigned for twenty-one years without ever governing, and threw himself from a palace balcony at twenty-one. He was Narayanrao's posthumous son, born in April 1774 to a widow whose husband had been murdered eight months earlier, and his birth is what allowed the Barbhai council to refuse Raghunathrao the office. Nana Fadnavis raised him and ruled in his name. The reign covers the First Anglo-Maratha War, the treaty at Salbai that kept the British out for twenty years, Mahadaji Shinde's reconquest of the north and the restoration of Shah Alam II - real achievements in which the Peshwa personally had no part. He grew up closely supervised, was married at twenty to a girl chosen for him, and by his twenties was in open conflict with Nana over having any authority at all; accounts describe increasing depression and physical illness. In October 1795, weeks after the Maratha victory at Kharda, he fell from a terrace of the Shaniwar Wada into a fountain and died two days later. Whether he jumped is not documented beyond contemporary belief that he did. The confederacy went to Bajirao II, and Nana Fadnavis was imprisoned within three years. Kharda in 1795 was the last battle in which the whole Maratha confederacy fought together on the same side. He had no children and the succession fell to his cousin. The Shaniwar Wada terrace he fell from was destroyed in the fire of 1828. His mother Gangabai was pregnant when the council refused Raghunathrao the office, and the birth of a son was the whole of their legal case.

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