Complete Works of Edmund Burke

by Edmund Burke

  XXV. That the said Warren Hastings, after forcibly recommending the plan aforesaid, did state strong objections, that did, “in his judgment, outweigh the advantages which might arise from a compliance with it.” Yet the said Hastings, being determined to pursue his scheme for aggrandizing at any rate the Mahratta power, in whose adult growth and the recent effects of it he could see no danger, did pursue the design of war against a nation or sect of religion in its infancy, from whom he had received no injury, and in whose present state of government he did not apprehend any mischief whatsoever; and finding the Council fixed and determined on not disbanding the frontier regiments, and thinking that therein he had found an advantage, he did ground thereon the following proposition.

  “If the expense [of the frontier troops] is to be continued, it may be surely better continued for some useful purpose than to keep up the parade of a great military corps designed merely to lie inactive in its quarters. On this ground, therefore, and on the supposition premised, I revert to my original sentiments in favor of the prince’s plan; but as this will require some qualification in the execution of it, I will state my recommendation of it in the terms of a proposition, viz., that, if it shall be the resolution of the board to continue the detachment now under the command of Colonel Sir John Cumming at Furruckabad, and if the prince Mirza Jehander Shah shall apply, with the authority of the king, and the concurrence of Mahdajee Sindia, for the assistance of an English military force, to act in conjunction with him, to expel the Seiks from the territories of which they have lately possessed themselves in the neighborhood of Delhi, it may be granted, and such a portion of the said detachment allotted to that service as shall be hereafter judged adequate to it.”

  XXVI. That the said Warren Hastings did, in the said proposal, endeavor to circumvent and overreach the Council-General, by converting an apparent and literal compliance with their resolution into a real and substantial opposition to and disappointment thereof. For his first proposal was, to withdraw the Company’s troops from the Vizier’s country on the pretence of relieving him from the burden of that establishment, but in reality with a view of facilitating the Mahratta pretensions on that province, which would then be deprived of the means of defence. And when the Council rejected the said proposal on the express ground of danger to the province by withdrawing from the Mahrattas the restraint of our troops, the said Hastings, finding his first scheme in favor of the Mahrattas against the provinces dependent on the Company defeated by the refusal of the Council to concur in the said measure of withdrawing the troops, did then endeavor to obtain the same purpose in a different way; and instead of leaving the troops, according to the intention and policy of the Council, as a check to the ambition and progress of the Mahrattas, he proposed to employ them in the actual furtherance of those schemes of aggrandizement of which his colleagues were jealous, and which it was the object of their resolution to counteract.

  XXVII. That, in the whole of the letters, negotiations, proposals, and projects of the said Warren Hastings relative to the Mogul, he did appear to pursue but one object, namely, the aggrandizement of the lately hostile and always dangerous power of the Mahrattas, and did pursue the same by means highly dishonorable to the British character for honor, justice, candor, plain-dealing, moderation, and humanity.

  XIX. — LIBEL ON THE COURT OF DIRECTORS.

  I. That Warren Hastings, Esquire, was, during the whole of the year 1783, a servant of the East India Company, and was bound by the duties of that relation not only to yield obedience to the orders of the Court of Directors, but to give to the whole of their service an example of submission, reverence, and respect to their authority; and that, if they should in the course of their duty call in question any part of his conduct, he was bound to conduct his defence with temper and decency; and while his conduct was under their consideration, it was not allowable to print and publish any of his letters to them without their consent first had and obtained; and he was bound by the same principles of duty, enforced by still more cogent reasons, to observe, in a paper intended for publication, great modesty and moderation, and to treat the said Court of Directors, his lawful masters, with respect.

  II. That the said Warren Hastings did print and publish, or cause to be printed and published, at Calcutta in Bengal, the narrative of his transactions at Benares, in a letter written at that place, without leave had of the Court of Directors, in order to preoccupy the judgment of the servants in that settlement, and to gain from them a factious countenance and support, previous to the judgment and opinion of the Court of Directors, his lawful superiors.

  III. That the Court of Directors, having come to certain resolutions of fact relative to the engagements subsisting between them and the Rajah of Benares, and the manner in which the same had been fulfilled on the part of the Rajah, did, in the fifth resolution, which was partly a resolution of opinion, declare as follows: “That it appears to this Court that the conduct of the Governor-General towards the Rajah, whilst he was at Benares, was improper; and that the imprisonment of his person, thereby disgracing him in the eyes of his subjects and others, was unwarrantable and highly impolitic, and may tend to weaken the confidence which the native princes of India ought to have in the justice and moderation of the Company’s government.”

  IV. That the said resolutions being transmitted to the said Warren Hastings, he, the said Warren Hastings, did write, and cause to be printed and published, a certain false, insolent, malicious, and seditious libel, purporting to be a letter from him, the said Warren Hastings, to the Court of Directors, dated Fort William, 20th March, 1783, “calculated,” as the Directors truly affirm, “to bring contempt, as well as an odium, on the Court of Directors, for their conduct on that occasion”; and the said libel had a direct tendency to excite a spirit of disobedience to the lawful government of this nation in India through all ranks of their service.

  V. That he, the said Warren Hastings, among other insolent and contumacious charges and aspersions on the Court of Directors, did address them in the printed letter aforesaid as follows. “I deny that Rajah Cheyt Sing was a native prince of India. Cheyt Sing is the son of a collector of the revenue of that province, which his arts, and the misfortunes of his master, enabled him to convert to a permanent and hereditary possession. This man, whom you have thus ranked among the princes of India, will be astonished, when he hears it, at an elevation so unlooked for, nor less at the independent rights which your commands have assigned him, — rights which are so foreign to his conceptions, that I doubt whether he will know in what language to assert them, unless the example which you have thought it consistent with justice, however opposite to policy, to show, of becoming his advocates against your own interests, should inspire any of your own servants to be his advisers and instructors.” And he did further, to bring into contempt the authority of the Company, and to excite a resistance to their lawful orders, frame a supposition that the Court of Directors had intended the restoration of the Rajah of Benares, and on that ground did presume in the said libel to calumniate, in disrespectful and contumelious terms, the policy of the Court of Directors, as well as the person whom he did conceive to be the object of their protection, as followeth. “Of the consequences of such a policy I forbear to speak. Most happily, the wretch whose hopes may be excited by the appearances in his favor is ill qualified to avail himself of them, and the force which is stationed in the province of Benares is sufficient to suppress any symptoms of internal sedition; but it cannot fail to create distrust and suspense in the minds both of the rulers and of the people, and such a state is always productive of disorder. But it is not in this partial consideration that I dread the effects of your commands; it is in your proclaimed indisposition against the first executive member of your first government in India. I almost shudder at the reflection of what might have happened, had these denunciations against your own minister, in favor of a man universally considered in this part of the world as justly attainted for his crimes, the murderer o
f your servants and soldiers, and the rebel to your authority, arrived two months earlier.”

  VI. That the said Warren Hastings did also presume to censure and asperse the Court of Directors for the moderate terms in which they had expressed their displeasure against him, as putting him under the necessity of stating in his defence a strong accusation against himself, and as implying in the said Court a consciousness that he was not guilty of the offences charged upon him, — being, as he asserts, in the resolutions of the Court of Directors, “arraigned and prejudged of a violation of national faith, in acts of such complicated aggravation, that, if they were true, no punishment SHORT OF DEATH could atone for the injury which the interest and credit of the public had sustained in them”; and he did therefore censure the said Court for applying no stronger or more criminating epithets than those of “improper, unwarrantable, and highly impolitic,” to an offence so by them charged, and by him described. And though it be true that the expressions aforesaid are much too reserved for the purpose of duly characterizing the offences of the said Hastings, yet was it in him most indecent to libel the Court of Directors for the same; and his implication, from the tenderness of the epithets and descriptions aforesaid used towards him, was not only indecent, but ungrounded, malicious, and scandalous, — he having himself highly, though truly, aggravated “the charge of the injuries done by him to the Rajah of Benares,” in order to bring the said Directors into contempt and suspicion, the paragraphs in the said libel being as follow.— “Here I must crave leave to say, that the terms ‘improper, unwarrantable, and highly impolitic’ are much too gentle, as deductions from such premises; and as every reader of the latter will obviously feel, as he reads, the deductions which inevitably belong to them, I will add, that the strict performance of solemn engagements on one part, followed by acts directly subversive of them and by total dispossession on the other, stamps on the perpetrators of the latter the guilt of the greatest possible violation of faith and justice.”— “There is an appearance of tenderness in this deviation from plain construction, of which, however meant, I have a right to complain; because it imposes on me the necessity of framing the terms of the accusation against myself, which you have only not made, but have stated the leading arguments to it so strongly, that no one who reads these can avoid making it, or not know it to have been intended.”

  VII. That the said Hastings, being well aware that his own declarations did contain the clearest condemnation of his own conduct from his own pen, did in the said libel attempt to overturn, frustrate, and render of none effect all the proofs to be given of prevarication, contradiction, and of opposition of action to principle, which can be used against men in public trust, and did contend that the same could not be used against him; and as if false assertions could be justified by factious motives, he did endeavor to do away the authority of his own deliberate, recorded declarations, entered by him in writing on the Council-Books of the Presidency; for, after asserting, but not attempting to prove, that his declarations were consistent with his conduct, he writes in the said libel as follows: For “were it otherwise, they were not to be made the rules of my conduct; and God forbid that every expression dictated by the impulse of present emergency, and unpremeditatedly uttered in the heat of party contention, should impose upon me the obligation of a fixed principle, and be applied to every variable occasion!”

  VIII. That the said Hastings, in order to draw the lawful dependence of the servants of the Company from the Court of Directors to a factious dependence on himself, did, in the libel aforesaid, treat the acts and appointments of their undoubted authority, when exercised in opposition to his arbitrary will, as ruinous to their affairs, in the following terms. “It is as well known to the Indian world as to the Court of English Proprietors, that the first declaratory instruments of the dissolution of my influence, in the year 1774, were Mr. John Bristow and Mr. Francis Fowke. By your ancient and known constitution the Governor has been ever held forth and understood to possess the ostensible powers of government; all the correspondence with foreign princes is conducted in his name; and every person resident with them for the management of your political concerns is understood to be more especially his representative, and of his choice: and such ought to be the rule; for how otherwise can they trust an agent nominated against the will of his principal? When the state of this administration was such as seemed to admit of the appointment of Mr. Bristow to the Residency of Lucknow without much diminution of my own influence, I gladly seized the occasion to show my readiness to submit to your commands; I proposed his nomination; he was nominated, and declared to be the agent of my own choice. Even this effect of my caution is defeated by your absolute command for his reappointment independent of me, and with the supposition that I should be adverse to it. — I am now wholly deprived of my official powers, both in the province of Oude, and in the zemindary of Benares.”

  IX. That, further to emancipate others and himself from due obedience to the Court of Directors, he did, in the libel aforesaid, enhance his services, which, without specification or proof, he did suppose in the said libel to be important and valuable, by representing them as done under their displeasure, and doth attribute his not having done more to their opposition, as followeth. “It is now a complete period of eleven years since I first received the first nominal charge of your affairs; in the course of it I have invariably had to contend, not with ordinary difficulties, but such as most unnaturally arose from the opposition of those very powers from which I primarily derived my authority, and which were required for the support of it. My exertions, though applied to an unvaried and consistent line of action, have been occasional and desultory; yet I please myself with the hope, that, in the annals of your dominion, which shall be written after the extinction of recent prejudices, this term of its administration will appear not the least conducive to the interests of the Company, nor the least reflective of the honor of the British name: and allow me to suggest the instructive reflection of what good might have been done, and what evil prevented, had due support been given to that administration which has performed such eminent and substantial services without it.”

  And the said Hastings, further to render the authority of the said Court perfectly contemptible, doth, in a strain of exultation for his having escaped out of a measure in which by his guilt he had involved the Company in a ruinous war, and out of which it had escaped by a sacrifice of almost all the territories before acquired (from that enemy which he had made) either by war or former treaties, and by the abandoning the Company’s allies to their mercy, attribute the said supposed services to his acting in such a manner as had on former occasions excited their displeasure, in the following words. “Pardon, Honorable Sirs, this digressive exultation. I cannot suppress the pride which I feel in this successful achievement of a measure so fortunate for your interests and the national honor; for that pride is the source of my zeal, so frequently exerted in your support, and never more happily than in those instances in which I have departed from the prescribed and beaten path of action, and assumed a responsibility which has too frequently drawn on me the most pointed effects of your displeasure. But however I may yield to my private feelings in thus enlarging on the subject, my motive in introducing it was immediately connected with its context, and was to contrast the actual state of your political affairs, derived from a happier influence, with that which might have attended an earlier dissolution of it”: and he did value himself upon “the patience and temper with which he had submitted to all the indignities which have been heaped upon him” (meaning, by the said Court of Directors) “in this long service”; and he did insolently attribute to an unusual strain of zeal for their service, that he “persevered in the VIOLENT MAINTENANCE OF HIS OFFICE.”

  X. That, in order further to excite the spirit of disobedience in the Company’s servants to the lawful authority set over them, he, the said Warren Hastings, did treat contemptuously and ironically the supposed disposition of the Company’s servants t
o obey the orders of the Court of Directors, in the words following. “The recall of Mr. Markham, who was known to be the public agent of my own nomination at Benares, and the reappointment of Mr. Francis Fowke by your order, contained in the same letter, would place it [the restoration of Cheyt Sing] beyond a doubt. This order has been obeyed; and whenever you shall be pleased to order the restoration of Cheyt Sing, I will venture to promise the same ready and exact submission in the other members of the Council.” And he did, in the postscript of the said letter, and as on recollection, endeavor to make a reparation of honor to his said colleagues, as if his expressions aforesaid had arisen from animosity to them, as follows. “Upon a careful revisal of what I have written, I fear that an expression which I have used, respecting the probable conduct of the board in the event of orders being received for the restoration of Cheyt Sing, may be construed as intimating a sense of dissatisfaction applied to transactions already past. — It is not my intention to complain of any one.”

  XI. That the said Hastings, in the acts of injury aforesaid to the Rajah of Benares, did assume and arrogate to himself an illegal authority therein, and did maintain that the acts done in consequence of that measure were not revocable by any subsequent authority, in the following words. “If you should proceed to order the restoration of Cheyt Sing to the zemindary, from which, by the powers which I legally possessed, and conceive myself legally bound to assert against any subsequent authority to the contrary derived from the same common source, he was dispossessed for crimes of the greatest enormity, and your Council shall resolve to execute the order, I will instantly give up my station and the service.”