by Edmund Burke
Thus, Gentlemen, have you delivered me over to a stranger; to a man unacquainted with government and business, and too opinionated to learn; to a man whose ignorance and prejudices operate to the neglect of every good measure, or the liberal coöperation with any that wish well to the public interests; to a man who, to pursue his own passions, plans, and designs, will certainly ruin all mine, as well as the Company’s affairs. His mismanagement and obstinacy have caused the loss of many lacs of my revenues, dissipated and embezzled, and every public consideration sacrificed to his vanity and private views. I beg to offer an instance in proof of my assertions, and to justify the hope I have that you will cause to be made good to me all the losses I have sustained by the maladministration and bad practices of your servants, according to all the account of receipts of former years, and which I made known to Lord Macartney, amongst other papers of information, in the beginning of his management in the collections. The district of Ongole produced annually, upon a medium of many years, 90,000 pagodas; but Lord Macartney, upon receiving a sum of money from Ramchundry let it out to him, in April last, for the inadequate rent of 50,000 pagodas per annum, diminishing, in this district alone, near half the accustomed revenues. After this manner hath he exercised his powers over the countries, to suit his own purposes and designs; and this secret mode has he taken to reduce the collections.
1st November, 1782. Copy of a Letter from the Nabob of Arcot to the Court of Directors, &c. Received 7th April, 1783.
The distresses which I have set forth in my former letters are now increased to such an alarming pitch by the imprudent measures of your Governor, and by the arbitrary and impolitic conduct pursued with the merchants and importers of grain, that the very existence of the Fort of Madras seems at stake, and that of the inhabitants of the settlement appears to have been totally overlooked: many thousands have died, and continue hourly to perish of famine, though the capacity of one of your youngest servants, with diligence and attention, by doing justice, and giving reasonable encouragement to the merchants, and by drawing the supplies of grain which the northern countries would have afforded, might have secured us against all those dreadful calamities. I had with much difficulty procured and purchased a small quantity of rice, for the use of myself, my family, and attendants, and with a view of sending off the greatest part of the latter to the northern countries, with a little subsistence in their hands. But what must your surprise be, when you learn that even this rice was seized by Lord Macartney, with a military force! and thus am I unable to provide for the few people I have about me, who are driven to such extremity and misery that it gives me pain to behold them. I have desired permission to get a little rice from the northern countries for the subsistence of my people, without its being liable to seizure by your sepoys: this even has been refused me by Lord Macartney. What must your feelings be, on such wanton cruelty exercised towards me, when you consider, that, of thousands of villages belonging to me, a single one would have sufficed for my subsistence!
22d March, 1783. Translation of a Letter from the Nabob of Arcot to the Chairman and Directors of the East India Company. Received from Mr. James Macpherson, 1st January, 1784.
I am willing to attribute this continued usurpation to the fear of detection in Lord Macartney: he dreads the awful day when the scene of his enormities will be laid open, at my restoration to my country, and when the tongues of my oppressed subjects will be unloosed, and proclaim aloud the cruel tyrannies they have sustained. These sentiments of his Lordship’s designs are corroborated by his sending, on the 10th instant, two gentlemen to me and my son, Amir-ul-Omrah; and these gentlemen from Lord Macartney especially set forth to me, and to my son, that all dependence on the power of the superior government of Bengal to enforce the intentions of the Company to restore my country was vain and groundless, — that the Company confided in his Lordship’s judgment and discretion, and upon his representations, and that if I, and my son, Amir-ul-Omrah, would enter into friendship with Lord Macartney, and sign a paper declaring all my charges and complaints against him to be false, that his Lordship might be induced to write to England that all his allegations against me and my son were not well founded, and, notwithstanding his declarations to withhold my country, yet, on these considerations, it might be still restored to me.
What must be your feelings for your ancient and faithful friend, on his receiving such insults to his honor and understanding from your principal servant, armed with your authority! From these manoeuvres, amongst thousands I have experienced, the truth must evidently appear to you, that I have not been loaded with those injuries and oppressions from motives of public service, but to answer the private views and interests of his Lordship and his secret agents: some papers to this point are inclosed; others, almost without number, must be submitted to your justice, when time and circumstances shall enable me fully to investigate those transactions. This opportunity will not permit the full representation of my load of injuries and distresses: I beg leave to refer you to my minister, Mr. Macpherson, for the papers, according to the inclosed list, which accompanied my last dispatches by the Rodney, which I fear have failed; and my correspondence with Lord Macartney subsequent to that period, such as I have been able to prepare for this opportunity, are inclosed.
Notwithstanding all the violent acts and declarations of Lord Macartney, yet a consciousness of his own misconduct was the sole incentive to the menaces and overtures he has held out in various shapes. He has been insultingly lavish in his expressions of high respect for my person; has had the insolence to say that all his measures flowed from his affectionate regard alone; has presumed to say that all his enmity and oppression were levelled at my son, Amir-ul-Omrah, to whom he before acknowledged every aid and assistance; and his Lordship being without any just cause or foundation for complaint against us, or a veil to cover his own violences, he has now had recourse to the meanness and has dared to intimate of my son, in order to intimidate me and to strengthen his own wicked purposes, to be in league with our enemies the French. You must doubtless be astonished, no less at the assurance than at the absurdity of such a wicked suggestion.
IN THE NABOB’S OWN HAND.
P.S. In my own handwriting I acquainted Mr. Hastings, as I now do my ancient friends the Company, with the insult offered to my honor and understanding, in the extraordinary propositions sent to me by Lord Macartney, through two gentlemen, on the 10th instant, so artfully veiled with menaces, hopes, and promises. But how can Lord Macartney add to his enormities, after his wicked and calumniating insinuations, so evidently directed against me and my family, through my faithful, my dutiful, and beloved son, Amir-ul-Omrah, who, you well know, has been ever born and bred amongst the English, whom I have studiously brought up in the warmest sentiments of affection and attachment to them, — sentiments that in his maturity have been his highest ambition to improve, insomuch that he knows no happiness but in the faithful support of our alliance and connection with the English nation?
12th August, and Postscript of the 16th August, 1783. Translation of a Letter to the Chairman and Directors of the East India Company. Received from Mr. James Macpherson, 14th January, 1784.
Your astonishment and indignation will be equally raised with mine, when you hear that your President has dared, contrary to your intention, to continue to usurp the privileges and hereditary powers of the Nabob of the Carnatic, your old and unshaken friend, and the declared ally of the king of Great Britain.
I will not take up your time by enumerating the particular acts of Lord Macartney’s violence, cruelty, and injustice: they, indeed, occur too frequently, and fall upon me and my devoted subjects and country too thick, to be regularly related. I refer you to my minister, Mr. James Macpherson, for a more circumstantial account of the oppressions and enormities by which he has brought both mine and the Company’s affairs to the brink of destruction. I trust that such flagrant violations of all justice, honor, and the faith of treaties will receive the severest marks of your disp
leasure, and that Lord Macartney’s conduct, in making use of your name and authority as a sanction for the continuance of his usurpation, will be disclaimed with the utmost indignation, and followed with the severest punishment. I conceive that his Lordship’s arbitrary retention of my country and government can only originate in his insatiable cravings, in his implacable malevolence against me, and through fear of detection, which must follow the surrender of the Carnatic into my hands, of those nefarious proceedings which are now suppressed by the arm of violence and power.
I did not fail to represent to the supreme government of Bengal the deplorable situation to which I was reduced, and the unmerited persecutions I have unremittingly sustained from Lord Macartney; and I earnestly implored them to stretch forth a saving arm, and interpose that controlling power which was vested in them, to check rapacity and presumption, and preserve the honor and faith of the Company from violation. The Governor-General and Council not only felt the cruelty and injustice I had suffered, but were greatly alarmed for the fatal consequences that might result from the distrust of the country powers in the professions of the English, when they saw the Nabob of the Carnatic, the friend of the Company, and the ally of Great Britain, thus stripped of his rights, his dominions, and his dignity, by the most fraudulent means, and under the mask of friendship. The Bengal government had already heard both the Mahrattas and the Nizam urge, as an objection to an alliance with the English, the faithless behavior of Lord Macartney to a prince whose life had been devoted and whose treasures had been exhausted in their service and support; and they did not hesitate to give positive orders to Lord Macartney for the restitution of my government and authority, on such terms as were not only strictly honorable, but equally advantageous to my friends the Company: for they justly thought that my honor and dignity and sovereign rights were the first objects of my wishes and ambition. But how can I paint my astonishment at Lord Macartney’s presumption in continuing his usurpation after their positive and reiterated mandates, and, as if nettled by their interference, which he disdained, in redoubling the fury of his violence, and sacrificing the public and myself to his malice and ungovernable passions?
I am, Gentlemen, at a loss to conceive where his usurpation will stop and have an end. Has he not solemnly declared that the assignment was only made for the support of war? and if neither your instructions nor the orders of his superiors at Bengal were to be considered as effectual, has not the treaty of peace virtually determined the period of his tyrannical administration? But so far from surrendering the Carnatic into my hands, he has, since that event, affixed advertisements to the walls and gates of the Black Town for letting to the best bidder the various districts for the term of three years, — and has continued the Committee of Revenue, which you positively ordered to be abolished, to whom he has allowed enormous salaries, from 6000 to 4000 pagodas per annum, which each member has received from the time of his appointment, though his Lordship well knows that most of them are by your orders disqualified by being my principal creditors.
If those acts of violence and outrage had been productive of public advantage, I conceive his Lordship might have held them forward in extenuation of his conduct; but whilst he cloaks his justification under the veil of your records, it is impossible to refute his assertions or to expose to you their fallacy; and when he is no longer able to support his conduct by argument, he refers to those records, where, I understand, he has exercised all his sophistry and malicious insinuations to render me and my family obnoxious in the eyes of the Company and the British nation. And when the glorious victories of Sir Eyre Coote have been rendered abortive by a constant deficiency of supplies, — and when, since the departure of that excellent general to Bengal, whose loss I must ever regret, a dreadful famine, at the close of last year, occasioned by his Lordship’s neglect to lay up a sufficient stock of grain at a proper season, and from his prohibitory orders to private merchants, — and when no exertion has been made, nor advantage gained over the enemy, — when Hyder’s death and Tippoo’s return to his own dominions operated in no degree for the benefit of our affairs, — in short, when all has been a continued series of disappointment and disgrace under Lord Macartney’s management, (and in him alone has the management been vested,) — I want words to convey those ideas of his insufficiency, ignorance, and obstinacy which I am convinced you would entertain, had you been spectators of his ruinous and destructive conduct.
But against me, and my son, Amir-ul-Omrah, has his Lordship’s vengeance chiefly been exerted: even the Company’s own subordinate zemindars have found better treatment, probably because they were more rich; those of Nizanagoram have been permitted, contrary to your pointed orders, to hold their rich zemindaries at the old disproportionate rate of little more than a sixth part of the real revenue; and my zemindar of Tanjore, though he should have regarded himself equally concerned with us in the event of the war, and from whose fertile country many valuable harvests have been gathered in, which have sold at a vast price, has, I understand, only contributed, last year, towards the public exigencies, the very inconsiderable sum of one lac of pagodas, and a few thousand pagodas’ worth of grain.
I am much concerned to acquaint you that ever since the peace a dreadful famine has swept away many thousands of the followers and sepoys’ families of the army, from Lord Macartney’s neglect to send down grain to the camp, though the roads are crowded with vessels: but his Lordship has been too intent upon his own disgraceful schemes to attend to the wants of the army. The negotiation with Tippoo, which he has set on foot through the mediation of Monsieur Bussy, has employed all his thoughts, and to the attainment of that object he will sacrifice the dearest interests of the Company to gratify his malevolence against me, and for his own private advantages. The endeavor to treat with Tippoo, through the means of the French, must strike you, Gentlemen, as highly improper and impolitic; but it must raise your utmost indignation to hear, that, by intercepted letters from Bussy to Tippoo, as well as from their respective vakeels, and from various accounts from Cuddalore, we have every reason to conclude that his Lordship’s secretary, Mr. Staunton, when at Cuddalore, as his agent to settle the cessation of arms with the French, was informed of all their operations and projects, and consequently that Lord Macartney has secretly connived at Monsieur Bussy’s recommendation to Tippoo to return into the Carnatic, as the means of procuring the most advantageous terms, and furnishing Lord Macartney with the plea of necessity for concluding a peace after his own manner: and what further confirms the truth of this fact is, that repeated reports, as well as the alarms of the inhabitants to the westward, leave us no reason to doubt that Tippoo is approaching towards us. His Lordship has issued public orders that the garrison store of rice, for which we are indebted to the exertions of the Bengal government, should be immediately disposed of, and has strictly forbid all private grain to be sold; by which act he effectually prohibits all private importation of grain, and may eventually cause as horrid a famine as that which we experienced at the close of last year from the same shortsighted policy and destructive prohibitions of Lord Macartney.
But as he has the fabrication of the records in his own hands, he trusts to those partial representations of his character and conduct, because the signatures of those members of government whom he seldom consults are affixed, as a public sanction; but you may form a just idea of their correctness and propriety, when you are informed that his Lordship, upon my noticing the heavy disbursements made for secret service money, ordered the sums to be struck off, and the accounts to be erased from the cash-book of the Company; and I think I cannot give you a better proof of his management of my country and revenues than by calling your attention to his conduct in the Ongole province, and by referring you to his Lordship’s administration of your own jaghire, from whence he has brought to the public account the sum of twelve hundred pagodas for the last year’s revenue, yet blazons forth his vast merits and exertions, and expects to receive the thanks of his Committee and Co
uncil.
I will beg leave to refer you to my minister, James Macpherson, Esq., for a more particular account of my sufferings and miseries, to whom I have transmitted copies of all papers that passed with his Lordship.