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Chapter 1 – First Period of Indian Service

Warren Hastings was born at Daylesford, in Worcestershire, in December, 1732. He was of good and ancient stock; although Burke, the son of a country solicitor, has described his origin as low, obscure, and vulgar – an unfounded calumny ventilated, like many others of the sort, by Sir Philip Francis. One of his name certainly held the manor of Daylesford in the time of Henry the Second; but the family suffered heavily in the great civil war of the seventeenth century, when John Hastings, then at Yelford Hastings in Oxfordshire, lost the greater part of his lands and his money in the service of Charles the First; and in 1715 Daylesford was sold to a merchant of Gloucester by Warren Hastings’ great-grandfather. Subsequent generations must have been pressing rather closely on each other, for Warren Hastings himself was born only seventeen years later, his father having married, without means, at the age of fifteen. The poor mother died a few days after giving birth to her second son; while the father married again, took holy orders when he was old enough, and died obscurely in the West Indies; having failed through improvidence in most of life’s affairs, though he succeeded in accidentally producing a very remarkable son.

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Perhaps no man of undisputed genius ever inherited less, in mind or money, from his parents, or owed them fewer obligations of any kind. It is not possible to find in Pynaston Hastings any trace of the character or intellectual qualities of his son; the mother died in child-birth, while the father seems to have abandoned him very soon afterwards; for in a petition presented to the Lord Chancellor by their uncle in 1733, on behalf of Warren Hastings and his sister Anne, it is said that their father had withdrawn himself to some distant place, leaving the children wholly unprovided for. The boy was at first placed by the grandfather at a charity school; but at the age of twelve he had the good kick to be sent by his uncle, who had taken charge of him, to Westminster. The system and mode of life at the large public schools of England, with all their grave deficiencies in regard to methodical teaching, have been usually good for the development of character and scholarship in boys of real intellectual ability. Their innate tastes and aptitudes, which need only free play and example, find room and stimulus, where the average schoolboy only discovers that loose discipline means liberty to be idle. Hastings worked hard, was good on the river, and was elected to a king’s scholarship in the year 1747, as the names engraved on the wall of his dormitory still testify. But his uncle died, and he was made over to the care of a distant connection, who happened to be a director of the East India Company, and who insisted, against the remonstrance of the Westminster head-master, that Hastings should give up his high hopes of distinction at a university, and should learn accounts from Mr. Smith of Christ’s Hospital

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before going out to Bengal as a writer on the Company’s establishment. It was thus by a series of fortuitous events that, after entering the world in very unpromising circumstances, after being passed on from one kinsman to another, and after losing all his natural guardians, Warren Hastings came to be shipped for India in the year 1750, being then seventeen years old, about the same age as his father when the son was born.

All readers of Macaulay’s famous Essays have some general knowledge of the political condition of India at the time when Warren Hastings landed in Calcutta, toward the end of 1750. The dynasty of the Mogul emperors, founded by Baber in the sixteenth century, was the longest and strongest that had ever ruled in the country. The great expanse of open and comparatively level country, which stretches from the Indus and the Himalayas south-eastward to the Ganges and the sea, had been completely under the imperial sway; the Deccan was a province of the empire, and its jurisdiction was recognised in almost all parts of the Indian continent, except the extreme south. The emperors exercised dominion, in fact, over an immense collection of districts, provinces, subordinate chiefships, and kingdoms; in most of which Mahomedans had settled, had converted great numbers of the population, and monopolised almost all the chief offices and commands. Under the descendants of Baber this dominion lasted in full vigour about one hundred and fifty years; but it was ill welded, heterogeneous, incoherent, and mainly held together by a foreign mercenary army and the constant influx of fresh blood from the original homes of the ruling race

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beyond the Afghan mountains. Its strength and stability were already much shaken when Aurungzebe’s death, in 1710, closed a remarkable series of able monarchs; and it slipped so rapidly out of the feeble hands of his successors that in 1750 it was in a state of widespread dilapidation. All the chief native principalities – with whom, as the “country powers,” we had so much fighting and treaty-making during the remainder of the century – were just then in the earlier stages of formation; their founders were collecting armies, scrambling for lands, and striking openly for separate independence; the territory of the empire was being pulled to pieces like a child’s map. The sack of Delhi in 1740 by Nadir Shah the Persian had ruined the capital and destroyed the resources of the imperial government. Then followed the invasions of Ahmed Shah, one of the captains of Nadir Shah’s host, and the founder of the present dynasty of Afghan Amirs; who descended upon India with a swarm of Duranis, broke down the defences of the empire’s north-western frontier, and seized all the adjoining provinces. In the Central Punjab the Sikhs were in full insurrection; the Mahrattas had broken loose in the west, had subdued or devastated great tracts of country, had overrun Central India, and were levying tribute throughout the richest districts of the empire. The death in 1748 of the great Nizam, who had made himself virtually king of the Deccan, had thrown Southern India into the confusion of the Carnatic war. And even in the rich plain which extends from the Himalayan mountains to the Bay of Bengal – the country which has always been the seat of empires in India and the source of their prosperity – the Delhi

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emperors were fast losing all authority; they could neither keep their troops in the field nor collect the revenue. An able and ambitions adventurer, usually from Central Asia, obtained the appointment to a governorship and proceeded to turn it into a family possession; or a bold military leader extorted from the Mogul the nominal title of Viceroy, Commander-in-Chief, or of some other great office under the crown, which afforded him a pretext for levying troops and collecting revenue on his own account. In Rohilcund the Rohilla chiefs, who were mostly Afghan soldiers of fortune, had in this manner established themselves as nominal feudatories of the empire, but in reality as independent usurpers of the governing power, and of the crown lands and revenue. In Oude the Nawab Vizier (or Vicegerent) was laying the foundations of an extensive sovereignty; while Bengal was ruled by Ali Verdi Khan, a sagacious and capable governor who kept on good terms with the English traders at Calcutta, and whose chief concern was to repel the incursions of the predatory Mahrattas.

The course of events which first attracted English commercial enterprise toward India, and latterly opened the way to territorial acquisitions, belongs to and is connected with the current of general history. The conquest of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and of the adjoining territories by barbarian invaders from North-Eastern and Central Asia, interrupted the old trade-routes overland to India by Syria and Bagdad, and from the Black Sea down the Tipis into the Persian Gulf. At first the trade shifted to Egypt and the Red Sea; but when the Turkish Sultan, Selim, overran Syria

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and seized Egypt in 1516, all the lines of commerce overland with Southern Asia were broken. This closing of the ancient trade routes diverted into new channels the adventurous mercantile spirit of Europe. The cities of the inland sea had lost their former advantage of position: Venice was cut off from her Asiatic communications; and the career of mixed commerce and conquest was taken over by the ocean-going nations of the West. In America, England and France contended during one hundred years for territorial predominance by conquest and colonisation; in India the struggle began with commercial competition. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century the colonial and commercial rivalry between the two nations had reached its climax all over the world; and the naval superiority of England was gradually developing out of the contest. In the Indian peninsula the news of the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) had caused a formal cessation of hostilities between the French and English; but in the same year began the war between the rival claimants for the rulership of the Carnatic province, in which the French and English trading companies took opposite sides, when the incomparable superiority of Dupleix and Bussy gave the victory at first to the French candidate.

Under the system, first invented by Dupleix, of acquiring a dominant influence in the political disputes of the native princes by maintaining a force drilled and armed on the European model, France had acquired in 1750 a decided ascendency. A king of unofficial warfare went on for two or three years 1, but the system of Dupleix, whose real genius has been somewhat overpraised, relied mainly upon complicated and very

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unscrupulous intrigues with the native competitors for rule in the Indian peninsula; a network in which he himself became ultimately entangled. The English were compelled, very reluctantly, to follow his example: they were forced to contract alliances and to join in the loose scuffling warfare that went on round them; and they soon proved themselves better players than the French at the round game of political hazard. There was great jealousy and disunion, as usual, among the French leaders in India: their ambitious designs alarmed their native friends; and latterly some unlucky enterprises of the French party, together with the discovery in France that these military operations were loading the Company with debt, induced the French Government to recall Dupleix, and to sign with the English in India a treaty renouncing on both all further interference with disputes between native States. The position thus abandoned was never regained by France; for when regular hostilities began again two years later, Lally was beaten after hard fighting in South India; and Clive’s victory at Plassey (1757) opened out for the English a much longer and more important field of war and diplomacy in Bengal, where the French from that time forward had no footing.

The earliest years of Warren Hastings’ residence in Bengal fell, therefore, within that period when the East India Company first began to interfere systematically in the quarrels of the country. The example of interference set by the French, the practice of following suit in India .to the lead in Europe, and of extending to Asia any war that broke out between France and England at home; the perils of the tumultuous discord all round their

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frontiers, and the opportunities offered by such a state of affairs – all these risks and temptations were inevitably bringing the English in India at this time upon the political stage. Up to this epoch they had done their best, on principle, to avoid fighting, to abide by the seashore, and to keep clear of territorial responsibilities; but from 1757 commenced the era when conquest became allied to commerce, and when trade carried and followed the flag into the interior of India.

Hastings lived two years at Calcutta, working as assistant in the Secretary’s office; he was transferred in 1753 to the factory at Kasimbazar, near Moorshedabad, on the Ganges, where his duties seem to have been connected with the silk spinning business, and in 1755 (or 56) he was promoted to the Factory Council. Factories were trading posts and warehouses established at some of the principal commercial towns, where goods sent out from Europe were sold, and Indian produce or manufactures collected for despatch home. Each of them seems to have been managed in early days by its own president and council; subordinate of course to the chief Presidencies at the seaports. Most of them were fortified and guarded by armed men, and within their limits the authority of the chief agents was practically unlimited. Within four months of Hastings’ arrival at Kasimbazar occurred the death of Ali Verdi Khan, the old Nawab of Bengal, an event which at once changed the aspect of affairs in Bengal, because it laid open that province, one of the richest in India, to the rising flood of discord and misrule that was spreading all round. Ali Verdi Khan was one of the imperial viceroys who had made himself independent; his firm government had maintained a

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barrier against external invasion, and had kept peace within his Borders; but the caprice and violence of his grandson and successor, Suraj-u-Dowlah, produced a state of terror, insecurity, and confusion. Incapable despotism is short-lived anywhere, especially in Asia; and when surrounded by disorganisation it has no chance at all. The instinct of self-preservation at once finds its natural remedy in conspiracy and revolt; the strongest elements in society rise rapidly to the surface, and the best and boldest men come to the front. In 1756 no one in Bengal regarded the English trading company as a political force, or supposed that Suraj-u-Dowlah’s quarrel with them would speedily lead to his defeat and death, and to the reduction of his kingdom under their authority. His first attack on them was quite unprovoked. The English, hearing that war with France was just breaking out in Europe, began to fortify Calcutta. The Nawab ordered them to stop the work; the English were obliged to disobey, for he had not the power and might not have had the will to protect them against the French. But their refusal enraged the Nawab, who at once surrounded the factory at Kasimbazar, plundered it, imprisoned the Company’s servants, Warren Hastings among the rest, and marched on Calcutta with ten thousand men, disregarding repeated offers of submission to all his demands. Then followed, in June, 1756, the tragedy of the Black Hole, when one hundred and forty-six English prisoners were crushed for a night into a room about twenty feet long by fourteen in width, with two small grated windows; of whom twenty-two men and one woman survived till the morning. The Calcutta factory was destroyed; all the English trading

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stations in Bengal were broken up, and the main body of the Company’s servants took refuge upon a little island in the river below Calcutta, where they encamped like a shipwrecked crew, awaiting rescue. They were relieved in December by the arrival of Admiral Watson’s fleet bringing Colonel Clive and some troops, when the scene was again changed by the recovery of Calcutta and the taking of Hooghly, the Nawab’s chief military post near Calcutta. Suraj-u-Dowlah, who had returned to Moorshedabad, reappeared with an army before Fort William, but after an indecisive night engagement he made peace with the English and restored their factories. In the East treaties mean little more than temporary truces; the Nawab, naturally anxious to strengthen himself against formidable intruders within his own borders, began to negotiate with the French at Chaudernagore, and was obviously dangerous and untrustworthy; so hostilities began in June, and were practically finished in a fortnight at Plassey. Suraj-u-Dowlah was first defeated and next murdered by his own officers; the throne became vacant, and the country masterless; whereupon there ensued the era of puppet Nawabs set up by the English, who tried to reserve political power without administrative responsibility, a régime which produced more scandalous abuses and oppressions than the worst of all purely native governments.

Warren Hastings had been released from detention at Moorshedabad on the security of Mr. Vynett, chief of a neighbouring Dutch factory, and had opened a correspondence with the English at Fulta, the island to which they had fled from Calcutta. Drake, the Calcutta governor, sent him a letter for the Nawab full

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of humility and submission, asking for a supply of provisions; but Hastings, who knew that the Nawab had his own difficulties, preferred to wait until he could be approached in a less suppliant tone; rightly judging that nothing could be gained by falling on their knees before Suraj-u-Dowlah. Some secret letters between the Fulta party and the powerful native bankers at Moorshedabad, who feared and detested the Nawab, also passed through the bands of Hastings, but the only effect was to make it unsafe for him to remain at Moorshedabad; so he escaped to Chunar, and thence vent clown the river Ganges to join the Calcutta refugees at Fulta. Here he met the widow of Captain Campbell, whom he afterwards married, and in 1758 he wrote to a friend that he was very happy, and found every good quality in his wife. But the poor lady died in 1759 lifter bearing him two children, neither of whom survived childhood; and of this brief episode in his eventful life only the bare facts remain, like the names and dates on some obscure stone among the historic monuments of a great church.

When the fleet arrived he returned to Calcutta, which was recovered after a slight resistance. He bore arms as a volunteer with the troops under Clive’s command, in the fighting round Calcutta and the taking of Hooghly fort; and lm had some share in conducting an abortive negotiation with the Nawab himself. When Mir Jafir succeeded, after Suraj-u-Dowlah’s defeat and death, to the Nawabship, Hastings was sent up as assistant to Mr. Scrafton, the Company’s representative with the new government at Moorshedabad, and afterwards was appointed to succeed him. The somewhat complicated

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nature of the Company’s occupations and interests that quarter rendered his duties proportionately multifarious. The English were already the dominant political power in Bengal, so that their agent at the court was surrounded by intrigues; while seems to have retained his connection with the neighbouring factory, and to have been charged with the collection of revenue assigned by Mir Jafir to the Company. He also discovered and remedied a flaw in the documents under which Mir Jafir had granted to the Company their first considerable territorial acquisition – a, service on winch Mr. Gleig1 lays much stress, though in those days treaties and title-deeds were hardly worth the trouble of verbal rectification, being usually construed by the changing light of circumstance. Some of his correspondence about this time with Clive, who was then his chief at Calcutta, is quoted by Mr. Gleig; the subjects are unimportant, but the style of the two writers, especially of Clive, which has a Cromwellian tone about it, is well marked. Hastings took some official umbrage at finding that Nuncomar, who was already figuring as an important agent of the English, had been sent to collect revenue within his jurisdiction without formal notice to himself; and Clive replied briefly that no slight was intended.

The position in winch Hastings found himself at the court of the Nawab Mir Jafir must have been one of considerable difficulty, for the English soon made the discovery, very often made by them since, that the establishment of puppet princes, which at first seems an ingenious and convenient device for keeping power and dropping

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responsibility, is an invention that almost invariably fails. To upset a hostile Eastern ruler and to set up a friendly one, are simple remedies for obvious incommodities; but the client prince is soon found to be entirely dependent on his patrons for support, and to have an awkward though natural propensity for saddling them with the blame for all his misfortunes, crimes, and blunders. Mir Jafir, who owed his place to the Company, had been obliged to pay heavily for it in land and cash, while the exorbitant pretensions of the Company to trade privileges disorganised his revenue; and the whole province was distracted by foreign attacks and internal conspiracy. He was threatened by Mahratta inroads; and Shah Alam, the new emperor, who was a wandering fugitive at Benares when his father died, had entered Bengal with some troops to upset the Nawab’s authority. Shah Alam defeated his troops, very nearly took Patna, ravaged Behar with the help of a band of Mahrattas, threw the province into complete disorder, and considerably damaged the financial resources of the Company, who had to find troops for expelling him, while the Nawab’s wasted land revenue could not find the money to pay them. Mir Jafir’s own regiment mutinied; his eldest son was killed by a stroke of lightning; conspiracies were forming all round him; the English pressed him for more than he could pay, and he began to find his situation intolerable. He did his best to shake off or counterbalance the English predominance by making overtures to the emperor and to the Dutch; by making away with ill-wishers and suspicions characters, and offering large presents to the Company’s agents. But his affairs were in a plight so

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desperate as to be beyond his capacity for retrieving them; and on the departure of Clive, whose head and hand atone kept the whole intricate machinery at work, he was speedily dethroned by Mr. Vansittart, who put up Mir Kasim Alli in his stead. Warren Hastings seems to have felt some sympathy with the unlucky Mir Jafir until he caused two widows of Ali Verdi Khan to be barbarously executed; but in any case the English agent at Moorshedabad was obliged to follow and act upon the policy of his principals at Calcutta, and he probably saw that Mir Jafir’s administration must come to an end. Mir Kasim proved a worse bargain to the Company than Mir Jafir; he found the treasury empty, the pay of his army in heavy arrears, and a large debt due as usual to his English backers, who had taken the opportunity of the change in Nawabs to tighten instead of relaxing their restrictions on his independence, and to increase the abuses of their private trade. There was, it must be confessed, almost as much miserable incapacity just thon at Calcutta as at Moorshedabad, for the two Nawabs, Jafir Alli and Mir Kasim, could hardly have been weaker administrators than the Presidents, Holwell and Vansittart, who succeeded Clive, particularly since front 1761 Vansittart was incessantly thwarted and overridden by a majority of his Council. Moreover, Clive, before leaving India, had sent home a public despatch rebuking the Honourable Company somewhat roughly for harsh and injudicious treatment of faithful servants, for unjust and unworthy language, for jobbery and favouritism. To which the London Board replied that they had taken into consideration the gross indignities and insults conveyed by their President’s letter, and positively

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ordered the immediate dismissal of all those who had signed it. Clive, who was in England, cared little for the wrath of the Directors, but others were turned out, and Hastings was transferred to fill one of these vacancies.

His removal from the Patna agency was probably very unfortunate, for he had already shown judgment and moderation; while he was replaced by a man absolutely unfit to deal with a complex and dangerous juncture of affairs. Mr. Ellis soon brought the altercations with the Nawab so near to the brink of an open rupture that Hastings was despatched again to Patna early in 1762, with a mission to inquire into the causes of some violent disputes that had Broken out between the native government and the English factories, and to look into certain rumours that the Nawab was corresponding with the Vizier of Oude. The reports which Hastings submitted betray no bias against the Nawab; he gives an impartial account of the misconduct on both sides; he appreciates the Nawab’s difficulties, showing that the Nawab’s discontent and the country’s troubles were largely attributable to the high-handed rapacity of persons trading or plundering under the Company’s flag or uniform. In a letter which he wrote to the Governor in 1762 he protested vigorously against the abuses that he found prevailing:

“I beg leave to lay before you a grievance which calls loudly for redress. I mean the oppressions committed under sanction of the English name, and through want of spirit in the nabob’s subjects to oppose them. This evil, I am well assured, is not confined to our dependants alone, but is practised all over the country by people assuming the habits of our sepoys and calling themselves our gomastahs. As, on such occasions, the great power of the English intimidates

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the people from resistance, so, on the other hand, the indolence of the Bengalees, or the difficulty of gaining access to those who might do them justice, prevents our having knowledge of the oppressions, and encourages their continuance, to the great, though unmerited, scandal of our government.”

In short, the English were too strong and the Bengalees were too weak; the Company had decreed to itself exemption from the authority of the native officials, and every one else naturally emulated this shilling example. The enormous profit of the private trade, which claimed to pass duty free, demoralised the English trading community and all who belonged to it. “Nothing,” wrote Hastings, “will ever reach the root of these evils till some certain boundary be fixed between the Nawab’s authority and our own privilege;” and he made proposals for adjusting quarrels upon this basis. The Nawab’s objections, he remarked, were not so much to the framing of proper regulations, as to the absence of any kind of authority to enforce their execution; but such an authority the majority in Council were not inclined to provide. After three months Hastings returned to Calcutta having accomplished nothing; and he went up again to Patna before the end of the year with Vansittart, who had determined to settle matters, which were growing worse and worse, in person. The English Company was privileged to carry on the shipping trade at the seaports free of customs; but their agent dishonestly pretended to exemption for their goods from all tolls and duties levied in the interior of Bengal, to the great damage of the inland revenue. Vansittart and Hastings settled with the Nawab a scheme for ending these malpractices and placing the whole inland trade upon an

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equal footing; but it was prematurely disclosed, and roused furious opposition from a majority of his Council, who condemned and cancelled the President’s agreement, and passed resolutions upholding their factories in resistance to the Nawab’s revenue officers. Hastings steadily supported the Governor in opposing these resolutions; and in one instance he voted against them alone, contending with all his strength for honest dealing and free trade. He said:

“As I have formerly lived among the country people in a very inferior station, and at a time when we were subject to the most slavish dependence on the government, and have met with the greatest indulgence, and even respect, from zemindars and officers of government, I can with the greater confidence deny the justice of this opinion; and add further, from repeated experience, that if our people, instead of erecting themselves into lords and oppressors of the country, confine themselves to an honest and fair trade, they will be everywhere courted and respected.”

The Nawab, greatly incensed, fell back at fast on the expedient of abolishing all internal duties on trade, whereby he deprived the English of all the advantages of their unjust insistence on special exemption. The Calcutta Council denounced this act as treacherous and exceedingly damaging to them, and when Hastings who had been Vansittart’s sole supporter in these debates objected to this denunciation as unreasonable, there followed high words with one Mr. Batson, who so grossly insulted Hastings that he sent him a challenge, though the duel was stopped.

With such politicians at, Calcutta, and with such an agent at Patna as Mr. Ellis, who was irritable, headstrong, and incompetent, some collision was evidently

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imminent. It came in 1763 when Mr. Ellis, hearing that the Nawab was about to attack the English factory, anticipated him by the bold stroke of seizing Patna city; but his troops were soon dispersed, and all the Englishmen were captured, to be massacred afterwards in cold blood. The Company declared war against Mir Kasim, and very soon drove him across the Ganges, whereupon Mir Jafir was reinstated in the Nawabship, which he held in a feeble and fictitious manner until the next year, when he died. Hastings, who was on the Council at Calcutta, recorded in a minute his disapproval of these proceedings; stating that his purpose had been to resign the service, since his unavailing protests had only kept alive the disputes and dissensions round the Council table; but that as a dangerous and troublesome war had now fulfilled his forebodings, he thought it his duty to remain for the time. In 1764, however, Vansittart left for England, and Hastings followed early in 1765, leaving Bengal affairs in great disarray until Lord Clive returned to set them in some order. In the meanwhile Shuja-u-Dowlah, the Vizier of Oude, had advanced upon Patna from the north, but had been defeated at Buxar by Major Munro, who followed him across the Ganges into his own territory and took Allahabad – an event of historical importance, as it marks the first step beyond the northwest frontier of Bengal and Behar into a wider and thenceforward unlimited field of war and politics. The Court of Directors foresaw the consequences of these extended operations and strenuously disapproved insisting earnestly upon a strict adherence to the commercial character and interests of the Company; but the arrangements concluded were necessarily confirmed, and Lord

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Clive’s acceptance next year of the Dewanni virtually established the English as a territorial power in India.

It must be allowed that Warren Hastings had passed with credit and integrity through the most discreditable and corrupt period in the annals of the East India Company. In the midst of a general scramble for money he never stooped to gains that were sordid or dishonest; and at a time when most of the English were either intoxicated by power or infuriated by misfortune demoralised by the cruelty and treachery which they saw all round them – Hastings preserved, so far as can be known from contemporary record, a character for equity and moderation. He engaged in private trade and contracts, as was the custom at that time of all the Company’s servants whose chief emoluments came from that recognised source. But he had no turn for commerce, which probably interested him less than politics; and Raymond, the French translator of the Sair Matakharin, says that he was obliged to borrow money from an Armenian merchant for his expenses in going home.

For the period itself the only excuse to be made is that it was very short, and so crowded with strange incidents, perilous adventures, and precipitate changes, that one cannot wonder if the actors in such a drama lost their heads. In June 1756 the Company had been turned out of Fort William and all their up-country factories in Bengal; part of their establishment was in the Black Hole; the rest, half-starved, upon an island in the Hooghly river. Within twelve months the Company were virtually lords of Bengal, and all the treasures of the State and resources of the provinces were at their absolute disposal; the French had lost all their settlements; their trade, up to

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that time considerable, was annihilated, and the export business of the country had become an English monopoly. A few years later the Company found themselves de facto rulers of Behar, the great province that extends from Bengal proper westward up to the Ganges at Benares, four hundred miles from Calcutta. They had come for commerce and had found conquest; they had been coin- to choose between their own expulsion and the overthrow of the native government; they fought for their own band, and won so easily that, they found the whole power and responsibility of administration thrust upon them without warning, experience, or time for preparation.

A government that is upset at the first touch hardly imposes much respect or forbearance at the bands of adversaries who are restrained by no principles of public policy. A country that can be subdued by a mere band of some fifteen hundred foreigners, and reduced at once to a chaotic state of disorder and helplessness, so that it falls suddenly and completely into the hands of a set of trading adventurers uncontrolled by any regular authority or by the public opinion of their own people – such a prize is a, terrible temptation to the morality of the victors. From 1760 to 1765, the interval between Clive’s leaving and returning to Bengal, there was literally no effective control or governing authority in the provinces; and the evils of political anarchy were enormously enhanced by using the English flag as the standard and trade-mark of most unjust and injurious commercial privileges. At this time, and for many years afterwards, it was a principle with the East India Company to avoid and disown the assumption of any power that might imply territorial independence; they feared that it might involve them

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with foreign nations in India, and that their sovereign rights would be at once claimed by the Crown at home. It was chiefly upon this ground that they pursued and countenanced the disastrous method of putting up native princes to reign nominally over countries where the English were complete masters of all the springs of authority and sources of revenue; nor is it surprising that Lord Clive on his return found the settlement in a deplorable situation – “a presidency divided, headstrong and licentious, a government without nerves, a treasury without money, and a service without subordination, discipline, or public spirit.”

It has been necessary to refer, though as briefly as possible, to the condition of Bengal when Warren Hastings left it, in order that the general course and connexion of the affairs of his time may be fairly understood; and for the same reason some mention must be made of Lord Clive’s proceedings when he took up again the governorship of the Presidency in September, 1765. Lord Clive came out armed with full powers to restore internal order, and to extricate the Company from external complications. He laid down strict regulations for checking commercial abuses and official corruption. He made some attempts to improve the administration; and he took one step of the highest importance, when he accepted from the nominal Emperor of Delhi a grant of the Dewanni of Bengal, Behar, and Orissa. The Dewan under the empire had been the imperial commissioner for the revenue and finance of a province, who was charged with the duty of superintending and accounting for the collection of revenue, defraying the expenses of the imperial troops within his circle, providing for the cost of

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the civil establishments, and remitting the balance to headquarters. The acquisition of the Dewanni obtained for the Company its first formal status of recognised jurisdiction in India; it gave a certain regularity to their proceedings and stability to their position. The English were henceforward something more than a formidable body of irresponsible foreigners interested only in private enterprise, although their nominal rank and functions in the State were still far from representing the real force of their actual interference with its machinery. Out of the revenues which they controlled they now maintained a standing disciplined army; they held the sword as well as the purse; foreign trade and foreign politics were both entirely in their hands; they confirmed their own commercial privileges and they arranged external alliances; the remaining attributes of sovereignty they were content to leave to the Nawab at Patna and his titular emperor somewhere in the vicinity of Delhi. We can easily understand why the Company persisted so long in these contrivances for securing the advantages and avoiding the obligations,’ of political supremacy in Bengal. They had advanced so far that they could not go back or stand still; and yet every step which they took toward the open ground of territorial rulership was upon an untried and dangerous road. There was no precedent for the development of a trading company into a governing power; their position was liable to challenge at home and abroad. Nevertheless it was this period of inconsistencies and half measures, of divided authorities and clashing jurisdictions, that produced and prolonged all the complicated disorders and internal abuses which surrounded the earlier stages of Warren Hastings’ subsequent

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governorship. We shall see, hereafter, that the first attempts of the Crown to interfere rather served to multiply than to mitigate the elements of administrative discord.

Hastings remained in England from 1765 to 1769, and of the manner in which he employed this time his biographers have found very few traces. His only son died just before his return, and although fourteen years’ residence in India was usually sufficient in those days to provide any Englishman with ample means for living four years at home, it seems certain that Hastings took home very little money, and that his generous attempt to assist his relations even led him into some embarrassment. No one can dent’ that this undisputed fact is strong evidence as to early character, or that in this respect the whole career of Warren Hastings stands out in sarong , contrast against contemporary practice, in England not much less than in India; for the notion that office meant before all things emolument was still accepted with much indulgence everywhere, and was by no means extinct among place-hunters in England itself. He had not been twelve months at home before he applied to be again employed in India, and when the Court of Directors, for reasons not explained, declined his services, he took to literature and the reading of books. His acquaintance with Dr. Johnson, which Boswell mentions, shows that he had some access to the best literary society of the day; and if he had lived a century later his name would probably have been seen in some of the reviews or magazines. But the public of the eighteenth century was a small circle, interested in a range of subjects infinitely narrower than the wide und

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varied list which now supplies every month fresh menus of astonishing diversity, imported, like the fruit and the flesh of our dinners, from all parts of the habitable world. The special literary gift which brought success to a writer of essays or verses at that period, and stamped him as an author of taste or erudition, was not in Hastings – the classic or academic style is a plant of hot-house culture – nor indeed did his capabilities even lie that way. His clear mind was at its best in the arrangement and statement of facts, and in plain, forcible representation of a complex situation of affairs, with all their causes and consequences distinctly indicated. When he was either writing or speaking on such questions, his style, like that of his great contemporary Lord Clive, was as strong and full as it was mediocre and thin when he was composing elegant verses or dissertations. His evidence before the Committee of the House of Commons in 1766 attracted the attention, according to Mr. Gleig, of both the Court of Directors and the Ministry; and induced the Court to appoint him two years later to a seat in the Presidency of Madras, as a gentleman who had served them many years in Bengal with great ability and unblemished character.

He sailed from Dover early in 1769, having been obliged to borrow money for his outfit. It is well known that during this voyage he became intimate with the Baroness Imhoff, who was going out to Madras with her husband, and whom Mr. Gleig describes as a gifted young person between whom and her husband there was no conformity at all, either of tastes or disposition. She nursed Hastings through a serious illness on shipboard; she was a clever, fascinating woman, under thirty years of

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age, not much attached to her husband, whose attachment to her seems to have been of a loose and soluble kind, and the result was that she and Hastings became very intimate. Her maiden name was Anna Maria Apollonia Chapusettin. They landed together at Madras, where they lived, it is said, chiefly with Hastings at his house on The Mount, until Imhoff, who began with a commission in the Company’s army but gave it up for miniature painting, went off to Calcutta in 1770. In 1771 he was followed thither by his wife, and Hastings arrived to assume the governorship of Bengal in 1772. A letter written from Calcutta just after his arrival says that his residence at Madras had “greatly increased his former reserve,” and describes Mrs. Imhoff as “about twenty-six years old, has a good person and has been very pretty, and wants only to be a greater mistress of the English language to prove that she has a great share of wit2.” In 1773 Imhoff went home, never, so far as is known, to return; but the divorce was delayed until 1777, so the marriage of Hastings with Mrs. Imhoff did not take place until August of that year. These facts, which are quite plain and speak for themselves, prove against Hastings a breach of the moral and social law upon which every one must pass his own judgment according to his estimate of the gravity of such offences in the circumstances of this particular case; nor will the verdict have been much affected by the attempts which the biographers of Hastings have made to address public opinion in mitigation of an austere sentence. Mr. Gleig dwells on the misery of ill-assorted union and on the fatal yielding to instinctive attractions elsewhere, “which render the

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cup of domestic existence more bitter than ever;” but whether he thinks that Hastings should or should not have done the thing he did, is a point which he leaves ambiguous. He declares rather boldly that the breath of censure never fell upon the good name of either party, and both he and Captain Trotter3 suggest that Imhoff judiciously retired in time from an awkward but not yet utterly false position; while Captain Trotter assures us that the bargain between Imhoff and Hastings was honourably fulfilled on both sides. On this matter it is sufficient to observe that contemporary opinion was not altogether so charitable. However this may be, for historical purposes the important point is that this was the only incident of Warren Hastings’ life, at a time and in a society by no means straitlaced, which throws any reflection upon his relations with women; that against the subsequent conduct of the second Mrs. Hastings no one has ever said a word;4 that she was in every respect a good wife to him, and that the marriage seems to have been one of perfect accord and lasting affection on both sides.

Returning, as Mr. Gleig phrases it, to “the more dry details” of Hastings’ official business at Madras, we find very Little worth record of his life, private or public, during the two years of his residence there as member of Council. He mentions in a letter to Sir George

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Colebrooke that the abilities of the President (Mr. Du Pré) left him little room for exertion beyond the limits of his own particular department, the export warehouse; an important branch of the commercial business which Hastings thoroughly reorganised with profit to his employers and credit to himself. Nevertheless it is remarkable that he should have played so subordinate a part in the political transactions connected with his tenure of office, which were complicated, considerable, and ill managed by the Madras Council. Three rival powers, Hyder Ali of Mysore, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and the Mahrattas, were at that moment contending for supremacy in the Indian peninsula, and each of them alternately threatened the Company’s possessions, or proposed an alliance against the others. The Directors in London incessantly enjoined upon the Madras government the necessity of avoiding alliances which were no better than intrigues, and military operations which exhausted in war the funds that were meant for trade. The true policy, they said, was to stand aloof and let the country powers weaken themselves by constant fighting, whereas “the power which you help to beat the rest will certainly turn its arms against us whenever it is strong enough, and your allies will be constantly negotiating a secret understanding with your enemies.” There can be no doubt that events justified the predictions and warnings of the Directors, who at this time laid earnest and incessant injunctions upon their Indian governors to abstain from all extensions of territory and from intermeddling in the quarrels of the “country powers.” But the Council at Madras thought a policy of isolation unsafe when they were surrounded by

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dangerous neighbours, and preferred to take a hand in the game of politics, with the result that alter much unsuccessful and expensive fighting, and after some instructive experiences of the value of treaties with feeble and faithless allies, they concluded a peace which left Hyder Ali deeply offended, and the Mahrattas more than ever masters of the situation. From his correspondence with some of the Directors, Warren Hastings appears to have defended the proceedings of his Council on the ground that they acted for the best in very dangerous circumstances; for the Madras Presidency was threatened by Hyder Ali and the Mahrattas, had been deserted by the Nizam, and was greatly alarmed by rumours of a French war. But subsequent events went far to prove that the perils and misfortunes which beset Madras a few years later were distinctly attributable to the mistaken policy of contracting engagements with Hyder Ali and the Mahrattas, which could not be fulfilled without offending one or the other power. When Hyder Ali had been utterly defeated by the Mahrattas in 1771 he applied for help to the English, who refused, and thereby incurred the resentment of their most dangerous neighbour in the peninsula. Ten years later he took his revenge; and it will be seen that the storm which then burst a few years later upon Madras, and very nearly overwhelmed that Presidency, was also one of the main causes why Hastings, then Governor-General, was driven into narrow straits and rather desperate political navigation.

Footnotes

1. Memoirs of Warren Hastings.

2. Echoes from Old Calcutta, 134.

3. Warren Hastings; by Captain L. J. Trotter (1878).

4. Even Francis, who liked gossip and local calumny, writes to his wife: “The lady herself is really an accomplished woman; she behaves with perfect propriety in her new station, and deserves every mark of respect.” But Lady Impey and other leaders of Calcutta society looked very coldly on her until she married Hastings.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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