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Chapter 4 – Hyder Ali’s Invasion – Duel with Francis

The full Governor-Generalship of Hastings, as it was established by the Act of 1773, may be divided into two periods of nearly equal length. During the first he was occupied mainly with internal difficulties and intestine broils; he was fighting with his Council or with the Court; driving forward his administrative measures with one hand, and with the other keeping a tight grasp on the reins of his own office. During the second period he was contending against external enemies in the field, or against the troubles at Benares and Lucknow in which he had become entangled by the financial necessities of his foreign wars. In June, 1777, Mr. Elliott, of the Indian service, was passing through Paris on his way to India, when Lord Stormont, our ambassador in France, communicated to him in the strictest confidence the secret intelligence that war with France was imminent, and that the French had formed a plan of attacking the British possessions in India.. When this news reached India a French agent was already at Poona negotiating with the Mahratta chiefs, and it appeared to the Governor-General that our possessions on the west coast were in manifest danger. In 1778, therefore, he had pushed a force across India from Bengal to co-operate with the

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Bombay expedition against Poona; and he had sent an agent to the Mahratta chief at Nagpore, with instructions to offer to support that chief’s pretensions to the throne of the Mahratta State if his alliance could not be had on lower terms. All these military and diplomatic operations had been more or less unsuccessful, and only involved us for the time in fresh embarrassments. The Bengal detachment made its way very slowly across India: the Bombay expedition against Poona failed egregiously – “they had desperately sent a handful of men against the strength of the Mahratta empire13”; and the Nagpore chief eluded our not very ingenuous proposals to aid him in obtaining a throne upon which the Bombay government was simultaneously attempting to place Ragoba. Francis and Wheler, now in a minority at Calcutta, who had been against any interference in Mahratta affairs, were confirmed by these failures in their original opinion, desired to drop the whole business at all hazards, and hinted that Hastings was continuing the war to satisfy his own restless and ambitions spirit. This last insinuation was untrue, for Hastings undoubtedly thought the peril serious, and his temperament led him to meet it by a deep and daring policy; though he might have done better if he had peremptorily stamped out the unlucky quarrel which the Bombay government had begun with the Mahrattas. But the misfortunes which marred his schemes and disheartened his Councillors only served to consolidate the firmness of his purposes. “It has been the will of God,” he said in Council, “to blast my designs by means which no human prudence could have foreseen, and

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against which I had therefore provided no resource”; yet he was resolved to hold on his course, to send forward fresh reinforcements to Bombay, and to organise another expedition against the northern possessions of the Mahrattas beyond the Jumna river. If Hastings had possessed the full dictatorial authority over all British India that was wielded by his successors, by Cornwallis and Wellesley, he might have succeeded in isolating the contest with the Mahrattas, in avoiding dangerous combinations against him, and in concentrating all his available strength against the Poona State in the west. But war, like fire, is easy to kindle and hard to stop; and the ruinous military exploits of the Bombay government were speedily surpassed by the diplomatic blunders perpetrated at Madras.

Up to the time of the passing of the Act of 1773, which placed our political relations throughout India under the control of the Governor-General at Calcutta, the minor Presidencies had negotiated independently with neighbouring powers. We had thus become entangled in various contradictory engagements, had concluded offensive and defensive alliances which we could not keep unless we took both sides in a war between two of our allies, and had made cross treaties that were sure to offend one or other of our friends. In 1769, when we made peace with Hyder Ali of Mysore, he had induced the Madras government to insert a clause agreeing to join him if he were attacked; but when the Mahrattas did attack him we excused ourselves from assisting him against them. When, therefore, the Mahrattas were attacked by the Bombay government, they found in Hyder Ali a willing ally against the English; and thus

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the two warlike States that would have naturally fought each other were united against a common enemy. This was an ominous confluence of troubled waters; and the Madras government laid all the blame upon the foolish meddling of Bombay with the Mahrattas; but it was an act of their own that opened the floodgates, by stirring up Hyder Ali and offending the Nizam of Hyderabad. Acting zealously upon the principle of extirpating French influence, and showing great impatience of their formal subordination in external matters to Bengal, the Madras authorities now contrived to provoke simultaneously these two formidable neighbours, precisely at the conjuncture when their alliance or at least their neutrality was most important. The Nizam was closely connected with the reigning party at Poona, and had declared against our client Ragoba, but he remained quiet until the Madras government chose to make a treaty, without consulting him, with his brother Bazalut Jung, who agreed to cede us a district. At this he took great and reasonable umbrage, and threatened to join the Mahrattas against us. But this was a trivial indiscretion in comparison with the next false step, whereby the Madras government succeeded in arousing the smouldering and implacable wrath of Hyder Ali. Upon news of the rupture with France the English in India attacked all the French settlements;. and although Hyder Ali warned the Madras authorities that Mahé, a small French possession on the coast, was under his special protectorate, it was seized by an English force. The only powers in India whom Hyder Ali respected were the English and the Mahrattas; and so long as they watched him on both sides of his country it was not easy for him

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to break out; but a fight between his two watchmen gave him an excellent opportunity of paying off old and new scores. He corresponded with the French, who sent him munitions of war from Bourbon Island: he sympathised with the Nizam, who made a league with him.; and in July, 1780, he descended upon the Carnatic with a great and irresistible predatory army, wasting the country far and vide with fire and sword. Colonel Baillie went out against him with a small force, but was defeated and captured; and the whole Presidency was brought to the verge of total rein.

Burke’s vivid and inflammable imagination was apt to be too inordinately excited by the strange and romantic colouring of Indian scenes and incidents: the sombre tragedy of the Asiatic stage affected him like Shakespeare’s rendering of some terrible period in English history; and Ms delineations of them fall into theatrical extravagances. Yet Ms splendid description, in the speech on the Arcot debts, of the bursting of this storm upon the plains of the Carnatic, of the havoc and desolation that it caused, of the consternation of the English and the misery of the people, is hardly overcharged. Hastings acted with Ms usual energy on receiving news of this tremendous calamity. Sir Eyre Coote, who had succeeded Clavering and was now Commander-in-Chief, was sent to Madras with all the men and money that could be collected, and with an order from the Supreme Council suspending the governor of Madras, who was evicted alter some controversy, and subsequently dismissed by the indignant Court of Directors. But the mischief had been very effectually done; for Hyder Ali took Arcot and occupied large tracts of country until he was defeated

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but not driven off by Coote in 1781, after a series of operations which drained the treasuries and nearly exhausted our military resources. The Nizam, Hyder Ali, and the Mahrattas were for some time in combination against us; and their pressure foiled Hastings in his attempt to detach from the confederacy the Mahratta chief of Nagpore, who sent a swarm of cavalry to threaten the eastern frontier of Bengal, and extracted a large sum of money as the prise of his neutrality.

The position of Hastings during the year 1780 was evidently one of extreme distress and anxiety. In a letter to the Directors he complains bitterly of “the harsh and unexampled treatment I have received for these six years past in return for a faithful and laborious service of thirty years”; and he alludes to the depression under which he is suffering on that account. “I have now been a second time,” he writes, “placed by my king and my country in a post of the first consequence under the British empire, but instead of enjoying that confidence so necessary for the support of this government, I have been treated by the Court of Directors with every mark of indignity and reproach.” In another letter (December, 1780) he refers to “the present alarming situation “of the Company’s affairs, and reports that “the vast expense for the subsistence and defence” of both Madras and Bombay has reduced him to the “mortifying extremity” of raising loans, has forced him to suspend the commercial investments, and has generally loaded him with heavy financial embarrassments. It must be admitted that at this time our Indian affairs had been so managed as to lower them to the general level of discredit and discomfiture that ruled everywhere

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under Lord North’s administration. We had set against ourselves the three principal fighting powers of Central and Southern India we had brought down upon our heads two separate wars on the east and west coasts, both within convenient distance of French co-operation with our enemies; and the two incapable governments that were directly engaged in hostilities depended wholly for troops, supplies, and competent generals upon the distant Presidency of Bengal. The Governor-General’s bold and far-reaching schemes had been foiled; he was surrounded by enemies abroad, at his wits’ end for money, and thwarted at every step by the opposition which Francis still kept up in his Council.

It was under the stress of the financial exigencies produced by this situation that Hastings was driven to the expedients and exactions which, with considerable distortion of facts, circumstances, and motives, formed the substantial ground of the most serious charges in his subsequent impeachment. But out of the disputes and difficulties of this period came also another affair, to which it is first necessary to advert. In North India Hastings had taken under his protection the Rana of Gohud, from whom the Mahrattas had wrested the famous fortress of Gwalior, which was gallantly stormed and recovered by Major Popham. But Francis had strenuously objected to the Mahratta war generally, and to this treaty with Gohud in particular; and although he had agreed, upon Barwell’s departure for Europe, to an arrangement binding himself generally neither to oppose the political measures of the Governor-General nor to interfere with the mode of conducting the Mahratta war, he contended that this did not apply to the project

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of aiding Goddard’s operations on the west toast by an attack on Sindia’s northern provinces, with the object of diverting the Mahratta forces. He accordingly, with Wheler, disallowed the proposal to reinforce the Company’s troops acting in that quarter. This was the particular point upon which the long-standing quarrel between the two men came to a climax; and the understanding upon which Barwell had been allowed to leave broke down with mutual recriminations of equivocation and bad faith; for Barwell’s absence gave Francis a majority in Council whenever he chose to thwart the Governor-General, as Wheler voted with Francis and Sir Eyre Coote was absent. Hastings unquestionably believed that he had been tricked, and took his measures characteristically. He conveyed his wife to Chinsurah, at a short distance from Calcutta, and returning alone sent Francis a minute redolent with the bitterness and resentment distilled out of their long personal altercations. “But in truth,” he said,

“I do not trust to his promise of candour; convinced that he is incapable of it, and that his sole purpose and wish are to embarrass and defeat every measure which I may undertake, or which may tend even to promote the public interests, if my credit is connected with them. Such has been the tendency and such the manifest spirit of all his actions from the beginning; almost every measure proposed by me has for that reason had his opposition to it. When carried against his opposition, and too far engaged to be withdrawn, yet even then and in every stage of it his labours to overcome it have been unremitted; every disappointment and misfortune have been aggravated by him, and every fabricated tale of armies devoted to famine and to massacre have found their first and most ready way to his office, where it is known

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they would meet with most welcome reception. To the same design may be attributed the annual computations of declining finances and an exhausted treasury; computations which, though made in the time of abundance, must verge to wrath14 at last, from the effect of a discordant government, not a constitutional decay. To the same design shall I attribute the policy of accelerating the boded event, and creating an artificial want, by keeping up a useless hoard of treasure and withholding it from a temporary circulation.”

Then came the well-known passage:–

“I judge of his public conduct by my experience of his private, which I have found void of truth and honour. This is a severe charge, but temperately and deliberately made.”

These words produced the effect intended; for after the meeting of Council at which the minute was read, Francis drew Hastings aside and read him a written challenge, which was accepted. On the second day following they met at a spot still well remembered in Calcutta tradition, taking ground at a distance of fourteen paces, measured out by Colonel Watson, one of the seconds, who said that Charles Fox and Adams had fought (1779) at that distance; although Hastings observed that it was a great distance for pistols. The seconds had baked the powder for their respective friends, nevertheless Francis’ pistol missed fire. Hastings waited until he had primed again and had missed, when he returned the shot so effectively that Francis was carried home with a ball in his right side. The remarkable coolness of Hastings was noticed; he objected to the spot first proposed as being overshadowed by trees; and probably those were right who inferred from his

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behaviour that he intended to hit his man. That the single English newspaper then published in Calcutta should have made no mention of so sensational an incident as the Governor-General’s duel, is good evidence of the kind of censorship then maintained over the Bengal press. But the editor had recently been in jail for a smart lampoon upon Hastings and Impey, a formidable pair of magnates to cut scandalous jokes upon in those days.

The duel served Hastings well, since it removed the last and strongest of the three adversaries against whom he had been contending in Council since 1774. Such a mode of dealing with political opponents may be thought questionable; but governors and high officials of that period had to be as ready with the pistol as with the pen, for a challenge was often the resource rot only of irritated rivals but of disappointed subordinates. Fox had met Adams, and Lord Shelburne, Colonel Fullerton; Lord Macartney was called out by General Stuart to account at twelve paces for some censure which he had passed on the general during his Madras governorship; and Sir John Macpherson, who held the Governor-Generalship for a time after Hastings, met an offended Major Brown in Hyde Park. Hastings sent Francis a friendly message, offering to visit him; but Francis declined any private intercourse with his adversary, and some months later he returned to England, where he prosecuted his feud against Hastings with pertinacious and inveterate malignity.

Before Francis left he had recorded his vote against the measure for appointing the Chief-Justice to be supreme judge and superintendent of all the Company’s

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civil courts in the provinces. It should be here mentioned that in 1779 the dissensions between the Court and the Council in Calcutta had risen to the degree of actual collision between the two authorities; that in this quarrel Hastings had made common cause with Francis against the judges, and that he had consequently broken off his alliance with Impey, who much lamented this rupture of their personal friendship and reciprocal understanding upon public affairs. The Governor-General in Council had published a proclamation authorising disregard of the Court’s process, and had supported it by an armed force. The Court issued warrants for apprehending the Company’s soldiers; and summonses on a plea of trespass were served on the Governor-General and his Councillors, which they refused to obey. Hastings endeavoured to excuse himself privately, hinting to Impey that he was “impelled by others”; and in May, 1780, Impey wrote home that he had been sacrificed to the union between Hastings and Francis. Open war had been declared, and the two hostile camps were skirmishing actively – employing writs, summonses, acrimonious letters, proclamations, contradictory orders, arrests, releases, captures, rules nisi, distraints, forcible rescues, and every other such missile or weapon to be found in the official arsenals. The Governor-General in Council accused the judges of arrogating to themselves the right to review the orders and proceedings of executive officers, and of the provincial councils which disposed of the revenue and judicial business in all the districts. The judges retorted that the government expected to indulge their subordinates with impunity in mere lawlessness and licentious oppression. Public opinion in

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Bengal seems to have supported the government, whose pretensions were more intelligible to the ordinary mind. On this aide lay also the advantage in the contest, or at any rate the balance of damage inflicted on the enemy; for at one time the judges’ salaries remained unpaid, and the Chief-Justice complained that the attorneys of his Court were lamentably near starvation.

Sir James Stephen has decided that the Court was on the whole less to blame than the Company’s officers; and he discovers the real offenders in the authors of the clumsy and ill-drawn Regulating Act of 1773, which bestowed powers without circumscribing the jurisdictions, and which purposely left uncertain the supreme jurisdiction, that is to say, the sovereignty of the country. However this may be, the judges had so roughly handled the district courts of justice, which were presided over by the revenue officers of the Company, that Hastings saw the necessity of establishing separate civil courts; and these courts were soon found to require proper judicial superintendence. There had for a long time existed a central court of appeal in civil suits, called the Sudder Diwani Adalat, whose powers had since 1773 been vested in the Governor-General in Council, but had never been exercised in any regular manner. Hastings conceived the luminous idea of transferring these powers, with a salary of £6000 yearly, to the Chief-Justice; and six weeks after the duel he announced his project in Council, stating, what was perfectly true, that the civil courts urgently needed the supervision and direction of a trained expert, and adding that he was well aware of the misunderstandings and invidious misconstruction to which his choice of the Chief-Justice for so influential an

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office would expose him The office and salary were to be held during the pleasure of the Governor-General in Council. The measure was at once politic, practical, and effective; it terminated by a master-stroke the conflict of jurisdictions; it disarmed and conciliated the Chief Justice; and it undoubtedly placed the country courts, which had been dispensing a very haphazard and intuitive kind of justice, for the first time under a person who could guide and control them upon recognised principles. Francis dissented from the proposal as illegal and injudicious. He protested that the government were conceding to their enemy all they had been fighting for; he probably saw also the important advantage that Hastings was gaining by this manoeuvre, and the strength that it would add to the Governor-General’s position. Nevertheless the appointment was made; and Francis departed for England with a fresh store of accusations against both Hastings and Impey, which he so used as to procure Impey’s recall by Lord Shelburne’s Ministry on this very charge, and to increase the growing distrust and uneasiness in Parliament regarding the Governor-General’s proceedings. Impey accepted the salary subject to refund if the arrangement should be disallowed at home; and he appears to have undertaken the duties in an honourable spirit. Any question as to the morality of this transaction touches Impey rather than Hastings; for even if Impey be held guilty of having compounded his controversy with the government by accepting a lucrative appointment, yet the plan of uniting the Chief-Justiceship with the superintendency of the district courts, taken on its merits, was a good and practical remedy of existing evils. Impey’s appointment

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was very soon rescinded, with strong expressions of disapproval; but the principle of placing all the country courts in each Presidency under the appellate jurisdiction of the High Court at the capital is that which has since been adopted throughout India. It must be added that Hastings took the significant precaution, which he may have thought essential, of making both office and salary revocable at the will of the Governor-General, and that this feature of his scheme has not been imitated by modern legislation. For the time, however, the measure answered his purposes admirably; its effect was to soften clown at once the bitter conflict of jurisdictions, to reunite the severed friendship of the Chief-Justice and the Governor-General, and to bring back Impey into cordial co-operation with Hastings, whose astute and versatile mind was now revolving projects and expedients of a kind that soon furnished an occasion for utilising his valuable support.

Footnotes

13. Grant Duff, ii. 379, 380.

14. Sic in original–?”truth.”

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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