The duel had relieved Hastings of Francis; and he had found a milder method of accommodation with the Chief-Justice; so that he now enjoyed comparative peace in Council and with the Court. But his external difficulties grew and multiplied, to the great detriment of his finances; and there was a constant drain of men and money both to Bombay and Madras. The following extract from a letter written afterwards to the Directors by Sir J. Macpherson while acting as Governor-General, supplies in outline an instructive sketch of the situation:
“Of the general distress of your affairs in all your Presidencies in the latter end of August 1781, when I arrived at Madras, you have long since had authentic accounts; but of the danger to which the very existence of the Company was then exposed, you can have no adequate idea. Your army towards Bombay had been obliged to retreat from a gallant but unsuccessful enterprise towards Poona, and it required great bravery and skill to secure their retreat from the Gauts to the seaside. Your Presidency of Bombay was then near a crore of rupees in debt, notwithstanding the immense supplies from Bengal and their newly-acquired revenues. The utmost of their military exertions, though supported by an army from Bengal, and though they had raised many new battalions, was directed to keep the Mahrattas in check.
“In the Carnatic your principal settlement, and your main
army under Sir Eyre Coote, were surrounded by the army of Hyder, who had indeed been defeated on July 1st, 1781, but who from that check seemed only to have become more guarded and determined in his purpose. Neither your army, nor even Fort St. George itself, had at that time above a few days’ provisions in store, nor could there be any prospect of supply from the country. Your treasury at Fort St. George was empty; your credit could not be said to exist in any active force. At Bengal, on which your other Presidencies depended almost entirely for supplies, your treasury was drained, and every effort of raising money by loan, by annuity, and by partial remittances had been tried, and, to complete the measure of your difficulties, a rebellion had broken forth upon your frontiers at Benares, which threatened destruction to all your possessions from the source to the mouths of the Ganges, and in every quarter of India. Such was the crisis at which it was my destiny to become one of the members of the superior administration of India. Few who could have seen the real difficulties of the part I had to act, would have envied my situation, and the most obstinate party contention had but ceased to rage in the scene where I was to begin my part.”
In 1778, on the first intelligence of a French war, when Hastings looked round him for means of replenishing his treasury, he had resolved with his Council’s approval that the Rajah of Benares should be one of those from whom a war subsidy should be demanded in aid of the extraordinary expenses of the Bengal government. The true relations of this personage to the British Government have been so much misapprehended and so often ignored, that a short explanation of them, though it has been frequently given, must here be repeated. The grandfather of Rajah Cheyt Singh, with whom Hastings had to deal, was a small landholder who acquired some wealth and local influence during the troubled period of the Mogul empire’s dissolution, and who obtained the title
of Rajah for his son Bulwunt Singh. When the Vizier of Oude took possession of the country, Rajah Bulwunt Singh held under him the lucrative office of farmer and collector of the revenue in Benares and Ghazipur; and when those districts were about to be transferred by the Vizier to the English, the Rajah wrote offering to hold them from the Calcutta government on the same terms. Such independence as Bulwunt Singh managed to obtain he derived from the protection of the English, who were interested in strengthening and supporting the possessor of lands which ran along their north-western frontier, and interposed between their districts and some very turbulent neighbours. Accordingly Cheyt Singh, who succeeded his father, had received from the Vizier of Oude, through the intervention of Hastings himself, a formal grant confirming his tenure as zemindar or landholder of the estate which had thus come into the bands of the family. In those days a man who was strong enough to establish his authority as collector of the land revenue on behalf of the State over an unruly tract, usually found no difficulty in making himself lord of the land. If he could enforce payment of rents, and maintain a rough kind of police, his proprietary title as superior landowner was very soon recognised by common consent. The tenure upon which the Rajah of Benares held his estates, and the authority exercised by him over the people, differed in no essential particular from those of every considerable landholder who rose to rank and power in the provinces which gradually fel’ away from the imperial government during the eighteenth century. In such times, as no one heeds the ordinary tax-gatherer, the provincial governors, who are often busy in making
themselves independent, find themselves obliged to treat, for the management of turbulent cultivating communities or groupe of distant villages, with some leading man of local influence who has probably distinguished himself for contumaciousness and insubordination, and who undertakes to levy rente on hie own account, paying a fixed share to the treasury, maintaining an annual force, and holding himself generally responsible for some elementary forms of order and justice. Under these conditions a district may easily become a domain, and a domain may become an independent chiefship if. the original sovereignty entirely disappears. The Benares Rajah was undoubtedly holding his lands on a mere zemindaree grant from the Vizier of Oude, who levied heavy fines upon him, when the territory was ceded by the Vizier to the Company under a treaty which particularly transferred, as between the two contracting parties, the sovereignty over the Benares district to the Company. The English government settled the amount of the annual revenue, or share of the rent, to be paid upon the whole astate, and continued the grant to him upon this and other stipulated conditions, with a guarantee that the annual demand should not be increased.
But Hastings held that this did not exempt the Rajah from the general duty that was inherent in all tributaries to an Indian sovereign, of furnishing extraordinary aida on extraordinary occasions; and it may be hem observed that in this view Pitt afterwards unhesitatingly concurred. The right, he said, had already been exercised and acquiesced in, and was indisputably transferred, with the territory, to the Company. In all ages and countries, however, and especially in Asia,
such rights depend for their validity on the power to enforce them. Cheyt Singh was now at that stage in the development of Oriental jurisdictions when dependence begins to verge on independence, and when the weakness or embarrassment of his superiors encourages an able and ambitions chief or governor to look out for opportunities. He had indeed become much too strong for the Oude ruler; he had amassed great wealth; he kept several fortresses well garrisoned and in good repair; he had a very respectably disciplined force of all arms; and he was in correspondence with the Mahrattas and other neighbouring potentates. Some reciprocal distrust had been growing up between him and Hastings, whom he had offended by sending a messenger prematurely to congratulate Clavering on the news of his temporary accession to the Governor-Generalship, and by other indications that he was calculating on a change in that office. When Hastings made out his list of contibutions to be demanded for the war expenses, he rated the Rajah of Benares at five lakhs for the first year, which were paid; but the same demand for 1779 met with great procrastination; and for the third year Hastings, irritated by rumours that the Rajah was counting on our embarrassments with the Mahrattas and elsewhere, sent him peremptory orders to furnish two thousand cavalry. The number required was afterwards reduced, but the Rajah sent none; and his restiveness increased in 1781, when ho had certainly heard of Hyder’s exploits in the Carnatic. The ordinary prognostications of the end of English rale in India were afloat, and Cheyt Singh probably became more than usually influenced by the profound conviction of the ephemeral nature of all governments
that prevails in all times throughout India. Whereupon Hastings pronounced him to be intractable and possibly treacherous.
“The Rajah’s offences were declared by the Governor-General and his Council to require early punishment, and as his wealth was great and the Company’s exigencies pressing, it was thought a measure of policy and justice to exact from him a large pecuniary mulct for their relief15.”
Upon these plain unvarnished grounds Hastings resolved to lay upon the Rajah a fine of fifty lakhs of rupees, and he took Benares on his way to visit the Vizier at Lucknow, for the purpose of directing personally the measures necessary for enforcing payment of the money; having determined before leaving Calcutta that the Rajah should be removed from his zemindaree if he refused compliance with the requisition. The Rajah went to meet him at Buxar, but failed to appease his displeasure; and at Benares Hastings determined to place him under restraint, lest he should escape from the city to his strongholds in the hills and woods which still cover an immense extent of the neighbouring country. A letter was addressed to him in which he was required to give satisfactory explanation of behaviour that was said to look like disaffection and infidelity. The reply was such that might have been expected from the attitudes and circumstances of the two antagonists thus brought face to face on the brink of a rupture; for the Rajah was in his own city, surrounded by armed retainers, while Hastings was in a garden house on the outskirts of the town, far from his capital, with a
slender escort and a weak regiment within call. As the answer was equivocal, the English Governor-General boldly sent his assistant., Mr. Markham, to arrest the Rajah at Shewalah Ghat, where he was residing in a building which may be roughly described as a walled enclosure surrounding a courtyard, with an inner hall and several chambers attached to it in the middle of the yard; its front being on a terrace leading by steps down to the riverside. The Rajah was simply told by the English officer to consider himself under arrest. He submitted quietly, saying that he would obey the Governor-General’s orders, but that he was hurt at the indignity of being subjected to confinement; and two companies of sepoys were placed on guard. What followed seems to have been entirely unexpected by Hastings, although it is surprising that he should not have perceived that by arresting the Rajah he had removed and probably turned against himself the only responsible authority capable of controlling the armed and excitable population by whom he was surrounded, and who cared nothing for the ulterior consequences of an insurrection. The city was full of the Rajah’s soldiery, while Hastings had only a slender escort with a few scattered detachments of sepoys. In such situations a daring act of authority may sometimes succeed, but the air is apt to be so charged with dangerous electricity that the least friction or shock will produce an explosion which blows to fragments all moral influence and political considerations. The two companies on guard over the Rajah had brought no ammunition, and before it could be sent they had been surrounded by large bands of soldiers from across the river. A company sent to reinforce them
was fired upon, whereupon the courtyard filled suddenly with armed men, and there was a general rush upon the sepoys, who with their English officers were massacred almost to a man. The Rajah escaped in the tumult through a wicket which opened on the river, let himself down the steep bank by turbans tied together, crossed the Ganges, and fled to one of his strongholds. Major Popham arrived with reinforcements at Shewalah Ghat only to find the corpses of the party that had been cut to pieces; and the English officer who commanded the rest of his detachment lost two hundred men and his own life in a rash attempt to storm Ramnagar, a massive irregular structure on the other aide of the river, which was then, as it is now, the palace and chief residence of the Benares Rajahs. Repeated warnings were sent to Hastings that his own quarters would be attacked that night. As this meant that he and about thirty Englishmen with him might easily be put to the sword, Hastings wisely made a rapid though not very orderly retreat after dark to the fortress of Chunar, about thirty miles from Benares, which had a small garrison of the Company’s troops. Of the Rajah’s overtures for peace and reconciliation he took no notice whatever, even while he was surrounded by the insurgent army and almost in their hands; he declined offers of assistance from Oude, and even abstained from drawing men or money from Lower Bengal, lest the consternation should spread. From Chunar he issued with great coolness and promptitude his orders for concentrating various detachments from the nearest stations, for attacking the Rajah’s forts, dispersing insurgents, and bringing all the Rajah’s country under the direct authority of the Company.
The commotion in Benares had disturbed the whole country round; the roads were beset; the armed peasantry and banditti swarmed out to attack outlying posts and troops on the march; communications were cut off; all the postal lines were broken; travellers were robbed and murdered; the banks of the rivers, which were the great highways in those days, were lined with armed men who fired upon and boarded all boats; and the news of a great catastrophe spread rapidly to the Company’s stations in the vicinity. Alarming rumours went flying through the bazaars, and authentic information came in only through scouts and disguised messengers. There had set in one of those floods of anarchy and confusion that formerly rose with incredible rapidity in a country where up to 1858 all the peasantry carried arms, and instinctively welcomed a. suspension of government as a relief from vexatious tax-gathering and police interference, and as an excellent opportunity for settling local differences and clearing off old scores. Some of the Company’s detachments in Oude were very severely handled, and Hastings believed that the rising against the English in this quarter was actively fomented by the Nawab’s mother at Fyzabad, the famous Bhow Begum, who highly disapproved of the purposes with which he was going to Lucknow, and would naturally use a promising opportunity of making the journey unpleasant for him. The high governing qualities possessed by Hastings, his calmness in danger, his capacity for collecting and employing vigorously all his available strength, his address and dexterity in handling all the springs of administrative resource, were never more conspicuously exhibited than at this crisis.
From Chunar he carried on his ordinary official work, corresponded with the Vizier of Oude and with Sindia, and directed the operations of his military subordinates, who came to his rescue and executed his orders with the greatest alacrity. The disorderly and disjointed resistance of the Rajah was Broken down by a few hardy strokes; Major Popham, the principal military officer within call, confronted the emergency with remarkable skill and energy, the Rajah’s troops were dispersed, his forts were taken by assault, the tumultuous uprising subsided rapidly, the Rajah fled with a large treasure into Bundelcund, his zemindaree estates were declared to be forfeited, and were bestowed on a grandson of Rajah Bulivunt Singh; from whom they have descended to the present Maharajah of Benares, a very loyal and distinguished nobleman.
It seems clear, upon review of this transaction, and after discarding misrepresentations and making allowance for difficulties, that Hastings must bear the blame of having provoked the insurrection at Benares. Whether he was entitled, by the prerogative that the Company had acquired over the Rajah, and by the practice of his predecessor the Oude Vizier, to demand an extraordinary aid and to impose a heavy fine when it was refused, is not really a material question. Shuja-u-Dowlah exacted from Cheyt Singh a much heavier fine on his succession; and Hastings merely adopted the financial usage of all Oriental rulers, who are not deterred by the risk of an insurrection whenever they feel themselves strong enough to suppress it. He undoubtedly intended to punish the Rajah’s contumacy and to supply the fiscal wants. of the Company, by placing Cheyt
Singh between the alternatives of paying an enormous fine or losing his lands; and in this he followed the recognised custom of needy Indian potentates. But it would be a radical error to suppose that an English government in Asia can be administered on the Asiatic system; for upon the fact that it consistently follows a totally different system depends its whole force and stability; and whenever the English in India descend to the ordinary level of political morality among Asiatic potentates, they lose all the advantages of the contrast. And although in the confused and transitional period of Hastings’ Governor-Generalship these principles were neither plainly affirmed nor easily acted upon, nevertheless his conduct was at least impolitic and imprudent; while the rash attempt to arrest the Rajah in the midst of his own troops can only be explained on the supposition that Hastings had been too long accustomed to deal only with the milder-mannered population of Lower Bengal. There is, moreover, a touch of impolitic severity and precipitation about his proceedings against Cheyt Singh, which gives colour to the suspicion, promulgated by his enemies, that Hastings was actuated by a certain degree of vindictiveness and private irritation, and had determined to disable or depose a man who was personally obnoxious as well as obstructive to his policy. On the other hand, the account given of this affair by the speakers who prosecuted this charge in the Trial contains little better than a mere burlesque of the true facts and circumstances. Mr. Anstruther declared that the Roman government, even at its most degenerate period, would not have borne with any proconsul who should have defended such oppression by a reference to
the practices of Nero and Caligula. And Mr. Burke, after drawing a picture of the Rajah degraded in the eyes of his people beyond human consolation by his arrest, and insulted while he had returned to his closet to address himself to the Divinity, the Common Father of All, rejects with scorn the idea that the degradation was less because Cheyt Singh was not a Brahmin, asking whether if the Lord Chancellor were arrested while at his devotions the disgrace would be less because he was not a bishop. The real point of this wonderful parallel lay in its allusion to Lord Thurlow, who was presiding at the moment, and whom it would have been exceedingly difficult to disturb at any devotional exercise; but the passage is a fair specimen of the astonishing jumble of ideas and distortion of facts which most of these speeches disclose.
The Benares insurrection had virtually been put down by the end of September, 1781, and in October Hastings returned to Benares, where he reorganised the whole administration of the Rajah’s estates. The incident had no material effect upon his system of foreign relations. At Chunar he had negotiated and arranged treaties with the two Mahratta chiefs, Sindia and the Rajah of Berar; and he was visited there by the Nawab of Oude, who offered him a present of ten lakhs of rupees. Hastings accepted the money, as he himself said, without hesitation, “being entirely destitute both of means and credit for the public service or the relief of his own necessities”; and he accounted for the money a few months later to the Company’s treasury. But in reporting the matter to the Court of Directors he suggested for their consideration whether this sum might not be adjudged to him as a mark of their approbation of his labours; although he
was aware, as he wrote privately to a friend, that the letter “would be thought extraordinary; indiscreet by his friends and presumptuous by his enemies.” The result fulfilled and even surpassed all these anticipations so completely that one can only; wonder how Hastings came to write a letter of which he foresaw that every one would disapprove. The Directors very coldly declined t,o present him with the money; and he soon found reason to complain of being subjected to much the same suspicions and reflections as if he had surreptitiously pocketed the Nawab’s gift. His letter to Major Scott, explaining the grounds upon which he asked for the money, reads as if he thought he might have been warranted in making some provision for himself if the Company’s treasury had not at the time been so empty. He had possibly thought of retaining a part of the sum until the sanction of the Directors to his doing so should have been received; but the whole transaction was in every respect imprudent. And the bare notion that the Directors might formally entertain his application to be reimbursed the sum he had paid into their account, is one among many proofs that the long absence of Hastings from England, and his acclimatisation to a different atmosphere of public life, had. obscured his understanding of the state of feeling at home, or of the temper with which all the acts and writings of Indian officials are sure to be scrutinised.
In the meantime he was severely pressed for money to carry on the war in the Madras and Bombay Presidencies, where the public funds were exhausted, the revenues in confusion, the pay of the troops in arrear, and the governments, especially at Madras, in a state of
extreme dejection. The Madras government had written to Bengal (September, 1781): “We know not in what words to describe our distress for money; nor can any conception you can form of it exceed the reality”; and from Bombay they received advices in July that no funds remained for keeping troops upon foreign service, that every man was needed for the protection of British territory, that no aid could be spared for Madras, and that the rupture with Holland, combined with the Mahratta war, had reduced the Presidency to a defensive attitude in a position of great jeopardy. The Benares insurrection, in these circumstances, brought his financial embarrassments to their climax; for disturbances in India always cause a temporary suspension of revenue payments in the districts affected, as no one will pay taxes to a government in trouble. The Nawab of Oude himself owed large arrears of debt to the Company, and had no means of discharging it. When, therefore, he came to discuss the situation with Hastings at Chunar, and was asked to find money for the emergency, the Nawab, while explaining that he had none of his own, pointed out that nothing but the guarantee of the Bengal government itself prevented his laying hands on a reserve that would for the time sufficiently relieve the necessities of both.
The late Nawab, Shuja-u-Dowlah, had loft at Fyzabad a large treasure, estimated at two millions sterling. On his death this money was detained by the two Begums, his mother and his widow, who also kept possession of several rich and extensive districts or jagirs, which they governed as their appanage quite independently of the Oude sovereign. Shuja-u-Dowlah died
heavily in debt; he owed large arrears of subsidy to the Company; and his son Asaph-u-Dowlah, a weak and ill-guided ruler, made some futile attempts to enforce his claims upon the treasure. In 1775 the widow had been persuaded by the British Resident to pay a certain sum to her son the Nawab, on condition that the Bengal government should guarantee his engagement to demand no more of her; a guarantee that was given by the Council notwithstanding the dissent of the Governor-General. What the Nawab now proposed was that Hastings should untie his bands; should withdraw the guarantee of 1775, and should enable him to replenish his own exchequer and to repay his debts to the Company by seizing the estates of the Begums, who were to be compensated by pensions or suitable allowances. These princesses were ladies of remarkable energy and resolution in politics. They kept on foot large bodies of well-armed men: they had easily set the Nawab at defiance; and the younger Begum had undoubtedly taken tare that the Benares insurrection should not die out for want of any fuel, that she could add to the conflagration. She had declared that she would throw her cash into the river rather than give it up to her son; and as a matter of fact the Begums held both treasure and territory by their own strength and the Nawab’s weakness, for no Eastern king who had the power would have hesitated about making them contribute largely to his wants. Hastings, who had originally voted against the guarantee, was now convinced that the Begums had fomented the commotion in Benares; and the pressure on him for money to keep up his fighting line against Hyder Ali and the Mahrattas
was tremendous; so he readily agreed to let the Nawab have his will with the jagirs. If this had been all, it might have been excusable; for the Nawab’s case against the Begums was a good one, and the British Government was not bound to stand for ever in his way. The Nawab was overwhelmed with debt; his troops were mutinous, and his whole administration out of gear for want of money; while the Begums and their followers openly set at nought his authority. But Asaph-u-Dowlah was timid and irresolute; the Begums were stubborn and indignant; the Nawab was daunted by their resistance. He applied for aid to the English Resident, asked for English troops to oppose the Begums’ levies, tried to evade the compact, and angered Hastings by faint-hearted and dilatory proceedings. Hastings was not in a temper to release his confederate in a profitable enterprise, or to abandon a work to which he had set his hand, because the instruments were too pliable. He now pressed not only for the resumption of the estates but also for the appropriation of the large treasure, or part of it, which the Begums were known to possess; he insisted on rigorous treatment of the two eunuchs whom he believed to be at the bottom of all the opposition to his policy, whom he accused of having stirred up insurrection, and who were certainly not infirm effeminate guardians of the harem, but the chief advisers and agents of the Begums, men of great wealth and influence in the palace, and in command of the armed forces. The Company’s troops were marched to Fyzabad; the palace was blockaded; the eunuchs arrested and put in irons; and the Governor-General warned the Resident that he had gone too far to recede, that he would not endure defeat. “My
conduct,” he wrote, “in the late arrangements will be arraigned with an the rancour of disappointment and rapacity, and my reputation and influence will suffer a mortal wound from the failure of them.” That he should have determined not to be baffled by resistance, active or passive, is in accordance with his whole character, and if the flx.ed end lay beyond ordinary means of attainment, he put the blame on those who compelled him to choose between force and failure.
Sir Elijah Impey had left Calcutta t,o inspect the provincial courts just placed under his charge. On his way up the country he heard of the outbreak at Benares, was pressed by Hastings to join him, and found the Governor-General at Chunar, where he was writing his narrative of the Benares affair and was anxious to have the facts properly authenticated. Impey suggested verification by affidavits; whereupon Hastings proposed that Impey should himself take them at Lucknow, and he availed himself of this excellent opportunity for obtaining the opinion of a Chief-Justice upon the case against the Begums, who were said to have rebelled against their lawful sovereign. Impey ruled that if the Begums were in actual rebellion, it was necessary to the existence of the Nawab’s government that he should have the power of taking away the treasures which enabled them to support rebellion. He also agreed to convey this opinion to the Resident at Lucknow, whose known “mildness of temper” might be detrimental to vigorous counsels, should the Nawab prove, as turned out, no match for his mother. Middleton accordingly wrote to Hastings in December, 1782: “Your pleasure respecting the Begums I have learnt from Sir Elijah Impey, and the measures
heretofore proposed will follow the resumption of the jagirs.” In his examination upon the trial of Hastings Impey says that a great multitude of affidavits were sworn before him at Lucknow, of which a few had been written in English, but that what the natives deponed he did not know and was not expected to inquire. So the verification was after all futile enough; it did Hastings no good and Impey much haret, for an English Chief-Justice surely travels out of his way when he goes about a foreign country taking affidavits in support of the Governor-General’s political escapades. Hastings might well desire that the evidence which he was collecting to implicate the Begums in Cheyt Singh’s revolt should be attested “in the most authentic and sacred manner”; nevertheless Impey might have thought twice before allowing himself to be persuaded into officiating upon this strange mission, or into giving his legal countenance to raids upon the Begums’ money-bags. And upon a connected review of the relations between Hastings and Impey it is manifest that they had a general tendency to bring Impey into trouble; that the profit usually lay with the Governor-General at the cost of the Chief Justice, and that in pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for Hastings he frequently burned his own fingers. His good faith and intentions have not been disproved, but he was clearly amenable to the superior force of character that Hastings could exert on critical occasions.
Fortified by the affidavits and the advice of the Chief Justice, the Resident at Lucknow had put some heart into the Nawab for his campaign against the Begums, who treated their sovereign with the utmost contempt
until the English troops came to aid and protect him. The elder lady told the Resident that if he would only stand neutral she would speedily dispose of the Nawab, his prime minister, and his army; but the Resident had very different instructions. The Nawab hesitated to move, not only through fear of the Begum’s “uncommonly violent temper,” but also from a certain apprehension lest if he encouraged the English to interfere in his domestic affairs, they might prove in the end even more troublesome than his grandmother; but at length he marched to Fyzabad with the British Resident. The Begums, although they mustered a large body of men and threatened battle, did not venture upon resistance; the troops were quietly disarmed or dispersed; the districts in their possession were resumed; the palace was blockaded; the eunuchs surrendered, were imprisoned and forced to give up some secret hoards of money that were in their own houses; and the Resident returned to Lucknow with a sum of money equal to the liquidation of the Nawab’s debt to the Company. It should be added that a cash allowance equal to the land revenue of the estates was guaranteed to the Begums by the Company, and that the residue of it is still paid for the maintenance of their heirs and dependents.
So far as the policy of Hastings consisted in spurring on the Nawab to resume the vast estates which the Begums ruled with all the power and revenue of a petty sovereign and no public responsibilities, it was fairly defensible in the interests of both governments. As the Bishop of Rochester put the case afterwards on the trial: “The Nawab owed the Company a large debt; Hastings represented the Nawab’s principal creditor; he
compelled the Nawab to reclaim property unjustly withheld and to apply it to the discharge of his debt.” But the methods of duress and compulsion which have given such a sombre colour to this transaction were used to extort the treasure. Hastings was at the time in very serious need and perplexity; England was at war with America, Spain, France, and Holland, of whom the last two maritime powers threatened India; and within India the English were locked in a desperate struggle with Hyder Ali and the Mahrattas. He believed that all our Indian possessions, for which he was personally responsible, might be lost if funds could not be provided for making head against our enemies. It seemed to him intolerable that in this emergency the Company should be kept out of money due from Oude, because the Nawab was too feeble and vacillating to recover a large reserve of treasure upon which the State had a very fair claim; and since he held the demand to be lawful and the necessity urgent, he had no mind to be foiled by the fidelity of eunuchs or the indignation of ladies. Nevertheless the employment of personal severitics, under the superintendence of British officers, in order to extract money from women and eunuchs, is an ignoble kind of undertaking; and it is impossible not to adjudge serious blame to Hastings for having taken a prominent part in such a business. He did not plainly understand that all such ways and expedients lie completely outside the range of English political methods, and that a governing Englishman loses caste and honour who takes a share, directly or indirectly, in these sinister fiscal operations. To cancel the guarantee and leave the Nawab to deal with the recalcitrant
princesses was justifiable; to push him on and actively assist in measures of coercion against women and eunuchs was conduct unworthy and indefensible. In this instance, as in the Rohilla war, and indeed in all joint undertakings and conventions in India, the finger of public opinion invariably points to the Englishman as the responsible partner; and, however modestly he may remain in the background, his Oriental colleagues usually take care that he shall find himself in the front of the prospectus, especially if the business in hand be awkward and unpopular. The whole odium of the coercion fell upon the English, for the Nawab took care to give out that he was their unwilling tool; and although Hastings, while admitting his determination not to be defeated in a public trial of strength with the Begums, drums his ignorance of the mode in which his orders were carried out, it is clear that he relied much too confidently on that very perilous doctrine of the justification of means by their end. Hastings was himself quite aware that his personal character would suffer from his conduct; but he said openly at his trial that he made this sacrifice deliberately in a great public emergency. To devote one’s character to the cause of one’s country is at least patriotic; and the inflexible grip with which he held the Nawab to the execution of his contract did expose him to severe obloquy, and to savage denunciations from the managers of his impeachment. He was described as one who had compelled a son to rob his parents; Burke read passages from a commentary on the Koran by Demetrius Cantemir, “the prince and priest of Moldavia,” to prove the sanctity of the parental character among Mahomedans; while Sheridan declared that Hastings forced
a dagger into the Nawab’s clenched hand, and pointed it against the bosom of his mother.
One of the internal reforms effected at this time by Hastings may be here mentioned, because it laid in some degree the foundation of the existing Revenue Board in Bengal, and also led to one of the wildest charges made against him at the impeachment. In 1781 he abolished the provincial Revenue Councils and substituted a Committee of Revenue in Calcutta, consisting of four English officers. The object was to concentrate at headquarters the chief direction and control of the most important administrative department, but the details of the land revenue system were not at that period sufficiently settled or organised, and the plan seems to have worked ill by reason of leaving too much to native subordinates, particularly to a chief agent or Dewan called Gunga, Govind Singh, whom Hastings trusted and promoted. Moreover, the fact that Hastings kept to himself the appointment to this committee roused much jealousy, although an Indian governor of the present day would probably do the same. At the trial Burke poured out a vial of his most fervid wrath upon this institution. He declared that it was a systematic plan of the most daring bribery and peculation, that Hastings composed the new committee of his own creatures and favourites, and that the members were “mere tools to a detestable instrument of corruption,” whom he called Congo Singh. The evidence given by witnesses at the trial to this man’s character is diverse. Hastings, after his usuel steadfast fashion, stood by him to the last, and on leaving India recorded a minute attesting Govind
Singh’s fidelity, diligence, and ability. He added – “To myself he has given proof of a constancy and attachment which neither the fears nor expectations excited by the prevaleuce of a very different influence could shako, and at a time when those qualities were so dangerous that, far from finding them amongst the generality of his countrymen I did. not invariably meet with them amongst my own.”
This is not the language of a guilty tyrant bidding farewell to the instrument of his enormities, though it must be said that Mr. Shore, afterwards Lord Teignmouth, who had been chief of the Revenue Committee, thought that Govind Singh’s behaviour was neither better nor worse than was to be expected from a native entrusted with far too much authority, which he proieably misused. Burke, however, after declaring this man to have been the infernal agent and dm,e damnée of the Governor-General, called him the most atrocious villain that India ever produced, said tehat all India turned pale at his name, and proceeded to give such horrific descriptions of the diabolical cruelties alleged to have been practised by him on the ryots – for all of which he made Hastings responsible – that Mrs. Sheridan fainted, and Burke himself, while imploring their lordships to avert Divine indignation from the British empire by their sentence on Hastings, became greatly agitated, was taken ill, and obliged to break off abruptly.
15. Mr. Wheler’s statement of facts, quoted by Hastings in his Narrative.
This collection transcribed by Chris Gage