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Chapter 6 – End of the Wars in India

“In these times of calamity and distress,” writes the ingenious author of the Sair ul Matakharin, “I arrived in Calcutta, where I paid a visit to the Governor-General. That Viceroy, who has a vast fund of innate goodness, condoled much with me, but he was so overwhelmed with public business that he could not give me many hearings.” Our native historian found the Calcutta government almost destitute of men and money, and he has recorded some quaint reflections upon the English habit of attributing their misfortunes entirely to material causes, and of relying so exclusively upon the temporal weapon that no room is left for Divine interposition16. The tide of affairs was indeed still running against the English in Southern India, though matters had slightly improved while Hastings was occupied at Benares and Lucknow. From both Madras and Bombay had come

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entreaties that he would make peace with the Mahrattas, but they demanded the restoration of all the places and districts acquired by the English since the first beginning of hostilities, terms which Hastings rejected peremptorily as fatal to British interests and disgraceful to the English name. In March, 1781, a detachment of French troops had landed at Pondicherry, and had effected a junction with the Mysore forces, which were nevertheless severely defeated by Coote at Porto Novo in July. Coote had been invested by the Governor-General with the entire command of all the forces in the Madras Presidency: an arrangement which excited great jealousy and acrimonious disputes, and led to much irritation between Hastings and Lord Macartney, who had taken up the Madras government in 1781. Early in 1782 Hyder Ali’s famous son Tippoo managed to surround and cut to pieces a body of English and native troops under Colonel Braithwaite, one of those obscure and forgotten commanders of detachments, whose fortitude and heroism in many a desperate skirmish, or behind some rough entrenchment, are now only remembered by those who read the original reports and despatches of those days. The half-effaced slabs that may still be found below the glacis of the crumbling forts, or in the depths of some jungle, are the atones upon which England bas

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raised the fair and stately monument of her Indian empire; their names have already passed away as completely as those of the Roman centurions, whose tablets are still exhumed at Cirencester or along Hadrian’s wall. Braithwaite, disregarding a friendly warning, allowed himself to be surrounded by Tippoo’s army, and had to defend himself with one hundred English soldiers and twelve hundred sepoys, outnumbered by twenty to one. He formed his men into a hollow square, which was only broken by incessant cannonade and charges alter a stubborn and savage contest of twenty-six hours; nearly the whole party was eut to pieces, and the English officers were barely saved by the generous interposition of the French officers who served with the Mysore force.

But the war was wearing itself out at last; for hostilities were now slackening in Europe as well as in Asia. Hyder Ali, that ancient and inveterate foe of the English, died undefeated and full of years in December, 1782, and earlier in the same year peace was concluded. with the Mahrattas, who had received simultaneous and independent overtures from all three Presidencie,s; a coincidence which did not strengthen English diplomacy and caused much inter - governmental recrimination. Large retrocessions of territory were made to the Mahrattas, wherein the lion’s share went to Sindia, through whose intervention Hastings had negotiated his treaty. It was for the purpose of conciliating this powerful arbitrator that Hastings brought himself to consent to the dismemberment of the possessions of the unlucky Rana of Gohud (now Dholpur), who had been an ally; while the Mahrattas on their side engaged to join the English in compelling Hyder Ali to relinquish

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the places he had taken from them. This latter article was never acted upon; for the Mahratta prime minister, a man of high degree in statecraft, saw that by holding it in suspense over the belligerents he could keep in his hands the balance of power between Hyder Ali (or Tippoo) and Hastings, for both of whom he had too sincere a respect to desire that either should be prematurely relieved of his antagonist. And although Hastings reminded the Mahrattas that if the fanatic Mahommedan power of Mysore became too strong for the English, Tippoo would speedily turn and rend his Hindu riyals and neighbours at Poona, yet even this argument did not convince the far-seeing Mahratta statesman that it was safer to strengthen the Englishman.

The treaty was fmally ratified in 1783, when Hastings at last emerged out of the stormy zone of war by which he had for the last five years been encompassed; and also sa.w some reasonable prospect of attaining, before the end of his long Governor-Generalship, something of that unity and concord in his Council which had been so strenuously and vainly prescribed at the beginning. Tippoo Sultan had continued the war after his father’s death; but it ceased when the French withdrew from him their support on concluding peace with the English in 1783. Lord Macartney submitted to tenus with Mysore of which Hastings disapproved, and which he unsuccessfully tried to amend. The details of this disagreement are now void of interest, except so far as they exhibit the extraordinary difficulties that in those days surrounded a Governor-General who was held, then as now, responsible for the foreign policy of India, and

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whose authority was thwarted and enfeebled by distance, and by the susceptibilities, local prejudices, partial views, and involuntary misunderstandings that so often affect the relations between the supreme and subordinate governments in India. Sir Eyre Coote had been induced to return to the command of the army in Madras, but he died on arrival; the generals who commanded in his place had been worsted by Tippoo, and if the peace had not intervened it is an open question whether Tippoo and his French contingent might not have justified the dictatorial interference of Hastings by capturing Madras and Lord Macartney together. There ensued a general cessation of warfare throughout the three continents of Asia, Europe, and America. For ten years this trace lasted in Europe, until another and much more violent shock of arms raised a conflagration that once more spread to India, where it revived a war in which Tippoo lost life and kingdom, and the power and possessions of the Mahrattas were so effectively shorn that the English predominance in India was thenceforward indisputably consummated.

But for Warren Hastings the wartime was finished. Bombay had been preserved, and Madras saved, as he himself declared, from annihilation; the Carnatic had been rescued from Hyder Ali; the Mahrattas pacified; and the Nizam conciliated. He had run through very narrow and perilous straits; he had faced heavy and damaging responsibilities, had committed errors and suffered reverses; and had barely rounded without shipwreck one or two very awkward points. Nevertheless he had eventually broken through the ring of obstacles and dangerous rivalries by which the British Government

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in India had been encircled, and had so planted our landmarks as to mark out the groundwork of the British dominion. It was the deliberate opinion of Sir John Macpherson (no friend to Hastings), when he looked back on the general situation of the English in India in the year 1781, that while the separation of the American colonies was a blow and a discomfiture from which the English nation would speedily recover, the loss of our Indian possessions would have been such a tremendous commercial and financial calamity, and would have transferred such immense advantages to the aide of the French, who would have taken our place and succeeded to all that we gave up, that Great Britain might have been forced to succumb in the contest she was waging against her European enemies, and might have fanon out of the first rank of nations.

“No person,” he wrote, “but one who had once seen the Carnatic in its prosperity, and who afterwards saw it in the misery in which I beheld it, could conceive the reality of the general scene of distress which I have described, as within the possibility of human events. There I saw men who supposed themselves, and who literally were, worth princely fortunes a few years before, absolutely in want of bread. The whole substance of a great colony, the credit of a mighty Company and of ally princes, were extinguished by the sword of desolation. ‘ You may come on shore,’ wrote Lord Macartney to me the day I came to anchor in the roads, but if the gentlemen who are passengers with you come along with you, they must sleep in the streets.’ And where was, at that instant, the existence of the India Company Only in the revenues of Bengal; and in Bengal a situation of affairs similar to that which existed in the Carnatic was to be greatly apprehended, and had it actually taken place, I leave it to your own ideas to reflect whether the general catastrophe which I have represented as possible, was not to

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be dreaded-as a certain consequence. France looked to such reversion in your fortune, and when you see her armaments prepared upon a scale of force and expense which is the utmost that her faculties can send against India, you cannot be too sensibly awakened to the dangers you have escaped; nor consider those events as impossible which could alone reimburse your natural enemies, or give them any prospect of future advantage from such extraordinary efforts.”

At any rate, all who have studied the condition of England during the later years of Lord North’s administration, before Rodney’s naval victory in 1782 had turned the scale, will admit that such a catastrophe might well have decided the war against us all over the world to the destruction of our transmarine empire. And few impartial judges will deny to Hastings the chief merit of averting it in India.

But although Hastings had at last succeeded in pacifying or putting down his enemies in India, in England he was exposed to great and growing danger from personal animosities and strong political antipathies. In 1781 Indian affairs began to engage the serious attention of public men, and from that time forward the subject emerged rapidly into prominence. The reports submitted by Mr. Dundas’s Committee provided a sort of arsenal whence both parties drew their war material; until in 1783 India became the battlefield on which the great Parliamentary captains fought the decisive campaign which ended in the defeat and dissolution of the Coalition Ministry, and which drove such statesmen as Fox and Burke into almost lifelong exile from office. The contest and its result affected to an important degree the fortunes of Hastings, whose name takes from 1781 a notable place in the general history of English politics.

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The letters written to him by Mr. Pechell, which are quoted in Gleig’s Life, give a curious account of the causes and influences that induced the leaders of English parties to treat Indian administration, which Hastings was now understood to impersonate, as a point of some tactical importance in the disposition of their forces and the occupation of the ground upon which they confronted each other. In 1781 Lord North, who at that moment thought himself still fairly safe in office, was well inclined to give Hastings his support; the more so because the misfortunes and discomfiture of England in America, the political blundering and the military incapacity, naturally formed a strong contrast against the handling of dangers and difficulties in India. Lord North was no purist in politics: he would probably not have objected to abate something in the article of morality if he could thereby have got better service from his soldiers and civilians; and he might well be inclined to deal tenderly with a Governor-General who, whatever might be his shortcomings, had at least shown no Jack of firmness and masterful ability to face troubles. Major Scott, whom Hastings had employed in England as his Parliamentary agent and plenipotentiary, was graciously received by the king; Lord Mansfield and Lord Bathurst, ex-Chancellors, and Lord Thurlow, the Chancellor, were all in his favour. Nevertheless the internal and external discord which pervaded India during 1780-81 had made noise enough to be heard at home; the Mahratta. war, the scandals at Madras, the appointment of Impey to preside over the Presidential Courts with a large salary, the awkward stories about Oude at Benares – all these things

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had damaged the public reputation of Hastings. Francis reached England in 1781 with his accusations and evidence amply and skilfully prepared. Burke was a close friend of Admiral Pigot, then in the Commons, a brother of the unlucky governor of Madras whose imprisonment Hastings was supposed to have connived at or at least to have condoned. His kinsman, William Burke, had been appointed agent with the Tanjore Rajah; had been treated at Madras with much attention by Lord Macartney, but had been somewhat neglected by Hastings, although they had been schoolfellows at Westminster. He was now writing home vehement complaints against the behaviour of the Bengal government toward the Tanjore Rajah, to which Edmund Burke replied very sympathetically. Sir Thomas Rumbold also, who had been removed from the Madras Governorship, had applied to Burke for help in clearing himself and incriminating Hastings; while the alarming news of Hyder Ali’s irruption into the Carnatic had roused the House of Commons to appoint two select committees for inquiry into Indian affairs. And although Lord North passed two Acts continuing the Company’s charter, for a consideration, for three years longer, and confirming Hastings in the Governor-Generalship, he was displaced early in 1782 by Lord Rockingham, in whose ministry Burke’s influence predominated. Burke wrote to William Burke at Madras that the Lord Advocate (Dundas) “continues in the same happy train of thinking which your early impressions had formed him to”; and that Dundas was about to bring forward such resolutions as would “free that unfortunate prince and harassed country (Tanjore) from the wicked usurpations of Hastings.”

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Dundas accordingly submitted to the House one hundred and eleven resolutions gravely reprobating the whole system of Indian administration, censuring Hastings and Hornby (the Bombay Governor), and recommending the prosecution of Rumbold and Whitehill, the two ex-Governors of Madras. The Commons resolved that Hastings and Hornby had “in sundry instances acted in a manner repugnant to the honour and policy of this nation, and thereby brought great calamities on India and enormous expenses on the Company,” and declared it to be the duty of the Directors to recall both of them.

After several animated discussions the Court of Directors carried by a majority a resolution setting forth that they, the Directors, had consistently enjoined their servants in India to abstain from schemes of conquest and extension of dominion, and had invariably recommended peace, moderation, and good faith; whereas their servants had nevertheless pursued a policy of contradictory negotiations, offensive treaties, and unnecessary and complicated wars; thereby piling up their debts and pulling clown their reputation. It was manifestly impossible to expect any change from those servants whose ideas accorded with so ruinous a system, and the Court therefore determined that it was expedient to remove Warren Hastings, Esquire, from the office of Governor-General of Bengal. This was in May, 1782; but in October Lord Rockingham’s death saved Hastings from immediate recall; and the Court of Proprietors, reassured by the change of Ministry, carried a motion rescinding the resolution of their Directors on the ground that it appeared from incontestable evidence, drawn from the records of the Company, and supported by the unanimous opinion

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of the House of Commons, that the Directors were unjustly laying on Hastings the blame of measures which they themselves had originally encouraged and adopted. They held that the Government-General of Bengal was using every means to produce a general pacification, that its conduct merited the warmest approbation, and that the removal of Hastings would be extremely injurious.

The Proprietors were so far right that the resolution of the Directors must be admitted to have been a shabby and somewhat hypocritical attempt to disown their share of responsibility for what had been going on in India, and to make a scapegoat of Hastings. But their vote very properly aroused much indignation in the Commons, where Dundas pronounced it insolent and dangerous in principle, and the Ministry exercised their power of prohibiting the Directors from issuing a despatch communicating to India the decision of the Court of Proprietors. Gleig gives a letter from Hastings to Lord Shelburne, who succeeded Lord Rockingham as Prime Minister, in which he endeavours to combat beforehand any unfavourable impressions that might have been produced by the reports (which he had not seen) of the secret Committee, and defends his foreign policy. Hastings particularly contends, with truth and force, that the Mahratta war was originally begun by the Directors and by the Bombay Presidency; allowing that the prosecution of it, and the peace, are his own. Nevertheless Lord Shelburne, who was too weak to protect Hastings from the formidable assaults of the leaders in the Commons, tried to compromise matters by arranging for him a retreat that should save his honour; but Fox, Burke, and Dundas were now making the Benares case a text for the

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most unmeasured invectives against him, and were diligently collecting every kind of evidence in support of their charges. Lord Shelburne would certainly have left Hastings to his fate if he had not himself been abandoned by his party in 1783, when Dundas brought up a bill for reconstructing the government of British India, for inquiring into alleged abuses, and for recalling the Governor-General. His plan was to send out a new Governor-General armed with extended powers and with authority to overrule Council; a change of system long urged by Hastings as essential, and now seen to be so by all parties. But as Dundas had not joined the famous Coalition, the Ministers had no mind to let him bring out and ride the best horse in their stable; so the bill had to be dropped in order to make way for the introduction, in November, 1783, of Fox’s celebrated East India Bill, which was drawn up in consultation with Burke, having been preceded by several speeches in which Burke violently and bitterly censured Hastings. Francis was now furnishing the ammunition by which these incessant volleys were sustained. Lord Macartney, the first governor who had come to India unconnected with the Company’s services, had been deeply offended by the interference of the Governor-General in the military and political business of Madras. All his influence at home was therefore thrown in the scale against Hastings; while with Burke Macartney corresponded in the same vein. And from a letter written by Sir William Jones to Burke (April, 1784), it may be learned that Burke had warned the Chief-Justice that if he heard of him siding with Hastings he would do all in his power to get Jones recalled.

The best and fiercest debaters that ever led the

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Commons of England now combined to treat Hastings as the embodiment of all the misgovernment, corruption, heartlessness, and tyrannous usurpation that had been laid to the charge of Anglo-Indian officiais; the issue of a desperate political struggle was staked upon accomplishing his overtluow; and while the unpopularity of the Coalition and the king’s detestation of his Ministers saved the East India Company, the Governor-General himself was loft unprotected. “Loaded for years as he has been,” cried Burke, “with the execrations of the natives, with the censures of the Court of Directors, and struck and blasted with the resolutions of this House, he still maintains the most despotic power ever known in India.” Such thunderous language, read a hundred years alter it was spoken, still strikes the judgment and startles the imagination; nor was it possible that before an audience to whom Hastings was known only by distant rumours, his reputation could resist the shocks of Burke’s scorching and fulminating oratory. And when, to quote Fox’s bold metaphor, “a bill framed for the happiness of thirty millions of our fellow-creatures was strangled in the very moment of triumph by an infamous string of bed-chamber janissaries17,” when, that is, the king’s personal exertions procured its rejection by the House of Lords, when the

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Company’s patronage and possessions escaped annexation, and the Coalition Ministry, dismissed by the Crown and deserted by the electors, fell to pieces with a crash, the defeat of his bitter enemies brought no security to Hastings. On the contrary, it sharpened their animosity and left him as much exposed as before to the effects of it. For although imputations of treasonable intrigue, corruption, servility, of private and public profligacy, allusions to conspirators who could pull down the throne and to reptiles who burrowed under it, taunts, threats, and invectives flew thick and fast between the opposing ranks, they were used as the legitimate weapons of partisan warfare, and did little real execution. But when two armies are furiously contesting some point of vantage which is alternately won and lost, the most dangerous position is between the lines of crossing fire; and this was the predicament of Hastings during the memorable political struggle that went on from 1782 to 1784. Of the three East India Bills laid before Parliament in those years by Dundas, Fox, and Pitt successively, the first two disappeared in the clash and confusion of party strife, were thrown aside in the rout or trampled down by the victors; the third was victoriously carried by Pitt in the teeth of his defeated riyals. The House was filled with sound and fury, signifying perhaps nothing to the combatants, but each and every proposal of Indian reform gave the foremost oratorical champions fresh occasion, incentive, and material for heaping insults and accusations upon the absent Governor-General. Hastings had been rather cruelly handled by Fox and his supporters; he was now again, in the debate on Pitt’s bill, attacked by Burke in terms of scorn and detestation, as one who had left whole

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provinces uninhabited, “and had exterminated the natives throughout the fairest portions of the globe.” It may have been necessary for Burke to stimulate the imagination of his hearers, and to appeal to their passions, in order to overcome the unconcern and selfish inattention with which we listen to a narrative of hardships and injuries suffered in a distant continent; but he himself saw the events and figures of Indian history through a hazy and distorted medium; and in order to make his pictures popular and impressive he enlarged and discoloured them beyond all natural proportion and verisimilitude. No more remarkable illustration, indeed, can be found of the change in style and habits of thought that has taken place during the last hundred years, than the fact that Burke’s extravagant invectives, which he exploded like charges of dynamite against his enemies, should have been thought fair weapons of war against an absent , governor, and should not have greatly offended against the standard of moderation, impartiality, and accuracy prevailing in a country like England. It must be admitted that Burke was savagely in earnest, and that the zealous advocacy of Hastings’ Parliamentary agent in England, Major Scott, merely added fuel to the fire, by stirring up the wrath of his antagonists and bringing the defence into contempt with the general public. Almost from the hour of his arrival in London, Scott began to worry and weary the public by pamphlets which followed each other in rapid series, and which only provided matter for somewhat indecorous pleasantry to the wits of the day18.

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No advocate so dangerous to his client could have been found as one who was fluent and prolix, a Forcible-Feeble without point or discretion; and nothing could be more hopeless than the imparity of Scott’s contact with Dundas who declared that Hastings imprisoned the princes and decimated the people of India, with Fox who denounced him as a State criminal of the first magnitude, or with Burke who cursed him as a scourge of God by whom Bengal had been reduced to a waste and howling desert.

In 1783, when the coalition between Lord North and Fox brought into power the most determined enemies of the Governor-General, the India Bill gave Burke an ample field for dilating upon the iniquities of the Company generally, and Hastings in particular. He collected and summed up their sins into concentrated charges that had all the effect of a converging artillery fire. He undertook to make good three “universal” assertions – First, that from Mount Imaus to Cape Comorin the Company had sold every prince with whom they had come into contact; secondly, that they had broken every treaty they had made; and thirdly, that they had ruined every prince or State which put any trust in them. All the chief acts of Hastings’ administration were reviewed and condemned in one tremendous indictment; he was said to have heaped up immense wealth, and his arrogant prosperity was contrasted with the fate of Monson and Clavering, whose days he had shortened, and of Francis, who had returned to England in virtuous despair. But the essential question before the Commons and the country was not so much whether the Company and their officers were guilty of these enormities,

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as whether the patronage of India should be the reward of an unscrupulous coalition at home; and on this point the king and his people were against the Ministry. Fox and Burke were driven out of office, and their abhorrence of Indian misdeeds, which was a feeling as sincere as its expression was exaggerated, must have been accentuated against Hastings by their defeat upon Indian ground. Thurlow told Major Scott that Hastings had put an end to the late Ministry as completely as if he had taken a pistol and shot them through the head one after another, and he swore Hastings should have a red ribbon and a peerage. Lord Temple expressed the highest regard for him, and Lord Mansfield congratulated Scott on the important victory for Hastings; another proof, he said, of the wonderful ascendency of his fortune. That the victors agreed with the discomfited party in debiting the lost battle to the score of Hastings was a method of account that left a heavy balance against him, as he very soon began to discover. The cautions and limited protection extended to Hastings by Pitt in 1784, when he refused to comply with Burke’s demand for papers regarding Oude, only served to encourage his assailants, and their exasperation naturally increased when Pitt brought in his own India Bill, which took out of their sails the wind on which they had relied for a prosperous voyage. To Pitt, with a strong majority at his back, it was a thing of small consequence that Burke should threaten the Ministers with retribution from an offended Deity, as accomplices in the guilt of deluging India with blood; but to Hastings, who had no such practical means of defying the lightning, and who was soon to stand bareheaded

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under the thunderstorm, it was a serious matter that all these vows of vengeance should gradually become diverted and concentrated upon him personally. Yet Hastings had been so often menaced with public ruin and private disgrace, his recall had been so often averted by accident, usually by some turn of the political kaleidoscope19; he had, like all who have lived long beyond the atmosphere of English politics, so imperfect a comprehension of the signs of the times, that he necessarily miscalculated his situation and mismanaged his measures for self-defence. He felt distress, vexation, and resentment; he had asked the Directors, in March, 1783, to send out a successor, and he had said that he would throw up office at once if Cheyt Singh were restored to the Benares zemindarship. But he does not seem to have been fully aware that the Coalition Ministry would have saved him the trouble of resigning, for if their India Bill had passed he would have been instantly recalled on the charge of peculation; and latterly he placed faith in the assurances of Major Scott, who relied upon the favour of the king, upon Pitt, Dundas, and Temple, whose support Scott fancied he had secured; and upon Thurlow, who hounded on Scott like a terrier to worry Fox, vowing that he had seen the greatest orators in the Commons struck dumb by a fact. Scott discovered, too late, the inutility of attempting to mop up with “a few plain facts” the surging and foaming tide that was to rise against Hastings; but manifestly Hastings himself

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had at this time no notion that his greatest perils and severest conflicts were not behind but before him; and though he may have felt keen anxiety he had not the presentiment with which a man looks forward to an obscure and ominous future:–

“As if calamity had but begun;

As if the vanward clouds of evil days

Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear

Was with its storied thunder labouring up.”

Footnotes

16. “For the English trusted much to the goodness of their troops and to the talents of their commander; nor do they admit any interference of the Deity in the affaire of this world; but attribute their repeated victories and numerous conquests to the good conduct of their officers, and to the bravery of their troops; nor do they ascribe the defeats given to General Carnac and to General Munro to anything else but to the misconduct of those two men, whom they loaded with imprecations and obloquy, as the principal authors of those disasters that had disgraced their nation. There is no doubt indeed but that wisdom and prudence bear a great sway in the direction of the affairs of the world; but not so much either, as that the original mover of all events, He that has created and bestowed that wisdom and prudence, should remain idle Himself, and, as it were, out of office, or that the affairs of the world, for want of apparent solidity and permanency, should be wholly and entirely in the power and disposal of human wisdom and foresight.”

17. Pitt, on the other hand, described Fox’s bill as one of the most desperate and alarming attempts at the exercise of tyranny that ever disgraced the annals of this or any other country. And Lord Loughborough, being at the moment a Foxite, said of Pitt’s own Indian bill that it merely stole the Company’s patronage and put it into the Minister’s pocket. In estimating the real weight and import of the epithets showered on Hastings, we have to remember that his accusera were habitually exchanging equally violent abuse of each other.

18. See The Rolliad, for the

“Reams and reams of tracts that without pain

Incessant spring from Scott’s prolific brain.”

19. In 1776, by Clavering’s death, when he retracted his resignation; in July, 1782, by Lord Rockingham’s death; in October, 1782, by a vote of the Proprietors; in 1783, by Lord Shelburne’s retirement from office; in December, 1783, by the overthrow of the Coalition.

This collection transcribed by Chris Gage
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