During the year 1785 Hastings was still occupied and harassed by extreme complications, internal dissensions, and chiefly by anxiety about his position at home. At the end of 1782 the resolution of the House of Commons for his dismissal was known in India, and had materially diminished his authority in his own Council, besides affecting his influence abroad. To Lord Shelburne, who had sent him verbally some professions of esteem, he wrote a long letter protesting against the conclusions of the secret Committee. Whether this letter was actually sent is not clear; but it is a remarkably vigorous and pointed composition, full of the strenuous pertinacity and upstanding disdainful combativeness with which Hastings usually rejected censure or challenged an adverse sentence.
“I have seen the resolutions,” he wrote, “but not the reports on which they are founded. I can, however, boldly venture to assure your Lordship that either the reports must have been garbled, or they are the most positive and direct evidences of the opposite of every resolution which professes to be formed upon them, and which contains my condemnation. ... I have never in a single instance broken the faith of a treaty, or deserted or injured the interests of the Company. I
have never sacrificed the honour of my nation. I had no more concern in the origin and commencement of the Mahratta war than the Lord Advocate of Scotland. .. . I have been the instrument of saving one Presidency from infamy and both from annihilation.”
Hastings was certainly not one of those men who allow enterprises of great pith and moment to fail through doubts, misgivings, or
“Some craven scruple
Of looking too precisely on the event.”
On the contrary, he is to be classed with those who, having said “This thing’s to do,” and having justified to themselves their own actions, are only rendered impatient by the criticism of others, and whose self-approval is not even shaken by failure. But his Councillors at Calcutta naturally took a different view; they were now men inferior in capacity and reputation to his former antagonists; yet although their opposition was proportionately less formidable, the minutes of proceedings show two out of his three colleagues constantly voting against him; while the third, Wheler, gave him very intermittent support. In one letter he writes of cavils and contradictions made in a tone of insolence which often threw him off the guard of his prudence: “For indeed I have not the collected firmness of mind which I once possessed, and which gave me such a superiority in my contesta with Clavering and his associates.”
After the Parliamentary censures came the reprimands from the Court of Directors. In February, 1783, he received from the Court resolutions entirely disapproving his conduct in the Benares affair as improper, unwarrantable, and highly impolitic. He evidently perused these
documents with profound indignation and contempt; and he consoles himself by remembering that his own narrative of events at Benares, which must have reached England soon after the passing of these resolutions, “must have completely defeated them, for if there ever was a demonstration produced by argument, I have demonstrated the falsehood of Cheyt Singh’s pretensions to independency.” He at once set himself to contradict and refute all that the Court had affirmed. In a long and peremptory letter he most solemnly and categorically denied the existence of their facts and the justice of their conclusions; he declared that if Cheyt Singh were reinstated at Benares he would instantly resign; he enlarged on his services to the Company, and on the patience and temper with which he had submitted to all the indignities that had been heaped upon him during eleven years of administration; and he upbraided his masters for their scurvy treatment of him in the midst of public dangers.
“While your existence was threatened by wars with the most formidable powers of Europe, and while you confessedly owed its preservation to the seasonable and vigorous exertions of this government, you chose that season to annihilate its constitutional powers. You annihilated the influence of its executive member. You proclaimed its annihilation. You virtually called on his associates to withdraw their support from him, and they have withdrawn it; but you have substituted no other instrument of rule in his stead, unless you suppose it may exist and can be effectually exercised in the body of your Council at large, possessing no power of motion but an inert submission to the letter of your command, which has never yet been applied to the establishment of any original plan or system of measures, and seldom felt but in instances of personal favour or personal displeasure.”
These hard-hitting sentences follow each other like the blows of a flail, and must have fluttered the pigeon-holes in Leadenhall Street. He ended by assuring the honourable Court that he was only detained in their service by fear of public damage from his abruptly quitting it, and desiring them to be pleased to obtain the early nomination of some person to succeed him. The Court rejoined by rebuking their Governor-General for unjustifiable animadversions on the conduct of his superiors; but as they did not at the moment desire to drive him to resignation, their letter ended with expressions of great approbation of the vigour which he had shown in the defence of Southern India, and with some admission of the exigencies which had made unavoidable the rather humiliating treaty which he had finally concluded with the Mahrattas.
The Court, however, admonished him on the subject of his treatment of the Begums in language which he thought harsh and insolent, and which encouraged his refractory Councillors, “who,” he writes, “all oppose me.” “I will resign this thankless office on the first opportunity, but I will not be driven from it either by the folly of my subordinates or the injustice of my superiors.” In short, they were all utterly wrong-headed and obstructive, and he was determined that they should not ruin the country and disgrace themselves by driving him out of the Governor-Generalship. It was his nature to dispute with his enemies every foot of ground; his innate fortitude reposed upon a sincere conviction of his own superiority; he was usually right, but when he was wrong he never seems to have admitted it, and his clear intelligence saw its objects so distinctly that he
scarcely comprehended hesitation about making straight for them.
The dissension over the negotiations for peace with Tippoo Sultan had now culminated into something like an open quarrel with the Madras government; for Lord Macartney had so persistently withheld obedience to orders from Bengal that his removal for insubordination was discussed in the Governor-General’s secret committee at Calcutta. At Benares there had been mismanagement of the revenue, and much discontent on the part of the new Rajah; while at Lucknow the Nawab and his minister were complaining to Hastings that the English Resident was usurping all their authority. For the affairs of the Benares estates and of Oude Hastings felt himself peculiarly responsible; and he was none the less ready to look into grievances because the officials at Benares and Lucknow were men whom he had removed, who had been reappointed against his will by the Court of Directors, and whom he believed to be now thwarting his arrangements, and calculating upon his early departure from India in a manner that he was not likely to overlook. He had thus various matters to settle, and sundry enemies to demolish, before he could wind up his Indian affairs satisfactorily.
Yet the end of his Indian career was manifestly drawing near; he had been thirteen years in chief command; he had outlived or outlasted all his colleagues; and many indications pointed to the expediency of withdrawing before his enemies, whom he had so long resisted, should prevail against him in England and India. His constitution was much damaged; and his wife, from whom he could scarcely bear to part, was so
ill as to be obliged to leave India without further delay. Nevertheless he determined not to depart until the Directors should have answered the letter in which he tendered his resignation, or before the arrival of his successor; for he had a strong repugnance, not unusual in similar circumstances, to allowing his discontented colleagues the chance of taking temporary command; and upon those reasons he resolved to hold on, if necessary, for another year. “No consideration upon earth,” he wrote, “shall induce or compel me to act longer with such associates” as his Councillors, with all of whom he had now become thoroughly disgusted. Clavering’s open enmity seemed now to him to have been less disagreeable than the underhand obstructiveness of Macpherson and Stables, who had come out to India as his “dear friends”; but in truth it would have puzzled any set of Councillors to hit off the precise degree and kind of opposition that Hastings was disposed to tolerate.
So Mrs. Hastings sailed alone for England in January, 1784. Her departure was to Hastings a severe affliction. He was miserable at losing her; and his first letters to her after the separation still touch the reader with a magnetic sympathy for the throb of grief with which he gazed after the vanishing ship, as it stood out into the open sea from the estuary of the river. For some days afterward he seems to have been completely dejected and unnerved. On the next day he writes to her – “I followed your ship with my eyes until I could no longer see it, and I passed a most wretched day with my heart swol’n with affliction and my head raging with pain. ... I am certain that no time nor habit will remove the
pressure of your image from my heart, nor from my spirits; nor would I remove it if I could, though it will prove a perpetual torment to me. ... Oh God, what a change was effected in my existence within the space of a few minutes, when I passed from the ship to the pinnace.” And throughout the numerous letters that he wrote to his wife, until he rejoined her in England, he recurs constantly to his misery at her absence, to his anxiety for her health, and to the longing thought of seeing her again by which he is unceasingly possessed. He had evidently been accustomed to make her the confidante of all his official troubles –
“I go to Oude,” he wrote to her, “on a bold adventure, from a divided and hostile Council, to a scene of difficulties unsurmountable but by very powerful exertions; to a country wasted by famine and threatened by an invading enemy; to a government loosened by twelve months’ distraction, its wealth exhausted, and its revenue dissipated. I go without a fixed idea, of the instruments which I am to employ or the materials on which I am to act, with great expectations entertained by others but very moderate of my own; my superiors at home labouring to thwart and if they can to remove me; and all this as well known to the Indian world as to our own. Add to the foregoing a mind unequal to its former strength and a constitution very much impaired.”
The allusion here is to the project of a final visit to Benares and Lucknow, upon which Hastings was the more steadily bent because his colleagues had raised objections to it. He had indeed some trouble in extracting an assent from the Council, one of whom “wickedly insinuated” that it was hardly worth while for the Governor-General to go so far from headquarters when orders dismissing him from his office were expected, and
might arrive any day from England. The remark, though unpleasant, had sufficient truth in it to make him set out speedily. He left Calcutta in February and did not return until November; so that this expedition practically occupied his last year in office, for he passed the intervening months at Benares and Lucknow.
The state of affairs in Oude undoubtedly called for the Governor-General’s presence and personal supervision. Mr. Bristow, who was then Resident at that Court, had been appointed to the post by orders direct from England. Against these orders Hastings had vehemently protested, had been sharply overruled, and had recorded in the minutes that the step was “a most pernicious degradation of the executive authority at the very crisis when the government was surrounded by foreign wars and complications.” To which Francis, for whom the appointment was a triumph, had rejoined by minuting that he “foresaw many more dangers and mischiefs to the government from contracting a habit of disobeying the Company’s orders,” as Hastings was quite ready to do if he could have got any support from his Council. However, it so happened that Middleton, for whom Hastings had originally turned out Bristow, subsequently incurred his chief’s displeasure for lack of vigour in clearing off the balances due from Oude, and also in pressing on certain urgently-needed reforms of the administration. The Nawab had neither paid his debts to the Company nor had set his kingdom in order; and Hastings taxed both the Resident and the Nawab’s prime minister with culpable negligence in allowing misrule and insolvency to continue. Middleton’s resignation
gave Hastings an opportunity of appointing Bristow with a good grace, in anticipation of reiterated orders to do so; but affairs in Oude did not mend, for in October, 1783, the country was, according to Hastings, in universal revolt; so before starting from Calcutta he persuaded the Council to turn out Bristow.
It must be admitted that Mr. Bristow’s conduct had gone some way toward fulfilling the dire prognostications that Hastings had recorded of the consequences of appointing him; nor could any good be expected from sending to the most important diplomatic post in India an agent notoriously at variance with his principal, who relied upon the surreptitious support of the malcontent Councillors for holding his own against so masterful a Governor-General. The correspondence of 1783 shows that the Resident’s behaviour was a prolific source of dissension in Council. Hastings thought he “had secured Bristow’s fidelity by his gratitude,” but he soon found himself obliged to lay before his Council charges sent in by the Nawab against the Resident. The Board promptly acquitted him on all charges, and Hastings immediately adjudged him guilty on every one of them. He reports this to Major Scott, adding rather naïvely, “You will wonder that all my Council should oppose me. So do I!” But he explains that Macpherson and Stables had intimidated Wheler, of whose conduct he is ashamed, and who himself became ashamed of it later, when Hastings had succeeded by great pains, and perhaps some Little counter-intimidation, in working Wheler’s head round again into the right direction. The Council was so constructed that its weakest and most irresolute member usually found himself holding the
casting vote between two fiercely contending factions, and the strongest of them dragged him over to their aide. Wheler feebly tried to do his duty, and was rewarded by a sentence in one of Burke’s philippics against Hastings, where he stands as “his supple, worn-down, beaten, cowed, and, I am afraid, bribed colleague, Mr. Wheler.”
After this fashion the Governor -General and his Councillors had mutually checked and counteracted each other in Calcutta, with the result that for some time Mr. Bristow appears to have attained emancipation from any superior control; he disregarded the instructions given him by Hastings, demurred to his authority, quarrelled with the ministers of the Nawab, treated the Nawab himself as a cipher, and so managed his powers of interference as to dislocate and paralyse a feeble and ill-constructed government. His success in overawing the palace and checkmating the ministers had been so complete that while he was supreme at the capital the provinces were left with no administration at all, and the normal confusion soon thickened into serious disorder. When the Nawab complained of the Resident’s inordinate arrogance and of his intolerable meddling in all departments under pretext of reform and guidance, Mr. Bristow alleged that he had received the Governor-General’s strict injunctions to insist on the proper liquidation of the Company’s claims, and that he was merely acting up to orders. This aspect of the case was of course supremely irriteing to Hastings, who recorded a long and exhaustive minute on the Resident’s misdeeds, treating him as the instrument and impersonation of the policy that had been originally forced upon
his government by Clavering and Francis, and that had caused, he said, great and irreparable mischief to Oude. In this State paper he argues with great cogency that the disorder and impoverishment of Oude were attributable to the system, introduced against his consistent protest, of weakening the kingdom and interfering with the administration; nor can any one rend his minute without admitting that his ideas were at any rate moderate, logical, and formed upon a connected and well-considered plan. His policy from the beginning had been to strengthen the ruler of Oude as our chief ally, and as our bulwark against other active powers; it was with these objecta that he had engaged in the Rohilla war, had opposed the treaty which deprived the Nawab of Benares, and had urged the Nawab to seize the lands and treasure detained by the Begums. Some of these transactions must be gravely condemned, but it should be understood that they were all politically coherent and founded on the intelligible principle of strengthening those from whom support is expected. It was the policy of those by whom Hastings had been overruled, and who laid at his door consequences for which they themselves, especially Francis, were responsible, that really brought Oude, as a State, to the verge of ruin: a vacillating policy of intrigue and intermittent exactions, of draining the resources of a country and damaging its ruler’s credit at a time when they were both subjected to extraordinary pressure. With the Nawab of Oude personally Hastings was always on terres of friendship and confidence; nor will the impartial student of Anglo-Indian history find in his acte and language the imperious, high-handed coercion that subsequently characterised
Lord Wellesley’s dealings with the successor of Asaph-u-Dowlah. But Lord Wellesley governed India as the representative of a powerf war-ministry in England at a time when the upsetting of thrones and the levying of heavy contributions upon subject nations prevailed in Europe to an estent which left the English people little leisure to inquire into the grievances of a distant Asiatic principality. It was a period of tumultuous confusion, sudden invasions, and unscrupulous annexations all over the civilised world; nor can we doubt that Lord Wellesley’s proceedings in India took their colour and their justification from the violent struggles for and against territorial aggrandisement in which England and other nations had engaged at home20. If Hastings had returned ten years later than he did – in 1795 instead of 1785 – no one, not even Burke, would have proposed his impeachment.
Hastings went first to Benares, whence he sent to the Council a long letter describing the condition of that province, which had suffered mach from drought, but more, he said, from mismanagement and the oppressive conduct of the chief native officials, who abused their position as the agents of an incompetent Rajah. The particular nature of the tenure upon which the
Rajah of Benares held, and still holds, his estates is not easily explainable to English readers, but it will suffice to mention here that he is a great landholder, bound to pay a fixed lump sum to the government out of the rente of his lands, and that the occupancy or proprietary rights of the tenants had to be maintained against the Rajah’s encroachment. The duty of the government, therefore, was not only to enforce payment of the a= due to its treasury, but also to protect the inferior holders from extortion or eviction by the Rajah’s land-agents; and it was toward this latter point that the inquiries and exertions of Hastings were chiefly directed. He submitted to the Calcutta Council an elaborate plan for reforming the administration, removing incapable officials, and placing under proper regulation the collection of rente and the adjudication of the rights and tenures. Hie proposes were approved by the Council after due deliberation, upon an understanding that nothing would be done to diminish the Company’s revenue, and that Hastings would take all responsibility for changes. From Benares Hastings went on to Lucknow, where he stayed from March until the end of August, occupied in aiding the ministers to bring their government into some orderly shape by regulating accounts, by the assignment of revenue to liabilities, by the formation of a regular military establishment; and, above all, by placing under close restrictions the power of the Company’s representative to interfere in the internal affaire of the country. He was well aware that irregular interference with Oriental States, when it diminishes the personal dignity of the ruler and disarms his authority, does much more harm than it can possibly prevent. This
consequence, he said, it had been his invariable study in his relations with Oude to avoid, by the removal or restriction of any British influence that interfered with the Nawab’s government. One of his la.st acts was to arrange for the withdrawal of a large and costly detachment of the Company’s troops that kas stationed at the Nawab’s expense upon the northern border of Oude, but to this the Council refused, out of regard for the Company’s finances, to accord their consent. In the art of administrative organisation Hastings always displayed skill and knowledge to a degree that places him far above all his predecessors and contemporaries in India, who indeed (except Clive) were for the most part remarkably deficient in the higher qualifications for the political settlement cd a great country. We may therefore fairly regard Hastings as the founder of the school of administration that has since had a not unsuccessful development in India; and aa the ancestor by official filiation of a long line of not unworthy descendants, who have carried his traditions and continued his methods of revenue management and orderly internal reformation throughout the provinces that have from time to time been added to his original Presidency of Bengal.
While Hastings was at Lucknow, the eldest son of the Mogul emperor, who had escaped in disguise from Delhi, where his father was an abject puppet in the hands of some military adventurers, arrived there and prayed the English governor for assistance. The story of his flight from Delhi, which he wrote, is still extant. It tells how he let himself down the city walls one cloudy night, and wandered about the fields in the dark till he
found a peasant watching crops who showed him a ford of the Jumna, and whom he resolved, after this service, to kill, “lest he should inform the enemy of my route”; how he spared the man at the last moment on reflection, and was safely escorted by the friendly folk of the country – with other details that give a faint glimpse and reminiscence of old India, such as living Englishmen have seen and known. The idea of lending a hand to set up again the great Mogul was not uncongenial to Hastings’ temperament. He proposed to his Council a project of rescuing the emperor from his distress and durante, on the grounds of our former connexion with and obligations to the house of Timur, and the impolicy of permitting it to be extinguished so utterly as to leave a vacuum that might be filled up by a new and much stronger power. If Hastings had been, like all the other rulers of that time in India, an independent chief, he might have struck in at that moment on the aide of the imperial authority with great opportuneness and effect; he would certainly have driven off the jackals that were tearing at the moribund carcass of empire; and he would have found no competitors to dispute with him the mastery of North India up to the line of the Jumna river. But the Mogul empire had sunk past the possibility of revival; he would have found the whole country upon his hands; and, in fazst, he would have anticipated prematurely by twenty years the exploits of Lord Lake and Lord Wellesley. And as ho was only a Company’s Governor-General, in a most precarious position personally, at odds with his Council, powerfully assailed at home, accused of rash adventures and unwarrantable wars, sucer a proposal, made on the eve of his retirement
from office, stands on record merely as a notable illustration of the hardy and self-reliant spirit of political enterprise that is so strongly diffused through his whole career and character. Left to himself he would probably have succeeded; for he must undoubtedly rank with that class of men who, if they can find an environment favourable to the unlimited employ of their faculties and resources, are sure to clear a wide space round them in a confused world, make a great splash in troubled waters, and often start a new epoch in the almanac of a country’s history.
But the Council refused, very rightly, any kind of countenance to expeditions in aid of the Great Mogul; and Hastings abandoned the notion without in the least giving up his conviction of its unquestionable expediency. He returned to Benares in August, 1784, during the height of the periodical rains; his boat was wrecked in a storm on the Ganges, so he travelled by land to Mirzapur and thence by river again to Chunar, where he received by his letters .from England news announcing the complete overthrow of his enemies the Whigs. Pitt had dissolved Parliament: the Coalition party had been utterly routed at the elections; and Major Scott assured Hastings that it was generally wished he should remain another year in India; that people were, in fact, greatly alarmed at the prospect of his throwing up the government. According to Scott, the Lord Chancellor Thurlow had spoken publicly and privately very warmly in favour of Hastings, and had pressed Pitt to give him an English peerage, declaring, as he told Scott, that Hastings had made him a Minister, and had made Pitt one too; a
declaration that was probably very unpalatable to the haughty Premier. Burke had been crushed by one of Scott’s speeches: both he and Francis had been made completely ridiculous; and Mrs. Hastings had had a very honourable and gracious reception from their Majesties. Hastings replied that he was pledged to resign, and that he was determined to leave in January, 1785. Nevertheless he seems t,o have contemplated, on Scott’s information, the possibility of Pitt’s Cabinet asking him to continue in office with extended powers, such as are vested in a modern Governor-General, to overrule his Council and act for himself in affairs of sufficient urgency or magnitude. He observed that a proper and dignified pretext for postponing his departure could only be furnished by the receipt of orders and instructions of this nature; and in that event he said, “I should deem myself bound against every consideration of domestic comfort, of life, and of fortune to remain.” In short, he evidently desired to try what might be done in India by a Governor-General who should be irresistible at the Indian Council-board, and powerfully backed in the British Parliament: the exact position of his successors, Cornwallis and Wellesley, who used it to subdue or annex an immense territory.
But Pitt had throughout replied with much caution and reserve to all these eager demonstrations on behalf of Hastings; he allowed him great merit, nevertheless there were charges against him which required explanation. Up to November, 1784, he remained in suspense, being still ready to stay, if required to do so officially and with extended powers; until any expectations he may have formed of remaining on such terms entirely disappeared
when accounts reached Calcutta of the debater, especially of Pitt’s introductory speech, on the new India Bill. Hastings had written a long letter to Pitt, as to a friendly official chief, expounding his policy, and apparently dilat, ing upon his project of assisting the Delhi emperor. He was therefore confounded and taken aback by the stress and earnestness with which Pitt spoke of the necessity for curbing the ambitions spirit of conquest in the Bengal government, which had colt so much blood and money, of severely punishing disobedience of orders, and of guarding against the continuante of offences that moere shocking to the feelings of humanity and disgraceful to the national character, by establishing a special tribunal for the trial. of Indian delinquents. The speech, he complained, contained “the same abuse of the Company’s servants, expressed in the same trite epithets”; and he learnt with astonishment that Major Scott himself had voted for the Bill. In point of fact, Pitt was so far from intending to support Hastings that he was preparing to issue orders for his recall; having been constantly rallied by the Opposition on his deference to the Company and his alleged tenderness for Bengal; nor did he or Dundas make any answer to the onslaughts of Burke and Fox against the Governor-General. When, therefore, at the end of December Hastings had received and read carefully a copy of the Bill, he treated it as “so unequivocal a demonstration that my resignation of the service is accepted and desired, that I shall lose no time in preparing for the voyage.” He wrote to the Directors that he had resolved to leave India within a month, wishing rather to avoid the receipt of orders regarding the new system of government than to await their
arrival, as they were not likely to concern him personally. “I consider myself,” he added, “in this act as the fortunate instrument of dissolving the frame of an inefficient government, pernicious to your interests, and disgraceful to the national character.” With this parting benediction on. the cranky vessel, ill made, ill manned, hard to steer, sail, or keep afloat in fout weather, which he had commanded with mutinous officers, short provisions, and inefficient machinery through the storms and straits of eleven years, Warren Hastings laid down his Governor-Generalship, “after a service of thirty-five years from its commencement, and almost thirteen of them passed in the charge and exorcise of the first nominal office of this government.”
He left the shores of India in February, 1785. Many valedictory addresses, and an universel expression of regret at his departure, attested the great honour and esteem in which he was indisputably held by all classes of the community; nor can there be any doubt that throughout Northern India he had the highest reputation as a statesman and an administrator. Forbes, who, though a contemporary of Hastings, never served under him, relates in his Oriental Menwirs how he was visited on the west coast of India by a Brahmin pilgrim, who said that he had been travelling all over the country and found that the natives were far better off under Hastings’ government than under any other rule. And it is on record that at the time when Hastings was most harassed by personal broils and public anxieties, any man, English or native, who had business with him might speak to him from six in the morning up to eight at night; a sure way to popularity for officiels in India. There is
also, among other testimonies, the evidence given on the trial by Lord Cornwallis, his successor in the Governor-Generalship, who said that Hastings was much esteemed and respected by the natives in the provinces under the Bengal government; and Sir John Shore, afterwards Lord Teignmouth, an Indian officer of the highest character, deposed to the same effect.
The subjoined extract from a contemporary native historian, whose work is not without some general merit, is taken out of Elliott’s materials for the History of India. It gives the popular version then current in India of the circumstances and causes of the Governor-General’s departure. It is also of some interest to the critical historian as illustrating the mistakes of fact and the total misconception of contemporary events into which even a fairly well-informed annalist may fall who relies, like all early chroniclers, mainly on hearsay and current report.
“Mr. Hastings, who some years previously had been appointed by the King of England as Governor of Bengal, Maksudabad, and Patna, revolted from his obedience, and paid no attention to the king’s orders, declaring that he was a servant of the kings of India. The King of England sent another to Calcutta in his place; and when he arrived in Calcutta and went to visit Mr. Hastings that gentleman killed him by the power of his sorceries. After this the King of England despatched another officer to fill the place of Mr. Hastings at Calcutta, but that gentleman declined to resign charge of the government. At last they determined on fighting a duel, with the understanding that the victor should assume the office of Governor. A day was fixed, and on that day they fought a duel. Mr. Hastings escaped, but wounded his antagonist in the arm with a pistol-ball, who was consequently obliged to return to England. The King of England then contrived a plot, and sent to Calcutta about four hundred
European soldiers in a vessel under the command of Mr. Macpherson, with a letter to Mr. Hastings to the effect that, as in these days he had many battles to fight, Mr. Macpherson had been despatched with these soldiers to reinforce him and to render service to him whenever exigency might require it. Secret instructions were given to Mr. Macpherson and the soldiers to seize Mr. Hastings and to forward him to His Majesty’s presence. When the ship reached near Calcutta Mr. Macpherson sent the royal letter to Mr. Hastings, and saluted him with the fire of guns of the ship. Mr. Hastings, having read the letter, embarked a boat, and, in company of the other English officers who were with him in Calcutta, proceeded to welcome Mr. Macpherson. On his approaching the vessel Mr. Macpherson paid a salute and with a double guard of the European soldiers went from the ship into Mr. Hastings’ boat. Immediately on boarding the boat, he ordered the soldiers to surround Mr. Hastings, and having thus made him a prisoner, showed him the orders for his own appointment as Governor, and the warrant which His Majesty had given for the apprehension of Mr. Hastings, who saw no remedy but to surrender himself a prisoner. Mr. Macpherson sent him to England in a ship under the custody of the European guard which had come out for that purpose.’
20. Mr. Spencer Walpole, referring (in his History of England) to Wellesley’s dealings with Oude, says “If these occurrences had taken place in Europe, if some Napoleon, for instance, had treated Spain as Wellesley treated Oude, history would have condemned his conduct. But historians apply one code of morality to India and another to Europe.” But Napoleon did treat Spain with extreme treachery and violence; and his political crimes were immeasurably greater than any that have been committed by the English in India.
This collection transcribed by Chris Gage