During his voyage home Hastings sketched out a review of the state of Bengal, which on reaching England he gave to Mr. Dundas, who professed to have derived much instruction from it. This paper may be taken partly as an account of his stewardship, of the condition and prospects of his government in its various branches at the time when he quitted it, and partly as a retrospect and political testament. In this review he estimates the revenues of Bengal at five and a half millions sterling, and the public debt at three millions; and he shows that at the end of a war maintained during five years with the Mahrattas, the Mysore rulers, and latterly with the French, after having sent two large armies “to the extremities of Hindustan and the Deccan,” after having supplied the heavy demands of the other Presidencies and maintained the commercial investments for England, the debt of Bengal stood at little more than half the animal income. Two years after the peace, he observed, the unfunded debt alone of Great Britain was thirty-six millions; but the Indian government had no such public credit as could provide their war expenditure from loans, and the financial distress of Bengal had been caused by the habit of regarding its revenues as an inexhaustible
fund upon which the rest of British India might draw without limit. It was this inability to borrow in times of emergency that drove Hastings to raise money by forced Tans and war contributions in Benares and Oude; for the natives of India were in those days unaccustomed to lend upon a public security, and indeed put lent trust in princes than in any other class of borrower.
Hastings takes in this review a rapid survey of the state of the relations between Bengal and the native powers; showing remarkable breadth of view and political prescience in his reflections upon the general position of the British nation in India, in explaining the scope and design of his own administrative plans, and in defending himself from the charges of ambition and a love of conquest. Touching the origin and growth of the Company’s power in India he says: “The seed of this wonderful production was sown by the hand of calamity; it was nourished by fortune, and cultivated and shaped by necessity.” So firmly, nevertheless, had this plant taken root in a few years, that the late war had proved to all the leading powers of India “that their combined strength and politics, assisted by our great enemy the French, have not been able to destroy the solid fabric of the English power in the East, nor even to deprive it of any portion of its territories.” He affirmed, and his judgment has been fully upheld by events, that India needed “nothing but attention, protection, and forbearance”; an equal, vigorous, and fixed administration, and free play for its vast natural resources and advantages, to secure its rapid rise to a high and permanent level of national prosperity. “But while,” he added, “I profess on these grounds the doctrine of peace,
I have never yet sacrificed to it by yielding a substantial right which I could assert, or submitting to a wrong which I could repel, with a moral assurance of success proportionate to the magnitude of either, and I should have deemed it criminal not to have hazarded both the public safety and my own in a crisis of uncommon and adequate emergency, or in an occasion of dangerous example.”
“I have ever deemed it even more unsafe than dishonourable to sue for peace; and more consistent with the love of pence to be the aggressor, in certain cases, than to see preparations of intended hostility, and to wait for their maturity, and for their open effect to repel it. The faith of treaties I have ever held inviolate. But I have had the satisfaction of seeing the policy, as well as the moral rectitude, of this practice justified by the exemplary sufferings of all who have deviated from it, in acts of perfidy to myself or to the government over which I have presided.”
He goes on to press, as a point incontestable, the impossibility of British India being ruled by a body of men variable in their succession, discordant in their opinion, jealous of each other, and often united in common interest against their ostensible leader; and he insists on the positive necessity of investing the Governor-General with the superior power that was in fact conferred upon his successor. To the hopes that he had entertained of exercising such powers, and of becoming the instrument of raising the British name and the worth of our Indian possessions to a degree of prosperity proportional to such a trust, he alludes as to a dream that had vanished, leaving him “with the poor and only consolation of the conscious knowledge of what I could have effected, had my destiny ordained that I should attain the situation to which I aspired.”
These passages are suffused and instinct with the glow and spirit of the writer’s character and temperament; with his self-reliance, firmness of purpose, hardihood, and ambition; showing a man capable of standing by friends and against enemies, and indicating the dangerous and slightly vindictive element in him that might come out under close pressure21. They illustrate also his faculty of looking through and beyond the passing clouds of adverse circumstance and accidental failure by which men are so easily blinded and dispirited, and of fixing his eyes steadily on the main chances and essential conditions of success. He saw not only the sea of troubles which encompassed the English in India, but the calm and open waters that were to be reached by resolute and skilful navigation. So long as he could keep the vessel’s head straight on the point to which he had set her, neither waves nor wind, nor a mutiny on board, could wrench the helm from his straining hands. His own business had latterly been rather to save the ship than to sail it; and he did save it at all personal hazards, risking his reputation as freely as men risk their lives in a storm. The rest of the great enterprise he was obliged to leave to others; but he foresaw plainly the potency of expansion contained in the superiority already acquired by the English in India, and the ease with which his successors might realise his vision of a spacious, flourishing, and pacific dominion.
Wraxall records in his Memoirs the appearance in London of Mrs. Hastings, her gracious reception at
Court, the society gossip about her antecedents, and the malevolent criticism excited by her diamonds22, and by her audacity in wearing her hair unpowdered when the fashionable lady’s head-dress was twelve or eighteen inches high. A year later he reports the arrival. “from the banks of the Ganges” of Governor-General Hastings.
“When he landed in his native country, he had attained his fifty-second year. ... In his person he was thin, but not tan; of a spare habit, very bald, with a countenance placid and thoughtful, but when animated full of intelligence. Never perhaps did any man who passed the Cape of Good Hope display a mind more elevated above mercenary considerations. Placed in a situation where he might have amassed immense wealth without exciting censure, he revisited England with only a modest competence. ... In private life he was playful and gay to a degree hardly conceivable, never carrying his political vexations into the bosom of his family. Of a temper so buoyant and elastic, that the instant he quitted the Council board, where he had been assailed by every species of opposition, often heightened by personal acrimony, he mixed in society like a youth upon whom care bad never intruded.”
Wraxall goes on to tell two anecdotes, too long for insertion here, in evidence of the magnanimity and generosity with which Hastings “looked down upon pecuniary concerns.” The sketch is so far valuable that it was drawn by a contemporary who knew Hastings, and who was by no means inclined to defend all his political acts. And the favourable impression produced by Hastings on his return home is corroborated by the entries regarding him in the reminiscences of Nicholls,
who like Wraxall was at that time in Parliament and in society, and who goes so far as to write, “I think that he was a man of the most powerful mind I ever conversed with.”
Hastings landed in June, 1785, was much vexed at not finding his wife in London, rushed off toward Cheltenham alter two days’ stay, and on Maidenhead Bridge met her coming to meet him. His first reception in England pleased and elated him greatly. He wrote that he found himself everywhere and universally treated with evidences that he possessed the good opinion of his country; the Directors formally thanked him for his services; the Board of Control was more than polite; the King and Queen received him most kindly; and “Lord Thurlow has been more substantially my friend than King, Ministers, or Directors.” He remarked, however, that these very distinctions also made him an object of public calumny; and so soon as in July he received a letter from the Court of Directors requiring him to furnish particulars of certain sums of money presented to him in 1782. Nevertheless he seems to have fancied himself above danger, and fair]y safe under the protection of those who had paid him so many compliments. The English nation were not much accustomed at that period to see their governors or their generals return triumphantly; they had witnessed the loss of colonies, the surrender of armies, and the failure of expeditions; but here at least was a man who had preserved a great territory entrusted to him, and who had made it over in tranquillity and security to his successor. Hastings, “whose whole life had been passed in Asia, and who very imperfectly knew the ground at St. James’s or
Westminster, ignorantly supposed that his public merits would at least balance any acts of severity, or any strong measures to which he might have had recourse for the ‘purpose, not of enriching himself, but of replenishing the exhausted treasury of Bengal23. ...” “That a man who had performed resplendent services should, instead of finding himself decorated with honours on revisiting his native country, meet an impeachment, that he should be compared by Burke to Verres, and by Courtenay to Cortez, may at first view create surprise”; but closer inspection [Wraxall said] would show the causes. He had numerous and powerful enemies, headed by Burke and Fox, who not only stood pledged to press forward the question of maladministration in India, but saw that the movement would give their party a tactical advantage in the contest with Pitt and Dundas. The Ministers would be placed in a dilemma; for while they could hardly oppose a demand for inquiry without laying themselves under suspicion of conniving at Indian delinquencies, by joining in the attack on Hastings they would risk their favour with the king and might be deserted by some of their supporters. There was indeed no lack of significant and ominous warnings that might have disquieted Hastings. Francis, “an implacable and able adversary,” supplied local information; and the league against him was joined by all the friends of Clavering, Monson, and Macartney. In February, only a few months before his return, Burke had taunted Scott with being Hastings’ agent; and Scott retaliated by accusing Burke of being himself virtually a minister of the Rajah of Tanjore; alluding to the position
of William Burke at the Tanjore Court. This roused Burke to declare, truly and impressively, that his long exertions for the oppressed and unfortunate had never received any pecuniary compensation. And a fortnight later he delivered his speech on the Nawab of Arcot’s debts, in which he thundered against the criminal prodigality and venal subservience to corrupt peculators that he detected in the Ministerial proposals for the settlement of these debts, taunted Pitt with showering gold, like Nero on his praetorians, on his Indian adherents, and solemnly bound himself over to spare no pains in prosecuting a full and severe inquiry into Indian affairs. Pitt treated with disdainful silence the attack on his own integrity, but he made no attempt to defend the Indian government; and during the rest of that year Burke was concerting with Fox and Francis the ways and means of bringing the whole question before Parliament. The House of Commons, he wrote to Francis, had conceived a favourable opinion of Hastings, and very favourable wishes for him; “they will not judge of his intentions by his acts, but will qualify his acts by his presumed intentions”; the condemnation of Hastings he believed then to be impracticable, and he only hoped to obtain a respectable minority for his own acquittance and justification. By December, 1785, he had sent to Francis his draft of “the first scene of the first act,” the Rohilla war; Lord Macartney came home in January, 1786, full of hostility to the les Governor-General, and disappointed in his expectation of succeeding him; while Hastings, unconscious of the gathering clouds, was travelling about England, negotiating for the purchase of Daylesford, and corresponding with Dundas and Thurlow about the
revision of Pitt’s India Act. He had heard that Pitt was withholding his honours on the plea that Burke was still threatening some charges. “Whether this man,” Hastings wrote, “really means what he has threatened I know not, having heard nothing about him for many months; nor have I ever made him the subject of my inquiries.”
When George the Third opened Parliament in January, 1786, his Ministry was led by the most powerful and triumphant chief that ever headed a strong majority in the Commons. But Pitt was also confronted by opponents of the highest intellectual genius and of consummate excellence in debate, smarting under an ignominious defeat upon an Indian question, and fighting desperately to retrieve it. In European politics there was a perceptible lull after the termination of a wide-spreading war; and at home the vicissitudes of party strife had concentrated public attention upon the affairs of India,, and upon the conduct of its English administrators. It was at this conjuncture that the devouring zeal of Major Scott impelled him to rise, toward the close of the first day of Parliament’s meeting, for the purpose of reminding Burke of his engagement at the last session to bring forward charges against Hastings, and of asking him to fix a time for proceeding, if he meant to proceed at all, as the late Governor-General felt the utmost anxiety for despatch. Fox rose first in reply to assure Scott that the business should not be neglected; and Burke coolly answered that a general did not consult his enemies as to the place or occasion for a battle. This sounded ominous enough to those who knew something of the fires underlying the deceptive trust on which Hastings was standing; and every one can now see that
the challenge was a tremendous blunder on the part of his friends. In February Burke rose, and desired that the resolutions moved by Dundas in 1782 for the censure and recall of Hastings might be read to the House; after which he moved for certain papers necessary to the framing of the impeachment, saying that he was called upon and driven to the business which he was now engaged to prosecute. Wraxall believed, with many others, that if Scott had never written or spoken in the House for Hastings, the latter would never have been impeached; but he adds that recent Parliamentary history ought to have forewarned him that he was on dangerous ground. Hastings relied for security, if not for recompense, on three foundations, all of which proved totally without solidity. The first was his public services; the second, royal favour; the last, Ministerial support. But the verdict on his services depended on whether they were judged by political expediency, or by such a rigorous moral standard as is rarely applied to the acts of men who have to face/ imminent public danger. As to royal favour, “George the Third could extend no protection to a man impeached by the Commons of Great Britain”; white Pitt, Dundas, and Jenkinson, the Cabinet leaders in Parliament, had no mind to stake their position on the defence of Indian administration, or to baulk the Opposition in starting at full cry after other game than His Majesty’s Ministers. Wraxall adds truly that what had saved Clive from a similar prosecution was that his services were not civil but military, and that he took tare not to provoke Parliamentary scrutiny.
During the month of March Burke moved several
times for papers connected with his charges against Hastings, whose conduct in regard to the Mahratta war Pitt and Dundas defended, declaring that the treaty which ended it saved the British empire in Asia In the meantime Scott skirmished with Fox and Sheridan, taunting the former with having denounced Lord North, his present colleague, quite as vehemently as he now accused Hastings, and exasperating both of them by his allegations that they had offered in 1784 to accommodate matters with Hastings as a bargain for the support of Fox’s India Bill by the friends of the Governor-General. Then the Act to confer upon the Governor-General in India power to overrule his Council, which Dundas passed on appointing Lord Cornwallis, brought out Burke with a demonstration in force against a measure which he styled the establishment of a Turkish tyranny throughout our Eastern dominions, of a new Star Chamber (the Board of Control) for the subversion of Magna Charta; while on the other side the word Impeachment had produced several rancorous allusions to Burke’s previous intentions of impeaching Lord North, “the noble lord in the blue ribbon “who now sat beside him. So by the time that Hastings appeared at the bar of the House of Commons to be heard in his own defence, the temper of the Opposition had grown hot and fierce, and their leaders had staked their reputation on a rigorous prosecution. It is now generally agreed that the first step made by Hastings, in applying to be heard in his own defence, was a mistake. Lord Clive had been defended in similar circumstances by Wedderburn, a consummate advocate; and Rigby, an adroit and unscrupulous Parliamentary tactician, had undertaken
the congenial task of pleading for Sir Thomas Rumbold, who was himself a member of the House of Commons. But Hastings committed the serious error of appearing in person to read for hours a long exculpatory paper of general observations upon the method and manner of the prosecution, and of separate replies to the particular charges. In the tone of a man injured and ill requited for his services he spoke of his surprise at finding himself arraigned there as a criminal, when he had left India unanimously regretted by princes and people, and had received the thanks of the Directors and the approval of the Court of Proprietors, “in whose applause alone I receive a consolation under all my discouragements. ... With such testimonies in my favour, and with the internal applause of my own mind superseding all evidence, what was my surprise to find, on my arrival in England, that my character still continued to be assailed by the bitterest calumnies and invectives. Though I might have thought myself entitled by my services to a different reception, and though I might erroneously imagine that no power on earth had a right to impeach me for the exercise of a trust which those for whom I had held it had repeatedly declared that I had discharged to their benefit and entire satisfaction, yet I was glad to me some substantial ground for hope of a speedy trial.” He complained of the delay in producing the charges; and went on into prolix and complicated explanations of the real nature and circumstances of the transactions with the Rajah and Begums of Benares, and of other details connected with the accusations against him.
The effect, says Wraxall, upon a popular assembly
accustomed to splendid displays of eloquence, was lame and tedious after the first hour; and the tone of his exordium rather put the Commons on their mettle to show what they thought of Directors and Proprietors, and of men whom the East India Company delighted to honour. The reading of this defence took up two days, which the House thought too long and Hastings much too short; and it elicited on its termination only a few words from Burke, who in June opened fire in earnest with the Rohilla war charge; preluding with the observation that the drift of the defence was to demur to the jurisdiction of Parliament, and to imply that a Governor-General was answerable only to his employers, the East India Company. He was supported by an effective and forcible speech from Fox, and followed by Hardinge, Solicitor-General to the Queen, whose severe criticism on the style of the defence appears to have impressed Pitt. “I see in it,” he said, “a perfect character drawn by the culprit himself, and that character is his own. Conscious triumph in the ability and success of all his measures pervades every sentence.” There was undoubtedly something provoking in the unswerving faith with which Hastings invariably maintained that he had always done what he ought to have done, and appealed to a conscience that never failed to acquit him fully of blame or blunder. But Hastings had been three times named by Parliament Governor-General of Bengal after the Rohilla war; so this charge was opposed by the Government, and rejected by a large Ministerial majority, whereupon the friends of the accused were loudly jubilant, but prematurely; for Pitt had said nothing, and so
many members had absented themselves that the vote had been taken in a thin House. It was soon evident that everything would depend upon the line taken by Pitt and Dundas in respect to the next charge against Hastings, which went upon his treatment of the Rajah of Benares. In the debate upon that article Pitt spoke at length. He censured the language of the prosecution as violent and unfair: he declared that the conduct of Francis, who had acquiesced in proceedings which he now imputed as a crime to Hastings, was malignant and tortuous; and he praised the high qualities shown by Hastings in great emergencies. Nevertheless, he said, he should agree to the motion, because although he flatly rejected the doctrine of Cheyt Singh’s sovereign independence, and allowed that he might be called upon for a subsidy, yet the fine, though justifiable in principle, was in amount exorbitant, unjust, and tyrannical. Wraxall, who was present, writes that the astonishment produced by so unexpected a declaration would be difficult to describe; and Lord Mahon tells us that when Pitt rose, and indeed for a long time afterward, the House had been firmly persuaded of his intention to side with Hastings. A Treasury circular had been sent to all the supporters of the Government, asking them to attend and vote against Fox’s motion; and the turn, says Lord Campbell, was so sudden that the Attorney-General divided against the Prime Minister, while several prominent men in office professed their inability to follow his conversion. But the Ministerialists as a body voted with their chief, and Hastings was condemned by one hundred and nineteen against seventy-nine.
Macaulay in his essay treats the ostensible reason
put forward by Pitt for his vote on this occasion, which determined the impeachment, as totally inadequate and unworthy of the Prime Minister’s great ability. That contemporary opinion took the same view is proved by the variety of rumours and conjectures of occult causes and veiled motives to which his sudden change of attitude gave currency. There is the story, told thirty years later by Hastings himself as a well-attested anecdote, of Dundas having visited Pitt early that morning, and having persuaded him after three hours’ discussion to abandon Hastings: there is the suggestion that Dundas was jealous of Hastings as a probable rival at the Board of Control; and there is Lord Campbell’s story of Pitt having received, a few hours before the debate began, intelligence of Thurlow’s assertion that he would put the Great Seal to a patent for Hastings’ peerage under the king’s authority, without consulting the minister. All these tales may have some truth in them, and the last of them, if authentic, would go far to account for Pitt’s action in the matter; for nothing could have been more calculated to irritate him than Thurlow’s ostentatious patronage of Hastings, or a threat of dealing with the king over his head. Nor would Pitt have been likely to be better pleased at the special favour shown by their Majesties to Mr. and Mrs. Hastings, which gave rise to scandalous insinuations against all concerned, to squibs and lampoons, and to very disagreeable doubts and surmises regarding Pitt’s own independence of Court influences, a point upon which he was particularly sensitive. On the day after the debate on the Benares charge, a big diamond sent by the Nizam of Hyderabad to the king was formally presented at a levée which was attended
by Hastings; an unlucky incident that attracted much public remark, and naturally formed a capital subject for broad political caricature. It is also worth notice that six months later, when Burke was pressing for the nomination of Francis upon the impeachment committee, he conveyed, in a letter to Dundas, a formal warning to Pitt that his personal reputation was committed to the business of the impeachment, and that there would be danger to his ministry in allowing Hastings and his friends to triumph and to form a political party in the country. Very possibly this may not have been then said or thought for the first time; and on the whole it is a reasonable conclusion that Pitt and Dundas, of whom the former always looked coldly on Hastings and the latter had censured and condemned him, did resolve, after private consultation, not to stand between Hastings and his powerful accusers at the risk of some loss of political character and some strain upon their ascendency in the House and the country.
The clouds were now gathering thick and heavy round Hastings. In the next session of Parliament (February, 1787) Sheridan delivered that famous speech upon the case of the Begums of Oude, in which, according to the universal opinion of his contemporaries, he rose to the highest water-mark of English eloquence; which was heard with intense attention during five hours, left the audience breathless with admiration, and produced a decisive effect on the whole House. His pathetic invocations, allusions, and exclamations; his impassioned invectives and appeals; his dramatic narratives and copious metaphors, the profusion of colouring and imagery – all these things seem to have enchanted,
captivated, and finally convinced the most renowned assembly of orators and statesmen in the world. Yet the few sentences preserved by Wraxall, whose admiration of the speech is unqualified, may appear to modern taste somewhat disappointing. Hastings is called a mixture of the trickster and the tyrant, at once Scapin and Dionysius: his policy is crooked as the curves of a writhing snake; he is likened to a highwayman, to a felon kite, to a man holding in one hand a bloody sceptre while with the other he picks pockets; and almost every crime which can stain or debase human nature is attributed to him. However this may be, Fox declared that all he had ever read or heard of in oratory, either in the House or elsewhere, sank to nothing in comparison with Sheridan’s speech. Scott vainly attempted to counteract its impression by pointing out perversions of fact, by pleas of urgent political necessity, and by enumerating the meritorious public acts of the man accused. Pitt admitted the resumption of the jagirs to be justifiable, but he censured the seizure of the Begums’ treasure; the Ministers voted against Hastings, and he was condemned by a still larger majority than before. Political necessity will serve as a palliation for irregularities in proportion as the sense of peril is strong in the national mind; but as this feeling fades the plea rapidly loses force, and when the danger is distant or forgotten public morality recovers its ordinary elevation. The only speech in Hastings’ favour that had for a moment checked the Parliamentary attacks on him was made by a distinguished admiral, Lord Hood, who told the House that he himself should have ended his days in prison if the Government had not stood between him and prosecutions
for illegal acts done to preserve his fleet during the late war, and who conjured the House to hesitate before punishing too severely a man who had elected rather to incur personal risks than the chances of failure in preserving a distant province in the midst of a general war. But the time had passed for holding this ground effectively against furious charges of cruelty or corruption; the doctrine of a set-off, of balancing good deeds against errors, was evidently inapplicable to such accusations; and, moreover, it had been distinctly repudiated as much by Hastings himself as by the prosecutors, for Hastings insisted that his conduct had been not only pardonable but meritorious. Pitt in replying to Admiral Hood laid stress on this point, observing that Hastings had disclaimed all benefit arising from the consideration of his services, “being persuaded that the very facts on which are founded the charges will, upon investigation, be found entitled to the approbation of this House.” It was this curious incapacity of Hastings to place himself in the mental attitude of those who discerned flaws in his conduct, that exposed him to the attacks of his accusers. He was like a man who should throw away a shield and disdain the arts of fence through belief in his own invulnerability. When, therefore, the issue whether he deserved praise or blame for certain specific acts was placed before the House of Commons, it was easily determined, with the assent of the Ministers, in favour of an impeachment. Pitt nominated Burke to be the first member of the Committee of Impeachment; but when Burke proceeded to nominate Philip Francis, Pitt joined the majority in rejecting him as a notorious and implacable enemy of the accused; a decision against
which Burke protested strenuously, feeling, he said, the cause to be in some degree damned by it. The Ministry supported the second reading of the articles of impeachment, which was carried after an acrimonious discussion; and in May, 1787, Burke, attended by a great number of the members present, formally impeached Warren Hastings at the bar of the House of Lords. He was taken into custody by the sergeant-at-arms, and held to bail for £20,000, with sureties for £10,00024 each; but the trial in Westminster Hall did not begin until February 13th in the following year.
The House of Lords is a court of justice in which peers and commoners may be tried for offences upon an impeachment (impetitio) by the House of Commons, which is the grand jury of the whole nation. The power of impeachment was the weapon by which the Parliament leaders fought their battle from 1640 to 1642; but in the eighteenth century its importance declined, and it became a subject rather of constitutional and antiquarian curiosity than of practical use25. It is manifest that such a tribunal was eminently adapted to invest its proceedings with the ceremonial splendour and dignified solemnity that exalt and harmonise with fine oratorical displays, and to fix the attention of a nation that has always been enormously interested in State trials, which have been the pictures that illustrate the national history. The spectacle at the opening of the impeachment has been described by Macaulay in a famous passage; and Debrett’s history of the trial published in 1796 contains a plan of the High Court of Parliament erected
in Westminster Hall, showing the arrangement of the seats, the places and names of the principal persons who were there, and even the dresses of the ladies. Warren Hastings was summoned and appeared at the bar, looking “very infirm and much indisposed; he was dressed in a plain poppy-coloured suit of clothes”; he dropped on his knees, and was told by the Lord Chancellor that he might rise. After proclamation had been made requiring all persons concerned to make good their charges, the Lord Chancellor (Thurlow), who had throughout been prepossessed very favourably toward Hastings, made him a short address that seems intended to convey an assurance that the high authority and adverse temper of the Commons should not prejudice his fair trial; “for the matter in the charges is most momentous, and the dates are remote since the occurrences alleged against you in those charges are said to have been committed.”
Twenty articles of charge, with Hastings’ answer and the Commons’ replication, were then read; and upon the third day Mr. Burke, standing forth, as he said, at the command of the Commons of England to accuse Warren Hastings, began a speech which occupied in delivery the next four days, concluding with the impassioned peroration of which Macaulay has given the final comminatory sentences. It was an introductory address reviewing the history of India, the system of government under the Company, and in particular the administration of Hastings; and he thence passed to a preliminary account of the charges that were to be proved against the accused, rising gradually from a grave and temperate narrative to the highest pitch of tragic declamation. He described with all the force and fire of his magnificent phraseology
the cruel tortures which certain native revenue officers appointed by the Governor-General were reported to have inflicted upon peasants in Bengal; and he denounced Hastings with having knowingly appointed as his subservient tools the diabolical authors of these atrocities; “with having thereby wasted the country, destroyed the landed interest, cruelly harassed the peasants, burned their houses, seized their crops, tortured and degraded their persons, and destroyed the honour of the whole female race of that country.” He also charged him with fraud, bribery, and robbery; adjuring all bishops, judges, and nobles there present to avenge the cause of oppressed princes, of undone women of the first rank, of desolated provinces and wasted kingdoms, by punishing impiety, injustice, dishonour, and the violation of all power and institutions.
Wraxall, who was present, writes in his Memoirs that the oration is unequalled, he believes, either in antiquity or in modern days. “It will be difficult to convey an idea of the agitation, distress, and horror excited among the female part of his audience by his statement of the atrocities and, in many instances, the deeds of blood perpetrated, as Burke asserted, by Hastings’ connivance or by his express command.” The whole audience were powerfully stirred, and there was great emotion among the ladies; yet it is doubtful whether such a rhetorical exhibition could have profoundly impressed the cooler hearts and stronger nerves of those present who understood what is meant by evidence when a man’s life and honour are in jeopardy; and the performance illustrates forcibly the changes of taste and style, so easy to mark and so hard to explain, that are constantly going on among us.
In our own days a governor or a general would rightly be held responsible for the misdeeds of his subordinates, when he might have foreseen, prevented, or discovered them; nor can a political party leader easily escape discredit and dishonour if his followers openly rejoice in sedition, rebellion, and assassination. But if at a great judicial investigation held at the present time the imputation of such a responsibility were made a pretext for denouncing a prominent personage in the terms used by Burke and Sheridan, the manoeuvre would only excite scorn and disgust, and would be fatal to the cause of those who employed it. Some such effect, indeed, was probably produced by the violence of the attack upon Hastings. The Lord Chancellor commented upon the circumstances of accumulated horror that had been described, and upon the acts of atrocity that had been imputed to the accused, and intimated that the management would be held to the proof of all that had been asserted. And Mr. Law, the leading counsel for the defence, ventured upon some protest against the harshness of the language used by the prosecution; but although he, Dallas, and Plumer were all men of high professional reputation, it was unfortunate for Hastings that Erskine, whose unrivalled eloquence as an advocate best qualified him to confront the brilliant staff of orators who led the attack, had been deterred from accepting the brief by his reluctance to appear in a political case against the chiefs of his own party.
Before the speeches began, the answer of Hastings to the charges had been read; it was the same as that which he had himself recited in the House of Commons. Burke, in opening the impeachment, alludes contemptuously to
“that indecent and unbecoming paper which lies on our table”; yet although it is not a model of judicious pleading, the answer contains matter for the attention and even the sympathy of a dispassionate reader.
“In truth,” he said, “the articles are not charges, but histories and comments. They are yet more; they are made up of mutilated quotations, of facts which have no mutual relation but are forced by false arrangement into connection, of principles of pernicious policy and false morality; assertions of guilt without proof or the attempt to prove them; interpretations of secret motives and designs which passed within my own breast, and which none but myself would know. ...
“With respect to the general subject of the charge I must beg leave to observe that it has been composed from a laboured scrutiny of my whole official life, during a most important and weighty administration of thirteen years, comprehending perhaps a greater variety of interesting events than have fallen to the lot of any man now living; events not brought to the public view by their notoriety alone, but all the subject of minute record. ... All my actions have undergone, and even during their actual progress they underwent, such a severity of investigation as could suit only a mind possessing in itself an absolute exemption from error. In the present occasion I am put to a harder test; for not my actions alone, but my words, and even my imputed thoughts, as at the final day of judgment, are converted into accusation against me. And from whom is this state of perfection exacted? From a man who was separated, while yet but a schoolboy, from his native country, and from every advantage of that instruction which might have better qualified him for the high offices and arduous situations which it became his lot to fill.”
It seems hardly possible that this appeal to his fellow-countrymen, although the style may have been a little out of fashion, should not have touched the sentiment of fair play and of consideration due to men who have at
least shown high courage and patriotic spirit in the public service, and who, after facing tremendous odds for their country, are brought by their country to fight at the same odds for themselves. Such a situation is well known in the annals of men of action, and popular governments are wayward masters; but on the whole the British nation has not much taste for reviling men who have carried its flag high in foreign lands. That the Committee of Impeachment should not have been troubled with these feelings is in no way a matter of surprise or of blame upon them. They were pledged to push on a great public prosecution: their own reputation and their political interests were staked upon its success; and the chief managers had sincerely convinced themselves of its justice and necessity. If Hastings had for thirteen years been contending against difficulties in India, in England Burke had for fourteen years been indefatigably labouring to check the disorders of Indian administration, and to bring Indian affairs under effective Parliamentary control. Now at last, as he believed, he had brought the chief offender to bay, and was closing in upon him, sore and exasperated with the fatigues and disappointments of a long chase. Nevertheless the unsparing vigour of the prosecutors, the language in which they endeavoured to inflame the minds of such a judicial body as the House of Lords and of the audience, and to hound on the nation against the prisoner, and their disregard of those precautions required for a proper scrutiny of unfamiliar circumstances and complex Oriental transactions, were unworthy of such large-minded statesmen as Burke and Fox, and must be accounted for by the pressure of a political atmosphere which was heated
and tempestuous to a degree unknown even in the rather stormy Parliamentary weather of our own times.
The first charge was opened by Fox in a speech that was much more moderate in tone, and closer in its reasoning, than Burke’s introductory address. And in June Sheridan took up the second charge regarding the treatment of the Begums of Oude, upon which he dilated for several successive days in a speech that was manifestly much better adapted to the intellectual form and fashion of those days than of the present time. It would be most presumptuous to suppose that Sheridan did not know how best to persuade and please the House of Lords; but if the summary of this oration has, been fairly given in Debrett’s history of the trial, the modern reader will probably be startled at the quantity of declamation, invocation, metaphor, humorous illustration, and caricature that is employed to throw a glaring light upon a sufficiently ill-favoured business, and to overdrive the true arguments for condemning the Governor-General’s part in it. No one in these days uses irony and bitter sarcasm against a prisoner on his trial, nor is it thought fair or judicious to introduce grotesque figures of speech or degrading comparisons. Nevertheless Gibbon wrote to Lord Sheffield that Sheridan had in this speech surpassed himself; but Sheridan had coupled Gibbon with Tacitus, and had paid him the well-known compliment of an allusion to his luminous (or vo-luminous) pages. Horace Walpole said that the orator had not quite satisfied the passionate expectations of the people who had given fifty guineas for a ticket to hear him, although he wished that the Empress Catherine of Russia and Joseph of Austria, who were just then lacerating Turkey
by a bloody and unjust war, could be brought to Westminster Hall and worried by Sheridan. At the close of his address he sank, as is well known, into the arms of Burke; and the Court, having sat thirty-five days in 1788, rose and adjourned to the next session of Parliament. In the meantime Fox had brought to the notice of the Commons a pamphlet published by one Stockdale26, containing, as he averred, highly disreputable and indecent observations upon the motives which had induced the House to impeach Hastings; and upon an address by the House a criminal information was filed against the publisher. But Stockdale was defended by Erskine, who showed on this occasion what he might have done had he been Hastings’ advocate; for he took the opportunity of vindicating Hastings in a speech of remarkable vigour and forensic dexterity, not denying that Hastings had acted despotically, but arguing that only the force wielded and the fear inspired by arbitrary rule could maintain a distant, alien, and usurped dominion.
“If England,” he said, “from a lust of ambition and dominion, will insist on maintaining despotic rule over distant and hostile nations beyond all comparison more numerous and extended than herself, and gives commissions to her viceroys to govern them, with no other instructions than to preserve them and to secure permanently their revenues with what colour or consistency of reason can she place herself in the moral chair, and affect to be shocked at the execution of her own orders?”
To this it may of course be answered that, in the present time at any rate, England does give other instructions, very plainly and firmly, to her viceroys; but the argument
had a sufficiency of truth and a good popular ring of fair play about it. And when Erskine drew a picture of the trial in Westminster Hall, where “a terrible, unceasing, exhaustless artillery of warm zeal, matchless vigour of understanding, consuming and devouring eloquence, was daily pouring forth upon one private unprotected man,” he succeeded in convincing the jury that while the Commons were thus engaged they were scarcely in a position to resent and punish a few reflections on themselves. Stockdale was acquitted, and Burke wrote to Francis that this verdict, coupled with another in a libel case concerning Impey, had the air of a “determination of the public voice against us.” He confessed, writing in 1789, that he totally despaired, and thought of nothing but an honourable retreat from the business, which was already becoming to some extent a burden on all who had taken part in it. Other episodes varied and prolonged the proceedings. Hastings had complained by petition to the Commons that Burke, speaking on the trial, had said that he (Hastings) had murdered Nuncomar by the hands of Sir Elijah Impey; and during the sharp debate on the question of receiving the petition, Fox observed that the managers might have shared Nuncomar’s fate if Impey had been their Chief-Justice. Finally the Commons resolved, by a majority, that Burke’s words ought not to have been used; whereupon Burke told the Lords in Westminster Hall that the poverty of the English language had led him to express his private feelings by a word insufficient to convey an impression of complicated atrocity, and that he had only used the word “murder” in a moral and popular sense. The proceedings, delayed by the king’s illness, were not reopened
until April, 1789, when Burke alluded to some public curiosity as to the calculable duration of the trial, and observed, with regard to some complaint by Hastings of the cost, that a prisoner who had amassed an immense fortune by bribes and peculation would hardly feel the loss of £30,000. This year the trial went on for only seventeen days.
When the Lord Chancellor was about to adjourn, Hastings humbly asked their Lordships to consider that “not one tenth part of one single article of the twenty which compose the charge had been brought to a conclusion on the part of the prosecution only”; that he had every prospect of passing the remainder of his life under impeachment and of suffering far more severely than if he had pleaded guilty at first. The Lord Chancellor gave a civil answer; and in the House of Lords the Earl of Camden spoke sympathetically of the position not only of the prisoner but of their Lordships generally, who were bound to sit out the trial, although many of them would be dead before it ended. Nevertheless in the following year (1790) the Lords sat no longer than a fortnight, which was taken up with Fox’s speech on the charges of internal maladministration and corruption, and with incessant disputes on points of the admissibility of evidence, which had usually to be referred to the judges. Burke moved the House of Commons for steps to expedite matters; while Scott wrote in Woodfall’s Diary a latter attacking the managers for cumbrous and dilatory procedure, thereby bringing down upon himself a formal reprimand from the Commons, who pronounced his writing to be scandalous and libellous. The meeting of a new Parliament
in November, 1790, raised the question, which was discussed at length in both Houses, whether an impeachment did not end and abate with a dissolution. Burke asked whether lawyers who confined their ideas to the narrow limits of a Nisi Prius trial were better able to ascertain what ought to be the end of an impeachment than a rabbit, who breeds three times a year, was capable of judging of the time of gestation of an elephant. It was decided that the impeachment was unaffected and survived; so after nearly a year’s interval the trial was again set in motion in May, 1791, when speeches were delivered and evidence given on the charges of prodigality, corruption, and favouritism in the award of contracts. Hastings again represented to the Court that he was now sixty years of age, had been four years their prisoner, loaded and tortured by the most virulent accusations; and that at the rate of progress hitherto made he had no human expectation of living to make his defence, or to hear their Lordships’ judgment. Burke and Fox replied by justifying strong language in the statement of strong facts, and said, not untruly, that the delay was none of their making. On the next day only eighteen lords were present; and at the end of May the prosecution was closed. Hastings then read a long statement of his defence, after which the Court adjourned, having sat only five days in the year 1791; although Lord King moved in the House of Lords that Parliament should not be prorogued until the trial had terminated, which would have very effectively shortened proceedings if the motion had not been indignantly negatived.
It was of course a task of extraordinary difficulty for
Hastings to reply comprehensively and yet concisely upon a case that had taken four years to be stated against him, and that had not been strictly limited to the articles charged, but had been extended and embellished by great orators who set the picture in a kind of framework of inhumanity and perfidy, and surrounded the real issues with dramatic narratives no less damaging than hard to disprove. Nevertheless the reply would be well worth reading if the reputation of Hastings still depended on the opinion that might be formed upon a study of these proceedings; and at any rate it illustrates his situation at this stage of the trial. For example, he says:
“Of thirty-four gentlemen who compose the list of witnesses whom I had originally selected for examination (in my defence) some are dead, some returned to their service in India, others, after an annual but fruitless and disheartening attendance, dispersed in unknown parts of these kingdoms, or in the remote regions of Europe. Those whose attendance I could engage are comparatively few in number, chiefly connected with me by habits of familiar intercourse, and their testimony for that very reason liable to be depreciated by the license which the managers have assumed with the characters of those, even of their own witnesses, whose evidence has not answered their expectations of it.”
For this and other reasons he complains of “the unparalleled injury which I have suffered by the extension of a criminal trial beyond the chances of a life’s duration”; and he declares to their Lordships that he is ready to waive his defence, if they will but graciously proceed to immediate judgment. As to the horrible cruelties of the native revenue officials which were charged upon him, he affirms that the worst of
them were never committed at all, and that the accusation, so far as he was concerned, is an atrocious calumny which the managers could never be induced to bring forward in the form of an article of charge, although they were closely and repeatedly urged to do so. He persists somewhat too confidently, as usual, not only in denying that he had done wrong but also in affirming that he had done right, in regard to both Cheyt Singh and the Oude Begums. He declares that the funds obtained at Benares and Lucknow saved our Indian possessions by supplying our armies at their utmost need; but he takes his stand on the ground that though his acts were justified by extreme necessity, they require no such justification. He concludes his address by drawing once more the contrast between his services and the treatment with which they had been requited.
“To the Commons of England, in whose name I am arraigned for desolating their provinces in India, I dare to reply that they are ... the most flourishing of all the states in India. It was I who made them so. ... I gave you all; and you have rewarded me with confiscation, disgrace, and a life of impeachment.”
From the beginning to the end of his trial he never failed to confront and contradict his accusers; nor was Burke a whit more convinced of his atrocious villainy than was Hastings of his own spotless and unassailable innocence.
In February, 1792, Mr. Law27 opened the defence. He began by remarking upon the disadvantages of those who had to meet the concentrated force, fire, and
unbridled violence of the attack by a laborious, accurate, and tedious defence, by detecting fallacies, disentangling errors, and unveiling misrepresentations. He travelled over much ground that would now be scarcely thought worth traversing. It had been the theory of the prosecution that a golden age of peace and good government in India had preceded the intervention of the English in the affairs of that unfortunate country; and for the purpose of demolishing this hypothesis Law thought himself obliged to enter upon a general sketch of the history of Hindustan. He then proceeded to review the whole series of the transactions, from 1756 to 1786, with which Hastings had been in any way connected, in a speech which, although it intentionally gives things a turn favourable to his client, yet may be safely read as a clear and well-arranged historical summary, accurate on all salient points and material questions; and he vindicated the personal integrity of Hastings in terms which have never been refuted. Referring to the earlier days of Lord Clive, when the whole revenues of Bengal were virtually at the disposal of a few Englishmen, he said:
“At the time when so many millions, either in the shape of restitution for losses, of presents, or in other ways, were transferred from the country government to the English, to the amount, as stated, of more than £1,200,000, you do not find a single penny of all these sums ascribed or ascribable to Mr. Hastings. And it was upon that circumstance that the noble Lord (North), then in supreme trust of the British affairs, rested principally his recommendation of him, in full Parliament, for the situation of Governor-General. He stated him then as being the only flesh and blood which had resisted temptation in the infections climate of India.”
Law concluded with a very effective enumeration of the successful acts of his government, with a description of the indisputable prosperity and security in which the Governor-General had left Bengal, with an appeal to the strong expressions of sympathy that his prosecution had elicited from the natives of India, and with an affirmation of his general ability and integrity. There can be no doubt that this defence, as a close and cogent argument sustained by a strong array of moderately-stated facts, deserves attentive study by all who desire to judge Hastings impartially; and the style of Law’s peroration might possibly be found as much to the taste of the present age as the far more famous periods of the orators who wore against him. Plumer followed in particular reply upon the question whether Hastings was entitled to levy a fine on Cheyt Singh, which, as he said, had been debated for ten years. Then came the witnesses, and the Court rose after having sat twenty-two days, beginning usually, as Hastings humbly observed, at two in the afternoon and rising soon after five.
In 1793 the trial was resumed with the reply on the second charge, relating to the treatment of the Oude Begums, when Law again took their Lordships through the history of Hindustan from the establishment of Mahommedanism in that country, to show that the widows of Shuja-u-Dowlah had no right to detain the treasures claimed by his successor. In this manner an astounding mass of abstruse erudition, historical precedent, juridical texts, and oral testimony, drawn indiscriminately from Europe and Asia, was heaped and piled up over every point, until the real issue and its true
aspect lay lost, hid, and shrivelled like a mummy under a huge pyramid. The dreary and flat waste of the voluminous record is studded here and there by these monuments of useless labour set up over against each other by the indefatigable energy of the disputants. The Court itself produced a mournful and sepulchral impression on the imagination of those who had seen the commencement, and were still surveying the course, of these slow-moving interminable proceedings; the attendance, sparse and attenuated, touched the mind with a sense of mortality. Of one hundred and eighty-six peers who had seen the Begum charge opened by the prosecution, not more than twenty-eight, and usually less, were now listening to the defence, and up to October, 1793, one hundred and twenty-seven changes had taken place in the peerage. Lord Thurlow in trying to upset Pitt had himself been upset, and had lost the seals; Lord Loughborough presided in his stead. The defending counsel toiled on in the task of picking to pieces the network of accusations, in dissecting propositions and arguments, exposing different sides of the same shield, setting one account of an affair against another flatly opposed to it, proving that saints were sinners and sinners saints, pouring cold water on the embers of the smouldering invectives of Burke and Sheridan, until the vast collection of contradictory proofs and arguments must have become intellectually unmanageable. Burke had described Nuncomar as a venerable priest, eminent for his talents, of irreproachable morals, who never appeared in public without exciting awe and exacting respect. Dallas, on the other side, drew the portrait of a “hoary intriguer,” in whose aged breast fermented the
furious passions of youth, full of malice and turbulence, and perpetually planning the ruin of civil society. The managers had termed Muni Begum a common prostitute, who kept “the greatest gin-shop in all Asia”; the defence proved undeniably that she was a lady treated with every respect by all high officers, including Lord Cornwallis; and so on. The proceedings were varied in May by an indecorous attempt on the part of the Archbishop of York (Markham), whose son had been with Hastings at Benares, to interrupt Burke; and when a few days later the Court adjourned, the trial virtually closed with an address by Hastings on the termination of his defence:
“In the presence,” he said,” of that Being from whom no secrets are hid, I do, upon a full review and scrutiny of my past life, unequivocally and conscientiously declare that in the administration of that trust of government which was so many years confided to me, I did in no instance intentionally sacrifice the interest of my country to any private views of personal advantage; that, according to my best skill and judgment I invariably promoted the essential interests of my employers, the happiness and prosperity of the people committed to my charge, and the welfare and honour of my country.”
He protested before God that he had at no time possessed a fortune which at its utmost exceeded £100,000; that all his property stood pledged for defraying the cost of the trial; and that there, and there only, were “the enormous fruits of thirteen years of imputed rapacity and peculation, and more than thirty years of active and important service.” In imploring their Lordships to pass immediate judgment, he ventured to remind them that “in the long period of another year I may be numbered
with those among my noble judges whom I have, with sorrow, seen drop off from year to year, and in aggravation of the loss by their deaths, I may lose the judgment of their survivors by my own.” However, the trial, alter debate in both Houses, with some sharp recrimination as to responsibility for delay and much criticism of the immense costs, was adjourned to the session of 1794.
The principal incident of this session was the examination of the Marquis Cornwallis, who had now returned from his seven years’ Governor-Generalship of India, and had been summoned by Hastings for the defence. He stated in reply to questions that during the whole of his residence in India no personal complaint against his predecessor had been received, that Hastings was much esteemed and respected by the natives in general and had rendered very essential services to his country. The managers continued to cross-examine witnesses for the defence; but the proceedings were still very frequently arrested by disputes over the admission of evidence28; for Burke proposed to put in and comment upon six folio volumes of printed proceedings and correspondence, in proof that Hastings was the author of the Mahratta war. Then came the replies of the prosecution, when the leading managers again spoke at length; until finally Burke summed up the case against the prisoner in a speech which lasted nine days, and in which he again
lashed Hastings severely, and defended the use of strong words in describing his conduct. The language of the Commons of England, he said, was rustic but intelligible; they had not learnt the refinement of Indian corruption, and the application of fine and emollient terms to bad actions proved the degeneracy of the present age. Sir Edward Coke was wrong in calling Raleigh a spider of hell, but if he had given the appellation to Hastings, Coke would have erred more against decorum than truth. It must be admitted that the display of such ever-burning animosity and such constant use of figurative execration were unworthy of a great statesman and splendid orator, a man of lofty patriotism and political genius, kindly-hearted and beloved in private life. But he was suffering from public disgust and private anxieties; and the luminous energies of his mind had now been turned upon the scene, to which he alluded at the conclusion of his final address, of barbarities, disorders, and bloody proscriptions, amid which Church and State in France were subsiding into what seemed to him irreparable. The epithets which he now so urgently needed for the Jacobins, for Danton and Robespierre, for regicides and brutal assassins of women, had lost some of their force by prodigal expenditure upon Hastings; and he had blunted the edge of his trenchant eloquence by hacking at his own countrymen. He ended his speech by declaring that the Commons awaited with trembling solicitude the issue of a cause on which they had been employed for twenty-two years, of which seven had been passed in this trial; he alluded to the destruction of the Parliament of Paris, a high court almost as dignified as that which he was then addressing; and he reminded
their Lordships that if their fate should be to pass also under the guillotine, their last hours would be quieted by the consciousness of having done justice in the great cause now before them.
Here ended the business of the management, and a vote of thanks to the managers, moved by Pitt, was carried by a majority in the Commons, to the somewhat unreasonable mortification of Hastings. Early in 1795 came the eighth and last session, when the Lords resolved themselves into a committee of the whole House for the consideration of the matter of the trial. Lord Thurlow argued warmly in favour of Hastings; while Lord Loughborough, the Chancellor, was against him, until after discussion for several days their Lordships adjourned to give judgment in Westminster Hall, where Warren Hastings was acquitted, in April, 1795, by a large majority on each of the sixteen questions that were put to the vote. Burke wrote in 1796 to Lord Loughborough, who had voted Hastings guilty on thirteen out of the sixteen counts:
“As to the acquittal, that it was total I was surprised at; that it should be so in a good measure I expected from the incredible corruption of the time.”
It should be understood that of the twenty articles of impeachment originally presented at the bar of the House of Lords, only six were regularly proceeded upon. The trial, from the opening of the proceedings to the vote of acquittal, extended over seven sessions of Parliament – from February, 1788, to April, 1795 – and occupied one hundred and forty-eight sittings of the Court; though the actual sittings in open Court to hear argument and evidence are given in the Report of the Commons Committee
at one hundred and eighteen29. The greatest number of Lords that sat at any Lime upon the Court was one hundred and sixty-eight; but in general there were from thirty to fifty; and there had been in all one hundred and eighty changes, from death or other causes, during the proceedings. The expenses of the accused had, by his own computation, amounted to about £100,000, of which £75,000 were verified legal costs; the expenses of the prosecution had also been very large.
21. “For though I am not splenetive or rash,
Yet there is in me something dangerous
Which let thy wisdom fear.” – Hamlet.
22. “Oh Pitt, with awe behold that precious throat
Whose necklace teems with many a future vote!
Pregnant with Burgage gems each hand she wears,
And lo! depending questions gleam upon her ears ! “
Probationary Ode.
23. Wraxall, Memoirs, i. 336.
24. Gleig says £2000 and £1000.
25. Stephen, History of Criminal Law, i 146.
26. A bookseller in Piccadilly. It was written by Logan, a Scotch minister of some repute.
27. Afterwards Lord Ellenborough.
28. Question. “What impression did the letting of the lands to Kullian Singh make on the inhabitants of the country ?”
Answer. “They heard it with terror and dismay.” After nearly a whole day’s argument, and reference to the judges, Law got this answer expunged from the record.
29. Distribution of sitting days:–
In the year 1788 the Court sat 35 days.
In 1789, 17 days.
In 1790, 14 days.
In 1791, 5 days.
In 1792, 22 days.
In 1793, 22 days.
In 1794 to March 1st, 3 days.
Total 118 days.
– Report of Commons Committee.
This collection transcribed by Chris Gage