It has been thought expedient to give some particular account of this extraordinary trial, as being on the whole the most remarkable and perhaps the most generally interesting incident of the life of Hastings, and as illustrating the manners of the time, the temper of that generation of Englishmen before whom Hastings was arraigned, and the state of public opinion that is represented, not unfairly, by the verdict. Lord Campbell says that the interest in these proceedings had greatly declined, and that public sympathy was all with the accused, which is easily intelligible when we remember that the trial ended amid the rising uproar and conflagration of the French Revolution, and at the outbreak of one of the fiercest and longest wars in modern English history. At a moment when a day’s journey to France could give the English people a nearer and clearer view of real horrors and atrocities, of judicial murders, massacres, violent unjustifiable invasions and usurpations, the rapacity of conquest, and the plundering of weak principalities, it was not to be expected that the national feeling would continue to be deeply stirred by narratives of what happened a dozen years back in India, of the oppressions of Bengal ryots, of heavy fines levied on
Begums and zemindars, of treaties twisted by equivocation, or even of a single Brahmin’s unmerited death by a formal judicial sentence. To the Englishmen of 1794–95 the later stages of the trial must inevitably have seemed tame and tedious; like a fine piece of historic tragedy, well acted and set out with footlights and costumes, but thinly attended toward the close because some genuine bloodshed is found to be going on outside in the neighbouring streets. No one will deny that those who first instituted these proceedings acted upon motives and with objects that were laudable and disinterested. They were men of the highest reputation and patriotic spirit, who were solicitous for the honour of their nation and for the integrity of its agents in distant countries, exposed to all the temptations of irresistible power, and of wealth that lay easily within the grasp of a strong hand. They felt a keen sympathy with weak princes and subject races; they were resolved that the flag of England should not fly over plundered provinces, that English arms should not uphold an Oriental despotism, and that the authority of Parliament should be made coextensive with the involuntary spread of its dominion. The first Act of Parliament to regulate Indian affairs was passed at a time (1773) when some such interposition was urgently needed; the second Act, eleven years later, was equally necessary to improve the machinery of the Indian government, and to establish a tighter control. But the intervening period had been one of unexampled difficulty and confusion, when our Indian polity was as yet quite unsettled, when the right principles of administration were still very imperfectly worked out, when England herself was under an incapable and corrupt rule, and
when the scramble of conquest and commerce in the east and the west was still going on among the nations of Europe. Our earlier forefathers held it a good answer to account for a man’s death that he was slain in chance medley; and it must be allowed that when Hastings had to hold his ground and keep his head in the Indian scuffles he took such weapons as came handiest, and was determined that others should want before he did. He did things that were bold, hard, and unjustifiable according to the standard of English proof, which ought always to be the measure of Englishmen who represent their country abroad. To hold a grand national inquisition into his conduct, upon his return, was an intelligible and not unreasonable proceeding; and the trial had several beneficial results. It cleared off a cloud of misconceptions, calumnies, exaggerations, and false notions generally on both sides; it fixed and promulgated the standard which the English people would in future insist upon maintaining in their Indian administration; it bound down the East India Company to better behaviour; it served as an example and as a salutary warning, and it relieved the national conscience. But the attempt to make Hastings a sacrifice and a burnt-offering for the sins of the people; the process of loading him with curses and driving him away into the wilderness; of stoning him with every epithet and metaphor that the English language could supply for heaping ignominy on his head; of keeping him seven years under an impeachment that menaced him with ruin and infamy – these were blots upon the prosecution and wide aberrations from the true course of justice which disfigured the aspect of the trial, distorted its aim, and had much to do with bringing
it to the lame and impotent conclusion30 that Burke so bitterly denounced.
For the excessive duration of the proceedings the managers, who had many motives for expedition, do not seem to have been responsible. In 1794 a Committee of the Commons, appointed to inquire into the length of the trial, laid the whole blame on the Lords; whereupon Thurlow indignantly pronounced their report to be a scurrilous pamphlet, indecent and disgraceful, such as ought not to pass unpunished. The truth is that the procedure by Parliamentary impeachment, which had been generally used as a sharp popular remedy for the offences of great men, was plainly unsuited to a case that went upon a large collection of documentary evidence, and afforded scope for dissertations on politics and history, arguments over Asiatic customs and creeds, and dialectics upon the philosophy of geographical morals. The fact that the prosecution was managed by Parliamentary orators and the defence by eminent lawyers, clearly led to a conflict of ideas as to the rules and principles to be mutually observed, and materially impeded a precise fixing of the real issues upon which the interests of India and England certainly demanded an authoritative judgment. The custom of the age still permitted Chancellors and Secretaries of State to accuse each other of heinous political crimes; and the chiefs of parties abused each other like Homeric heroes. All this was tolerable in open warfare, and it partially explains the violence of the language used against Hastings; but it
gave a very damaging tone of passion and prejudice to the prosecutors of a man who was precluded from replying upon equal terms31.
The final verdict was approved by and expressed the sense of the country. If Hastings had done wrong and deserved public censure rather than public honours, he had now suffered heavily; and the single fact that his character for personal integrity, though vehemently attacked, had passed unscathed through strong temptations and such an ordeal as this trial, must have told powerfully upon a generation with whom incorruptibility was as yet, in common belief, something of a rare quality among politicians. The benefit of the acquittal did not go wholly to the score of the accused. Its effect was to confirm and ratify certain important acts of State for which he had been impeached; and from which, be it remembered, the East India Company and the British nation derived large profits and political advantages. If Hastings, like Julius Caesar, had been hard on subject princes, at any rate their ransoms did, as Mark Antony said, fill the public coffers. The prosecution had often been reminded, not very seriously or forcibly, that if their charges were established the reinstatement of Cheyt Singh in the Benares estate, the repayment of great sums of money to the Begums and the Nawab of Oude,
and various other inconvenient measures of reparation, ought logically to follow. It is not probable that in any event this would have been thought necessary; for the Ministers might have adopted Sir John Falstaff’s view in respect to the Gadshill subsidy, that paying back is double labour; but it had been proved that the Company benefited to the amount of several millions sterling by the transactions in Oude and Benares; and the result of the trial was to set at rest all questions of reopening these arrangements.
Immediately after his acquittal Hastings sent to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Pitt, a petition praying that the House of Commons would indemnify him for his legal expenses. Pitt replied, as might have been expected, by a brief and formal refusal; while Burke protested to the Lord Chancellor against the infamy of condemning the Commons in costs and damages, and granting pensions to “the accused and the accursed.” The matter was next brought before the Court of Proprietors, who voted him compensation and a pension out of the Indian revenues, after obtaining from him a full account of his debts and assets which proved his liabilities for costs of the trial to be very nearly equal to all his available resources; but the Board of Control decided against the legality of such an appropriation. And the matter was finally arranged by a compromise between the Government and the Company whereby Hastings received a pension of £4000 for twenty-eight and a half years, with a large payment in advance and a loan of £50,000 free of interest. But he had been laying out £60,000 on the purchase of the Daylesford estate, and another £60,000 were still due for law charges. The
failure of a “great Dutch house in the city” had swept away a considerable sum deposited there by Mrs. Hastings. Dr. French Lawrence wrote to Burke in 1797 a hilarious letter upon this piece of news; and Burke replies with sombre satisfaction, saying also that the grants of public money to Hastings amounted to a condemnation of himself as the persecutor of innocence and merit. In another letter to Lawrence he remarks, “they are nursing up Hastings for the peerage,” and asks whether he (Burke) is to be called in to prove how right it is “to raise a sharping bullock contractor above the common level of citizens.” Such was the inextinguishable ire of that celestial mind; but Burke was now very soon to be laid where his heart could no more be lacerated by disappointment and savage indignation. Hastings survived him twenty years; the peerage never came, and notwithstanding advances, loans, and mortgages on his pension and his lands, he was for some years afterward in pecuniary straits, until in 1804 a fresh interposition of the authorities placed his income on a very moderate but secure footing.
Thenceforward Hastings passed many years at Daylesford, living a life of retirement and comparative obscurity after the manner of those who settled down in an outlying English county at the beginning of this century, when men rarely took to a fresh occupation after middle age, and when a seat in Parliament offered almost the only serious employment beyond rural pursuits to an active country gentleman. He had not the modern resource of contributing to literary reviews, or of joining archaeological societies or city companies; he farmed, rode, read and admired Scott, and wrote verses in the
style of the period. The incidents which varied the even tenor of such an existence were few and of little moment. In 1804 Mr. Addington, baited by the Opposition, ill-supported by some of his friends, and depressed by the feeling that the nation at large preferred Pitt to him as chief minister at a crisis when Bonaparte threatened an invasion of England, was about to resign. Hastings, who had been under some obligation to Addington for sympathy and assistance, asked and obtained an audience for the purpose of dissuading him. The interview, which Macaulay treats scornfully, is described by Gleig with unction and respectful deference to “the pure-minded and venerable statesman” whom Hastings addressed with a formal remonstrance against yielding to pressure. He assured Addington that the voice of the House of Commons was not the voice of the people; that during the course of the last week he had scarcely seen man or woman who did not execrate the confederacy (of Pitt, Fox, and the Grenvilles) that had been formed against the Minister; that, on the contrary, they were exceedingly well satisfied with the administration, and that even his enemies admitted Addington’s integrity while they profligately sneered at it. The language is courageous, but there is in it an echo of his own part injuries and resentments; particularly when he goes on to make light of the Minister’s deficiency in oratory – “that waste of words and time which is the invariable substitute for useful matter and progressive action”; and the tone leaves on the reader, as it probably did on Addington, an impression that Hastings had by no means mastered the art or learnt the ways of English politics. He could hardly have failed to see that
Pitt’s popularity, parliamentary influence, and governing capacity made him a far better leader of the nation at the climax of a great struggle than Addington; but he was probably actuated by a certain degree of animosity toward Pitt and Fox, who were about to coalesce; and it had never been his own habit to resign when he was abused, attacked, and overmatched. Nor must it be forgotten that Fox himself was of opinion at the time that Addington need not have resigned while he had a majority in the House. Hastings did not succeed in convincing Addington; but on the contrary Addington convinced Hastings, who went away satisfied that the Minister’s only course was to resign, and possibly thinking that he himself would have tried a very different line of conduct if he could only have had Addington’s chance of commanding the national ship in a storm. Soon afterward came the political ruin of Lord Melville, who just escaped impeachment for corruption, to the great distress and in some degree to the discredit of Pitt. In his correspondence Hastings refera to this event without bitterness; yet he may have thought that there was some retribution in the fate of Dundas, who had taken a large though indirect share in the promotion of similar imputations against him.
When the death of Pitt in January, 1806, dissolved the Tory Ministry, Hastings, like his enemy Francis, seems to have thought that the accession to office of Lord Grenville and the Whigs might afford him a chance of returning to active employ, and that some members of the Cabinet might be inclined to look favourably on his claims. That both Francis and Hastings should have applied almost simultaneously (in the spring of 1806) to
the Regent and the new Ministers for public office and personal distinction, is at least a coincidence and a curious reappearance of their ancient rivalry, for each of the two men must have been heartily sure that the other deserved nothing but dishonour and chastisement. They may at any rate have been consoled by each other’s failure; although their overtures were made in a very different style and temper. Both of them had in mind the Governor-Generalship of India, Francis wanted to succeed Lord Cornwallis, and quarrelled viciously with Fox and Lord Grenville because they refused to appoint him; his intrigues at Court were equally unsuccessful, and all he got was a Civil Knight Companionship of the Bath. Hastings merely obtained audience of the Prince of Wales, when after modestly saying that he had now relinquished his thoughts of public office, he suggested that the House of Commons might make him some reparation for the injuries that he had suffered, and also expressed a desire for some title in which his wife, “the best and most amiable of women,” might participate. The Prince professed much regard for him, and appears to have endeavoured to further his wishes; but the Cabinet were unwilling to give their assent, because any public recognition of his merits might imply a condemnation of the measures formerly taken against him by some of the Ministers. That this was their attitude toward him Hastings gathered from an interview with Lord Moira on the subject; and although some hope was held out that the Prince’s influence might nevertheless prevail, he seems to have drawn back at once. “I never,” he said to Lord Moira, “will receive a favour without an acknowledgment; much less will
I accept a favour from men who have done me great personal wrongs, though the act so construed should be the result of their submission to a different consideration.”
From that time forward he withdrew almost entirely from connexion with public affairs; nor does his correspondence show many references even to India, where the position of the English Government had changed rapidly and radically since he left the country. The transformation of the chief governorship of a chartered commercial company into a senatorial proconsulship had been completed; the first two parliamentary Governors-General, Cornwallis and Wellesley, had made good use of their time; the strength of the great native powers against whom Hastings had so painfully contended was effectually broken; and on their ruins a vast territorial sovereignty had been established. In 1786 Hastings had been impeached (among other matters) for having taken from the Mahrattas the little island of Salsette, on which now stands a part of the town of Bombay. In 1806 the Mahratta confederacy had lost, by war, whole provinces extending into the heart of India: the dynasty of Hyder Ali had disappeared from Mysore; and half the possessions of the Oude ruler had been transferred to the British. How much the nature of a Governor-General’s business, and his method of conducting it, had altered since the days of Hastings, may be inferred from a passage in one of his letters, where he regrets the absence of Lord Minto (an ancient enemy of the impeachment period) from Calcutta, “as it must be productive of all the evils of an insufficient and unresponsible government.”
“I am not afraid of saying that no future Governor-General will discharge his duty properly that does not do as I did – inspect the weekly or monthly details of every department, and give his instructions as often to the head of it. This duty he can only perform by being constantly on the spot; it cannot be done by delegation.”
To those who know the magnitude and multiplicity of the affairs which now fill up a Governor-General’s time, this conception of his duty will seem rather obsolete; and indeed it was out of date in 1806, when Hastings wrote. In fact the changes, political and administrative, that took place in India between 1786 and 1806 almost equalled those which Europe underwent during the same period; nor was any such great stride forward made again for over forty years, until the Punjab had been subdued, and the territories of two dynasties with whom Hastings had been very closely connected, the Nawabs of Oude and the Bhonsla Rajahs of Nagpore, were finally incorporated with the British empire.
In 1813, when the revision of the Company’s charter came before Parliament, Hastings was summoned by both Houses to give evidence. The brief and probably inaccurate report of his examination by the Committee of the Commons is to some extent disappointing. The tendency of his views is very strongly conservative – it might be called, even then, old-fashioned; but he had been nearly thirty years absent from India, and the effect of time in spoiling the soundest experience and the most valuable opinions is distinctly perceptible. It is indeed remarkable that while people are constantly describing India as of all countries the most conservative and the slowest to change, yet no political knowledge falls more rapidly out of date or grows musty sooner
than that which is brought back from India; the fundamental principles being always excepted. He was treated, as is well known, with particular respect.
“By the Commons I was under examination between three and four hours, and when I was ordered to withdraw, and was retiring, all the members by one simultaneous impulse rose with their heads uncovered, and stood in silence till I passed the door of their chamber. The House was unusually crowded. The same honour was paid to me, though of course with a more direct intention, by the Lords.”
Two or three months later the University of Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Law, when his reception in the theatre was very flattering; he was much pleased by Dr. Phillimore’s elegant Latin oration, and still more by a sonorous poem which Sir Elijah Impey indited upon the occasion. In 1814 his name was added to the list of Privy Councillors – an honour that Mr. Gleig seems inclined most unnecessarily to attribute to the stimulative effect upon the good feelings of the nation at large produced by the joy and excitement at the ending of the long French war, and to “the operation of this common principle of human nature in the highest quarter,” to wit, the Prince Regent. The Prince presented him to the allied sovereigns, “as the most deserving and at the same time one of the worst used men in the empire”; and he promised still greater distinctions, but no performance followed; and Hastings returned finally to country life at Daylesford, varied by occasional visits to London. He had presided at a dinner given by Anglo-Indian gentlemen to the Duke of Wellington; but he was a little troubled at the newspaper having said, in reporting his speech, that his
voice was feeble. At Daylesford he busied himself with superintending the work of restoring his parish church; making the remark, evidently derived from Indian recollections, that an occupation which engages the attention upon visible and palpable objects is most suited to infirm and simple minds, just as idols are necessary to worship in certain stages. His health was not seriously impaired up to the spring of 1818, when the infirmities of old age closed in upon him, and he became gradually worse until after an illness of six weeks he died on August 18th, 1818. About a fortnight before his death he dictated a letter conveying (through a friend) to the Court of Directors his earnest desire for the continuance of his annuity to his wife, “the dearest object of all my mortal concerns,” to whom, he said, it was due that he had been able to maintain the affairs of the Company for thirteen years in vigour, respect, and credit; and whose independent fortitude and presence of mind had on one occasion been the means of guarding a province of their dominion from impending ruin. Mrs. Hastings survived him some years, and was over ninety years of age when she died; but it is not wonderful that the application failed entirely, remembering that even Lord Nelson’s last testamentary appeal on behalf of a woman (“the only favour I ask of my king and my country at this moment when I am going to fight their battle”) had been rejected and utterly disregarded.
Such battles as Hastings waged had been long finished, and were comparatively inglorious. He lies buried in a vault of Daylesford Church; and in Westminster Abbey a bust and an inscription commemorate
the name and career of a man who, rising early to high place and power, held an office of the greatest importance to his country for thirteen years by sheer force of character and tenaciousness against adversity; and who spent the next seven years in defending himself bof ore a nation which accepted the benefits but disliked the ways of his too masterly activity. He was a man of great original capacity, whose special qualities, and their defects, had been exercised and drawn out by a course of very practical training. He owed nothing to the study of text-books, nothing to accepted usage, official precedent, professional tradition, or even to the pressure of public opinion which limits and shapes the possibilities of statesmanship. He had been shipped out to India a raw lad, and had there been left to gather his experience among the extraordinary incidents of Anglo-Indian politics in their earliest, roughest, and most rudimentary stage. He had to work with a set of adventurous and rather unscrupulous Englishmen in dealing with a subject population of a totally different nature; he found himself in a situation of much hazard, where most things were permissible and very few things impossible, where written laws were unknown, where the common law and conventions of civilised States were as yet unrecognised, and where the primitive necessity of self-preservation, which lies at the basis of the most firmly organised societies, stood constantly and markedly in the foreground. There is no such school for practical politics as Asia, where the good old rules of taking and keeping still prevail side by side with the most solemn and laudable precepts of justice and virtue; and where inconsistencies between acts and axioms trouble no one.
It was this training that strengthened the natural aptitude of Hastings for fertility of resource, firmness of temper, self-reliance, patience, equanimity, and reserve, which served him well at critical moments and enabled him to outlast protracted opposition. But it also enhanced his love of power, his autocratic disposition, and his inability to see or admit that a view may have been wrong, or an action blameworthy. His unrivalled grasp of detail, his thorough knowledge of the needs and capabilities of Bengal, gave full scope to his talent for administrative organisation; while in the general range of his tastes and interests he seems to have gone far beyond his Anglo-Indian contemporaries. The very remarkable journey of Mr. Bogle to the court of the Teshoo Lama in Tibet was made entirely under the initiative and encouragement of Hastings; and while he was always ready to promote geographical exploration he was still more active in advancing schemes for education and the revival of Oriental learning. The Mahommedan college which he instituted in Calcutta, still flourishes: Sir William Jones acknowledged the support he gave to the Asiatic Society; and the great interest he took in the translation and digest of Hindu laws suggested to Burke various ironical reflections on his supposed disregard of them.
Looking back on the character and career of Hastings, we may say that he possessed some of the strongest inbred qualities and defects of an Englishman, developed and directed by very remarkable circumstances. He showed a genius for pioneering administration that would have won him distinction at any epoch of our Indian
history. His fortune brought him forward in the transitional period between Clive and Cornwallis, when the confusion of new conquest was still fermenting, and when the methods of irregular, unrecognised rulership had been discountenanced but not discontinued; when the conscience of the nation demanded orderly government before it had become altogether practicable. It is no wonder that among the sundry and manifold difficulties of such a period, a man of his training and temper should have occasionally done things that are hard to justify and easy to condemn, or that his public acts should have brought him to the verge of private ruin. For he was undoubtedly cast in the type, so constantly recurrent in political history, of the sons of Zeruiah, and he very nearly earned their historical reward.
30. “To the perpetual infamy of a body which, God knows, I wish to be held in perpetual honour, I mean the House of Lords.” – Burke to Lord Loughborough, January, 1795.
31. “The impeachment of Warren Hastings is, I think, a blot on the judicial history of the country. It was monstrous that a man should be tortured at irregular intervals for seven years in order that a singularly incompetent tribunal might be addressed before an excited audience by Burke and Sheridan, in language far removed from the calmness with which an advocate for the prosecution ought to address a criminal court.” – History of Criminal Law, by Sir James Stephen, i. 160.
This collection transcribed by Chris Gage