The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 09 (of 12)

LXII. That the said Warren Hastings, who did pretend so deep a concern for the indignities supposed to be suffered by the Nabob merely in the limitation and regulation of unnecessary expenses relative to his kitchen, domestics, &c., did show no attention or compassion to the said Nabob, when, in the year 1779, the said Nabob represented, that the pensions of his old servants for thirty years, the expenses of his family and kitchen, together with the jaghires of his grandmother, mother, and aunts, and of his brothers and dependants, given for their support, were not regulated, but stopped.

LXIII. That the other articles of regulation, namely, the reform of the troops in number and in arrangement, the appointment of proper collectors for the revenues, and the general constitution of offices for the executive administration, were in like manner totally defeated by the said Hyder Beg Khân. And the said Hastings did receive a charge from him, and did adopt it as his own, representing the endeavors of the Resident to act in the regulations aforesaid agreeably to the spirit of his instructions, and in confidence of the powers vested in and the responsibility imposed upon him, the said Resident, as usurpations of the authority and prerogative of the Nabob; and he, the said Hastings, did make criminal charges thereon against the said Resident, Bristow, of which charges the Council Board did, on hearing the same, and the defence of the said Bristow, fully acquit him.

LXIV. That the said Hastings, by abetting Hyder Beg Khân, a person described by him as aforesaid, in his opposition to all the plans of necessary reformation proposed by the said Hastings himself, and having suggested no other whatever in lieu thereof, to answer the purposes for which he had stipulated in the treaty of Chunar the interference of the Resident in every branch of the Nabob's government, did thereby frustrate every one of the good ends proposed by him in the said treaty of Chunar, and did grossly abuse his trust in giving the exorbitant powers before recited, and asserting them to exist in the British Resident, without suffering them even in appearance to answer any of the proper and justifiable ends for which any power or influence can or ought to exist in any government.

LXV. That there is just ground to violently presume that not only the letters in the name of the Nabob aforesaid were dictated to him by his minister, Hyder Beg Khân, in whose hands the said Hastings has described his master to be "a mere cipher," &c., but which Hyder Beg was the known instrument of the said Hastings, but that the conduct and letters of complaint of the said Hyder Beg were in effect and substance prescribed and dictated to him by the said Warren Hastings, or his secret agent, Palmer, by his direction: because it is notorious that the powers of the said Hyder Beg were solely supported by him, the said Hastings, who, according to the state of favor or displeasure in which he stood, hath frequently promised him support or threatened him with dismission and punishment, and therefore it is not to be thought that he would take so material a step as to oppose the Company's Resident, acting under the instructions of the Governor-General and Council, and to accuse him with so much confidence, and in a manner so different from the usual style of supplication on all other occasions employed by that court, if he had not been previously well assured that his writing in that manner would be pleasing to the person upon whom he solely depended for his power, his fortune, and perhaps for his life;—secondly, because, when it suited the purposes of the said Hastings on a former occasion, that is, in the year 1784 [1781?], to remove the Resident Bristow aforesaid from his office, a letter from the Nabob was laid before the Council Board at Calcutta, proposing, that, in order to prevent the effects of the said Bristow's application to Europe for redress, the said Hastings should send him drafts of letters which he, the said Nabob, would write in his own name and character to the King, to his Majesty's ministers, and to the Court of Directors, expressing himself, in the letter aforesaid, in the words following, viz., "To prevent his [Bristow's] applying to Europe, send me, if you think proper, the drafts of letters which I may write to the King, the Vizier, and the chiefs of the Company";—thirdly, that, though the said Hastings, and his secret agent, Palmer, did pretend and positively assert that they had no share in the letters aforesaid from the Nabob and his minister, there was an original note to the Nabob's letters of accusation, referring to distinct parts and specified numbers of the agent Palmer's secret correspondence with the said Warren Hastings, and the said letter, with the said reference, was, through inadvertence, laid before the board.

LXVI. That the said Warren Hastings, having thrown the government of Oude into great confusion and distress, and thereby prevented the discharge of the debt, or pretended debt, to the Company, did, by all the said intrigues, machinations, and charges, aim at the filling the said office of Resident at Oude with his own dependants or by himself personally; as it appears that he did first propose to place in the said office his secret agent, Palmer, and that afterwards, when he was not able to succeed therein, he did propose nominally to abolish the said office, but in effect to fill it by himself,—proposing to the Council and rendering himself responsible (but not in fortune) for the payment of the Company's debt within a certain given time, if he were permitted and commissioned by the Council to act for the board in that province, and did inform them that he was privately well assured that in a few days he should receive an invitation to that effect; and he did state, (as in the year 1781 he had stated as a reason for his former delegation,) "that the state of the country was so disordered in its revenue and administration, and the credit and influence of the Nabob himself so much shook by the late usurpation of his authority, and the contests which attended it, as to require the accession of an extraneous aid to restore the powers and to reanimate the constitution of his government,"—although he, the said Hastings, did for a long time before attribute the weakness of his government to an extraneous interference. And the said Council, on his engagement aforesaid, did consent thereto; and he did accordingly receive a commission, enabling him to act in the affairs of Oude, not only as the Resident might have done, but as largely as the Council-General might legally delegate their own powers.

LXVII. That the said Warren Hastings, in accepting the said commission, did subject his character and the reputation of his office to great imputations and suspicions, by taking upon himself an inferior office, out of which another had upon his intrigues been removed by a perpetual obstruction which rendered it impossible for him to perform his duty or to obey his instructions; and he did increase the said grounded suspicions by exercising that office in a government from whence it was notorious he had himself received an unlawful gift and present from the ministers, and in which he had notoriously suffered many, and had himself actually directed some, acts of peculation, by granting various pensions and emoluments, to the prejudice of the revenue of a distressed country, which he was not authorized to grant.

LXVIII. That the said Warren Hastings did proceed unto the said province of Oude under color of providing a remedy for the disorders described to be existing in the same, and for the recovery of the Company's pretended debt. And the said Warren Hastings, who had thought fit to recall the Company's Resident, appointed to that office by the Court of Directors, and to suspend his office, did, notwithstanding, of his own choice and selection, and on his own mere authority, take with him in his progress a large retinue, "and a numerous society of English gentlemen to compose his family," which he represents as necessary, although, in a letter from that very place to which he took that very numerous society, he informs the Court of Directors "that his own consequence and that of the nation he represents are independent of show." And after his arrival there, he, the said Warren Hastings, did write from Lucknow, the capital of that province, a letter, dated the 30th of April, 1784, to the Court of Directors, in which are several particulars to the following purport or tenor, and which he points out to the Directors "to be circumstances of no trivial information," namely,—"that he had found that the lands in that province, as well as in some parts more immediately under the Company, have suffered in a grievous manner, being completely exhausted of their natural moisture by the total failure of one entire season of the periodical rains," with a few exceptions, which were produced only "by the uncommon labor of the husbandman." And in a letter to Edward Wheler, Esquire, a member of the Council-General, from Benares, the 20th of September, 1784, he says, that "the public revenues had declined with the failure of the cultivation in three successive years; and all the stores of grain which the providence of the husbandmen, (as he was informed is their custom,) in defiance of the vigilance of the aumils [collectors], clandestinely reserved for their own use, were of course exhausted, in which state no person would accept of the charge of the collections on a positive engagement; nor did the rain fall till the 10th of July." And in another letter, dated from Benares, the 1st of October following, he repeats the same accounts, and that the "country could not bear further additions of expense: that it had no inlets of trade to supply the issues that were made from it" (the exceptions stated there being inconsiderable); "therefore every rupee which is drawn into your treasury [the Company's] from its circulation will accelerate the period at which its ability must cease to pay even the stipulated subsidy." Notwithstanding this state of the country, of which he was well apprised before he left Calcutta, and the poverty and distress of the prince having been frequently, but in vain, represented to him, in order to induce him to forbear his oppressive exactions, he did, in order to furnish the Council with a color for permitting him to recall the Company's Resident, and to exercise the whole powers of the Company in his own person, without any check whatsoever, or witness of his proceedings, except the persons of his own private choice, make the express and positive engagement aforesaid, which, if understood of a real and substantial discharge of debt for the relief of the total of the Company's finances, was grossly fallacious: because at the very time he must have been perfectly sensible, that, in the then state of the revenues and country of Oude, (which are in effect the Company's revenues and the Company's country,) the debt or pretended debt aforesaid, asserted to be about five hundred thousand pounds, or thereabouts, could not be paid without contracting another debt at an usurious interest, without encroaching on the necessary establishments or on private property or on the pay of the army, or without grievous oppression of the country, or all these together. And it doth appear that one hundred thousand pounds towards the said payment of debts was borrowed at Calcutta by the Nabob's agent there, but at what interest is not known; it appears also that other sums were borrowed for arrear of the interest, on which forty thousand pounds sterling appears in the Company's claims for the current year, and that various deductions were made from the jaghires restored to the Begums, as well as other parts of the Nabob's family; and it did and doth appear that an arrear is still due to the old and new brigade,—but whether the same be growing or not doth not appear: yet he hath not hesitated to assert that he had "provided for the complete discharge, in one year, of a debt contracted by the accumulation of many, and from a country whose resources have been wasted and dissipated by three successive years of drought and one of anarchy." But the said Hastings never did even realize the payments to be made in the first year, (as he confesses in the said letter,) except by an anticipation of the second; and though he states in his letter aforesaid the following facts and engagements, that is to say, "that a recovery of so large a part of your property [the Company's] will afford a seasonable and substantial relief to the necessities of your government, and enable it (for such is my confident hope) to begin on the reduction of your debt at interest before the conclusion of this year (I mean the year of this computation)." Whereas the said Warren Hastings did apply the whole produce of the revenue to the mere pay of some part of the British army in Oude; and did not mention in his correspondence that he had remitted any money whatsoever to Calcutta, nor to any other place, (except the fifty thousand pounds taken from Almas Ali Khân, and said to be remitted to Surat,) for the said "substantial relief," in consequence of the said pretended "recovery of property,"—admitting that it had been suggested to him, and not by him denied, that he had "disappointed the popular expectation by not adopting the policy which he had, on the conception of better grounds, rejected; nor did he begin the reduction of the interest debt" at the time stated, nor at any time; but the whole (he well knowing the state of the country from whence the resources aforesaid were by him promised) was a premeditated deceit and imposition on the Board of Council, his colleagues, and on the Court of Directors, his masters.

LXIX. That no traces of regulation appear to have been adopted by the said Warren Hastings during his residence at Lucknow, in conformity to the spirit and intentions of the treaty of Chunar, or of his instructions to Middleton and Bristow, or of the proposed objects of his own commission. But he did, in lieu thereof, pretend to free the Nabob's government from the interference of the Company's servants, and the usurpation (as he called it) of a Resident, and thereby to restore it to its proper tone and energy; whereas the measures he took were such as to leave no useful or responsible superintendence in the British, and no freedom in the Nabob's government: for he did confirm the sole, unparticipated, and entire administration, with all the powers annexed to the government, on the minister, Hyder Beg Khân, to whom he prevailed on the Nabob Vizier to commit the entire charge of his revenues, although he knew that his master was a cipher in his hands,—that he "had affixed his seal to letters written without his knowledge, and such as evidently tended to promote Hyder Beg Khân's influence and interest,"—that his said master did not consider him as a minister of his choice, but as an instrument of his degradation,—that "he exists as a minister by his dependence on the Calcutta government, and that the Nabob himself had no other opinion of him,—that it is by its declared and most obvious support alone that he could maintain his authority and influence." And in his instructions to his secret agent, Major Palmer, dated 6th of May, 1782, to ease his mind and remove his jealousy with regard to British interference, he did instruct him, "that much delicacy and caution will be required in your declarations on this subject, lest they should be construed to extend to an immediate change in the administration of his affairs, or the instruments of it. Their persons must be considered as sacred, while they act with the participation of our influence. This distinction the Nabob understands; nor will it be either necessary or proper to allude to it, unless he himself should first introduce the subject." And the said Hastings did assume, as to a dependant of the lowest order, to prescribe to him the conditions on which he is to hold his place,—to threaten him with scrutinies into his conduct, with dismission, with punishment,—that he was guilty of falsehood and duplicity, and that he had made his master assert what was true to be false,—that he suspected he had withheld from his master what he ought to have paid to him,—that the event of his having prevailed on the Nabob to intrust him as aforesaid was, according to his, the said Hastings's, own letter, written to the said Hyder Beg Khân himself, "an accumulation of distress, debasement, and dissatisfaction to the Nabob, and of disappointment and disgrace to me. Every measure which he had himself proposed, and to which he had solicited my assistance, has been so conducted as to give him cause of displeasure; there are no officers established by which his affairs could be regularly conducted; mean, incapable, and indigent man have been appointed aumils of the districts, without authority, and without the means of personal protection; some of them have been murdered by the zemindars, and those zemindars, instead of punishment, have been permitted to retain their zemindaries with independent authority; all the other zemindars suffered to rise up in rebellion, and to insult the authority of the sircar, without any attempt made to suppress them; and the Company's debt, instead of being discharged by the assignments, and extraordinary sources of money provided for that purpose, is likely to exceed even the amount at which it stood at the time in which the arrangement with his Excellency was concluded. The growth of these evils was early made known to me, and their effects foreboded in the same order and manner as they have since come to pass. In such a state of calamity and disgrace, I can no longer remain a passive spectator; nor would it be becoming to conceal my sentiments, or qualify the expression of them. I now plainly tell you, that you are answerable for every misfortune and defect of the Nabob Vizier's government." And after giving orders, and expressing some hopes of better behavior, he adds, "If I am disappointed, you will impose on me the painful and humiliating necessity of acknowledging to him that I have been deceived, and of recommending the examination of your conduct to his justice, both for the redress of his own and the Company's grievances, and for the injury sustained by both in their mutual connection. Do not reply to me, that what I have written is from the suggestion of your enemies; nor imagine that I have induced myself to write in such plain and declaratory terms, without a clear insight into all the consequences of it, and a fixed determination upon them."

LXX. That the aforesaid being the tenure of the power of the said minister, and such his character, as given by the said Warren Hastings himself, who did originally compel the Nabob to receive him, who did constantly support him against the Nabob, his master, as well as against the Company's Resident,—the delivering over to such a person his master, his family, his country, and the care of the British interests therein, without control or public inspection, was an high crime and misdemeanor.

LXXI. That the next person whom the said Hastings did invest with power in the said country was a certain opulent and powerful native manager of revenue, called Almas Ali Khân, closely connected with the said Hyder Beg Khân, and to whom the said Hyder Beg Khân, as the said Hastings has admitted, "had intrusted the greatest part of his revenues, without any pledge or security for his fidelity." And afterwards the said Hastings charges the said Almas Ali with an intention of removing from the Nabob's dominions: he states, "as taking with him," and therefore being possessed of, "an immense treasure, the fruits of his embezzlements and oppressions, and an army raised for its protection."

LXXII. That the said Warren Hastings was, or pretended to be, impressed with the evil character, dangerous designs, and immoderate power of the said Almas Ali; that he did insert among his instructions to the Resident Bristow an order of a dangerous and unwarrantable nature, in which, upon his, the said Hastings's, simple allegation of offences, not accurately described or specified, with regard either to the fact, the nature of the offence, or the proof, he was required to urge the Nabob to put him to death, with many qualifications in the said instructions, full of fraud and duplicity, calculated to insnare the said Resident Bristow, and to throw upon him the responsibility of the conduct of the said Almas Ali Khân, if he should continue at large contrary to his orders, or to subject him, the said Resident, to the shame and scandal of apprehending and putting him to death by means which, in the circumstances, must necessarily be such as would be construed into treachery, and he, the said Almas Ali Khân, being from nature and situation suspicious and watchful, and being at that very time in the collection, or farmer of the most important part of the revenues, with an extensive jurisdiction annexed, and at the head of fourteen thousand of his own troops, and having been recently accepted by the Resident Middleton as security for large sums of money advanced by the bankers of Benares to the use of the East India Company; which orders (if the said Resident would or could have executed them) must have raised an universal alarm among all the considerable men of the country concerned in the government, and would have been a means of subverting the public credit of the Company, by the murder of a person engaged for very great sums of money that had been advanced for their use. And the said instruction is as followeth.

"If any engagement shall actually subsist between them at the time you have charge of the Residency, it must, however exceptionable, be faithfully observed; but if he has been guilty of any criminal offence to the Nabob, his master, for which no immunity is provided in the engagement, or he shall break any one of the conditions of it, I do most strictly enjoin you, and it must be your special care to endeavor, either by force or surprise, to secure his person and bring him to justice. By bringing him to justice I mean, that you urge the Nabob, on due conviction, to punish him with death, as a necessary example to deter others from the commission of the like crimes; nor must you desist till this is effected. I cannot prescribe the means; but to guard myself against the obloquy to which I may be exposed by a forced misconstruction of this order by those who may hereafter be employed in searching our records for cavils and informations against me, I think it proper to forbid and protest against the use of any fraudulent artifice or treachery to accomplish the end which I have prescribed; and as you alone are privy to the order, you will of course observe the greatest secrecy, that it may not transpire: but I repeat my recommendation of it, as one of the first and most essential duties of your office."

LXXIII. That, among the reasons assigned for putting to death the said Almas Ali, which the said Hastings did recommend directly and repeatedly to the Resident, "as one of the first and most essential duties of his office," was, in substance, "that, by his extensive trust with regard to the revenues, he had been permitted to acquire independency; that the means thereof had been long seen and the effects thereof foretold by every person acquainted with the state of government, except those immediately interested in it"; and he, the said Warren Hastings, did also charge the said Almas Ali with embezzlement of the revenues and oppression of the people; and nothing appears to disprove the same, but much to give ground to a presumption that the said Almas Ali did grievously abuse the power committed to him, as farmer and collector of the revenue, to the great oppression of the inhabitants of the countries which had been rented to him by Hyder Beg Khân with the knowledge and consent of the said Warren Hastings.

LXXIV. That the Resident, Bristow, declining the violent attempt on the life of Almas Ali deceitfully ordered by the said Warren Hastings, did, on weighty reasons, drawn from the spirit of the said Hastings's own instructions, recommend that his, the said Almas Ali Khân's, farms of revenue, or a great part of them, should be, on the expiration of his lease, taken out of his hands, as being too extensive, and supplying the means of a dangerous power in the country; but yet he, the said Warren Hastings, did not only continue him in the possession of the said revenues, but did give to him a new lease thereof for the term of five years. And on this renovation and increase of trust, the said Warren Hastings did not consent to produce the informer upon whose credit he had made his charge of capital crimes on the said Almas Ali, and had directed him to be put to death, or call upon him to make good his charges; but, instead of this, totally changing his relation to the said Almas Ali, did himself labor to procure from all parts attestations to prove him not guilty of the perfidy and disloyalty of which the said Hastings himself appears to have been to that very time his sole accuser, as he hath since been his most anxious advocate: but though he did use many endeavors to acquit Almas Ali of his intended flight, yet concerning his embezzlements and oppressions, the most important of all charges relative to that of the revenue and collection, he, the said Hastings, hath made no inquiry whatever; by which it might appear that he was not as fully guilty thereof as he had always represented him to be. But some time after he, the said Warren Hastings, had arrived at Lucknow, in the year 1784, he suggested to the said Almas Ali Khân the advance to the Company's use of a sum of money amounting to fifty thousand pounds or thereabouts; and the said suggested advance was (as the said Warren Hastings asserts, no witness or document of the transaction appearing) "cheerfully and without hesitation complied with, considering it as an evidence seasonably offered for the general refutation of the charges of perfidy and disloyalty": which practice of charging wealthy persons with treason and disloyalty, and afterwards acquitting them on the payment of a sum of money, is highly scandalous to the honor, justice, and government of Great Britain; and the offence is highly aggravated by the said Hastings's declaration to the Court of Directors that the charges against Almas Ali Khân have been too laboriously urged against him, and carried at one time to such an excess as had nearly driven him to abandon his country "for the preservation of his life and honor," and thus to give a "color to the charges themselves," when he, the said Warren Hastings, did well know that he himself did consider as a crime, and did make it an article in a formal accusation against the Resident Middleton, that he did not inform him, the said Hastings, of the supposed treasons of Almas Ali Khân, and of his design to abandon the country, when he himself did most laboriously urge the charges against him, and when no attempt appears to have been made against the life of the said Almas Ali Khân except by the said Warren Hastings himself.

LXXV. That the sum of fifty thousand pounds sterling, or thereabouts, publicly taken by the said Warren Hastings, as an advance for the use of the Company, if given as a consideration or fine, on account of the renewal for a long term of civil authority and military command, and the collection of the revenues to an immense amount, the same being at least eight hundred thousand pounds sterling yearly, was so totally inadequate to the interest granted, that it may justly be presumed it was not on that, or on any public ground or condition, that the said Hastings did delegate, out of all reach of resumption or correction, a lease of boundless power and enormous profit, for so long a term, to a known oppressor of the country.

LXXVI. That Warren Hastings, being at Lucknow in consequence of his deputation aforesaid, did, in his letter from that city, dated 30th of April, 1784, recommend to the Court of Directors, "as his last and ultimate hope, that their wisdom would put a final period to the ruinous and disreputable system of interference, whether avowed or secret, in the affairs of the Nabob of Oude, and withdraw forever the influence by which it is maintained," and that they ought to confine their views to the sole maintenance of the old brigade stationed in Oude by virtue of the first treaty with the reigning Nabob, expressing himself in the following words to the Court of Directors. "If you transgress that line, you may extend the distribution of patronage, and add to the fortunes of individuals, and to the nominal riches of Great Britain; but your own interests will suffer by it; and the ruin of a great and once flourishing nation will he recorded as the work of your administration, with an everlasting reproach to the British name. To this reasoning I shall join the obligations of justice and good faith, which cut off every pretext for your exercising any power or authority in this country, as long as the sovereign of it fulfils the engagements he has articled with you."

LXXVII. That it appears by the extraordinary recommendation aforesaid, asserted by him, the said Hastings, to be enforced by the "obligations of justice and good faith," that the said Warren Hastings, at the time of writing the said letter, had made an agreement to withdraw the British interference, represented by him as a "ruinous and disreputable system," out of the dominions of the Nabob of Oude. But the instrument itself, in which the said agreement is made, (if at all existing,) does not appear; nor hath the said Hastings transmitted any documents relative to the said treaty, which is a neglect highly criminal,—especially as he has informed the Company, in his letter from Benares, "that he has promised the Nabob that he will not abandon him to the chance of any other mode of relation, and most confidently given him assurance of the ratification and confirmation of that which he [the said Hastings] had established between his government and the Company": the said confident assurance being given to an agreement never produced, and made without any sort of authority from the Court of Directors,—an agreement precluding, on the one hand, the operation of the discretion of his masters in the conduct of their affairs, or, on the other, subjecting them to the hazard of an imputation on their faith, by breaking an engagement confidently made in their name, though without their consent, by the first officer of their government.