school by one of his uncles and sent to Westminster, where he
distinguished himself by winning a King’s scholarship in the year 1747.
Even when his poor old grandfather, the last Hastings of Dalesford, and
the miserably paid rector of the parish which his ancestors had owned,
sent Warren to sit beside the little rustics of the village school, he
immediately singled himself out from them by the willing intelligence
with which he took to his work and afterwards the headmaster of
Westminster had high hopes of university distinctions for him. It was
indeed a somewhat curious coincidence that Robert Clive should have
been such an exceedingly bad boy and the completer of his work such a
good one.
But the Fates had already decided that Warren Hastings was to graduate
with honours in a very much bigger university than that on the banks
of the Isis or the Cam. His uncle died suddenly, and the orphan lad
was passed on to the care of a distant connection who happened to be a
director of the East India Company.
His headmaster remonstrated strongly, but happily without effect,
against his immediate removal to Christ’s Hospital to learn
account-keeping before going out to Bengal as a writer in the service
of “John Company.”
It seems as though the worthy Dr. Nichols had a very high opinion of
his intellectual abilities, for, when all his protests failed, he
actually offered to send his brilliant young pupil to Oxford at his own
expense.
Happily for the British Empire Mr. Director Chiswick, the relative
aforesaid, stuck to his selfish project of getting him off his hands as
quickly and permanently as possible by sending him out to Calcutta to
take jungle fever or make a fortune, just in the same way that Clive’s
despairing parents had done.
He sailed for Calcutta when he was seventeen, the same age as his
precious father was when he was born. He had been two years at the desk
in Calcutta when there came the news that Clive had taken Arcot and put
a very different complexion on the struggle between the English and
French Companies for the supremacy of India.
About that time he was sent to a little town on the Hooghly about a
mile from Moorshedabad, and while he was here driving bargains with
native silk-weavers and tea merchants, Surajah Dowlah marched into
Calcutta and cast such English prisoners as he could lay hold of into
the Black Hole.
Hastings was also taken prisoner, but most fortunately did not get
into the Black Hole, and he appears to have been set at large on the
intercession of the chief of the Dutch factory. During the period which
followed his partial release--for he was still under surveillance at
Moorshedabad--he made his first essay in diplomacy, or what would
perhaps be more correctly described as political intrigue, with the
result that the city got too hot for him, and he fled to Fulda, an
island below Calcutta, where, as has been pithily said, the English
fugitives from Fort William “were encamped like a shipwrecked crew
awaiting rescue.”
The rescue came in the shape of the combined naval and military
expedition, commanded by Admiral Watson and Robert Clive, which was
destined to end in the triumph of Plassey, and Warren Hastings, as
Macaulay aptly suggests in his brilliant but singularly misinformed
essay, doubtless inspired by the example of Clive and the similarity of
their entrance on to the stage of Indian affairs, like him exchanged
the pen for the sword, and fought through the campaign. But Clive saw
“that there was more in his head than his arm,” and after the battle
of Plassey he sent him as resident Agent of the Company to the Court
of Meer Jaffier, the puppet-nabob who had been set up in the place of
Surajah Dowlah.
He held this post until he was made a Member of Council in 1761, and
was obliged to remove to Calcutta. Clive was at home now, and the
interregnum of oppression, extortion, and general mismanagement was
in full swing; but the man who was afterwards so grossly wronged and
falsely impeached, and who passed through the most celebrated trial in
English history charged with just such crimes, had so little taste for
them that three years later he came back a comparatively poor man, and
the fortune he had he either gave away to his relations or lost through
the failure of a Dutch trading-house.
After a stay of four years, during which he renewed his intimacy with
his old schoolfellow, the creator of the immortal John Gilpin, and made
the acquaintance of Johnson and Boswell, he found himself so reduced in
circumstances that he not only had to ask the Directors of the Company
to give him more employment in India, but when he got it he was forced
to borrow the money to pay his passage out again.
It is quite impossible to form any just and reasonable judgment of the
work which Warren Hastings now went out to do unless one first gets an
adequate idea of the condition of things obtaining in India before the
English went there, and of the conditions that would have obtained,
if men like Clive, Hastings, Cornwallis, and Wellesley had not by one
means and another--some good, some bad, but all just what were possible
under the circumstances--succeeded in imposing the _Pax Britannica_
upon the rival and constantly warring potentates who governed the
native populations.
No doubt the war on the Rohillas, or the so-called spoliation of the
Begums of Oude, together with more or less magnified incidentals,
formed famous themes in after years for the inflated eloquence and
grandiloquent over-statements of Edmund Burke and Sheridan, and for the
far less comprehensible or excusable special pleading of Lord Macaulay.
It was, no doubt, very affecting to see the patched and powdered fine
ladies who paid their fifty guineas a seat in Westminster Hall to
watch the men of words mangling the reputation of the man of deeds,
weeping and fainting at the harrowing pictures they drew--mostly on
their own imaginations--of the sufferings which he had _not_ caused;
but we of to-day are sufficiently far removed from the personal spite
and the passion and rivalry which inspired the enemies and accusers
of the great Governor to be able to look at things as they actually
were, and in doing so we shall see that, however heavy was the hand
that Warren Hastings laid upon the subject peoples, it was but as a
caress to a blow when compared with the oppression and extortion with
which conqueror after conqueror, Mohammedan and Hindoo, Sikh, Afghan,
and Mahratta, had ground down and despoiled the helpless races which
successively passed under their sway.
Order, however dearly bought, is always less expensive than anarchy,
and the impassioned periods of Burke and Sheridan look somewhat silly
when we compare them with the sober facts. It never seems to have
struck them or their audience to make any comparison between the
English gentleman and loyal servant of his country whom they would have
handed down to history as a monster of iniquity, and those real tyrants
of the type of Surajah Dowlah, Hyder-Ali, and Nana-Sahib, whose brutal
rule and ruthless wars of conquest and extermination must have been,
under the circumstances, the only possible alternative to the strong
and steady control of the Englishman.
The first thing that Warren Hastings did on his return was to
reorganise the trade of the Province, and in this he succeeded so
well that the Directors rewarded him in 1772 with the Governorship
of Bengal; and if they could have stopped there, leaving him to do
the rest, the immediately subsequent history of India might have been
very much more creditable to the rulers and more pleasant reading
for the descendants of the ruled than it was. But unhappily a body
of traders and shareholders became possessed with the idea that they
were the proper sort of people to rule a country divided by political
and religious factions, with a history of almost constant warfare
stretching back for centuries, and situated fifteen thousand miles away.
This, on the face of it, was an impossibility. When they had found
their Governor they should have trusted him to govern, instead of
sending out his personal enemies to sit at his council-table to spy
upon his actions and hamper and oppose him in everything that he did.
But there was something else in its way quite as serious as this.
Practically all the charges that were brought against Warren Hastings
on his impeachment are answered and disposed of by the fact that the
only condition upon which he could retain his position and do the work
that he had set his soul upon doing was, in three words, making India
_pay_. John Company looked upon his new possession as a trader on a
market. With the Directors, who, after all were Hastings’ masters, it
was business first, and policy and government a good distance after.
Even Macaulay admits that every exhortation to govern leniently and
respect the rights of the native princes and their subjects was
accompanied by a demand for increased contributions. “The inconsistency
was at once manifest to their vice-regent at Calcutta, who, with an
empty treasury, with an unpaid army, with his own salary often in
arrear, with deficient crops, with Government tenants daily running
away, was called upon to remit home another half-million without fail.”
There is another thing to be remembered before we can judge Warren
Hastings fairly in the matter of his forced contributions. The tea
that was flung overboard in Boston Harbour in the December of 1773 was
imported by the East India Company. The connection will appear more
obvious when we look at what followed.
Great Britain was about to plunge into war, east and west, north and
south. Criminal misgovernment at home had produced revolt abroad.
Disaster after disaster and disgrace after disgrace were soon to befall
the British arms. The Anglo-Saxon race was about to be split in two,
and England herself was to fight, if not for her very existence, at
least for her honourable place among the nations.
All this Warren Hastings foresaw with that marvellous prevision which
made some of his actions look almost prophetic, and determined that,
come what might elsewhere, the Star of the East should not be plucked
from the British Crown. He was not a soldier. He was an administrator.
His task was not to increase but to hold. He was by no means always
successful in war, and in all his long rule he never added a province
or a district to the area of British India; but what Clive won he held
and strengthened during those fateful years when the destiny of Britain
as an empire was trembling in the balances of Fate.
Now, to keep India, money was absolutely necessary, and the getting
of it was not always work that could be done with kid gloves on, and
the greatness of Warren Hastings as Empire-Maker or Holder may be seen
in the fact that he deliberately, and with his eyes open, risked his
future fortune and reputation in the doing of this work by the only
means available.
He knew that his methods would be censured by his masters and made
unscrupulous use of by his enemies, and he said so in so many words,
and, careless of criticism and undeterred by the most virulent and
treasonable opposition, he succeeded so far that he was able to say
with truth that he had rescued one province from infamy, and two from
total ruin. It is simply amazing to the dispassionate reader of the
present day to watch the needless struggles which were imposed upon
this man, already confronted by a titanic task, by the very men who
ought to have been the first, for their own sakes and their country’s,
to have made his way as smooth and his burdens as light as possible.
The man who may be fairly described as the evil genius of Warren
Hastings’ career was that Sir Philip Francis who is generally looked
upon as the author of the far-famed Letters of Junius. He and Sir John
Clavering, both personal enemies of the Governor-General--as he was
now--were sent out as members of the Council, and to the days of their
death they never ceased to thwart and embarrass him by every means in
their power.
One reason for their enmity was undoubtedly the sordid motive of
getting him turned out of the Governor-Generalship in order that one
of them might succeed to his office, and that both might share in the
fruits of the extortions which, in him, they condemned.
This was not only unjust to Hastings, but it was also a crime against
their country, committed at a moment when she had all too much need of
such men as he was.
To my mind, at least, there is a very strong resemblance between
the savage invective of Junius and the consistent and unscrupulous
malevolence with which Sir Philip Francis tried to wreck the life-work
of a man at whose table he was not worthy to sit.
Those were days in which political rivalry and personal enmity
entailed personal consequences if they were pushed too far. Hastings
seemed to have come at length to the conclusion that India was not
large enough to hold himself and Francis. He had submitted to insult
after insult, and he would have been something more than human if his
enemy’s unceasing efforts to make his life a misery and his work a
failure had not left some bitterness in his soul, and so one fine day
he sat down and embodied his opinion of him in a Minute to the Council,
and in this he purposely put words which meant inevitable bloodshed:
“I do not trust to his promise of candour; convinced that he is
incapable of it, and that his sole purpose and wish are to embarrass
and defeat every measure which I may undertake or which may tend even
to promote the public interest if my credit is connected with them....
Every disappointment and misfortune have been aggravated by him,
and every fabricated tale of armies devoted to famine and massacre
have found their first and most ready way to his office, where it is
known they would meet with most welcome reception.... I judge of his
public conduct by my experience of his private, which I have found
void of truth and honour. This is a severe charge but temperately and
deliberately made.”
These were not words which a man in those days could write without
taking his chance of a bullet or the point of a small-sword, and
Hastings knew this perfectly well. Francis challenged him on
the spot, and the day but one after they confronted each other
with pistols at fourteen paces. Francis’s pistol missed fire, and
Hastings obligingly waited until he had reprimed. The second time the
pistol went off, but the ball flew wide. Hastings returned it very
deliberately and his enemy went down with a bullet in the right side.
[Illustration: HIS ENEMY WENT DOWN WITH A BULLET IN THE RIGHT SIDE.]
The difference between the two men may be seen from what followed.
After his adversary had been carried home, the Governor-General sent
him a friendly message offering to visit him and bury the hatchet for
good, as was customary in such affairs between gentlemen. Francis, not
being a gentleman, refused, and as soon as he was well enough to travel
he came home to England to injure by backstairs-intrigue and the most
unscrupulous lying and misrepresentation the man who, in the midst of
his difficulties and dangers, had proved all too strong for him in the
open.
To use his own words, “after a service of thirty-five years from
its commencement, and almost thirteen of them passed in the charge
and exercise of the first nominal office of the government,” Warren
Hastings at last laid down his thankless task and came home to render
an account of his stewardship before a tribunal which possessed neither
adequate knowledge to judge of his actions nor that judicial spirit of
calmness and impartiality which could alone have guaranteed him such a
trial as English justice accords to the vilest criminal.
His impeachment is not only the most notable but altogether the
most amazing trial in the history of British Law. It would be alike
superfluous and presumptuous to reproduce here an account of that which
has been described in the incomparable sentences of Lord Macaulay. His
essay on Warren Hastings has been considered by many to be the finest
of that magnificent collection of Essays and Reviews, and the story of
the Impeachment is undoubtedly the finest portion of it. Hence those
who read these lines cannot do better than read it as well. If they
have read it before they will simply be repeating a pleasure; if they
have not, then a new pleasure awaits them.
What we are concerned with here are the bare facts of the matter; but
we may first pause for a moment to look at the man as he was when he
came across the world to face his mostly incompetent and prejudiced
judges. This is how his picture is drawn by Wraxall, a contemporary and
a personal acquaintance. The portrait is certainly more faithful than
the ridiculous caricatures drawn by Burke and Sheridan.
“When he landed in his native country he had attained his fifty-second
year. In his person he was thin, but not tall, of a spare habit, very
bald, with a countenance placidly thoughtful, but when animated full
of intelligence. 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 had never intruded.”
Such was the man who, in a period of national dejection which almost
amounted to disgrace, came back, the one man of his generation who
had upheld the honour of the British name abroad in a post of great
difficulty and danger, to receive, not reward, but impeachment.
He first faced his judges on February 13, 1788, “looking very infirm
and much indisposed, and dressed in a plain, poppy-coloured suit of
clothes.” He was finally acquitted on March 1, 1794! The trial thus
languished through seven sessions of Parliament, the total hearing
occupied one hundred and eighteen sittings of the Court, and the
vindication of his personal and official character from the slanders
of enemies, who were at last refuted with complete discredit to his
slanderers cost him about £100,000, of which no less than £75,000 were
actually certified legal costs--and this was the reward that England
gave to the one man who was capable of preserving to her the fruit of
the victories of Clive and his gallant lieutenants!
Modern opinion, endorsed by the high legal authority of the late Sir
James Stephen, has completely rejected alike the personal vilifications
of such self-interested traitors as Francis and Clavering, and the
emotional special-pleading of Burke and Sheridan.
“The impeachment of Warren Hastings,” he says, “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.”
To some extent Hastings was recouped for the cost of his persecution,
even if he was not rewarded for his distinguished services. He was
granted a pension of £4,000 a year for twenty-eight and a half years,
part paid in advance, and a loan of £50,000 free of interest. But
meanwhile he had been fulfilling the dream of his boyhood by buying
back his ancestral estate for £60,000, and another £60,000 was still
owing to the lawyers.
Henceforth, disgusted, as he may well have been, with the ingratitude
of the country he had served so well in so difficult a time, he retired
to his old home and spent the remaining years of his life in the calm
pursuits of a country gentleman, diversified by the cultivation of
letters and the writing of verses.
It was in these days that he used to tell his friends how, as a little
lad of seven, he had lain in the long grass on the banks of a stream
that flowed through the old domain of Dalesford and dreamt the wild
dream whose fulfilment had, after all, been stranger than the dream
itself--for not even his boyish romance could be compared with the
fact that, during the winning of the means to buy back the home of his
fathers, he had risen to be the actual ruler of something like fifty
millions of people, and the dictator of terms of peace and war to
princes who governed territories half as large as Europe and even more
populous.
But in the end he outlived both his enemies and the discredit they had
tried to cast upon him. Two years before the battle of Waterloo he was
summoned before the Houses of Parliament in the evening of his days to
give evidence on the work of his manhood, and when he retired, after
nearly four hours’ examination, the whole crowded House of Commons rose
and stood uncovered and in silence as the old Empire-Keeper walked out
of the Chamber.
He lived to see that empire, for which he had striven so painfully and
so manfully, redeemed by the genius and valour of Rodney and Nelson
and Wellington from the disgrace and degradation which had threatened
it during the last decades of the eighteenth century, and three years
after Waterloo he died.
His remains lie in the family church at Dalesford, and, to once more
quote the words of Sir Alfred Lyall, “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 before a nation which accepted the
benefits but disliked the ways of his too masterly activity.”
Lord Macaulay, who throughout his famous essay does him less than
justice, concludes it by making almost generous amends. “Not only had
the poor orphan retrieved the fallen fortunes of his line--not only
had he re-purchased the old lands and rebuilt the old dwelling--he
had preserved and extended an empire.[1] He had founded a policy. He
had administered government and war with more than the capacity of
Richelieu. He patronised learning with the judicious liberality of
Cosmo. He had been attacked by the most formidable combination of
enemies that ever sought the destruction of a single victim; and over
that combination, after a struggle of ten years, he had triumphed. He
had at length gone down to his grave in the fulness of age, in peace
after so many troubles, in honour after so much obloquy.”
[1] In the territorial sense this is hardly correct. The
great essayist probably meant extension in the sense
of increase of prestige and influence over the still
independent states of the Peninsula.
IX
_NELSON_
“_ENGLAND EXPECTS THAT EVERY MAN WILL DO HIS DUTY._”
IX
NELSON
I am conscious of more difficulties ahead in beginning this sketch
than I have felt with regard to any other of the series, for, while on
the one hand it would be absurd to omit from the glorious ranks of our
Empire-Makers the most glorious of them all, it is at the same time
practically impossible to say anything fresh or even anything that is
not very generally known about the man who, however much he may once
have been slighted, and however inadequately his earlier services may
have been rewarded during his life, has now come to be the idol of the
country that he saved from invasion and the Empire that he preserved
from destruction.
His life has been written and re-written, his character and his actions
have been discussed and rediscussed, the most private acts and thoughts
of his life have been dragged out into the full glare of publicity--a
fate which any great man would have to be a very great sinner to
deserve--but when all this has been said and done there remains a
single, sharply-defined individuality of this incomparable naval
captain whom the whole world now acknowledges and reveres, quite apart
from all national considerations, as the greatest sailor who ever trod
a deck and the greatest naval strategist who ever planned a battle or
took a fleet into action.