WARREN HASTINGS.
[Sidenote: 1732--The birth of Warren Hastings]
In the days when Clive was first winning his way to fame in India there
was another young Englishman serving John Company, whose ability
attracted the notice and gained the esteem of the conqueror of Dupleix.
It is one of the privileges of genius to discern the genius of others.
But even Clive, when he noted a young volunteer at Falta, who seemed
destined for better things than the handling of a musket, cannot have
dreamed that he was giving an opportunity to a man whose name was to
take as high a rank in the history of India as his own, whose deeds
were to be no less fiercely battled over, whose part in the creation of
a great Indian Empire was to be as illustrious. All that India had
been to Clive--a refuge, a battleground, a theatre of great deeds, and
unfortunately also of great offences, the cause of almost unbearable
triumph and almost intolerable humiliation, all that in as great a
degree India was to be to Warren Hastings.
Warren Hastings was born in the December of 1732, in Churchill,
Oxfordshire, near Daylesford in Worcestershire. His family had been a
good as it was an old family. But it had come down in the world. It
had grown poorer and poorer as the generations rolled on, and that
manor of Daylesford which had been in the family in the days of the
second Henry had passed in the year of Sheriffmuir into the hands of a
Gloucester merchant. When Warren Hastings was born, the fortunes of
the house had come to a very low ebb indeed. Pynaston Hastings, Warren
Hastings's father, was, perhaps, as imbecile a man as ever yet was the
means of bringing an illustrious son into the world. He seems to have
been weak, foolish, shiftless, as {246} worthless as a man well could
be who was not actually a criminal. He had married very young, before
he was sixteen; his wife had died shortly after giving birth to Warren
Hastings. Pynaston married again, entered the Church, when he was old
enough to take holy orders, and drifted away into the West Indies into
outer darkness and oblivion, leaving children entirely dependent upon
the charity of relatives. That charity did not fail, though at first
it could be but meagrely extended. Warren Hastings's grandfather was
desperately poor. All he could do for his deserted grandchild was to
place him at the charity school of the village. There, habited almost
like a beggar, taught as a beggar, the companion of clowns and
playfellow of rustics, the future peer of kings and ruler of rajahs,
the coming pro-consul who was yet to make the state of England as
imperial as the state of Rome, received his earliest lessons in the
facts of life, and dreamed his earliest dreams. His were strange
dreams. In sleep, says a Persian poet with whom young Hastings was
afterwards doubtless acquainted, the beggar and the king are equal. If
Warren Hastings slept as a beggar, he certainly dreamed as a king. We
know, on his own statement, that when he was but a child of seven he
cherished that wild ambition which was to lead him through so many
glories and so many crimes. We are familiar with the picture of the
boy leaning over the stream on that summer day, and looking at the old
dwelling of his race, and swearing to himself his oath of Hannibal that
some day he would, if the stars were propitious, win back his
inheritance.
[Sidenote: 1750--Warren Hastings's early life]
Somewhere about a year after this oath of Hannibal the fortunes of the
lad took a turn for the better. An uncle, Howard Hastings, who had a
place in the Customs, was willing to give a helping hand to the son of
his graceless brother. He brought Warren Hastings to London. In
London Warren Hastings was first sent to school at Newington, where his
mind was better nourished than his body. In after life he used to
declare that his meagre proportions and stunted form were due to the
hard living of his Newington days. But the Newington days came to
{247} an end. When he was some twelve years of age, his uncle sent him
to Westminster School, where his name is still inscribed in letters of
gold, and where his memory adds its lustre to the historic associations
of a place that is richly blessed with historic associations. Warren
Hastings distinguished himself in the great school of Westminster, as
he had already distinguished himself in the little village school of
Daylesford. With his oath of Hannibal burning in his mind, he seems to
have determined to seek success in all that he attempted, and to gain
it by his indomitable energy and will. If he was brilliant as a
scholar, he was not, therefore, backward in those other arts which
school-boys prize beyond scholarship. He was as famous on the river
for his swimming and his boating as he was famous in the classroom for
his application and his ability. His masters predicted for him a
brilliant University career, and it is possible that Hastings may have
seen Daylesford Manor awaiting him at the end of such a career, and
have welcomed the prospect. But the life of Warren Hastings was not
fated to pass in the cloistered greenness of a university or in the
still air of delightful studies. Howard Hastings died and left his
nephew to the care of a connection, a Mr. Chiswick, who happened to be
a member of the East India Company. Perhaps Mr. Chiswick resented the
obligation thus laid upon him; perhaps, as a member of the East India
Company, he honestly believed that to enter its service was the
proudest privilege that a young man could enjoy. Whatever were his
reasons, he resolutely refused to sanction his charge's career at the
university, insisted upon his being placed for a season at a commercial
school to learn arithmetic and book-keeping, and then shipped him off
out of hand to Bengal as an addition to the ranks of the Calcutta
clerks. Thus it came to pass that Warren Hastings, like Clive, was
sent to India by persons in England who were anxious to get rid of a
troublesome charge. There were a good many persons in the years to
come who were very ready to curse the obstinacy of the elder Clive and
the asperity of Mr. Chiswick for sending two such terrible adventurers
forth to {248} the great battle-field of India. The history of our
Indian Empire would certainly have been a very different story if only
Mr. Clive had been more attached to his ne'er-do-well son, and if only
Mr. Chiswick had been better affected towards his industrious charge.
In the January of 1750 Warren Hastings said farewell to his dreams of a
scholar's garland in England and sailed for India. In the October of
the same year he landed in Bengal and altered the history of the world.
Gentlemen adventurers who went out to India in the last century in the
service of John Company seldom knew much, or indeed cared much, about
the condition of the country which they were invading. They dreamed
mostly of large fortunes, fortunes to be swiftly made and then brought
home and expended splendidly to the amazement of less fortunate
stay-at-homes. For the past history of India they did not care a penny
piece. What to them were the mythical deeds of Rama and of Krishna;
what to them the marches of Semiramis and Sesostris, or the conquests
of Alexander, or the fate and fortunes of the ancient kingdoms of the
Deccan and Hindostan? They cared nothing for the spread of Mahommedan
influence and authority, the glories of the Mogul Empire, the fate of
Tamerlane, the fame of Aurungzebe. For them the history of India began
with the merchant adventurers of 1659 and the East India Company of
1600, with the grant of Bombay to England as part of the dower which
the Princess of Portugal brought to Charles the Second. Nor were they
moved by imperial ambitions. It did not enter into their heads to
conceive or to desire the addition of a vast Indian empire to the
appanages of the English crown. They cared little for the conflicting
creeds of India, for Brahmanism and Buddhism and Jainism and Hinduism
and the sects of Islam. They knew little of the differing tongues
talked over that vast continent, more than five hundred in number, from
the Hindi of one hundred million men to the most restricted dialects of
the mountains of Assam and Nepaul. India for them meant the little
space of earth where the English had a trading interest, {249} and the
regions of the shadowy potentates beyond from whom in some way or other
money might be got.
[Sidenote: 1750--Suraj ud Dowlah]
When Warren Hastings landed in India the relations of England and of
Englishmen to India were just upon the turn. The star of Clive's
fortunes was mounting towards its zenith; the fiery planet of Dupleix
had begun to fail and pale and fade. The policy which Dupleix had
adopted, that policy of intrigue with the native princes of India, the
English East India Company had been forced in self-defence and very
reluctantly to adopt. Having adopted it, the men of the English East
India Company proved themselves to be better players at the game than
Dupleix. Warren Hastings, driving his pen at a desk in Calcutta, or
looking after silk-spinning in the factory of Kazim Bazar near
Murshidabad on the Ganges, was able to watch almost from its beginning
the great political drama in which he was destined in his time to play
so great a part, and which was to end in giving England a great Asiatic
empire. When Suraj ud Dowlah declared war against the English his
first move was to fall upon the Kazim Bazar settlement. Warren
Hastings and the other English residents were made prisoners and sent
to Murshidabad, where, through the intervention of the Dutch Company,
they were humanely treated. Then came the madman's march on Calcutta,
the horror of the Black Hole, and the flight of the Governor and the
Company's servants to the little fort at Falta in the Hughli below
Calcutta. Communications were entered upon between Governor Drake in
Falta Island and Hastings at Murshidabad with a view to coming to terms
with Suraj ud Dowlah. Warren Hastings was already, however, developing
that genius for Oriental diplomacy which afterwards so characterized
his career. He was made aware of the treason that was hatching against
Suraj ud Dowlah in his own court and among his own friends, and he was
quite ready to play his part and find his account in that treason.
Treason is a risky game for a political prisoner at a court like that
of Suraj ud Dowlah. Warren Hastings was quick-witted enough to see
that the sooner he got away from that {250} court the better for
himself. He succeeded accordingly in making his escape and joining the
fugitives at Falta. Here two things of moment happened to him. He met
the woman who was to be his first wife, and he met the great man who
was to give him his first chance for fame. Among the refugees from
Calcutta was the widow of a Captain Campbell. Warren Hastings fell in
love with her, and afterwards in an hour of greater security he married
her. He seem to have been very fond of her, to have been very happy
with her, but she died very soon after the marriage, and the two
children she bore him both died young, and so that episode came to an
end. The more momentous meeting was with Clive. When the Madras
expedition appeared in the Hughli, Warren Hastings volunteered to serve
in the ranks, shouldered his gun, and took his part in the fighting
round Calcutta. But Clive's keen eyes discerned stuff for better
things than the sieging of Indian forts in the young volunteer. When
Suraj ud Dowlah's defeat ended in Suraj ud Dowlah's death, and the
traitorous Mir Jaffier sat on the throne in his stead, Warren Hastings
was sent to the court of the new prince at Murshidabad, originally as
second to the Company's representative, Mr. Scratton, and afterwards as
sole representative.
[Sidenote: 1762--Clive and the East India Company]
At Murshidabad Warren Hastings had every opportunity to justify Clive's
acumen in singling him out for distinction. The post he held was one
of exceptional difficulty and delicacy. Mir Jaffier was not altogether
an agreeable person to get on with. The English in India were taking
their first lessons in Oriental intrigue. They were learning that if
it was not particularly difficult to upset one tyrant and place another
on his throne, it was not always easy to keep that other on the throne,
or at all safe to rely upon his loyalty to the men who had brought
about his exaltation. Mir Jaffier was surrounded by enemies. His
court, like every other Oriental court, was honeycombed with intrigues
against him. His English patrons, or rather his English masters,
proved to have an itching palm. They were always wanting money, and
Mir Jaffier {251} had not always got enough money in his treasury to
content their desires. So he began to intrigue against the English
with the Dutch, and the English found him out and promptly knocked him
off his throne, and set up a new puppet in his stead. By this time
Clive had returned to England, and the direction of the destinies of
the East India Company was in the hands of the Governor, Mr.
Vansittart, a well-meaning man whose views were not the views of Clive.
Clive objected very much to the course which the East India Company
were pursuing. He wrote a letter to the London Board rebuking in no
measured language the defects and evils of the Indian Administration.
Once again Clive was the cause of Warren Hastings's advancement. The
London Board ordered the instant dismissal of all the officials who had
signed Clive's letter and Warren Hastings was appointed to fill one of
the vacant places.
The five years that elapsed between the departure of Clive for England
in 1760 and his return to India in 1765 are not years that reflect much
credit upon the East India Company's administration. They had suddenly
found themselves lifted from a condition of dependency and, at one
moment, of despair to a position of unhoped-for authority and
influence. New to such power, dazzled by such influence, they abused
the one and they misused the other. But the part that Warren Hastings
played during this unfortunate five years reflects only credit upon
himself. The vices of the East India Company were not his vices; he
was no party to their abuse of their power, or their misuse of their
influence. When he was advanced from the Patna agency, his place was
taken by a Mr. Ellis, who seems to have been exceptionally and
peculiarly unfitted for the delicate duties of his post. He appears to
have carried on all his negotiations and communications with the Nawab
Mir Kasim with a high-handed arrogance and an absence of tact which
were in their way astonishing. Relations between the Nawab and Mr.
Ellis, as the Company's representative, became so strained that in 1762
Warren Hastings was again sent to Patna to investigate the whole
trouble. {252} Clive's judgment was already justified: Warren
Hastings's ability had already found much of the recognition it
deserved; his twelve years of Indian life had changed him from the
adventurous, inexperienced lad into the ripe and skilful statesman upon
whom his masters were confident that they could rely in such a moment
of emergency as had now come.
It would have been better for the Company if they had taken the advice
that Warren Hastings gave in the report on the quarrel between the
Nawab on the one side and Mr. Ellis on the other. He was a servant of
John Company, but he was too good a servant not to see the faults of
his masters and the follies to which those faults were leading. The
Company had blundered very badly before the coming of Clive; had
blundered through false security, through negligence, through
pusillanimity, through greed. After the victories of Clive had placed
the Board in Leadenhall Street, and its representatives in India, on a
very different footing, the Company blundered through rapacity, through
selfishness, through the arrogance born of an unforeseen success. All
manner of oppressions and injustices were committed under the powerful
protection of the English name. Hastings declared that the only way of
ending the difficulty was to come to some definite settlement with the
Nawab as to his authority on the one hand and the Company's privileges
on the other. Together with Mr. Vansittart, the Governor, Hastings
visited the Nawab, and a plan of conciliation was made by which the
rights of the Nawab and the rights of the Company were duly apportioned
and declared. But the headstrong Council of the Company refused the
propositions of Warren Hastings and of Vansittart, and refused to make
any concessions to the Nawab. The irritated Nawab retaliated by
abolishing all internal duties upon trade, by which act he deprived the
English of the unjust advantages for which they had contended. It was
now a question which should attack the other first, and Mr. Ellis,
hearing a rumor of intended hostilities on the part of Mir Kasim,
attacked the Nawab, drove him out of his dominions and {253} set up Mir
Jaffier again for a time. Hastings protested against these acts, and
declared that he would have resigned but that he was unwilling to leave
the Company while engaged in a harassing war. But his position was
uncomfortable. His counsels and those of Mr. Vansittart were unheeded.
English aggression continued. Mr. Vansittart left for England in 1764,
and in the December of that year Hastings followed him, glad to leave a
scene of so much disorder, a disorder that was to increase alarmingly,
until in the September of 1765 Clive reappeared in India and set things
straight again.
[Sidenote: 1765-69--Hastings's return to England]
Of no period of Warren Hastings's life is less known than of the four
years which he spent in his native land--from 1765 to 1769. He did not
return to England like the traditional Nabob, with pockets overflowing
with rupees. He had not employed his time and his energies, as so many
other servants of John Company had done, solely to the furthering of
his own fortunes, and the filling of his own pockets. If he had sailed
for India fourteen years earlier as a penniless lad, he returned to
England comparatively a poor man. He had tried his hand at commerce
like every one else in India, but commerce was not much in his line.
He had the capacities of a statesman, he had the tastes of a man of
letters, but he did not in any great degree possess the qualities that
go to make a successful merchant. It is even said that he had to
borrow the money to pay his passage home, and it seems certain that
when he was home, the generous way in which he endeavored to assist his
relations sorely taxed his meagre means.
Hastings seems to have sought for distinction in the career of a man of
letters and not to have found it. The ability which he displayed in
administration and the writing of State papers and political
correspondence vanished whenever he attempted to produce work that made
a more ambitious claim to be considered literature. The clearness of
statement, the width of view, the logical form, the firm grasp and
profound knowledge which were characteristic of the evidence he gave
before the House of {254} Commons Committee in 1766, gave place to a
thin and niggling pedantry of style when he turned his pen to the
essays and the verses of a man of letters. Yet there were some topics
on which he was eminently qualified to write, and by which, under
happier conditions, he might have earned distinction. While he was in
India he had not allowed his active mind to be entirely occupied with
the duties of his official career. That love of literature, that
marvellous capacity for acquiring knowledge, which had characterized
him in his Westminster school-days, remained with him at the desk of
the East India Company and in the courts of Indian princes. He gave
great attention to the languages and the literatures of the East. Most
of those English who served their term in India contented themselves,
when they troubled themselves at all about the matter, with learning as
much of the native vernaculars with which they were brought into
contact as was necessary for the carrying on of a conversation and the
giving of an order. With such a measure of knowledge Warren Hastings
was not content. He studied Persian, the courtly language of India,
closely; he read much in its enchanting literature. When he came back
to England in 1765 he was possessed of a knowledge of the most
beautiful of the Eastern languages, as rare as it was useless then for
an English man of letters to possess.
[Sidenote: 1769--Warren Hastings as an Oriental scholar]
Almost a century later the great American transcendentalist, Emerson,
prophesied a rise of Orientalism in England, and he lived to see his
words come true. But in the days when Warren Hastings was striving to
make his way in London as an author, the influence of the East upon
literature, upon scholarship, upon thought, was scarcely perceptible.
People read indeed the "Arabian Nights" in M. Galland's delightful
version; read the Persian tales of Petit de la Croix; read all the
translations of the many sham Oriental tales which the popularity of
Galland and Petit de la Croix had called for in Paris, and which the
Parisian writers were ready to supply. But serious Oriental
scholarship can hardly be said to have existed in England. Sir William
Jones was the only Englishman of {255} distinction who was earnestly
devoted to Eastern studies; but his Persian Grammar, which was in some
degree the foundation-stone of Persian scholarship in England, had not
yet appeared, and Sir William Jones was still writing to Reviczki those
delightful letters in which he raves about the poetry of the Arabs and
the Persians. Thus the scholarship of Warren Hastings placed him in an
exceedingly small minority among Englishmen of letters. Hastings was
not the man to be alarmed or discouraged by finding himself in a
minority. He was as impassioned an admirer of Persian poetry as Sir
William Jones; he considered that the Persian language should be
included in the studies of all well-educated men; he dreamed of
animating the waning fires of Oriental learning at Oxford. He had a
vision in his mind of a new scholarship, to be called into being by the
generosity of the East India Company. He thought of Englishmen
becoming as familiar with the deeds of Rustum as with the wrath of
Achilles, as intimate with the Ghazels of Hafiz as with the Odes of
Horace. He seems to have visited Dr. Johnson in the hope of securing
him as an ally in his scheme. The scheme came to nothing, but the
learning, the literary taste, and scholarly ambition of Hastings made a
strong impression upon Johnson, who entertained a stately regard for
the young man from India.
It soon became plain to Warren Hastings that he was not going to make
much of a livelihood either by Persian poetry or by the calling of a
man of letters. His thoughts had turned back to India within a year of
his return to England, and he had applied for employment to the
Company, but for some reason his request was not granted. In 1768,
however, the Court of Directors appointed him to a seat in Council at
Madras, and early in the following year, 1769, he sailed again for
India on his most momentous voyage. Not only was that ship, the "Duke
of Grafton," bearing him to a career of the greatest glory and the
greatest obloquy; not only was it carrying him to a grandeur and a fall
almost unparalleled in the history of men who were not monarchs. On
board the "Duke of {256} Grafton" Warren Hastings was to meet with one
of the most serious influences of his life. We have already seen how
Hastings had married, had been a father, and how wife and children had
passed out of his life and left him alone. Hastings was a man of
strong emotions. Now he met a woman who awoke all the strongest
emotions of his nature and won his devotion for the rest of his life.
The Baroness von Imhoff was a young, beautiful, attractive woman,
married to a knavish adventurer.
It is certain that she and Hastings felt a warm attachment for each
other; it seems certain that Imhoff connived at, or at least winked at,
the attachment. It may be that the understanding between Hastings and
Imhoff was in this sense honorable--that the Baron was willing to free
his wife from an unhappy union that she might form a happy union. It
may be that Hastings's passion was indeed, in Macaulay's fine phrase,
"patient of delay." The simple facts that call for no controversy are
that Hastings met the Baroness von Imhoff in 1769; that eight years
later, in 1777, Imhoff, with the aid of Hastings's money, obtained his
divorce in the Franconian Courts, and that the woman who had been his
wife became the wife of Hastings. She made him a devoted wife; he made
her a devoted husband. Hastings was never a profligate. In an age
that was not remarkable for morality his life was apparently moral even
to austerity. His relationships with the Imhoffs constitute the only
charge of immorality that has been brought against him, and the charge,
at least, is not of the gravest kind. If Anglo-Indian society was at
first inclined to be uncharitable, if the great ladies of its little
world held aloof in the beginning from the Baroness von Imhoff, her
marriage with Hastings seems to have restored her to general favor and
esteem.
[Sidenote: 1771--Hastings's great administrative qualities]
Warren Hastings found plenty of work cut out for him on his return to
India. He had his own ideas, and strong ideas, about the necessity for
reforms. He was much opposed to the policy of sending out as
secretaries to the local governments men who were without local
experience and therefore less likely to take a warm interest {257} in
the Company's welfare, while such appointments were in themselves
unjust to the claims of the Company's own servants. He vehemently
urged the necessity for making the rewards of the service more adequate
to the duties of the service, and he announced himself as determined to
do all he could for "the improvement of the Company's finances, so far
as it can be effected without encroaching upon their future income."
If Hastings could scheme out needed reforms on his way out, he found on
his arrival that the need for reform was little short of appalling.
The position which Hastings held was a curious one. He was President
of the Council, it is true, but president of a council of which every
member had an equal vote, and many of the members of which had personal
reasons for wishing to oppose the reforms that Hastings was coming out
to accomplish. A disorganized government had to be reorganized, an
exhausted exchequer to be refilled, a heart-breaking debt to be
reduced, and all this had to be done under conditions that well might
have shaken a less dauntless spirit than that of Warren Hastings.
Warren Hastings was never for one moment shaken. In a very short space
of time he had greatly bettered the administrative system, had fostered
the trade of the country by the adoption of a uniform and low Customs
duty, and had greatly furthered the establishment of civilized rule in
the province conquered by Clive. He accomplished this in the face of
difficulties and all dissensions in his own Council, against subtle
native intrigues, against opposition open and covert of the most
persistent kind. Every creature who throve out of the disorganization
of India naturally worked, in the daylight or in the dark, against
Hastings's efforts at organization. In 1771, when he was made Governor
of Bengal, he had attempted much and succeeded in much. He fought hard
with the secret terror of dacoity. Having given Bengal a judicial
system, he proceeded to increase its usefulness by drawing up a code of
Mohammedan and Hindu law. For the former he used the digest made by
command of Aurungzebe; for the {258} second he employed ten learned
Pundits, the result of whose labors was afterwards translated into
English by Halhed, who had been the friend of Sheridan and his rival
for the hand of Miss Linley.
The work which Warren Hastings accomplished in India must be called
gigantic. He created organization out of chaos; he marched
straightforward upon the course which Clive had already marked out as
the path of the East India Company's glory. The East India Company was
not very eager to advance along that path. Hastings spurred its
sluggish spirit, and, though he was not able to do all that his daring
nature dreamed of, he left behind him a long record of great
achievements. The annexation of Benares, the practical subjection of
Oude, the extension of British dominion, the triumphs of British arms,
must be remembered to the credit of Warren Hastings when his career as
a great English adventurer is being summed up. That British Empire in
India for which Clive unconsciously labored owes its existence to-day
in no small degree to the genius, to the patience, and to the untiring
energy of Warren Hastings.
[Sidenote: 1773--Hastings and the Rohilla War]
The two heaviest charges levelled against Warren Hastings are in
connection with the Rohilla war and with the trial of Nuncomar, now
better known as Nand Kumar. The genius of Burke and the genius of
Macaulay have served not merely to intensify the feeling against
Hastings, but in some degree to form the judgments and bias the
opinions of later writers. But it is only due to the memory of a great
man to remember that both in the case of the Rohilla war and in the
case of Nand Kumar there were two sides to the question, and that
Hastings's side has not always been investigated with the care it
deserves. The adversary who denounced him in the House of Commons and
impeached him in Westminster Hall, the adversary who assailed him with
a splendid prose, were alike inspired by a longing for justice and a
hatred of oppression. But it should be possible now, when more than a
century has passed since the indictment of the one and well-nigh half a
century since the indictment of the other, to remember {259} that if
Hastings cannot be exculpated there is at least a measure of excuse to
be offered for his action.
There is much to be said from a certain point of view in defence of
Warren Hastings's action with regard to the Rohilla war. The Rohilla
chiefs were no doubt a danger to the Nawab of Oude, whom Hastings
regarded as a useful ally of the Company. By the conquest of
Rohilkhand Hastings hoped to obtain for that ally a compact State shut
in effectually from foreign invasion by the Ganges all the way from the
frontiers of Behar to the mountains of Thibet, while at the same time
this useful ally would remain equally accessible to the British forces
either for hostilities or protection. Put in this way the case seemed,
no doubt, plausible enough to Hastings, and to all who thought with
Hastings that Indian chiefs and princes were but pieces on a board, to
be pushed this way or that way, advanced or removed altogether at the
pleasure and for the advantage of the English resident and ruler. But
what actually happened was that Hastings, in defiance of the whole
principle of the Company's administration in India, interfered in the
contests of native races and lent the force of English arms to aid a
despot in the extirpation of his enemies. It is not to the point to
urge that the Rohillas were not undeserving of their fate. Even if the
Rohillas were little other than robber chiefs, even if their existence
constituted a weak point in the lines of defence against the
ever-terrible Mahrattas, all this did not in the eyes of Burke and of
those who thought with Burke justify Hastings in lending English arms
for their extermination and receiving Indian money for the loan. They
saw an act of hideous injustice and corruption where Hastings saw
merely a piece of ingenious state policy. He gave the troops, he got
the money. The Rohillas were destroyed as an independent power, and
the Company was richer than it had been before the transaction by some
four hundred thousand pounds.
The story of Nand Kumar comes into the history as the result of an
organic change in the composition and administration of the East India
Company. North's {260} Regulating Act of 1773 made many changes in the
administration of English India. The changes that most directly
concerned Hastings converted the Governor of Bengal into a
Governor-General, and reduced his Council to four members. The
Governments of Madras and Bombay were placed under the joint control of
Governor-General and Council. Hastings was appointed, naturally
enough, to be the new Governor-General. His four councillors were
Richard Barwell, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Philip Francis.
Barwell was the only one who was a member of Hastings's old Council.
The three others were in England; they had been chosen expressly to
guide Indian policy in accordance with the views of the home
Government. Clavering and Monson had already earned some distinction
of a soldierly kind; Francis was by far the ablest of the three. The
author of the "Letters of Junius" was much of a scholar and something
of a statesman, but he was a man of a fierce and unbending temper,
prompt to quarrel, hotly arrogant in argument, unrelenting in his
hatred of those who crossed his purposes.
These were not the kind of men with whom Hastings was likely to get on,
and from the moment of their landing in India, where they complained
that they were not received with sufficient ceremony, they and Hastings
were furiously hostile. The meetings of the Governor-General and his
Council became so many pitched battles, in which Hastings, aided only
by Barwell, fought with tenacity and patience against men whose
determination appeared to be in every possible instance to undo what he
had done, and to oppose what he proposed to do. They treated him as if
he were little better than a clerk in the Company's service; they acted
as if their one purpose was to drive him out of public life.
[Sidenote: 1775--Charges against Hastings]
As soon as it was plain that the new men of the new Council were
hostile to Hastings, Hastings's enemies were eager enough to come
forward and help in the work. One of Hastings's oldest and bitterest
enemies was the Brahmin Nand Kumar. Nand Kumar had always been hostile
to Hastings. Now, when Hastings was in danger, was {261} threatened
with defeat and with disgrace, Nand Kumar came forward with a whole
string of accusations against him, accusations to which Francis,
Clavering, and Monson listened eagerly. Nand Kumar accused Hastings of
many acts of shameless bribery, declared that he himself had bribed him
in large sums, and produced a letter from a native princess in which
she avowed that she had bribed Hastings in large sums. The three
councillors appear to have accepted every word uttered by Nand Kumar as
gospel truth. Hastings, on his side, refused to be arraigned at his
own Council-board by a man whom he alleged to be of notoriously
infamous character, though he and Barwell were perfectly willing that
the whole matter should be referred to the Supreme Court. At last
Hastings withdrew from the Council, followed by Barwell. The others
immediately voted Clavering into the chair, summoned Nand Kumar before
them, listened to all that he had to say, and on that evidence, in the
absence of the accused man, the self-constituted tribunal found
Hastings guilty of taking bribes from the princess, and ordered him to
repay the sum of thirty-five thousand pounds to the public treasury.
For the moment it seemed as if Francis and his party had carried the
day. Hastings had his back to the wall, he seemed to be well-nigh
friendless. The triumvirate declared that there was no form of
peculation from which Hastings had thought it reasonable to abstain,
and they formally charged him with having acquired by peculation a
fortune of no less than forty lakhs of rupees in two years and a half.
Suddenly, when the position of Hastings appeared to be at its worst, it
changed. Nand Kumar and two Englishmen named Fowke, who had been very
zealous against Hastings, were charged before the Supreme Court with
conspiracy, in having compelled a native revenue farmer to bear false
witness against Hastings. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was
Elijah Impey, Hastings's old and attached friend, a circumstance of
which much has been made. While Nand Kumar was bound over for trial on
the charge of conspiracy, another and more serious charge was brought
against him by a native attorney, who {262} accused him of forging and
publishing a bond. On this charge Nand Kumar was arrested, and after a
lengthy hearing of the case committed to the common jail.
There is nothing very surprising in this charge of forgery. Forgery
was not a very serious crime in the eyes of such men as either Nand
Kumar or his accuser. It was made plain that, whether he had forged
the bond or no, he had forged the letter from the princess upon which
the charge against Hastings was based, for the princess herself
declared it to be a forgery. It had aroused some suspicion even before
the disclaimer, on account of the signature, which did not resemble her
signature in undoubted and authentic communications. On the question
of the forged bond Nand Kumar was duly and apparently fairly tried. It
was not very much of a charge. The business was very old. The native
attorney had been seeking for some time to bring Nand Kumar to trial,
and had only substituted a criminal for a civil suit when the
establishment of the Supreme Court enabled him to do so.
[Sidenote: 1775--The execution of Nand Kumar]
Nand Kumar's trial ended in conviction, and conviction for forgery
brought with it by the English law sentence of death. Whatever may be
thought of the crime of forgery in England, it certainly was not looked
upon in India by Indians as a criminal offence of a kind that called
for the severest penalty of the law. But Nand Kumar had been tried by
English law. His judges, in order to show their fidelity not merely to
the spirit but to all the forms of English law, had worn their heavy
wigs all through the torrid heat of those Calcutta June days. By the
English law he was convicted and sentenced to death. The triumvirate
made little or no attempt to save the man on whose word they had
relied. On August 5, 1775, Nand Kumar was hanged on the Maidan outside
Calcutta. He met his death with the composed courage of a man who
looked upon himself as a martyr. Whatever his offences may have been,
he had done nothing which in his own eyes, or in the eyes of his
fellow-countrymen, called for the pitiless punishment which fell upon
him.
Of course, the important question is how far, if at all, {263} Hastings
was concerned in the death of Nand Kumar. That is just the question
which it is impossible to answer definitely. The certain facts are
that Nand Kumar was Hastings's enemy, that Impey was Hastings's friend;
that at a moment of grave crisis in Hastings's life, when Nand Kumar
was the most eminent witness against his name and fame, that witness,
was arraigned on a charge that was very old, that had been suddenly
converted from a civil to a criminal charge; that he was tried, found
guilty, and executed. On the basis of that bare narrative of facts it
would seem that if Hastings had nothing to do with the matter, he might
almost as well have had as far as the judgment of posterity went. The
thing was too apt, the conditions too peculiar not to leave their
stigma upon the memory of the man who gained most by them.
At the same time it must be remembered that, however black the
arguments against Hastings may seem, there is no positive proof that he
was directly implicated in what his enemies called the judicial murder
of Nand Kumar. It must be remembered that the writer who has gone most
deeply into the whole ugly story, Sir James Stephen, in his careful
"Story of Nuncomar," has after long and exhaustive analysis of every
particular of the case recorded his judgment in favor of Impey and of
Hastings. Sir James Stephen's judgment is not final, indeed, but it
must have weight with any one who attempts impartially to appreciate
two public men who have been accused for more than a century of a
terrible crime. Sir James Stephen believes that Nand Kumar's trial was
perfectly fair, that Hastings had no share whatever in the prosecution,
and that there was no collusion of any kind between Hastings and Impey
with regard to the trial, the verdict, or the execution. Every one
must form as best he may his own judgment upon the matter and the men;
but Sir James Stephen's opinion is one that must be taken into account
in any attempt to decide.
The death of Nand Kumar did not end the struggle between Hastings and
his three antagonists. While they made no further attempt of a like
kind--the fate of Nand {264} Kumar, said Francis, would prevent any
further native information against the Governor-General--they still
resolutely strove by all possible means to cross and check him. It is
not necessary to follow in all their mean and wearisome details the
particulars of that prolonged conflict. The odds were against Hastings
until the death of Monson, when, by means of his own casting vote and
the adhesion of Barwell, Hastings found himself the master of the
majority at the Council-table. But the persistence of the attacks had
their result at home, where an ill-advised offer of resignation made by
Hastings was seized upon by the Directors of the Company. The
resignation was accepted, Wheler was appointed Governor-General in his
stead, and pending his arrival in India the post was to be filled by
Clavering.
This was a severe blow for Hastings. At first he thought of yielding
to it, in which case his career in India would have been closed. But
Clavering's indecent eagerness to seize upon the Governor-Generalship
before it was fairly vacant forced Hastings to defiance. He refused to
surrender his office to Clavering. Clavering called upon the army to
support him. Hastings called upon the army to stand fast by him. The
army followed Hastings, and the support of the men of the sword was
followed by the support of the men of the robe. The judges of the
Supreme Court backed up Hastings and censured Clavering, and a little
later Clavering's death left Hastings for the time supreme in the
Council-chamber. His supremacy was contested after the arrival of
Wheler, who immediately sided with Francis against Hastings. But the
supremacy was not overthrown. Hastings was in the majority; he would
not allow the alliance of Francis and Wheler to impede him in his
purposes, and he stuck to his post as Governor-General.
The East India Company made no effort to enforce his resignation. The
Court of Directors resented his conduct, and found fault with him
persistently, but they could not overlook his influence with the Court
of Proprietors, and the condition of affairs in India was too grave to
make the {265} dismissal of Hastings wise or politic. The Government
bore Hastings little love, and the King in particular was much incensed
at his refusal to resign, and was all for his recall and the recall of
Barwell who had abetted, and the judges who had supported him. But the
struggle with the American colonies absorbed the attention of the
Administration too closely to allow them to interfere so markedly in
the affairs of India at a moment when interference might perhaps have a
result not unlike the civil war.
[Sidenote: 1702-82--Haidar the bitter enemy of the English]
English opposition was not the only difficulty that Warren Hastings had
to contend with. Like the monarch in the Arabian tale who discerns
armies marching against his capital from every point of the compass,
Hastings found enemies rising up against him in all directions. A
league of three native powers menaced the safety of the British
possessions. The Mahratta states combined with the Nizam of the
Deccan. Both again combined with a new power whose rise had been as
rapid as it was alarming, the Mohammedan power of Haidar in Mysore.
When Warren Hastings arrived in India the second time Haidar was in his
sixty-seventh year. He was born in 1702 as the son of a Mogul officer
in the Punjaub. At his death Haidar held a rank somewhat similar to
that of a captain in the service of the Emperor of Delhi. Haidar
deemed, and rightly deemed, that there was little or no opportunity for
his ambition in that service, and his eyes seeking for a better chief,
found the man in Nunjeraj, the nominal vizier and real ruler of the
Rajah of Mysore. In 1750 Haidar persuaded the troops under his command
to leave their Mogul prince and take service with the sovereign of
Mysore. Under that sovereignty he rose rapidly to distinction. Though
he was little better than a robber chieftain, the ablest and most
daring robber of a horde of robbers, his power grew so rapidly that in
time he was able to supplant Nunjeraj, and in the end to usurp the
sovereignty of Mysore in 1761.
Haidar had his bitter grudge against the English. In 1771 he had been
badly beaten by the Mahrattas and had appealed to the English to help
him, as they had {266} undertaken by treaty to do. But the help was
refused to the defeated prince, and the defeated prince swore an oath
of vengeance against the English, and when the time seemed ripe he did
his best to keep his oath. When in 1779 France declared war against
England, Haidar declared in favor of the French. He gave his sword to
the service of the Grand Confederacy in 1778 and prepared to march upon
Madras. The President and the Council were taken unawares. It was not
until Haidar had marched with fire and sword into the Carnatic, and
that the smoke of the villages he destroyed in his progress could be
seen from Madras, that they learned that Haidar was in earnest and not
merely making a menace in the hope of frightening the English into an
advantageous treaty. Hastings himself seems to have been convinced
that Haidar did not mean to attack the Company, but when the Mysore
prince's purpose was plain every effort was made to stay his onset.
Lord Macartney, although not one of the Company's servants, was made
Governor of Madras. Haidar was compelled for the time to abandon his
attempt upon the Carnatic. In 1783 his hatred of the English was ended
by his sudden death. But he bequeathed it as a rich legacy to his son
Tippu, a man as daring and as ambitious as his sire.
Hastings won away by concessions the Mahrattas and the Nizam from the
cause of Tippu. But Tippu had his French allies, and Tippu and his
French allies carried on a campaign successful enough to force the
English practically to appeal for a peace, which Tippu accorded in a
treaty flattering at once to his pride and to his ambition. It was a
somewhat dearly bought peace for the English, for Tippu, regarding the
advances of the English as a proof of their weakness, made demands far
more arrogant than his successes justified, and those demands were
agreed to by the English envoys. The treaty with Tippu had to be made
on a basis of mutual restitution of conquests, so that England was left
at the end of the struggle against Mysore with a great loss both of men
and money, and no advantages, territorial or strategical, to set
against the loss. Even the peace upon these terms obtained did not
prove {267} a lasting peace. Tippu was not unnaturally tempted by the
concessions of the English into further displays of arrogance which in
time inevitably resulted in another war. But by the time that war
broke out Warren Hastings had returned to England and had no further
personal concern with the affairs of British India.
In the mean time Hastings's feud with his antagonists on the
Council-board continued. A kind of reconciliation, a kind of agreement
with Francis, enabled Hastings to allow Barwell to return to England
and still to leave the Governor-General in authority at the Board. But
Hastings found that reconciliation or agreement with Francis was
practically impossible. Rightly or wrongly, Francis renewed his old
policy of attacking every proposal and interfering with every project
that Hastings entertained. At last the long quarrel came to a violent
head. Hastings replied to one of Francis's minutes in some severe
words, in which he declared himself unable to rely upon Francis's word,
as he had found Francis to be a man devoid of truth and honor.
[Sidenote: 1780--Hastings and Francis fight a duel]
Such a charge made in those days was generally to be met with in only
one way. In that way Francis met it. Francis challenged Hastings to a
duel. Hastings accepted the challenge. The antagonists met, exchanged
shots, and Francis fell severely wounded before the pistol of Hastings.
Hastings sent friendly messages to Francis and offered to visit him,
but Francis rejected his overtures absolutely, and on his return to
health renewed his attacks upon Hastings until the close of the year,
when he sailed for England to carry on more successfully his plans
against his enemy.
Well as the Supreme Court had served Hastings in the case of Nuncomar
and in the quarrel with Clavering, the time came when Hastings found
himself placed in a position of temporary hostility to that Court and
to his old friend Impey. The bad machinery of the Act of 1773 left
room for almost every possibility of friction between the Supreme Court
on the one hand and the Council on the other, instead of framing, as it
should have framed, its {268} measure so as to allow the two powers to
work harmoniously together, each in its own sphere, for the welfare of
British India. The friction grew more intense as time went on.
Sometimes one party to the quarrel was in the right, sometimes the
other. Whichever was the case, the spectacle of the quarrel was in
itself sufficiently humiliating and sufficiently dangerous. Hastings
devised a scheme for the better regulation of the powers and privileges
of the two conflicting bodies, but his scheme was put on one side by
the British Government, and the Court and the Council remained as
irreconcilable as before. At last it reached such a pitch that the
Court issued a summons against the Government. The Government ignored
the summons; things stood at a dead-lock; the personal relationships of
Hastings and Impey were strained almost to severance. In this crisis
Hastings thought of and carried out a compromise. He offered to Impey
the presidency of the Company's chief civil court. Impey accepted the
offer, and, though he has been severely censured for what has been
called the taking of a bribe, the compromise proved to be the best way
out of the difficulty that had arisen. Impey, who has been happily
called the first of Indian codifiers, showed himself to be an excellent
head for the provincial courts that were thus put under his control.
The provincial courts had been hitherto more of a curse than a
blessing; under Impey's guidance they were brought into harmony with
the Supreme Court. Impey was not long suffered to remain in his new
office. Two years after his acceptance of the post he was removed from
it by order of the Court of Directors. But the work he had done in
that short time was good work and left abiding traces. Hastings's plan
had borne fruit in Impey's "Code," and afterwards in the passing of an
Act of Parliament clearly defining the jurisdiction and the powers of
the Supreme Court.
[Sidenote: 1781--Hastings and the Rajah of Benares]
One of the latest acts of Warren Hastings's administration was also one
of the acts that most provoked the indignation and the resentment of
those who in England were watching with hostile eyes the progress of
his career. {269} Chait Singh, the Rajah of Benares, held authority at
first under the ruler of Oude, and afterwards under the government of
the East India Company, to whom the sovereign of Oude had transferred
it. The Rajah of Benares paid a certain tribute to the Company. The
heavy necessities of the war compelled Hastings to call upon the Rajah
for a larger sum. The step was not unusual. In time of war a vassal
of the Company might very well expect to be called upon for an
increased levy. But the Rajah of Benares was very unwilling to give
this proof of his devotion to the Company. He demurred, temporized,
promised aid of men and arms, which was never rendered. Hastings seems
to have been convinced, first of all, that the Rajah was possessed of
enormous wealth, and could well afford to pay heavily for the privilege
of being ruled over by the Company, and in the second place that it was
necessary for the power and influence of the Company to force the
almost mutinous Rajah to his knees. He made a final demand for no less
than fifty lakhs, or half a million pounds, and set off himself for
Benares to compel the Rajah to obey.
Hastings never wanted courage, but his Benares expedition was certainly
the most daring deed of his whole life. He entered the sacred city of
Benares attended by an escort of a mere handful of men, and in Benares,
in the midst of a hostile population, and practically in the power of
the Rajah, he acted as if he were the absolute master of prince,
people, and city. He insisted upon his full demands being complied
with, and as the Rajah's reply appeared to be unsatisfactory he
immediately ordered his assistant, Mr. Markham, to place the Rajah
under arrest. The audacity of the step was so great as to suggest
either that Hastings was acting with the recklessness of despair, or
had formed no thought as to the not merely possible but probable result
of his action. The Rajah accepted the confinement to his palace with a
dignified protest. Two companies of sepoys were placed to guard him.
These sepoys had no ammunition; they were surrounded by swarms of the
Rajah's soldiery raging at the insult offered to their lord. The
Rajah's men fell upon the sepoys and cut them {270} and their English
officers to pieces. The Rajah lowered himself to the river by a rope
of turbans, crossed the Ganges, and shut himself up in his stronghold
of Ramnagar. Hastings's life was in imminent peril. Had he remained
where he was he and his thirty Englishmen and his twenty sepoys would
have been massacred. He fled in the darkness of the night to the
fortress of Chunar, about thirty miles from Benares, where there was a
small garrison of the Company's troops.
[Sidenote: 1781--The Vizier of Oude and the Begums]
However rash Hastings might have been in provoking the conflict with
the Rajah, once it was provoked he carried himself with admirable
courage and coolness. Shut up with a small force in a region blazing
with armed rebellion, menaced by an army of forty thousand men, he
acted with as much composure and ability as if he were the unquestioned
master of the situation. He declined all offers of assistance from the
Vizier of Oude, rejected all Chait Singh's overtures for peace, and
issued his orders to the forces that were gradually rallying around him
with rare tact and judgment. In a very short time the whole aspect of
affairs changed. The Company's forces under Major Popham defeated the
Rajah's troops, captured fort after fort, drove the Rajah to take
refuge in Bundelcund, and brought the city and district of Benares
under British rule again. Hastings immediately declared that the
fugitive Rajah's estates were forfeited, and he bestowed them upon the
Rajah's nephew upon tributary terms which bound him faster to the
Company, and exacted double the revenue formerly payable into the
Company's exchequer.
But the money which Hastings so urgently needed, the money for which he
had struck his bold stroke at Benares, was still lacking. All the
booty gained in the reduction of Benares had been divided among the
victors; none of it had found its way into the Company's coffers. The
Vizier of Oude was deeply in the Company's debt, but the Vizier of Oude
was in desperately straitened circumstances, and could not pay his
debt. Knowing Hastings's need, the Vizier exposed to him certain plans
he had formed for raising money by seizing upon the estates of the two
{271} Begums, his mother, the widow of the late Nawab, and his
grandmother, the late Nawab's mother. The Vizier may have had just
claims enough upon the Begums, but it was peculiarly rash and
unjustifiable of Hastings to make himself a party to the Vizier's
interests. Hastings, unhappily for himself, lent the Vizier the aid of
the Company's troops. The Begums, who were quite prepared to resist
their feeble-spirited relation, did not go so far as to oppose the
Company in arms. Their palace was occupied, their treasure seized,
their servants imprisoned, and they themselves suffered discomforts and
slights of a kind which constituted very real indignities and insults
in the eyes of Mohammedan women. This was practically the last, as it
was the most foolish, act of Hastings's rule. It had the misfortune
for him of stirring the indignant soul of Burke.
{272}