THE GREAT IMPEACHMENT.
[Sidenote: 1785--Burke's knowledge of India]
Burke's spacious mind was informed by a passion for justice. He was
not cast in the mould of men who make concessions to their virtues or
compacts with their virtues. He could not for a moment admit that the
aggrandizement of the empire should be gained by a single act of
injustice, and in his eyes Warren Hastings's career was stained by a
long succession of acts of injustice. He certainly would not do evil
that good might come of it. If the Rohilla war was a crime, if the
execution of Nand Kumar was an infamy, if the deposition of Chait Singh
and the plundering of the Begums were crimes, then no possible
advantage that these acts might cause to the temporal greatness of the
State could weigh for one moment in the balance with Burke. In the
high court of Burke's mind Warren Hastings was a doomed, a degraded
man, even though it could have been proved, as indeed it would have
been hard to prove, that any ill deeds which Warren Hastings had done
were essential to the maintenance of English rule and English glory in
India. Burke argued that English rule in India, English glory in
India, did not gain but only lost by ill deeds. But if England's gain
and England's glory in India depended upon such deeds, he for his part
would have refused the gain and shuddered at the glory.
If Burke's all-conquering passion was a passion for justice, perhaps
his keenest political taste was for India and the affairs of India. At
a time when our Indian Empire was merely in its dawn, at a time when
the affairs of India were looked upon by the nation at large as the
commercial matters of a company, Burke allowed all the resources of his
great mind to be employed in the study of India. He {273} knew
India--he who had never sailed its seas or touched its shores--as
probably no other Englishmen of his time knew India, not even those
whose lives had been for the most part passed in the country. And this
comprehensive knowledge Burke was able to impart again with a readiness
that was never unreliable, with a copiousness that was never redundant.
He gave a fascination to the figures of Indian finance; he made the
facts of contemporary Indian history live with all the charm of the
most famous events of Greek or Roman history. India in his hands
became what it rightly is, but what few had thought it till then, one
of the most fascinating of human studies. Indian affairs on his lips
allied all the allurement of a romance with all the statistical
accuracy of a Parliamentary report. Such a genius for the presentation
of facts inspired by such a passion for justice has enriched English
literature with some of its noblest and most truthful pages.
The pith of all Burke's Indian policy, the text upon which all his
splendid sermons of Indian administration were preached, is to be found
in one single sentence of the famous speech on the Nabob of Arcot's
debts. In that single sentence the whole of Burke's theory of
government is summed up with the directness of an epigram and with the
authority of a law. "Fraud, injustice, oppression, peculation,
engendered in India, are crimes of the same blood, family, and caste,
with those that are born and bred in England." Outside the noble
simplicity of that ethical doctrine Burke could not and would not
budge. That sentence represents the whole difference between him and
the man whom he afterwards accused, between him and the men of whom
that man came to be the representative. Burke's morality was direct,
uncompromising, unalterable by climatic conditions or by the supple
moralities of other races. The morality of Warren Hastings and of
those who thought with and acted for Warren Hastings was the morality
of Clive beforehand, was the morality that had been professed and
practised time and again since the days of Clive and Hastings by the
inheritors of their policy in India. The ingenious theory was set up
that in {274} dealing with Oriental races it was essential for the
Englishman to employ Oriental means of carrying his point. If an
Oriental would lie and cheat and forge and, if needs were, murder, why
then the Englishman dealing with him must lie and cheat and forge and
murder too, in order to gain the day. Things that he would not dare to
do, things that, to do him justice, he would not dream of doing in
England, were not merely permissible but justifiable, not merely
justifiable but essential in his intercourse with Asiatic princes and
peoples, with dexterous Mohammedan and dexterous Hindoo. The policy
was inevitably new in Burke's time; it has been upheld again and again
since Burke's time. The theory which allowed Clive to forge and Warren
Hastings to plunder was the same principle which led English soldiers
three generations later to make Brahmins wipe up blood before being
killed, which prompted them to blow their prisoners from the cannon's
mouth in the hope that their victims should believe that their souls as
well as their bodies were about to perish, which instigated gallant men
to suggest in all seriousness the advisability of flaying alive their
captured mutineers. The influence of the East is not always a
wholesome influence upon the wanderer from the West. It is displayed
at its worst when it leads great men, as Clive and Hastings undoubtedly
were great men, into the perpetration of evil actions, and the
justification of them on the principle that in dealing with an Oriental
the Englishman's morality undergoes a change, and becomes for the time
and the hour an Oriental morality.
[Sidenote: 1785-87--The defender of Hastings]
Against such an adversary, Hastings, ignorant of the conditions of
English political life, could bring forward no better champion than
Major Scott. Hastings opposed to the greatest orator and most widely
informed man of his age, a man of meagre parts, who only succeeded in
wearying profoundly the House of Commons and every other audience to
which he appealed. Such a proconsul as Warren Hastings standing his
trial upon such momentous charges needed all the ability, all the art
that an advocate can possess to be employed in his behalf. Had
Hastings {275} been so lucky as to find a defender endowed, not indeed
with the genius or the knowledge of Burke, for there was no such man to
be found, but with something of the genius, something of the knowledge
of Burke, his case might have appeared very different then and in the
eyes of posterity. If Scott could have pleaded for Hastings
eloquently, brilliantly, with something of the rich coloring, something
of the fervid enthusiasm that was characteristic of the utterances of
his great antagonist, he might have done much to stem, if not to turn
the stream of public thought. But Warren Hastings was not graced so
far. His sins had indeed found him out when he was cursed with such an
enemy and cursed with such a friend.
It is clear that Hastings himself on his return had little idea of the
serious danger with which he was menaced. He seems to have become
convinced that his services to the State must inevitably outweigh any
accidents or errors in the execution of those services. He honestly
believed himself to have been a valuable and estimable servant of his
country and his Crown. We may very well take his repeated declarations
of his own integrity and uprightness, not, indeed, as proof of his
possession of those qualities, but as proof of his profound belief that
he did possess them. When he landed in England he appears to have
expected only honors, only acclamation, admiration, and applause. He
returned to accept a triumph; he did not dream that he should have to
face a trial.
The long years in India had served to confuse his perception of the
conduct of affairs at home. He did not in the least appreciate the men
with whom he had to deal. If he gauged pretty closely the malignity of
Francis, he may have fancied that the malignity was not very likely to
prove dangerous. But he wholly misunderstood the character of the
other foes, as important as Francis was unimportant, who were ranged
against him. He made the extraordinary mistake of despising Burke.
Hastings had certain anxieties on his return to England, His first was
caused by his disappointment at not finding his wife in London to greet
him on his arrival, a {276} disappointment that was consoled two days
later when, as he was journeying post-haste to the country to join her,
he met her on Maidenhead Bridge driving in to join him. His second was
the pleasurable anxiety of negotiating for the purchase of Daylesford,
the realization of his youthful dream. He was made a little anxious
too, later on, by the delay in the awarding to him of those honors
which he so confidently expected. But he does not seem to have been
disturbed in any appreciable degree by the formidable preparations
which were being made against him by Burke and Fox and the followers of
Burke and Fox.
It is just possible that those preparations might have come to little
or nothing but for the folly of Major Scott. Major Scott was mad
enough to try and force the hand of the enemies of Hastings by calling
upon Burke and Fox to fix a day for the charges that they were
understood to be prepared to bring against him. Fox immediately rose
to assure Major Scott that the matter was not forgotten. Burke, with
grave composure, added that a general did not take choice of time and
place of battle from his adversaries. It has been suggested that but
for Major Scott's ill-advised zeal the attack might never have come to
a head. But the conclusion is one which it would be rash to draw.
Burke was not the man to forego his long-cherished hope of bringing a
criminal to justice. If he had been inclined to forego it, he was not
the kind of man to be goaded into unwilling resumption of his purpose
by the taunts of Major Scott. It may surely be assumed that the
impeachment of Warren Hastings would have been made even if Major Scott
had been as wise and discreet as he proved himself to be unwise and
indiscreet.
Even when the attack was formally begun, Hastings failed to grasp its
gravity or guess the best mode of meeting it. He insisted upon being
heard at the Bar of the House in his own defence. A man of rare
oratorical ability, gifted with special skill in the selection of his
material and the adjustment of his arguments, might have done himself a
good turn by such a decision. But Hastings was not so endowed, and he
would have done far better in {277} following the example of Clive and
of Rumbold. He committed the one fault which the House of Commons
never forgives, he wearied it. Such dramatic effect as he might have
got out of his position as a proconsul arraigned before a senate he
spoiled by the length and tedium of his harangue. He took two days to
read a long and wordy defence, two days which he considered all too
short, and which the House of Commons found all too long. It yawned
while Hastings prosed. Accustomed to an average of eloquence of which
the art has long been lost, it found Hastings's paper insufferably
wearisome.
Although he was the target for the eloquence of Burke, of Fox, and of
Sheridan, still Hastings's hopes were high, and they mounted higher
when the Rohilla war charge was rejected by a large majority. But they
were only raised so high to be dashed to earth again in the most
unexpected manner. The friends of Hastings were convinced that he
would have the unfailing support of Pitt in his defence. He was now to
learn that he was mistaken.
[Sidenote: 1787--Pitt and the impeachment]
Hastings had one very zealous champion in the House of Commons. This
was a young member, Sir James Bland-Burges. He rose not merely with
the approval of Pitt, but actually at Pitt's instigation, to defend
Warren Hastings on the question of the treatment of the Rajah of
Benares. It is scarcely surprising that the House did not pay him any
great attention. Having just come under "the spell of the enchanter,"
it would hardly have listened with attention to an old and well-known
member, and Bland-Burges was a young and unknown man. He could not
command a hearing, so, whispering to Pitt that he would leave the
remainder of the defence to him, he sat down, and the debate, on Pitt's
suggestion, was adjourned.
On the following day the young defender came to the House hot to hear
Pitt deliver to an attentive senate that defence which he had striven
unsuccessfully to make. He has recorded the astonishment, indignation,
and despair when Pitt rose to make his declaration concerning the
charge against Hastings. The minister in whom Hastings trusted to find
an ally offered some cold condemnation of {278} the intemperance of the
attack, proffered some lukewarm praise to Hastings, and then announced
that he would agree to the motion. To most of Pitt's supporters Pitt's
action came as an unpleasant surprise; but to Bland-Burges, from his
previous conversation with the minister, it seemed like an act of
treason. There was little for Bland-Burges to do, but it is to his
credit that he did that little. It required no small courage for a
follower and a friend of Pitt to defy his authority in the House. Yet
that is practically what Bland-Burges did. Raging with indignation at
what he conceived to be the tergiversation of his leader and the
treachery to his hero, Bland-Burges once again forced himself upon the
attention of the House. The leaders on both sides being agreed, it was
expected that the matter would be settled out of hand, and the Speaker
had actually put the question and declared it carried when Bland-Burges
leaped to his feet and challenged a division. He acted with the
courage of his despair, but, as he says, few unpremeditated enterprises
ever succeeded better than this one. "The question indeed was carried
by a great majority, but those who were against it were almost entirely
of those who till then had implicitly voted with the minister. This
was not only mortifying to Mr. Pitt, but highly encouraging to Mr.
Hastings and his steadfast friends."
Bland-Burges did not escape an early intimation of the disapproval of
his chief. When the House broke up, Pitt said to him, with an austere
look, "So, sir, you have thought proper to divide the House. I hope
you are satisfied." Bland-Burges answered that he was perfectly
satisfied. "Then you seem satisfied very easily," the minister
retorted; to which Bland-Burges replied, "Not exactly so, sir. I am
satisfied with nothing that has passed this evening except the
discovery I have made that there were still honest men present." "On
that," Bland-Burges continues, "with a stern look and a stately air he
left me."
[Sidenote: 1787--Bland-Burges and Hastings]
Bland-Burges won a reward for his courage which outweighed the
disapproval of Pitt. When he had thus {279} volunteered on behalf of
Warren Hastings he was so entirely a stranger to him that he did not
even know him by sight. Naturally enough, however, the arraigned man
was desirous to become acquainted with the stranger who had stood by
him when his own friends had abandoned him. He lost no time,
therefore, in calling upon Bland-Burges to thank him for the part he
had played. Bland-Burges says that the conversation was deeply
interesting, but that he only made a note of one passage, in which he
explained that, independently of his own conviction that the cause of
Warren Hastings was just and honorable, he had been moved to take part
in his defence by the positive instructions of his father, who had died
about two years previously. Bland-Burges's father, attributing the
preservation of England's power in India to Hastings, had enjoined his
son, if ever an attack were made upon Hastings, to abstract himself
from all personal and party considerations and to support him liberally
and manfully. Whatever we may think of the conduct of Warren Hastings,
it is a pleasure to find that those who thought him to be in the right
stood up for their belief as honorably and as gallantly as
Bland-Burges. It is not surprising that Warren Hastings was moved to
tears. That day's interview was the beginning of a friendship that
endured unbroken until the death of Warren Hastings.
The reason which Pitt gave for his action on the Benares vote was
simple enough. He said that, although the action of Hastings towards
the Rajah was in itself justifiable, yet that the manner of the action
was not justifiable. Chait Singh deserved to be fined, but not to be
fined in an exorbitant and tyrannical manner. The explanation might
very well be considered sufficient. A high-minded minister might feel
bound to condemn the conduct of an official whom he admired, if that
conduct had pushed a legal right to an illegal length. But Pitt's
decision came with such a shock to the friends, and even to the enemies
of Hastings, that public rumor immediately set to work to find some
other less simple and less honest reason for Pitt's action. One rumor
ascribed it to an {280} interview with Dundas, in which Dundas had
succeeded, after hours of argument, in inducing Pitt to throw Warren
Hastings over. Another suggested that Pitt was spurred by anger at a
declaration of Thurlow's that he and the King between them would make
Hastings a peer, whether the minister would or no. A third suggested
that Pitt was jealous of the royal favor to Mr. and Mrs. Hastings;
while a fourth asserted that Pitt deliberately sacrificed Hastings in
order to afford the Opposition other quarry than himself. But there is
no need to seek for any other motive than the motive which Pitt
alleged. It was quite sufficient to compel an honorable man to give
the vote that Pitt gave.
Blow after blow fell upon Hastings. The terrible attacks of Burke were
for a time eclipsed by the dazzling brilliancy of Sheridan's attack
upon him in the famous Begum speech. Those who heard that speech speak
of it with reverence and with passion as one of the masterpieces of the
world. In the form in which it is preserved, or rather in which it has
failed to be preserved for us, it is hard, if not impossible, to find
merit calling for the rapture which it aroused in the minds of men
familiar with magnificent oratory, and perfectly competent to judge.
That it did arouse rapture is beyond doubt, and for the moment it was
even more effective in injuring Hastings than the more profound but
less flaming utterances of Burke. The testimony of Fox, the testimony
of Byron, alike are offered in its unqualified praise.
It was decided by the House of Commons, with the consent of Pitt, that
Hastings should be impeached. One indignity Pitt spared him, one
danger Pitt saved him from. Burke was, somewhat incomprehensibly,
anxious that the name of Francis should be placed upon that Committee
of Impeachment to which Burke had already been nominated as the first
member by Pitt. But here Pitt was resolute. Francis was flagrantly
hostile to Hastings, hostile with a personal as well as a public
hatred, and Pitt could not tolerate the notion that he should find a
place upon the Committee of Impeachment. Burke protested, and the
{281} very protest was characteristic of Burke's high-mindedness. For
to Burke the whole business was a purely public business, in no sense
connected with any private feelings, and it seemed to him as if the
exclusion of any one of those who had been conspicuous in the
arraignment of Hastings from a responsible place on the Committee of
Impeachment on the ground of personal feeling was to cast something
like a slur upon the purity of motive of the men engaged in the attack.
But Pitt was in the right, and the name of Francis was, by a large
majority, not suffered to appear upon the committee.
[Sidenote: 1787--The impeachment trial]
In the May of 1787 Burke formally impeached Warren Hastings at the Bar
of the House of Lords. Hastings was immediately taken into custody by
the Sergeant-at-Arms, and was held to bail for 20,000 pounds, with two
sureties for 10,000 pounds each. The delay which was to be
characteristic of the whole proceedings was evident from the first.
Though Hastings was taken into custody in the May of 1787, It was not
until February 13 of the following year, 1788, that the impeached man
was brought to his trial in Westminster Hall.
Before the trial began, popular feeling was roused against Hastings
more keenly by the action of the Court than by the action of Burke and
of his colleagues. The Court was inclined to be even more than
friendly to Hastings and to his wife, and both Hastings and his wife,
who were not in touch with English public opinion, took the unwise
course of making the very most of the royal favor, and of displaying
themselves as much as possible in the royal sunlight. The London
public, always jealous of any Court favoritism, resented the patronage
of Hastings, and while it was in this temper an event took place which
served to heighten its resentment. The Nizam of the Deccan had sent a
very magnificent diamond to the King as a present, and, being ignorant
of what was going on in England, he chose Hastings, naturally enough,
as the medium through which to convey his diamond to the King.
Hastings, with the want of judgment which characterized him at this
time, accepted a duty which, delicate at any {282} time, became under
the conditions positively dangerous. He was present at the Levee at
which the diamond was presented to the King. Immediately rumor seized
upon the incident and distorted it. It was confidently asserted that
Hastings was bribing the Sovereign with vast presents of precious
stones to use his influence in his behalf. The solitary diamond became
in the popular eye more numerous than the stones that Sinbad came upon
in the enchanted valley. The print-shops teemed with caricatures, all
giving some highly colored exaggeration of the prevailing impression.
Every possible pictorial device which could suggest to the passer-by
that Hastings was buying the protection of the King by fabulous gifts
of diamonds was made public. In one Hastings was shown flinging
quantities of precious stones into the open mouth of the King. In
another he was represented as having bought the King bodily, crown and
sceptre and all, with his precious stones, and as carrying him away in
a wheelbarrow. So high did popular feeling run that the great diamond
became the hero of a discussion in the House of Commons, when Major
Scott was obliged to make a statement in his chief's behalf giving an
accurate account of what had really occurred.
The trial of Warren Hastings is one of the most remarkable examples of
contrasts in human affairs that is to be found in the whole course of
our history. It began under conditions of what may fairly be called
national interest. It came to an end amid the apathy and indifference
of the public. When it began, the Great Hall of Westminster was
scarcely large enough to contain all those who longed to be present at
the trial of the great proconsul. All the rank, the wealth, the
genius, the wit, the beauty of England seemed to be gathered together
in the building, which is said to be the oldest inhabited building in
the world. When it ended, and long before it had ended, the attendance
had dwindled down to a mere handful of spectators, some two or three
score of persons whose patience, whose interest, or whose curiosity had
survived the indifference with which the rest of the world had come to
{283} regard the whole business. The spirit of genius and the spirit
of dulness met in close encounter in that memorable arena, and it must
be admitted that the spirit of dulness did on the whole prevail. There
seemed a time when it was likely that the trial might go on forever.
Men and women who came to the first hearing eager on the one side or
the other, impassioned for Hastings or enthusiastic for Burke, died and
were buried, and new men and women occupied themselves with other
things, and still the trial dragged its slow length along.
[Sidenote: 1788-95--Hastings's Oriental fortitude]
It may be unhesitatingly admitted that during the long course of the
trial Warren Hastings bore himself with courage and with dignity. He
was firmly convinced that he was a much-injured man, and if the justice
of a man's cause were to be decided merely upon the demeanor of the
defendant, Hastings would have been exonerated. He professed to be
horrified, and he no doubt was horrified, by what he called "the
atrocious calumnies of Mr. Burke and Mr. Fox." He carried himself as
if they were indeed atrocious calumnies without any basis whatsoever.
His attitude was that of the martyr supported by the serenity of the
saint. He had lived so long in the East that he gained not a little of
that Eastern fortitude which is the fortitude of fatalism. While the
trial was progressing he told a dear friend that he found much
consolation in a certain Oriental tale. The story was of an Indian
king whose temper never knew a medium, and who in prosperity was
hurried into extravagance by his joy, while in adversity grief
overwhelmed him with despondency. Having suffered many inconveniences
through this weakness, he besought his courtiers to devise a sentence,
short enough to be engraved upon a ring, which should suggest a remedy
for his evil. Many phrases were proposed; none were found acceptable
until his daughter offered him an emerald on which were graven two
Arabic words, the literal translation of which is, "This, too, will
pass." The King embraced his daughter and declared that she was wiser
than all his wise men. "Now," said Hastings, "when I appear at the Bar
and hear the violent invectives {284} of my enemies, I arm myself with
patience. I reflect upon the mutability of human life, and I say to
myself, 'This, too, will pass.'"
It did pass, but it took its long time to pass. The trial lasted seven
years. Begun in the February of 1788, it ended in the April of 1795.
In that long space of time men might well be excused if they had grown
weary of it. Had its protracted course been even pursued in colorless,
eventless times it would have been hard to preserve the public interest
in the trial so terribly drawn out. But it was one of the curious
fortunes of the trial to embrace within its compass some of the most
thrilling and momentous years that have been recorded in the history of
mankind. In the year after the trial began the Bastille fell. In the
year before the trial closed the Reign of Terror came to an end with
the deaths of Robespierre and St. Just. The interval had seen the
whole progress of the French Revolution, had applauded the
constitutional struggle for liberty, had shuddered at the September
massacres, had seen the disciplined armies of the great European Powers
reel back dismayed before the ragged regiments of the Republic, had
seen France answer Europe with the head of a king, with the head of a
queen, had observed how the Revolution, like Saturn, devoured its own
children, had witnessed with fear as well as with fury the apotheosis
of the guillotine. While the events in France were shaking every
European State, including England, to its centre, it was hard for the
public mind to keep itself fixed with any degree of intentness upon the
trial of Warren Hastings.
The events of that interval had affected too, profoundly, the chief
actor in the trial. Burke entered upon the impeachment of Warren
Hastings at the zenith of his great career, at the moment of his
greatest glory. The rise and progress of the French evolution
exercised a profound, even a disastrous, effect upon him. For once his
fine intellect failed to discriminate between the essentials and the
non-essentials of a great question. His horror at the atrocities of
the Revolution blinded him to all the advantages that {285} the success
of the Revolution brought with it. The whole framework of that great
event was to him so hideously stained with the blood of the Queen, with
the blood of so many innocent persons, that he could see nothing but
the blood, and the influence of this is to be noticed in Burke's final
speech with its almost confident expectation that the guillotine would
sooner or later be established in England. Burke's frenzy against the
French Revolution made it appear to many as if his reasoned and careful
indictment of the erring Governor-General might after all be only mere
frenzy too.
[Sidenote: 1788-95--Acquittal of Hastings]
Such as it was, and under such conditions, the trial did come to an end
at last, after such alternations of brilliant speeches and dull
speeches as the world had never witnessed before. Sheridan again added
to his fame by a speech of which, unhappily, we are able to form no
very clear idea. Law defended Hastings in detailing the whole of the
history of Hindostan. Hastings again and again appealed piteously and
pathetically that the trial might be brought somehow or other to an
end. He was growing old, he had been for years a nominal prisoner, he
was very anxious that the terrible strain of waiting upon the slow
proceedings of the tribunal should be relieved. At last the end came
after weary years of controversy, in which Hastings had been loaded
with more contumely and lauded with more extravagance than it were
possible to conceive him good enough or bad enough to deserve.
Finally, in the April of 1795, Warren Hastings was acquitted by a large
majority on every one of the sixteen counts against him that were put
to the vote. Burke could not conceal his chagrin at this unexpected
result. He had expected, he declared afterwards, that the corruption
of the age would enable Hastings to escape on some of the counts, but
he was not prepared for the total acquittal. It is probable that
Hastings himself was not prepared for it, but the relief it afforded
him was tempered by the grave financial difficulties into which he
found himself plunged. The conduct of that long defence had well-nigh
exhausted all his available resources. After a vain appeal to Pitt to
{286} indemnify him for his legal expenses, an arrangement was come to
between the Government and the Company by which Hastings was enabled to
live at first in straitened, afterwards in moderate, circumstances for
the rest of his life.
[Sidenote: 1788-95--Effect of the impeachment trial]
It can scarcely be questioned but that Burke was in some degree
responsible for the result of the trial. His burning sense of
injustice, his passionate righteousness, and the perfervid strength of
his convictions betrayed him into an intemperance of language that
inevitably caused a reaction of sympathy in favor of the man so
violently assailed. It is impossible to read without regret the actual
ferocity of the epithets that Burke hurled against Warren Hastings. In
this he was followed, even exceeded, by Sheridan; but the utterances of
Sheridan, while they enraptured their hearers by their brilliancy, did
not carry with them the weight that attached to the utterances of
Burke. Burke's case was too strong to need an over-charged form of
expression. The plain statement of the misdeeds of Warren Hastings was
far more telling as an indictment than the abuse with which Burke
unhappily was tempted to overload his case. Those who were amazed and
sickened, with Macaulay, to think that in that age any one could be
found capable of calling the greatest of living public men, "that
reptile Mr. Burke," must reluctantly be compelled to admit that Burke
set his enemies a bad example by his own unlicensed use of opprobrium.
In justifying, for instance, the application to Warren Hastings of
Coke's savage description of Raleigh as a "spider of hell," Burke
allowed his fierce indignation to get the better of his tongue, to the
detriment of his own object, the bringing of an offender to justice.
Miss Burney in her memoirs affords a remarkable instance of the injury
which Burke did to his own object by the exuberance of his anger. She
tells us how, as she listened to Burke's arraignment of Hastings, and
went over the catalogue of his offences, she felt her sympathy for
Hastings slowly disappear, but that as Burke increased in the fury of
his assault, and passed from accusation to invective, the convincing
effect {287} of his oratory withered, and the effect which he had so
carefully created he himself contrived to destroy.
In spite of defects which in some degree brought their own punishment
with them, Burke's speeches against Warren Hastings must ever remain
among the highest examples of human eloquence employed in the service
of the right. The gifts of the statesman, the philosopher, the orator,
the great man of letters, are all allied in those marvellous pages
which first taught Englishmen how closely their national honor as well
as their national prosperity was involved in the administration of
justice in India. If Burke failed to convict Warren Hastings, he
succeeded in convicting the system which made such misdemeanors as
Warren Hastings's possible. We owe to Burke a new India. What had
been but the appanage of a corrupt and corrupting Company he
practically made forever a part of the glory and the grandeur of the
British Empire.
Abuse and invective were not confined to Burke nor to the side which
Burke represented. Warren Hastings, or those who acted for Warren
Hastings, employed every means in their power to blacken the characters
of their opponents and to hold them up to public ridicule and to public
detestation. The times were not gentle times for men engaged in
political warfare, and the companions of Hastings employed all the arts
that the times placed at their disposal. Burke and Sheridan, and those
who acted with Burke and Sheridan, were savage enough in the tribune,
but they did not employ the extra-tribunal methods by which their enemy
retaliated upon them.
Hastings is scarcely to be blamed, considering duly the temper of his
age, for doing everything that party warfare permitted against his
opponents. He was fighting as for his life; he was fighting for what
was far dearer to him than life--for life, indeed, he had ever shown a
most soldierly disregard; he was fighting for an honorable name, for
the reward of a lifetime devoted to the interests of his country, as he
understood those interests; he was fighting for fame as against infamy,
and he fought hard and he {288} fought after the fashion of the time in
which he lived. The newspaper, the pamphlet, the lampoon, the
caricature, the acidulated satire, the envenomed epigram, all were
used, and used with success, against the promoters of the impeachment.
The caricatures were not all on one side, but the most numerous and the
most effective were in favor of the impeached statesman. If the
adversaries of Hastings naturally seized upon the opportunity of a
classical effect by presenting Burke and Hastings in the character of
Cicero and Verres, the friends of Verres replied by the pencil of
Gillray, representing Hastings as the savior of India defending himself
heroically against assassins with the faces of Burke and of Fox. As
the interest in the trial flagged the caricatures grew fewer and fewer,
to revive a little at the close of the case. The popular view of the
trial was then represented fairly enough by a large print called "The
Last Scene of the Manager's Farce," in which Hastings was represented
as rising in glory from the clouds of calumny, while Burke and Fox are
represented witnessing with despair the failure of their protracted
farce, and the crafty face of Philip Francis peeped from behind a scene
where he was supposed to be playing the part of the prompter--"no
character in the farce, but very useful behind the scenes," a
description which sums up smartly enough the part that Philip Francis
played in the whole transaction from first to last.
[Sidenote: 1818--Death of Hastings]
The eve of Hastings's life was as peaceful as its noon and day had been
stormy. The proconsul became a country squire; the ruler of an empire,
the autocrat of kings, soothed his old age very much after the fashion
of Diocletian and of Candide, in the planting of cabbages. For
three-and-twenty years he dwelt at Daylesford, happy in his wife, happy
in his friends, happy in his health, in his rustic tastes, in his
simple pleasures, in his tranquil occupation. He and his wife often
visited London, but Hastings seems to have been always happiest in the
country, and he gradually declined into extreme old age with all the
grace and dignity of a Roman gentleman, loved by his {289} friends,
dearly loved by those who were young. Once in those long quiet years,
after the death of Pitt, Hastings, to please his wife, pleaded for
public reparation of the wrong which he believed had been done him.
Grenville professed every willingness to grant him a peerage, but
refused to entertain the idea of inducing the Commons to reverse their
former judgment. On those terms Hastings declined the peerage. The
nearest approach to anything like public consolation for his sorrows
came to him in 1813, when, at the age of eighty, he came once more to
the Bar of the House of Commons, this time to give evidence on the
question of renewing the Charter of the East India Company. By both
Houses, Commons and Lords alike, the old man was greeted with the
greatest enthusiasm, saluted with rapturous applause on his arrival,
with reverential salutations on his departure. In 1818 the health
which he had preserved so well till then broke, and he died after some
severe suffering on August 22 in that year, and was laid in the earth
that he had always loved so well.
One of the latest acts of his life was to appeal to the Court of
Directors to make some provision for his wife, by extending to her the
annuity that had been accorded to him. They gave, says his most
devoted biographer, no more heed to his dying entreaties than they
would have given to the whine of a self-convicted beggar. Yet surely
Hastings had deserved well of the East India Company. His faults had
been committed in their service and had given them, not himself, wealth
and power. But England is not always grateful to her servants. It is
not wonderful, says Sir Alfred Lyall, that Hastings's application
failed entirely, "remembering that even Lord Nelson's last testamentary
appeal on behalf of a woman--'the only favor I ask of my King and my
country at the moment when I am going to fight their battle'--had been
rejected and utterly disregarded." Mrs. Hastings survived her husband
for some years, and was over ninety years of age when she died.
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