generally approved. At the commencement of the trial there had been a
strong and indeed unreasonable feeling against Hastings. At the close of
the trial there was a feeling equally strong and equally unreasonable
in his favour. One cause of the change was, no doubt, what is commonly
called the fickleness of the multitude, but what seems to us to be
merely the general law of human nature. Both in individuals and in
masses violent excitement is always followed by remission, and often
by reaction. We are all inclined to depreciate whatever we have
overpraised, and, on the other hand, to show undue indulgence where we
have shown undue rigour. It was thus in the case of Hastings. The
length of his trial, moreover, made him an object of compassion. It was
thought, and not without reason, that, even if he was guilty, he was
still an ill-used man, and that an impeachment of eight years was more
than a sufficient punishment. It was also felt that, though, in the
ordinary course of criminal law, a defendant is not allowed to set off
his good actions against his crimes, a great political cause should be
tried on different principles, and that a man who had governed an empire
during thirteen years might have done some very reprehensible things,
and yet might be on the whole deserving of rewards and honours rather
than of fine and imprisonment. The press, an instrument neglected by
the prosecutors, was used by Hastings and his friends with great effect.
Every ship, too {138}that arrived from Madras or Bengal, brought a
cuddy full of his admirers. Every gentleman from India spoke of the
late Governor-General as having deserved better, and having been treated
worse, than any man living. The effect of this testimony unanimously
given by all persons who knew the East was naturally very great. Retired
members of the Indian services, civil and military, were settled in all
corners of the kingdom. Each of them was, of course, in his own little
circle, regarded as an oracle on an Indian question, and they were, with
scarcely one exception, the zealous advocates of Hastings. It is to be
added, that the numerous addresses to the late Governor-General, which
his friends in Bengal obtained from the natives and transmitted to
England, made a considerable impression. To these addresses we attach
little or no importance. That Hastings was beloved by the people whom
he governed is true; but the eulogies of pundits, zemindars, Mahommedan
doctors, do not prove it to be true. For an English collector or judge
would have found it easy to induce any native who could write to sign a
panegyric on the most odious ruler that ever was in India. It was said
that at Benares, the very place at which the acts set forth in the first
article of impeachment had been committed, the natives had erected
a temple to Hastings, and this story excited a strong sensation in
England. Burke’s observations on the apotheosis were admirable. He saw
no reason for astonishment, he said, in the incident which had been
represented as so striking. He knew something of the mythology of the
Brahmins. He knew that as they worshipped some gods from love, so they
worshipped others from fear. He knew that they erected shrines, not
only to the benignant deities of light and {139}plenty, but also to the
fiends who preside over smallpox and murder; nor did he at all dispute
the claim of Mr. Hastings to be admitted into such a Pantheon. This
reply has always struck us as one of the finest that ever was made in
Parliament. It is a grave and forcible argument, decorated by the most
brilliant wit and fancy.
Hastings was, however, safe. But in every thing except character, he
would have been far better off if, when first impeached, he had at
once pleaded guilty, and paid a fine of fifty thousand pounds. He was
a ruined man. The legal expenses of his defence had been enormous. The
expenses which did not appear in his attorney’s bill were perhaps larger
still. Great sums had been paid to Major Scott. Great sums had been
laid out in bribing newspapers, rewarding pamphleteers, and circulating
tracts. Burke, so early as 1790, declared in the House of Commons that
twenty thousand pounds had been employed in corrupting the press. It is
certain that no controversial weapon, from the gravest reasoning to
the coarsest ribaldry, was left unemployed. Logan defended the accused
Governor with great ability in prose. For the lovers of verse, the
speeches of the managers were burlesqued in Simpkin’s letters. It is,
we are afraid, indisputable that Hastings stooped so low as to court
the aid of that malignant and filthy baboon John Williams, who called
himself Anthony Pasquin. It was necessary to subsidise such allies
largely. The private hoards of Mrs. Hastings had disappeared. It is said
that the banker to whom they had been intrusted had failed. Still if
Hastings had practised strict economy, he would, after all his losses,
have had a moderate competence; but in the management of his private
affairs he was imprudent. {140}The clearest wish of his heart had always
been to regain Daylesford. At length, in the very year in which his
trial commenced, the wish was accomplished; and the domain, alienated
more than seventy years before, returned to the descendant of its old
lords. But the manor house was a ruin; and the grounds round it had,
during many years, been utterly neglected. Hastings proceeded to build,
to plant, to form a sheet of water, to excavate a grotto; and, before he
was dismissed from the bar of the House of Lords, he had expended more
than forty thousand pounds in adorning his seat.
The general feeling both of the Directors and of the proprietors of
the East India Company was that he had great claims on them, that his
services to them had been eminent, and that his misfortunes had been the
effect of his zeal for their interest. His friends in Leadenhall Street
proposed to reimburse him the costs of his trial, and to settle on him
an annuity of five thousand pounds a year. But the consent of the Board
of Control was necessary; and at the head of the Board of Control was
Mr. Dundas, who had himself been a party to the impeachment, who had,
on that account, been reviled with great bitterness by the adherents
of Hastings, and who, therefore, was not in a very complying mood.
He refused to consent to what the Directors suggested. The Directors
remonstrated. A long controversy followed. Hastings, in the mean time,
was reduced to such distress, that he could hardly pay his weekly bills.
At length a compromise was made. An annuity for life of four thousand
pounds was settled on Hastings; and in order to enable him to meet
pressing demands, he was to receive ten years’ annuity in advance. The
Company was also permitted {141}to lend him fifty thousand pounds, to be
repaid by instalments without interest. The relief, though given in the
most absurd manner, was sufficient to enable the retired Governor to
live in comfort, and even in luxury, if he had been a skilful manager.
But he was careless and profuse, and was more than once under the
necessity of applying to the Company for assistance, which was liberally
given.
He had security and affluence, but not the power and dignity which,
when he landed from India, he had reason to expect. He had then looked
forward to a coronet, a red riband, a seat at the Council Board, an
office at Whitehall. He was then only fifty-two, and might hope for many
years of bodily and mental vigour. The case was widely different when he
left the bar of the Lords. He was now too old a man to turn his mind
to a new class of studies and duties. He had no chance of receiving any
mark of royal favour while Mr. Pitt remained in power; and, when Mr.
Pitt retired, Hastings was approaching his seventieth year.
Once, and only once, after his acquittal, he interfered in polities; and
that interference was not much to his honour. In 1804 he exerted himself
strenuously to prevent Mr. Addington, against whom Fox and Pitt had
combined, from resigning the Treasury. It is difficult to believe that
a man so able and energetic as Hastings can have thought that, when
Bonaparte was at Boulogne with a great army, the defence of our island
could safely be intrusted to a ministry which did not contain a single
person whom flattery could describe as a great statesman. It is also
certain that, on the important question which had raised Mr. Addington
to power, and on which he differed from both Fox and Pitt, Hastings,
as might have been expected, agreed {142}with Fox and Pitt, and was
decidedly opposed to Addington, Religious intolerance has never been the
vice of the Indian service, and certainly was not the vice of Hastings.
But Mr. Addington had treated him with marked favour. Fox had been a
principal manager of the impeachment. To Pitt it was owing that there
had been an impeachment; and Hastings, we fear, was on this occasion
guided by personal considerations, rather than by a regard to the public
interest.
The last twenty-four years of his life were chiefly passed at
Daylesford. He amused himself with embellishing his grounds, riding fine
Arab horses, fattening prize-cattle, and trying to rear Indian
animals and vegetables in England. He sent for seeds of a very fine
custard-apple, from the garden of what had once been his own villa,
among the green hedgerows of Allipore. He tried also to naturalise in
Worcestershire the delicious leechee, almost the only fruit of Bengal
which deserves to be regretted even amidst the plenty of Covent
Garden. The Mogul emperors, in the time of their greatness, had in vain
attempted to introduce into Hindustan the goat of the table-land of
Thibet, whose down supplies the looms of Cashmere with the materials
of the finest shawls. Hastings tried, with no better fortune, to rear a
breed at Daylesford; nor does he seem to have succeeded better with the
cattle of Bootan, whose tails are in high esteem as the best fans for
brushing away the mosquitoes.
Literature divided his attention with his conservatories and his
menagerie. He had always loved books, and they were now necessary to
him. Though not a poet, in any high sense of the word, he wrote neat and
polished lines with great facility, and was fond of exercising {143}this
talent. Indeed, if we must speak out, he seems to have been more of a
Trissotin than was to be expected from the powers of his mind, and from
the great part which he had played in life. We are assured in these
Memoirs that the first thing which he did in the morning was to write a
copy of verses. When the family and guests assembled, the poem made its
appearance as regularly as the eggs and rolls; and Mr. Gleig requires
us to believe that, if from any accident Hastings came to the
breakfast-table without one of his charming performances in his hand,
the omission was felt by all as a grievous disappointment. Tastes differ
widely. For ourselves, we must say that, however good the breakfasts at
Daylesford may have been,--and we are assured that the tea was of the
most aromatic flavour, and that neither tongue nor venison-pasty was
wanting,--we should have thought the reckoning high if we had been
forced to earn our repast by listening every day to a new madrigal or
sonnet composed by our host. We are glad, however, that Mr. Gleig has
preserved this little feature of character, though we think it by no
means a beauty. It is good to be often reminded of the inconsistency
of human nature, and to learn to look without wonder or disgust on the
weaknesses which are found in the strongest minds. Dionysius in old
times, Frederic in the last century, with capacity and vigour equal to
the conduct of the greatest affairs, united all the little vanities
and affectations of provincial blue-stockings. These great examples
may console the admirers of Hastings for the affliction of seeing him
reduced to the level of the Hayleys and Sewards.
When Hastings had passed many years in retirement, and had long outlived
the common age of men, he again {144}became for a short time an object
of general attention. In 1813 the charter of the East India Company
was renewed; and much discussion about Indian affairs took place in
Parliament. It was determined to examine witnesses at the bar of the
Commons; and Hastings was ordered to attend. He had appeared at that bar
once before. It was when he read his answer to charges which Burke
had laid on the table. Since that time twenty-seven years had elapsed;
public feeling had undergone a complete change; the nation had
now forgotten his faults, and remembered only his services. The
reappearance, too, of a man who had been among the most distinguished of
a generation that had passed away, who now belonged to history, and who
seemed to have risen from the dead, could not but produce a solemn and
pathetic effect. The Commons received him with acclamations, ordered a
chair to be set for him, and, when he retired, rose and uncovered. There
were, indeed, a few who did not sympathize with the general feeling. One
or two of the managers of the impeachment were present. They sate in the
same seats which they had occupied when they had been thanked for
the services which they had rendered in Westminster Hall: for, by the
courtesy of the House, a member who has been thanked in his place
is considered as having a right alwavs to occupy that place. These
gentlemen were not disposed to admit that they had employed several
of the best years of their lives in persecuting an innocent man. They
accordingly kept their seats, and pulled their hats over their brows;
but the exceptions only made the prevailing enthusiasm more remarkable.
The Lords received the old man with similar tokens of respect. The
University of Oxford conferred on him the degree {145}of’ Doctor of
Laws; and, in the Sheldonian Theatre, the undergraduates welcomed him
with tumultuous cheering.
These marks of public esteem were soon followed by marks of royal
favour. Hastings was sworn of the Privy Council, and was admitted to
a long private audience of the Prince Regent, who treated him very
graciously. When the Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia visited
England, Hastings appeared in their train both at Oxford and in the
Guildhall of London, and, though surrounded by a crowd of princes
and great warriors, was everywhere received with marks of respect and
admiration. He was presented by the Prince Resent both to Alexander and
to Frederic William; and his Royal Highness went so far as to declare
in public that honours far higher than a seat in the Privy Council
were due, and would soon be paid, to the man who had saved the British
dominions in Asia. Hastings now confidently expected a peerage; but,
from some unexplained cause, he was again disappointed.
He lived about four years longer, in the enjoyment of good spirits, of
faculties not impaired to any painful or degrading extent, and of health
such as is rarely enjoyed by those who attain such an age. At length, on
the twenty-second of August, 1818, in the eighty-sixth year of his age,
he met death with the same tranquil and decorous fortitude which he had
opposed to all the trials of his various and eventful life.
With all his faults,--and they were neither few nor small,--only one
cemetery was worthy to contain his remains. In that temple of silence
and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations He buried,
in the Great Abbey which has during many ages afforded {146}a quiet
resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by
the contentions of the Great Hall, the dust of the illustrious accused
should have mingled with the dust of the illustrious accusers. This was
not to be. Yet the place of interment was not ill-chosen. Behind the
chancel of the parish church of Daylesford, in earth which already held
the bones of many chiefs of the house of Hastings, was laid the coffin
of the Greatest man who has ever borne that ancient and widely extended
name. On that very spot, probably, fourscore years before, the little
Warren, meanly clad and scantily fed, had played with the children of
ploughmen. Even then his young mind had revolved plans which might be
called romantic. Yet, however romantic, it is not likely that they had
been so strange as the truth. Not only had the poor orphan retrieved the
fallen fortunes of his line. Not only had he repurchased the old lands,
and rebuilt the old dwelling. He had preserved and extended an empire.
He had founded a polity. He had administered government and war with
more than the capacity of Richelieu. He had patronised learning with
the judicious liberality of Cosmo. He had been attacked by the most
formidable combination of enemies that ever sought the destruction of a
single victim: and over that combination, after a struggle of ten years,
he had triumphed. He had at length gone down to his grave in the fulness
of age in peace, after so many troubles, in honour, after so much
obloquy.
Those who look on his character without favour or malevolence will
pronounce that, in the two great elements of all social virtue, in
respect for the rights of others, and in sympathy for the sufferings
of others, he was deficient. His principles were somewhat lax. {147}His
heart was somewhat hard. But though we cannot with truth describe him
either as a righteous or as a merciful ruler, we cannot regard without
admiration the amplitude and fertility of his intellect, his rare
talents for command, for administration, and for controversy, his
dauntless courage, his honourable poverty, his fervent zeal for the
interests of the state, his noble equanimity, tried by both extremes of
fortune, and never disturbed by either.
FREDERIC THE GREAT. (1)
(_Edinburgh Review_, April, 1842.)
This {148}work, which has the high honour of being introduced to the
world by the author of Loehiel and Hohenlinden, is not wholly unworthy
of so distinguished a _chaperon_. It professes, indeed, to be no more
than a compilation; but it is an exceedingly amusing compilation, and
we shall be glad to have more of it. The narrative comes down at present
only to the commencement of the Seven Years’ War, and therefore does not
comprise the most interesting portion of Frederic’s reign.
It may not be unacceptable to our readers that we should take this
opportunity of presenting them with a slight sketch of the life of the
greatest king that has, in modern times, succeeded by right of birth
to a throne. It may, we fear, be impossible to compress so long and
eventful a story within the limits which we must prescribe to
ourselves. Should we be compelled to break off, we may perhaps, when the
continuation of this work appears, return to the subject.
The Prussian monarchy, the youngest of the great European states, but
in population and revenue the fifth among them, and in art, science, and
civilisation entitled to the third, if not to the second place, sprang
(1) _Frederic the Great and his Times_. Edited, with an
Introduction, by Thomas Campbell., Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London:
1842.
{149}from a humble origin. About the beginning of the fifteenth century,
the marquisate of Brandenburg was bestowed by the Emperor Sigismund on
the noble family of Hohenzollern. In the sixteenth century that family
embraced the Lutheran doctrines. It obtained from the King of Poland,
early in the seventeenth century, the investiture of the duchy of
Prussia. Even after this accession of territory, the chiefs of the house
of Hohenzollern hardly ranked with the Electors of Saxony and Bavaria.
The soil of Brandenburg was for the most part sterile. Even round
Berlin, the capital of the province, and round Potsdam, the favourite
residence of the Margraves, the country was a desert. In some places,
the deep sand could with difficulty be forced by assiduous tillage to
yield thin crops of rye and oats. In other places, the ancient forests,
from which the conquerors of the Roman empire had descended on the
Danube, remained untouched by the hand of man. Where the soil was rich
it was generally marshy, and its insalubrity repelled the cultivators
whom its fertility attracted. Frederic William, called the Great
Elector, was the prince to whose policy his successors have agreed to
ascribe their greatness. He acquired by the peace of Westphalia several
valuable possessions, and among them the rich city and district
of Magdeburg; and he left to his son Frederic a principality as
considerable as any which was not called a kingdom.
Frederic aspired to the style of royalty. Ostentatious and profuse,
negligent of his true interests and of his high duties, insatiably eager
for frivolous distinctions, he added nothing to the real weight of the
state which he governed: perhaps he transmitted his inheritance to his
children impaired rather than augmented in value; but he succeeded in
gaining the great object of his life, {150}the title of King. In the
year 1700 he assumed this new dignity. He had on that occasion to
undergo all the mortifications which fall to the lot of ambitious
upstarts. Compared with the other crowned heads of Europe, he made a
figure resembling that which a Nabob or a Commissary, who had bought
a title, would make in the company of Peers whose ancestors had been
attainted for treason against the Plantagenets. The envy of the class
which Frederic quitted, and the civil scorn of the class into which he
intruded himself, were marked in very significant ways. The Elector
of Saxony at first refused to acknowledge the new Majesty. Lewis the
Fourteenth looked down on his brother King with an air not unlike that
with which the Count in Molière’s play regards Monsieur Jourdain, just
fresh from the mummery of being made a gentleman. Austria exacted
large sacrifices in return for her recognition, and at last gave it
ungraciously.
Frederic was succeeded by his son, Frederic William, a prince who must
be allowed to have possessed some talents for administration, but whose
character was disfigured by odious vices, and whose eccentricities were
such as had never before been seen out of a madhouse. He was exact and
diligent in the transacting of business; and he was the first who formed
the design of obtaining for Prussia a place among the European powers,
altogether out of proportion to her extent and population, by means of
a strong military organization. Strict economy enabled him to keep up
a peace establishment of sixty thousand troops. These troops were
disciplined in such a manner, that placed beside them, the household
regiments of Versailles and St. James’s would have appeared an awkward
squad. The master of such a force could not but be regarded by {151}all
his neighbours as a formidable enemy and a valuable ally.
But the mind of Frederic William was so ill regulated, that all his
inclinations became passions, and all his passions partook of the
character of moral and intellectual disease. His parsimony degenerated
into sordid avarice. His taste for military pomp and order became a
mania, like that of a Dutch burgomaster for tulips, or that of a member
of the Roxburghe Club for Caxtons. While the envoys of the Court of
Berlin were in a state of such squalid poverty as moved the laughter
of foreign capitals, while the food placed before the princes and
princesses of the blood-royal of Prussia was too scanty to appease
hunger, and so bad that even hunger loathed it, no price was thought too
extravagant for tall recruits. The ambition of the King was to form a
brigade of giants, and every country was ransacked by his agents for
men above the ordinary stature. These researches were not confined to
Europe. No head that towered above the crowd in the bazaars of Aleppo,
of Cairo, or of Surat, could escape the crimps of Frederic William. One
Irishman more than seven feet high, who was picked up in London by the
Prussian ambassador, received a bounty of near thirteen hundred pounds
sterling, very much more than the ambassador’s salary. This extravagance
was the more absurd, because a stout youth of five feet eight, who might
have been procured for a few dollars, would in all probability have
been a much more valuable soldier. But to Frederic William, this huge
Irishman was what a brass Otho, or a Vinegar Bible, is to a collector of
a different kind.
It is remarkable, that though the main end of Frederic William’s
administration was to have a great military {152}force, though his reign
forms an important epoch in the history of military discipline, and
though his dominant passion was the love of military display, he was yet
one of the most pacific of princes. We are afraid that his aversion to
war was not the effect of humanity, but was merely one of his thousand
whims. His feeling about his troops seems to have resembled a miser’s
feeling about his money. He loved to collect them, to count them, to see
them increase; but he could not find it in his heart to break in upon
the precious hoard. He looked forward to some future time when his
Patagonian battalions were to drive hostile infantry before them like
sheep: but this future time was always receding; and it is probable
that, if his life had been prolonged thirty years, his superb army would
never have seen any harder service than a sham fight in the fields
near Berlin. But the great military means which he had collected were
destined to be employed by a spirit far more daring and inventive than
his own.