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The gravest offence of which Hastings was guilty did not affect his popularity
with the people of Bengal; for those offences were committed against neighboring
states. Those offences, as our readers must have perceived, we are not disposed
to vindicate; yet, in order that the censure may be justly apportioned to the
transgression, it is fit that the motive of the criminal should be taken into
consideration. The motive which prompted the worst acts of Hastings was
misdirected and ill-regulated public spirit. The rules of justice, the
sentiments of humanity, the plighted faith of treaties, were in his view as
nothing, when opposed to the immediate interest of the State. This is no
justification, according to the principles either of morality, or of what we
believe to be identical with morality, namely, far-sighted policy. Nevertheless
the common sense of mankind, which in questions of this sort seldom goes far
wrong, will always recognize a distinction between crimes which originate in an
inordinate zeal for the commonwealth, and crimes which originate in selfish
cupidity. To the benefit of this distinction Hastings is fairly entitled. There
is, we conceive, no reason to suspect that the Rohilla war, the revolution of
Benares, or the spoliation of the Princesses of Oude, added a rupee to his
fortune. We will not affirm that, in all pecuniary dealings, he showed that
punctilious integrity, that dread of the faintest appearance of evil, which is
now the glory of the Indian civil service. But when the school in which he had
been trained, and the temptations to which he was exposed are considered, we are
more inclined to praise him for his general uprightness with respect to money,
than rigidly to blame him for a few transactions which would now be called
indelicate and irregular, but which even now would hardly be designated as
corrupt. A rapacious man he certainly was not. Had he been so, he would
infallibly have returned to his country the richest subject in Europe. We speak
within compass, when we say that, without applying any extraordinary pressure,
he might easily have obtained from the zemindars of the Company's provinces and
from neighboring princes, in the course of thirteen years, more than three
millions sterling, and might have outshone the splendor of Carlton House and of
the Palais Royal. He brought home a fortune such as a Governor-General, fond of
state, and careless of thrift, might easily, during so long a tenure of office,
save out of his legal salary. Mrs. Hastings, we are afraid, was less scrupulous.
It was generally believed that she accepted presents with great alacrity, and
that she thus formed, without the connivance of her husband, a private hoard
amounting to several lacs of rupees. We are the more inclined to give credit to
this story, because Mr. Gleig, who cannot but have heard it, does not, as far as
we have observed, notice or contradict it.
The influence of Mrs. Hastings over her husband was indeed such that she might
easily have obtained much larger sums than she was ever accused of receiving. At
length her health began to give way; and the Governor-General, much against his
will, was compelled to send her to England. He seems to have loved her with that
love which is peculiar to men of strong minds, to men whose affection is not
easily won or widely diffused. The talk of Calcutta ran for some time on the
luxurious manner in which he fitted up the round-house of an Indiaman for her
accommodation, on the profusion of sandal-wood and carved ivory which adorned
her cabin, and on the thousands of rupees which had been expended in order to
procure for her the society of an agreeable female companion during the voyage.
We may remark here that the letters of Hastings to his wife are exceedingly
characteristic. They are tender, and full of indications of esteem and
confidence; but, at the same time, a little more ceremonious than is usual in so
intimate a relation. The solemn courtesy with which he compliments "his elegant
Marian" reminds us now and then of the dignified air with which Sir Charles
Grandison bowed over Miss Byron's hand in the cedar parlor.
After some months, Hastings prepared to follow his wife to England. When it was
announced that he was about to quit his office, the feeling of the society which
he had so long governed manifested itself by many signs. Addresses poured in
from Europeans and Asiatics, from civil functionaries, soldiers, and traders. On
the day on which he delivered up the keys of office, a crowd of friends and
admirers formed a lane to the quay where he embarked. Several barges escorted
him far down the river; and some attached friends refused to quit him till the
low coast of Bengal was fading from the view, and till the pilot was leaving the
ship.
Of his voyage little is known, except that he amused himself with books and with
his pen; and that, among the compositions by which he beguiled the tediousness
of that long leisure, was a pleasing imitation of Horace's Otium Divos rogat.
This little poem was inscribed to Mr. Shore, afterwards Lord Teignmouth, a man
of whose integrity, humanity, and honor, it is impossible to speak too highly,
but who, like some other excellent members of the civil service, extended to the
conduct of his friend Hastings an indulgence of which his own conduct never
stood in need.
The voyage was, for those times, very speedy. Hastings was little more than four
months on the sea. In June 1785, he landed at Plymouth, posted to London,
appeared at Court, paid his respects in Leadenhall Street, and then retired with
his wife to Cheltenham.
He was greatly pleased with his reception. The King treated him with marked
distinction. The Queen, who had already incurred much censure on account of the
favor which, in spite of the ordinary severity of her virtue, she had shown to
the "elegant Marian," was not less gracious to Hastings. The Directors received
him in a solemn sitting; and their chairman read to him a vote of thanks which
they had passed without one dissentient voice. "I find myself," said Hastings,
in a letter written about a quarter of a year after his arrival in England, "I
find myself everywhere, and universally, treated with evidences, apparent even
to my own observation, that I possess the good opinion of my country."
The confident and exulting tone of his correspondence about this time is the
more remarkable, because he had already received ample notice of the attack
which was in preparation. Within a week after he landed at Plymouth, Burke gave
notice in the House of Commons of a motion seriously affecting a gentleman
lately returned from India. The Session, however, was then so far advanced, that
it was impossible to enter on so extensive and important a subject.
Hastings, it is clear, was not sensible of the danger of his position. Indeed
that sagacity, that judgment, that readiness in devising expedients, which had
distinguished him in the East, seemed now to have forsaken him; not that his
abilities were at all impaired; not that he was not still the same man who had
triumphed over Francis and Nuncomar, who had made the Chief justice and the
Nabob Vizier his tools, who had deposed Cheyte Sing, and repelled Hyder Ali. But
an oak, as Mr. Grattan finely said, should not be transplanted at fifty. A man
who having left England when a boy, returns to it after thirty or forty years
passed in India, will find, be his talents what they may, that he has much both
to learn and to unlearn before he can take a place among English statesmen. The
working of a representative system, the war of parties, the arts of debate, the
influence of the press, are startling novelties to him. Surrounded on every side
by new machines and new tactics, he is as much bewildered as Hannibal would have
been at Waterloo, or Themistocles at Trafalgar. His very acuteness deludes him.
His very vigor causes him to stumble. The more correct his maxims, when applied
to the state of society to which he is accustomed, the more certain they are to
lead him astray. This was strikingly the case with Hastings. In India he had a
bad hand; but he was master of the game, and he won every stake. In England he
held excellent cards, if he had known how to play them; and it was chiefly by
his own errors that he was brought to the verge of ruin.
Of all his errors the most serious was perhaps the choice of a champion. Clive,
in similar circumstances, had made a singularly happy selection. He put himself
into the hands of Wedderburn, afterwards Lord Loughborough, one of the few great
advocates who have also been great in the House of Commons. To the defense of
Clive, therefore, nothing was wanting, neither learning nor knowledge of the
world, neither forensic acuteness nor that eloquence which charms political
assemblies. Hastings entrusted his interests to a very different person, a Major
in the Bengal army, named Scott. This gentleman had been sent over from India
some time before as the agent of the Governor-General. It was rumored that his
services were rewarded with Oriental munificence; and we believe that he
received much more than Hastings could conveniently spare. The Major obtained a
seat in Parliament, and was there regarded as the organ of his employer. It was
evidently impossible that a gentleman so situated could speak with the authority
which belongs to an independent position. Nor had the agent of Hastings the
talents necessary for obtaining the ear of an assembly which, accustomed to
listen to great orators, had naturally become fastidious. He was always on his
legs; he was very tedious; and he had only one topic, the merits and wrongs of
Hastings. Everybody who knows the House of Commons will easily guess what
followed. The Major was soon considered as the greatest bore of his time. His
exertions were not confined to Parliament. There was hardly a day on which the
newspapers did not contain some puff upon Hastings, signed Asiaticus or
Bengalensis, but known to be written by the indefatigable Scott; and hardly a
month in which some bulky pamphlet on the same subject, and from the same pen,
did not pass to the trunkmakers and the pastry-cooks. As to this gentleman's
capacity for conducting a delicate question through Parliament, our readers will
want no evidence beyond that which they will find in letters preserved in these
volumes. We will give a single specimen of his temper and judgment. He
designated the greatest man then living as "that reptile Mr. Burke."
In spite, however, of this unfortunate choice, the general aspect of affairs was
favorable to Hastings. The King was on his side. The Company and its servants
were zealous in his cause. Among public men he had many ardent friends. Such
were Lord Mansfield, who had outlived the vigor of his body, but not that of his
mind; and Lord Lansdowne, who, though unconnected with any party, retained the
importance which belongs to great talents and knowledge. The ministers were
generally believed to be favorable to the late Governor-General. They owed their
power to the clamor which had been raised against Mr. Fox's East India Bill. The
authors of that bill, when accused of invading vested rights, and of setting up
powers unknown to the constitution, had defended themselves by pointing to the
crimes of Hastings, and by arguing that abuses so extraordinary justified
extraordinary measures. Those who, by opposing that bill, had raised themselves
to the head of affairs, would naturally be inclined to extenuate the evils which
had been made the plea for administering so violent a remedy; and such, in fact,
was their general disposition. The Lord Chancellor Thurlow, in particular, whose
great place and force of intellect gave him a weight in the Government inferior
only to that of Mr. Pitt, espoused the cause of Hastings with indecorous
violence. Mr. Pitt, though he had censured many parts of the Indian system, had
studiously abstained from saying a word against the late chief of the Indian
Government. To Major Scott, indeed, the young minister had in private extolled
Hastings as a great, a wonderful man, who had the highest claims on the
Government. There was only one objection to granting all that so eminent a
servant of the public could ask. The resolution of censure still remained on the
journals of the House of Commons. That resolution was, indeed, unjust; but, till
it was rescinded, could the minister advise the King to bestow any mark of
approbation on the person censured? If Major Scott is to be trusted, Mr. Pitt
declared that this was the only reason which prevented the advisers of the Crown
from conferring a peerage on the late Governor-General. Mr. Dundas was the only
important member of the administration who was deeply committed to a different
view of the subject. He had moved the resolution which created the difficulty;
but even from him little was to be apprehended. Since he had presided over the
committee on Eastern affairs, great changes had taken place. He was surrounded
by new allies; he had fixed his hopes on new objects; and whatever may have been
his good qualities,--and he had many,--flattery itself never reckoned rigid
consistency in the number.
From the Ministry, therefore, Hastings had every reason to expect support; and
the Ministry was very powerful. The Opposition was loud and vehement against
him. But the Opposition, though formidable from the wealth and influence of some
of its members, and from the admirable talents and eloquence of others, was
outnumbered in Parliament, and odious throughout the country. Nor, as far as we
can judge, was the Opposition generally desirous to engage in so serious an
undertaking as the impeachment of an Indian Governor. Such an impeachment must
last for years. It must impose on the chiefs of the party an immense load of
labor. Yet it could scarcely, in any manner, affect the event of the great
political game. The followers of the coalition were therefore more inclined to
revile Hastings than to prosecute him. They lost no opportunity of coupling his
name with the names of the most hateful tyrants of whom history makes mention.
The wits of Brooks's aimed their keenest sarcasms both at his public and at his
domestic life. Some fine diamonds which he had presented, as it was rumored, to
the royal family, and a certain richly-carved ivory bed which the Queen had done
him the honor to accept from him, were favorite subjects of ridicule. One lively
poet proposed, that the great acts of the fair Marian's present husband should
be immortalized by the pencil of his predecessor; and that Imhoff should be
employed to embellish the House of Commons with paintings of the bleeding
Rohillas, of Nuncomar swinging, of Cheyte Sing letting himself down to the
Ganges. Another, in an exquisitely humorous parody of Virgil's third eclogue,
propounded the question, what that mineral could be of which the rays had power
to make the most austere of princesses the friend of a wanton. A third
described, with gay malevolence, the gorgeous appearance of Mrs. Hastings at St.
James's, the galaxy of jewels, torn from Indian Begums, which adorned her
head-dress, her necklace gleaming with future votes, and the depending questions
that shone upon her ears. Satirical attacks of this description, and perhaps a
motion for a vote of censure, would have satisfied the great body of the
Opposition. But there were two men whose indignation was not to be so appeased,
Philip Francis and Edmund Burke.
Francis had recently entered the House of Commons, and had already established a
character there for industry and ability. He labored indeed under one most
unfortunate defect, want of fluency. But he occasionally expressed himself with
a dignity and energy worthy of the greatest orators, Before he had been many
days in Parliament, he incurred the bitter dislike of Pitt, who constantly
treated him with as much asperity as the laws of debate would allow. Neither
lapse of years nor change of scene had mitigated the enmities which Francis had
brought back from the East. After his usual fashion, he mistook his malevolence
for virtue, nursed it, as preachers tell us that we ought to nurse our good
dispositions, and paraded it, on all occasions, with Pharisaical ostentation.
The zeal of Burke was still fiercer; but it was far purer. Men unable to
understand the elevation of his mind, have tried to find out some discreditable
motive for the vehemence and pertinacity which he showed on this occasion. But
they have altogether failed. The idle story that he had some private slight to
revenge has long been given up, even by the advocates of Hastings. Mr. Gleig
supposes that Burke was actuated by party spirit, that he retained a bitter
remembrance of the fall of the coalition, that he attributed that fall to the
exertions of the East India interest, and that he considered Hastings as the
head and the representative of that interest. This explanation seems to be
sufficiently refuted by a reference to dates. The hostility of Burke to Hastings
commenced long before the coalition; and lasted long after Burke had become a
strenuous supporter of those by whom the coalition had been defeated. It began
when Burke and Fox, closely allied together, were attacking the influence of the
Crown, and calling for peace with the American republic. It continued till
Burke, alienated from Fox, and loaded with the favors of the Crown, died,
preaching a crusade against the French republic. We surely cannot attribute to
the events of 1784 an enmity which began in 1781, and which retained
undiminished force long after persons far more deeply implicated than Hastings
in the events of 1784 had been cordially forgiven. And why should we look for
any other explanation of Burke's conduct than that which we find on the surface?
The plain truth is that Hastings had committed some great crimes, and that the
thought of those crimes made the blood of Burke boil in his veins. For Burke was
a man in whom compassion for suffering, and hatred of injustice and tyranny,
were as strong as in Las Casas or Clarkson. And although in him, as in Las Casas
and in Clarkson, these noble feelings were alloyed with the infirmity which
belongs to human nature, he is, like them, entitled to this great praise, that
he devoted years of intense labor to the service of a people with whom he had
neither blood nor language, neither religion nor manners in common, and from
whom no requital, no thanks, no applause could be expected.
His knowledge of India was such as few, even of those Europeans who have passed
many years in that country have attained, and such as certainly was never
attained by any public man who had not quitted Europe. He had studied the
history, the laws, and the usages of the East with an industry, such as is
seldom found united to so much genius and so much sensibility. Others have
perhaps been equally laborious, and have collected an equal mass of materials.
But the manner in which Burke brought his higher powers of intellect to work on
statements of facts, and on tables of figures, was peculiar to himself. In every
part of those huge bales of Indian information which repelled almost all other
readers, his mind, at once philosophical and poetical, found something to
instruct or to delight. His reason analyzed and digested those vast and
shapeless masses; his imagination animated and colored them. Out of darkness,
and dullness, and confusion, he formed a multitude of ingenious theories and
vivid pictures. He had, in the highest degree, that noble faculty whereby man is
able to live in the past and in the future, in the distant and in the unreal.
India and its inhabitants were not to him, as to most Englishmen, mere names and
abstractions, but a real country and a real people. The burning sun, the strange
vegetation of the palm and the cocoa-tree, the rice-field, the tank, the huge
trees, older than the Mogul empire, under which the village crowds assemble, the
thatched roof of the peasant's hut, the rich tracery of the mosque where the
imaum prays with his face to Mecca, the drums, and banners, and gaudy idols, the
devotee swinging in the air, the graceful maiden, with the pitcher on her head,
descending the steps to the riverside, the black faces, the long beards, the
yellow streaks of sect, the turbans and the flowing robes, the spears and the
silver maces, the elephants with their canopies of state, the gorgeous palanquin
of the prince, and the close litter of the noble lady, all these things were to
him as the objects amidst which his own life had been passed, as the objects
which lay on the road between Beaconsfield and St. James's Street. All India was
present to the eye of his mind, from the hall where suitors laid gold and
perfumes at the feet of sovereigns to the wild moor where the gipsy camp was
pitched, from the bazaar, humming like a bee-hive with the crowd of buyers and
sellers, to the jungle where the lonely courier shakes his bunch of iron rings
to scare away the hyenas. He had just as lively an idea of the insurrection at
Benares as of Lord George Gordon's riots, and of the execution of Nuncomar as of
the execution of Dr. Dodd. Oppression in Bengal was to him the same thing as
oppression in the streets of London.
He saw that Hastings had been guilty of some most unjustifiable acts. All that
followed was natural and necessary in a mind like Burke's. His imagination and
his passions, once excited, hurried him beyond the bounds of justice and good
sense. His reason, powerful as it was, became the slave of feelings which it
should have controlled. His indignation, virtuous in its origin, acquired too
much of the character of personal aversion. He could see no mitigating
circumstance, no redeeming merit. His temper, which, though generous and
affectionate, had always been irritable, had now been made almost savage by
bodily infirmities and mental vexations, Conscious of great powers and great
virtues, he found himself, in age and poverty, a mark for the hatred of a
perfidious Court and a deluded people. In Parliament his eloquence was out of
date. A young generation, which knew him not, had filled the House. Whenever he
rose to speak, his voice was drowned by the unseemly interruption of lads who
were in their cradles when his orations on the Stamp Act called forth the
applause of the great Earl of Chatham. These things had produced on his proud
and sensitive spirit an effect at which we cannot wonder. He could no longer
discuss any question with calmness, or make allowance for honest differences of
opinion. Those who think that he was more violent and acrimonious in debates
about India than on other occasions, are ill-informed respecting the last years
of his life. In the discussions on the Commercial Treaty with the Court of
Versailles, on the Regency, on the French Revolution, he showed even more
virulence than in conducting the impeachment. Indeed it may be remarked that the
very persons who called him a mischievous maniac, for condemning in burning
words the Rohilla war and the spoliation of the Begums, exalted him into a
prophet as soon as he began to declaim, with greater vehemence, and not with
greater reason, against the taking of the Bastile and the insults offered to
Marie Antoinette. To us he appears to have been neither a maniac in the former
case, nor a prophet in the latter, but in both cases a great and good man, led
into extravagance by a sensibility which domineered over all his faculties.
It may be doubted whether the personal antipathy of Francis, or the nobler
indignation of Burke, would have led their party to adopt extreme measures
against Hastings, if his own conduct had been judicious. He should have felt
that, great as his public services had been, he was not faultless, and should
have been content to make his escape, without aspiring to the honors of a
triumph. He and his agent took a different view. They were impatient for the
rewards which, as they conceived, it were deferred only till Burke's attack
should be over. They accordingly resolved to force on a decisive action with an
enemy for whom, if they had been wise, they would have made a bridge of gold. On
the first day of the session of 1786, Major Scott reminded Burke of the notice
given in the preceding year, and asked whether it was seriously intended to
bring any charge against the late Governor-General. This challenge left no
course open to the Opposition, except to come forward as accusers, or to
acknowledge themselves calumniators. The administration of Hastings had not been
so blameless, nor was the great party of Fox and North so feeble, that it could
be prudent to venture on so bold a defiance. The leaders of the Opposition
instantly returned the only answer which they could with honor return; and the
whole party was irrevocably pledged to a prosecution.
Burke began his operations by applying for Papers. Some of the documents for
which he asked were refused by, the ministers, who, in the debate, held language
such as strongly confirmed the prevailing opinion, that they intended to support
Hastings. In April, the charges were laid on the table. They had been drawn by
Burke with great ability, though in a form too much resembling that of a
pamphlet. Hastings was furnished with a copy of the accusation; and it was
intimated to him that he might, if he thought fit, be heard in his own defense
at the bar of the Commons.
Here again Hastings was pursued by the same fatality which had attended him ever
since the day when he set foot on English ground. It seemed to be decreed that
this man, so politic and so successful in the East, should commit nothing but
blunders in Europe. Any judicious adviser would have told him that the best
thing which he could do would be to make an eloquent, forcible, and affecting
oration at the bar of the House; but that, if he could not trust himself to
speak, and found it necessary to read, he ought to be as concise as possible.
Audiences accustomed to extemporaneous debating of the highest excellence are
always impatient of long written compositions. Hastings, however, sat down as he
would have done at the Government-house in Bengal, and prepared a paper of
immense length. That paper, if recorded on the consultations of an Indian
administration, would have been justly praised as a very able minute. But it was
now out of place. It fell flat, as the best written defense must have fallen
flat, on an assembly accustomed to the animated and strenuous conflicts of Pitt
and Fox. The members, as soon as their curiosity about the face and demeanor of
so eminent a stranger was satisfied, walked away to dinner, and left Hastings to
tell his story till midnight to the clerks and the Sergeant-at-Arms.
All preliminary steps having been duly taken, Burke, in the beginning of June,
brought forward the charge relating to the Rohilla war. He acted discreetly in
placing this accusation in the van; for Dundas had formerly moved, and the House
had adopted, a resolution condemning, in the most severe terms, the policy
followed by Hastings with regard to Rohilcund, Dundas had little, or rather
nothing, to say in defense of his own consistency; but he put a bold face on the
matter, and opposed the motion. Among other things, he declared that, though he
still thought the Rohilla war unjustifiable, he considered the services which
Hastings had subsequently rendered to the State as sufficient to atone even for
so great an offence Pitt did not speak, but voted with Dundas; and Hastings was
absolved by a hundred and nineteen votes against sixty-seven.
Hastings was now confident of victory. It seemed, indeed, that he had reason to
be so. The Rohilla war was, of all his measures, that which his accusers might
with greatest advantage assail. It had been condemned by the Court of Directors.
It had been condemned by the House of Commons. It had been condemned by Mr.
Dundas, who had since become the chief minister of the Crown for Indian affairs.
Yet Burke, having chosen this strong ground, had been completely defeated on it.
That, having failed here, he should succeed on any point, was generally thought
impossible. It was rumored at the clubs and coffee-houses that one or perhaps
two more charges would be brought forward, that if, on those charges, the sense
of the House of Commons should be against impeachment, the Opposition would let
the matter drop, that Hastings would be immediately raised to the peerage,
decorated with the star of the Bath, sworn of the Privy Council, and invited to
lend the assistance of his talents and experience to the India Board. Lord
Thurlow, indeed, some months before, had spoken with contempt of the scruples
which prevented Pitt from calling Hastings to the House of Lords; and had even
said that, if the Chancellor of the Exchequer was afraid of the Commons, there
was nothing to prevent the Keeper of the Great Seal from taking the royal
pleasure about a patent of peerage. The very title was chosen. Hastings was to
be Lord Daylesford. For, through all changes of scene and changes of fortune,
remained unchanged his attachment to the spot which had witnessed the greatness
and the fall of his family, and which had borne so great a part in the first
dreams of his young ambition.
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