The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 08 (of 12)

"The very idea of prize-money suggests to my remembrance the former disorders which arose in our army from this source, and had almost proved fatal to it. Of this circumstance you must be sufficiently apprised, and of the necessity for discouraging every expectation of this kind amongst the troops. It is to be avoided like poison. The bad effects of a similar measure were but too plainly felt in a former period, and our honorable masters did not fail on that occasion to reprobate with their censure, in the most severe terms, a practice which they regarded as the source of infinite evils, and which, if established, would in their judgment necessarily bring corruption and ruin on their army."

XXI. That the said Hastings, after he had given the license aforesaid, and that in consequence thereof the booty found in the castle, to the amount of 23,27,813 current rupees, was distributed among the soldiers employed in its reduction, the said Hastings did retract his declaration of right, and his permission to the soldiers to appropriate to themselves the plunder, and endeavored, by various devices and artifices, to explain the same away, and to recover the spoil aforesaid for the use of the Company; and wholly failing in his attempts to resume by a breach of faith with the soldiers what he had unlawfully disposed of by a breach of duty to his constituents, he attempted to obtain the same as a loan, in which attempt he also failed; and the aforesaid money being the only part of the treasures belonging to the Rajah, or any of his family, that had been found, he was altogether frustrated in the acquisition of every part of that dishonorable object which alone he pretended to, and pursued through a long series of acts of injustice, inhumanity, oppression, violence, and bloodshed, at the hazard of his person and reputation, and, in his own opinion, at the risk of the total subversion of the British empire.

XXI. That the said Warren Hastings, after the commission of the offences aforesaid, being well aware that he should be called to an account for the same, did, by the evil counsel and agency of Sir Elijah Impey, Knight, his Majesty's chief-justice, who was then out of the limits of his jurisdiction, cause to be taken at Benares, before or by the said Sir Elijah Impey, and through the intervention, not of the Company's interpreter, but of a certain private interpreter of his, the said Hastings's, own appointment, and a dependant on him, called Major Davy, several declarations and depositions by natives of Hindostan,—and did also cause to be taken before the said Sir Elijah Impey several attestations in English, made by British subjects, and which were afterwards transmitted to Calcutta, and laid before the Council-General,—some of which depositions were upon oath, some upon honor, and others neither upon oath nor honor, but all or most of which were of an irregular and irrelevant nature, and not fit or decent to be taken by a British magistrate, or to be transmitted to a British government.

XXIII. That one of the said attestations (but not on oath) was made by a principal minister of the Nabob of Oude, to whom the said Hastings had some time before proposed to sell the sovereignty of that very territory of Benares; and that one other attestation (not upon oath) was made by a native woman of distinction, whose son he, the said Hastings, did actually promote to the government of Benares, vacated by the unjust expulsion of the Rajah aforesaid, and who in her deposition did declare that she considered the expelled Rajah as her enemy, and that he never did confer with her, or suffer her to be acquainted with any of his designs.

XXIV. That, besides the depositions of persons interested in the ruin of the Rajah, others were made by persons who then received pensions from him, the said Hastings; and several of the affidavits were made by persons of mean condition, and so wholly illiterate as not to be able to write their names.

XXV. That he, the said Hastings, did also cause to be examined by various proofs and essays, the result of which was delivered in upon honor, the quality of certain military stores taken by the British troops from the said Rajah of Benares; and upon the report that the same were of a good quality, and executed by persons conversant in the making of good military stores, although the cannon was stated by the same authority to be bad, he, the said Warren Hastings, from the report aforesaid, did maliciously, and contrary to the principles of natural and legal reason, infer that the insurrection which had been raised by his own violence and oppression, and rendered for a time successful by his own improvidence, was the consequence of a premeditated design to overturn the British empire in India, and to exterminate therefrom the British nation; which design, if it had been true, the said Hastings might have known, or rationally conjectured, and ought to have provided against. And if the said Hastings had received any credible information of such design, it was his duty to lay the same before the Council Board, and to state the same to the Rajah, when he was in a condition to have given an answer thereto or to observe thereon, and not, after he had proscribed and driven him from his dominions, to have inquired into offences to justify the previous infliction of punishment.

XXVI. That it does not appear, that, in taking the said depositions, there was any person present on the part of the Rajah to object to the competence or credibility or relevancy of any of the said affidavits or other attestations, or to account, otherwise than as the said deponents did account, for any of the facts therein stated; nor were any copies thereof sent to the said Rajah, although the Company had a minister at the place of his residence, namely, in the camp of the Mahratta chief Sindia, so as to enable him to transmit to the Company any matters which might induce or enable them to do justice to the injured prince aforesaid. And it does not appear that the said Hastings has ever produced any witness, letter, or other document, tending to prove that the said Rajah ever did carry on any hostile negotiation whatever with any of those powers with whom he was charged with a conspiracy against the Company, previous to the period of the said Hastings's having arrested him in his palace, although he, the said Hastings, had various agents at the courts of all those princes,—and that a late principal agent and near relation of a minister of one them, the Rajah of Berar, called Benaram Pundit, was, at the time of the tumult at Benares, actually with the said Hastings, and the said Benaram Pundit was by him highly applauded for his zeal and fidelity, and was therefore by him rewarded with a large pension on those very revenues which he had taken from the Rajah Cheyt Sing, and if such a conspiracy had previously existed, the Mahratta minister aforesaid must have known, and would have attested it.

XXVII. That it appears that the said Warren Hastings, at the time that he formed his design of seizing upon the treasures of the Rajah of Benares, and of deposing him, did not believe him guilty of that premeditated project for driving the English out of India with which he afterwards thought fit to charge him, or that he was really guilty of any other great offence: because he has caused it to be deposed, that, if the said Rajah should pay the sum of money by him exacted, "he would settle his zemindary upon him on the most eligible footing"; whereas, if he had conceived him to have entertained traitorous designs against the Company, from whom he held his tributary estate, or had been otherwise guilty of such enormous offences as to make it necessary to take extraordinary methods for coercing him, it would not have been proper for him to settle upon such a traitor and criminal the zemindary of Benares, or any other territory, upon the most eligible, or upon any other footing whatever: whereby the said Hastings has by his own stating demonstrated that the money intended to have been exacted was not as a punishment for crimes, but that the crimes were pretended for the purpose of exacting money.

XXVIII. That the said Warren Hastings, in order to justify the acts of violence aforesaid to the Court of Directors, did assert certain false facts, known by him to be such, and did draw from them certain false and dangerous inferences, utterly subversive of the rights of the princes and subjects dependent on the British nation in India, contrary to the principles of all just government, and highly dishonorable to that of Great Britain: namely, that the "Rajah of Benares was not a vassal or tributary prince, and that the deeds which passed between him and the board, upon the transfer of the zemindary in 1775, were not to be understood to bear the quality and force of a treaty upon optional conditions between equal states; that the payments to be made by him were not a tribute, but a rent; and that the instruments by which his territories were conveyed to him did not differ from common grants to zemindars who were merely subjects; but that, being nothing more than a common zemindar and mere subject, and the Company holding the acknowledged rights of his former sovereign, held an absolute authority over him; that, in the known relations of zemindar to the sovereign authority, or power delegated by it, he owed a personal allegiance and an implicit and unreserved obedience to that authority, at the forfeiture of his zemindary, and even of his life and property." Whereas the said Hastings did well know, that, whether the payments from the Rajah were called rent or tribute, having been frequently by himself called the one and the other, and that of whatever nature the instruments by which he held might have been, he did not consider him as a common zemindar or landholder, but as far independent as a tributary prince could be: for he did assign as a reason for receiving his rent rather within the Company's province than in his own capital, that it would not "frustrate the intention of rendering the Rajah independent; that, if a Resident was appointed to receive the money as it became due at Benares, such a Resident would unavoidably acquire an influence over the Rajah, and over his country, which would in effect render him the master of both; that this consequence might not, perhaps, be brought completely to pass without a struggle, and many appeals to the Council, which, in a government constituted like this, cannot fail to terminate against the Rajah, and, by the construction to which his opposition to the agent would be liable, might eventually draw on him severe restrictions, and end in reducing him to the mean and depraved state of a zemindar."

XXIX. And the said Hastings, in the said Minute of Consultation, having enumerated the frauds, embezzlements, and oppressions which would ensue from the Rajah's being in the dependent state aforesaid, and having obviated all apprehensions from giving to him the implied symbols of dominion, did assert, "that, without such appearance, he would expect from every change of government additional demands to be made upon him, and would of course descend to all the arts of intrigue and concealment practised by other dependent Rajahs, which would keep him indigent and weak, and eventually prove hurtful to the Company; but that, by proper encouragement and protection, he might prove a profitable dependant, an useful barrier, and even a powerful ally to the Company; but that he would be neither, if the conditions of his connection with the Company were left open to future variations."

XXX. That, if the fact had been true that the Rajah of Benares was merely an eminent landholder or any other subject, the wicked and dangerous doctrine aforesaid, namely, that he owed a personal allegiance and an implicit and unreserved obedience to the sovereign authority, at the forfeiture of his zemindary, and even of his life and property, at the discretion of those who held or fully represented the sovereign authority, doth leave security neither for life nor property to any persons residing under the Company's protection; and that no such powers, nor any powers of that nature, had been delegated to the said Warren Hastings by any provisions of the act of Parliament appointing a Governor-General and Council at Fort William in Bengal.

XXXI. That the said Warren Hastings did also advance another dangerous and pernicious principle in justification of his violent, arbitrary, and iniquitous actings aforesaid: namely, "that, if he had acted with an unwarrantable rigor, and even injustice, towards Cheyt Sing, yet, first, if he did believe that extraordinary means were necessary, and those exerted with a strong hand, to preserve the Company's interests from sinking under the accumulated weight that oppressed them, or, secondly, if he saw a political necessity for curbing the overgrown power of a great member of their dominion, and to make it contribute to the relief of their pressing exigencies, that his error would be excusable, as prompted by an excess of zeal for their [the Company's] interest, operating with too strong a bias on his judgment; but that much stronger is the presumption, that such acts are founded on just principles than that they are the result of a misguided judgment." That the said doctrines are, in both the members thereof, subversive of all the principles of just government, by empowering a governor with delegated authority, in the first case, on his own private belief concerning the necessities of the state, not to levy an impartial and equal rate of taxation suitable to the circumstances of the several members of the community, but to select any individual from the same as an object of arbitrary and unmeasured imposition,—and, in the second case, enabling the same governor, on the same arbitrary principles, to determine whose property should be considered as overgrown, and to reduce the same at his pleasure.

PART IV.

SECOND REVOLUTION IN BENARES

That the said Warren Hastings, after he had, in the manner aforesaid, unjustly and violently expelled the Rajah Cheyt Sing, the lord or zemindar of Benares, from his said lordship or zemindary, did, of his own mere usurped authority, and without any communication with the other members of the Council of Calcutta, appoint another person, of the name of Mehip Narrain, a descendant by the mother from the late Rajah, Bulwant Sing, to the government of Benares; and on account or pretence of his youth and inexperience (the said Mehip Narrain not being above twenty years old) did appoint his father, Durbege Sing, to act as his representative or administrator of his affairs; but did give a controlling authority to the British Resident over both, notwithstanding his declarations before mentioned of the mischiefs likely to happen to the said country from the establishment of a Resident, and his opinion since declared in a letter to the Court of Directors, dated from this very place (Benares) the 1st of October, 1784, to the same or stronger effect, in case "agents are sent into the country, and armed with authority for the purposes of vengeance and corruption,—for to no other will they be applied."

That the said Warren Hastings did, by the same usurped authority, entirely set aside all the agreements made between the late Rajah and the Company (which were real agreements with the state of Benares, in the person of the lord or prince thereof, and his heirs); and without any form of trial, inquisition, or other legal process, for forfeiture of the privileges of the people to be governed by magistrates of their own, and according to their natural laws, customs, and usages, did, contrary to the said agreement, separate the mint and the criminal justice from the said government, and did vest the mint in the British Resident, and the criminal justice in a Mahomedan native of his own appointment; and did enhance the tribute to be paid from the province, from two hundred and fifty thousand pounds annually, limited by treaty, or thereabouts, to three hundred and thirty thousand pounds for the first year, and to four hundred thousand for every year after; and did compel the administrator aforesaid (father to the Rajah) to agree to the same; and did, by the same usurped authority, illegally impose, and cause to be levied, sundry injudicious and oppressive duties on goods and merchandise, which did greatly impair the trade of the province, and threaten the utter ruin thereof; and did charge several pensions on the said revenues, of his own mere authority; and did send and keep up various bodies of the Company's troops in the said country; and did perform sundry other acts with regard to the said territory, in total subversion of the rights of the sovereign and the people, and in violation of the treaties and agreements aforesaid.

That the said Warren Hastings, being absent, on account of ill health, from the Presidency of Calcutta, at a place called Nia Serai, about forty miles distant therefrom, did carry on a secret correspondence with the Resident at Benares, and, under color that the instalments for the new rent or tribute were in arrear, did of his own authority make, in about one year, a second revolution in the government of the territory aforesaid, and did order and direct that Durbege Sing aforesaid, father of the Rajah, and administrator of his authority, should be deprived of his office and of his lands, and thrown into prison, and did threaten him with death: although he, the said Warren Hastings, had, at the time of the making his new arrangement, declared himself sensible that the rent aforesaid might require abatement; although he was well apprised that the administrator had been for two months of his administration in a weak and languid state of body, and wholly incapable of attending to the business of the collections; though a considerable drought had prevailed in the said province, and did consequently affect the regularity and produce of the collections; and though he had other sufficient reason to believe that the said administrator had not himself received from the collectors of government and the cultivators of the soil the rent in arrear: yet he, the said Warren Hastings, without any known process, or recording any answer, defence, plea, exculpation, or apology from the party, or recording any other grounds of rigor against him, except the following paragraph of a letter from the Resident, not only gave the order as aforesaid, but did afterwards, without laying any other or better ground before the Council-General, persuade them to, and did procure from them, a confirmation of the aforesaid cruel and illegal proceedings, the correspondence concerning which had not been before communicated: he pleading his illness for not communicating the same, though that illness did not prevent him from carrying on correspondence concerning the deposition of the said administrator, and other important affairs in various places.

That in the letter to the Council requiring the confirmation of his acts aforesaid the said Warren Hastings did not only propose the confinement of the said administrator at Benares, although by his imprisonment he must have been in a great measure disabled from recovering the balances due to him, and for the non-payment of which he was thus imprisoned, but did propose, as an alternative, his imprisonment at a remote fortress, out of the said territory, and in the Company's provinces, called Chunar: desiring them to direct the Resident at Benares "to exact from Baboo Durbege Sing every rupee of the collections which it shall appear that he has made and not brought to account, and either to confine him at Benares, or to send him a prisoner to Chunar, and to keep him in confinement until he shall have discharged the whole of the amount due from him." And the said Warren Hastings did assign motives of passion and personal resentment for the said unjust and rigorous proceedings, as follows: "I feel myself, and may be allowed on such an occasion to acknowledge it, personally hurt at the ingratitude of this man, and at the discredit which his ill conduct has thrown on my appointment of him. He has deceived me; he has offended against the government which I then represented." And as a further reason for depriving him of his jaghire, (or salary out of land,) he did insinuate in the said letter, but without giving or offering any proof, "that the said Rajah had been guilty of little and mean peculations, although the appointments assigned to him had been sufficient to free him from the temptations thereto."

That it appears, as it might naturally have been expected, that the wife of the said administrator, the daughter of Bulwant Sing, the late Rajah of Benares, and her son, the reigning Rajah, did oppose to the best of their power, but by what remonstrances or upon what plea the said Warren Hastings did never inform the Court of Directors, the deposition, imprisonment, and confiscation of the estates of the husband of the one and the father of the other; but that the said Hastings, persisting in his malice, did declare to the said Council as follows: "The opposition made by the Rajah and the old Rannee, both equally incapable of judging for themselves, does certainly originate from some secret influence, which ought to be checked by a decided and peremptory declaration of the authority of the board, and a denunciation of their displeasure at their presumption."

That the said Warren Hastings, not satisfied with the injuries done and the insults and disgraces offered to the family aforesaid, did, in a manner unparalleled, except by an act of his own on another occasion, fraudulently and inhumanly endeavor to make the wife and son of the said administrator, contrary to the sentiments and the law of Nature, the instruments of his oppressions: directing, "that, if they" (the mother and son aforesaid) "could be induced to yield the appearance of a cheerful acquiescence in the new arrangement, and to adopt it as a measure formed with their participation, it would be better than that it should be done by a declared act of compulsion; but that at all events it ought to be done."

That, in consequence of the pressing declarations aforesaid, the said Warren Hastings did on his special recommendation appoint, in opposition to the wishes and desires of the Rajah and his mother, another person to the administration of his affairs, called Jagher Deo Seo.

That, the Company having sent express orders for the sending the Resident by them before appointed to Benares, the said Warren Hastings did strongly oppose himself to the same, and did throw upon the person appointed by the Company (Francis Fowke, Esquire) several strong, but unspecified, reflections and aspersions, contrary to the duty he owed to the Company, and to the justice he owed to all its servants.

That the said Resident, being appointed by the votes of the rest of the Council, in obedience to the reiterated orders of the Company, and in despite of the opposition of the said Hastings, did proceed to Benares, and, on the representation of the parties, and the submission of the accounts of the aforesaid Durbege Sing to an arbitrator, did find him, the said Durbege Sing, in debt to the Company for a sum not considerable enough to justify the severe treatment of the said Durbege Sing: his wife and son complaining, at or about the same time, that the balances due to him from the aumils, or sub-collectors, had been received by the new administrator, and carried to his own credit, in prejudice and wrong to the said Durbege Sing; which representation, the only one that has been transmitted on the part of the said sufferers, has not been contradicted.

That it appears that the said Durbege Sing did afterwards go to Calcutta for the redress of his grievances, and that it does not appear that the same were redressed, or even his complaints heard, but he received two peremptory orders from the Supreme Council to leave the said city and to return to Benares; that, on his return to Benares, and being there met by Warren Hastings aforesaid, he, the said Warren Hastings, although he had reason to be well assured that the said Durbege Sing was in possession of small or no substance, did again cruelly and inhumanly, and without any legal authority, order the said Durbege Sing to be strictly imprisoned; and the said Durbege Sing, in consequence of the vexations, hardships, and oppressions aforesaid, died in a short time after, insolvent, but whether in prison or not does not appear.