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

IX. That the said Warren Hastings, in order to cover the violent and unjust proceedings aforesaid, did assert a claim of right in the same Nabob to all the possessions of his said mother and grandmother, as belonging to him by the Mahomedan law; and this pretended claim was set up by the said Warren Hastings, after the Nabob had, by a regular treaty ratified and guarantied by the said Hastings as Governor-General, renounced and released all demands on them. And this false pretence of a legal demand was taken up and acted upon by the said Warren Hastings, without laying the said question on record before the Council-General, or giving notice to the persons to be affected thereby to support their rights before any of the principal magistrates and expounders of the Mahomedan law, or taking publicly the opinions of any person conversant therein.

X. That, in order to give further color to the acts of ill faith and violence aforesaid, the said Warren Hastings did cause to be taken at Lucknow and other places, before divers persons, and particularly before Sir Elijah Impey, Knight, his Majesty's chief-justice, acting extra-judicially, and not within the limits of his jurisdiction, several passionate, careless, irrelevant, and irregular affidavits, consisting of matter not fit to be deposed on oath,—of reports, conjectures, and hearsays; some of the persons swearing to the said hearsays having declined to declare from whom they heard the accounts at second hand sworn to; the said affidavits in general tending to support the calumnious charge of the said Warren Hastings, namely, that the aged women before mentioned had formed or engaged in a plan for the deposition of their son and sovereign, and the utter extirpation of the English nation: and neither the said charge against persons whose dependence was principally, if not wholly, on the good faith of this nation, and highly affecting the honor, property, and even lives, of women of the highest condition, nor the affidavits intended to support the same, extra-judicially taken, ex parte, and without notice, by the said Sir Elijah Impey and others, were at any time communicated to the parties charged, or to any agent for them; nor were they called upon to answer, nor any explanation demanded of them.

XI. That the article affecting private property secured by public acts, in the said pretended treaty, contains nothing more than a general permission, given by the said Warren Hastings, for confiscating such jaghires, or landed estates, with the modifications therein contained, "as he [the Nabob] may find necessary," but does not directly point at, or express by name, any of the landed possessions of the Nabob's mother. But soon after the signing of the said pretended treaty, (that is, on the 29th November, 1781,) it did appear that a principal object thereof was to enable the Nabob to seize upon the estates of his female parents aforesaid, which had been guarantied to them by the East India Company. And although in the treaty, or pretended treaty, aforesaid, nothing more is purported than to give a simple permission to the Nabob to seize upon and confiscate the estates, leaving the execution or non-execution of the same wholly to his discretion, yet it appears, by several letters from Nathaniel Middleton, Esquire, the Resident at the Court of Oude, of the 6th, 7th, and 9th of December, 1781, that no such discretion as expressed in the treaty was left, or intended to be left, with him, the said Nabob, but that the said article ought practically to have a construction of a directly contrary tendency: that, instead of considering the article as originating from the Nabob, and containing a power provided in his favor which he did not possess before, the confiscation of the jaghires aforesaid was to be considered as a measure originating from the English, and to be intended for their benefit, and, as such, that the execution was to be forced upon him; and the execution thereof was accordingly forced upon him. And the Resident, Middleton, on the Nabob's refusal to act in contradiction to his sworn engagement guarantied by the East India Company, and in the undutiful and unnatural manner required, did totally supersede his authority in his own dominions, considering himself as empowered so to act by the instructions of the said Hastings, although he had reason to apprehend a general insurrection in consequence thereof, and that he found it necessary to remove his family, "which he did not wish to retain there, in case of a rupture with the Nabob, or the necessity of employing the British forces in the reduction of his aumils and troops"; and he did accordingly, as sovereign, issue his own edicts and warrants, in defiance of the resistance of the Nabob, in the manner by him described in the letters aforesaid,—in a letter of 6th December, 1781, that is to say: "Finding the Nabob wavering in his determination about the resumption of the jaghires, I this day, in presence of and with the minister's concurrence, ordered the necessary purwannahs to be written to the several aumils for that purpose; and it was my firm resolution to have dispatched them this evening, with proper people to see them punctually and implicitly carried into execution; but before they were all transcribed, I received a message from the Nabob, who had been informed by the minister of the resolution I had taken, entreating that I would withhold the purwannahs until to-morrow morning, when he would attend me, and afford me satisfaction on this point. As the loss of a few hours in the dispatch of the purwannahs appeared of little moment, and as it is possible the Nabob, seeing that the business will at all events be done, may make it an act of his own, I have consented to indulge him in his request; but, be the remit of our interview whatever it may, nothing shall prevent the orders being issued to-morrow, either by him or myself, with the concurrence of the ministers. Your pleasure respecting the Begums I have learnt from Sir Elijah, and the measure heretofore proposed will soon follow the resumption of the jaghires. From both, or indeed from the former alone, I have no doubt of the complete liquidation of the Company's balance." And also in another letter, of the 7th December, 1781: "I had the honor to address you yesterday, informing you of the steps I had taken in regard to the resumption of the jaghires. This morning the Vizier came to me according to his agreement, but seemingly without any intention or desire to yield me satisfaction on the subject under discussion; for, after a great deal of conversation, consisting on his part of trifling evasion and puerile excuses for withholding his assent to the measure, though at the same time professing the most implicit submission to your wishes, I found myself without any other resource than the one of employing that exclusive authority with which I consider your instructions to vest me: I therefore declared to the Nabob, in presence of the minister and Mr. Johnson, who I desired might bear witness of the conversation, that I construed his rejection of the measure proposed as a breach of his solemn promise to you, and an unwillingness to yield that assistance which was evidently in his power towards liquidating his heavy accumulating debt to the Company, and that I must in consequence determine, in my own justification, to issue immediately the purwannahs, which had only been withheld in the sanguine hope that he would be prevailed upon to make that his own act which nothing but the most urgent necessity could force me to make mine. He left me without any reply, but afterwards sent for his minister and authorized him to give me hopes that my requisition would be complied with; on which I expressed my satisfaction, but declared that I could admit of no further delays, and, unless I received his Excellency's formal acquiescence before the evening, I should then most assuredly issue my purwannahs; which I have accordingly done, not having had any assurances from his Excellency that could justify a further suspension. I shall, as soon as possible, inform you of the effect of the purwannahs, which, in many parts, I am apprehensive it will be found necessary to enforce with military aid. I am not, however, entirely without hopes that the Nabob, when he sees the inefficacy of further opposition, may alter his conduct, and prevent the confusion and disagreeable consequences which would be too likely to result from the prosecution of a measure of such importance without his concurrence. His Excellency talks of going to Fyzabad, for the purpose heretofore mentioned, in three or four days: I wish he may be serious in his intention, and you may rest assured I shall spare no pains to keep him to it." And further, in a letter of the 9th December, 1781: "I had the honor to address you on the 7th instant, informing you of the conversation which had passed between the Nabob and me on the subject of resuming the jaghires, and the step I had taken in consequence. His Excellency appeared to be very much hurt and incensed at the measure, and loudly complains of the treachery of his ministers,—first, in giving you any hopes that such a measure would be adopted, and, secondly, in their promising me their whole support in carrying it through; but, as I apprehended, rather than suffer it to appear that the point had been carried in opposition to his will, he at length yielded a nominal acquiescence, and has this day issued his own purwannahs to that effect,—declaring, however, at the same time, both to me and his ministers, that it is an act of compulsion. I hope to be able in a few days, in consequence of this measure, to transmit you an account of the actual value and produce of the jaghires, opposed to the nominal amount at which they stand rated on the books of the circar."

XII. That the said Warren Hastings, instead of expressing any disapprobation of the proceedings aforesaid, in violation of the rights secured by treaty with the mother and grandmother of the reigning prince of Oude, and not less in violation of the sovereign rights of the Nabob himself, did by frequent messages stimulate the said Middleton to a perseverance in and to a rigorous execution of the same,—and in his letter from Benares of the 25th December, 1781, did "express doubts of his firmness and activity, and, above all, of his recollection of his instructions and their importance; and that, if he could not rely on his own [power] and the means he possessed for performing those services, he would free him [the said Middleton] from the charges, and would proceed himself to Lucknow, and would himself undertake them."

XIII. That very doubtful credit is to be given to any letters written by the said Middleton to the said Warren Hastings, when they answer the purposes which the said Warren Hastings had evidently in view: the said Middleton having written to him in the following manner from Lucknow, 30th December, 1781.

XIV. "MY DEAR SIR,—I have this day answered your public letter in the form you seem to expect. I hope there is nothing in it that may appear to you too pointed. If you wish the matter to be otherwise understood than I have taken up and stated it, I need not say I shall be ready to conform to whatever you may prescribe, and to take upon myself any share of the blame of the (hitherto) non-performance of the stipulations made on behalf of the Nabob: though I do assure you I myself represented to his Excellency and the ministers, (conceiving it to be your desire,) that the apparent assumption of the reins of his government, (for in that light he undoubtedly considered it at the first view,) as specified in the agreement executed by him, was not meant to be fully and literally enforced, but that it was necessary you should have something to show on your side, as the Company were deprived of a benefit without a requital; and upon the faith of this assurance alone, I believe I may safely affirm, his Excellency's objections to signing the treaty were given up. If I have understood the matter wrong, or misconceived your design, I am truly sorry for it: however, it is not too late to correct the error; and I am ready to undertake, and, God willing, to carry through, whatever you may, on receipt of my public letter, tell me is your final resolve."

XV. That it appears, but on his, the said Middleton's, sole authority, in a letter from the said Middleton, dated Lucknow, 2d December, 1781, that the Nabob of Oude, wishing to evade the measure of resuming the jaghires aforesaid, did send a message to him, purporting, "that, if the measure proposed was intended to procure the payment of the balance due to the Company, he could better and more expeditiously effect that object by taking from his mother the treasures of his father, which he did assert to be in her hands, and to which he did claim a right; and that it would be sufficient that he, the said Hastings, would hint his opinion upon it, without giving a formal sanction to the measure proposed; and that, whatever his resolution upon the subject should be, it would be expedient to keep it secret": adding, "The resumption of the jaghires it is necessary to suspend till I have your answer to this letter."

XVI. That it does not appear that the said Hastings did write any letter in answer to the proposal of the said Middleton, but he, the said Hastings, did communicate his pleasure thereon, to Sir Elijah Impey, being then at Lucknow, for his, the said Middleton's, information; and it does appear that the seizing of the treasures of the mother of the Nabob, said to have been proposed as an alternative by the said Nabob to prevent the resumption of the jaghires, was determined upon and ordered by the said Hastings,—and that the resumption of the said jaghires, for the ransom of which the seizing of the treasures was proposed, was also directed: not one only, but both sides of the alternative, being enforced upon the female parents of the Nabob aforesaid, although both the one and the other had been secured to them by a treaty with the East India Company.

XVIII.59 That Sir Elijah Impey, Knight, his Majesty's chief-justice at Port William, did undertake a journey of nine hundred miles, from Calcutta to Lucknow, on pretence of health and pleasure, but was in reality in the secret of these and other irregular transactions, and employed as a channel of confidential communication therein. And the said Warren Hastings, by presuming to employ the said chief-justice, a person particularly unfit for an agent, in the transaction of affairs primâ facie at least unjust, violent, and oppressive, contrary to public faith, and to the sentiments and law of Nature, and which he, the said Hastings, was sensible "could not fail to draw obloquy on himself by his participation," did disgrace the king's commission, and render odious to the natives of Hindostan the justice of the crown of Great Britain.

XIX. That, although the said Warren Hastings was from the beginning duly informed of the violence offered to the personal inclinations of the Nabob, and the "apparent assumption of the reins of his government," for the purposes aforesaid, yet more than two years after he did write to his private agent, Major Palmer, that is to say, in his letter of the 6th of May, 1783, "that it has been a matter of equal surprise and concern to him to learn from the letters of the Resident that the Nabob Vizier was with difficulty and almost unconquerable reluctance induced to give his consent to the attachment of the treasure deposited by his father under the charge of the Begum, his mother, and to the resumption of her jaghire, and the other jaghires of the individuals of his family": which pretence of ignorance of the Nabob's inclinations is fictitious and groundless. But whatever deception he might pretend to be in concerning the original intention of the Nabob, he was not, nor did he pretend to be, ignorant of his, the Nabob's, reluctance to proceed in the said measures; but did admit his knowledge of the Nabob's reluctance to their full execution, and yet did justify the same as follows.

XX. "I desire that you will inform him [the Nabob], that, in these and the other measures which were either proposed by him or received his concurrence in the agreement passed between us at Chunar, I neither had nor could have any object but his relief, and the strengthening of his connection with the Company; and that I should not on any other ground have exposed myself to the personal obloquy which they could not fail to draw upon me by my participation in them, but left him to regulate by his own discretion and by his own means the economy of his own finances, and, with much more cause, the assertion of his domestic right. In these he had no regular claim to my interference; nor had I, in my public character, any claim upon him, but for the payment of the debt then due from him to the Company, although I was under the strongest obligations to require it for the relief of the pressing exigencies of their affairs. He will well remember the manner in which, at a visit to him in his own tent, I declared my acquiescence freely, and without hesitation, to each proposition, which afterwards formed the substance of a written agreement, as he severally made them; and he can want no other evidence of my motives for so cheerful a consent, nor for the requests which I added as the means of fulfilling his purposes in them. Had he not made these measures his own option, I should not have proposed them; but having once adopted them, and made them the conditions of a formal and sacred agreement, I had no longer an option to dispense with them, but was bound to the complete performance and execution of them, as points of public duty and of national faith, for which I was responsible to my king, and the Company my immediate superiors: and this was the reason for my insisting on their performance and execution, when I was told that the Nabob himself had relaxed from his original purpose, and expressed a reluctance to proceed in it."

XXI. That the said Warren Hastings does admit that the Nabob had originally no regular claim upon him for his interference, or he any claim on the Nabob, which, might entitle him to interfere in the Nabob's domestic concerns; yet, in order to justify his so invidious an interference, he did, in the letter aforesaid, give a false account of the said treaty, which (as before mentioned) did nothing more than give a permission to the Nabob to resume the jaghires, if HE should judge the same to be necessary, and did therefore leave the right of dispensing with the whole, or any part thereof, as much in his option after the treaty as it was before: the declared intent of the article being only to remove the restraint of the Company's guaranty forbidding such resumption, but furnishing nothing which could authorize putting that resumption into the hands and power of the Company, to be enforced at their discretion. And with regard to the other part of the spoil made by order of the said Hastings, and by him in the letter aforesaid stated to be made equally against the will of the Nabob, namely, that which was committed on the personal and movable property of the female parents of the Nabob, nothing whatsoever in relation to the same is stipulated in the said pretended treaty.

XXII. That the said Hastings, in asserting that he was bound to the acts aforesaid by public duty, and even by national faith, in the very instance in which that national faith was by him grossly violated, and in justifying himself by alleging that he was bound to the complete execution by a responsibility to the Company which he immediately served, and by asserting that these violent and rapacious proceedings, subjecting all persons concerned in them to obloquy, would be the means of strengthening the connection of the Nabob with the British United Company of Merchants trading to the East Indies, did disgrace the authority under which he immediately acted. And that the said Hastings, in justifying his obligations to the said acts by a responsibility to the king, namely, to the King of Great Britain, did endeavor to throw upon his Majesty, his lawful sovereign, (whose name and character he was bound to respect, and to preserve in estimation with all persons, and particularly with the sovereign princes, the allies of his government,) the disgrace and odium of the aforesaid acts, in which a sovereign prince was by him, the said Hastings, made an instrument of perfidy, wrong, and outrage to two mothers and wives of sovereign princes, and in which he did exhibit to all Asia (a country remarkable for the utmost devotion to parental authority) the spectacle of a Christian governor, representing a Christian sovereign, compelling a son to become the instrument of such violence and extortion against his own mother.

That the said Warren Hastings, by repeated messages and injunctions, and under menaces of "a dreadful responsibility," did urge the Resident to a completion of this barbarous act; and well knowing that such an act would probably be resisted, did order him, the said Resident, to use the British troops under his direction for that purpose; and did offer the assistance of further forces, urging the execution in the following peremptory terms: "You yourself must be personally present; you must not allow any negotiation or forbearance, but must prosecute both services, until the Begums [princesses] are at the entire mercy of the Nabob."60

XXIII. That, in conformity to the said peremptory orders, a party of British and other troops, with the Nabob in the ostensible, and the British Resident in the real command, were drawn towards the city of Fyzabad, in the castle of which city the mother and grandmother of the Nabob had their residence; and after expending two days in negotiation, (the particulars of which do not appear,) the Resident not receiving the satisfaction he looked for, the town was first stormed, and afterwards the castle; and little or no resistance being made, and no blood being shed on either side, the British troops occupied all the outer inclosure of the palace of one of the princesses, and blocked up the other.61

XXIV. That this violent assault, and forcible occupation of their houses, and the further extremities they had to apprehend, did not prevail on the female parents of the Nabob to consent to any submission, until the Resident sent in unto them a letter from the said Warren Hastings,62 (no copy of which appears,) declaring himself no longer bound by the guaranty, and containing such other matter as tended to remove all their hopes, which seemed to be centred in British faith.

XXV. That the chief officers of their household, who were their treasurers and confidential agents, the eunuchs Jewar Ali Khân and Behar Ali Khân, persons of great eminence, rank, and distinction, who had been in high trust and favor with the late Nabob, were ignominiously put into confinement under an inferior officer, in order to extort the discovery of the treasures and effects committed to their care and fidelity. And the said Middleton did soon after, that is to say, on the 12th of January, 1782, deliver them over for the same purpose into the custody of Captain Neal Stuart, commanding the eighth regiment, by his order given in the following words: "To be kept in close and secure confinement, admitting of no intercourse with them, excepting by their four menial servants, who are authorized to attend them until further orders. You will allow them to have any necessary and convenience which may be consistent with a strict guard over them."

XXVI. That, in consequence of these severities upon herself, and on those whom she most regarded and trusted, the mother of the said Nabob did at length consent to the delivering up of her treasures, and the same were paid to the Resident, to the amount of the bond given by the Nabob to the Company for his balance of the year 1779-80; and the said treasure "was taken from the most secret recesses in the houses of the two eunuchs."

XXVII. That the Nabob continuing still under the pressure of a further pretended debt to the Company for his balance of the year 1780-81, the Resident, not satisfied with the seizure of the estates and treasures of his parents aforesaid, although he, the said Resident, did confess that the princess mother "had declared, with apparent truth, that she had delivered up the whole of the property in her hands, excepting goods which from the experience which he, the Resident, had of the small produce of the sales of a former payment made by her in that mode he did refuse, and that in his opinion it certainly would have amounted to little or nothing," did proceed to extort another great sum of money, that is to say, the sum of one hundred and twenty thousand pounds sterling, on account of the last pretended balance aforesaid: in order, therefore, to compel the said ministers and treasurers either to distress their principals by extorting whatever valuable substance might by any possibility remain concealed, or to furnish the said sum from their own estates or from their credit with their friends, did order their imprisonment to be aggravated with circumstances of great cruelty, giving an order to Lieutenant Francis Rutledge, dated 20th January, 1782, in the following words.