A History of the Four Georges and of William IV Volume III Part 13

[Sidenote: 1762--Clive and the East India Company]

At Murshidabad Warren Hastings had every opportunity to justify Clive's ac.u.men in singling him out for distinction. The post he held was one of exceptional difficulty and delicacy. Mir Jaffier was not altogether an agreeable person to get on with. The English in India were taking their first lessons in Oriental intrigue. They were learning that if it was not particularly difficult to upset one tyrant and place another on his throne, it was not always easy to keep that other on the throne, or at all safe to rely upon his loyalty to the men who had brought about his exaltation. Mir Jaffier was surrounded by enemies. His court, like every other Oriental court, was honeycombed with intrigues against him. His English patrons, or rather his English masters, proved to have an itching palm. They were always wanting money, and Mir Jaffier {251} had not always got enough money in his treasury to content their desires. So he began to intrigue against the English with the Dutch, and the English found him out and promptly knocked him off his throne, and set up a new puppet in his stead. By this time Clive had returned to England, and the direction of the destinies of the East India Company was in the hands of the Governor, Mr.

Vansittart, a well-meaning man whose views were not the views of Clive.

Clive objected very much to the course which the East India Company were pursuing. He wrote a letter to the London Board rebuking in no measured language the defects and evils of the Indian Administration.

Once again Clive was the cause of Warren Hastings's advancement. The London Board ordered the instant dismissal of all the officials who had signed Clive's letter and Warren Hastings was appointed to fill one of the vacant places.

The five years that elapsed between the departure of Clive for England in 1760 and his return to India in 1765 are not years that reflect much credit upon the East India Company's administration. They had suddenly found themselves lifted from a condition of dependency and, at one moment, of despair to a position of unhoped-for authority and influence. New to such power, dazzled by such influence, they abused the one and they misused the other. But the part that Warren Hastings played during this unfortunate five years reflects only credit upon himself. The vices of the East India Company were not his vices; he was no party to their abuse of their power, or their misuse of their influence. When he was advanced from the Patna agency, his place was taken by a Mr. Ellis, who seems to have been exceptionally and peculiarly unfitted for the delicate duties of his post. He appears to have carried on all his negotiations and communications with the Nawab Mir Kasim with a high-handed arrogance and an absence of tact which were in their way astonishing. Relations between the Nawab and Mr.

Ellis, as the Company's representative, became so strained that in 1762 Warren Hastings was again sent to Patna to investigate the whole trouble. {252} Clive's judgment was already justified: Warren Hastings's ability had already found much of the recognition it deserved; his twelve years of Indian life had changed him from the adventurous, inexperienced lad into the ripe and skilful statesman upon whom his masters were confident that they could rely in such a moment of emergency as had now come.

It would have been better for the Company if they had taken the advice that Warren Hastings gave in the report on the quarrel between the Nawab on the one side and Mr. Ellis on the other. He was a servant of John Company, but he was too good a servant not to see the faults of his masters and the follies to which those faults were leading. The Company had blundered very badly before the coming of Clive; had blundered through false security, through negligence, through pusillanimity, through greed. After the victories of Clive had placed the Board in Leadenhall Street, and its representatives in India, on a very different footing, the Company blundered through rapacity, through selfishness, through the arrogance born of an unforeseen success. All manner of oppressions and injustices were committed under the powerful protection of the English name. Hastings declared that the only way of ending the difficulty was to come to some definite settlement with the Nawab as to his authority on the one hand and the Company's privileges on the other. Together with Mr. Vansittart, the Governor, Hastings visited the Nawab, and a plan of conciliation was made by which the rights of the Nawab and the rights of the Company were duly apportioned and declared. But the headstrong Council of the Company refused the propositions of Warren Hastings and of Vansittart, and refused to make any concessions to the Nawab. The irritated Nawab retaliated by abolishing all internal duties upon trade, by which act he deprived the English of the unjust advantages for which they had contended. It was now a question which should attack the other first, and Mr. Ellis, hearing a rumor of intended hostilities on the part of Mir Kasim, attacked the Nawab, drove him out of his dominions and {253} set up Mir Jaffier again for a time. Hastings protested against these acts, and declared that he would have resigned but that he was unwilling to leave the Company while engaged in a hara.s.sing war. But his position was uncomfortable. His counsels and those of Mr. Vansittart were unheeded.

English aggression continued. Mr. Vansittart left for England in 1764, and in the December of that year Hastings followed him, glad to leave a scene of so much disorder, a disorder that was to increase alarmingly, until in the September of 1765 Clive reappeared in India and set things straight again.

[Sidenote: 1765-69--Hastings's return to England]

Of no period of Warren Hastings's life is less known than of the four years which he spent in his native land--from 1765 to 1769. He did not return to England like the traditional Nabob, with pockets overflowing with rupees. He had not employed his time and his energies, as so many other servants of John Company had done, solely to the furthering of his own fortunes, and the filling of his own pockets. If he had sailed for India fourteen years earlier as a penniless lad, he returned to England comparatively a poor man. He had tried his hand at commerce like every one else in India, but commerce was not much in his line.

He had the capacities of a statesman, he had the tastes of a man of letters, but he did not in any great degree possess the qualities that go to make a successful merchant. It is even said that he had to borrow the money to pay his pa.s.sage home, and it seems certain that when he was home, the generous way in which he endeavored to a.s.sist his relations sorely taxed his meagre means.

Hastings seems to have sought for distinction in the career of a man of letters and not to have found it. The ability which he displayed in administration and the writing of State papers and political correspondence vanished whenever he attempted to produce work that made a more ambitious claim to be considered literature. The clearness of statement, the width of view, the logical form, the firm grasp and profound knowledge which were characteristic of the evidence he gave before the House of {254} Commons Committee in 1766, gave place to a thin and niggling pedantry of style when he turned his pen to the essays and the verses of a man of letters. Yet there were some topics on which he was eminently qualified to write, and by which, under happier conditions, he might have earned distinction. While he was in India he had not allowed his active mind to be entirely occupied with the duties of his official career. That love of literature, that marvellous capacity for acquiring knowledge, which had characterized him in his Westminster school-days, remained with him at the desk of the East India Company and in the courts of Indian princes. He gave great attention to the languages and the literatures of the East. Most of those English who served their term in India contented themselves, when they troubled themselves at all about the matter, with learning as much of the native vernaculars with which they were brought into contact as was necessary for the carrying on of a conversation and the giving of an order. With such a measure of knowledge Warren Hastings was not content. He studied Persian, the courtly language of India, closely; he read much in its enchanting literature. When he came back to England in 1765 he was possessed of a knowledge of the most beautiful of the Eastern languages, as rare as it was useless then for an English man of letters to possess.

[Sidenote: 1769--Warren Hastings as an Oriental scholar]

Almost a century later the great American transcendentalist, Emerson, prophesied a rise of Orientalism in England, and he lived to see his words come true. But in the days when Warren Hastings was striving to make his way in London as an author, the influence of the East upon literature, upon scholarship, upon thought, was scarcely perceptible.

People read indeed the "Arabian Nights" in M. Galland's delightful version; read the Persian tales of Pet.i.t de la Croix; read all the translations of the many sham Oriental tales which the popularity of Galland and Pet.i.t de la Croix had called for in Paris, and which the Parisian writers were ready to supply. But serious Oriental scholarship can hardly be said to have existed in England. Sir William Jones was the only Englishman of {255} distinction who was earnestly devoted to Eastern studies; but his Persian Grammar, which was in some degree the foundation-stone of Persian scholarship in England, had not yet appeared, and Sir William Jones was still writing to Reviczki those delightful letters in which he raves about the poetry of the Arabs and the Persians. Thus the scholarship of Warren Hastings placed him in an exceedingly small minority among Englishmen of letters. Hastings was not the man to be alarmed or discouraged by finding himself in a minority. He was as impa.s.sioned an admirer of Persian poetry as Sir William Jones; he considered that the Persian language should be included in the studies of all well-educated men; he dreamed of animating the waning fires of Oriental learning at Oxford. He had a vision in his mind of a new scholarship, to be called into being by the generosity of the East India Company. He thought of Englishmen becoming as familiar with the deeds of Rustum as with the wrath of Achilles, as intimate with the Ghazels of Hafiz as with the Odes of Horace. He seems to have visited Dr. Johnson in the hope of securing him as an ally in his scheme. The scheme came to nothing, but the learning, the literary taste, and scholarly ambition of Hastings made a strong impression upon Johnson, who entertained a stately regard for the young man from India.

It soon became plain to Warren Hastings that he was not going to make much of a livelihood either by Persian poetry or by the calling of a man of letters. His thoughts had turned back to India within a year of his return to England, and he had applied for employment to the Company, but for some reason his request was not granted. In 1768, however, the Court of Directors appointed him to a seat in Council at Madras, and early in the following year, 1769, he sailed again for India on his most momentous voyage. Not only was that ship, the "Duke of Grafton," bearing him to a career of the greatest glory and the greatest obloquy; not only was it carrying him to a grandeur and a fall almost unparalleled in the history of men who were not monarchs. On board the "Duke of {256} Grafton" Warren Hastings was to meet with one of the most serious influences of his life. We have already seen how Hastings had married, had been a father, and how wife and children had pa.s.sed out of his life and left him alone. Hastings was a man of strong emotions. Now he met a woman who awoke all the strongest emotions of his nature and won his devotion for the rest of his life.

The Baroness von Imhoff was a young, beautiful, attractive woman, married to a knavish adventurer.

It is certain that she and Hastings felt a warm attachment for each other; it seems certain that Imhoff connived at, or at least winked at, the attachment. It may be that the understanding between Hastings and Imhoff was in this sense honorable--that the Baron was willing to free his wife from an unhappy union that she might form a happy union. It may be that Hastings's pa.s.sion was indeed, in Macaulay's fine phrase, "patient of delay." The simple facts that call for no controversy are that Hastings met the Baroness von Imhoff in 1769; that eight years later, in 1777, Imhoff, with the aid of Hastings's money, obtained his divorce in the Franconian Courts, and that the woman who had been his wife became the wife of Hastings. She made him a devoted wife; he made her a devoted husband. Hastings was never a profligate. In an age that was not remarkable for morality his life was apparently moral even to austerity. His relationships with the Imhoffs const.i.tute the only charge of immorality that has been brought against him, and the charge, at least, is not of the gravest kind. If Anglo-Indian society was at first inclined to be uncharitable, if the great ladies of its little world held aloof in the beginning from the Baroness von Imhoff, her marriage with Hastings seems to have restored her to general favor and esteem.

[Sidenote: 1771--Hastings's great administrative qualities]

Warren Hastings found plenty of work cut out for him on his return to India. He had his own ideas, and strong ideas, about the necessity for reforms. He was much opposed to the policy of sending out as secretaries to the local governments men who were without local experience and therefore less likely to take a warm interest {257} in the Company's welfare, while such appointments were in themselves unjust to the claims of the Company's own servants. He vehemently urged the necessity for making the rewards of the service more adequate to the duties of the service, and he announced himself as determined to do all he could for "the improvement of the Company's finances, so far as it can be effected without encroaching upon their future income."

If Hastings could scheme out needed reforms on his way out, he found on his arrival that the need for reform was little short of appalling.

The position which Hastings held was a curious one. He was President of the Council, it is true, but president of a council of which every member had an equal vote, and many of the members of which had personal reasons for wishing to oppose the reforms that Hastings was coming out to accomplish. A disorganized government had to be reorganized, an exhausted exchequer to be refilled, a heart-breaking debt to be reduced, and all this had to be done under conditions that well might have shaken a less dauntless spirit than that of Warren Hastings.

Warren Hastings was never for one moment shaken. In a very short s.p.a.ce of time he had greatly bettered the administrative system, had fostered the trade of the country by the adoption of a uniform and low Customs duty, and had greatly furthered the establishment of civilized rule in the province conquered by Clive. He accomplished this in the face of difficulties and all dissensions in his own Council, against subtle native intrigues, against opposition open and covert of the most persistent kind. Every creature who throve out of the disorganization of India naturally worked, in the daylight or in the dark, against Hastings's efforts at organization. In 1771, when he was made Governor of Bengal, he had attempted much and succeeded in much. He fought hard with the secret terror of dacoity. Having given Bengal a judicial system, he proceeded to increase its usefulness by drawing up a code of Mohammedan and Hindu law. For the former he used the digest made by command of Aurungzebe; for the {258} second he employed ten learned Pundits, the result of whose labors was afterwards translated into English by Halhed, who had been the friend of Sheridan and his rival for the hand of Miss Linley.

The work which Warren Hastings accomplished in India must be called gigantic. He created organization out of chaos; he marched straightforward upon the course which Clive had already marked out as the path of the East India Company's glory. The East India Company was not very eager to advance along that path. Hastings spurred its sluggish spirit, and, though he was not able to do all that his daring nature dreamed of, he left behind him a long record of great achievements. The annexation of Benares, the practical subjection of Oude, the extension of British dominion, the triumphs of British arms, must be remembered to the credit of Warren Hastings when his career as a great English adventurer is being summed up. That British Empire in India for which Clive unconsciously labored owes its existence to-day in no small degree to the genius, to the patience, and to the untiring energy of Warren Hastings.

[Sidenote: 1773--Hastings and the Rohilla War]

The two heaviest charges levelled against Warren Hastings are in connection with the Rohilla war and with the trial of Nuncomar, now better known as Nand k.u.mar. The genius of Burke and the genius of Macaulay have served not merely to intensify the feeling against Hastings, but in some degree to form the judgments and bias the opinions of later writers. But it is only due to the memory of a great man to remember that both in the case of the Rohilla war and in the case of Nand k.u.mar there were two sides to the question, and that Hastings's side has not always been investigated with the care it deserves. The adversary who denounced him in the House of Commons and impeached him in Westminster Hall, the adversary who a.s.sailed him with a splendid prose, were alike inspired by a longing for justice and a hatred of oppression. But it should be possible now, when more than a century has pa.s.sed since the indictment of the one and well-nigh half a century since the indictment of the other, to remember {259} that if Hastings cannot be exculpated there is at least a measure of excuse to be offered for his action.

There is much to be said from a certain point of view in defence of Warren Hastings's action with regard to the Rohilla war. The Rohilla chiefs were no doubt a danger to the Nawab of Oude, whom Hastings regarded as a useful ally of the Company. By the conquest of Rohilkhand Hastings hoped to obtain for that ally a compact State shut in effectually from foreign invasion by the Ganges all the way from the frontiers of Behar to the mountains of Thibet, while at the same time this useful ally would remain equally accessible to the British forces either for hostilities or protection. Put in this way the case seemed, no doubt, plausible enough to Hastings, and to all who thought with Hastings that Indian chiefs and princes were but pieces on a board, to be pushed this way or that way, advanced or removed altogether at the pleasure and for the advantage of the English resident and ruler. But what actually happened was that Hastings, in defiance of the whole principle of the Company's administration in India, interfered in the contests of native races and lent the force of English arms to aid a despot in the extirpation of his enemies. It is not to the point to urge that the Rohillas were not undeserving of their fate. Even if the Rohillas were little other than robber chiefs, even if their existence const.i.tuted a weak point in the lines of defence against the ever-terrible Mahrattas, all this did not in the eyes of Burke and of those who thought with Burke justify Hastings in lending English arms for their extermination and receiving Indian money for the loan. They saw an act of hideous injustice and corruption where Hastings saw merely a piece of ingenious state policy. He gave the troops, he got the money. The Rohillas were destroyed as an independent power, and the Company was richer than it had been before the transaction by some four hundred thousand pounds.

The story of Nand k.u.mar comes into the history as the result of an organic change in the composition and administration of the East India Company. North's {260} Regulating Act of 1773 made many changes in the administration of English India. The changes that most directly concerned Hastings converted the Governor of Bengal into a Governor-General, and reduced his Council to four members. The Governments of Madras and Bombay were placed under the joint control of Governor-General and Council. Hastings was appointed, naturally enough, to be the new Governor-General. His four councillors were Richard Barwell, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Philip Francis.

Barwell was the only one who was a member of Hastings's old Council.

The three others were in England; they had been chosen expressly to guide Indian policy in accordance with the views of the home Government. Clavering and Monson had already earned some distinction of a soldierly kind; Francis was by far the ablest of the three. The author of the "Letters of Junius" was much of a scholar and something of a statesman, but he was a man of a fierce and unbending temper, prompt to quarrel, hotly arrogant in argument, unrelenting in his hatred of those who crossed his purposes.

These were not the kind of men with whom Hastings was likely to get on, and from the moment of their landing in India, where they complained that they were not received with sufficient ceremony, they and Hastings were furiously hostile. The meetings of the Governor-General and his Council became so many pitched battles, in which Hastings, aided only by Barwell, fought with tenacity and patience against men whose determination appeared to be in every possible instance to undo what he had done, and to oppose what he proposed to do. They treated him as if he were little better than a clerk in the Company's service; they acted as if their one purpose was to drive him out of public life.

[Sidenote: 1775--Charges against Hastings]

As soon as it was plain that the new men of the new Council were hostile to Hastings, Hastings's enemies were eager enough to come forward and help in the work. One of Hastings's oldest and bitterest enemies was the Brahmin Nand k.u.mar. Nand k.u.mar had always been hostile to Hastings. Now, when Hastings was in danger, was {261} threatened with defeat and with disgrace, Nand k.u.mar came forward with a whole string of accusations against him, accusations to which Francis, Clavering, and Monson listened eagerly. Nand k.u.mar accused Hastings of many acts of shameless bribery, declared that he himself had bribed him in large sums, and produced a letter from a native princess in which she avowed that she had bribed Hastings in large sums. The three councillors appear to have accepted every word uttered by Nand k.u.mar as gospel truth. Hastings, on his side, refused to be arraigned at his own Council-board by a man whom he alleged to be of notoriously infamous character, though he and Barwell were perfectly willing that the whole matter should be referred to the Supreme Court. At last Hastings withdrew from the Council, followed by Barwell. The others immediately voted Clavering into the chair, summoned Nand k.u.mar before them, listened to all that he had to say, and on that evidence, in the absence of the accused man, the self-const.i.tuted tribunal found Hastings guilty of taking bribes from the princess, and ordered him to repay the sum of thirty-five thousand pounds to the public treasury.

For the moment it seemed as if Francis and his party had carried the day. Hastings had his back to the wall, he seemed to be well-nigh friendless. The triumvirate declared that there was no form of peculation from which Hastings had thought it reasonable to abstain, and they formally charged him with having acquired by peculation a fortune of no less than forty lakhs of rupees in two years and a half.

Suddenly, when the position of Hastings appeared to be at its worst, it changed. Nand k.u.mar and two Englishmen named Fowke, who had been very zealous against Hastings, were charged before the Supreme Court with conspiracy, in having compelled a native revenue farmer to bear false witness against Hastings. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was Elijah Impey, Hastings's old and attached friend, a circ.u.mstance of which much has been made. While Nand k.u.mar was bound over for trial on the charge of conspiracy, another and more serious charge was brought against him by a native attorney, who {262} accused him of forging and publishing a bond. On this charge Nand k.u.mar was arrested, and after a lengthy hearing of the case committed to the common jail.

There is nothing very surprising in this charge of forgery. Forgery was not a very serious crime in the eyes of such men as either Nand k.u.mar or his accuser. It was made plain that, whether he had forged the bond or no, he had forged the letter from the princess upon which the charge against Hastings was based, for the princess herself declared it to be a forgery. It had aroused some suspicion even before the disclaimer, on account of the signature, which did not resemble her signature in undoubted and authentic communications. On the question of the forged bond Nand k.u.mar was duly and apparently fairly tried. It was not very much of a charge. The business was very old. The native attorney had been seeking for some time to bring Nand k.u.mar to trial, and had only subst.i.tuted a criminal for a civil suit when the establishment of the Supreme Court enabled him to do so.

[Sidenote: 1775--The execution of Nand k.u.mar]

Nand k.u.mar's trial ended in conviction, and conviction for forgery brought with it by the English law sentence of death. Whatever may be thought of the crime of forgery in England, it certainly was not looked upon in India by Indians as a criminal offence of a kind that called for the severest penalty of the law. But Nand k.u.mar had been tried by English law. His judges, in order to show their fidelity not merely to the spirit but to all the forms of English law, had worn their heavy wigs all through the torrid heat of those Calcutta June days. By the English law he was convicted and sentenced to death. The triumvirate made little or no attempt to save the man on whose word they had relied. On August 5, 1775, Nand k.u.mar was hanged on the Maidan outside Calcutta. He met his death with the composed courage of a man who looked upon himself as a martyr. Whatever his offences may have been, he had done nothing which in his own eyes, or in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen, called for the pitiless punishment which fell upon him.

Of course, the important question is how far, if at all, {263} Hastings was concerned in the death of Nand k.u.mar. That is just the question which it is impossible to answer definitely. The certain facts are that Nand k.u.mar was Hastings's enemy, that Impey was Hastings's friend; that at a moment of grave crisis in Hastings's life, when Nand k.u.mar was the most eminent witness against his name and fame, that witness, was arraigned on a charge that was very old, that had been suddenly converted from a civil to a criminal charge; that he was tried, found guilty, and executed. On the basis of that bare narrative of facts it would seem that if Hastings had nothing to do with the matter, he might almost as well have had as far as the judgment of posterity went. The thing was too apt, the conditions too peculiar not to leave their stigma upon the memory of the man who gained most by them.

At the same time it must be remembered that, however black the arguments against Hastings may seem, there is no positive proof that he was directly implicated in what his enemies called the judicial murder of Nand k.u.mar. It must be remembered that the writer who has gone most deeply into the whole ugly story, Sir James Stephen, in his careful "Story of Nuncomar," has after long and exhaustive a.n.a.lysis of every particular of the case recorded his judgment in favor of Impey and of Hastings. Sir James Stephen's judgment is not final, indeed, but it must have weight with any one who attempts impartially to appreciate two public men who have been accused for more than a century of a terrible crime. Sir James Stephen believes that Nand k.u.mar's trial was perfectly fair, that Hastings had no share whatever in the prosecution, and that there was no collusion of any kind between Hastings and Impey with regard to the trial, the verdict, or the execution. Every one must form as best he may his own judgment upon the matter and the men; but Sir James Stephen's opinion is one that must be taken into account in any attempt to decide.

The death of Nand k.u.mar did not end the struggle between Hastings and his three antagonists. While they made no further attempt of a like kind--the fate of Nand {264} k.u.mar, said Francis, would prevent any further native information against the Governor-General--they still resolutely strove by all possible means to cross and check him. It is not necessary to follow in all their mean and wearisome details the particulars of that prolonged conflict. The odds were against Hastings until the death of Monson, when, by means of his own casting vote and the adhesion of Barwell, Hastings found himself the master of the majority at the Council-table. But the persistence of the attacks had their result at home, where an ill-advised offer of resignation made by Hastings was seized upon by the Directors of the Company. The resignation was accepted, Wheler was appointed Governor-General in his stead, and pending his arrival in India the post was to be filled by Clavering.

This was a severe blow for Hastings. At first he thought of yielding to it, in which case his career in India would have been closed. But Clavering's indecent eagerness to seize upon the Governor-Generalship before it was fairly vacant forced Hastings to defiance. He refused to surrender his office to Clavering. Clavering called upon the army to support him. Hastings called upon the army to stand fast by him. The army followed Hastings, and the support of the men of the sword was followed by the support of the men of the robe. The judges of the Supreme Court backed up Hastings and censured Clavering, and a little later Clavering's death left Hastings for the time supreme in the Council-chamber. His supremacy was contested after the arrival of Wheler, who immediately sided with Francis against Hastings. But the supremacy was not overthrown. Hastings was in the majority; he would not allow the alliance of Francis and Wheler to impede him in his purposes, and he stuck to his post as Governor-General.

The East India Company made no effort to enforce his resignation. The Court of Directors resented his conduct, and found fault with him persistently, but they could not overlook his influence with the Court of Proprietors, and the condition of affairs in India was too grave to make the {265} dismissal of Hastings wise or politic. The Government bore Hastings little love, and the King in particular was much incensed at his refusal to resign, and was all for his recall and the recall of Barwell who had abetted, and the judges who had supported him. But the struggle with the American colonies absorbed the attention of the Administration too closely to allow them to interfere so markedly in the affairs of India at a moment when interference might perhaps have a result not unlike the civil war.

[Sidenote: 1702-82--Haidar the bitter enemy of the English]

English opposition was not the only difficulty that Warren Hastings had to contend with. Like the monarch in the Arabian tale who discerns armies marching against his capital from every point of the compa.s.s, Hastings found enemies rising up against him in all directions. A league of three native powers menaced the safety of the British possessions. The Mahratta states combined with the Nizam of the Deccan. Both again combined with a new power whose rise had been as rapid as it was alarming, the Mohammedan power of Haidar in Mysore.

When Warren Hastings arrived in India the second time Haidar was in his sixty-seventh year. He was born in 1702 as the son of a Mogul officer in the Punjaub. At his death Haidar held a rank somewhat similar to that of a captain in the service of the Emperor of Delhi. Haidar deemed, and rightly deemed, that there was little or no opportunity for his ambition in that service, and his eyes seeking for a better chief, found the man in Nunjeraj, the nominal vizier and real ruler of the Rajah of Mysore. In 1750 Haidar persuaded the troops under his command to leave their Mogul prince and take service with the sovereign of Mysore. Under that sovereignty he rose rapidly to distinction. Though he was little better than a robber chieftain, the ablest and most daring robber of a horde of robbers, his power grew so rapidly that in time he was able to supplant Nunjeraj, and in the end to usurp the sovereignty of Mysore in 1761.

Haidar had his bitter grudge against the English. In 1771 he had been badly beaten by the Mahrattas and had appealed to the English to help him, as they had {266} undertaken by treaty to do. But the help was refused to the defeated prince, and the defeated prince swore an oath of vengeance against the English, and when the time seemed ripe he did his best to keep his oath. When in 1779 France declared war against England, Haidar declared in favor of the French. He gave his sword to the service of the Grand Confederacy in 1778 and prepared to march upon Madras. The President and the Council were taken unawares. It was not until Haidar had marched with fire and sword into the Carnatic, and that the smoke of the villages he destroyed in his progress could be seen from Madras, that they learned that Haidar was in earnest and not merely making a menace in the hope of frightening the English into an advantageous treaty. Hastings himself seems to have been convinced that Haidar did not mean to attack the Company, but when the Mysore prince's purpose was plain every effort was made to stay his onset.

Lord Macartney, although not one of the Company's servants, was made Governor of Madras. Haidar was compelled for the time to abandon his attempt upon the Carnatic. In 1783 his hatred of the English was ended by his sudden death. But he bequeathed it as a rich legacy to his son Tippu, a man as daring and as ambitious as his sire.

Hastings won away by concessions the Mahrattas and the Nizam from the cause of Tippu. But Tippu had his French allies, and Tippu and his French allies carried on a campaign successful enough to force the English practically to appeal for a peace, which Tippu accorded in a treaty flattering at once to his pride and to his ambition. It was a somewhat dearly bought peace for the English, for Tippu, regarding the advances of the English as a proof of their weakness, made demands far more arrogant than his successes justified, and those demands were agreed to by the English envoys. The treaty with Tippu had to be made on a basis of mutual rest.i.tution of conquests, so that England was left at the end of the struggle against Mysore with a great loss both of men and money, and no advantages, territorial or strategical, to set against the loss. Even the peace upon these terms obtained did not prove {267} a lasting peace. Tippu was not unnaturally tempted by the concessions of the English into further displays of arrogance which in time inevitably resulted in another war. But by the time that war broke out Warren Hastings had returned to England and had no further personal concern with the affairs of British India.

In the mean time Hastings's feud with his antagonists on the Council-board continued. A kind of reconciliation, a kind of agreement with Francis, enabled Hastings to allow Barwell to return to England and still to leave the Governor-General in authority at the Board. But Hastings found that reconciliation or agreement with Francis was practically impossible. Rightly or wrongly, Francis renewed his old policy of attacking every proposal and interfering with every project that Hastings entertained. At last the long quarrel came to a violent head. Hastings replied to one of Francis's minutes in some severe words, in which he declared himself unable to rely upon Francis's word, as he had found Francis to be a man devoid of truth and honor.

[Sidenote: 1780--Hastings and Francis fight a duel]

Such a charge made in those days was generally to be met with in only one way. In that way Francis met it. Francis challenged Hastings to a duel. Hastings accepted the challenge. The antagonists met, exchanged shots, and Francis fell severely wounded before the pistol of Hastings.

Hastings sent friendly messages to Francis and offered to visit him, but Francis rejected his overtures absolutely, and on his return to health renewed his attacks upon Hastings until the close of the year, when he sailed for England to carry on more successfully his plans against his enemy.

Well as the Supreme Court had served Hastings in the case of Nuncomar and in the quarrel with Clavering, the time came when Hastings found himself placed in a position of temporary hostility to that Court and to his old friend Impey. The bad machinery of the Act of 1773 left room for almost every possibility of friction between the Supreme Court on the one hand and the Council on the other, instead of framing, as it should have framed, its {268} measure so as to allow the two powers to work harmoniously together, each in its own sphere, for the welfare of British India. The friction grew more intense as time went on.

Sometimes one party to the quarrel was in the right, sometimes the other. Whichever was the case, the spectacle of the quarrel was in itself sufficiently humiliating and sufficiently dangerous. Hastings devised a scheme for the better regulation of the powers and privileges of the two conflicting bodies, but his scheme was put on one side by the British Government, and the Court and the Council remained as irreconcilable as before. At last it reached such a pitch that the Court issued a summons against the Government. The Government ignored the summons; things stood at a dead-lock; the personal relationships of Hastings and Impey were strained almost to severance. In this crisis Hastings thought of and carried out a compromise. He offered to Impey the presidency of the Company's chief civil court. Impey accepted the offer, and, though he has been severely censured for what has been called the taking of a bribe, the compromise proved to be the best way out of the difficulty that had arisen. Impey, who has been happily called the first of Indian codifiers, showed himself to be an excellent head for the provincial courts that were thus put under his control.

The provincial courts had been hitherto more of a curse than a blessing; under Impey's guidance they were brought into harmony with the Supreme Court. Impey was not long suffered to remain in his new office. Two years after his acceptance of the post he was removed from it by order of the Court of Directors. But the work he had done in that short time was good work and left abiding traces. Hastings's plan had borne fruit in Impey's "Code," and afterwards in the pa.s.sing of an Act of Parliament clearly defining the jurisdiction and the powers of the Supreme Court.

[Sidenote: 1781--Hastings and the Rajah of Benares]

One of the latest acts of Warren Hastings's administration was also one of the acts that most provoked the indignation and the resentment of those who in England were watching with hostile eyes the progress of his career. {269} Chait Singh, the Rajah of Benares, held authority at first under the ruler of Oude, and afterwards under the government of the East India Company, to whom the sovereign of Oude had transferred it. The Rajah of Benares paid a certain tribute to the Company. The heavy necessities of the war compelled Hastings to call upon the Rajah for a larger sum. The step was not unusual. In time of war a va.s.sal of the Company might very well expect to be called upon for an increased levy. But the Rajah of Benares was very unwilling to give this proof of his devotion to the Company. He demurred, temporized, promised aid of men and arms, which was never rendered. Hastings seems to have been convinced, first of all, that the Rajah was possessed of enormous wealth, and could well afford to pay heavily for the privilege of being ruled over by the Company, and in the second place that it was necessary for the power and influence of the Company to force the almost mutinous Rajah to his knees. He made a final demand for no less than fifty lakhs, or half a million pounds, and set off himself for Benares to compel the Rajah to obey.