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Chapter 11 – The Governor-Generalship of Warren Hastings

Warren Hastings did not take his seat as first Governor-General in India until 1774; but from 1772, when he went to Calcutta as Governor of the Bengal Presidency, until his final departure in the spring of 1785, the whole course and character of Anglo-Indian history bear the impress of his personality and are connected with his name.

At the time of his taking office, the power of the Marathas, which had been accumulating for a hundred years, was threatening every prince and state in India from the Sutlaj River southward to Cape Comorin. The shattering overthrow that they had suffered at Panipat in 1761 had expelled them from the Panjab. Yet in Western India they were supreme; in Rajputana and Central India they plundered and ransomed at their leisure; and they were incessantly making predatory excursions north-eastward into the fertile plains

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watered by the Ganges and the Jumna to harry the lands of the Oudh Vizir, of Rohilkhand, and of the Mohammedan chiefships about Delhi, Agra, and Allahabad. Although the Maratha armies subsisted by free-booting, and although their leaders were rough uneducated captains whose business it was to levy contributions and seize territory, their civil administration, especially the whole collection of revenue in conquered lands, was managed by Brahmans, by far the ablest class of officials then existing in India. The Maratha tactics were to overrun a country with swarms of light horsemen, harassing and exhausting their opponents, exacting heavy contributions if they retired, or rack-renting the land scientifically if they settled down on it.

By this combination of skilful irregularity in war and methodical absorption of a country’s wealth, the leaders were able to keep on foot great roving armies, which were the terror of every other Indian power. The unwieldy State of Haidarabad, notwithstanding its size, was no match for them; they were too numerous and active even for such an eminent professor of their own predatory science as Hyder Ali of Mysore; and they descended annually, like a chronic plague, upon the Rohillas and the Oudh Vizir, who could barely hold against them the large provinces that they had secured out of the partition of the Empire. Everything pointed to the Marathas as destined to be the foremost rivals of the English in the impending contest for ascendency. And in fact no native power other than the Marathas did oppose any solid resistance to the spread of British

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Warren Hastings, Governor-General of Bengal

dominion in Tipper India, until the Sikhs crossed the Sutlaj long afterwards in 1845.

When Warren Hastings assumed the government of Bengal in 1772, the different Maratha chiefs were just beginning to found separate rulerships without abandoning their confederacy under the Peshwa. And from 1774, during the whole of his Governor-Generalship, the state and course of the East India Company’s foreign affairs were governed principally by the varying relations of the English with these chiefs. Hastings found that a Maratha army had made its annual irruption into the districts north-west of Bengal, where the emperor Shah Alam, who had been living at Allahabad on the revenues assigned him by Clive in 1765, solicited and obtained their assistance toward recovering his

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capital. Under their patronage, he had been replaced on his throne in 1771, but the Marathas treated his kingship as a mere pageant, using his name as a pretext for seizing more districts, and leaving him almost destitute in the midst of a plentiful camp. They were now swarming about the north country and rapidly gaining the upper hand of all the Mohammedan princes. What concerned the English more particularly was that they were demanding, in the emperor’s name, surrender of the districts of Kora and Allahabad, which had been made over to him by Lord Clive in 1765, when the Diwani of Bengal was granted to the Company. For since these districts bordered on Bengal as well as on Oudh, their occupation by the Marathas would have been equally fatal to the security of both territories.

On the northern frontier of Oudh, in the angle between the line of the Himalayas and the Upper Ganges, lay the country possessed by the Rohilla Afghans. This was a chiefship established about twenty-five years previously by an adventurer of reputed Afghan parentage, who had asserted his independence of the Moghul Empire during the confusion caused by Ahmad Shah’s earlier descent upon India. It was now under a confederacy of which Hafiz Rihmat Khan was the leader, and it formed an important section of the general line of defence against the Marathas, who had broken through in 1771 and now reappeared in 1772. As Oudh covered the open side of Bengal, Rohilkhand covered the exposed frontier of Oudh; so when the Rohillas implored the vizir to succour them, the vizir, fearing

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for his own dominions, asked the English to co-operate against the common enemy. The Calcutta government sent up an English brigade under Sir Robert Barker, instructing him to make a demonstration in support of the vizir and to act generally on his side in any negotiations. A treaty was arranged between the vizir and the Rohillas and attested by the English commander, whereby the vizir agreed to drive off the Marathas on payment of a stipulated subsidy by the Rohillas.

The Marathas soon afterwards retired of their own accord into quarters for the rainy season; but early in 1773 they again menaced Rohilkhand, and this time the combined forces of Oudh, the Rohillas, and the English marched against them. When they had been compelled to withdraw, the vizir demanded payment of his subsidy, but Hafiz Rihmat Khan, the principal Rohilla chief, sent evasive answers; whereupon the vizir addressed himself to the English, whose commander had attested, though he had in no way guaranteed, the engagement.

Out of these transactions arose the Rohilla War, which brought down such violent obloquy and so much loose parliamentary invective upon Hastings, against whom it has always been charged as a dark political crime. The whole situation was overspread by a network of transparent intrigue. The vizir suspected that the Rohilla chiefs, who were a band of Afghan usurpers in an imperial province, might on emergency join the Marathas against him; nor was there, indeed, any particular reason why they should not do so, since the

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vizir himself had been meditating seriously over a proposal from the Marathas that he should join them in an attack upon the Rohillas and in making a partition of their country. But he was wise enough to see that by joining a band of robbers to plunder his neighbour’s house, he would bring them the sooner to his own door; and on the whole he thought the safer step would be an alliance with the English, whose troops would make him sure of success in the field, and whose avowed interest lay in strengthening him as a barrier against the Marathas.

The vizir, therefore, at an interview with the Governor-General at Benares in 1773, desired the assistance of an English force to put him in possession of Rohilkhand, alleging that the Rohillas had broken their treaty by withholding the subsidy from him, and promising liberal payment for the service. To this proposition Hastings, after some deliberation and hesitation on both sides, finally consented. “Our ally,” he wrote to his Council, “would obtain by this acquisition a complete compact state shut in effectually from foreign invasions by the Ganges, while he would remain equally accessible to our forces either for hostility or protection. It would give him wealth, of which we shall partake, and give him security without any dangerous increase of power; ... by bringing his frontier nearer to the Marathas, for whom singly he is no match, it would render him more dependent on us and connect the union more firmly between us.”

The united forces accordingly invaded Rohilkhand

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in the spring of 1774; the Rohillas, who were well led and fought bravely, would soon have disposed of the vizir’s army, but they could not stand against the English troops, and after some gallant charges they were defeated. Hafiz Rihmat Khan was killed fighting courageously at the head of his men, and the short-lived power of the Afghan confederacy was utterly broken. Rohilkhand was annexed to the possessions of the vizir, who thereby acquired the country lying east of the Tipper Ganges up to the Himalayas, with a strong frontage on the river against attacks from the west.

The result, from the point of view of English political interests, was to complete our defensive position toward the north-west by substituting a safe and sub-missive ally for untrustworthy neighbours upon an important section of the barrier, and it is certain that the plan succeeded. For many years afterwards our north-west frontier remained undisturbed, until, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the English took up ground beyond it. Nevertheless, this advantage was gained by an unprovoked aggression upon the Rohillas, who sought no quarrel with us, and with whom we had been on not unfriendly terms; nor is Warren Hastings’s policy in this matter easily justifiable even upon the elastic principle that enjoins the governor of a distant dependency to prefer above all other considerations the security of the territory entrusted to him.

The Rohilla campaign was the only war directly planned and undertaken by Hastings; although he was constantly engaged during seven stormy years, beginning

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in 1776, with the support and supervision of military operations. From this time forward up to the end of the century, the battle-fields are all in the west and south of India. In Bengal, the subsidiary alliance with Oudh remained the corner-stone of the British defensive system; nor was that province ever invaded, though often threatened, by the Maratha armies. But in Bombay, the President and Council being anxious to distinguish themselves by the acquisition of territory, especially of Salsette, which is close to Bombay, entered into a covenant with a Maratha chief named Raghunath Rao, who had been ejected from power at Poona, to replace him at the head of the Maratha government, stipulating for the cession of certain districts to the Company in return. The object of the Bombay President was to obtain political ascendency at Poona and to make his presidency pay its way by an increase of land revenue; but the plan was very badly laid, and the means adopted proved quite inadequate for the ends in view.

When the Calcutta government received from Bombay a copy of the treaty with Raghunath Rao, they at once totally condemned the measures that had been taken, declaring the war “impolitic, dangerous, unauthorized, and unjust,” and protesting that the Bombay Presidency had imposed upon itself” the charge of conquering the whole Maratha empire for a man who appeared incapable of affording effectual assistance in the undertaking.” They foretold, rightly, that the enterprise would only embark them upon an indefinite

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Raghunath Rao

sea of troubles; and they peremptorily ordered the Company’s forces to be withdrawn, if it could be done without danger. But before this letter could reach Bombay, the expedition had started; Salsette and Bassein, two very important points, had been forcibly occupied; and the English were committed to the war.

At Arras was fought the first of that long series of battles between the English and the Marathas, almost all of which have been well and honourably contested. The Bombay troops were obliged to fall back in disorder, losing many English officers, who sacrificed themselves with their usual devotion in the attempt to rally their sepoys.

It now seemed to Hastings impossible to make peace immediately and honourably, so he insisted that his countrymen must stand their ground and face their reverses; reinforcements were sent across India; and attempts were made at negotiation with the Marathas, who were justly incensed by these proceedings.

In this manner England became entangled in a long, costly, and unprofitable war, which may be taken to have been the original source of the interminable hostilities which occupied Hastings for the next seven years, straining his finances, damaging his reputation, distracting his administration, and bringing both Bombay

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and Madras at different moments into serious jeopardy. Any attempt to give a brief and also intelligible narrative of the straggling inconclusive fighting that went on must inevitably fail. The essence of the whole matter is that the Marathas were at this period far too strong and too well united to be shaken or overawed by such forces as the English could despatch against them. They held a position in the centre of India which enabled them to threaten all the three divided English Presidencies, to intrigue successfully against the British at Haidarabad and Mysore, and to communicate with the French by their ports on the western seacoast.

The two minor Presidencies of Bombay and Madras were governed by rash, incompetent persons who were exceedingly jealous of the Governor-General’s superior authority, who disregarded his advice or orders, and thwarted his policy; while Hastings himself was hampered by opposition in his own Council and by enemies at headquarters in London. If he had been able to withdraw from the war at once, and to insist on making peace with the Marathas, he might have escaped the graver complications that followed upon the original blunder of attacking them. But the English still held, and were determined to retain, Salsette and Bassein, and although Hastings sent an envoy to Poona, the refusal of the Marathas to cede these two valuable points protracted negotiations up to the end of 1776, when a turn of European politics materially affected, as usual, the situation in India.

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By this time the United States had declared their independence, and England had now become so deeply involved in the attempt to put down rebellion in North America that the French determined to use such an apparently excellent opportunity of revenge for the injuries suffered during the Seven Years’ War. Providence, said the French minister in a secret state paper, had marked out this moment for the humiliation of England; and accordingly the colonists were actively, though surreptitiously, assisted by France to a degree that made a rupture with that power unavoidable.

A French agent reached India in 1777 to propose alliance with the Marathas on conditions including the cession of a seaport on the west coast. His overtures, which were naturally encouraged by the Peshwa at Poona, filled with alarm and indignation the English, to whom the actual state of affairs in Europe, India, and America rendered the prospect of such a combination exceedingly disagreeable. In the same year, Has-tings received secret information from the British embassy- at Paris that the French were concerting a scheme for an expedition to India in support of the enemies of the English there. In 1778, came news that Burgoyne had surrendered to the Americans at Sara-toga, and that France, probably also Spain, was declaring war; while a French ship from Bourbon Island had actually landed officers and military stores on the south coast for Hyder Ali.

Although at this moment the dissension between Hastings and Philip Francis in the Calcutta Council

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The great cave at Elephanta, near Bombay

was fierce and bitter, yet the Governor-General carried with a high hand his energetic measures for meeting these dangers. All the French settlements in India were seized; a force was despatched from Bengal to reinforce Bombay, and under the stress of the emergency the Governor-General determined to throw aside a treaty just settled with the Marathas and to sanction another march upon Poona in support of Raghunath Rao.

In modern times, the device of supporting pretenders to a foreign throne has fallen into disuse among civilized states, even when they are at war; partly because international law disapproves, if it does not condemn, the proceeding, but mainly because a long series of experiments has proved that such enterprises only exasperate the enemy and as political expedients

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are generally foredoomed to failure. Yet in Europe it was once an ordinary method of vexing or weakening an antagonist, and in Asia it is still a very popular kind of adventure; while Anglo-Indian history contains several examples that are invariably warnings.

Thus the backing of Raghunath Rao for the Maratha premiership turned out a disastrous speculation, for the second expedition ended in ignominious failure. Its leaders, civil and military, blundered signally and retreated disgracefully; the pretender fled back into exile; and nothing was gained except the just and enduring resentment of the Marathas. The Bombay government, says Grant Duff, had desperately sent a handful of men against the Maratha empire and had committed the conduct of such an enterprise to men totally unfit for such a charge; the truth being that the Marathas were at that time, and nearly up to the end of the century, at least a match for the English.

After this second discomfiture in the field, and after the miscarriage of some very diplomatic attempts to detach certain of the leading chiefs from the Maratha confederacy – attempts in which he was outwitted by those adepts in subtle statecraft – Hastings found himself caught in the meshes of protracted war with a loose, active, shifty, and indefatigable enemy, who well knew how to stir up trouble for him in various parts of India. Hyder Ali of Mysore, who for some years had been husbanding his resources and biding his time in the peninsula, now began to disclose ominous symptoms of the vindictive spirit that had been

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fermenting in his implacable mind ever since the English had abandoned him to the Marathas in 1769.

When the Calcutta government determined to seize the French settlements, orders had been sent to Madras that Mahé, which belonged to France, should be occupied without delay; because this port, in the extreme southwest of the Indian peninsula, might become an important channel of communication between the French and Mysore. It is conceivable that this may have been precisely the reason why Hyder Ali preferred that the place should be left under his protection; at any rate he desired the Madras authorities not to meddle with it, adding that since Mahé was within his jurisdiction and the inhabitants were his subjects, he might find it necessary to defend them if they were attacked. Nevertheless, Mahé was taken by an English detachment in 1779, at a moment when Ryder Ali was engaged in picking off some outlying districts belonging to the Marathas, having naturally availed himself of the quarrel between them and the English to round off his own possessions. Such a disregard of his express interdict gave the Mysore ruler serious umbrage, which was not lessened by the imprudent attempt of an English force to march across a part of his territory without his permission.

Throughout all this period – that is, during the last quarter of the eighteenth century – the balance of power in India rested upon a kind of triangular equipoise between the English, the Marathas, and Mysore. If two of these powers quarrelled, the third became

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predominant for the time; if two of them united, the third was in jeopardy. This is what. had happened in 1778, when the alarm of war with France drove the Anglo-Indian government into precipitate measures that embroiled us first with the Marathas and secondly with Mysore, and consequently brought down upon us the combined hostility of both.

By the summer of 1780, the fortunes of the English in India had fallen to their lowest watermark. At Calcutta the resources of Bengal were drained by the cost of distant and protracted war, and cramped, as Hastings said, by internal imbecility; for the Governor-General was still contending against perverse and obstructive colleagues, one of whom, Francis, he at last quieted by a pistol-shot, wounding him severely, though not fatally, in a duel at Calcutta, August 17, 1780. At Bombay, the funds were so completely exhausted that the Council reported, as their best reason for keeping the troops on active service abroad, their inability to pay them at home. In the south, Ryder Ali had made common cause with the Marathas, had drawn the Nizam of Haidarabad into the triple alliance against the English, had obtained promises of French co-operation on the seacoast, and in July, 1780, had descended from the hills upon the plains of the Karnatic with an army of eighty thousand men.

All premonitory signs of coming danger had been treated at Madras with inattention and contempt. Sir Thomas Rumbold, a corrupt and incapable. governor, departing homeward in the spring, had recorded in a

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farewell minute his satisfaction at leaving the southern Presidency in perfect tranquillity; yet a few months later Hyder Ali, whose preparations had long been notorious, burst upon the low country like a thunderstorm, and his cavalry ravaged the Karnatic up to the suburbs of Madras, in an irruption which Burke describes with splendid rhetoric in his speech on the Nawab of Arkot’s debts. The English troops sent to oppose him were surrounded and almost annihilated; the treasury was empty; and there were no supplies in the town, which might easily have been taken if Hyder Ali had resolutely assailed it in force.

Hastings lost no time in despatching money and reinforcements from Calcutta under Sir Eyre Coote, who defeated Hyder Ali in the battle of Porto Novo, in July, 1781, and managed to drive him off from the vicinity of the Presidency town; but the irruption had dislocated all the Governor-General’s plans. He now had both Mysore and the Marathas simultaneously on his hands. His finances were exhausted; his military strength overstrained; his attempts to create disunion among the Maratha chiefs had been frustrated; he had to fight one of them, Sind, in the north-west near Gwalior, another, the Peshwa, near Bombay; and his offers of peace, on terms very favourable to the Marathas, were ill received.

The utmost military exertions hardly kept the Marathas in check on the western coast, while at Madras the army which was confronting Hyder Ali was in the greatest straits for provisions, and the Presidency

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A castle on the Barwa Sagar, Gwalior

treasure-chest was empty. Shad, who was fast becoming the most powerful chief of the Maratha federation, had by this time extended his conquests from Central India northward toward Agra and Delhi; but although this forward movement threatened the flank of Bengal, yet it also brought him within striking distance of the strongest position of the British. After several

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sharp skirmishes with the English troops, and the loss of the fortress of Gwalior taken by escalade (a brilliant and daring exploit of Captain Popham, one of the forgotten Anglo-Indian heroes), Sind discovered that his interest lay in coming to an understanding. It was arranged that he should be allowed to prosecute his designs upon the few districts round Delhi still retained by the Moghul emperor, on condition of his mediating between the English and the Maratha government.

In this manner, after considerable sacrifices, Hastings at last succeeded in terminating, by a treaty made with the Marathas in May, 1782, a war that was neither honourable to the English name nor advantageous to their interests, and out of which arose those exigencies which drove him into the transactions that formed the main grounds of his subsequent impeachment. In 1780, the vast expense for the subsistence and defence of both Madras and Bombay had, as he wrote, reduced him to the most mortifying financial extremities; the two Presidencies depended almost entirely on Bengal for money; and in 1781 the treasury had been drained, although every kind of expedient for raising funds had been tried.

It was under the pressure of these embarrassments that he demanded a heavy subsidy from the Raja of Benares, which aroused a famous insurrection. When the raja evaded payment of the subsidy, Hastings went in person to Benares, imposed a still heavier fine upon him, and placed him under arrest. The result was an outbreak which for the moment placed the Governor-General

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in some jeopardy, but it was vigorously sup-pressed without any permanent damage to the political situation. Under the same stress of financial hunger caused by an empty military chest, Hastings subjected the Oudh Begums and their eunuchs to coercion for the purpose of compelling the payment of money which the Begums had no right to withhold, although it is more than questionable whether the Governor-General should have used such means to obtain it. The particulars of these two transactions have been so repeatedly and recently given, that an allusion to them seems here sufficient.

The diffusion and versatility of the Maratha armies had made them very troublesome enemies; and from their headquarters at Poona, above the passes leading down to the western coast, they overhung and could always menace Bombay. But their coalition was weakened for consistent action by mutual distrust among the chiefs, who were now supplanting the Peshwa’s authority in the Maratha empire, as the Peshwa had previously wrested the sovereignty from the heirs of Sivaji; whereas Hyder Ali’s forces obeyed the will of one ruler – strongly entrenched with an effective army in the angle of the Indian peninsula, commanding ac-cess to the plains round Madras and to the seacoast on both sides, – whose position, ability, and warlike energy all rendered him a most formidable antagonist in any single campaign. Hyder Ali had long perceived that the weakness of India and the strength of England lay in the defenceless condition of the Indian seaboard.

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Hilt of Tippu’s Sword

Now in His Majesty’s Collection at Windsor.

He had himself made strenuous exertions to organize a naval armament; and in his present war against the English he was relying upon the arrival of a French squadron which was known to be fitting out at Bourbon Island with the design of breaking the communications between England and India.

When this squadron appeared on the Coromandel coast, in 1781, Hyder Ali was employing himself in reducing the scattered posts of the English in the Karnatic, which were wholly at his mercy; and if the French could have co-operated, he would have taken the important town of Cuddalore, which, indeed, surrendered to his son Tippu in 1782.

But the French admiral sailed back to Bourbon; Hyder Ali was pressed by Sir Eyre Coote, and at last brought to bay at Porto Novo, where he was crippled by a heavy defeat which restored the open country to the English. Thus it came to pass that when Suffren, than whom France has never had a better admiral, returned to the coast in 1782 with a much larger fleet, he was met by a strong though unequal force of English ships under Sir Edward Hughes, and he found Hyder comparatively disabled. All the possessions of the French and the Dutch had

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been occupied by the English; so that Suffren had no base of supplies or repair upon the Indian seaboard.

He succeeded in landing two thousand French troops, which were soon joined by a large contingent from Hyder Ali, when a large force, including four hundred Frenchmen, under Tippu, Hyder Ali’s son, surprised Colonel Braithwaite’s detachment and almost destroyed it after a stubborn and desperate resistance. Meanwhile, five obstinately contested naval engagements took place in the Bay of Bengal between Suffren and Hughes. Suffren, an admirable naval tactician, might have beaten the English squadron if he had not been ill supported by his captains. On the other side, Hughes and all his men fought their ships with stubborn fierceness, until the superior seamanship and unconquerable endurance of the English sailors so far prevailed that the French fleet was prevented from affording any material assistance to the army on land.

Early in 1783, Bussy arrived from France with a large reinforcement of French infantry. But the death of Hyder Ali in December, 1782, had just relieved the English from their inveterate foe; and although his son and successor Tippu Sahib, acting with the French troops, reduced the English army before Cuddalore to a very awkward predicament, yet no effective blow had been struck when in July, 1783, the news of peace between England and France arrived. Thereupon Suffren sailed for Europe, and Tippu of Mysore, finding himself alone, very reluctantly came to terms somewhat later. Thus ended a war of seven years, during which the

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Some of Tippu’s forces

After Gold’s Oriental Drawings

English power in India underwent some perilous vicissitudes; but the ring of enemies by which Hastings had been encompassed was at last broken, and in the spring of 1785, when he resigned the Governor-General-ship, the English were at peace with all the native powers of India.

It will be observed that throughout the eighteenth century the main alternations of peace and war in India keep time with the successive ruptures and renewals of amity between France and England. So long as the French were rivals of the English in the country, the two Companies necessarily took the word of command, for peace or war, from their home governments. After this rivalry had ceased, the French kept their coast settlements; but their navy could always threaten the British Indian seaboard, and the safety of all English communications with India depended entirely upon the result of the maritime wars between the two nations.

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The Anglo-Indian governments were, therefore, so keenly sensitive to any apprehension of war with France that the mere rumour of a French descent on the coast aroused them to warlike activity. A native ruler who might be detected in correspondence with Mauritius was sure to be treated as a dangerous enemy, to be attacked and disabled with all possible speed. The consequence had been that each repeated demonstration of France against the English dominion in India had accelerated instead of retarding its expansion; excepting only the war that ended in 1783 with the Peace of Versailles. During the greater part of that stormy period the English were too heavily over-matched, too closely pressed in all parts of the world, to do more than hold their ground in India.

In 1781, England, without an ally, and with great odds against her, was confronted by all the great naval powers of Europe, France, Spain, and Holland, and by the North American colonies. In Asia, she was locked in a fierce struggle with the two most warlike and skilful Indian powers, both of whom were dealing with the French, who on their side had brought into play against England in India the same strategy that was proving eminently successful against her in America. England lost her American colonies not through the resistance on land, which might and would have been worn down, but through the pressure of her naval enemies upon her communications across the Atlantic. This was the weapon used against her in the east by Suffren, who had learnt from her the lesson that in

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regions distant from Europe superiority of sea power meant the control of the issues upon the land. The French made great exertions to stop England’s sea-roads to India, to drive her fleet off the Indian coasts, and to throw reinforcements into the camps of her Indian opponents; they captured the only good harbour that commands the Indian peninsula, Trincomali in Ceylon, and in conjunction with Hyder Ali they might have taken Madras, if Suffren could have shaken off the English admiral’s indomitable grip.

It is no wonder that, during such a struggle, and for some time afterwards, the territorial landmarks of England in India remained stationary, since her resources in men and money barely sufficed to preserve Madras and Bombay from destruction. But the centre and heart of the English power lay in Bengal, which the war never reached at all, and which was governed by a man of rare talent and organizing capacity. No Anglo-Indian government of that time could carry on a campaign by war loans, as in Europe; for its public credit, the sphere within which it could borrow, was confined to the Presidency town. The main cost had to be provided out of revenue, or by requiring subsidies from allied native rulers; and it was Bengal that furnished not only the money and the men, but also the chief political direction and military leadership which surmounted the difficulties and repaired the calamities of the English in the western and southern Presidencies.

When at last the Marathas made peace, when Hyder Ali died, and Suffren, with all his courage and genius,

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could not master the English fleet in the Bay of Bengal, there could be no doubt that the war had proved the strength of the English position in India and had tested the firmness of its foundation. Although the tidings of peace reached India in 1783, just in time to release the English army in South India from considerable difficulties, and though the French ships still outnumbered the English on the coast, yet Suffren, on receiving the despatches, exclaimed: “God be praised for the peace! for it was clear that in India, though we had the means to impose the law, all would have been lost.”

With the termination of this war ended the only period, in the long contest between England and the native powers, during which the British position in India was seriously jeoparded for a time. That the English dominion emerged from this prolonged struggle uninjured, though not unshaken, is a result due to the political intrepidity of Warren Hastings. It seems unnecessary to continue here the discussions, which have now lasted more than a century, over the career of this remarkable Englishman. What chiefly concerns us to understand is that Hastings carried the government of India safely through one of the sharpest crises in England’s national history, when her transmarine possessions were in great peril all over the world, because all the naval powers of Europe were banded against her.

When, in the course of the Seven Years’ War, the successes of the British against the French in India and North America had freed England from her only

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powerful rival, it might have been supposed that she should remain in comparatively peaceful occupation. But so soon as foreign competition ceased, internal troubles began in both hemispheres; the colonists struck for independence in the West; the native powers combined to dispute English predominance in the East; and France, evicted and disappointed, naturally encouraged and aided both movements. In America, the insurgents, after an. arduous struggle, tore down the British flag; in India, the end of a long and exhausting contest found the English flag not only flying still, but planted more firmly than. ever; nor had either the vindictive hostility of Mysore, or the indefatigable activity of the Marathas, succeeded in wresting an acre of British territory from the grasp of Warren Hastings.

Hastings had no aristocratic connections or parliamentary influence at a time when the great families and the House of Commons held immense power; he was surrounded by enemies in his own Council; and his immediate masters, the East India Company, gave him very fluctuating support. Fiercely opposed by his own colleagues, and very ill-obeyed by the subordinate Presidencies, he had to maintain the Company’s commercial investments, and at the same time to find money for carrying on distant and impolitic wars in which he had been involved by blunders at Madras or Bombay. These funds he had been expected to provide out of current revenues, after buying and despatching the merchandise on which the Company’s home dividends depended; for the resource of raising public loans, so freely used

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Umbrella tree and granite boulder at Bellary in the Madras Presidency

in England, was scarcely available to him; but because his war expenses exceeded the scale of his peace establishment, he was accused of lavish dissipation of the public income.

Hastings was thus inevitably driven to the financial transactions at Benares and Lucknow that were now so bitterly stigmatized as crimes by men who made no allowance for a perilous situation in a distant land, or for the weight of enormous national interests committed to the charge of the one man capable of sustaining them. When the storm had blown over in India, and lie had piloted his vessel into calm water, he was sacrificed with little or no hesitation to party exigencies in England; the Ministry would have recalled him; they consented to his impeachment; they left him to be baited by the Opposition and to be ruined by the law’s delay, by the incredible procrastination, and the obsolete formalities

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of a seven years’ trial before the House of Lords. Upon such a career, upon the value of the services rendered by Hastings to his country and the injustice with which he was requited, the English people must by this time have formed a judgment too broadly based to be much affected by any fresh scrutiny of the reckless calumnies flung at him while he stood at bay against false and vindictive accusers like Nuncomar and Francis, or fought at great odds against Hyder Ali and the Maratha league.

It may be added, as a curious proof of the reputation acquired by Hastings in Europe, that in 1785, when he was just leaving Bengal, the French ambassador in London seriously proposed to his government a plan of secretly encouraging Hastings to make himself an independent ruler in India by means of his native army and of French support. The ambassador, having evidently in his mind the success with which France had abetted the revolt of the American colonists, argued confidently that a man who held “almost a royal position” in India, who had been recalled with indignity and threatened with impeachment, would be found easily accessible to such overtures; and the peremptory refusal of the French minister to entertain his ingenious plot was a bitter disappointment to him.

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