The Prosecution of General Hastings
He was then taken away from school and granted a writership as the junior appointments in the East India Company were called , and in , at age 17, he sailed for Bengal. In British contact with India was still the monopoly of the East India Company, which was engaged in buying and selling goods at small settlements in Indian ports.
But after the outlook for both the company and its servants was radically altered.
Impeachment of Warren Hastings
The company became involved in hostilities in India both with the French and with Indian rulers, and under Robert Clive its army was able to depose the nawab, or Indian governor, of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in Although the company did not at this stage intend to set itself up as the actual ruler of the province, it was now so powerful that the new nawabs became its satellites.
Thus, the servants, including Hastings, began to be drawn more and more into Indian politics. His career was cut short, however, by bitter disputes within the Council. Short of money, Hastings sought service in India again. In he was appointed second in Council in Madras. Since he had last been in Bengal, the disintegration and demoralization of the normal Indian government of the province, begun after Plassey, had gathered speed; yet the company had been reluctant to create a new system in its place.
In practical terms Bengal was in the power of the British, who were also virtually its legal rulers after being granted in the powers called the dewanee by the Mughal emperor. But the business of government was still conducted by Indian officials, with very limited European participation. His view of the role of the British in India was later to be regarded as a very conservative one.
Bengal was to be governed in strictly traditional ways, and the life of its people was not to be disturbed by innovation. To ensure good government, however, he felt that the British must actively intervene. He acquired the new title of governor-general and new responsibilities for supervising other British settlements in India, but these powers had now to be shared with a Supreme Council of four others, three of whom were new to India.
The new councillors, who were led by an army officer, Sir John Clavering, and included the immensely able and ambitious Philip Francis , immediately quarreled with Hastings. Bribery, extortion, and other abuses of power by Englishmen, which had been so common since Plassey, undoubtedly continued. The quarrel between the new councillors and Hastings paralyzed the government of Bengal and produced a number of squalid episodes in which the newcomers, to discredit Hastings at home, encouraged Indians to bring accusations of malpractices against him, while his friends used various methods to deter such accusations.
The most notorious of these episodes concerned one Maharaja Nandakumar , who made accusations against the governor-general but was in his turn accused of forgery and hanged for it. Hastings was certainly not guilty of procuring a judicial murder, but recent research does suggest that he knew in advance of the counterplot against Nandakumar.
It ended in a pistol duel between Hastings and Francis; the latter was wounded, and he returned to Europe. But by the energies of the Bengal government were becoming more and more absorbed in war. As full participants in the unstable world created in India by the fall of the Mughal Empire , the company now found it difficult not to be drawn into the rivalries of the powers that had set themselves up in the ruins of the empire.
Rightly or wrongly, Hastings came to believe that it was necessary for the safety of the British in India to ensure that the Maratha leaders were friendly to the company and that he would be justified in applying military pressure to achieve this end. After the entry of France into the American Revolution in , he was also confronted with French expeditionary forces in the Indian Ocean.
The Marathas were brought to peace in , as was Mysore in , and the French were held in check until peace was made in Europe in But war stretched the company to the limit, disrupting its trade and thus antagonizing opinion at home.
Early life
War also forced Hastings or so he believed into dubious acts to raise extra funds, two of which—the demand for a subsidy to the company from Chait Singh, the raja of Banaras, and the requisitioning of the treasures of the begums of Oudh the mother and grandmother of the vizier —were to count heavily against him later. It was, however, an India at peace and with British dominions fully intact that Hastings finally left in But even before his retirement the allegations of Francis and the reports of wars, whether justly or unjustly undertaken, had damaged his reputation; and the passionate moral concern about the standards of the British in India felt by Edmund Burke , the great Whig parliamentarian, had come to be focused on Hastings.
But Hastings was vulnerable on episodes such as the execution of Nandakumar and his treatment of the begums of Oudh and Chait Singh and even on some aspects of his personal finances, where he had acquired money in excess of his official allowances. In , when Burke introduced an impeachment process against him a prosecution by the House of Commons before the House of Lords , these blemishes were enough to persuade the House of Commons and in particular William Pitt the Younger , the prime minister , that Hastings ought to be sent to trial.
The trial before the House of Lords lasted from to , when he was acquitted. It is difficult not to regard this long-drawn-out ordeal as a serious injustice. At the most it made some contribution to the process by which standards were being laid down for the future conduct of British rule in India.
After his acquittal, Hastings lived to age 85 as a retired country gentleman—unassuming, mild-mannered, and of scholarly tastes, as he had been during his active career. As the first governor-general of Bengal, Hastings was responsible for consolidating British control over the first major Indian province to be conquered. In his term of office he initiated solutions to such problems as how vast Indian populations were to be administered by a handful of foreigners and how the British, now themselves a major Indian power, were to fit into the state system of 18th-century India.
We welcome suggested improvements to any of our articles. Hastings was particularly upset by this, as he was an admirer of Pitt. Hastings sailed for home on 6 February and reached Britain in June In early Burke began his first move by raising questions over Hastings' role in the Maratha War. The attacks on Hastings were largely made by opposition Whigs hoping to embarrass the government of William Pitt. Pitt and other government ministers such as Dundas defended Hastings and suggested that he had saved the British Empire in Asia.
Pitt broadly defended Hastings, but declared his punishment of the Rajah had been excessive.
Warren Hastings
In the wake of this an anti-Hastings motion was passed in the Commons — Encouraged by Pitt's failure to adequately support Hastings, his opponents pressed on with their campaign. The situation quickly deteriorated for Hastings. It soon became clear that he was heading towards an impeachment. Hastings recruited Edward Law, 1st Baron Ellenborough to act in his defence.
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Hastings was to be prosecuted in the House of Lords by an Impeachment Committee. Impeachment was a relatively rare process of prosecuting those in high public office. Previous figures who had faced such trials included the Duke of Buckingham , a favourite of James I , and the Earl of Strafford , whose impeachment failed but was followed up by a legislative bill of attainder that resulted in Strafford's execution.
Hastings' trial began on 13 February and took place in Westminster Hall with members of the House of Commons seated to his right and the Lords to his left and a large audience of spectators, including royalty, in the boxes and public galleries. Hastings was granted bail in spite of Burke's suggestion that he might flee the country with the wealth he had allegedly stolen from India. In total there were nineteen members of the Impeachment Committee. In spite of the early excitement about the trial public interest in it began to wane as it dragged on over months and years.
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Other major events dominated the news particularly once the French Revolution began in Sheridan now complained he was "heartily tired of the Hastings trial" despite being one of its instigators. Hastings had initially been overwhelmingly portrayed as guilty in the popular press, but doubts were increasingly raised. Increased support for Hastings may have been a result of declining perceptions of his accusers.
Catalog Record: The history of the trial of Warren Hastings, | Hathi Trust Digital Library
A major lift for the defence came with the testimony on 9 April of Lord Cornwallis who had recently returned from India, where he succeeded Hastings as Governor General. Cornwallis rejected the accusations that Hastings' actions had damaged Britain's reputation and observed that Hastings was universally popular with the inhabitants. A further blow for the prosecution came with the evidence of William Larkins the former Accountant General of Bengal.
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They had rested their hopes on his revealing widespread corruption but he denied that Hastings had amassed any illicit money and made a defence of his conduct. Various other figures came forwards as character witnesses to support Hastings. A third of the Lords who had attended the trial's opening had since died [19] and only twenty-nine of the others had sat through enough of the evidence to be permitted to pronounce judgement.
On most charges he was unanimously found not guilty. On three questions five or six peers gave guilty verdicts, but Hastings was still comfortably cleared by majority vote. Burke, who had invested a large amount of time and energy into the prosecution, was frustrated by the ultimate failure of the impeachment. He had warned the Lords that it would be "to the perpetual infamy" of the House if they voted to acquit and remained convinced of Hastings' guilt until his death in Although this did not solve all his financial worries, Hastings was ultimately able to fulfill his lifelong ambition of purchasing the family's traditional estate of Daylesford in Gloucestershire which had been lost in a previous generation.
Hastings held no further public office, but was regarded as an expert on Indian matters and was asked to give evidence to parliament on the subject in After he had finished giving his testimony, the members all stood up in an almost unprecedented act for anyone other than the royal family. Hastings' successors as Governor General, beginning with Lord Cornwallis , were granted the much wider powers that Hastings had sought while in Calcutta.