Notwithstanding all the violent acts and declarations of Lord Macartney, yet a consciousness of his own misconduct was the sole incentive to the menaces and overtures he has held out in various shapes. He has been insultingly lavish in his expressions of high respect for my person; has had the insolence to say that all his measures flowed from his affectionate regard alone; has presumed to say that all his enmity and oppression were levelled at my son, Amir-ul-Omrah, to whom he before acknowledged every aid and assistance; and his Lordship being without any just cause or foundation for complaint against us, or a veil to cover his own violences, he has now had recourse to the meanness and has dared to intimate of my son, in order to intimidate me and to strengthen his own wicked purposes, to be in league with our enemies the French. You must doubtless be astonished, no less at the assurance than at the absurdity of such a wicked suggestion.
IN THE NABOB'S OWN HAND.
P.S. In my own handwriting I acquainted Mr. Hastings, as I now do my ancient friends the Company, with the insult offered to my honor and understanding, in the extraordinary propositions sent to me by Lord Macartney, through two gentlemen, on the 10th instant, so artfully veiled with menaces, hopes, and promises. But how can Lord Macartney add to his enormities, after his wicked and calumniating insinuations, so evidently directed against me and my family, through my faithful, my dutiful, and beloved son, Amir-ul-Omrah, who, you well know, has been ever born and bred amongst the English, whom I have studiously brought up in the warmest sentiments of affection and attachment to them,—sentiments that in his maturity have been his highest ambition to improve, insomuch that he knows no happiness but in the faithful support of our alliance and connection with the English nation?
12th August, and Postscript of the 16th August, 1783. Translation of a Letter to the Chairman and Directors of the East India Company. Received from Mr. James Macpherson, 14th January, 1784.
Your astonishment and indignation will be equally raised with mine, when you hear that your President has dared, contrary to your intention, to continue to usurp the privileges and hereditary powers of the Nabob of the Carnatic, your old and unshaken friend, and the declared ally of the king of Great Britain.
I will not take up your time by enumerating the particular acts of Lord Macartney's violence, cruelty, and injustice: they, indeed, occur too frequently, and fall upon me and my devoted subjects and country too thick, to be regularly related. I refer you to my minister, Mr. James Macpherson, for a more circumstantial account of the oppressions and enormities by which he has brought both mine and the Company's affairs to the brink of destruction. I trust that such flagrant violations of all justice, honor, and the faith of treaties will receive the severest marks of your displeasure, and that Lord Macartney's conduct, in making use of your name and authority as a sanction for the continuance of his usurpation, will be disclaimed with the utmost indignation, and followed with the severest punishment. I conceive that his Lordship's arbitrary retention of my country and government can only originate in his insatiable cravings, in his implacable malevolence against me, and through fear of detection, which must follow the surrender of the Carnatic into my hands, of those nefarious proceedings which are now suppressed by the arm of violence and power.
I did not fail to represent to the supreme government of Bengal the deplorable situation to which I was reduced, and the unmerited persecutions I have unremittingly sustained from Lord Macartney; and I earnestly implored them to stretch forth a saving arm, and interpose that controlling power which was vested in them, to check rapacity and presumption, and preserve the honor and faith of the Company from violation. The Governor-General and Council not only felt the cruelty and injustice I had suffered, but were greatly alarmed for the fatal consequences that might result from the distrust of the country powers in the professions of the English, when they saw the Nabob of the Carnatic, the friend of the Company, and the ally of Great Britain, thus stripped of his rights, his dominions, and his dignity, by the most fraudulent means, and under the mask of friendship. The Bengal government had already heard both the Mahrattas and the Nizam urge, as an objection to an alliance with the English, the faithless behavior of Lord Macartney to a prince whose life had been devoted and whose treasures had been exhausted in their service and support; and they did not hesitate to give positive orders to Lord Macartney for the restitution of my government and authority, on such terms as were not only strictly honorable, but equally advantageous to my friends the Company: for they justly thought that my honor and dignity and sovereign rights were the first objects of my wishes and ambition. But how can I paint my astonishment at Lord Macartney's presumption in continuing his usurpation after their positive and reiterated mandates, and, as if nettled by their interference, which he disdained, in redoubling the fury of his violence, and sacrificing the public and myself to his malice and ungovernable passions?
I am, Gentlemen, at a loss to conceive where his usurpation will stop and have an end. Has he not solemnly declared that the assignment was only made for the support of war? and if neither your instructions nor the orders of his superiors at Bengal were to be considered as effectual, has not the treaty of peace virtually determined the period of his tyrannical administration? But so far from surrendering the Carnatic into my hands, he has, since that event, affixed advertisements to the walls and gates of the Black Town for letting to the best bidder the various districts for the term of three years,—and has continued the Committee of Revenue, which you positively ordered to be abolished, to whom he has allowed enormous salaries, from 6000 to 4000 pagodas per annum, which each member has received from the time of his appointment, though his Lordship well knows that most of them are by your orders disqualified by being my principal creditors.
If those acts of violence and outrage had been productive of public advantage, I conceive his Lordship might have held them forward in extenuation of his conduct; but whilst he cloaks his justification under the veil of your records, it is impossible to refute his assertions or to expose to you their fallacy; and when he is no longer able to support his conduct by argument, he refers to those records, where, I understand, he has exercised all his sophistry and malicious insinuations to render me and my family obnoxious in the eyes of the Company and the British nation. And when the glorious victories of Sir Eyre Coote have been rendered abortive by a constant deficiency of supplies,—and when, since the departure of that excellent general to Bengal, whose loss I must ever regret, a dreadful famine, at the close of last year, occasioned by his Lordship's neglect to lay up a sufficient stock of grain at a proper season, and from his prohibitory orders to private merchants,—and when no exertion has been made, nor advantage gained over the enemy,—when Hyder's death and Tippoo's return to his own dominions operated in no degree for the benefit of our affairs,—in short, when all has been a continued series of disappointment and disgrace under Lord Macartney's management, (and in him alone has the management been vested,)—I want words to convey those ideas of his insufficiency, ignorance, and obstinacy which I am convinced you would entertain, had you been spectators of his ruinous and destructive conduct.