(Signed) "EDWARD COLEBROOKE,
"Persian Translator."
Hear, then, my Lords, what becomes of the records of the Company, which were to be the vouchers for every public act,—which were to show whether, in the Company's transactions, agreements, and treaties with the native powers, the public faith was kept or not. You see them all crammed into Mr. Scott's trunk: a trunk into which they put what they please, take out what they please, suppress what they please, or thrust in whatever will answer their purpose. The records of the Governor-General and Council of Bengal are kept in Captain Jonathan Scott's trunk; this trunk is to be considered as the real and true channel of intelligence between the Company and the country powers. But even this channel was not open to any member of the Council, except Mr. Hastings; and when the Council, for the first time, daring to think for themselves, call upon the Persian Translator, he knows nothing about it. We find that it is given into the hands of a person nominated by Mr. Hastings,—Major Davy. What do the Company know of him? Why, he was Mr. Hastings's private secretary. In this manner the Council have been annihilated during all these transactions, and have no other knowledge of them than just what Mr. Hastings and his trunk-keeper thought proper to give them. All, then, that we know of these transactions is from the miserable, imperfect, garbled correspondence.
But even if these papers contained a full and faithful account of the correspondence, what we charge is its not being delivered to the Council as it occurred from time to time. Mr. Hastings kept the whole government of Oude in his own hands; so that the Council had no power of judging his acts, of checking, controlling, advising, or remonstrating. It was totally annihilated by him; and we charge, as an act of treason and rebellion against the act of Parliament by which he held his office, his depriving the Council of their legitimate authority, by shutting them out from the knowledge of all affairs,—except, indeed, when he thought it expedient, for his own justification, to have their nominal concurrence or subsequent acquiescence in any of his more violent measures.
Your Lordships see Mr. Hastings's system, a system of concealment, a system of turning the vassals of the Company into his own vassals, to make them contributory, not to the Company, but to himself. He has avowed this system in Benares; he has avowed it in Oude. It was his constant practice. Your Lordships see in Oude he kept a correspondence with Mr. Markham for years, and did alone all the material acts which ought to have been done in Council. He delegated a power to Mr. Markham which he had not to delegate; and you will see he has done the same in every part of India.
We first charge him not only with acting without authority, but with a strong presumption, founded on his concealment, of intending to act mischievously. We next charge his concealing and withdrawing correspondence, as being directly contrary to the orders of the Court of Directors, the practice of his office, and the very nature and existence of the Council in which he was appointed to preside. We charge this as a substantive crime, and as the forerunner of the oppression, desolation, and ruin of that miserable country.
Mr. Hastings having thus rendered the Council blind and ignorant, and consequently fit for subserviency, what does he next do? I am speaking, not with regard to the time of his particular acts, but with regard to the general spirit of the proceedings. He next flies in the face of the Company upon the same principle on which he removed Mr. Fowke from Benares. "I removed him on political grounds," says he, "against the orders of the Court of Directors, because I thought it necessary that the Resident should be a man of my own nomination and confidence." At Oude he proceeds on the same principle. Mr. Bristow had been nominated to the office of Resident by the Court of Directors. Mr. Hastings, by an act of Parliament, was ordered to obey the Court of Directors. He positively refuses to receive Mr. Bristow, for no other reason that we know of but because he was nominated by the Court of Directors; he defies the Court, and declares in effect that they shall not govern that province, but that he will govern it by a Resident of his own.
Your Lordships will mark his progress in the establishment of that new system, which, he says, he had been obliged to adopt by the evil system of his predecessors. First, he annihilates the Council, formed by an act of Parliament, and by order of the Court of Directors. In the second place, he defies the order of the Court, who had the undoubted nomination of all their own servants, and who ordered him, under the severest injunction, to appoint Mr. Bristow to the office of Resident in Oude. He for some time refused to nominate Mr. Bristow to that office; and even when he was forced, against his will, to permit him for a while to be there, he sent Mr. Middleton and Mr. Johnson, who annihilated Mr. Bristow's authority so completely that no one public act passed through his hands.
After he had ended this conflict with the Directors, and had entirely shook off their authority, he resolved that the native powers should know that they were not to look to the Court of Directors, but to look to his arbitrary will in all things; and therefore, to the astonishment of the world, and as if it were designedly to expose the nakedness of the Parliament of Great Britain, to expose the nakedness of the laws of Great Britain, and the nakedness of the authority of the Court of Directors to the country powers, he wrote a letter, which your Lordships will find in page 795 of the printed Minutes. In this letter the secret of his government is discovered to the country powers. They are given to understand, that, whatever exaction, whatever oppression or ruin they may suffer, they are to look nowhere for relief but to him: not to the Council, not to the Court of Directors, not to the sovereign authority of Great Britain, but to him, and him only.
Before we proceed to this letter, we will first read to you the Minute of Council by which he dismissed Mr. Bristow upon a former occasion, (it is in page 507 of the printed Minutes,) that your Lordships may see his audacious defiance of the laws of the country. We wish, I say, before we show you the horrible and fatal effects of this his defiance, to impress continually upon your Lordships' minds that this man is to be tried by the laws of the country, and that it is not in his power to annihilate their authority and the authority of his masters. We insist upon it, that every man under the authority of this country is bound to obey its laws. This minute relates to his first removal of Mr. Bristow: I read it in order to show that he dared to defy the Court of Directors so early as the year 1776.
"Resolved, That Mr. John Bristow be recalled to the Presidency from the court of the Nabob of Oude, and that Mr. Nathaniel Middleton be restored to the appointment of Resident at that court, subject to the orders and authority of the Governor-General and Council, conformably to the motion of the Governor-General."