India was pacified. Tippoo-Saib had made a treaty with England, and his troops had evacuated the Carnatic. Alone among English possessions, the vast Oriental territories had not suffered any diminution during the war engendered by the American rebellion. The Hindoo princes had seen their power vanishing; they had become magnificent subjects while still enjoying the sovereign title. The supreme authority of the English was everywhere established; a regular administration, however imperfect and rude as yet, had on all hands succeeded anarchy. Incessantly fettered by unintelligent or contradictory orders coming to him from Europe, the governor-general had found in the resources of his fertile genius the means of government and control which his rivals and chiefs disputed with him. He had known how to attach the army to him, and the natives themselves, accustomed to the capricious exactions of their princes, blessed the prosperity and order which marked his government. He had unrestrictedly used his power with an ill-ordered zeal for the public weal. "The rules of justice, the sentiments of humanity, the sworn faith of treaties, were nothing in his eyes when they were opposed to the actual interests of the state." He had enriched himself, and his wife even more, but he had above all, enriched and served the company and England without scruple and without remorse.
It was this delicate scruple and this honest remorse that the most ardent of Warren Hastings' adversaries, virtuous, passionate, and embittered by vexatious and severe disappointments, felt. Among the accusers of Warren Hastings many were animated by hatred or personal views. Edmund Burke solely stood up for the cause of the justice and right offended by the governor-general. His name has remained connected with the trial of Hastings as that of an avenger of public virtue, disinterested and sincere even in the violence of his patriotic transport.
The greeting that awaited Warren Hastings in London did not prepare him for the fate which threatened him. Treated by the king with a marked distinction, he was solemnly thanked by the India Company. "I see myself treated on all sides," wrote he three months after his arrival in England, "in a way that proves to me that I possess the good opinion of my country."
The attack was being prepared, however, and Burke had already announced it. The coalition ministry had fallen, precisely on the India bill. It had presented a violent address against Hastings; a vote of the House of Commons had condemned it.
What would be the attitude of the new cabinet, at the head of which William Pitt reigned as master, of which Dundas formed part, he who had lately proclaimed the faults of the governor-general, no one knew. The entire opposition was in arms against Warren Hastings. Francis had entered the House of Commons and pursued his enemy with his persistent hate. The accusation brought by Burke on the subject of the war against the Rohillas was rejected by a great majority. When Fox attacked the governor-general's conduct in the affair of Benares, Mr. Pitt, who had been deemed favorable to Warren Hastings, declared that the governor had had a right to impose a fine on the fugitive prince, but that the penalty had not been proportioned to the offense. To the general stupefaction he then supported Mr. Fox's proposition. "The affair is too bad; I cannot sustain him," he said to his intimate friend Wilberforce. An eloquent speech of Sheridan ended in deciding the House. The Commons voted twenty heads of accusation, and the trial was carried before the House of Lords.
It began on the 13th of February, 1788, with extreme brilliancy. The reputation of the accused and that of the lawyers was effaced by that of his accusers, the most eloquent of their eloquent epoch. Pitt alone took no part in the discussion. Fox, Sheridan, Wyndham, and young Lord Grey had left to Burke the honor of making the first speech. He spoke at length. Chancellor Thurlow himself, although favorable to Warren Hastings, could not withhold a murmur of satisfaction. The impassioned tones of the great orator stirred all consciences, moved all hearts, when he cried at last, in a voice of thunder, "This is why the House of Commons of Great Britain has ordered me, in all assurance, to impeach Warren Hastings of crimes and grave offenses. I impeach him in the name of the House of Commons, whose confidence he has deceived; I impeach him in the name of the English nation, whose ancient honor he has soiled; I impeach him in the name of the Hindoo people, whose rights he has trodden under foot and whose country he has made a desert; finally, in the name of nature herself, in the name of men and women, in the name of all times, in the name of all ranks, I impeach the common enemy and oppressor of all."
It was with the same violence, excessive and unjust in the passion of its justice, that Burke pursued the public prosecution against Warren Hastings. The trial lasted ten years. Proclaimed from 1785 in the House of Commons, sometimes ardently, sometimes languidly, sustained before the House of Lords since 1788, it was only in 1795, and when national attention was directed elsewhere upon the actual and neighboring dramas of the French revolution, that Warren Hastings, old and almost ruined, was finally acquitted by the House of Lords, the greater portion of whose members had not assisted at the beginning of the trial. "The impeachment has taken place before one generation," said Hastings himself, "the sentence has been pronounced by its children." The accusers, like the judges, were scattered, drawn into various paths by political passion. Burke no longer fought with Fox, nor Wyndham with Lord Grey and Sheridan. Public opinion, formerly severe on the accused, had softened. The length of the trial had placed the crimes of Hastings among the facts belonging to history; it had brought to light the eminent services which he had rendered to the country. When he entered the retreat from which he was only to emerge at rare intervals, Hastings was accompanied there by public favor. It remained faithful to him even to the end of his long life. After having struggled, governed and suffered with the same calmness and the same evenness of mind which he brought towards the end of his career to the peaceful study of literature, Warren Hastings died at Daylesford, the ancient manor of his fathers, which he had formerly bought and embellished, on the 22nd of August [1818], at the age of eighty-five years.
Warren Hastings was yet alive, and America had long become an independent and free nation. India was conquered and henceforth submissive to English law. Hereafter it was on the European scene exclusively that great dramas and great actors were to appear.