VIII
WARREN HASTINGS
Both in point of time and personal capacity, Warren Hastings, first Governor-General of the British Empire in India, was the successor of Robert, Lord Clive. At the same time it may be as well to point out in this connection that there might be more literal correctness in describing Warren Hastings as an Empire-Preserver rather than an Empire-Maker.
It was the victor of Plassey who rough-hewed the stones upon which the now gorgeous fabric of our Indian Empire stands. It was Hastings who, in spite of stupendous difficulties, took those stones and laid them down according to that plan which he had formed, and which has been followed in the main by all who have added to the structure.
As was said in other words of William of Orange, one of the greatest claims that the great Governor has to the interest and admiration of those who have a share in the splendid inheritance that he built up, lies in the fact that he did his work in the face of everlasting hindrances and in the midst of perpetual embarrassments, which must infallibly have discouraged and bewildered any but a man upon whom the gods had set the stamp of greatness, and, in their own way, crowned him one of the kings of men. In short, like the grandson of William the Silent, Warren Hastings was first and foremost an overcomer of difficulties.
Great and splendid and enduring as his work undoubtedly was, it would not, after all, have been very difficult to do if he had just been left to do it—not helped, because he wasn’t the kind of man who wanted help, but just left alone. Instead of this, however, as though it were not enough that his work of organising and consolidating what the sword of Clive had won, and combating the infinity of complications arising out of the rivalry of a dozen warring native potentates, he was purposely surrounded in his own council-chamber by unscrupulous enemies of his own blood and country, whose only title to historical recognition is now the infamy that they have earned by failing to prevent the doing of that work which Warren Hastings saw had got to be done, and which he, with an inflexible heroism, decided to do in spite of everything that his enemies, white or brown, Mohammedan, Hindoo or British, could do to cripple him.
Sir Alfred Lyall, his most recent biographer, has very happily said of him that “perhaps no man of undisputed genius ever inherited less in mind or money from his parents or owed them fewer obligations of any kind.” His father, Pynaston Hastings, was the vagrant ne’er-do-well son of a fine old family. He married when only fifteen without any means or prospect of supporting a family. Warren was the second son. His father was only seventeen at his birth, and his mother died a few days later. As soon as he was old enough Pynaston took holy orders, married again, obtained a living in the West Indies, and there died, leaving his son to be put into a charity school by his grandfather.
This is not much for a father to do for a son, but there was something else that Pynaston Hastings did which was of very great consequence, though in the nature of the case no credit is due to him for it. He transmitted to him the blood of a long line of ancestors, which stretched away back through one of the followers of William the Norman to the days of those old pirate kings of the Northland who, as I have pointed out before, were none the worse fathers of Empire-Makers because they were pirates as well.
One of his ancestors, John Hastings, Lord of the Manors of Yelford-Hastings in Oxfordshire, and of Dalesford in Worcestershire, lost about half of his worldly goods, including the plate that he sent to be coined at the Oxford Mint, in helping Charles Stuart to fight the great Oliver, and afterwards spent most of the remainder in buying his peace from the Parliament. It was on the ancient estate of Dalesford, long before sold to the stranger and the alien, that Warren Hastings was born, some two hundred years later, practically a pauper and almost an outcast, under the shadow of his ancestral home.
When he came to reasoning years he made a boyish resolve, challenging fate with all the splendid insolence of a seven-year-old dreamer, that some day he would make his fortune and buy the old place back—which in due course he did, although in those days his prospect of doing so was about as small as it was of reigning over the millions of subjects whose descendants to-day revere his memory almost as that of one of their own demigods.