When he was twelve years old Warren was taken away from the charity school by one of his uncles and sent to Westminster, where he distinguished himself by winning a King’s scholarship in the year 1747. Even when his poor old grandfather, the last Hastings of Dalesford, and the miserably paid rector of the parish which his ancestors had owned, sent Warren to sit beside the little rustics of the village school, he immediately singled himself out from them by the willing intelligence with which he took to his work and afterwards the headmaster of Westminster had high hopes of university distinctions for him. It was indeed a somewhat curious coincidence that Robert Clive should have been such an exceedingly bad boy and the completer of his work such a good one.
But the Fates had already decided that Warren Hastings was to graduate with honours in a very much bigger university than that on the banks of the Isis or the Cam. His uncle died suddenly, and the orphan lad was passed on to the care of a distant connection who happened to be a director of the East India Company.
His headmaster remonstrated strongly, but happily without effect, against his immediate removal to Christ’s Hospital to learn account-keeping before going out to Bengal as a writer in the service of “John Company.”
It seems as though the worthy Dr. Nichols had a very high opinion of his intellectual abilities, for, when all his protests failed, he actually offered to send his brilliant young pupil to Oxford at his own expense.
Happily for the British Empire Mr. Director Chiswick, the relative aforesaid, stuck to his selfish project of getting him off his hands as quickly and permanently as possible by sending him out to Calcutta to take jungle fever or make a fortune, just in the same way that Clive’s despairing parents had done.
He sailed for Calcutta when he was seventeen, the same age as his precious father was when he was born. He had been two years at the desk in Calcutta when there came the news that Clive had taken Arcot and put a very different complexion on the struggle between the English and French Companies for the supremacy of India.
About that time he was sent to a little town on the Hooghly about a mile from Moorshedabad, and while he was here driving bargains with native silk-weavers and tea merchants, Surajah Dowlah marched into Calcutta and cast such English prisoners as he could lay hold of into the Black Hole.
Hastings was also taken prisoner, but most fortunately did not get into the Black Hole, and he appears to have been set at large on the intercession of the chief of the Dutch factory. During the period which followed his partial release—for he was still under surveillance at Moorshedabad—he made his first essay in diplomacy, or what would perhaps be more correctly described as political intrigue, with the result that the city got too hot for him, and he fled to Fulda, an island below Calcutta, where, as has been pithily said, the English fugitives from Fort William “were encamped like a shipwrecked crew awaiting rescue.”
The rescue came in the shape of the combined naval and military expedition, commanded by Admiral Watson and Robert Clive, which was destined to end in the triumph of Plassey, and Warren Hastings, as Macaulay aptly suggests in his brilliant but singularly misinformed essay, doubtless inspired by the example of Clive and the similarity of their entrance on to the stage of Indian affairs, like him exchanged the pen for the sword, and fought through the campaign. But Clive saw “that there was more in his head than his arm,” and after the battle of Plassey he sent him as resident Agent of the Company to the Court of Meer Jaffier, the puppet-nabob who had been set up in the place of Surajah Dowlah.
He held this post until he was made a Member of Council in 1761, and was obliged to remove to Calcutta. Clive was at home now, and the interregnum of oppression, extortion, and general mismanagement was in full swing; but the man who was afterwards so grossly wronged and falsely impeached, and who passed through the most celebrated trial in English history charged with just such crimes, had so little taste for them that three years later he came back a comparatively poor man, and the fortune he had he either gave away to his relations or lost through the failure of a Dutch trading-house.