Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

Great Britain was about to plunge into war, east and west, north and south. Criminal misgovernment at home had produced revolt abroad. Disaster after disaster and disgrace after disgrace were soon to befall the British arms. The Anglo-Saxon race was about to be split in two, and England herself was to fight, if not for her very existence, at least for her honourable place among the nations.

All this Warren Hastings foresaw with that marvellous prevision which made some of his actions look almost prophetic, and determined that, come what might elsewhere, the Star of the East should not be plucked from the British Crown. He was not a soldier. He was an administrator. His task was not to increase but to hold. He was by no means always successful in war, and in all his long rule he never added a province or a district to the area of British India; but what Clive won he held and strengthened during those fateful years when the destiny of Britain as an empire was trembling in the balances of Fate.

Now, to keep India, money was absolutely necessary, and the getting of it was not always work that could be done with kid gloves on, and the greatness of Warren Hastings as Empire-Maker or Holder may be seen in the fact that he deliberately, and with his eyes open, risked his future fortune and reputation in the doing of this work by the only means available.

He knew that his methods would be censured by his masters and made unscrupulous use of by his enemies, and he said so in so many words, and, careless of criticism and undeterred by the most virulent and treasonable opposition, he succeeded so far that he was able to say with truth that he had rescued one province from infamy, and two from total ruin. It is simply amazing to the dispassionate reader of the present day to watch the needless struggles which were imposed upon this man, already confronted by a titanic task, by the very men who ought to have been the first, for their own sakes and their country’s, to have made his way as smooth and his burdens as light as possible.

The man who may be fairly described as the evil genius of Warren Hastings’ career was that Sir Philip Francis who is generally looked upon as the author of the far-famed Letters of Junius. He and Sir John Clavering, both personal enemies of the Governor-General—as he was now—were sent out as members of the Council, and to the days of their death they never ceased to thwart and embarrass him by every means in their power.

One reason for their enmity was undoubtedly the sordid motive of getting him turned out of the Governor-Generalship in order that one of them might succeed to his office, and that both might share in the fruits of the extortions which, in him, they condemned.

This was not only unjust to Hastings, but it was also a crime against their country, committed at a moment when she had all too much need of such men as he was.

To my mind, at least, there is a very strong resemblance between the savage invective of Junius and the consistent and unscrupulous malevolence with which Sir Philip Francis tried to wreck the life-work of a man at whose table he was not worthy to sit.

Those were days in which political rivalry and personal enmity entailed personal consequences if they were pushed too far. Hastings seemed to have come at length to the conclusion that India was not large enough to hold himself and Francis. He had submitted to insult after insult, and he would have been something more than human if his enemy’s unceasing efforts to make his life a misery and his work a failure had not left some bitterness in his soul, and so one fine day he sat down and embodied his opinion of him in a Minute to the Council, and in this he purposely put words which meant inevitable bloodshed:

“I do not trust to his promise of candour; convinced that he is incapable of it, and that his sole purpose and wish are to embarrass and defeat every measure which I may undertake or which may tend even to promote the public interest if my credit is connected with them.... Every disappointment and misfortune have been aggravated by him, and every fabricated tale of armies devoted to famine and massacre have found their first and most ready way to his office, where it is known they would meet with most welcome reception.... I judge of his public conduct by my experience of his private, which I have found void of truth and honour. This is a severe charge but temperately and deliberately made.”