Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

These were not words which a man in those days could write without taking his chance of a bullet or the point of a small-sword, and Hastings knew this perfectly well. Francis challenged him on the spot, and the day but one after they confronted each other with pistols at fourteen paces. Francis’s pistol missed fire, and Hastings obligingly waited until he had reprimed. The second time the pistol went off, but the ball flew wide. Hastings returned it very deliberately and his enemy went down with a bullet in the right side.

HIS ENEMY WENT DOWN WITH A BULLET IN THE RIGHT SIDE.

The difference between the two men may be seen from what followed. After his adversary had been carried home, the Governor-General sent him a friendly message offering to visit him and bury the hatchet for good, as was customary in such affairs between gentlemen. Francis, not being a gentleman, refused, and as soon as he was well enough to travel he came home to England to injure by backstairs-intrigue and the most unscrupulous lying and misrepresentation the man who, in the midst of his difficulties and dangers, had proved all too strong for him in the open.

To use his own words, “after a service of thirty-five years from its commencement, and almost thirteen of them passed in the charge and exercise of the first nominal office of the government,” Warren Hastings at last laid down his thankless task and came home to render an account of his stewardship before a tribunal which possessed neither adequate knowledge to judge of his actions nor that judicial spirit of calmness and impartiality which could alone have guaranteed him such a trial as English justice accords to the vilest criminal.

His impeachment is not only the most notable but altogether the most amazing trial in the history of British Law. It would be alike superfluous and presumptuous to reproduce here an account of that which has been described in the incomparable sentences of Lord Macaulay. His essay on Warren Hastings has been considered by many to be the finest of that magnificent collection of Essays and Reviews, and the story of the Impeachment is undoubtedly the finest portion of it. Hence those who read these lines cannot do better than read it as well. If they have read it before they will simply be repeating a pleasure; if they have not, then a new pleasure awaits them.

What we are concerned with here are the bare facts of the matter; but we may first pause for a moment to look at the man as he was when he came across the world to face his mostly incompetent and prejudiced judges. This is how his picture is drawn by Wraxall, a contemporary and a personal acquaintance. The portrait is certainly more faithful than the ridiculous caricatures drawn by Burke and Sheridan.

“When he landed in his native country he had attained his fifty-second year. In his person he was thin, but not tall, of a spare habit, very bald, with a countenance placidly thoughtful, but when animated full of intelligence. Placed in a situation where he might have amassed immense wealth without exciting censure, he revisited England with only a modest competence. In private life he was playful and gay to a degree hardly conceivable; never carrying his political vexations into the bosom of his family. Of a temper so buoyant and elastic that the instant he quitted the council-board where he had been assailed by every species of opposition, often heightened by personal acrimony, he mixed in society like a youth upon whom care had never intruded.”

Such was the man who, in a period of national dejection which almost amounted to disgrace, came back, the one man of his generation who had upheld the honour of the British name abroad in a post of great difficulty and danger, to receive, not reward, but impeachment.

He first faced his judges on February 13, 1788, “looking very infirm and much indisposed, and dressed in a plain, poppy-coloured suit of clothes.” He was finally acquitted on March 1, 1794! The trial thus languished through seven sessions of Parliament, the total hearing occupied one hundred and eighteen sittings of the Court, and the vindication of his personal and official character from the slanders of enemies, who were at last refuted with complete discredit to his slanderers cost him about £100,000, of which no less than £75,000 were actually certified legal costs—and this was the reward that England gave to the one man who was capable of preserving to her the fruit of the victories of Clive and his gallant lieutenants!