Men Who Have Made the Empire

by George Chetwynd Griffith

Modern opinion, endorsed by the high legal authority of the late Sir James Stephen, has completely rejected alike the personal vilifications of such self-interested traitors as Francis and Clavering, and the emotional special-pleading of Burke and Sheridan.

“The impeachment of Warren Hastings,” he says, “is, I think, a blot on the judicial history of the country. It was monstrous that a man should be tortured at irregular intervals for seven years, in order that a singularly incompetent tribunal might be addressed before an excited audience by Burke and Sheridan, in language far removed from the calmness with which an advocate for the prosecution ought to address a criminal court.”

To some extent Hastings was recouped for the cost of his persecution, even if he was not rewarded for his distinguished services. He was granted a pension of £4,000 a year for twenty-eight and a half years, part paid in advance, and a loan of £50,000 free of interest. But meanwhile he had been fulfilling the dream of his boyhood by buying back his ancestral estate for £60,000, and another £60,000 was still owing to the lawyers.

Henceforth, disgusted, as he may well have been, with the ingratitude of the country he had served so well in so difficult a time, he retired to his old home and spent the remaining years of his life in the calm pursuits of a country gentleman, diversified by the cultivation of letters and the writing of verses.

It was in these days that he used to tell his friends how, as a little lad of seven, he had lain in the long grass on the banks of a stream that flowed through the old domain of Dalesford and dreamt the wild dream whose fulfilment had, after all, been stranger than the dream itself—for not even his boyish romance could be compared with the fact that, during the winning of the means to buy back the home of his fathers, he had risen to be the actual ruler of something like fifty millions of people, and the dictator of terms of peace and war to princes who governed territories half as large as Europe and even more populous.

But in the end he outlived both his enemies and the discredit they had tried to cast upon him. Two years before the battle of Waterloo he was summoned before the Houses of Parliament in the evening of his days to give evidence on the work of his manhood, and when he retired, after nearly four hours’ examination, the whole crowded House of Commons rose and stood uncovered and in silence as the old Empire-Keeper walked out of the Chamber.

He lived to see that empire, for which he had striven so painfully and so manfully, redeemed by the genius and valour of Rodney and Nelson and Wellington from the disgrace and degradation which had threatened it during the last decades of the eighteenth century, and three years after Waterloo he died.

His remains lie in the family church at Dalesford, and, to once more quote the words of Sir Alfred Lyall, “in Westminster Abbey a bust and an inscription commemorate the name and career of a man who, rising early to high place and power, held an office of the greatest importance to his country for thirteen years, by sheer force of character and tenaciousness against adversity, and who spent the next seven years in defending himself before a nation which accepted the benefits but disliked the ways of his too masterly activity.”

Lord Macaulay, who throughout his famous essay does him less than justice, concludes it by making almost generous amends. “Not only had the poor orphan retrieved the fallen fortunes of his line—not only had he re-purchased the old lands and rebuilt the old dwelling—he had preserved and extended an empire.[1] He had founded a policy. He had administered government and war with more than the capacity of Richelieu. He patronised learning with the judicious liberality of Cosmo. He had been attacked by the most formidable combination of enemies that ever sought the destruction of a single victim; and over that combination, after a struggle of ten years, he had triumphed. He had at length gone down to his grave in the fulness of age, in peace after so many troubles, in honour after so much obloquy.”

[1] In the territorial sense this is hardly correct. The great essayist probably meant extension in the sense of increase of prestige and influence over the still independent states of the Peninsula.