A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III

by Justin McCarthy; Justin H. McCarthy

In the mean time Hastings's feud with his antagonists on the Council-board continued. A kind of reconciliation, a kind of agreement with Francis, enabled Hastings to allow Barwell to return to England and still to leave the Governor-General in authority at the Board. But Hastings found that reconciliation or agreement with Francis was practically impossible. Rightly or wrongly, Francis renewed his old policy of attacking every proposal and interfering with every project that Hastings entertained. At last the long quarrel came to a violent head. Hastings replied to one of Francis's minutes in some severe words, in which he declared himself unable to rely upon Francis's word, as he had found Francis to be a man devoid of truth and honor.

[Sidenote: 1780—Hastings and Francis fight a duel]

Such a charge made in those days was generally to be met with in only one way. In that way Francis met it. Francis challenged Hastings to a duel. Hastings accepted the challenge. The antagonists met, exchanged shots, and Francis fell severely wounded before the pistol of Hastings. Hastings sent friendly messages to Francis and offered to visit him, but Francis rejected his overtures absolutely, and on his return to health renewed his attacks upon Hastings until the close of the year, when he sailed for England to carry on more successfully his plans against his enemy.

Well as the Supreme Court had served Hastings in the case of Nuncomar and in the quarrel with Clavering, the time came when Hastings found himself placed in a position of temporary hostility to that Court and to his old friend Impey. The bad machinery of the Act of 1773 left room for almost every possibility of friction between the Supreme Court on the one hand and the Council on the other, instead of framing, as it should have framed, its {268} measure so as to allow the two powers to work harmoniously together, each in its own sphere, for the welfare of British India. The friction grew more intense as time went on. Sometimes one party to the quarrel was in the right, sometimes the other. Whichever was the case, the spectacle of the quarrel was in itself sufficiently humiliating and sufficiently dangerous. Hastings devised a scheme for the better regulation of the powers and privileges of the two conflicting bodies, but his scheme was put on one side by the British Government, and the Court and the Council remained as irreconcilable as before. At last it reached such a pitch that the Court issued a summons against the Government. The Government ignored the summons; things stood at a dead-lock; the personal relationships of Hastings and Impey were strained almost to severance. In this crisis Hastings thought of and carried out a compromise. He offered to Impey the presidency of the Company's chief civil court. Impey accepted the offer, and, though he has been severely censured for what has been called the taking of a bribe, the compromise proved to be the best way out of the difficulty that had arisen. Impey, who has been happily called the first of Indian codifiers, showed himself to be an excellent head for the provincial courts that were thus put under his control. The provincial courts had been hitherto more of a curse than a blessing; under Impey's guidance they were brought into harmony with the Supreme Court. Impey was not long suffered to remain in his new office. Two years after his acceptance of the post he was removed from it by order of the Court of Directors. But the work he had done in that short time was good work and left abiding traces. Hastings's plan had borne fruit in Impey's "Code," and afterwards in the passing of an Act of Parliament clearly defining the jurisdiction and the powers of the Supreme Court.

[Sidenote: 1781—Hastings and the Rajah of Benares]

One of the latest acts of Warren Hastings's administration was also one of the acts that most provoked the indignation and the resentment of those who in England were watching with hostile eyes the progress of his career. {269} Chait Singh, the Rajah of Benares, held authority at first under the ruler of Oude, and afterwards under the government of the East India Company, to whom the sovereign of Oude had transferred it. The Rajah of Benares paid a certain tribute to the Company. The heavy necessities of the war compelled Hastings to call upon the Rajah for a larger sum. The step was not unusual. In time of war a vassal of the Company might very well expect to be called upon for an increased levy. But the Rajah of Benares was very unwilling to give this proof of his devotion to the Company. He demurred, temporized, promised aid of men and arms, which was never rendered. Hastings seems to have been convinced, first of all, that the Rajah was possessed of enormous wealth, and could well afford to pay heavily for the privilege of being ruled over by the Company, and in the second place that it was necessary for the power and influence of the Company to force the almost mutinous Rajah to his knees. He made a final demand for no less than fifty lakhs, or half a million pounds, and set off himself for Benares to compel the Rajah to obey.

Hastings never wanted courage, but his Benares expedition was certainly the most daring deed of his whole life. He entered the sacred city of Benares attended by an escort of a mere handful of men, and in Benares, in the midst of a hostile population, and practically in the power of the Rajah, he acted as if he were the absolute master of prince, people, and city. He insisted upon his full demands being complied with, and as the Rajah's reply appeared to be unsatisfactory he immediately ordered his assistant, Mr. Markham, to place the Rajah under arrest. The audacity of the step was so great as to suggest either that Hastings was acting with the recklessness of despair, or had formed no thought as to the not merely possible but probable result of his action. The Rajah accepted the confinement to his palace with a dignified protest. Two companies of sepoys were placed to guard him. These sepoys had no ammunition; they were surrounded by swarms of the Rajah's soldiery raging at the insult offered to their lord. The Rajah's men fell upon the sepoys and cut them {270} and their English officers to pieces. The Rajah lowered himself to the river by a rope of turbans, crossed the Ganges, and shut himself up in his stronghold of Ramnagar. Hastings's life was in imminent peril. Had he remained where he was he and his thirty Englishmen and his twenty sepoys would have been massacred. He fled in the darkness of the night to the fortress of Chunar, about thirty miles from Benares, where there was a small garrison of the Company's troops.

[Sidenote: 1781—The Vizier of Oude and the Begums]

However rash Hastings might have been in provoking the conflict with the Rajah, once it was provoked he carried himself with admirable courage and coolness. Shut up with a small force in a region blazing with armed rebellion, menaced by an army of forty thousand men, he acted with as much composure and ability as if he were the unquestioned master of the situation. He declined all offers of assistance from the Vizier of Oude, rejected all Chait Singh's overtures for peace, and issued his orders to the forces that were gradually rallying around him with rare tact and judgment. In a very short time the whole aspect of affairs changed. The Company's forces under Major Popham defeated the Rajah's troops, captured fort after fort, drove the Rajah to take refuge in Bundelcund, and brought the city and district of Benares under British rule again. Hastings immediately declared that the fugitive Rajah's estates were forfeited, and he bestowed them upon the Rajah's nephew upon tributary terms which bound him faster to the Company, and exacted double the revenue formerly payable into the Company's exchequer.

But the money which Hastings so urgently needed, the money for which he had struck his bold stroke at Benares, was still lacking. All the booty gained in the reduction of Benares had been divided among the victors; none of it had found its way into the Company's coffers. The Vizier of Oude was deeply in the Company's debt, but the Vizier of Oude was in desperately straitened circumstances, and could not pay his debt. Knowing Hastings's need, the Vizier exposed to him certain plans he had formed for raising money by seizing upon the estates of the two {271} Begums, his mother, the widow of the late Nawab, and his grandmother, the late Nawab's mother. The Vizier may have had just claims enough upon the Begums, but it was peculiarly rash and unjustifiable of Hastings to make himself a party to the Vizier's interests. Hastings, unhappily for himself, lent the Vizier the aid of the Company's troops. The Begums, who were quite prepared to resist their feeble-spirited relation, did not go so far as to oppose the Company in arms. Their palace was occupied, their treasure seized, their servants imprisoned, and they themselves suffered discomforts and slights of a kind which constituted very real indignities and insults in the eyes of Mohammedan women. This was practically the last, as it was the most foolish, act of Hastings's rule. It had the misfortune for him of stirring the indignant soul of Burke.