[Sidenote: 1783—Fox's coalition with Lord North]

The King's contempt for North since the failure to coerce America, the King's dislike of Fox since Fox became an advanced politician, were deepened now into uncompromising and unscrupulous enmity by the cavalier conduct of the coalition. The King, with his doggedness of purpose and his readiness to use any weapons against those whom he chose to regard as his enemies, was a serious danger even to a coalition that seemed so formidable as the coalition between Fox and North. Fox may very well have thought that his unjustifiable league with North would at least have the result of giving him sufficient time and sufficient influence to carry into effect some of those schemes for the good of the country which he had most nearly at heart. The statesman who makes some unhappy surrender of principle, some ignoble concession to opportunity in order to obtain power, makes his unworthy bargain from a conviction that his hold of office is essential to the welfare of the State, and that a little {227} evil is excusable for a great good. The sophistry that deceives the politician does not deceive the public. Fox gravely injured his position with the people who loved him by stooping to the pact with North, and he did not reap that reward of success in his own high-minded and high-hearted purposes which could alone have excused his conduct. The great coalition which was to stand so strong and to work such wonders was destined to vanish like a breath after accomplishing nothing, and to condemn Fox with all his hopes and dreams to a career of almost unbroken opposition for the rest of his life. If anything in Fox's checkered career could be more tragic than the degradation of his union with the politician whom he declared to be void of every principle of honor and honesty, it was the abiding consequences of the retribution that followed it. Fox had fought hard and with success to live down the follies of his youth. He had to fight harder and with far less success to live down what the world persisted in regarding as the infamy of his association with North.

It is difficult to realize the arguments which persuaded Fox, which persuaded Burke, to join their forces with the fallen minister whom their own mouths, but a little while before, had, in no measured terms, declared to be guilty of the basest conduct and deserving of the severest punishment. All that we know of Fox, all that we know of Burke—and it is possible to know them almost as well as if they were the figures of contemporary history—would seem to deny the possibility of their condescending to any act of conscious baseness. Stained and sullied as the youth of Fox had been with some of the more flagrant vices of a flagrantly vicious society, his record as gambler, as spendthrift, and as libertine seems relatively clean in comparison with this strange act of public treason to the chosen beliefs of his manhood, of public apostasy from those high and generous principles by whose strenuous advocacy he had redeemed his wasted youth. Fiery as Burke's temper had often proved itself to be, fantastic and grotesque as his obstinacy had often showed itself in {228} clinging defiantly to some crotchet or whimsey, that seemed to the spectator unworthy the adhesion of his great intellect, his most eccentric action, his most erratic impulse, appeared sweetly reasonable and serenely lucid when contrasted with the conduct that allowed him to guide or be guided by Fox in a course that proved as foolish as it looked disgraceful, to lead or to follow Fox into packing cards with their arch-enemy of the American war.

On the face of it there is nothing that seems not merely to justify, but even to palliate, the conduct of Fox and Burke. Ugly as the deed seemed to the men of their day, to the men who believed in them, trusted them, loved them, it seems no less ugly to those who at the distance of a century revere their memories and cherish their teachings. One thing may be, must be, assumed by those before whom the lives of Fox and Burke lie bare—that men so animated by high principles, so illuminated by high ideals, cannot deliberately, of set purpose, have sinned against the light. They must have felt, and strongly felt, their justification for entering on a course which was destined to prove so disastrous. Their justification probably was the conviction, nursed if not expressed, that to statesmen whose hands were so full of blessings, to statesmen whose hearts were so big with splendid enterprises, a trivial show of concession, a little paltering with the punctilio of honor, a little eating of brave words, and a little swallowing of principle, was a small price to pay and a price well worth paying for the immeasurable good that England was to gather from their supremacy.

Whatever may have been the motives which induced Fox and Burke to ally themselves with a discredited and defeated politician like Lord North, the results of that alliance were as unsatisfactory to the high contracting parties as the most rigid believer in poetic justice could desire. The Coalition Ministry was unlucky enough in its enterprises to satisfy George himself, who had talked of going back to Hanover rather than accept its services, and had only been dissuaded from self-exile by the sardonic reminder of Lord Thurlow that it might be easier for the {229} King to go to Hanover than to return again to England. Burke inaugurated his new career at the Pay Office by an unhappy act of patronage. He insisted upon restoring to their offices two clerks, named Powell and Bembridge, who had been removed and arraigned for malversation, and he insisted upon defending his indefensible action in the House of Commons with a fury that was as diverting to his opponents as it was distracting to his colleagues. Fox, who had earned so large a share of public admiration for his advocacy of what now would be called liberal opinions, was naturally held responsible by the public for the successful opposition of the Coalition Ministry to Pitt's plan of Parliamentary reform.

[Sidenote: 1783—Legislation of the Coalition Ministry]

Pitt's proposal was not very magnificent. He asked the House to declare that measures were highly necessary to be taken for the future prevention of bribery and expense at elections. He urged that for the future, when the majority of voters for any borough should be convicted of gross and notorious corruption before a select committee of the House appointed to try the merits of any election, such borough should be disfranchised and the minority of voters not so convicted should be entitled to vote for the county in which such borough should be situated. He suggested that an addition of knights of the shire and of the representatives of the metropolis should be made to the state of the representation. He left the number to the discussion and consideration of the House, but for his own part he stated that he should propose an addition of one hundred representatives. Pitt's scheme was scarcely a splendid measure of reform; but at least it was a measure of reform, and it met with small mercy at the hands of the coalition, being defeated by a majority of 293 to 149. This was not an auspicious beginning for the new Ministry, and it was scarcely surprising that many of Fox's adherents in the country should resent his employment of the swollen forces that were practically if not technically under his command to compass the defeat of a bill which, however inadequate, did at least endeavor to bring about a much-needed improvement.

{230}

The great adventure of the Coalition Ministry, the deed by which it hoped to justify its existence, and by which indeed it has earned its only honorable title to remembrance, was the bill which is known to the world as Fox's India Bill. If the extending influence of England in India was a source of pride to the English people, it was also a source of grave responsibility. The conditions under which that influence was exercised, the weaknesses and inadequacies of the system by which the East India Company exercised its semi-regal authority, were becoming more apparent with every succeeding year to the small but steadily increasing number of persons who took a serious and intelligent interest in Indian affairs. A series of events, to be referred to later, had served to force into a special prominence the difficulties and the dangers of the existing state of affairs and to fasten the attention of thinkers upon the evils that had resulted, and the evils that must yet result from its continuance. To mitigate those evils in the present, and to minimize them in the future, Fox, inspired and aided by Burke's splendid knowledge of Indian affairs, worked out a measure which was confidently expected to substitute order for disorder and reason for unreason. In the November of 1783, Pitt addressed a challenge to the Ministry calling upon them to bring forward some measure securing and improving the advantages to be derived from England's Eastern possessions, some measure not of temporary palliation and timorous expedients, but vigorous and effectual, suited to the magnitude, the importance, and the alarming exigencies of the case. Fox answered this challenge by asking leave to bring in a bill "for vesting the affairs of the East India Company in the hands of certain commissioners for the benefit of the proprietors and the public." At the same time Fox asked leave to bring in another bill "for the better government of the territorial possessions and dependencies in India." These two bills, supplementing each other, formed, in the opinion of those who framed and who advocated them, a simple, efficient, and responsible plan for the better administration of England's Indian {231} dependencies. However tentative and incomplete they may now appear as a means of dealing with a problem of such vast importance and such far-reaching consequences, they certainly were measures the adoption of which must have proved a gain to the country governing and to the country governed.

[Sidenote: 1783—Fox and the affairs of India]

The measures, which, it is probable, were originally planned out by Burke, but to which it is certain that Fox devoted all the strength of his intellect and all the enthusiasm of his nature, were of a daring and comprehensive character. The first proposed to make a clean sweep of the existing state of things in India by the appointment of a Board composed of seven commissioners to whom absolute authority over the East India Company's property, and over the appointment or removal of holders of offices in India, was to be intrusted for a term of four years. This term of four years was not to be affected by any changes of administration that might occur in England during the time. The commerce of the Company was to be managed by a council of directors, who were themselves entirely under the control of the seven commissioners. The commissioners and the directors were required to lay their accounts before the proprietors every six months, and before both Houses at the beginning of every session. The commissioners were in the first instance to be appointed by Parliament, that is to say, by the Ministry headed by Fox and North; at the end of the four years they were to be appointed by the Crown. The Court of Proprietors was to fill up the vacancies in the council of directors. The second and less important measure dealt with the powers of the Governor-General and Council and the conduct to be observed towards the princes and natives of India.

The first measure was the measure of paramount importance, the measure from which Fox and his friends hoped so much, the measure which aroused in a very peculiar degree the anger of the King and of the King's followers. They saw in a moment the enormous influence that the passing of the measure would place in the hands of Fox. The names of the commissioners were left blank {232} in the bill, but when their time came to be filled up in committee they were all filled with the names of followers of Fox. It was argued that were the bill to become law a set of persons extremely obnoxious to the King would have in their hands for a solid term of years the entire administration of India and the control of an amount of patronage, estimated at not less than three hundred thousand a year. This would enable them to oppose to the royal prerogative of patronage an influence of like nature that brought with it scarcely less than royal power. It is scarcely surprising that Pitt should have employed all his eloquence and all his energy against what he described as "the boldest and most unconstitutional measure ever attempted, transferring at one stroke, in spite of all charters and compacts, the immense patronage and influence of the East to Charles Fox in or out of office."

[Sidenote: 1783—Henry Dundas and James Sayer]

If Pitt was the most conspicuous opponent of the India Bills, only less conspicuous was a man who, though much Pitt's senior, was still young, and who had already made himself prominent in the House of Commons, not merely as a politician of general ability, but as one who took a special interest in the affairs of India. Henry Dundas had been a characteristic ornament of the Scottish bar, at once a skilful lawyer and an attractive man of the world when, eight years before the existence of the Coalition Ministry, he had come to St. Stephen's as Lord Advocate. An ambition to shine as a statesman and an extraordinary power of application had equipped him with the varied information that enabled him to assert himself as an authority in many departments of national business. He had early recognized the importance of India as a field for the powers of a rising politician, and he had devoted to India and to Indian affairs that tireless assiduity which permitted him at once to appear a convivial spirit with the temperament and leisure of a man of pleasure, and a master of profound and intricate subjects, the secret of which was only known to those who were acquainted with his habit of early rising and his indefatigable capacity for work in the time that he allotted to work. When the public attention was {233} directed to India, towards the close of the American war, and when a very general sense of indignation was aroused by the mismanagement that lessened and that threatened to destroy British influence in the East, Dundas came forward with the confident air of one who was intimately acquainted with the complicated problem and who believed himself perfectly competent to set all difficulties right. He was the chairman of the select committee of the House of Commons appointed to inquire into the causes of the war in the Carnatic, and he impressed himself upon the House as an authority upon India of no mean order, both in the report from that committee and in a bill which he himself introduced for the purpose of dealing with the Indian question. He did not succeed in carrying his measure, but he took care that his knowledge of his subject increased in proportion to its growing importance in the public view, and his ready eloquence and specious show of information made him a very valuable ally for Pitt and a fairly formidable opponent to Fox in the heady debates over the measures to which the political honor of the dishonorable coalition was pledged.

The India Bill had a more serious enemy than Dundas, a more serious enemy than Pitt so far as the immediate effect of enmity upon public opinion is to be estimated. There was an attorney in London named James Sayer whose private means enabled him to neglect his profession and devote himself to the production of political caricatures and squibs. Sayer was one of the many who believed in the rising star of Pitt, and he proved his belief by the publication of a caricature which Fox himself is said to have admitted gave the India Bill its severest blow in public estimation. This caricature was called "Carlo Khan's Triumphal Entry into Leadenhall Street." It represented Fox in the grotesque attire of a theatrical Oriental potentate, and with a smile of conquest upon his black-haired face, perched upon an elephant with the staring countenance of Lord North, that was led by Burke, whose spectacled acridity was swollen with the blowing of a trumpet from which depended a map of India. The {234} caricature was ingenious, timely, and extraordinarily efficacious in harming the measure and its champions. It had an enormous sale; it was imitated and pirated far and wide. It carried to all parts of the kingdom the conviction that Fox was aiming at nothing less than a dictatorship of India, and it intensified the general animosity towards the measures and the men of the Coalition Ministry more effectively than any amount of speeches in Westminster could have done. But it had no more power to weaken the solid majority of the Ministry in the House of Commons than the hurried erudition of Dundas, or than what Walpole called the "Bristol stone" of Pitt's eloquence as contrasted with the "diamond reason" of Fox's solid sense. Neither political caricature nor popular disapproval, neither the indignation of the King nor the opulence of the fearful and furious East India Company, could prevent Fox from carrying his measures in the House of Commons by means of the sheer force of numbers that he had obtained by his unhallowed compact with North.

But the power of the new Ministry was vulnerable in another place where the most unconstitutional weapons were employed against it. The King was eager to avenge the affront that had, as he conceived, been put upon him by the compulsion that had forced him to accept ministers so little to his taste. He was prepared to stick at little in order to retaliate upon his enemies, as he always conceived those men to be who ventured to cross his purposes. Nothing could be done effectively to change the political composition of the Lower House; something could be essayed with the reasonable hope of modifying the composition of the Upper House. Lord Temple, a second-rate statesman, whose position gave him almost first-rate importance, was the instrument by which the King was able to bring very effective pressure upon the peers. George wrote a letter to Lord Temple in which he declared that he should deem those who should vote for Fox's measure as "not only not his friends, but his enemies;" and he added that if Lord Temple could put this in stronger words "he had full authority to do so." With this amazing document in his {235} possession Lord Temple went from one noble lord to another, pointing out the unwisdom of each in pursuing a course which would constitute him an avowed enemy of the King, and insisting upon the advantages that must follow from the taking of the very broad hint of the royal pleasure thus conveyed. Temple's arguments, backed by and founded upon the King's letter, had the most satisfactory result from the King's point of view. Peer after peer fell away from the doomed Ministry; peer after peer hastened to prove himself one of the elect, to assert himself as a King's friend by recording his vote against the obnoxious measure.

[Sidenote: 1783—Fall of the Coalition Ministry]

The course of action inspired by the King and acted upon by Lord Temple was flagrantly unconstitutional even in an age which permitted to the sovereign so much liberty of personal intervention in affairs. It was, however, attended with complete success. The India Bills were rejected in the House of Lords by a majority of nineteen, and this defeat, which would not have been regarded in more recent times as fatal to a Ministry, however fatal for the time being to the measure thus condemned, was instantly used by the King as a pretext for ridding himself of the advisers whose advice he detested. The King resolved to dismiss the ministers, and to dismiss them with every circumstance of indignity that should render their dismissal the more contemptuous. On the midnight of the day following the final defeat of the measure in the House of Lords a messenger delivered to the two Secretaries of State, Fox and North, a message from the King stating that it was his Majesty's will and pleasure that they should deliver to him the seals of their respective offices, and that they should send them by the Under-Secretaries, Mr. Frazer and Mr. Nepean, as a personal interview on the occasion would be disagreeable to the King. The seals were immediately sent to Buckingham House and were promptly handed over by the King to Lord Temple, who on the following day sent letters of dismissal to the other members of the Cabinet Council.

When the House of Commons met, under conditions of {236} keen excitement, Fox and North took their seats on the Front Opposition Bench with their vast majority behind them eager to retaliate upon the King, who had defied their voices and insulted their leaders. A young member, Mr. Richard Pepper Arden, rose in his place and moved a new writ for the borough of Appleby, in the room of the Right Honorable William Pitt, who had accepted the office of First Lord of the Treasury and Chancellor of the Exchequer. We are told that this motion was received with loud and general laughter by the Opposition, who regarded Pitt's conduct as a piece of foolhardy presumption. And indeed at first Pitt's position seemed difficult in the extreme. It was hard to form a Government in the face of a hostile majority in the Commons, and in the Lords Pitt's perplexity was increased by Lord Temple's sudden and sullen resignation of the office to which he had been so newly appointed. Various reasons have been given for Temple's mysterious and petulant behavior. Some have thought that he resigned because he was in favor of an immediate dissolution, while Pitt was opposed to such a step. Others believe that he was eager for some high mark of royal favor, possibly a dukedom, which was refused by the King and not warmly advocated by Pitt. In spite of all obstacles, however, Pitt succeeded in forming a Ministry, the best he could manage under the conditions. To Shelburne he offered nothing, and this omission adds a mystery greater than that of Temple's resignation to Pitt's administration. It must have surprised Shelburne, as it surprised every observer then and since. Pitt has been accused of ingratitude to the man who had been his father's friend and to whom he himself had owed so short a time before the leadership of the House of Commons. But Pitt was not ungrateful. He was merely astute. He read Shelburne as perhaps no other of his contemporaries was able to read him, and he gauged him at his true value or want of value. Shelburne's glittering unreality, his showy unreliability, were to have no place in Pitt's scheme of things. Abandoned by Temple, abandoning Shelburne, Pitt went his own way, doing the best he could in the face {237} of tremendous odds and doing it very well. One of his first acts of office was to bring in an India Bill of his own, which was decisively defeated in the Commons. For some months Pitt fought his hard and thankless fight as a minister with a minority behind him. At last, in the end of March, he saw his opportunity for a dissolution and resolved to take it. A singular episode threatened to delay his purpose. [Sidenote: 1784—The disappearance of the Great Seal] The Great Seal of England was stolen from the house of the Lord Chancellor in Great Ormond Street, and was never recovered. It may have been purloined by some political partisan who believed, as James the Second believed, that by making away with the Great Seal he could effectively embarrass his opponents. But this "curious manoeuvre," as Pitt himself called it, was nullified by the promptitude with which another Great Seal was made.

The result of the dissolution was as gratifying to Pitt as it was disastrous to Fox. More than one hundred and sixty of Fox's friends lost their seats and earned instead the sobriquet of Fox's Martyrs, and Fox himself had very great difficulty in getting elected for the new Parliament. So ended the unfortunate episode of the Coalition Ministry. Much as Fox had suffered from the sins of youth, he was destined to suffer even more from this error of his manhood. For the rest of his life, save for a few months towards its close, he was destined to remain out of office, conscious of the great deeds he would have done and denied the power to do them, while his antagonist Pitt lived through long years of office, long years that were as eventful as any years and more eventful than most years in the history of the country. Fox had run up a great debt for a little power. He had paltered with his honor, with his principles, with his public utterances; he had staked more than he had a right to stake on success, and he had lost, utterly and hopelessly. If every error in life has to be paid for sooner or later, the price due from Fox for his apostasy was very promptly demanded and was very heavy.

It is to be regretted that Pitt began his long period of authority by an attempt as stubborn as it was ungenerous to keep his great rival out of public life. The election for {238} Fox's constituency of Westminster was one of the fiercest conflicts in English history. Every effort was made to drive Fox out, every effort to put him in. Beautiful women—whom Pitt described as "women of the people," in parody of the name they gave to Fox of "the man of the people"—bribed voters with kisses, while the friends of Pitt rallied every man they could muster to the polling booths. Fox was returned, but the unconstitutional conduct of the High Bailiff in granting the request of the defeated candidate, Sir Cecil Wray, for a scrutiny, and in refusing to make a return till the scrutiny was effected, might have deprived Westminster for a season of any Parliamentary representation, and would have kept Fox out of Parliament altogether if he had not been returned for the Kirkwall Borough through the friendship of Sir Thomas Dundas. Pitt unfortunately backed up the action of the High Bailiff with a vehemence of zeal that suggested rancor, and that failed of its purpose. Fox was in the Commons to defend himself and his cause, and he did defend himself with an eloquence that even he never surpassed, and that gave its additional glory to its ultimate success.

[Sidenote: 1784—Pitt as a financier]

However the generosity or the taste of Pitt's conduct towards Fox in this instance might be questioned, there could be no question as to the rare ability he soon made proof of as a statesman and as a financier. During his few and troubled months of office before the dissolution, he had introduced an India Bill to take the place of that of Fox, which the King and the Lords had shattered. This Bill had been defeated by a majority of eight. He now introduced what was practically the same measure, and carried it triumphantly by a majority of more than two hundred. It established that Board of Control and that double system of government which existed, with some modifications, until the Act of 1858, following upon the Indian Mutiny, effected a radical revolution in the administration of India. The enemies of Pitt's measure declared that its abuse of patronage was as flagrant as and more enduring than that proposed by Fox, and for a long time public discontent {239} expressed itself loudly against the extreme favor that was shown to Scotchmen in the filling up of appointments.

The financial affairs of the country called for a bold hand and found it. Lord North had muddled the finances of England almost as completely and almost as hopelessly as contemporary French financiers were muddling the finances of France. Pitt faced something that was not altogether unlike financial chaos with a courage which was well and with a genius which was better. The picturesque institution of smuggling, capitalized by wealth and rank in London, and profitably employing some forty thousand adventurous spirits, withered before the spell of Pitt's dexterous manipulations. A window tax compensated for a lightened tea duty that made smuggling merely a ridiculous waste of time, and its most sinister effect may still be noticed here and there in England in the hideous imitations of windows painted on to the walls of houses to support a grotesque idea of harmony, without incurring the expense of an actual aperture for light and air. Pitt raised the loans necessary to meet the yawning deficit and to minimize the floating debt, and he astonished his world by introducing the amazing elements of absolute honesty and admirable publicity into the transaction. The principle of patronage that had made previous loans a scandalous source of corruption was gallantly thrown overboard; and the new minister announced to the general amazement that the new loans would be contracted for with those who offered the lowest terms in public competition. A glittering variety of new taxes, handled with the dexterity of a conjuror, and extracting sources of revenue from sources untaxed and very justifiably taxable, rounded off a series of financial proposals that inaugurated brilliantly his administration, and that had their abiding effect upon the welfare of the country. The crown of his financial fame was his plan for the redemption of the National Debt introduced in 1786. His plan was based on the comparatively familiar idea of a sinking fund. Up to the time of Pitt's proposal, however, such sinking fund as might exist in a time of peace was always liable to be taken over and {240} made use of by the Government in a time of war. Pitt's plan was to form a sinking fund which should be made inalienable by an Act of Parliament until the Act creating it should be repealed by another Act of Parliament. For this purpose Pitt created a Board of Commissioners consisting of the Speaker, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Master of the Rolls, the Accountant-General, and the Governor and Deputy-Governor of the Bank of England. To this independent and distinguished body of men the sum of one million sterling was to be handed over annually for the gradual redemption of the existing debt by the purchase of stock.

The story of Pitt's early administration was not all a record of success. For the last time, and unsuccessfully, he attempted to bring about a Parliamentary reform. For the first time, and no less unsuccessfully, he tried to bring about that better understanding between England and Ireland which it was his merit always to desire, and his misfortune never to accomplish. In spite of his genius, his eloquence, and his popularity, his position in the House of Commons was in a sense precarious. It was not merely that he had the bad luck to be opposed by such a galaxy of ability as has perhaps never before or since dazzled from the benches of Opposition the eyes of any minister of Pitt's intellectual power. To be fought against relentlessly, tirelessly, by a Sheridan, a Burke, and a Fox would have been bad enough for a statesman at the head of a large and reliable majority and enjoying the uncheckered confidence of his sovereign. But Pitt did not enjoy the uncheckered confidence of the King, and Pitt's majority was not reliable. Lord Rosebery quotes an analysis of the House of Commons dated May 1, 1788, recently discovered among the papers of one of Pitt's private secretaries, which serves to show how uncertain Pitt's position was, and how fluctuating the elements upon which he had to depend for his political existence. In this document the "Party of the Crown"—an ominous term—is set down as consisting of 185 members, including "all those who would probably support his Majesty's Government under any minister not {241} peculiarly unpopular." No less than 108 members are set down as "independent or unconnected;" the party ascribed to Fox musters 138, while that of Pitt is only estimated at 52, with the minimizing comment that "of this party, were there a new Parliament, and Mr. P. no longer to continue minister, not above twenty would be returned." In the face of difficulties like these Pitt stood practically alone. His was no Ministry "of All the Talents;" the ranks of the Ministry did not represent, even in a lesser degree, the rich variety of ability that made the Opposition so formidable.

[Sidenote: 1788—Prince George Augustus Frederick]

If the King was at best but a lukewarm supporter of his splendid minister, the heir to the throne was the minister's very warm and persistent enemy. When Pitt came to power the Prince of Wales was, and had been for some time, a conspicuous figure in society, a fitful element in political life, and a subject of considerable scandal to the public mind. George the Third was not the kind of man to be happy with or to bring happiness to his children. Possessed of many of those virtues which are supposed to make for domestic peace, he nevertheless failed signally to attach to himself the affection of his children. One and all, they left him as soon as they could, came back to him as seldom as they could. The King's idea of firmness was always a more or less aggravated form of tyranny, and he reaped in loneliness the harvest of his early harshness. Between his eldest son and himself there soon arose and long continued that feud between the reigning sovereign and his heir which seemed traditional in the House of Hanover.

George Augustus Frederick, Prince of Wales, has many claims to be regarded as perhaps the worst, and as certainly the most worthless, prince of his House. Something was to be excused in the son of such a father; some wild oats were surely to be sown in the soil of a childhood so dully and so sourly cultivated. But no severity of early surroundings will explain or palliate the unlovely mixture of folly and of falseness, of debauchery, vulgarity, profligacy, and baseness, which were the most conspicuous {242} characteristics of the Prince's nature. The malignant enemy of his unhappy father, the treacherous lover, the perjured friend, a heartless fop, a soulless sot, the most ungentlemanly First Gentleman of Europe, his memory baffles the efforts of the sycophant and paralyzes the anger of the satirist. Genius has wasted itself again and again in the attempt fittingly to describe him. To Byron he became "the fourth of the fools and oppressors called George." Moore immortalized his "nothingness" as a "sick epicure's dream, incoherent and gross." Leigh Hunt went to prison for calling him a "fat Adonis of fifty." Landor, in an epigram on himself and his royal namesakes as bitter as four biting lines could be, could find nothing more bitter than to record his descent from earth, and thankfulness to Heaven that with him the Georges had come to an end. Thackeray abandoned in despair the task of doing justice to his existence. "I own I once used to think it would be good sport to pursue him, fasten on him, and pull him down. But now I am ashamed to mount and lay good dogs on, to summon a full field, and then to hunt the poor game."

When Pitt became Prime Minister the Prince of Wales was in Opposition, because he was opposed to his father. He imagined himself to be the friend of Fox, of Sheridan, of Burke, because Fox and Sheridan and Burke were unpopular with the King. His career had been one of debt and drunkenness, of mean amours and degrading pleasures, when the son of Chatham passed from his studious youth to the control of the destinies of England. Pitt was called upon and refused to consent to a Parliamentary appeal to the King for the payment of the Prince's debts. Pitt could feel no courtier's sympathy for the unnatural son, for the faithless Florizel of foolish Perdita Robinson, for the perjured husband of Mrs. Fitzherbert. There can be no doubt that in the December of 1785 the Prince of Wales went through a ceremony of marriage, which could not under the conditions constitute a legal marriage, with Mrs. Fitzherbert, a beautiful young woman of a little more than twenty-nine years of age, who had twice been widowed {243} and was a member of the Roman Catholic faith. The town soon rang with gossip, and what was gossip in the drawing-rooms threatened to become a matter for "delicate investigation" in the House of Commons. The denial given by Fox in Parliament on the authority of the Prince of Wales practically ended any attempt at public inquiry, and almost broke the heart of Mrs. Fitzherbert. To her the Prince of course promptly disavowed Fox, with whom she immediately broke off all friendship. Fox himself, indignant at the Prince's falsehood and at the base use which had been made of his voice, shunned the Prince's society for a long time, which might very well have been longer. The scandal slowly ebbed; a compromise was arrived at between the King and his son; the King made an appeal to Parliament; and a sum of money was voted to deal with the Prince's debts in consideration of his promises of reform in the future.

[Sidenote: 1788—Talk of a Regency]

The Prince of Wales did not forget Pitt's attitude towards him, and the time soon arrived in which the minister came near to feeling the force of the Prince's anger. The health of the King was suddenly and seriously affected. Soon after his reign began he had been afflicted by a temporary loss of reason. The same misfortune now fell upon him in the autumn of 1788. It became necessary to make arrangements for the appointment of a regent, and the necessity was the cause of a fierce Parliamentary controversy. Fox rashly insisted that the Prince of Wales had as much right to assume the reins of government as he would have had in the case of the death of the monarch. Pitt maintained the more constitutional opinion that it was the privilege of Parliament to appoint a regent and to decide what powers should be intrusted to him. However little the knowledge may have influenced his action, Pitt knew very well that with the appointment of the Prince of Wales as regent his own hold of power would, for a time, come to an end. The whole question, however, was suddenly set on one side by the unexpected recovery of the King. The King's restoration to reason was well for the minister, and undoubtedly well for the {244} kingdom. If Burke and Sheridan and Fox were avowedly the Prince's friends in Parliament, his most intimate friends, those who would be likely to prove influential in his mimic Court, were men of a very different kind. These were such men as George Hanger, the half-mad soldier, the "Paragon of Debauchery," as the caricaturists labelled the Prince's "confidential friend," who having been almost everything from captain of Hessians to coal merchant, and from recruiter for the East India Company to inmate of a debtor's prison, ended his long and unlovely career by declining to assume the title of Lord Coleraine, to which he became entitled in 1814, ten years before his death. These were such men as Charles Morris, the amiable Anacreon of Carlton House, who made better punch and rhymed better ballads than his fellows of that convivial age, and who had the grace to expiate the ignoble noonday of his existence by an honorable evening. These were such men as the queer gang of blackguards, ruffians, and rowdies who haunted Brighthelmstone, the bad and brutal Richard Barry, the "Hellgate" Lord Barrymore; the Jockey of Norfolk, with his hair grown gray in iniquities; Sir John Lade, whose wife had been the mistress of a highwayman; and the worst and basest spirit of the gang, the Duke of Queensberry. Such were the men whom the Prince delighted to make his companions; such were the men who, if the King's madness had persisted, would have hailed with satisfaction the overthrow of Mr. Pitt.

It were needless to dwell further for the present upon the adventures of the Prince of Wales, his amours, his debts, his friendships, his fantastic pavilion at Brighton, or his unhappy marriage in April, 1795, to his cousin, the Princess Caroline Amelia Elizabeth of Brunswick. Twenty years were to pass away before the recurrence of the King's malady was to give his eldest son the show of power, and in those twenty years the two political rivals—one of whom was the greatest of his allies, and the other the greatest of his adversaries—had passed away.



{245}

CHAPTER LVIII.

WARREN HASTINGS.

[Sidenote: 1732—The birth of Warren Hastings]

In the days when Clive was first winning his way to fame in India there was another young Englishman serving John Company, whose ability attracted the notice and gained the esteem of the conqueror of Dupleix. It is one of the privileges of genius to discern the genius of others. But even Clive, when he noted a young volunteer at Falta, who seemed destined for better things than the handling of a musket, cannot have dreamed that he was giving an opportunity to a man whose name was to take as high a rank in the history of India as his own, whose deeds were to be no less fiercely battled over, whose part in the creation of a great Indian Empire was to be as illustrious. All that India had been to Clive—a refuge, a battleground, a theatre of great deeds, and unfortunately also of great offences, the cause of almost unbearable triumph and almost intolerable humiliation, all that in as great a degree India was to be to Warren Hastings.

Warren Hastings was born in the December of 1732, in Churchill, Oxfordshire, near Daylesford in Worcestershire. His family had been a good as it was an old family. But it had come down in the world. It had grown poorer and poorer as the generations rolled on, and that manor of Daylesford which had been in the family in the days of the second Henry had passed in the year of Sheriffmuir into the hands of a Gloucester merchant. When Warren Hastings was born, the fortunes of the house had come to a very low ebb indeed. Pynaston Hastings, Warren Hastings's father, was, perhaps, as imbecile a man as ever yet was the means of bringing an illustrious son into the world. He seems to have been weak, foolish, shiftless, as {246} worthless as a man well could be who was not actually a criminal. He had married very young, before he was sixteen; his wife had died shortly after giving birth to Warren Hastings. Pynaston married again, entered the Church, when he was old enough to take holy orders, and drifted away into the West Indies into outer darkness and oblivion, leaving children entirely dependent upon the charity of relatives. That charity did not fail, though at first it could be but meagrely extended. Warren Hastings's grandfather was desperately poor. All he could do for his deserted grandchild was to place him at the charity school of the village. There, habited almost like a beggar, taught as a beggar, the companion of clowns and playfellow of rustics, the future peer of kings and ruler of rajahs, the coming pro-consul who was yet to make the state of England as imperial as the state of Rome, received his earliest lessons in the facts of life, and dreamed his earliest dreams. His were strange dreams. In sleep, says a Persian poet with whom young Hastings was afterwards doubtless acquainted, the beggar and the king are equal. If Warren Hastings slept as a beggar, he certainly dreamed as a king. We know, on his own statement, that when he was but a child of seven he cherished that wild ambition which was to lead him through so many glories and so many crimes. We are familiar with the picture of the boy leaning over the stream on that summer day, and looking at the old dwelling of his race, and swearing to himself his oath of Hannibal that some day he would, if the stars were propitious, win back his inheritance.

[Sidenote: 1750—Warren Hastings's early life]

Somewhere about a year after this oath of Hannibal the fortunes of the lad took a turn for the better. An uncle, Howard Hastings, who had a place in the Customs, was willing to give a helping hand to the son of his graceless brother. He brought Warren Hastings to London. In London Warren Hastings was first sent to school at Newington, where his mind was better nourished than his body. In after life he used to declare that his meagre proportions and stunted form were due to the hard living of his Newington days. But the Newington days came to {247} an end. When he was some twelve years of age, his uncle sent him to Westminster School, where his name is still inscribed in letters of gold, and where his memory adds its lustre to the historic associations of a place that is richly blessed with historic associations. Warren Hastings distinguished himself in the great school of Westminster, as he had already distinguished himself in the little village school of Daylesford. With his oath of Hannibal burning in his mind, he seems to have determined to seek success in all that he attempted, and to gain it by his indomitable energy and will. If he was brilliant as a scholar, he was not, therefore, backward in those other arts which school-boys prize beyond scholarship. He was as famous on the river for his swimming and his boating as he was famous in the classroom for his application and his ability. His masters predicted for him a brilliant University career, and it is possible that Hastings may have seen Daylesford Manor awaiting him at the end of such a career, and have welcomed the prospect. But the life of Warren Hastings was not fated to pass in the cloistered greenness of a university or in the still air of delightful studies. Howard Hastings died and left his nephew to the care of a connection, a Mr. Chiswick, who happened to be a member of the East India Company. Perhaps Mr. Chiswick resented the obligation thus laid upon him; perhaps, as a member of the East India Company, he honestly believed that to enter its service was the proudest privilege that a young man could enjoy. Whatever were his reasons, he resolutely refused to sanction his charge's career at the university, insisted upon his being placed for a season at a commercial school to learn arithmetic and book-keeping, and then shipped him off out of hand to Bengal as an addition to the ranks of the Calcutta clerks. Thus it came to pass that Warren Hastings, like Clive, was sent to India by persons in England who were anxious to get rid of a troublesome charge. There were a good many persons in the years to come who were very ready to curse the obstinacy of the elder Clive and the asperity of Mr. Chiswick for sending two such terrible adventurers forth to {248} the great battle-field of India. The history of our Indian Empire would certainly have been a very different story if only Mr. Clive had been more attached to his ne'er-do-well son, and if only Mr. Chiswick had been better affected towards his industrious charge. In the January of 1750 Warren Hastings said farewell to his dreams of a scholar's garland in England and sailed for India. In the October of the same year he landed in Bengal and altered the history of the world.

Gentlemen adventurers who went out to India in the last century in the service of John Company seldom knew much, or indeed cared much, about the condition of the country which they were invading. They dreamed mostly of large fortunes, fortunes to be swiftly made and then brought home and expended splendidly to the amazement of less fortunate stay-at-homes. For the past history of India they did not care a penny piece. What to them were the mythical deeds of Rama and of Krishna; what to them the marches of Semiramis and Sesostris, or the conquests of Alexander, or the fate and fortunes of the ancient kingdoms of the Deccan and Hindostan? They cared nothing for the spread of Mahommedan influence and authority, the glories of the Mogul Empire, the fate of Tamerlane, the fame of Aurungzebe. For them the history of India began with the merchant adventurers of 1659 and the East India Company of 1600, with the grant of Bombay to England as part of the dower which the Princess of Portugal brought to Charles the Second. Nor were they moved by imperial ambitions. It did not enter into their heads to conceive or to desire the addition of a vast Indian empire to the appanages of the English crown. They cared little for the conflicting creeds of India, for Brahmanism and Buddhism and Jainism and Hinduism and the sects of Islam. They knew little of the differing tongues talked over that vast continent, more than five hundred in number, from the Hindi of one hundred million men to the most restricted dialects of the mountains of Assam and Nepaul. India for them meant the little space of earth where the English had a trading interest, {249} and the regions of the shadowy potentates beyond from whom in some way or other money might be got.

[Sidenote: 1750—Suraj ud Dowlah]

When Warren Hastings landed in India the relations of England and of Englishmen to India were just upon the turn. The star of Clive's fortunes was mounting towards its zenith; the fiery planet of Dupleix had begun to fail and pale and fade. The policy which Dupleix had adopted, that policy of intrigue with the native princes of India, the English East India Company had been forced in self-defence and very reluctantly to adopt. Having adopted it, the men of the English East India Company proved themselves to be better players at the game than Dupleix. Warren Hastings, driving his pen at a desk in Calcutta, or looking after silk-spinning in the factory of Kazim Bazar near Murshidabad on the Ganges, was able to watch almost from its beginning the great political drama in which he was destined in his time to play so great a part, and which was to end in giving England a great Asiatic empire. When Suraj ud Dowlah declared war against the English his first move was to fall upon the Kazim Bazar settlement. Warren Hastings and the other English residents were made prisoners and sent to Murshidabad, where, through the intervention of the Dutch Company, they were humanely treated. Then came the madman's march on Calcutta, the horror of the Black Hole, and the flight of the Governor and the Company's servants to the little fort at Falta in the Hughli below Calcutta. Communications were entered upon between Governor Drake in Falta Island and Hastings at Murshidabad with a view to coming to terms with Suraj ud Dowlah. Warren Hastings was already, however, developing that genius for Oriental diplomacy which afterwards so characterized his career. He was made aware of the treason that was hatching against Suraj ud Dowlah in his own court and among his own friends, and he was quite ready to play his part and find his account in that treason. Treason is a risky game for a political prisoner at a court like that of Suraj ud Dowlah. Warren Hastings was quick-witted enough to see that the sooner he got away from that {250} court the better for himself. He succeeded accordingly in making his escape and joining the fugitives at Falta. Here two things of moment happened to him. He met the woman who was to be his first wife, and he met the great man who was to give him his first chance for fame. Among the refugees from Calcutta was the widow of a Captain Campbell. Warren Hastings fell in love with her, and afterwards in an hour of greater security he married her. He seem to have been very fond of her, to have been very happy with her, but she died very soon after the marriage, and the two children she bore him both died young, and so that episode came to an end. The more momentous meeting was with Clive. When the Madras expedition appeared in the Hughli, Warren Hastings volunteered to serve in the ranks, shouldered his gun, and took his part in the fighting round Calcutta. But Clive's keen eyes discerned stuff for better things than the sieging of Indian forts in the young volunteer. When Suraj ud Dowlah's defeat ended in Suraj ud Dowlah's death, and the traitorous Mir Jaffier sat on the throne in his stead, Warren Hastings was sent to the court of the new prince at Murshidabad, originally as second to the Company's representative, Mr. Scratton, and afterwards as sole representative.

[Sidenote: 1762—Clive and the East India Company]

At Murshidabad Warren Hastings had every opportunity to justify Clive's acumen in singling him out for distinction. The post he held was one of exceptional difficulty and delicacy. Mir Jaffier was not altogether an agreeable person to get on with. The English in India were taking their first lessons in Oriental intrigue. They were learning that if it was not particularly difficult to upset one tyrant and place another on his throne, it was not always easy to keep that other on the throne, or at all safe to rely upon his loyalty to the men who had brought about his exaltation. Mir Jaffier was surrounded by enemies. His court, like every other Oriental court, was honeycombed with intrigues against him. His English patrons, or rather his English masters, proved to have an itching palm. They were always wanting money, and Mir Jaffier {251} had not always got enough money in his treasury to content their desires. So he began to intrigue against the English with the Dutch, and the English found him out and promptly knocked him off his throne, and set up a new puppet in his stead. By this time Clive had returned to England, and the direction of the destinies of the East India Company was in the hands of the Governor, Mr. Vansittart, a well-meaning man whose views were not the views of Clive. Clive objected very much to the course which the East India Company were pursuing. He wrote a letter to the London Board rebuking in no measured language the defects and evils of the Indian Administration. Once again Clive was the cause of Warren Hastings's advancement. The London Board ordered the instant dismissal of all the officials who had signed Clive's letter and Warren Hastings was appointed to fill one of the vacant places.

The five years that elapsed between the departure of Clive for England in 1760 and his return to India in 1765 are not years that reflect much credit upon the East India Company's administration. They had suddenly found themselves lifted from a condition of dependency and, at one moment, of despair to a position of unhoped-for authority and influence. New to such power, dazzled by such influence, they abused the one and they misused the other. But the part that Warren Hastings played during this unfortunate five years reflects only credit upon himself. The vices of the East India Company were not his vices; he was no party to their abuse of their power, or their misuse of their influence. When he was advanced from the Patna agency, his place was taken by a Mr. Ellis, who seems to have been exceptionally and peculiarly unfitted for the delicate duties of his post. He appears to have carried on all his negotiations and communications with the Nawab Mir Kasim with a high-handed arrogance and an absence of tact which were in their way astonishing. Relations between the Nawab and Mr. Ellis, as the Company's representative, became so strained that in 1762 Warren Hastings was again sent to Patna to investigate the whole trouble. {252} Clive's judgment was already justified: Warren Hastings's ability had already found much of the recognition it deserved; his twelve years of Indian life had changed him from the adventurous, inexperienced lad into the ripe and skilful statesman upon whom his masters were confident that they could rely in such a moment of emergency as had now come.

It would have been better for the Company if they had taken the advice that Warren Hastings gave in the report on the quarrel between the Nawab on the one side and Mr. Ellis on the other. He was a servant of John Company, but he was too good a servant not to see the faults of his masters and the follies to which those faults were leading. The Company had blundered very badly before the coming of Clive; had blundered through false security, through negligence, through pusillanimity, through greed. After the victories of Clive had placed the Board in Leadenhall Street, and its representatives in India, on a very different footing, the Company blundered through rapacity, through selfishness, through the arrogance born of an unforeseen success. All manner of oppressions and injustices were committed under the powerful protection of the English name. Hastings declared that the only way of ending the difficulty was to come to some definite settlement with the Nawab as to his authority on the one hand and the Company's privileges on the other. Together with Mr. Vansittart, the Governor, Hastings visited the Nawab, and a plan of conciliation was made by which the rights of the Nawab and the rights of the Company were duly apportioned and declared. But the headstrong Council of the Company refused the propositions of Warren Hastings and of Vansittart, and refused to make any concessions to the Nawab. The irritated Nawab retaliated by abolishing all internal duties upon trade, by which act he deprived the English of the unjust advantages for which they had contended. It was now a question which should attack the other first, and Mr. Ellis, hearing a rumor of intended hostilities on the part of Mir Kasim, attacked the Nawab, drove him out of his dominions and {253} set up Mir Jaffier again for a time. Hastings protested against these acts, and declared that he would have resigned but that he was unwilling to leave the Company while engaged in a harassing war. But his position was uncomfortable. His counsels and those of Mr. Vansittart were unheeded. English aggression continued. Mr. Vansittart left for England in 1764, and in the December of that year Hastings followed him, glad to leave a scene of so much disorder, a disorder that was to increase alarmingly, until in the September of 1765 Clive reappeared in India and set things straight again.

[Sidenote: 1765-69—Hastings's return to England]

Of no period of Warren Hastings's life is less known than of the four years which he spent in his native land—from 1765 to 1769. He did not return to England like the traditional Nabob, with pockets overflowing with rupees. He had not employed his time and his energies, as so many other servants of John Company had done, solely to the furthering of his own fortunes, and the filling of his own pockets. If he had sailed for India fourteen years earlier as a penniless lad, he returned to England comparatively a poor man. He had tried his hand at commerce like every one else in India, but commerce was not much in his line. He had the capacities of a statesman, he had the tastes of a man of letters, but he did not in any great degree possess the qualities that go to make a successful merchant. It is even said that he had to borrow the money to pay his passage home, and it seems certain that when he was home, the generous way in which he endeavored to assist his relations sorely taxed his meagre means.

Hastings seems to have sought for distinction in the career of a man of letters and not to have found it. The ability which he displayed in administration and the writing of State papers and political correspondence vanished whenever he attempted to produce work that made a more ambitious claim to be considered literature. The clearness of statement, the width of view, the logical form, the firm grasp and profound knowledge which were characteristic of the evidence he gave before the House of {254} Commons Committee in 1766, gave place to a thin and niggling pedantry of style when he turned his pen to the essays and the verses of a man of letters. Yet there were some topics on which he was eminently qualified to write, and by which, under happier conditions, he might have earned distinction. While he was in India he had not allowed his active mind to be entirely occupied with the duties of his official career. That love of literature, that marvellous capacity for acquiring knowledge, which had characterized him in his Westminster school-days, remained with him at the desk of the East India Company and in the courts of Indian princes. He gave great attention to the languages and the literatures of the East. Most of those English who served their term in India contented themselves, when they troubled themselves at all about the matter, with learning as much of the native vernaculars with which they were brought into contact as was necessary for the carrying on of a conversation and the giving of an order. With such a measure of knowledge Warren Hastings was not content. He studied Persian, the courtly language of India, closely; he read much in its enchanting literature. When he came back to England in 1765 he was possessed of a knowledge of the most beautiful of the Eastern languages, as rare as it was useless then for an English man of letters to possess.

[Sidenote: 1769—Warren Hastings as an Oriental scholar]

Almost a century later the great American transcendentalist, Emerson, prophesied a rise of Orientalism in England, and he lived to see his words come true. But in the days when Warren Hastings was striving to make his way in London as an author, the influence of the East upon literature, upon scholarship, upon thought, was scarcely perceptible. People read indeed the "Arabian Nights" in M. Galland's delightful version; read the Persian tales of Petit de la Croix; read all the translations of the many sham Oriental tales which the popularity of Galland and Petit de la Croix had called for in Paris, and which the Parisian writers were ready to supply. But serious Oriental scholarship can hardly be said to have existed in England. Sir William Jones was the only Englishman of {255} distinction who was earnestly devoted to Eastern studies; but his Persian Grammar, which was in some degree the foundation-stone of Persian scholarship in England, had not yet appeared, and Sir William Jones was still writing to Reviczki those delightful letters in which he raves about the poetry of the Arabs and the Persians. Thus the scholarship of Warren Hastings placed him in an exceedingly small minority among Englishmen of letters. Hastings was not the man to be alarmed or discouraged by finding himself in a minority. He was as impassioned an admirer of Persian poetry as Sir William Jones; he considered that the Persian language should be included in the studies of all well-educated men; he dreamed of animating the waning fires of Oriental learning at Oxford. He had a vision in his mind of a new scholarship, to be called into being by the generosity of the East India Company. He thought of Englishmen becoming as familiar with the deeds of Rustum as with the wrath of Achilles, as intimate with the Ghazels of Hafiz as with the Odes of Horace. He seems to have visited Dr. Johnson in the hope of securing him as an ally in his scheme. The scheme came to nothing, but the learning, the literary taste, and scholarly ambition of Hastings made a strong impression upon Johnson, who entertained a stately regard for the young man from India.

It soon became plain to Warren Hastings that he was not going to make much of a livelihood either by Persian poetry or by the calling of a man of letters. His thoughts had turned back to India within a year of his return to England, and he had applied for employment to the Company, but for some reason his request was not granted. In 1768, however, the Court of Directors appointed him to a seat in Council at Madras, and early in the following year, 1769, he sailed again for India on his most momentous voyage. Not only was that ship, the "Duke of Grafton," bearing him to a career of the greatest glory and the greatest obloquy; not only was it carrying him to a grandeur and a fall almost unparalleled in the history of men who were not monarchs. On board the "Duke of {256} Grafton" Warren Hastings was to meet with one of the most serious influences of his life. We have already seen how Hastings had married, had been a father, and how wife and children had passed out of his life and left him alone. Hastings was a man of strong emotions. Now he met a woman who awoke all the strongest emotions of his nature and won his devotion for the rest of his life. The Baroness von Imhoff was a young, beautiful, attractive woman, married to a knavish adventurer.

It is certain that she and Hastings felt a warm attachment for each other; it seems certain that Imhoff connived at, or at least winked at, the attachment. It may be that the understanding between Hastings and Imhoff was in this sense honorable—that the Baron was willing to free his wife from an unhappy union that she might form a happy union. It may be that Hastings's passion was indeed, in Macaulay's fine phrase, "patient of delay." The simple facts that call for no controversy are that Hastings met the Baroness von Imhoff in 1769; that eight years later, in 1777, Imhoff, with the aid of Hastings's money, obtained his divorce in the Franconian Courts, and that the woman who had been his wife became the wife of Hastings. She made him a devoted wife; he made her a devoted husband. Hastings was never a profligate. In an age that was not remarkable for morality his life was apparently moral even to austerity. His relationships with the Imhoffs constitute the only charge of immorality that has been brought against him, and the charge, at least, is not of the gravest kind. If Anglo-Indian society was at first inclined to be uncharitable, if the great ladies of its little world held aloof in the beginning from the Baroness von Imhoff, her marriage with Hastings seems to have restored her to general favor and esteem.

[Sidenote: 1771—Hastings's great administrative qualities]

Warren Hastings found plenty of work cut out for him on his return to India. He had his own ideas, and strong ideas, about the necessity for reforms. He was much opposed to the policy of sending out as secretaries to the local governments men who were without local experience and therefore less likely to take a warm interest {257} in the Company's welfare, while such appointments were in themselves unjust to the claims of the Company's own servants. He vehemently urged the necessity for making the rewards of the service more adequate to the duties of the service, and he announced himself as determined to do all he could for "the improvement of the Company's finances, so far as it can be effected without encroaching upon their future income." If Hastings could scheme out needed reforms on his way out, he found on his arrival that the need for reform was little short of appalling. The position which Hastings held was a curious one. He was President of the Council, it is true, but president of a council of which every member had an equal vote, and many of the members of which had personal reasons for wishing to oppose the reforms that Hastings was coming out to accomplish. A disorganized government had to be reorganized, an exhausted exchequer to be refilled, a heart-breaking debt to be reduced, and all this had to be done under conditions that well might have shaken a less dauntless spirit than that of Warren Hastings.

Warren Hastings was never for one moment shaken. In a very short space of time he had greatly bettered the administrative system, had fostered the trade of the country by the adoption of a uniform and low Customs duty, and had greatly furthered the establishment of civilized rule in the province conquered by Clive. He accomplished this in the face of difficulties and all dissensions in his own Council, against subtle native intrigues, against opposition open and covert of the most persistent kind. Every creature who throve out of the disorganization of India naturally worked, in the daylight or in the dark, against Hastings's efforts at organization. In 1771, when he was made Governor of Bengal, he had attempted much and succeeded in much. He fought hard with the secret terror of dacoity. Having given Bengal a judicial system, he proceeded to increase its usefulness by drawing up a code of Mohammedan and Hindu law. For the former he used the digest made by command of Aurungzebe; for the {258} second he employed ten learned Pundits, the result of whose labors was afterwards translated into English by Halhed, who had been the friend of Sheridan and his rival for the hand of Miss Linley.

The work which Warren Hastings accomplished in India must be called gigantic. He created organization out of chaos; he marched straightforward upon the course which Clive had already marked out as the path of the East India Company's glory. The East India Company was not very eager to advance along that path. Hastings spurred its sluggish spirit, and, though he was not able to do all that his daring nature dreamed of, he left behind him a long record of great achievements. The annexation of Benares, the practical subjection of Oude, the extension of British dominion, the triumphs of British arms, must be remembered to the credit of Warren Hastings when his career as a great English adventurer is being summed up. That British Empire in India for which Clive unconsciously labored owes its existence to-day in no small degree to the genius, to the patience, and to the untiring energy of Warren Hastings.

[Sidenote: 1773—Hastings and the Rohilla War]

The two heaviest charges levelled against Warren Hastings are in connection with the Rohilla war and with the trial of Nuncomar, now better known as Nand Kumar. The genius of Burke and the genius of Macaulay have served not merely to intensify the feeling against Hastings, but in some degree to form the judgments and bias the opinions of later writers. But it is only due to the memory of a great man to remember that both in the case of the Rohilla war and in the case of Nand Kumar there were two sides to the question, and that Hastings's side has not always been investigated with the care it deserves. The adversary who denounced him in the House of Commons and impeached him in Westminster Hall, the adversary who assailed him with a splendid prose, were alike inspired by a longing for justice and a hatred of oppression. But it should be possible now, when more than a century has passed since the indictment of the one and well-nigh half a century since the indictment of the other, to remember {259} that if Hastings cannot be exculpated there is at least a measure of excuse to be offered for his action.

There is much to be said from a certain point of view in defence of Warren Hastings's action with regard to the Rohilla war. The Rohilla chiefs were no doubt a danger to the Nawab of Oude, whom Hastings regarded as a useful ally of the Company. By the conquest of Rohilkhand Hastings hoped to obtain for that ally a compact State shut in effectually from foreign invasion by the Ganges all the way from the frontiers of Behar to the mountains of Thibet, while at the same time this useful ally would remain equally accessible to the British forces either for hostilities or protection. Put in this way the case seemed, no doubt, plausible enough to Hastings, and to all who thought with Hastings that Indian chiefs and princes were but pieces on a board, to be pushed this way or that way, advanced or removed altogether at the pleasure and for the advantage of the English resident and ruler. But what actually happened was that Hastings, in defiance of the whole principle of the Company's administration in India, interfered in the contests of native races and lent the force of English arms to aid a despot in the extirpation of his enemies. It is not to the point to urge that the Rohillas were not undeserving of their fate. Even if the Rohillas were little other than robber chiefs, even if their existence constituted a weak point in the lines of defence against the ever-terrible Mahrattas, all this did not in the eyes of Burke and of those who thought with Burke justify Hastings in lending English arms for their extermination and receiving Indian money for the loan. They saw an act of hideous injustice and corruption where Hastings saw merely a piece of ingenious state policy. He gave the troops, he got the money. The Rohillas were destroyed as an independent power, and the Company was richer than it had been before the transaction by some four hundred thousand pounds.

The story of Nand Kumar comes into the history as the result of an organic change in the composition and administration of the East India Company. North's {260} Regulating Act of 1773 made many changes in the administration of English India. The changes that most directly concerned Hastings converted the Governor of Bengal into a Governor-General, and reduced his Council to four members. The Governments of Madras and Bombay were placed under the joint control of Governor-General and Council. Hastings was appointed, naturally enough, to be the new Governor-General. His four councillors were Richard Barwell, General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Philip Francis. Barwell was the only one who was a member of Hastings's old Council. The three others were in England; they had been chosen expressly to guide Indian policy in accordance with the views of the home Government. Clavering and Monson had already earned some distinction of a soldierly kind; Francis was by far the ablest of the three. The author of the "Letters of Junius" was much of a scholar and something of a statesman, but he was a man of a fierce and unbending temper, prompt to quarrel, hotly arrogant in argument, unrelenting in his hatred of those who crossed his purposes.

These were not the kind of men with whom Hastings was likely to get on, and from the moment of their landing in India, where they complained that they were not received with sufficient ceremony, they and Hastings were furiously hostile. The meetings of the Governor-General and his Council became so many pitched battles, in which Hastings, aided only by Barwell, fought with tenacity and patience against men whose determination appeared to be in every possible instance to undo what he had done, and to oppose what he proposed to do. They treated him as if he were little better than a clerk in the Company's service; they acted as if their one purpose was to drive him out of public life.

[Sidenote: 1775—Charges against Hastings]

As soon as it was plain that the new men of the new Council were hostile to Hastings, Hastings's enemies were eager enough to come forward and help in the work. One of Hastings's oldest and bitterest enemies was the Brahmin Nand Kumar. Nand Kumar had always been hostile to Hastings. Now, when Hastings was in danger, was {261} threatened with defeat and with disgrace, Nand Kumar came forward with a whole string of accusations against him, accusations to which Francis, Clavering, and Monson listened eagerly. Nand Kumar accused Hastings of many acts of shameless bribery, declared that he himself had bribed him in large sums, and produced a letter from a native princess in which she avowed that she had bribed Hastings in large sums. The three councillors appear to have accepted every word uttered by Nand Kumar as gospel truth. Hastings, on his side, refused to be arraigned at his own Council-board by a man whom he alleged to be of notoriously infamous character, though he and Barwell were perfectly willing that the whole matter should be referred to the Supreme Court. At last Hastings withdrew from the Council, followed by Barwell. The others immediately voted Clavering into the chair, summoned Nand Kumar before them, listened to all that he had to say, and on that evidence, in the absence of the accused man, the self-constituted tribunal found Hastings guilty of taking bribes from the princess, and ordered him to repay the sum of thirty-five thousand pounds to the public treasury.

For the moment it seemed as if Francis and his party had carried the day. Hastings had his back to the wall, he seemed to be well-nigh friendless. The triumvirate declared that there was no form of peculation from which Hastings had thought it reasonable to abstain, and they formally charged him with having acquired by peculation a fortune of no less than forty lakhs of rupees in two years and a half. Suddenly, when the position of Hastings appeared to be at its worst, it changed. Nand Kumar and two Englishmen named Fowke, who had been very zealous against Hastings, were charged before the Supreme Court with conspiracy, in having compelled a native revenue farmer to bear false witness against Hastings. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was Elijah Impey, Hastings's old and attached friend, a circumstance of which much has been made. While Nand Kumar was bound over for trial on the charge of conspiracy, another and more serious charge was brought against him by a native attorney, who {262} accused him of forging and publishing a bond. On this charge Nand Kumar was arrested, and after a lengthy hearing of the case committed to the common jail.

There is nothing very surprising in this charge of forgery. Forgery was not a very serious crime in the eyes of such men as either Nand Kumar or his accuser. It was made plain that, whether he had forged the bond or no, he had forged the letter from the princess upon which the charge against Hastings was based, for the princess herself declared it to be a forgery. It had aroused some suspicion even before the disclaimer, on account of the signature, which did not resemble her signature in undoubted and authentic communications. On the question of the forged bond Nand Kumar was duly and apparently fairly tried. It was not very much of a charge. The business was very old. The native attorney had been seeking for some time to bring Nand Kumar to trial, and had only substituted a criminal for a civil suit when the establishment of the Supreme Court enabled him to do so.

[Sidenote: 1775—The execution of Nand Kumar]

Nand Kumar's trial ended in conviction, and conviction for forgery brought with it by the English law sentence of death. Whatever may be thought of the crime of forgery in England, it certainly was not looked upon in India by Indians as a criminal offence of a kind that called for the severest penalty of the law. But Nand Kumar had been tried by English law. His judges, in order to show their fidelity not merely to the spirit but to all the forms of English law, had worn their heavy wigs all through the torrid heat of those Calcutta June days. By the English law he was convicted and sentenced to death. The triumvirate made little or no attempt to save the man on whose word they had relied. On August 5, 1775, Nand Kumar was hanged on the Maidan outside Calcutta. He met his death with the composed courage of a man who looked upon himself as a martyr. Whatever his offences may have been, he had done nothing which in his own eyes, or in the eyes of his fellow-countrymen, called for the pitiless punishment which fell upon him.

Of course, the important question is how far, if at all, {263} Hastings was concerned in the death of Nand Kumar. That is just the question which it is impossible to answer definitely. The certain facts are that Nand Kumar was Hastings's enemy, that Impey was Hastings's friend; that at a moment of grave crisis in Hastings's life, when Nand Kumar was the most eminent witness against his name and fame, that witness, was arraigned on a charge that was very old, that had been suddenly converted from a civil to a criminal charge; that he was tried, found guilty, and executed. On the basis of that bare narrative of facts it would seem that if Hastings had nothing to do with the matter, he might almost as well have had as far as the judgment of posterity went. The thing was too apt, the conditions too peculiar not to leave their stigma upon the memory of the man who gained most by them.

At the same time it must be remembered that, however black the arguments against Hastings may seem, there is no positive proof that he was directly implicated in what his enemies called the judicial murder of Nand Kumar. It must be remembered that the writer who has gone most deeply into the whole ugly story, Sir James Stephen, in his careful "Story of Nuncomar," has after long and exhaustive analysis of every particular of the case recorded his judgment in favor of Impey and of Hastings. Sir James Stephen's judgment is not final, indeed, but it must have weight with any one who attempts impartially to appreciate two public men who have been accused for more than a century of a terrible crime. Sir James Stephen believes that Nand Kumar's trial was perfectly fair, that Hastings had no share whatever in the prosecution, and that there was no collusion of any kind between Hastings and Impey with regard to the trial, the verdict, or the execution. Every one must form as best he may his own judgment upon the matter and the men; but Sir James Stephen's opinion is one that must be taken into account in any attempt to decide.

The death of Nand Kumar did not end the struggle between Hastings and his three antagonists. While they made no further attempt of a like kind—the fate of Nand {264} Kumar, said Francis, would prevent any further native information against the Governor-General—they still resolutely strove by all possible means to cross and check him. It is not necessary to follow in all their mean and wearisome details the particulars of that prolonged conflict. The odds were against Hastings until the death of Monson, when, by means of his own casting vote and the adhesion of Barwell, Hastings found himself the master of the majority at the Council-table. But the persistence of the attacks had their result at home, where an ill-advised offer of resignation made by Hastings was seized upon by the Directors of the Company. The resignation was accepted, Wheler was appointed Governor-General in his stead, and pending his arrival in India the post was to be filled by Clavering.

This was a severe blow for Hastings. At first he thought of yielding to it, in which case his career in India would have been closed. But Clavering's indecent eagerness to seize upon the Governor-Generalship before it was fairly vacant forced Hastings to defiance. He refused to surrender his office to Clavering. Clavering called upon the army to support him. Hastings called upon the army to stand fast by him. The army followed Hastings, and the support of the men of the sword was followed by the support of the men of the robe. The judges of the Supreme Court backed up Hastings and censured Clavering, and a little later Clavering's death left Hastings for the time supreme in the Council-chamber. His supremacy was contested after the arrival of Wheler, who immediately sided with Francis against Hastings. But the supremacy was not overthrown. Hastings was in the majority; he would not allow the alliance of Francis and Wheler to impede him in his purposes, and he stuck to his post as Governor-General.

The East India Company made no effort to enforce his resignation. The Court of Directors resented his conduct, and found fault with him persistently, but they could not overlook his influence with the Court of Proprietors, and the condition of affairs in India was too grave to make the {265} dismissal of Hastings wise or politic. The Government bore Hastings little love, and the King in particular was much incensed at his refusal to resign, and was all for his recall and the recall of Barwell who had abetted, and the judges who had supported him. But the struggle with the American colonies absorbed the attention of the Administration too closely to allow them to interfere so markedly in the affairs of India at a moment when interference might perhaps have a result not unlike the civil war.

[Sidenote: 1702-82—Haidar the bitter enemy of the English]

English opposition was not the only difficulty that Warren Hastings had to contend with. Like the monarch in the Arabian tale who discerns armies marching against his capital from every point of the compass, Hastings found enemies rising up against him in all directions. A league of three native powers menaced the safety of the British possessions. The Mahratta states combined with the Nizam of the Deccan. Both again combined with a new power whose rise had been as rapid as it was alarming, the Mohammedan power of Haidar in Mysore. When Warren Hastings arrived in India the second time Haidar was in his sixty-seventh year. He was born in 1702 as the son of a Mogul officer in the Punjaub. At his death Haidar held a rank somewhat similar to that of a captain in the service of the Emperor of Delhi. Haidar deemed, and rightly deemed, that there was little or no opportunity for his ambition in that service, and his eyes seeking for a better chief, found the man in Nunjeraj, the nominal vizier and real ruler of the Rajah of Mysore. In 1750 Haidar persuaded the troops under his command to leave their Mogul prince and take service with the sovereign of Mysore. Under that sovereignty he rose rapidly to distinction. Though he was little better than a robber chieftain, the ablest and most daring robber of a horde of robbers, his power grew so rapidly that in time he was able to supplant Nunjeraj, and in the end to usurp the sovereignty of Mysore in 1761.

Haidar had his bitter grudge against the English. In 1771 he had been badly beaten by the Mahrattas and had appealed to the English to help him, as they had {266} undertaken by treaty to do. But the help was refused to the defeated prince, and the defeated prince swore an oath of vengeance against the English, and when the time seemed ripe he did his best to keep his oath. When in 1779 France declared war against England, Haidar declared in favor of the French. He gave his sword to the service of the Grand Confederacy in 1778 and prepared to march upon Madras. The President and the Council were taken unawares. It was not until Haidar had marched with fire and sword into the Carnatic, and that the smoke of the villages he destroyed in his progress could be seen from Madras, that they learned that Haidar was in earnest and not merely making a menace in the hope of frightening the English into an advantageous treaty. Hastings himself seems to have been convinced that Haidar did not mean to attack the Company, but when the Mysore prince's purpose was plain every effort was made to stay his onset. Lord Macartney, although not one of the Company's servants, was made Governor of Madras. Haidar was compelled for the time to abandon his attempt upon the Carnatic. In 1783 his hatred of the English was ended by his sudden death. But he bequeathed it as a rich legacy to his son Tippu, a man as daring and as ambitious as his sire.

Hastings won away by concessions the Mahrattas and the Nizam from the cause of Tippu. But Tippu had his French allies, and Tippu and his French allies carried on a campaign successful enough to force the English practically to appeal for a peace, which Tippu accorded in a treaty flattering at once to his pride and to his ambition. It was a somewhat dearly bought peace for the English, for Tippu, regarding the advances of the English as a proof of their weakness, made demands far more arrogant than his successes justified, and those demands were agreed to by the English envoys. The treaty with Tippu had to be made on a basis of mutual restitution of conquests, so that England was left at the end of the struggle against Mysore with a great loss both of men and money, and no advantages, territorial or strategical, to set against the loss. Even the peace upon these terms obtained did not prove {267} a lasting peace. Tippu was not unnaturally tempted by the concessions of the English into further displays of arrogance which in time inevitably resulted in another war. But by the time that war broke out Warren Hastings had returned to England and had no further personal concern with the affairs of British India.