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.



{272}

CHAPTER LIX.

THE GREAT IMPEACHMENT.

[Sidenote: 1785—Burke's knowledge of India]

Burke's spacious mind was informed by a passion for justice. He was not cast in the mould of men who make concessions to their virtues or compacts with their virtues. He could not for a moment admit that the aggrandizement of the empire should be gained by a single act of injustice, and in his eyes Warren Hastings's career was stained by a long succession of acts of injustice. He certainly would not do evil that good might come of it. If the Rohilla war was a crime, if the execution of Nand Kumar was an infamy, if the deposition of Chait Singh and the plundering of the Begums were crimes, then no possible advantage that these acts might cause to the temporal greatness of the State could weigh for one moment in the balance with Burke. In the high court of Burke's mind Warren Hastings was a doomed, a degraded man, even though it could have been proved, as indeed it would have been hard to prove, that any ill deeds which Warren Hastings had done were essential to the maintenance of English rule and English glory in India. Burke argued that English rule in India, English glory in India, did not gain but only lost by ill deeds. But if England's gain and England's glory in India depended upon such deeds, he for his part would have refused the gain and shuddered at the glory.

If Burke's all-conquering passion was a passion for justice, perhaps his keenest political taste was for India and the affairs of India. At a time when our Indian Empire was merely in its dawn, at a time when the affairs of India were looked upon by the nation at large as the commercial matters of a company, Burke allowed all the resources of his great mind to be employed in the study of India. He {273} knew India—he who had never sailed its seas or touched its shores—as probably no other Englishmen of his time knew India, not even those whose lives had been for the most part passed in the country. And this comprehensive knowledge Burke was able to impart again with a readiness that was never unreliable, with a copiousness that was never redundant. He gave a fascination to the figures of Indian finance; he made the facts of contemporary Indian history live with all the charm of the most famous events of Greek or Roman history. India in his hands became what it rightly is, but what few had thought it till then, one of the most fascinating of human studies. Indian affairs on his lips allied all the allurement of a romance with all the statistical accuracy of a Parliamentary report. Such a genius for the presentation of facts inspired by such a passion for justice has enriched English literature with some of its noblest and most truthful pages.

The pith of all Burke's Indian policy, the text upon which all his splendid sermons of Indian administration were preached, is to be found in one single sentence of the famous speech on the Nabob of Arcot's debts. In that single sentence the whole of Burke's theory of government is summed up with the directness of an epigram and with the authority of a law. "Fraud, injustice, oppression, peculation, engendered in India, are crimes of the same blood, family, and caste, with those that are born and bred in England." Outside the noble simplicity of that ethical doctrine Burke could not and would not budge. That sentence represents the whole difference between him and the man whom he afterwards accused, between him and the men of whom that man came to be the representative. Burke's morality was direct, uncompromising, unalterable by climatic conditions or by the supple moralities of other races. The morality of Warren Hastings and of those who thought with and acted for Warren Hastings was the morality of Clive beforehand, was the morality that had been professed and practised time and again since the days of Clive and Hastings by the inheritors of their policy in India. The ingenious theory was set up that in {274} dealing with Oriental races it was essential for the Englishman to employ Oriental means of carrying his point. If an Oriental would lie and cheat and forge and, if needs were, murder, why then the Englishman dealing with him must lie and cheat and forge and murder too, in order to gain the day. Things that he would not dare to do, things that, to do him justice, he would not dream of doing in England, were not merely permissible but justifiable, not merely justifiable but essential in his intercourse with Asiatic princes and peoples, with dexterous Mohammedan and dexterous Hindoo. The policy was inevitably new in Burke's time; it has been upheld again and again since Burke's time. The theory which allowed Clive to forge and Warren Hastings to plunder was the same principle which led English soldiers three generations later to make Brahmins wipe up blood before being killed, which prompted them to blow their prisoners from the cannon's mouth in the hope that their victims should believe that their souls as well as their bodies were about to perish, which instigated gallant men to suggest in all seriousness the advisability of flaying alive their captured mutineers. The influence of the East is not always a wholesome influence upon the wanderer from the West. It is displayed at its worst when it leads great men, as Clive and Hastings undoubtedly were great men, into the perpetration of evil actions, and the justification of them on the principle that in dealing with an Oriental the Englishman's morality undergoes a change, and becomes for the time and the hour an Oriental morality.

[Sidenote: 1785-87—The defender of Hastings]

Against such an adversary, Hastings, ignorant of the conditions of English political life, could bring forward no better champion than Major Scott. Hastings opposed to the greatest orator and most widely informed man of his age, a man of meagre parts, who only succeeded in wearying profoundly the House of Commons and every other audience to which he appealed. Such a proconsul as Warren Hastings standing his trial upon such momentous charges needed all the ability, all the art that an advocate can possess to be employed in his behalf. Had Hastings {275} been so lucky as to find a defender endowed, not indeed with the genius or the knowledge of Burke, for there was no such man to be found, but with something of the genius, something of the knowledge of Burke, his case might have appeared very different then and in the eyes of posterity. If Scott could have pleaded for Hastings eloquently, brilliantly, with something of the rich coloring, something of the fervid enthusiasm that was characteristic of the utterances of his great antagonist, he might have done much to stem, if not to turn the stream of public thought. But Warren Hastings was not graced so far. His sins had indeed found him out when he was cursed with such an enemy and cursed with such a friend.

It is clear that Hastings himself on his return had little idea of the serious danger with which he was menaced. He seems to have become convinced that his services to the State must inevitably outweigh any accidents or errors in the execution of those services. He honestly believed himself to have been a valuable and estimable servant of his country and his Crown. We may very well take his repeated declarations of his own integrity and uprightness, not, indeed, as proof of his possession of those qualities, but as proof of his profound belief that he did possess them. When he landed in England he appears to have expected only honors, only acclamation, admiration, and applause. He returned to accept a triumph; he did not dream that he should have to face a trial.

The long years in India had served to confuse his perception of the conduct of affairs at home. He did not in the least appreciate the men with whom he had to deal. If he gauged pretty closely the malignity of Francis, he may have fancied that the malignity was not very likely to prove dangerous. But he wholly misunderstood the character of the other foes, as important as Francis was unimportant, who were ranged against him. He made the extraordinary mistake of despising Burke.

Hastings had certain anxieties on his return to England, His first was caused by his disappointment at not finding his wife in London to greet him on his arrival, a {276} disappointment that was consoled two days later when, as he was journeying post-haste to the country to join her, he met her on Maidenhead Bridge driving in to join him. His second was the pleasurable anxiety of negotiating for the purchase of Daylesford, the realization of his youthful dream. He was made a little anxious too, later on, by the delay in the awarding to him of those honors which he so confidently expected. But he does not seem to have been disturbed in any appreciable degree by the formidable preparations which were being made against him by Burke and Fox and the followers of Burke and Fox.

It is just possible that those preparations might have come to little or nothing but for the folly of Major Scott. Major Scott was mad enough to try and force the hand of the enemies of Hastings by calling upon Burke and Fox to fix a day for the charges that they were understood to be prepared to bring against him. Fox immediately rose to assure Major Scott that the matter was not forgotten. Burke, with grave composure, added that a general did not take choice of time and place of battle from his adversaries. It has been suggested that but for Major Scott's ill-advised zeal the attack might never have come to a head. But the conclusion is one which it would be rash to draw. Burke was not the man to forego his long-cherished hope of bringing a criminal to justice. If he had been inclined to forego it, he was not the kind of man to be goaded into unwilling resumption of his purpose by the taunts of Major Scott. It may surely be assumed that the impeachment of Warren Hastings would have been made even if Major Scott had been as wise and discreet as he proved himself to be unwise and indiscreet.

Even when the attack was formally begun, Hastings failed to grasp its gravity or guess the best mode of meeting it. He insisted upon being heard at the Bar of the House in his own defence. A man of rare oratorical ability, gifted with special skill in the selection of his material and the adjustment of his arguments, might have done himself a good turn by such a decision. But Hastings was not so endowed, and he would have done far better in {277} following the example of Clive and of Rumbold. He committed the one fault which the House of Commons never forgives, he wearied it. Such dramatic effect as he might have got out of his position as a proconsul arraigned before a senate he spoiled by the length and tedium of his harangue. He took two days to read a long and wordy defence, two days which he considered all too short, and which the House of Commons found all too long. It yawned while Hastings prosed. Accustomed to an average of eloquence of which the art has long been lost, it found Hastings's paper insufferably wearisome.

Although he was the target for the eloquence of Burke, of Fox, and of Sheridan, still Hastings's hopes were high, and they mounted higher when the Rohilla war charge was rejected by a large majority. But they were only raised so high to be dashed to earth again in the most unexpected manner. The friends of Hastings were convinced that he would have the unfailing support of Pitt in his defence. He was now to learn that he was mistaken.

[Sidenote: 1787—Pitt and the impeachment]

Hastings had one very zealous champion in the House of Commons. This was a young member, Sir James Bland-Burges. He rose not merely with the approval of Pitt, but actually at Pitt's instigation, to defend Warren Hastings on the question of the treatment of the Rajah of Benares. It is scarcely surprising that the House did not pay him any great attention. Having just come under "the spell of the enchanter," it would hardly have listened with attention to an old and well-known member, and Bland-Burges was a young and unknown man. He could not command a hearing, so, whispering to Pitt that he would leave the remainder of the defence to him, he sat down, and the debate, on Pitt's suggestion, was adjourned.

On the following day the young defender came to the House hot to hear Pitt deliver to an attentive senate that defence which he had striven unsuccessfully to make. He has recorded the astonishment, indignation, and despair when Pitt rose to make his declaration concerning the charge against Hastings. The minister in whom Hastings trusted to find an ally offered some cold condemnation of {278} the intemperance of the attack, proffered some lukewarm praise to Hastings, and then announced that he would agree to the motion. To most of Pitt's supporters Pitt's action came as an unpleasant surprise; but to Bland-Burges, from his previous conversation with the minister, it seemed like an act of treason. There was little for Bland-Burges to do, but it is to his credit that he did that little. It required no small courage for a follower and a friend of Pitt to defy his authority in the House. Yet that is practically what Bland-Burges did. Raging with indignation at what he conceived to be the tergiversation of his leader and the treachery to his hero, Bland-Burges once again forced himself upon the attention of the House. The leaders on both sides being agreed, it was expected that the matter would be settled out of hand, and the Speaker had actually put the question and declared it carried when Bland-Burges leaped to his feet and challenged a division. He acted with the courage of his despair, but, as he says, few unpremeditated enterprises ever succeeded better than this one. "The question indeed was carried by a great majority, but those who were against it were almost entirely of those who till then had implicitly voted with the minister. This was not only mortifying to Mr. Pitt, but highly encouraging to Mr. Hastings and his steadfast friends."

Bland-Burges did not escape an early intimation of the disapproval of his chief. When the House broke up, Pitt said to him, with an austere look, "So, sir, you have thought proper to divide the House. I hope you are satisfied." Bland-Burges answered that he was perfectly satisfied. "Then you seem satisfied very easily," the minister retorted; to which Bland-Burges replied, "Not exactly so, sir. I am satisfied with nothing that has passed this evening except the discovery I have made that there were still honest men present." "On that," Bland-Burges continues, "with a stern look and a stately air he left me."

[Sidenote: 1787—Bland-Burges and Hastings]

Bland-Burges won a reward for his courage which outweighed the disapproval of Pitt. When he had thus {279} volunteered on behalf of Warren Hastings he was so entirely a stranger to him that he did not even know him by sight. Naturally enough, however, the arraigned man was desirous to become acquainted with the stranger who had stood by him when his own friends had abandoned him. He lost no time, therefore, in calling upon Bland-Burges to thank him for the part he had played. Bland-Burges says that the conversation was deeply interesting, but that he only made a note of one passage, in which he explained that, independently of his own conviction that the cause of Warren Hastings was just and honorable, he had been moved to take part in his defence by the positive instructions of his father, who had died about two years previously. Bland-Burges's father, attributing the preservation of England's power in India to Hastings, had enjoined his son, if ever an attack were made upon Hastings, to abstract himself from all personal and party considerations and to support him liberally and manfully. Whatever we may think of the conduct of Warren Hastings, it is a pleasure to find that those who thought him to be in the right stood up for their belief as honorably and as gallantly as Bland-Burges. It is not surprising that Warren Hastings was moved to tears. That day's interview was the beginning of a friendship that endured unbroken until the death of Warren Hastings.

The reason which Pitt gave for his action on the Benares vote was simple enough. He said that, although the action of Hastings towards the Rajah was in itself justifiable, yet that the manner of the action was not justifiable. Chait Singh deserved to be fined, but not to be fined in an exorbitant and tyrannical manner. The explanation might very well be considered sufficient. A high-minded minister might feel bound to condemn the conduct of an official whom he admired, if that conduct had pushed a legal right to an illegal length. But Pitt's decision came with such a shock to the friends, and even to the enemies of Hastings, that public rumor immediately set to work to find some other less simple and less honest reason for Pitt's action. One rumor ascribed it to an {280} interview with Dundas, in which Dundas had succeeded, after hours of argument, in inducing Pitt to throw Warren Hastings over. Another suggested that Pitt was spurred by anger at a declaration of Thurlow's that he and the King between them would make Hastings a peer, whether the minister would or no. A third suggested that Pitt was jealous of the royal favor to Mr. and Mrs. Hastings; while a fourth asserted that Pitt deliberately sacrificed Hastings in order to afford the Opposition other quarry than himself. But there is no need to seek for any other motive than the motive which Pitt alleged. It was quite sufficient to compel an honorable man to give the vote that Pitt gave.

Blow after blow fell upon Hastings. The terrible attacks of Burke were for a time eclipsed by the dazzling brilliancy of Sheridan's attack upon him in the famous Begum speech. Those who heard that speech speak of it with reverence and with passion as one of the masterpieces of the world. In the form in which it is preserved, or rather in which it has failed to be preserved for us, it is hard, if not impossible, to find merit calling for the rapture which it aroused in the minds of men familiar with magnificent oratory, and perfectly competent to judge. That it did arouse rapture is beyond doubt, and for the moment it was even more effective in injuring Hastings than the more profound but less flaming utterances of Burke. The testimony of Fox, the testimony of Byron, alike are offered in its unqualified praise.

It was decided by the House of Commons, with the consent of Pitt, that Hastings should be impeached. One indignity Pitt spared him, one danger Pitt saved him from. Burke was, somewhat incomprehensibly, anxious that the name of Francis should be placed upon that Committee of Impeachment to which Burke had already been nominated as the first member by Pitt. But here Pitt was resolute. Francis was flagrantly hostile to Hastings, hostile with a personal as well as a public hatred, and Pitt could not tolerate the notion that he should find a place upon the Committee of Impeachment. Burke protested, and the {281} very protest was characteristic of Burke's high-mindedness. For to Burke the whole business was a purely public business, in no sense connected with any private feelings, and it seemed to him as if the exclusion of any one of those who had been conspicuous in the arraignment of Hastings from a responsible place on the Committee of Impeachment on the ground of personal feeling was to cast something like a slur upon the purity of motive of the men engaged in the attack. But Pitt was in the right, and the name of Francis was, by a large majority, not suffered to appear upon the committee.

[Sidenote: 1787—The impeachment trial]

In the May of 1787 Burke formally impeached Warren Hastings at the Bar of the House of Lords. Hastings was immediately taken into custody by the Sergeant-at-Arms, and was held to bail for 20,000 pounds, with two sureties for 10,000 pounds each. The delay which was to be characteristic of the whole proceedings was evident from the first. Though Hastings was taken into custody in the May of 1787, It was not until February 13 of the following year, 1788, that the impeached man was brought to his trial in Westminster Hall.

Before the trial began, popular feeling was roused against Hastings more keenly by the action of the Court than by the action of Burke and of his colleagues. The Court was inclined to be even more than friendly to Hastings and to his wife, and both Hastings and his wife, who were not in touch with English public opinion, took the unwise course of making the very most of the royal favor, and of displaying themselves as much as possible in the royal sunlight. The London public, always jealous of any Court favoritism, resented the patronage of Hastings, and while it was in this temper an event took place which served to heighten its resentment. The Nizam of the Deccan had sent a very magnificent diamond to the King as a present, and, being ignorant of what was going on in England, he chose Hastings, naturally enough, as the medium through which to convey his diamond to the King. Hastings, with the want of judgment which characterized him at this time, accepted a duty which, delicate at any {282} time, became under the conditions positively dangerous. He was present at the Levee at which the diamond was presented to the King. Immediately rumor seized upon the incident and distorted it. It was confidently asserted that Hastings was bribing the Sovereign with vast presents of precious stones to use his influence in his behalf. The solitary diamond became in the popular eye more numerous than the stones that Sinbad came upon in the enchanted valley. The print-shops teemed with caricatures, all giving some highly colored exaggeration of the prevailing impression. Every possible pictorial device which could suggest to the passer-by that Hastings was buying the protection of the King by fabulous gifts of diamonds was made public. In one Hastings was shown flinging quantities of precious stones into the open mouth of the King. In another he was represented as having bought the King bodily, crown and sceptre and all, with his precious stones, and as carrying him away in a wheelbarrow. So high did popular feeling run that the great diamond became the hero of a discussion in the House of Commons, when Major Scott was obliged to make a statement in his chief's behalf giving an accurate account of what had really occurred.

The trial of Warren Hastings is one of the most remarkable examples of contrasts in human affairs that is to be found in the whole course of our history. It began under conditions of what may fairly be called national interest. It came to an end amid the apathy and indifference of the public. When it began, the Great Hall of Westminster was scarcely large enough to contain all those who longed to be present at the trial of the great proconsul. All the rank, the wealth, the genius, the wit, the beauty of England seemed to be gathered together in the building, which is said to be the oldest inhabited building in the world. When it ended, and long before it had ended, the attendance had dwindled down to a mere handful of spectators, some two or three score of persons whose patience, whose interest, or whose curiosity had survived the indifference with which the rest of the world had come to {283} regard the whole business. The spirit of genius and the spirit of dulness met in close encounter in that memorable arena, and it must be admitted that the spirit of dulness did on the whole prevail. There seemed a time when it was likely that the trial might go on forever. Men and women who came to the first hearing eager on the one side or the other, impassioned for Hastings or enthusiastic for Burke, died and were buried, and new men and women occupied themselves with other things, and still the trial dragged its slow length along.

[Sidenote: 1788-95—Hastings's Oriental fortitude]

It may be unhesitatingly admitted that during the long course of the trial Warren Hastings bore himself with courage and with dignity. He was firmly convinced that he was a much-injured man, and if the justice of a man's cause were to be decided merely upon the demeanor of the defendant, Hastings would have been exonerated. He professed to be horrified, and he no doubt was horrified, by what he called "the atrocious calumnies of Mr. Burke and Mr. Fox." He carried himself as if they were indeed atrocious calumnies without any basis whatsoever. His attitude was that of the martyr supported by the serenity of the saint. He had lived so long in the East that he gained not a little of that Eastern fortitude which is the fortitude of fatalism. While the trial was progressing he told a dear friend that he found much consolation in a certain Oriental tale. The story was of an Indian king whose temper never knew a medium, and who in prosperity was hurried into extravagance by his joy, while in adversity grief overwhelmed him with despondency. Having suffered many inconveniences through this weakness, he besought his courtiers to devise a sentence, short enough to be engraved upon a ring, which should suggest a remedy for his evil. Many phrases were proposed; none were found acceptable until his daughter offered him an emerald on which were graven two Arabic words, the literal translation of which is, "This, too, will pass." The King embraced his daughter and declared that she was wiser than all his wise men. "Now," said Hastings, "when I appear at the Bar and hear the violent invectives {284} of my enemies, I arm myself with patience. I reflect upon the mutability of human life, and I say to myself, 'This, too, will pass.'"

It did pass, but it took its long time to pass. The trial lasted seven years. Begun in the February of 1788, it ended in the April of 1795. In that long space of time men might well be excused if they had grown weary of it. Had its protracted course been even pursued in colorless, eventless times it would have been hard to preserve the public interest in the trial so terribly drawn out. But it was one of the curious fortunes of the trial to embrace within its compass some of the most thrilling and momentous years that have been recorded in the history of mankind. In the year after the trial began the Bastille fell. In the year before the trial closed the Reign of Terror came to an end with the deaths of Robespierre and St. Just. The interval had seen the whole progress of the French Revolution, had applauded the constitutional struggle for liberty, had shuddered at the September massacres, had seen the disciplined armies of the great European Powers reel back dismayed before the ragged regiments of the Republic, had seen France answer Europe with the head of a king, with the head of a queen, had observed how the Revolution, like Saturn, devoured its own children, had witnessed with fear as well as with fury the apotheosis of the guillotine. While the events in France were shaking every European State, including England, to its centre, it was hard for the public mind to keep itself fixed with any degree of intentness upon the trial of Warren Hastings.

The events of that interval had affected too, profoundly, the chief actor in the trial. Burke entered upon the impeachment of Warren Hastings at the zenith of his great career, at the moment of his greatest glory. The rise and progress of the French evolution exercised a profound, even a disastrous, effect upon him. For once his fine intellect failed to discriminate between the essentials and the non-essentials of a great question. His horror at the atrocities of the Revolution blinded him to all the advantages that {285} the success of the Revolution brought with it. The whole framework of that great event was to him so hideously stained with the blood of the Queen, with the blood of so many innocent persons, that he could see nothing but the blood, and the influence of this is to be noticed in Burke's final speech with its almost confident expectation that the guillotine would sooner or later be established in England. Burke's frenzy against the French Revolution made it appear to many as if his reasoned and careful indictment of the erring Governor-General might after all be only mere frenzy too.

[Sidenote: 1788-95—Acquittal of Hastings]

Such as it was, and under such conditions, the trial did come to an end at last, after such alternations of brilliant speeches and dull speeches as the world had never witnessed before. Sheridan again added to his fame by a speech of which, unhappily, we are able to form no very clear idea. Law defended Hastings in detailing the whole of the history of Hindostan. Hastings again and again appealed piteously and pathetically that the trial might be brought somehow or other to an end. He was growing old, he had been for years a nominal prisoner, he was very anxious that the terrible strain of waiting upon the slow proceedings of the tribunal should be relieved. At last the end came after weary years of controversy, in which Hastings had been loaded with more contumely and lauded with more extravagance than it were possible to conceive him good enough or bad enough to deserve. Finally, in the April of 1795, Warren Hastings was acquitted by a large majority on every one of the sixteen counts against him that were put to the vote. Burke could not conceal his chagrin at this unexpected result. He had expected, he declared afterwards, that the corruption of the age would enable Hastings to escape on some of the counts, but he was not prepared for the total acquittal. It is probable that Hastings himself was not prepared for it, but the relief it afforded him was tempered by the grave financial difficulties into which he found himself plunged. The conduct of that long defence had well-nigh exhausted all his available resources. After a vain appeal to Pitt to {286} indemnify him for his legal expenses, an arrangement was come to between the Government and the Company by which Hastings was enabled to live at first in straitened, afterwards in moderate, circumstances for the rest of his life.

[Sidenote: 1788-95—Effect of the impeachment trial]

It can scarcely be questioned but that Burke was in some degree responsible for the result of the trial. His burning sense of injustice, his passionate righteousness, and the perfervid strength of his convictions betrayed him into an intemperance of language that inevitably caused a reaction of sympathy in favor of the man so violently assailed. It is impossible to read without regret the actual ferocity of the epithets that Burke hurled against Warren Hastings. In this he was followed, even exceeded, by Sheridan; but the utterances of Sheridan, while they enraptured their hearers by their brilliancy, did not carry with them the weight that attached to the utterances of Burke. Burke's case was too strong to need an over-charged form of expression. The plain statement of the misdeeds of Warren Hastings was far more telling as an indictment than the abuse with which Burke unhappily was tempted to overload his case. Those who were amazed and sickened, with Macaulay, to think that in that age any one could be found capable of calling the greatest of living public men, "that reptile Mr. Burke," must reluctantly be compelled to admit that Burke set his enemies a bad example by his own unlicensed use of opprobrium. In justifying, for instance, the application to Warren Hastings of Coke's savage description of Raleigh as a "spider of hell," Burke allowed his fierce indignation to get the better of his tongue, to the detriment of his own object, the bringing of an offender to justice. Miss Burney in her memoirs affords a remarkable instance of the injury which Burke did to his own object by the exuberance of his anger. She tells us how, as she listened to Burke's arraignment of Hastings, and went over the catalogue of his offences, she felt her sympathy for Hastings slowly disappear, but that as Burke increased in the fury of his assault, and passed from accusation to invective, the convincing effect {287} of his oratory withered, and the effect which he had so carefully created he himself contrived to destroy.

In spite of defects which in some degree brought their own punishment with them, Burke's speeches against Warren Hastings must ever remain among the highest examples of human eloquence employed in the service of the right. The gifts of the statesman, the philosopher, the orator, the great man of letters, are all allied in those marvellous pages which first taught Englishmen how closely their national honor as well as their national prosperity was involved in the administration of justice in India. If Burke failed to convict Warren Hastings, he succeeded in convicting the system which made such misdemeanors as Warren Hastings's possible. We owe to Burke a new India. What had been but the appanage of a corrupt and corrupting Company he practically made forever a part of the glory and the grandeur of the British Empire.

Abuse and invective were not confined to Burke nor to the side which Burke represented. Warren Hastings, or those who acted for Warren Hastings, employed every means in their power to blacken the characters of their opponents and to hold them up to public ridicule and to public detestation. The times were not gentle times for men engaged in political warfare, and the companions of Hastings employed all the arts that the times placed at their disposal. Burke and Sheridan, and those who acted with Burke and Sheridan, were savage enough in the tribune, but they did not employ the extra-tribunal methods by which their enemy retaliated upon them.

Hastings is scarcely to be blamed, considering duly the temper of his age, for doing everything that party warfare permitted against his opponents. He was fighting as for his life; he was fighting for what was far dearer to him than life—for life, indeed, he had ever shown a most soldierly disregard; he was fighting for an honorable name, for the reward of a lifetime devoted to the interests of his country, as he understood those interests; he was fighting for fame as against infamy, and he fought hard and he {288} fought after the fashion of the time in which he lived. The newspaper, the pamphlet, the lampoon, the caricature, the acidulated satire, the envenomed epigram, all were used, and used with success, against the promoters of the impeachment.

The caricatures were not all on one side, but the most numerous and the most effective were in favor of the impeached statesman. If the adversaries of Hastings naturally seized upon the opportunity of a classical effect by presenting Burke and Hastings in the character of Cicero and Verres, the friends of Verres replied by the pencil of Gillray, representing Hastings as the savior of India defending himself heroically against assassins with the faces of Burke and of Fox. As the interest in the trial flagged the caricatures grew fewer and fewer, to revive a little at the close of the case. The popular view of the trial was then represented fairly enough by a large print called "The Last Scene of the Manager's Farce," in which Hastings was represented as rising in glory from the clouds of calumny, while Burke and Fox are represented witnessing with despair the failure of their protracted farce, and the crafty face of Philip Francis peeped from behind a scene where he was supposed to be playing the part of the prompter—"no character in the farce, but very useful behind the scenes," a description which sums up smartly enough the part that Philip Francis played in the whole transaction from first to last.

[Sidenote: 1818—Death of Hastings]

The eve of Hastings's life was as peaceful as its noon and day had been stormy. The proconsul became a country squire; the ruler of an empire, the autocrat of kings, soothed his old age very much after the fashion of Diocletian and of Candide, in the planting of cabbages. For three-and-twenty years he dwelt at Daylesford, happy in his wife, happy in his friends, happy in his health, in his rustic tastes, in his simple pleasures, in his tranquil occupation. He and his wife often visited London, but Hastings seems to have been always happiest in the country, and he gradually declined into extreme old age with all the grace and dignity of a Roman gentleman, loved by his {289} friends, dearly loved by those who were young. Once in those long quiet years, after the death of Pitt, Hastings, to please his wife, pleaded for public reparation of the wrong which he believed had been done him. Grenville professed every willingness to grant him a peerage, but refused to entertain the idea of inducing the Commons to reverse their former judgment. On those terms Hastings declined the peerage. The nearest approach to anything like public consolation for his sorrows came to him in 1813, when, at the age of eighty, he came once more to the Bar of the House of Commons, this time to give evidence on the question of renewing the Charter of the East India Company. By both Houses, Commons and Lords alike, the old man was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm, saluted with rapturous applause on his arrival, with reverential salutations on his departure. In 1818 the health which he had preserved so well till then broke, and he died after some severe suffering on August 22 in that year, and was laid in the earth that he had always loved so well.

One of the latest acts of his life was to appeal to the Court of Directors to make some provision for his wife, by extending to her the annuity that had been accorded to him. They gave, says his most devoted biographer, no more heed to his dying entreaties than they would have given to the whine of a self-convicted beggar. Yet surely Hastings had deserved well of the East India Company. His faults had been committed in their service and had given them, not himself, wealth and power. But England is not always grateful to her servants. It is not wonderful, says Sir Alfred Lyall, that Hastings's application failed entirely, "remembering that even Lord Nelson's last testamentary appeal on behalf of a woman—'the only favor I ask of my King and my country at the moment when I am going to fight their battle'—had been rejected and utterly disregarded." Mrs. Hastings survived her husband for some years, and was over ninety years of age when she died.



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CHAPTER LX.

THE CHANGE OF THINGS.

[Sidenote: 1789—The political condition of France]

The establishment of the American republic meant something more for England than the loss of her fairest colonies, and meant much more for Europe than the establishment of a new form of government in the New World. While the United States were acclaiming Washington as their first President and rejoicing over the excellence of their carefully framed Constitution, the principles which had elected the one and had created the other were working elsewhere to unexpected and mighty issues. French gentlemen of rank and fortune, fired by a philosophic admiration for liberty, had fought and fought well for the American colonists. When the revolt had become a revolution, and the revolution a triumph, the French gentlemen went back to France with their hearts full of love and their lips loud in praise for the young republic and its simple, splendid citizens. The doctrines of liberty and equality, which had been so dear to the Philosophers and the Encyclopaedists, were now being practically applied across the Atlantic, and the growth of their success was watched by the eager eyes of the wisest and the unwisest thinkers in France. Within five years from the time when the American army was disbanded French political philosophy found itself making astonishing strides towards the realization of its cherished ideals. It had long felt the need of some change in the system of government that had prevailed in France, but its desires had seemed dim as dreams until the success of a handful of rebellious colonists in a distant country had made the spirit of democracy an immediate force in the life and the thought of the world. Undoubtedly the condition of France was bad. {291} The feudal system, or what was left of the feudal system, worn out, degraded, and corrupt, was rapidly reducing France to financial, physical, and political ruin. It is no part of the business of this history to dwell upon the conditions prevailing in France towards the close of the eighteenth century, conditions which prevailed in varying degree over the most part of Europe. Great French financiers like Turgot, great French thinkers like Voltaire and Rousseau and the company of the "Encyclopaedia," had been keenly conscious of the corroding evils in the whole system of French political and social life, and had labored directly and indirectly to diminish them. Keen-eyed observers from abroad, men of the world like Chesterfield, philosophers like Arthur Young, had at different epochs observed the symptoms of social disease and prognosticated the nature of its progress. The France of that day has been likened to a pyramid with the sovereign for its apex, with the nobility, a remnant of antique feudalism, for its next tier, with the wealthy and influential Church for the next, and below these the vast unrecognized bulk of the pyramid, the unprivileged masses who were the people of France. In the hands of the few who had the happiness to be "born," or who otherwise belonged to the privileged orders, lay all the power, all the authority which for the most part they misused or abused. It has been said with truth that the man who did not belong to the privileged orders had scarcely any more influence upon the laws which bound him and which ground him than if he lived in Mars or Saturn instead of in Picardy or Franche Comte. Such a system of government, which could only have been found tolerable if it had been swayed by a brotherhood of saints and sages, was, as a matter of fact, worked in the worst manner possible and for the worst purposes. The conditions under which the vast mass of the French people lived, struggled, suffered, and died were so cruel that it is hard indeed to believe them compatible with the high degree of civilization which, in other respects, France had reached. A merciless and most comprehensive process of taxation squeezed life and hope out of the French nation {292} for the benefit of a nobility whose corruption was only rivalled by its worthlessness and an ecclesiasticism that had forgotten the Sermon on the Mount and the way to Calvary.

But if the condition of France was bad it contained the germs of improvement. A greater freedom of thought, a greater freedom of speech were beginning, very gradually, to assert themselves and to make their influence felt. Philosophical speculation on sorrow and suffering turned the minds of men to thoughts of how that sorrow might be stanched and that suffering abated. The slowly rising tide of thought was blown into an angry sea by a wind from the west, and in a little while a scarcely suspected storm became a hurricane that swept into a common ruin everything that opposed its fury. England had long been looked up to by French reformers as the pattern for the changes they desired to see brought about in their own country. The moderation and equality of its laws, as compared with those of France, the facilities of utterance afforded to the popular voice, made it seem a veritable Utopia to eyes dimmed by the mist of French feudality. But now another and a greater England had arisen in the New World. Across the Atlantic the descendants of the men who had overthrown a dynasty and beheaded a king had shaken themselves free from forms of oppression that seemed mild indeed to Frenchmen, and had proclaimed themselves the champions of theories of social liberty and political freedom which had been dreamed of by French philosophers but had never yet been put into practice. Rebellious America had fired the enthusiasm of gallant French adventurers; successful, independent America animated the hopes and spurred the imaginations of those whose eyes turned in longing admiration from the seasoned constitution of monarchical England to the as yet green constitution of republican America.

[Sidenote: 1789—Revival of the States-General in France]

Those Englishmen whose tastes and sympathies induced them to keep in touch with political opinion in France, and to watch with interest the spread of ideas which they themselves held dear, noted with approval many remarkable {293} signs of activity across the Channel. While the strain upon the false financial system of France had become so great that the attempt to stop the hole in the money chest broke the spirit of finance minister after finance minister, a feeling in favor of some change in the system that made such catastrophes possible seemed to be on the increase in educated and even in aristocratic circles. Many Englishmen of that day knew France, or at least Paris, fairly well. If Pitt had paid the French capital but a single visit, Fox was intimately acquainted with it, and Walpole was almost as familiar with a superficial Paris as he was with a superficial London. Dr. Johnson, not very long before the time of which we write, had visited Paris with his friends the Thrales, and had made the acquaintance of a brewer named Santerre. Arthur Young travelled in France as he travelled in England and in Ireland. On the other hand, Frenchmen who were soon to be conspicuous advocates of change were not unknown on the English side of the Channel. Mirabeau was known in London—not too favorably—and the cousin of the French King, the Duke de Chartres, afterwards Duke of Orleans, had moved in London society and was to move there again. So when educated Englishmen heard that Lafayette had demanded the revival of the States-General, unused and almost forgotten these two centuries, they knew that the friend of Washington was not likely to ask for impossibilities. When the Duke of Orleans set himself openly in opposition to the King, his cousin, they recognized a significance in the act, and when Mirabeau asserted himself as the champion of a growing agitation in favor of an oppressed and unrepresented people they remembered the big, vehement man who had passed so much of his life in prisons and had played the spy upon the Prussian Court. Gradually prepared for some change in the administrative system of France, they were not prepared for the rapid succession of changes that followed upon the formal convocation of the States-General in the spring of 1789.

The States-General was the nearest approach to a representative parliamentary system that was known to France. {294} But the States-General had not been summoned to aid the deliberations of a French monarch in the course of many reigns. France had lived under what was practically a despotism untempered by an expression of organized public opinion for several generations. It was so long since the States-General had been convoked that the very forms and ceremonies incidental to or essential to its convocation had passed out of living memory, and had to be painfully ascertained by much groping after authority and precedent. In the end, however, authority and precedent were ascertained, and the States-General, composed of representatives of the three estates of the realm—the Church, the Nobility, and the People—met with much ceremony at Versailles. They were called together for the ostensible purpose of dealing with the financial difficulties that threatened to make the country bankrupt. But it was soon clear that they, or at least the majority of their members, intended to accomplish much more than that. The news that travelled slowly in those days from the capital of France to the capital of England grew to be interesting and important with an interest and an importance that were not to cease in steady activity for more than a quarter of a century. Event followed event with startling rapidity. The members of the Third Estate severed themselves from the Church and the Nobility, met in the Tennis Court in Versailles, and declared themselves a National Assembly. The people of Paris, profoundly agitated, and fearing that the King intended to suppress the insurgent National Assembly by force, broke out into riots, which culminated in an attack upon the famous and detested prison in the Faubourg St. Antoine, the Bastille. The Bastille had not for many years been a serious instrument of oppression, but its record was an evil record, and it represented in the eyes of the people of Paris all that was most detested and most detestable in the old order. The Bastille was captured; its few prisoners were borne in triumph through the streets, while its commander, De Launay, was decapitated and his head carried about on the point of a pike.

[Sidenote: 1789—The French Revolution]

If the King of France had been a different man from {295} Louis the Sixteenth he might have faced the rising storm with some hope of success. But he could do nothing, would do nothing. His advisers, his intimates, his kinsmen, his captains, despairing at his vacillation and fearing that they would be abandoned to the fury of insurgent Paris, fled for their lives from a country that seemed to them as if possessed by a devil. The country was possessed, possessed by the spirit of revolution. After ages of injustice a chance had come for the oppressed, and the oppressed had seized their chance and misused it, as the long oppressed always misuse sudden power. Rebellious Paris marched upon Versailles, camped outside the King's palace; broke in the night time into the King's palace, slaying and seeking to slay. The Royal Family were rescued, if rescue it can be called, by the interposition of Lafayette. They were carried in triumph to Paris. Still nominally sovereign, they were practically prisoners in their palace of the Tuileries. Europe looked on in astonishment at the unexpected outbreak. In England at first the leaders of liberal opinion applauded what they believed to be the dawn of a new and glorious era of political freedom. Fox hailed in a rapture of exultation the fall of the Bastille. The Duke of Dorset, the English ambassador to France, saluted the accomplishment of the greatest revolution recorded by history. Eager young men, nameless then but yet to be famous, apostrophised the dawn of liberty. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven," Wordsworth wrote, with a wistful regret, fifteen years after the Bastille had fallen, recalling with a kind of tragic irony the emotions of that hour and contrasting them with his thoughts on the events that had followed through half a generation. All over England strenuous politicians, catching the contagion of excitement from excited France, formulated their sympathy with the Revolution in ardent, eloquent addresses, formed themselves into clubs to propagate the principles that were making France free and illustrious, and sent delegates speeding across the Channel to convey to a confident, constitution-making National Assembly the {296} assurance that the best hearts and the wisest brains in England pulsed and moved in unison with their desires.

[Sidenote: 1790—Burke and the French Revolution]

Such assurances were inaccurate and misleading. There was one man in England the goodness of whose heart, the wisdom of whose brain could scarcely be questioned, whose censure in England, and not in England alone, was more serious than the applause of a whole theatre of others. At a moment when all who represented liberal thought in politics, all who some ten years earlier had sympathized with the American colonists, were showing a like sympathy for the insurgent people of France, Edmund Burke made himself conspicuous by the vehemence and the vigor of his opposition to a movement which commanded the admiration of his most intimate friends and closest political allies. While the Revolution was still almost in its infancy, while Sheridan and Fox vied with each other in the warmth of their applause, Burke set himself to preach a crusade against the Revolution with all the unrestrained ardor of his uncompromising nature. No words of Fox or of Sheridan, no resolution of clubs, no delegated enthusiasm had anything like the same effect in aiding, that Burke's famous pamphlet had in injuring the French Revolution, in the eyes not merely of the mass of the English people, but in the eyes of a very great number of people in the countries of Europe. People whose business it was to be king, to use the famous phrase of a then reigning prince, readily welcomed Burke's "Reflexions on the French Revolution," which was soon disseminated all over the Continent in a French translation. Naturally enough it appealed to the Emperor of Germany, to the Empress Catherine of Russia, to the French princes sheltering in Coblentz and boasting of the revenge they would take on the Revolution when the King should enjoy his own again. Naturally enough it appealed to George the Third as a book which every gentleman ought to read. Kings and princes everywhere, who felt that at any moment their own thrones might begin to rock unsteadily beneath them, inevitably applauded the unexpected assistance of the greatest orator and thinker of his age.

{297}

Such applause alone would not have made Burke's pamphlet the formidable weapon that it proved to be in the hands of reaction, or have brought about the grave results that may be directly attributed to Burke's pen. The words of Burke created, the breath of Burke fanned, a public opinion in England and abroad that was in direct antagonism to everything that was meant by those who formed and who guided or were driven by the Revolution. It would be hard to find a parallel in history for the influence thus exerted by a single man against so great a force. All the conservatism of Burke's nature—the conservatism that led him to regard the English Parliamentary system of his day as well-nigh ideally perfect, and that prompted him to resist so steadily and so successfully Pitt's proposals of Parliamentary reform—concentrated itself against what he believed to be the spirit of anarchy newly arisen in France. The Revolution was but a year old, and was as yet unstained by the worst excesses of the Terror, when Burke launched his bolt, shouted his battle-cry, and animated Europe to arms. It must be admitted that many of the evils which Burke prophesied in his review of the nascent revolution were the stigmas of its prime. From the premises he beheld he drew clear and definite conclusions, which were only too unhappily verified as the tide of revolution flowed. But it must also be remembered that Burke was himself in no small measure the cause of the realization of his own dark and tragic prognostications. Burke's arguments, Burke's eloquence, Burke's splendid ability were among the most potent factors in animating the hopes of the refugee princes, of inspiriting their allies, and of forming that ill-advised and disastrous coalition of the Powers against France which Danton answered with the head of a king. It was the genius of Burke that stemmed the sympathy between England and a nation struggling to be free; it was the genius of Burke that fostered the spirit of animosity to France which began with the march upon Paris, and which ended after the disastrous defeats of the invaders, the deaths of the King and Queen, and all the agonies of the Terror, in {298} creating for England, in common with Europe at large, the most formidable enemy that she had ever known.

In spite of Burke and Burke's melancholy vaticinations the course of the Revolution in France seemed at first to most liberal-minded Englishmen to move along reasonable lines and to confine itself within the bounds of moderation. The excesses and outrages that followed immediately upon the first upheaval, the murders of Foulon and Berthier in Paris, the peasant war upon the castles, were regarded as the unavoidable, deplorable ebullitions of a long dormant force which, under the guidance of capable and honorable men, would be directed henceforward solely to the establishment of a stable and popular system of government. The men who were, or who seemed to be, at the head of affairs in France had names that for the most part commended themselves to such Englishmen as had anything more than a superficial knowledge of the country. The fame of Lafayette, the hero of the American war, seemed to answer for the conduct of the army. In Bailly, the astronomer whom unhappy chance had made Mayor of Paris, constitutionalism recognized a man after its own heart. The majority of the members of the National Assembly seemed to be gloriously occupied in evolving out of the chaos of the old order a new and entirely admirable framework of laws modelled boldly after the English pattern. Most English observers thought, in opposition to Burke, what the majority of the members of the National Assembly themselves thought, that the Revolution was an accomplished fact, a concluded page of history, brought about not indeed bloodlessly, but still, on the whole, with comparatively slight shedding of blood, considering the difficulty and the greatness of the accomplished thing. The practical imprisonment of the King and Queen within the walls of Paris, within the walls of the Tuileries, seemed no great hardship in the eyes of the Englishmen who sympathized with the aims of those of the French revolutionaries with whom they were acquainted. The French King himself seemed to be reconciled to his lot, to have joined himself frankly and {299} freely enough to the party of progress within his dominions, and to be as loyally eager to accept the new constitution which the National Assembly was busy framing as the most ardent patriot among its members. Even the flight of the Royal Family, the attempted flight that began with such laborious pomp at Paris to end in such pitiful disaster at Varennes, the flight that condemned the King and Queen to a restraint far more rigorous than before, did not greatly disturb British equanimity.

[Sidenote: 1791—Burke and the coalition against France]

To the mind of Burke, however, his prophecies were already justifying themselves. He could see nothing in the Revolution but its errors, and he hailed the coalition of Europe against France as a league of light against the powers of darkness. He broke away furiously from his friends and allies of so many great political battles. He could not understand, he could not bear to realize that men who had struggled with him to champion the rights of the American colonists, and to punish the offences of Warren Hastings, should now be either avowed sympathizers with or indifferent spectators of the events that were passing in France. He had loved Charles Fox greatly ever since Fox had shaken off the traditions of Toryism and become the most conspicuous champion of liberal ideas in England. But he could not and would not forgive him for his attitude towards the French Revolution and the French Revolutionists. Burke saw nothing but evil in, thought nothing but evil could come of, what was happening in France, and he feared disasters for his own country if it became impregnated with the poison of the revolutionary doctrine. That Fox should in any way advocate that doctrine made him in Burke's eyes an enemy of England, and not merely of England but of the whole human race. There was no middle way with Burke. Those who were not with him were against him, not merely as a politician, but as a man. To the day of his death, in 1797, he hated the Revolution and denied his friendship to those who expressed anything less than execration for its principles and its makers. Although it is always easy to exaggerate the influence that any single spirit may have upon a movement embracing {300} many nationalities and many different orders of mind, it would be difficult to overestimate the effect of Burke's words and Burke's actions in animating the coalition of monarchical Europe against insurgent France. And upon a responsibility for the intervention of other States in the affairs of France depends also a proportionate degree of responsibility for the results of that intervention. Burke was to see all the horrors he had so eloquently anticipated realized as the direct consequence of the invasion of France by the allied armies. The French people in the very hour in which they believed their cherished revolution to be an accomplished fact saw it menaced by the formidable league which proposed to bring the King's brothers back in triumph from Coblentz, and which threatened, in the extraordinary language to which Brunswick put his name, to blot Paris from the map of Europe if any injury were done to the King, who had already formally accepted the constitution that the Revolution had created. Paris went mad with fear and rage. The September massacres, the attacks upon the Tuileries, the proclaimed republicanism of the Convention, the rise of the men of the Mountain, Marat, Danton, and Robespierre, the execution first of the King and then of the Queen, the dominion of the guillotine and the Reign of Terror, were the direct results of a coalition whose only excuse would have been its complete success. The coalition proved to be an absolute failure. To the cry that the country was in danger ragged legions of desperate men rushed to the frontiers, and, to the astonishment of the world, proved more than a match for the armies that were sent against them.

[Sidenote: 1789-92—Pitt and the French Revolution]

Pitt was not himself eager to see England dragged into the European quarrel with France. But it was not easy for a minister who loved popularity, and who very sincerely believed his presence at the head of affairs to be essential to the welfare of the State, to avoid being involved in the controversy. The result of the unsuccessful coalition had been to increase the crimes that marked the course of the French Revolution, and seemingly to justify the fierce indignation of Burke. The country that had {301} been profoundly impressed by Burke's eloquence was profoundly shocked by the horrors that lost nothing of their magnitude in the reports that crossed the Channel. The country was flooded with fugitives from France, emigrants who presented in themselves moving pictures of the sufferings of those who were opposed to the Revolution, and who were not slow to express their sense of the ruin that had fallen upon their country. King George's native shrewdness and native narrowness of mind had made him from the first an active opponent of the Revolution. He declared that if a stop were not put to French principles there would not be a king left in Europe in a few years. To him, whose business above all things it had been to be king, the prospect was unlovely and alarming. The fear that he felt for his office was shared in varying degree by all those who felt that they would have much to lose if the example set by France came to be followed in England. The Church and the aristocracy, with all wealthy and vested interests, were naturally ranked to resist by all means the spread of the new doctrines. There were a few noblemen who, like Lord Stanhope and Lord Lauderdale, professed themselves to be champions of the French Revolution; there were some statesmen among the Opposition who were either sympathizers with the Revolution or asserters of the doctrine that it was no part of England's duty to interfere with the way in which another nation chose to govern herself. But the strength of public opinion was against these, as it was against the minister who was as eager as any Englishman living to remain on good terms with France.

Pitt from the first had looked with a favorable eye upon the changes that were taking place across the Channel. To maintain a friendship with France was a radical part of his policy. Friendship with France was essential in his mind in order to combat the aggrandizement of Russia and Prussia, and friendship with France seemed more possible under an enlightened constitution than under a despotic king. While Burke, who could only make the House of Commons smile and sneer by his denunciations {302} of Jacobin intrigues and his display of Jacobin daggers, was playing on the heart-strings of England and reviving all the old hostility to France, Pitt pursued as long as he was allowed to pursue it a policy of absolute neutrality. But he was not long allowed to pursue that policy, although he reaped some reward for it in a proof that the French Government appreciated his intentions and shared his desire for friendship. An English settlement at Nootka Sound, in Vancouver Island, had been interfered with by Spain. England was ready to assert her rights in arms. Spain appealed to France for her aid by the terms of the Family Compact. The French King and the French Ministers were willing enough to engage in a war with England, in the hope of diverting the course and weakening the power of the Revolution. But the National Assembly, after a long and angry struggle, took away from the King the old right to declare war, save with the consent of the National Assembly, which consent the National Assembly, in that particular crisis, was decided not to give. Pitt was delighted at this proof of the friendly spirit of the French people and the advantage of his principle of neutrality. But he was not able to act upon that principle. The forces brought against him were too many and too potent for him to resist. From the King on the throne to the mob in the streets, who sacked the houses of citizens known to be in sympathy with the Revolution, the English people as a whole were against him. The people who sympathized with the Revolution, who made speeches for it in Westminster and formed Constitutional Clubs which framed addresses of friendship to France, were but a handful in the House of Commons, were but a handful in the whole country. Their existence dazzled and deluded the French Revolutionists into the belief that the heart of England was with them at a time when every feeling of self-interest and of sentiment in England was against them. Pitt clung desperately to peace. He thought, what the Opposition thought then and for long years later, that it was wisest to leave France to settle her internal affairs and her form of government in her own way. When England {303} no longer had an ambassador at the French capital Pitt adhered doggedly, tenaciously, to a peace policy; persisted in preserving the neutrality of Holland; was ready, were it only possible, only permitted to him, to recognize the new Republic. But even if the execution of Louis the Sixteenth had not roused irresistible indignation in England the action of the new Republic made the prolongation of peace an impossibility. When, in the winter of 1792, the Convention made the famous offer of its aid in arms to all peoples eager to be free, it must have been plain to Pitt that, with France in that temper and England tempest-tossed between hatred of the Revolution and fear lest its theories were being insidiously fostered in her own confines, the preservation of peace was a dream. The dream was finally dissipated when France made ready to attack Holland and, rejecting all possible negotiations, declared war in the early days of 1793.

[Sidenote: 1793—France declares war against Holland]

At first the war went ill with France, and if the German Powers had co-operated earnestly and honestly with England it is at least within the limits of possibility that Paris might have been occupied and the Revolution for the time retarded. France seemed to be circled by foes; her enemies abroad were aided by civil war at home. La Vendee was in Royalist revolt; Marseilles and Lyons rose against the tyranny of Paris; Toulon, turning against the Republic, welcomed an English fleet. For a moment the arms of England and the aims of the Allies seemed to have triumphed. But the passionate determination of the French popular leaders and the mass of the French people to save the Revolution seemed to inspire them with a heroism that grew in proportion to the threatened danger. Her armies were swollen with enthusiastic recruits. Her internal revolts were coped with and crushed with savage severity. Loyal La Vendee was beaten. The rebellious towns of Lyons and Marseilles almost ceased to exist under the merciless repression of their conquerors. Many of the allied armies were defeated, while those of the two German Powers for their own selfish ends played the game of revolutionary France by abstaining from any serious effort to {304} advance into the country. Germany and Austria were confident that they could whenever they pleased crush revolutionary France, and they preferred to postpone the process, in order to occupy themselves in a new partition of Poland, which they could scarcely have carried out if the French monarchy had been restored. If there was nothing to justify the conduct of the two German Powers, there was much to warrant their confidence in their own strength when they judged that the time had come for them to exert it. They counted upon the known when they measured their forces with those of revolutionary France; they could not count upon the unknown quantity which was to disturb all their calculations. The unknown quantity asserted itself just at the moment when France, in spite of some successes, seemed to be deeply wounded by the loss of Toulon.

With the great port of Toulon in their hands the adversaries of France might well believe that a serious blow had been struck at her strength, and that the spirit which so long had defied them might yet be broken. But the success which had seemed to menace France so gravely proved to be but the point of departure for a new era of French glory. The occupation of Toulon is forever memorable, because it gave an opportunity to a young lieutenant of artillery in the French service, quite obscure in that service and wholly unknown outside of it. The quick intelligence of this young soldier perceived that the seizure of a certain promontory left unguarded by the invaders would place Toulon and those who had held it at the mercy of the French cannon. The suggestion was acted upon; was entirely successful; the English admiral was obliged to retire with all his fleet, and Toulon was once again a French citadel garrisoned by French soldiers. But the importance of the event, for France and the world lay not in the capture but in the captor. Though Barras, confident in his dominion over the Directory, might sneer at the young adventurer from Corsica and minimize his share in a success that had suddenly made him conspicuous, the name of Bonaparte then for the first time took its {305} place in the history of Europe. The youth whose military genius had enabled him to see and to seize upon the fatal weakness in a well-defended city was destined to prove the greatest soldier France had ever known, the greatest as well as the most implacable enemy England had ever to reckon with, and one of the greatest conquerors that ever followed the star of conquest across the war-convulsed earth.

[Sidenote: 1793—Napoleon Bonaparte]

This is the story of England, not the story of France, and Napoleon was at his best and worst rather an influence upon than an integral part of English history. It must be enough to say here that he is assumed to have been born in Ajaccio, in Corsica, in 1769; that when he was ten years old he tried to become French rather than Italian—a feat which he never successfully accomplished—by entering the military school of Brienne; that he served Louis the Sixteenth with indifference and the Revolution with an ambition that was often baffled, and that he struck the first of his many strokes at England when he won Toulon for France.



{306}

CHAPTER LXI.

"NINETY-EIGHT."

[Sidenote: 1798—Irish Catholic disabilities]

England was not concerned merely with the successes of France upon the Continent, with the French power of resisting invasion and preserving its capital and its constitution. The time was at hand when England was to take the French Republic into consideration as a more active enemy, whose enmity might take effect and be a very serious menace at her own doors. The breath of the French Revolution was to Great Britain like that of a sudden storm which sweeps round some stately mansion and finds out all its weak places and shatters some of its outlying buildings, although it cannot unroof its firmest towers or disturb its foundations. The weakest spot in Great Britain, and indeed we might almost say in the whole British Empire, was the kingdom of Ireland. Ireland had for long been in a state of what might almost be called chronic rebellion against the rule of England. England's enemies had always been regarded as Ireland's friends by the Irishmen who claimed especially to represent the national aspirations of their country. This is a fact which cannot be made too clear to the minds of Englishmen even at the present day, for the simple reason that no one who is capable of forming a rational idea on the subject can doubt that where a government is persistently hated that government must have done much to deserve the hate.

It is not necessary here to undertake a survey of the many grievances of which Ireland complained under the rule of Great Britain. One grievance which was especially felt during the reign of George the Third came from the persistent refusal of the Hanoverian Sovereign to listen {307} to any proposals for the relief of the Roman Catholics from the civil and religious disabilities under which they suffered. The Catholics constituted five-sixths of the whole population of Ireland, and up to the time of the War of Independence in America no Catholic in Great Britain or Ireland could sit in Parliament, or vote for the election of a member of Parliament, or act as a barrister or solicitor, or sit on a bench of magistrates or on a grand jury, or hold land, or obtain legal security for a loan. No doubt the state of the penal laws as they then existed was mitigated when compared with that which had prevailed but a short time before, when an ordinary Catholic had hardly any right to do more than live in Ireland, and a Catholic priest had not even a legal right to live there. But up to the time when the growing principles of liberty manifested themselves in the overthrow of the feudal system in France the Catholics in Great Britain and Ireland were practically excluded from any approach to civil or religious liberty. Ireland had a Parliament, but it was a Parliament of Protestants, elected by Protestants, and it was in fact a mere department of the King's Administration. The American War of Independence suddenly awakened wild hopes in the breasts of all oppressed nationalities, and the Irish Catholic population was among the first to be quickened by the new life and the new hope. The national idea was not, however, at first for a separation from England. Ireland was then for the most part under the leadership of Henry Grattan, a patriot, statesman, and orator—an orator whom Charles James Fox described as the "Irish Demosthenes," and whom Byron glorified as "with all that Demosthenes wanted endued, and his rival and victor in all he possessed."

Grattan's purpose was not separation from England or the setting up of an independent republic. An Ireland enjoying religious equality for all denominations and possessing a Parliament thoroughly independent of that sitting at Westminster would have satisfied all his patriotic ambition. In fact, what Grattan would have desired for Ireland is exactly such a system as is now possessed by one {308} of the provinces of Canada or Australia. When the alliance between France and independent America began to threaten Great Britain, and the English Government practically acknowledged its inability to provide for the defence of Ireland, Henry Grattan, with other Irish patriots of equal sincerity, and some of them of even higher social rank, started the Irish Volunteer movement, to be a bulwark of the country in case of foreign invasion. When the Irish patriots found themselves at the head of an army of disciplined volunteers they naturally claimed that the country which was able to defend herself should be allowed also an independent Parliament with which to make her domestic laws. They obtained their end, at least for the moment, and at least to all outward appearance, and Grattan was enabled to declare that for the first time he addressed a free Parliament in Ireland and to invoke the spirit of Swift to rejoice over the event. Catholic emancipation, however, had not yet been secured, although Grattan and those who worked with him did their best to carry it through the Parliament in Dublin. The obstinacy of King George still prevailed against every effort made by the more enlightened of his ministers. Pitt was in his brain and heart a friend of Catholic emancipation, but he had at last given way to the King's angry and bitter protests and complaints, and had made up his mind never again to trouble his Sovereign with futile recommendations. It so happened that a new Viceroy sent over to Ireland in 1794, Earl Fitzwilliam, became impressed with a sense of the justice of the claims for Catholic emancipation, and therefore gave spontaneous and honorable encouragement o the hopes of the Irish leaders. The result was that after three months' tenure of office he was suddenly recalled, and the expectations of the Irish leaders and the Irish people were cruelly disappointed.

From that moment it must have been clear to any keen observer in Ireland that the influence of Grattan and his friends could no longer control the action of Irish nationalists in general, and that the policy of Grattan would no longer satisfy the popular demands of Ireland. Short {309} as had been the Irish independent Parliament's term of existence, it had been long enough to satisfy most Irishmen that the control of the King's accepted advisers was almost as absolute in Dublin as in Westminster. To the younger and more ardent spirits among the Irish nationalists the setting up of a nominally independent Irish Parliament had always seemed but a poor achievement when compared with the change which their national ambition longed for and which the conditions of the hour to all appearance conspired to render attainable. These young men were now filled with all the passion of the French Revolution; they had always longed for the creation of an independent Ireland; they insisted that Grattan's compromise had already proved a failure, and in France, the enemy of England, they found their new hopes for the emancipation of Ireland.

[Sidenote: 1791—The United Irishmen]

There were among the Irish rebels, as they were soon to declare themselves, many men of great abilities and of the purest patriotic purpose. Among the very foremost of these were Theobald Wolfe Tone and Lord Edward Fitzgerald. Both these men, like all the other leaders of the movement that followed, were Protestants, as Grattan was. Wolfe Tone was a young man of great capacity and promise, who began his public career as secretary to an association formed for the purpose of effecting the relief of the Roman Catholics from the civil and religious disabilities which oppressed them. This society, after awhile, was named the Association of United Irishmen. The United Irishmen were at that time only united for the purpose of obtaining Catholic Emancipation. The association, as we shall soon see, when it failed of its first object became united for other and sterner purposes. Wolfe Tone was a young man of a brilliant Byronic sort of nature. There was much in his character and temperament which often recalls to the mind of the reader the generous impulse, the chivalric ardor, and the impetuous eccentricity of Byron. Tone, as a youth, was a careless student, or, indeed, to put it more distinctly, he only studied the subjects he cared about and was in the habit of neglecting his {310} collegiate tasks until the hour arrived when it became absolutely necessary that he should master them enough at least to pass muster for each emergency. He was a keen and close student of any subject which had genuine interest for him, but such subjects were seldom those which had anything to do with his academical career. He studied law after a fashion in one of the London Inns of Court, and he was called to the Bar in due course; but he had no inclination whatever for the business of an advocate, and his mind was soon drawn away from the pursuit of a legal career. He had a taste for literature and a longing for travel and military adventure in especial, and for a time he lived a pleasant, free and easy, Bohemian sort of life, if we may use the term Bohemian in describing days that existed long before Henri Murger had given the word its modern application.

[Sidenote: 1763-89—Theobald Wolfe Tone]

One of the many odd, original ideas which floated like bubbles across Wolfe Tone's fancy was a scheme for founding a sort of military colony in some island in the South Seas, to act as a check upon the designs and enterprises of Spain against the British Empire. Tone took his idea so seriously that he wrote to William Pitt, the Prime Minister, describing and explaining his project and asking for Government help in order to make it a reality. As will be easily understood, Pitt took no notice of the proposal, having probably a good many more suggestions made to him every day as to the best defences of England than he could possibly consider in a week. It is somewhat curious, however, to find that Wolfe Tone should at one period of his life have formed the idea of helping England to defend herself against her enemies. Some historians have gone so far as to opine that if Pitt could have seen his way to take Tone's proposition seriously, and to patronize the young man, the world might never have heard of the insurrection of "Ninety-Eight." But no one who gives any fair consideration to the whole career and character of Tone can have any doubt that Tone's passionate patriotism would have made him the champion of his own country, no matter what prospects the patronage of an {311} English minister might have offered to his ambition. At the time when Tone was scheming out his project for the island in the South Seas the leaders in the national movement in Ireland still believed that the just claims of their people were destined to receive satisfaction from the wisdom and justice of the English Sovereign. When it became apparent that Catholic Emancipation was not to be obtained through George the Third and through Pitt, then Wolfe Tone made up his mind that there was no hope for Ireland but in absolute independence, and that that independence was only to be won by the help of Napoleon Bonaparte and of France. In the mean time Tone had taken a step which brilliant, gifted, generous, and impecunious young men usually take at the opening of their career—he had made a sudden marriage. Matilda Witherington was only sixteen when Tone persuaded her to accept him as her husband and to share his perilous career. Romance itself hardly contains any story of a marriage more imprudent and yet more richly rewarded by love. Tone adored his young wife and she adored him. Love came in at their door and, though poverty entered there too, love never flew out at the window. The whole story of Wolfe Tone's public career may be read in the letters which, during their various periods of long separation, no difficulties and no dangers ever prevented him from writing to his wife. When he made up his mind to consecrate himself to the national cause of Ireland, and, if necessary, to die for it, he set forth his purpose to his wife, and she never tried to dissuade him from it. It is told of her that at one critical period of his fortunes she concealed from him the fact that she expected to become a mother, lest the knowledge might chill his patriotic enthusiasm or make him unhappy in his enterprise.

Tone went out to America and got into council with the representative of the French Republic there; then he returned to Europe, and he entered into communication with Carnot and with Napoleon Bonaparte. To these and to others he imparted his plans for a naval and military expedition from France to approach the coast of Ireland, to {312} land troops there, and to make the beginning of a great Irish rebellion, which must distract the attention and exhaust the resources of England and place her at the feet of all-conquering France. Tone felt certain that if an adequate number of French troops were landed on the western or southern shore of Ireland the whole mass of the population there would rally to the side of the invaders, and England would have to let Ireland go or waste herself in a hopeless struggle. Tone insisted in all his arguments and expositions that Ireland must be free and independent, and that no idea of conquering and annexing her must enter into the minds of the French statesmen and soldiers. Napoleon and Carnot approved of Tone's schemes as a whole, but Tone could not help seeing that Napoleon cared nothing whatever about the independence or prosperity of Ireland, and only took up with the whole scheme as a convenient project for the embarrassment and the distraction of England. Tone received a commission in the army of the French Republic, and became the soul and the inspiration of the policy which at fitful moments, when his mind was not otherwise employed, Napoleon was inclined to carry out on the Irish shores.

[Sidenote: 1763-98—Lord Edward Fitzgerald]

Lord Edward Fitzgerald was a son of the great ducal house of Leinster. He was born in the same year as Wolfe Tone; he was to die in the same year. It was his evil fortune to have to fight for the cause of King George against the uprising of the patriotic colonists of North America. He afterwards became filled with the ideas of the French Revolution, and got into trouble more than once by expressing his sentiments too freely while yet he wore the uniform of the British army. In Paris he became acquainted with Thomas Paine and was greatly taken with the theories and charmed with the ways of the revolutionary thinker, and in the company of Paine and congenial associates he took part in Republican celebrations which became talked of in England and led to his dismissal from the army. Lord Edward Fitzgerald had a strong love of adventure and exploration, and had contrived to combine with his military career in the New {313} World a number of episodes almost any one of which might have supplied the materials for a romance. He was a man of a thoroughly lovable nature, gallant, high-spirited, generous. Like Wolfe Tone, he had made a romantic marriage. His wife was the famous Pamela, the beautiful girl who was ward to Madame de Genlis, and commonly believed to be the daughter of the Duke of Orleans, Philippe Egalite. Louis Philippe, afterwards King of France, was one of the witnesses at the marriage ceremony. Lord Edward was perfectly happy with his young and beautiful wife until the political events came on which gave the sudden and tragic turn to his life. He was a member of the Irish Parliament for many years, and had on several occasions supported the policy which was advocated by Grattan. He too, however, soon made up his mind, as Wolfe Tone had done, that there was nothing to be expected from the Sovereign and his ministers, and he became an active member of the Society of United Irishmen when that association ceased to be a constitutional body and set its heart on armed rebellion. Lord Edward went over to France and worked hard there for the purpose of obtaining armed assistance for the Irish cause, but he returned to Ireland to work up the rebellious movement there while Tone remained in France to influence as well as he could the policy of Napoleon and Carnot.