Part 10

If the broken invalid of those days had been the same man as the defender of Arcot and the victor of Plassey, the history of the Anglo-Saxon race might well have been changed, for Robert Clive would not only have been strong to crush the rebels, but also just and generous to procure them afterwards those equal rights of citizenship the denial of which split Anglo-Saxondom in two.

Of this, at least, we may be fairly certain: there would have been no Bunker’s Hill and no Brandywine River save as geographical expressions, and there would have been neither a Saratoga nor a Yorktown save as towns and nothing more.

But this was not to be. Clive’s genius had given forth its last flash and the eclipse had come. On November 22, 1774, some ten weeks after the assembly of the Revolutionary Congress at Philadelphia, Robert, Lord Clive, Baron of Plassey, and Conqueror of the domains of the great Tamerlane, for the third time put a pistol to his head--and this time it went off.

It was, as Macaulay says, an awful close to such a career, and yet, after all, granted even everything that his worst enemies said against him, Robert Clive had well and worthily earned a place in the front rank of Britain’s Empire-Makers.

On Sir Thomas Wren’s tomb in St. Paul’s stands the Latin legend which translated reads: “If you seek his monument look around you!” If a man could be endowed with an infinite range of vision he might be placed on the highest pinnacle of the Himalayas, and as he looked east and west and south the same might be said to him as the epitaph of Robert Clive; for all that he could see from the Arabian Gulf to the Bay of Bengal, and from the Himalayan slopes to the coral reefs of Cape Comorin, would be the monument of his eternal fame--and is there man born of woman who could desire a worthier?

VIII

_WARREN HASTINGS_,

_THE FIRST UNCROWNED KING OF INDIA_

VIII

WARREN HASTINGS

Both in point of time and personal capacity, Warren Hastings, first Governor-General of the British Empire in India, was the successor of Robert, Lord Clive. At the same time it may be as well to point out in this connection that there might be more literal correctness in describing Warren Hastings as an Empire-Preserver rather than an Empire-Maker.

It was the victor of Plassey who rough-hewed the stones upon which the now gorgeous fabric of our Indian Empire stands. It was Hastings who, in spite of stupendous difficulties, took those stones and laid them down according to that plan which he had formed, and which has been followed in the main by all who have added to the structure.

As was said in other words of William of Orange, one of the greatest claims that the great Governor has to the interest and admiration of those who have a share in the splendid inheritance that he built up, lies in the fact that he did his work in the face of everlasting hindrances and in the midst of perpetual embarrassments, which must infallibly have discouraged and bewildered any but a man upon whom the gods had set the stamp of greatness, and, in their own way, crowned him one of the kings of men. In short, like the grandson of William the Silent, Warren Hastings was first and foremost an overcomer of difficulties.

Great and splendid and enduring as his work undoubtedly was, it would not, after all, have been very difficult to do if he had just been left to do it--not helped, because he wasn’t the kind of man who wanted help, but just left alone. Instead of this, however, as though it were not enough that his work of organising and consolidating what the sword of Clive had won, and combating the infinity of complications arising out of the rivalry of a dozen warring native potentates, he was purposely surrounded in his own council-chamber by unscrupulous enemies of his own blood and country, whose only title to historical recognition is now the infamy that they have earned by failing to prevent the doing of that work which Warren Hastings saw had got to be done, and which he, with an inflexible heroism, decided to do in spite of everything that his enemies, white or brown, Mohammedan, Hindoo or British, could do to cripple him.

Sir Alfred Lyall, his most recent biographer, has very happily said of him that “perhaps no man of undisputed genius ever inherited less in mind or money from his parents or owed them fewer obligations of any kind.” His father, Pynaston Hastings, was the vagrant ne’er-do-well son of a fine old family. He married when only fifteen without any means or prospect of supporting a family. Warren was the second son. His father was only seventeen at his birth, and his mother died a few days later. As soon as he was old enough Pynaston took holy orders, married again, obtained a living in the West Indies, and there died, leaving his son to be put into a charity school by his grandfather.

This is not much for a father to do for a son, but there was something else that Pynaston Hastings did which was of very great consequence, though in the nature of the case no credit is due to him for it. He transmitted to him the blood of a long line of ancestors, which stretched away back through one of the followers of William the Norman to the days of those old pirate kings of the Northland who, as I have pointed out before, were none the worse fathers of Empire-Makers because they were pirates as well.

One of his ancestors, John Hastings, Lord of the Manors of Yelford-Hastings in Oxfordshire, and of Dalesford in Worcestershire, lost about half of his worldly goods, including the plate that he sent to be coined at the Oxford Mint, in helping Charles Stuart to fight the great Oliver, and afterwards spent most of the remainder in buying his peace from the Parliament. It was on the ancient estate of Dalesford, long before sold to the stranger and the alien, that Warren Hastings was born, some two hundred years later, practically a pauper and almost an outcast, under the shadow of his ancestral home.

When he came to reasoning years he made a boyish resolve, challenging fate with all the splendid insolence of a seven-year-old dreamer, that some day he would make his fortune and buy the old place back--which in due course he did, although in those days his prospect of doing so was about as small as it was of reigning over the millions of subjects whose descendants to-day revere his memory almost as that of one of their own demigods.

When he was twelve years old Warren was taken away from the charity school by one of his uncles and sent to Westminster, where he distinguished himself by winning a King’s scholarship in the year 1747. Even when his poor old grandfather, the last Hastings of Dalesford, and the miserably paid rector of the parish which his ancestors had owned, sent Warren to sit beside the little rustics of the village school, he immediately singled himself out from them by the willing intelligence with which he took to his work and afterwards the headmaster of Westminster had high hopes of university distinctions for him. It was indeed a somewhat curious coincidence that Robert Clive should have been such an exceedingly bad boy and the completer of his work such a good one.

But the Fates had already decided that Warren Hastings was to graduate with honours in a very much bigger university than that on the banks of the Isis or the Cam. His uncle died suddenly, and the orphan lad was passed on to the care of a distant connection who happened to be a director of the East India Company.

His headmaster remonstrated strongly, but happily without effect, against his immediate removal to Christ’s Hospital to learn account-keeping before going out to Bengal as a writer in the service of “John Company.”

It seems as though the worthy Dr. Nichols had a very high opinion of his intellectual abilities, for, when all his protests failed, he actually offered to send his brilliant young pupil to Oxford at his own expense.

Happily for the British Empire Mr. Director Chiswick, the relative aforesaid, stuck to his selfish project of getting him off his hands as quickly and permanently as possible by sending him out to Calcutta to take jungle fever or make a fortune, just in the same way that Clive’s despairing parents had done.

He sailed for Calcutta when he was seventeen, the same age as his precious father was when he was born. He had been two years at the desk in Calcutta when there came the news that Clive had taken Arcot and put a very different complexion on the struggle between the English and French Companies for the supremacy of India.

About that time he was sent to a little town on the Hooghly about a mile from Moorshedabad, and while he was here driving bargains with native silk-weavers and tea merchants, Surajah Dowlah marched into Calcutta and cast such English prisoners as he could lay hold of into the Black Hole.

Hastings was also taken prisoner, but most fortunately did not get into the Black Hole, and he appears to have been set at large on the intercession of the chief of the Dutch factory. During the period which followed his partial release--for he was still under surveillance at Moorshedabad--he made his first essay in diplomacy, or what would perhaps be more correctly described as political intrigue, with the result that the city got too hot for him, and he fled to Fulda, an island below Calcutta, where, as has been pithily said, the English fugitives from Fort William “were encamped like a shipwrecked crew awaiting rescue.”

The rescue came in the shape of the combined naval and military expedition, commanded by Admiral Watson and Robert Clive, which was destined to end in the triumph of Plassey, and Warren Hastings, as Macaulay aptly suggests in his brilliant but singularly misinformed essay, doubtless inspired by the example of Clive and the similarity of their entrance on to the stage of Indian affairs, like him exchanged the pen for the sword, and fought through the campaign. But Clive saw “that there was more in his head than his arm,” and after the battle of Plassey he sent him as resident Agent of the Company to the Court of Meer Jaffier, the puppet-nabob who had been set up in the place of Surajah Dowlah.

He held this post until he was made a Member of Council in 1761, and was obliged to remove to Calcutta. Clive was at home now, and the interregnum of oppression, extortion, and general mismanagement was in full swing; but the man who was afterwards so grossly wronged and falsely impeached, and who passed through the most celebrated trial in English history charged with just such crimes, had so little taste for them that three years later he came back a comparatively poor man, and the fortune he had he either gave away to his relations or lost through the failure of a Dutch trading-house.

After a stay of four years, during which he renewed his intimacy with his old schoolfellow, the creator of the immortal John Gilpin, and made the acquaintance of Johnson and Boswell, he found himself so reduced in circumstances that he not only had to ask the Directors of the Company to give him more employment in India, but when he got it he was forced to borrow the money to pay his passage out again.

It is quite impossible to form any just and reasonable judgment of the work which Warren Hastings now went out to do unless one first gets an adequate idea of the condition of things obtaining in India before the English went there, and of the conditions that would have obtained, if men like Clive, Hastings, Cornwallis, and Wellesley had not by one means and another--some good, some bad, but all just what were possible under the circumstances--succeeded in imposing the _Pax Britannica_ upon the rival and constantly warring potentates who governed the native populations.

No doubt the war on the Rohillas, or the so-called spoliation of the Begums of Oude, together with more or less magnified incidentals, formed famous themes in after years for the inflated eloquence and grandiloquent over-statements of Edmund Burke and Sheridan, and for the far less comprehensible or excusable special pleading of Lord Macaulay.

It was, no doubt, very affecting to see the patched and powdered fine ladies who paid their fifty guineas a seat in Westminster Hall to watch the men of words mangling the reputation of the man of deeds, weeping and fainting at the harrowing pictures they drew--mostly on their own imaginations--of the sufferings which he had _not_ caused; but we of to-day are sufficiently far removed from the personal spite and the passion and rivalry which inspired the enemies and accusers of the great Governor to be able to look at things as they actually were, and in doing so we shall see that, however heavy was the hand that Warren Hastings laid upon the subject peoples, it was but as a caress to a blow when compared with the oppression and extortion with which conqueror after conqueror, Mohammedan and Hindoo, Sikh, Afghan, and Mahratta, had ground down and despoiled the helpless races which successively passed under their sway.

Order, however dearly bought, is always less expensive than anarchy, and the impassioned periods of Burke and Sheridan look somewhat silly when we compare them with the sober facts. It never seems to have struck them or their audience to make any comparison between the English gentleman and loyal servant of his country whom they would have handed down to history as a monster of iniquity, and those real tyrants of the type of Surajah Dowlah, Hyder-Ali, and Nana-Sahib, whose brutal rule and ruthless wars of conquest and extermination must have been, under the circumstances, the only possible alternative to the strong and steady control of the Englishman.

The first thing that Warren Hastings did on his return was to reorganise the trade of the Province, and in this he succeeded so well that the Directors rewarded him in 1772 with the Governorship of Bengal; and if they could have stopped there, leaving him to do the rest, the immediately subsequent history of India might have been very much more creditable to the rulers and more pleasant reading for the descendants of the ruled than it was. But unhappily a body of traders and shareholders became possessed with the idea that they were the proper sort of people to rule a country divided by political and religious factions, with a history of almost constant warfare stretching back for centuries, and situated fifteen thousand miles away.

This, on the face of it, was an impossibility. When they had found their Governor they should have trusted him to govern, instead of sending out his personal enemies to sit at his council-table to spy upon his actions and hamper and oppose him in everything that he did.

But there was something else in its way quite as serious as this. Practically all the charges that were brought against Warren Hastings on his impeachment are answered and disposed of by the fact that the only condition upon which he could retain his position and do the work that he had set his soul upon doing was, in three words, making India _pay_. John Company looked upon his new possession as a trader on a market. With the Directors, who, after all were Hastings’ masters, it was business first, and policy and government a good distance after.

Even Macaulay admits that every exhortation to govern leniently and respect the rights of the native princes and their subjects was accompanied by a demand for increased contributions. “The inconsistency was at once manifest to their vice-regent at Calcutta, who, with an empty treasury, with an unpaid army, with his own salary often in arrear, with deficient crops, with Government tenants daily running away, was called upon to remit home another half-million without fail.”

There is another thing to be remembered before we can judge Warren Hastings fairly in the matter of his forced contributions. The tea that was flung overboard in Boston Harbour in the December of 1773 was imported by the East India Company. The connection will appear more obvious when we look at what followed.

Great Britain was about to plunge into war, east and west, north and south. Criminal misgovernment at home had produced revolt abroad. Disaster after disaster and disgrace after disgrace were soon to befall the British arms. The Anglo-Saxon race was about to be split in two, and England herself was to fight, if not for her very existence, at least for her honourable place among the nations.

All this Warren Hastings foresaw with that marvellous prevision which made some of his actions look almost prophetic, and determined that, come what might elsewhere, the Star of the East should not be plucked from the British Crown. He was not a soldier. He was an administrator. His task was not to increase but to hold. He was by no means always successful in war, and in all his long rule he never added a province or a district to the area of British India; but what Clive won he held and strengthened during those fateful years when the destiny of Britain as an empire was trembling in the balances of Fate.

Now, to keep India, money was absolutely necessary, and the getting of it was not always work that could be done with kid gloves on, and the greatness of Warren Hastings as Empire-Maker or Holder may be seen in the fact that he deliberately, and with his eyes open, risked his future fortune and reputation in the doing of this work by the only means available.

He knew that his methods would be censured by his masters and made unscrupulous use of by his enemies, and he said so in so many words, and, careless of criticism and undeterred by the most virulent and treasonable opposition, he succeeded so far that he was able to say with truth that he had rescued one province from infamy, and two from total ruin. It is simply amazing to the dispassionate reader of the present day to watch the needless struggles which were imposed upon this man, already confronted by a titanic task, by the very men who ought to have been the first, for their own sakes and their country’s, to have made his way as smooth and his burdens as light as possible.

The man who may be fairly described as the evil genius of Warren Hastings’ career was that Sir Philip Francis who is generally looked upon as the author of the far-famed Letters of Junius. He and Sir John Clavering, both personal enemies of the Governor-General--as he was now--were sent out as members of the Council, and to the days of their death they never ceased to thwart and embarrass him by every means in their power.

One reason for their enmity was undoubtedly the sordid motive of getting him turned out of the Governor-Generalship in order that one of them might succeed to his office, and that both might share in the fruits of the extortions which, in him, they condemned.

This was not only unjust to Hastings, but it was also a crime against their country, committed at a moment when she had all too much need of such men as he was.

To my mind, at least, there is a very strong resemblance between the savage invective of Junius and the consistent and unscrupulous malevolence with which Sir Philip Francis tried to wreck the life-work of a man at whose table he was not worthy to sit.

Those were days in which political rivalry and personal enmity entailed personal consequences if they were pushed too far. Hastings seemed to have come at length to the conclusion that India was not large enough to hold himself and Francis. He had submitted to insult after insult, and he would have been something more than human if his enemy’s unceasing efforts to make his life a misery and his work a failure had not left some bitterness in his soul, and so one fine day he sat down and embodied his opinion of him in a Minute to the Council, and in this he purposely put words which meant inevitable bloodshed:

“I do not trust to his promise of candour; convinced that he is incapable of it, and that his sole purpose and wish are to embarrass and defeat every measure which I may undertake or which may tend even to promote the public interest if my credit is connected with them.... Every disappointment and misfortune have been aggravated by him, and every fabricated tale of armies devoted to famine and massacre have found their first and most ready way to his office, where it is known they would meet with most welcome reception.... I judge of his public conduct by my experience of his private, which I have found void of truth and honour. This is a severe charge but temperately and deliberately made.”

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

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

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

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

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