A Biography Of Warren Hastings

 This edition is published by PICKLE PARTNERS PUBLISHING—www.picklepartnerspublishing.com

To join our mailing list for new titles or for issues with our books – picklepublishing@gmail.com

Or on Facebook

Text originally published in 1889 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2013, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

A Biography of Warren Hastings

by Sir Alfred Lyall, K.C.B.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

Chapter 1 – First Period of Indian Service 6

Chapter 2 – The Governorship of Bengal (1772–74) 17

Chapter 3 – The First Governor-Generalship in India 25

Chapter 4 – Hyder Ali’s Invasion – Duel with Francis 45

Chapter 5 – Benares and the Oude Begums 51

Chapter 6 – End of the Wars in India 60

Chapter 7 – Resignation and Return to England 68

Chapter 8 – The Impeachment and Trial 77

Chapter 9 – Last Years 92

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 99

Chapter 1 – First Period of Indian Service

Warren Hastings was born at Daylesford, in Worcestershire, in December, 1732. He was of good and ancient stock; although Burke, the son of a country solicitor, has described his origin as low, obscure, and vulgar – an unfounded calumny ventilated, like many others of the sort, by Sir Philip Francis. One of his name certainly held the manor of Daylesford in the time of Henry the Second; but the family suffered heavily in the great civil war of the seventeenth century, when John Hastings, then at Yelford Hastings in Oxfordshire, lost the greater part of his lands and his money in the service of Charles the First; and in 1715 Daylesford was sold to a merchant of Gloucester by Warren Hastings’ great-grandfather. Subsequent generations must have been pressing rather closely on each other, for Warren Hastings himself was born only seventeen years later, his father having married, without means, at the age of fifteen. The poor mother died a few days after giving birth to her second son; while the father married again, took holy orders when he was old enough, and died obscurely in the West Indies; having failed through improvidence in most of life’s affairs, though he succeeded in accidentally producing a very remarkable son.

Perhaps no man of undisputed genius ever inherited less, in mind or money, from his parents, or owed them fewer obligations of any kind. It is not possible to find in Pynaston Hastings any trace of the character or intellectual qualities of his son; the mother died in child-birth, while the father seems to have abandoned him very soon afterwards; for in a petition presented to the Lord Chancellor by their uncle in 1733, on behalf of Warren Hastings and his sister Anne, it is said that their father had withdrawn himself to some distant place, leaving the children wholly unprovided for. The boy was at first placed by the grandfather at a charity school; but at the age of twelve he had the good kick to be sent by his uncle, who had taken charge of him, to Westminster. The system and mode of life at the large public schools of England, with all their grave deficiencies in regard to methodical teaching, have been usually good for the development of character and scholarship in boys of real intellectual ability. Their innate tastes and aptitudes, which need only free play and example, find room and stimulus, where the average schoolboy only discovers that loose discipline means liberty to be idle. Hastings worked hard, was good on the river, and was elected to a king’s scholarship in the year 1747, as the names engraved on the wall of his dormitory still testify. But his uncle died, and he was made over to the care of a distant connection, who happened to be a director of the East India Company, and who insisted, against the remonstrance of the Westminster head-master, that Hastings should give up his high hopes of distinction at a university, and should learn accounts from Mr. Smith of Christ’s Hospital before going out to Bengal as a writer on the Company’s establishment. It was thus by a series of fortuitous events that, after entering the world in very unpromising circumstances, after being passed on from one kinsman to another, and after losing all his natural guardians, Warren Hastings came to be shipped for India in the year 1750, being then seventeen years old, about the same age as his father when the son was born.

All readers of Macaulay’s famous Essays have some general knowledge of the political condition of India at the time when Warren Hastings landed in Calcutta, toward the end of 1750. The dynasty of the Mogul emperors, founded by Baber in the sixteenth century, was the longest and strongest that had ever ruled in the country. The great expanse of open and comparatively level country, which stretches from the Indus and the Himalayas south-eastward to the Ganges and the sea, had been completely under the imperial sway; the Deccan was a province of the empire, and its jurisdiction was recognised in almost all parts of the Indian continent, except the extreme south. The emperors exercised dominion, in fact, over an immense collection of districts, provinces, subordinate chiefships, and kingdoms; in most of which Mahomedans had settled, had converted great numbers of the population, and monopolised almost all the chief offices and commands. Under the descendants of Baber this dominion lasted in full vigour about one hundred and fifty years; but it was ill welded, heterogeneous, incoherent, and mainly held together by a foreign mercenary army and the constant influx of fresh blood from the original homes of the ruling race beyond the Afghan mountains. Its strength and stability were already much shaken when Aurungzebe’s death, in 1710, closed a remarkable series of able monarchs; and it slipped so rapidly out of the feeble hands of his successors that in 1750 it was in a state of widespread dilapidation. All the chief native principalities – with whom, as the country powers, we had so much fighting and treaty-making during the remainder of the century – were just then in the earlier stages of formation; their founders were collecting armies, scrambling for lands, and striking openly for separate independence; the territory of the empire was being pulled to pieces like a child’s map. The sack of Delhi in 1740 by Nadir Shah the Persian had ruined the capital and destroyed the resources of the imperial government. Then followed the invasions of Ahmed Shah, one of the captains of Nadir Shah’s host, and the founder of the present dynasty of Afghan Amirs; who descended upon India with a swarm of Duranis, broke down the defences of the empire’s north-western frontier, and seized all the adjoining provinces. In the Central Punjab the Sikhs were in full insurrection; the Mahrattas had broken loose in the west, had subdued or devastated great tracts of country, had overrun Central India, and were levying tribute throughout the richest districts of the empire. The death in 1748 of the great Nizam, who had made himself virtually king of the Deccan, had thrown Southern India into the confusion of the Carnatic war. And even in the rich plain which extends from the Himalayan mountains to the Bay of Bengal – the country which has always been the seat of empires in India and the source of their prosperity – the Delhi emperors were fast losing all authority; they could neither keep their troops in the field nor collect the revenue. An able and ambitions adventurer, usually from Central Asia, obtained the appointment to a governorship and proceeded to turn it into a family possession; or a bold military leader extorted from the Mogul the nominal title of Viceroy, Commander-in-Chief, or of some other great office under the crown, which afforded him a pretext for levying troops and collecting revenue on his own account. In Rohilcund the Rohilla chiefs, who were mostly Afghan soldiers of fortune, had in this manner established themselves as nominal feudatories of the empire, but in reality as independent usurpers of the governing power, and of the crown lands and revenue. In Oude the Nawab Vizier (or Vicegerent) was laying the foundations of an extensive sovereignty; while Bengal was ruled by Ali Verdi Khan, a sagacious and capable governor who kept on good terms with the English traders at Calcutta, and whose chief concern was to repel the incursions of the predatory Mahrattas.

The course of events which first attracted English commercial enterprise toward India, and latterly opened the way to territorial acquisitions, belongs to and is connected with the current of general history. The conquest of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean and of the adjoining territories by barbarian invaders from North-Eastern and Central Asia, interrupted the old trade-routes overland to India by Syria and Bagdad, and from the Black Sea down the Tipis into the Persian Gulf. At first the trade shifted to Egypt and the Red Sea; but when the Turkish Sultan, Selim, overran Syria and seized Egypt in 1516, all the lines of commerce overland with Southern Asia were broken. This closing of the ancient trade routes diverted into new channels the adventurous mercantile spirit of Europe. The cities of the inland sea had lost their former advantage of position: Venice was cut off from her Asiatic communications; and the career of mixed commerce and conquest was taken over by the ocean-going nations of the West. In America, England and France contended during one hundred years for territorial predominance by conquest and colonisation; in India the struggle began with commercial competition. Toward the middle of the eighteenth century the colonial and commercial rivalry between the two nations had reached its climax all over the world; and the naval superiority of England was gradually developing out of the contest. In the Indian peninsula the news of the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748) had caused a formal cessation of hostilities between the French and English; but in the same year began the war between the rival claimants for the rulership of the Carnatic province, in which the French and English trading companies took opposite sides, when the incomparable superiority of Dupleix and Bussy gave the victory at first to the French candidate.

Under the system, first invented by Dupleix, of acquiring a dominant influence in the political disputes of the native princes by maintaining a force drilled and armed on the European model, France had acquired in 1750 a decided ascendency. A king of unofficial warfare went on for two or three years 1, but the system of Dupleix, whose real genius has been somewhat overpraised, relied mainly upon complicated and very unscrupulous intrigues with the native competitors for rule in the Indian peninsula; a network in which he himself became ultimately entangled. The English were compelled, very reluctantly, to follow his example: they were forced to contract alliances and to join in the loose scuffling warfare that went on round them; and they soon proved themselves better players than the French at the round game of political hazard. There was great jealousy and disunion, as usual, among the French leaders in India: their ambitious designs alarmed their native friends; and latterly some unlucky enterprises of the French party, together with the discovery in France that these military operations were loading the Company with debt, induced the French Government to recall Dupleix, and to sign with the English in India a treaty renouncing on both all further interference with disputes between native States. The position thus abandoned was never regained by France; for when regular hostilities began again two years later, Lally was beaten after hard fighting in South India; and Clive’s victory at Plassey (1757) opened out for the English a much longer and more important field of war and diplomacy in Bengal, where the French from that time forward had no footing.

The earliest years of Warren Hastings’ residence in Bengal fell, therefore, within that period when the East India Company first began to interfere systematically in the quarrels of the country. The example of interference set by the French, the practice of following suit in India .to the lead in Europe, and of extending to Asia any war that broke out between France and England at home; the perils of the tumultuous discord all round their frontiers, and the opportunities offered by such a state of affairs – all these risks and temptations were inevitably bringing the English in India at this time upon the political stage. Up to this epoch they had done their best, on principle, to avoid fighting, to abide by the seashore, and to keep clear of territorial responsibilities; but from 1757 commenced the era when conquest became allied to commerce, and when trade carried and followed the flag into the interior of India.

Hastings lived two years at Calcutta, working as assistant in the Secretary’s office; he was transferred in 1753 to the factory at Kasimbazar, near Moorshedabad, on the Ganges, where his duties seem to have been connected with the silk spinning business, and in 1755 (or 56) he was promoted to the Factory Council. Factories were trading posts and warehouses established at some of the principal commercial towns, where goods sent out from Europe were sold, and Indian produce or manufactures collected for despatch home. Each of them seems to have been managed in early days by its own president and council; subordinate of course to the chief Presidencies at the seaports. Most of them were fortified and guarded by armed men, and within their limits the authority of the chief agents was practically unlimited. Within four months of Hastings’ arrival at Kasimbazar occurred the death of Ali Verdi Khan, the old Nawab of Bengal, an event which at once changed the aspect of affairs in Bengal, because it laid open that province, one of the richest in India, to the rising flood of discord and misrule that was spreading all round. Ali Verdi Khan was one of the imperial viceroys who had made himself independent; his firm government had maintained a barrier against external invasion, and had kept peace within his Borders; but the caprice and violence of his grandson and successor, Suraj-u-Dowlah, produced a state of terror, insecurity, and confusion. Incapable despotism is short-lived anywhere, especially in Asia; and when surrounded by disorganisation it has no chance at all. The instinct of self-preservation at once finds its natural remedy in conspiracy and revolt; the strongest elements in society rise rapidly to the surface, and the best and boldest men come to the front. In 1756 no one in Bengal regarded the English trading company as a political force, or supposed that Suraj-u-Dowlah’s quarrel with them would speedily lead to his defeat and death, and to the reduction of his kingdom under their authority. His first attack on them was quite unprovoked. The English, hearing that war with France was just breaking out in Europe, began to fortify Calcutta. The Nawab ordered them to stop the work; the English were obliged to disobey, for he had not the power and might not have had the will to protect them against the French. But their refusal enraged the Nawab, who at once surrounded the factory at Kasimbazar, plundered it, imprisoned the Company’s servants, Warren Hastings among the rest, and marched on Calcutta with ten thousand men, disregarding repeated offers of submission to all his demands. Then followed, in June, 1756, the tragedy of the Black Hole, when one hundred and forty-six English prisoners were crushed for a night into a room about twenty feet long by fourteen in width, with two small grated windows; of whom twenty-two men and one woman survived till the morning. The Calcutta factory was destroyed; all the English trading stations in Bengal were broken up, and the main body of the Company’s servants took refuge upon a little island in the river below Calcutta, where they encamped like a shipwrecked crew, awaiting rescue. They were relieved in December by the arrival of Admiral Watson’s fleet bringing Colonel Clive and some troops, when the scene was again changed by the recovery of Calcutta and the taking of Hooghly, the Nawab’s chief military post near Calcutta. Suraj-u-Dowlah, who had returned to Moorshedabad, reappeared with an army before Fort William, but after an indecisive night engagement he made peace with the English and restored their factories. In the East treaties mean little more than temporary truces; the Nawab, naturally anxious to strengthen himself against formidable intruders within his own borders, began to negotiate with the French at Chaudernagore, and was obviously dangerous and untrustworthy; so hostilities began in June, and were practically finished in a fortnight at Plassey. Suraj-u-Dowlah was first defeated and next murdered by his own officers; the throne became vacant, and the country masterless; whereupon there ensued the era of puppet Nawabs set up by the English, who tried to reserve political power without administrative responsibility, a régime which produced more scandalous abuses and oppressions than the worst of all purely native governments.

Warren Hastings had been released from detention at Moorshedabad on the security of Mr. Vynett, chief of a neighbouring Dutch factory, and had opened a correspondence with the English at Fulta, the island to which they had fled from Calcutta. Drake, the Calcutta governor, sent him a letter for the Nawab full of humility and submission, asking for a supply of provisions; but Hastings, who knew that the Nawab had his own difficulties, preferred to wait until he could be approached in a less suppliant tone; rightly judging that nothing could be gained by falling on their knees before Suraj-u-Dowlah. Some secret letters between the Fulta party and the powerful native bankers at Moorshedabad, who feared and detested the Nawab, also passed through the bands of Hastings, but the only effect was to make it unsafe for him to remain at Moorshedabad; so he escaped to Chunar, and thence vent clown the river Ganges to join the Calcutta refugees at Fulta. Here he met the widow of Captain Campbell, whom he afterwards married, and in 1758 he wrote to a friend that he was very happy, and found every good quality in his wife. But the poor lady died in 1759 lifter bearing him two children, neither of whom survived childhood; and of this brief episode in his eventful life only the bare facts remain, like the names and dates on some obscure stone among the historic monuments of a great church.

When the fleet arrived he returned to Calcutta, which was recovered after a slight resistance. He bore arms as a volunteer with the troops under Clive’s command, in the fighting round Calcutta and the taking of Hooghly fort; and lm had some share in conducting an abortive negotiation with the Nawab himself. When Mir Jafir succeeded, after Suraj-u-Dowlah’s defeat and death, to the Nawabship, Hastings was sent up