already mentioned as a schoolfellow of Hastings at Westminster. The whole tendency of the Regulating Act was to establish for the first time the influence of the crown, or rather of parliament, in Indian affairs. The new members of council disembarked at Calcutta on the 19th of October 1774; and on the following day commenced the long feud which scarcely terminated twenty-one years later with the acquittal of Warren Hastings by the House of Lords. Macaulay states that the members of council were put in ill-humour because their salute of guns was not proportionate to their dignity. In a contemporary letter Francis thus expresses the same petty feeling: “Surely Mr H. might have put on a ruffled shirt.” Taking advantage of an ambiguous clause in their commission, the majority of the council (for Barwell uniformly sided with Hastings) forthwith proceeded to pass in review the recent measures of the governor-general. All that he had done they condemned; all that they could they reversed. Hastings was reduced to the position of a cipher at their meetings. After a time they lent a ready ear to detailed allegations of corruption brought against him by his old enemy Nuncomar. To charges from such a source, and brought in such a manner, Hastings disdained to reply, and referred his accuser to the supreme court. The majority of the council, in their executive capacity, resolved that the governor-general had been guilty of peculation, and ordered him to refund. A few days later Nuncomar was thrown into prison on a charge of forgery preferred by a private prosecutor, tried before the supreme court sitting in bar, found guilty by a jury of Englishmen and sentenced to be hanged. Hastings always maintained that he did not cause the charge to be instituted, and the legality of Nuncomar’s trial is thoroughly proved by Sir James Stephen. The majority of the council abandoned their supporter, who was executed in due course. He had forwarded a petition for reprieve to the council, which Clavering took care should not be presented in time, and which was subsequently burnt by the common hangman on the motion of Francis. While the strife was at its hottest, Hastings had sent an agent to England with a general authority to place his resignation in the hands of the Company under certain conditions. The agent thought fit to exercise that authority. The resignation was promptly accepted, and one of the directors was appointed to the vacancy. But in the meantime Colonel Monson had died, and Hastings was thus restored, by virtue of his casting vote, to the supreme management of affairs. He refused to ratify his resignation; and when Clavering attempted to seize on the governor-generalship, he judiciously obtained an opinion from the judges of the supreme court in his favour. From that time forth, though he could not always command an absolute majority in council, Hastings was never again subjected to gross insult, and his general policy was able to prevail.
A crisis was now approaching in foreign affairs which demanded all the experience and all the genius of Hastings for its solution. Bengal was prosperous, and free from external enemies on every quarter. But the government of Bombay had hurried on a rupture with the Mahratta confederacy at a time when France was on the point of declaring war against England, and when the mother-country found herself unable to subdue her rebellious colonists in America. Hastings did not hesitate to take upon his own shoulders the whole responsibility of military affairs. All the French settlements in India were promptly occupied. On the part of Bombay, the Mahratta war was conducted with procrastination and disgrace. But Hastings amply avenged the capitulation of Wargaon by the complete success of his own plan of operations. Colonel Goddard with a Bengal army marched across the breadth of the peninsula from the valley of the Ganges to the western sea, and achieved almost without a blow the conquest of Gujarat. Captain Popham, with a small detachment, stormed the rock fortress of Gwalior, then deemed impregnable and the key of central India; and by this feat held in check Sindhia, the most formidable of the Mahratta chiefs. The Bhonsla Mahratta raja of Nagpur, whose dominions bordered on Bengal, was won over by the diplomacy of an emissary of Hastings. But while these events were taking place, a new source of embarrassment had arisen at Calcutta. The supreme court, whether rightly or wrongly, assumed a jurisdiction of first instance over the entire province of Bengal. The English common law, with all the absurdities and rigours of that day, was arbitrarily extended to an alien system of society. Zamíndárs, or government renters, were arrested on mesne process; the sanctity of the zenána, or women’s chamber, as dear to Hindus as to Mahommedans, was violated by the sheriff’s officer; the deepest feelings of the people and the entire fabric of revenue administration were alike disregarded. On this point the entire council acted in harmony. Hastings and Francis went joint-bail for imprisoned natives of distinction. At last, after the dispute between the judges and the executive threatened to become a trial of armed force, Hastings set it at rest by a characteristic stroke of policy. A new judicial office was created in the name of the Company, to which Sir Elijah Impey was appointed, though he never consented to draw the additional salary offered to him. The understanding between Hastings and Francis, originating in this state of affairs, was for a short period extended to general policy. An agreement was come to by which Francis received patronage for his circle of friends, while Hastings was to be unimpeded in the control of foreign affairs. But a difference of interpretation arose. Hastings recorded in an official minute that he had found Francis’s private and public conduct to be “void of truth and honour.” They met as duellists. Francis fell wounded, and soon afterwards returned to England.
The Mahratta war was not yet terminated, but a far more formidable danger now threatened the English in India. The imprudent conduct of the Madras authorities had irritated beyond endurance the two greatest Mussulman powers in the peninsula, the nizam of the Deccan and Hyder Ali, the usurper of Mysore, who began to negotiate an alliance with the Mahrattas. A second time the genius of Hastings saved the British empire in the east. On the arrival of the news that Hyder had descended from the highlands of Mysore, cut to pieces the only British army in the field, and swept the Carnatic up to the gates of Madras, he at once adopted a policy of extraordinary boldness. He signed a blank treaty of peace with the Mahrattas, who were still in arms, reversed the action of the Madras government towards the nizam, and concentrated all the resources of Bengal against Hyder Ali. Sir Eyre Coote, a general of renown in former Carnatic wars, was sent by sea to Madras with all the troops and treasure that could be got together; and a strong body of reinforcements subsequently marched southwards under Colonel Pearse along the coast line of Orissa. The landing of Coote preserved Madras from destruction, though the war lasted through many campaigns and only terminated with the death of Hyder. Pearse’s detachment was decimated by an epidemic of cholera (perhaps the first mention of this disease by name in Indian history); but the survivors penetrated to Madras, and not only held in check Bhonsla and the nizam, but also corroborated the lesson taught by Goddard—that the Company’s sepoys could march anywhere, when boldly led. Hastings’s personal task was to provide the ways and means for this exhausting war. A considerable economy was effected by a reform in the establishment for collecting the land tax. The government monopolies of opium and salt were then for the first time placed upon a remunerative basis. But these reforms were of necessity slow in their beneficial operation. The pressing demands of the military chest had to be satisfied by loans, and in at least one case from the private purse of the governor-general. Ready cash could alone fill up the void; and it was to the hoards of native princes that Hastings’s fertile mind at once turned. Chait Sing, raja of Benares, the greatest of the vassal chiefs who had grown rich under the protection of the British rule, lay under the suspicion of disloyalty. The wazir of Oudh had fallen into arrears in the payment due for the maintenance of the Company’s garrison posted in his dominions, and his administration was in great disorder. In his case the ancestral hoards were under the control of his mother, the begum of Oudh, into whose hands they had been allowed to pass at the time when Hastings
