A Biography of Warren Hastings EnglishMenofAction WarrenHastings A BiographyofWarrenHastings by SirAlfredLyall,K.C.B. 1889 Reproducedby Sani H. Panhwar(2018) CONTENTS CHAPTER I FIRST PERIOD OF INDIAN SERVICE .. .. .. .. 1 CHAPTER II THE GOVERNORSHIP OF BENGAL (1772-74) .. .. 15 CHAPTER III THE FIRST GOVERNOR-GENERALSHIP IN INDIA .. 26 CHAPTER IV HIDER ALI'S INVASION-DUEL WITH FRANCIS .. .. 53 CHAPTER V BENARES AND THE OUDE BEGUUS .. .. .. .. 60 CHAPTER VI ENDOF THEWARSININDIA .. .. .. .. .. 72 CHAPTER VII RESIGNATION AND RETURN TO ENGLAND .. .. 82 CHAPTER VIII THEIMPEACHMENTANDTRIAL .. .. .. .. 93 CHAPTER IX LAST YEARS .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 114 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Chancellor by their uncle in 1733, on behalf of Warren Hastings and his sister Anne, it is said that their father had withdrawn himself to some distant place, leaving the children wholly unprovided for.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, EnglishMenofActionWarrenHastings, Copyright © www.sanipanhwar.com 1 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 recognized 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 monopolized almost all the chief offices and commands. Under the descendants of Baber this dominion lasted in full vigor 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 defenses 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 EnglishMenofActionWarrenHastings, Copyright © www.sanipanhwar.com 2 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 colonization; 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 ruler ship 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.