the nabob should retain their jaghires; that their hidden treasures should be seized and handed over to the Company, in partial discharge of the debt of the nabob, who undertook to execute the process by which the treasure was to be got at. He returned to Lucknow, from whence he went to Fyzabad, the ancient capital of Oude, in which the princesses resided. This was on the 8th of January, 1782. He was accompanied by a detachment of British troops, who, after three days' parley, got possession of the town quietly. With these the nabob then proceeded to the abode of the begums -"the Beautiful Residence"-a palace delightfully situated among hills and woods, through which flow pleasant streams. The troops took possession of the palace, on which the startled and shrieking begums shut themselves up in an inner apartment. But all negotiation with them proved unavailing; so the nabob's next step was to operate on their feelings, through those of their confidential agents, two aged eunuchs, named Behar Ali Khan, and Jewar Ali Khan. They were seized, heavily ironed, and the usual processes, so common in the East for the discovery of money or any secret, were at once resorted to, "and the mind of Mr. Middleton, Englishman and English gentleman as he claimed to be, does not appear to have shrunk from their adoption." Hastings, we are glad to say, was not on the spot, when this "mode was found, of which, even at this distance of time, we cannot speak without shame and sorrow." As it has always been held in the East that these unfortunate beings-who are estranged from all sympathy with their kind—are those whom princes may with safety trust, there was little doubt that they knew where the treasure was concealed, or, if they did not, that their sufferings would act upon the hearts of the begums and extract the secret. The sufferings of the old men, or perhaps their own, for they too were kept prisoners and almost starved, so far overcame the avarice of the Bhow Begum and younger widow, that before the 23rd of February, 1782, upwards of £500,000 had been paid by bond to Mr. Nathaniel Middleton. To raise the balance of what was demanded, they requested leave to go abroad, and seek the assistance of their friends; but this was absolutely refused. After the two old eunuchs had been in confinement, their health gave way, and they "implored permission to take a little exercise in the garden of their prison." This the officer in charge of them wished they should have, and stated that if they desired to escape there was not the least chance of their being able to do so-heavily ironed and guarded as they were. But the officer, says Macaulay, "did not understand the plan of his superiors. Their object in these inflictions was not security, but torture; and all mitigation was refused; yet this was not the worst. It was resolved by an English Government, that these two infirm old men should be delivered to the tormentors. For this purpose they were removed to Lucknow. What horrors their dungeon witnessed can only be guessed." They were now put in the English prison-at least, their guards there were British troops in the service of the Honourable Company; but in deference to the superior skill of the nabob's people in the modes of torture, that portion of the horrible work was left to the officials of Asophud-Dowlah. That scourging was a portion of their torture there can be little doubt, as the following letter, written by the assistant-resident to the officer in command, is among the records of the House of Commons: "Sir,-The nabob having determined to inflict corporal punishment upon the prisoners under your guard, this is to desire that his officers, when they shall come, may have free access to the prisoners, and be permitted to do with them as they shall see proper." Every severity proving unavailing, a suspicion arose that the work of pillage was complete, or, if it was to be continued, lenient measures might attain it. The begums and their attendants, who had often been in danger of perishing from hunger (after, Macaulay says, £1,200,000 had been wrung out of them), were set free from restraint, and the eunuchs recovered their freedom. But the kind of treatment to which they had been subjected may be learned from the delight they expressed at their deliverance, as described by the officer commanding the sepoy guard at the time of their release. "In tears of joy Behar and Jewar Ali Khan expressed their sincere acknowledgments to the Governor-General, his Excellency the Nabob-Vizier, and to you, sir, for restoring them to that inestimable blessing-liberty; for which they would ever retain the most grateful remembrance; and, at their request, I transmit you the enclosed letters. I wish you had been present at the enlargement of the prisoners; the quivering lips, with the tears of joy stealing down the poor men's cheeks, was a scene truly affecting. If the prayers of these poor men will avail, you will at the last trump be translated to the happiest regions in heaven." The officer who wrote thus must have been either a very simple or a very servile man. Although the two begums and their eunuchs had but small 1782.] THE NABOB'S GIFT TO HASTINGS. claim to public sympathy, from their alliance with Cheyte Sing, and other acts, the mode in which they were despoiled can by no means be justified; but, by the enemies of Warren Hastings, the whole proceedings were vividly exaggerated, for, twenty years after all the imprisonments and alleged tortures, in the year 1803, Arthur, Viscount Valentia, found at Lucknow the identical Ali Khan over whose sufferings the brilliant Burke had expended a torrent of eloquence. After all the cruelties he had undergone at the behest of the nabob, he was said to be worth half a million sterling. In his eightieth year he was still six feet in height, and stout in proportion, but then in his dotage, and the nabob still eyeing his property covetously. Bhow Begum had gone to her grave; but the mother of Asophud-Dowlah was in excellent health, and in possession of abundance of riches, notwithstanding all the lamentations that had been expressed over her fate in St. Stephen's and Westminster Hall.* But for the money obtained in Oude, India would have been perilled; and every rupee of it went to defray the wars in the Carnatic, the operations on the Bombay side, and to keep quiet the ever-restless Mahrattas. During his visit to Chunar, the nabob had offered, and Hastings accepted, a present of ten lacs (or £100,000) not in specie, for he had none, but in bills on the great Souicars, or bankers of Oude. On the part of the Governor-General, the acceptance of these bills has been declared by some to have been altogether illegal, as by the Regulating Act, the servants of the Company were expressly prohibited from taking from the princes or powers of India, "any present, gift, donation, gratuity, or reward, pecuniary or otherwise;" though no such laws existed at the time of Clive's dealings with Meer Jaffier. Hastings and his friends seem to have maintained that he accepted the gift of the nabob, in order to have something in hand to apply to the public service. Thus, a good many months after, Hastings acknowledged the transaction to the Court of Directors; but an historian says, "the intention of concealing it should not be imputed to Mr. Hastings, unless so far as evidence appears; so in this case the disclosure cannot be imputed to him as a virtue, since no prudent man would have risked the chance * Valentia's "Travels," &c. 257 of discovery which the publicity of a banker's transactions implied." + In a letter to the directors on the 20th December, 1782, Hastings begged their permission to retain the money, as he had saved but little, thus :— "I accepted it (the gift) without hesitation, and gladly, being entirely destitute of means and credit, whether for your service or the relief of my own necessities. It was made, not in specie, but in bills. What I have received has been laid out in the public service; the rest shall be applied to the same account. The nominal sum is ten lacs, Oude currency. As soon as the whole is completed, I shall send you a faithful account of it, resigning the disposal of it to the pleasure of your honourable court. If you shall adjudge the disposal to me, I shall consider it as the most honourable appointment and reward of my labours, and I wish to owe my fortune to your bounty. I am now in my fiftieth year; I have passed thirtyone years in your service. My conscience allows me boldly to claim the merit of zeal and integrity, nor has fortune been unpropitious to their exertions. To these qualities I bound my pretensions. I shall not repine, if you shall deem otherwise of my services; nor ought your decision, however it may disappoint my hope of a retreat adequate to the consequence and elevation of the office which I now possess, to lessen my gratitude for having so long been permitted to hold it, since it has at least permitted me to lay up a provision with which I can be contented in a more humble station." The £100,000 would not have been a bad sum to retire upon; but unfortunately Hastings asked it at a time when he was in extreme disfavour with the directors, and when the following resolution was moved in the House of Commons, on the 30th May, 1782 "Resolved that Warren Hastings, Esq., GovernorGeneral, and William Hornby, Esq., President of the Council of Bombay, having in sundry instances acted in a manner repugnant to the honour and policy of this nation, and thereby brought great calamities on India and enormous expenses on the Company, it is the duty of the directors to pursue all legal and effectual means for the removal of the said Governor-General and President from their respective offices, and recall them to Great Britain." + Mill. CHAPTER LI. FYZOOLA KHAN-RESIGNATION OF WARREN HASTINGS, ETC. with the nabob, Hastings, with singular harshness, inserted and signed an article which affirmed that Fyzoola Khan, by his breach of faith had forfeited the protection of the Honourable Company, and that, as his independent state was a source of political alarm to the nabob, the latter should be at liberty to resume possession of the jaghire, or territory of the khan. IN the conferences at Chunar between Hastings | place at Chunar, and in the new treaty made there and the nabob, the affairs of the last of the great Rohilla chiefs, who remained in Rohilcund, Fyzoola Khan, who had so nobly done battle for his country, and possessed the most extensive of all the jaghires there, came under discussion. By the treaty between Fyzoola and the Nabob of Oude-a document which the Company had guaranteed-he was to have quiet possession of a certain district near the Rohilla frontier, engaging to maintain 5,000 troops, with at least two-thirds of whom he was to assist the nabob in war. Whether true or false is doubtful now, but complaints had been made at the court of Oude, that the khan disregarded his military engagements, and was making himself dangerous in Rohilcund, though, among other sacrifices, he had bound himself to abandon all connection with the exiled chiefs of his country; yet, in the war with France, the khan, as bound by his treaty, sent some troops to join our ally, the nabob, and promised more. Hastings and the Council-on the plea that "in the hurry of business, he and the other members of the board were deceived," by some letter, "into the belief that 5,000 was the quota defined, and horse, though not expressed in the treaty, was distinctly understood "--proceeded now to put the usual screw upon the khan. The latter urged, with truth, that the treaty stipulated no such thing; but that he should retain in his service never more than 5,000 men, and that whenever the nabob required aid, 3,000 of these should be at his disposal; he added, that all the cavalry he ever had did not exceed 2,000. On this, Hastings ordered that a deputation consisting partly of British officers and Oude officials, should wait upon the luckless khan, and instantly demand 3,000 horse, and if they were not forthcoming, to declare the treaty null and the guarantees also. Urging again and again the exact terms of that document, Fyzoola offered, if a little time were given him, to raise 2,000 cavalry and 1,000 infantry, and to pay down money in advance, enough to maintain these troops for a year. But the inexorable deputation, well aware that the greedy nabob was coveting the last fragment of Rohilcund, made a protest to the effect that the treaty was worth only so much waste paper. Whether Hastings, under pressure of the moment, was sacrificing honour and justice, it is impossible to say; but he soon after informed the Council that he looked upon the whole affair as a mere blind to gratify the nabob for the present, and that no active measures would be taken for depriving Fyzoola Khan of his inheritance, and moreover, that our Government could always interfere to prevent it-words which mean nothing, if not very tortuous policy. Eventually Hastings induced Asoph-ud-Dowlah to give up the idea of invading the khan, or dispossessing him, for a handsome payment in bullion, and a British officer was actually sent to Fyzoola to demand from him fifteen lacs of rupees, promising that for that sum he was to be secured anew in his jaghire, which was to become perpetual and hereditary in his family. Fyzoola declared there was not so much money in all his country, and as none could be procured, Hastings, who felt that he was greatly to blame in the whole affair, firmly forbade all hostilities on the part of the nabob; thus Fyzoola Khan retained possession of the jaghire-the last remnant of his country held by a Rohilla-till his death in 1795, when he had attained to the age of a patriarch, and he left that corner of Rohilcund one of the most peaceful, prosperous, and thriving parts of Hindostan. It is impossible to dismiss the ugly story of the two begums and the Treaty of Chunar, without some mention of the part played at this time by the Chief Justice of Bengal, Sir Elijah Impey, who certainly intruded himself into a business quite alien to his official duties. But some weeks after it had been agreed to punish the begums and arrest the old eunuchs, Sir Elijah, who happened to be on a tour of inspection among the minor courts of his province, Bengal, suddenly travelled to Lucknow, as fast as his palanquin-bearers could trot-at Matters remained thus till the conferences took his own suggestion, according to Hastings- and while the former mustered in jabbering hundreds, but "the evidence was collected in a hurry," wrote Hastings, "and on the suggestion of Sir Elijah Impey, who told me that facts of the most stamped notoriety here would be doubted at home, unless such means were taken to establish their reality." It is also said that even the depositions made in English, by a few of our officers who had taken service under the Nabob of Oude, were of the most vague and unsatisfactory nature, and their motives were not above suspicion; for one of them Nuncomar had collected at Calcutta to swear away the life of Hastings-came pouring before Impey with affidavits in their hands, some of which he did not read, and some of which he was scarcely able to, as, says Macaulay, "they were in the dialects of Northern India, and no interpreter was employed. He administered the oath to the deponents," continues the essayist, "with all possible expedition, and asked not a single question, not even whether they had perused the statements to which they swore. This work performed, he got again into his palanquin, and posted back to Cal--Colonel Hannay, a Scotsman-was poor, and cutta, to be in time for the opening of the term.” deeply in debt when he entered the service of future, after payment of a dividend of eight per Asoph, and when he left it, five years later, he had | important of these questions still open. Thus the realised—not without resorting at times to rough Company were left in possession of all their former means a fortune of £300,000. But the evidence privileges, till three years' notice after the 1st of the Chief Justice collected was all woven into the March, 1791, and a sum of £400,000 was accepted appendix of Hastings' narrative of the transactions as full payment of the arrears due to the public concerning Cheyte Sing and the begums. Though under former arrangements; providing also, that in why, or for what practical purpose the collection of verbose matter was made, is not very clear, after its transmission to the Court at Leadenhall Street. "What applicability could it have to the guilt or punishment of the begums," asks a writer, "when the forfeiture of their jaghires and treasure had been decreed at Chunar weeks before any witness or affidavit had been seen; weeks before the Chief Justice reached Benares? Sir Elijah Impey, who retained the friendship and esteem of some of the best men in England, was assuredly not the man that Burke represented him to be; but his memory, like that of his friend and schoolfellow, must, in these matters, remain subjected to some dark imputations, lightened only by lame excuses, or the extreme difficulty and urgency of the cases, and the anomalous and undefined nature of the Company's relations with the native princes. And in reality, though Oude was nominally an independent kingdom, and not included in the Act or Acts which prescribed the limits of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Calcutta, it was to all intents and purposes a conquered and dependent country. Even Sujah Dowlah, who wanted neither pride nor understanding, and who had kept together an army and a government far stronger than those of his contemptible son and successor, would have thought it an honour to have been called the Vizier of the King of England, and had actually offered to coin his money in the name, and with the effigy of George III. If the offer of sovereignty had been accepted; if the Company or nation had frankly declared themselves-what they were de facto-the lords and rulers of Oude and Benares, the mission of Sir Elijah Impey might have borne a somewhat different aspect." On three years' notice, given at any time after the 25th of March, 1780, the great and exclusive privileges of the Company were to expire, and with a view to future arrangements, many communications passed between the Ministry and the directors. The chief points in debate were the claim of the Crown to the territories acquired by the Company, or the amount of payment which the latter should make to the public for their exclusive privileges. Lord North's Ministry, at this crisis, was in a somewhat precarious position, and thus gave the directors advantages of which they availed themselves to the full, and the Act was passed, leaving the most The last two years of his administration in India are said to have formed by far the happiest of the long and stirring public life of Warren Hastings. Our being at peace with France, enabled him to paralyse the power of the native princes, and get the whole country into a state of tranquillity such as it had never known before. This interval of peace enabled Hastings to extend British influence in several new quarters, and to confirm it in others, at the very time when it was declining in the western hemisphere, where disasters attended our arms, and we were losing the American colonies. Though opposition against him had ceased in the Supreme Council publicly, in private, Francis and other vindictive enemies were preparing in London the means of his ruin and impeachment. On the reception of a letter from the directors, condemning his conduct at Benares, and declaring his treatment of Cheyte Sing alike impolitic and unwarrantable, he made a proposal of resigning, and while in a state of suspense as to whether this proposal would be accepted, and when a successor might arrive, he undertook a journey to Lucknow, though he must have foreseen that it would occupy several months. For that city he set out on the 17th February, 1784, and reached it on the 27th of March; and as he passed through to Benares he had a good opportunity of beholding the result of the revolution effected there. Thither, from the confines of Buxar, he was followed by a multitude of clamorous |