was powerless in council. Hastings resolved to make a progress up country in order to arrange the affairs of both provinces, and bring back all the treasure that could be squeezed out of its holders by his personal intervention. When he reached Benares and presented his demands, the raja rose in insurrection, and the governor-general barely escaped with his life. But the faithful Popham rapidly rallied a force for his defence. The insurgents were defeated again and again; Chait Sing took to flight, and an augmented permanent tribute was imposed upon his successor. The Oudh business was managed with less risk. The wazir consented to everything demanded of him. The begum was charged with having abetted Chait Sing in his rebellion; and after the severest pressure applied to herself and her attendant eunuchs, a fine of more than a million sterling was exacted from her. Hastings appears to have been not altogether satisfied with the incidents of this expedition, and to have anticipated the censure which it received in England. As a measure of precaution, he procured documentary evidence of the rebellious intentions of the raja and the begum, to the validity of which Impey obligingly lent his extra-judicial sanction.
The remainder of Hastings’s term of office in India was passed in comparative tranquillity, both from internal opposition and foreign war. The centre of interest now shifts to the India House and to the British parliament. The long struggle between the Company and the ministers of the crown for the supreme control of Indian affairs and the attendant patronage had reached its climax. The decisive success of Hastings’s administration alone postponed the inevitable solution. His original term of five years would have expired in 1778; but it was annually prolonged by special act of parliament until his voluntary resignation. Though Hastings was thus irremovable, his policy did not escape censure. Ministers were naturally anxious to obtain the reversion to his vacant post, and Indian affairs formed at this time the hinge on which party politics turned. On one occasion Dundas carried a motion in the House of Commons, censuring Hastings and demanding his recall. The directors of the Company were disposed to act upon this resolution; but in the court of proprietors, with whom the decision ultimately lay, Hastings always possessed a sufficient majority. Fox’s India Bill led to the downfall of the Coalition ministry in 1783. The act which Pitt successfully carried in the following year introduced a new constitution, in which Hastings felt that he had no place. In February 1785 he finally sailed from Calcutta, after a dignified ceremony of resignation, and amid enthusiastic farewells from all classes.
On his arrival in England, after a second absence of sixteen years, he was not displeased with the reception he met with at court and in the country. A peerage was openly talked of as his due, while his own ambition pointed to some responsible office at home. Pitt had never taken a side against him, while Lord Chancellor Thurlow was his pronounced friend. But he was now destined to learn that his enemy Francis, whom he had discomfited in the council chamber at Calcutta, was more than his match in the parliamentary arena. Edmund Burke had taken the subject races of India under the protection of his eloquence. Francis, who had been the early friend of Burke, supplied him with the personal animus against Hastings, and with the knowledge of detail, which he might otherwise have lacked. The Whig party on this occasion unanimously followed Burke’s lead. Dundas, Pitt’s favourite subordinate, had already committed himself by his earlier resolution of censure; and Pitt was induced by motives which are still obscure to incline the ministerial majority to the same side. To meet the oratory of Burke and Sheridan and Fox, Hastings wrote an elaborate minute with which he wearied the ears of the House for two successive nights, and he subsidized a swarm of pamphleteers. The impeachment was decided upon in 1786, but the actual trial did not commence until 1788. For seven long years Hastings was upon his defence on the charge of “high crimes and misdemeanours.” During this anxious period he appears to have borne himself with characteristic dignity, such as is consistent with no other hypothesis than the consciousness of innocence. At last, in 1795, the House of Lords gave a verdict of not guilty on all charges laid against him; and he left the bar at which he had so frequently appeared, with his reputation clear, but ruined in fortune. However large the wealth he brought back from India, all was swallowed up in defraying the expenses of his trial. Continuing the line of conduct which in most other men would be called hypocrisy, he forwarded a petition to Pitt praying that he might be reimbursed his costs from the public funds. This petition, of course, was rejected. At last, when he was reduced to actual destitution, it was arranged that the East India Company should grant him an annuity of £4000 for a term of years, with £90,000 paid down in advance. This annuity expired before his death; and he was compelled to make more than one fresh appeal to the bounty of the Company, which was never withheld. Shortly before his acquittal he had been able to satisfy the dream of his childhood, by buying back the ancestral manor of Daylesford, where the remainder of his life was passed in honourable retirement. In 1813 he was called on to give evidence upon Indian affairs before the two houses of parliament, which received him with exceptional marks of respect. The university of Oxford conferred on him the honorary degree of D.C.L.; and in the following year he was sworn of the privy council, and took a prominent part in the reception given to the duke of Wellington and the allied sovereigns. He died on the 22nd of August 1818, in his 86th year, and lies buried behind the chancel of the parish church, which he had recently restored at his own charges.
In physical appearance, Hastings “looked like a great man, and not like a bad man.” The body was wholly subjugated to the mind. A frame naturally slight had been further attenuated by rigorous habits of temperance, and thus rendered proof against the diseases of the tropics. Against his private character not even calumny has breathed a reproach. As brother, as husband and as friend, his affections were as steadfast as they were warm. By the public he was always regarded as reserved, but within his own inner circle he gave and received perfect confidence. In his dealings with money, he was characterized rather by liberality of expenditure than by carefulness of acquisition. A classical education and the instincts of family pride saved him from both the greed and the vulgar display which marked the typical “nabob,” the self-made man of those days. He could support the position of a governor-general and of a country gentleman with equal credit. Concerning his second marriage, it suffices to say that the Baroness Imhoff was nearly forty years of age, with a family of grown-up children, when the complaisant law of her native land allowed her to become Mrs Hastings. She survived her husband, who cherished towards her to the last the sentiments of a lover. Her children he adopted as his own; and it was chiefly for her sake that he desired the peerage which was twice held out to him.
Hastings’s public career will probably never cease to be a subject of controversy. It was his misfortune to be the scapegoat upon whose head parliament laid the accumulated sins, real and imaginary, of the East India Company. If the acquisition of the Indian empire can be supported on ethical grounds, Hastings needs no defence. No one who reads his private correspondence will admit that even his least defensible acts were dictated by dishonourable motives. It is more pleasing to point out certain of his public measures upon which no difference of opinion can arise. He was the first to attempt to open a trade route with Tibet, and to organize a survey of Bengal and of the eastern seas. It was he who persuaded the pundits of Bengal to disclose the treasures of Sanskrit to European scholars. He founded the Madrasa or college for Mahommedan education at Calcutta, primarily out of his own funds; and he projected the foundation of an Indian institute in England. The Bengal Asiatic Society was established under his auspices, though he yielded the post of president to Sir W. Jones. No Englishman ever understood the native character so well as Hastings; none ever devoted himself more heartily to the promotion of every scheme, great and small, that could advance the prosperity of India. Natives and Anglo-Indians alike venerate his name, the former as their first beneficent administrator, the latter as the
