would not lower the dignity of his office by sitting there to have his word weighed in the balance against that of a corrupt and mendacious Brahmin. The majority resolved notwithstanding to proceed with the investigation of the charge. Hastings with Barwell thereupon withdrew, and Nuncomar was called in. He had long sat patiently by the well of vengeance, and at length had found wherewith to draw. Hastings was informed by his colleagues of all that was sworn against him. More than one of the English servants of the Company came forward to sustain the charges. The accused inflexibly refused to answer; and the Council, in his absence, recorded their conviction of his guilt. Nuncomar's revelations were declared by them to have shed "a clear light upon the Governor-General's conduct, and the means he had taken of making the large fortune he was said to possess-upwards of forty lacs of must have amassed in the course of three years." 1

rupees-which he

Driven to bay, Hastings clutched at a weapon which lay at his feet, but which no one else had thought of using. The newly-created Supreme Court set up by Parliament to administer English law in English fashion among the people of Bengal, had been given unlimited jurisdiction, and the power of life and death. The Judges had sided with him throughout the schism which had brought society in Calcutta to the verge of anarchy, and the Chief-Justice was his confidant and friend. Suddenly an indictment for the forgery of a bond six years before was preferred in the name of an obscure native, as was generally understood, at the instance of Hastings, and under a warrant of the court Nuncomar was thrown into prison. Indignant reclamations were made by the triumvirate, and they ordered the prisoner's release; but the troops obeyed the commands of Hastings, and no sense

1 Minute of Council, 11th April 1775.

of decorum or of generosity restrained him. The arraignment was indeed a hideous mockery. Technically and substantially the indictment could not have been sustained had an appeal lain to Westminster. The statute of 1773, which was said to give jurisdiction in the case, could not have had a retrospective effect; and it was not promulgated or even passed until after the alleged crime had been committed; for the crime itself had been made capital even in England only by a modern Act, and in no part of Asia had such a law been ever known. Time out of mind, the falsification of a private contract had been regarded, as it was in this country before Walpole's time, as a grave misdemeanour and no more. Nuncomar may or may not have been guilty of the offence; but if anything is certain, it is that he was innocent of breaking the law under which he was accused of a capital crime. The claim to take away life for the breach of an English criminal statute had indeed been made before. In February 1765, one Radachurn Mittre was indicted for forgery at the General Quarter-Sessions of the town of Calcutta, convicted and sentenced to be hanged. The Bench of Justices having subsequently made a proclamation that English laws were to be extended to the natives, the latter issued a protest against this in a petition to the President and Council. The petitioners set forth the general "consternation, astonishment, and even panic with which the natives in all parts under the dominion of the English were seized by the example of Radachurn Mittre. They found themselves subject to the pains and penalties of laws to which they were utter strangers, and were liable through ignorance unwittingly to incur them. As they were in no way instructed in those laws, they could not tell when they transgressed them, many things it seemed being capital by English laws which were 1 Long's Records, vol. i. p. 67.

1

only fineable by the laws of the petitioners' forefathers, subject to which they had hitherto been bred, lived, and been governed, and that (till very lately) even under the English flag." The petition concluded with a prayer for a "rehearsal, or respite of execution till an appeal had been made to the King of Great Britain, and further, that the English law might be translated into the Bengalee tongue." Mr Verelst in council approved the petition, and characterised the proceedings of the Justices as an “act unjustifiable in itself, and in its nature and consequences cruel and oppressive." Hastings and Impey could not have been ignorant of these circumstances, though, strange to say, they have been overlooked by one who, in our own time, filled the office of legal member of the Supreme Council, and to whom was specially confided the task of framing a criminal code. A jury, on which there was not a single native, found that the fact of the false signature was proved; and the Chief-Justice condemned Nuncomar to die. Clavering, Monson, and Francis remonstrated against the execution of the sentence, and earnestly demanded a respite until the pleasure of the Crown could be known. But they expostulated in vain, and in presence of a multitude such as never before had been gathered together within range of the guns of Fort William, the aged chief of the Brahmins was put to death. A wail of horror rose as the drop fell, and the echoes of that cry did not cease until, long years after, in Westminster Hall, Burke denounced Hastings for having "murdered Nuncomar by the hands of Sir Elijah Impey."

2

1 Long's Records, vol. i. p. 430.

2 Lord Macaulay, in his Essay on Warren Hastings, has fallen into error in asserting that no attempt had been made to enforce the law of forgery among the natives of the East. In Long's "Unpublished Records," there is a succinct account of the case above cited.

3 5th August 1776.

4 Speech of Mr Burke on sixth count of the impeachment, 25th April 1789.

Led by Mr Pitt, a majority of the House of Commons subsequently voted, on the motion of the Marquis of Graham, that these words ought not to have been spoken; but Fox, Windham, and Sheridan defiantly adopted them, and declared that the Managers would make them good. The resolution of censure remains to this day unexpunged; but history has reversed the vote, and the memory of the great international Tribune needs no vindication.

CHAPTER X.

BENARES AND OUDE.

1777-1780.

"It had been said of the Company that there was something in their operations which combined the meanness of a pedlar with the profligacy of a pirate. Alike in the military and the political line could be observed auctioneering ambassadors and trading generals; and thus we saw a revolution brought about by affidavits, an army employed in executing an arrest, a town besieged on a note of hand, a prince dethroned for the balance of an account. Thus it was they united the mock majesty of a bloody sceptre and the little traffic of a merchant's counting-house, wielding a truncheon with one hand, and picking a pocket with the other."

FROM

-R. B. SHERIDAN,1

OM the reports sent home by the baffled triumvirate, Ministers learned enough to justify them in desiring the recall of Hastings. The Regulating Act enabled the Crown to supersede him only on an address to that effect from the Company; and that body was so nearly balanced in opinion that he only escaped a resolution for his dismissal by a few votes.

Lord North, though the most good-natured of men, was much incensed, and threatened to summon Parliament earlier than usual in order to put an end to a state of things that had become scandalous, and to reduce the privileges of the Company to those which gave them a monopoly of trade in the Indian Seas. Colonel Macleane, alarmed at

1

1 Speech on the Begums of Oude, 7th February 1787-Parliamentary History, vol. xxv. col. 287.