Chapter XV (2)

The fort was surrendered oh express stipulation for the safety, and freedom from search, of the females; but, adds Mills, “the idea suggested by Mr. Hastings diffused itself but too perfectly amongst the soldiery; and when the princesses, with their relatives and attendants, to the number of three hundred women, besides children, withdrew from the castle, the capitulation was shamefully violated; they were plundered of their effects, and their persons otherwise rudely and disgracefully treated by the licentious people, and followers of the camp.” He adds, “one is delighted for the honour of distinguished gallantry, that in no part of the opprobrious business the commanding officer had any share. He leaned to generosity and the protection of the princesses from the beginning. His utmost endeavours were exerted to restrain the outrages of the camp; and he represented them with feeling to Mr. Hastings, who expressed his concurrence, etc.”

The only other consolation in this detestable affair is, that the soldiers, in spite of Hastings, got the plunder of the Rajah, and that the Court of Directors at home censured his conduct. But these are miserable drops of satisfaction in this huge and overflowing cup of bitterness,—of misery to trusting, friendly, and innocent people; and of consequent infamy on the British name.

We must, out of the multitudes of such cases, confine ourselves to one more. The atrocities just recited had put Benares into the entire power of the English, but it had only tended to increase the pecuniary difficulties. The soldiery had got the plunder—the expenses of the war were added to the expenses of other wars;—some other kingdom must be plundered, for booty must be had: so Mr. Hastings continued his journey, and paid a visit to the Nabob of Oude. It is not necessary to trace the complete progress of this Nabob’s friendship with the English. It was exactly like that of the other princes just spoken of. A treaty was made with him; and then, from time to time, the usual exactions of money and the maintenance of troops for his own subjection were heaped upon him. As with the Nabob of Arcot, so with him, they were ready to sanction and assist him in his most criminal views on his neighbours, to which his need of money drove him. He proposed to Mr. Hastings, in 1773, to assist him in _exterminating the Rohillas_, a people bordering on his kingdom; “a people,” says Mills, “whose territory was, by far, the best governed part of India: the people protected, their industry encouraged, and the country flourishing beyond all parallel.” It was by a careful neutrality, and by these acts, that the Rohillas sought to maintain their independence; and it was of such a people that Hastings, sitting at table with his tool, the Nabob of Oude, coolly heard him offer him a bribe of forty lacs of rupees (400,000_l._) and the payment of the troops furnished, to assist him to destroy them utterly! There does not seem to have existed in the mind of Hastings one human feeling: a proposition which would have covered almost any other man with unspeakable horror, was received by him as a matter of ordinary business. “Let us see,” said Hastings, “we have a heavy bonded debt, at one time 125 lacs of rupees. By this a saving of near one third of our military expenses would be effected during the period of such service; the forty lacs would be an ample supply to our treasury; and the Vizir (the Nabob of Oude) would be freed from a troublesome neighbour.” These are the monster’s own words; the bargain was struck, but it was agreed to be kept secret from the council and court of Directors. In one of Hastings’ letters still extant, he tells the Nabob, “should the Rohillas be guilty of a breach of their agreement (a demand of forty lacs suddenly made upon them—for in this vile affair everything had a ruffian character—they first demanded their money, and then murdered them), _we will thoroughly exterminate them_, and settle your excellency in the country.”[17] The extermination was conducted to the letter, as agreed, as far as was in their power. The Rohillas defended themselves most gallantly; but were overpowered,—and their chief, and upwards of a hundred thousand people fled to the mountains. The whole country lay at the mercy of the allies, and the British officers themselves declared that perhaps never were the rights of conquest more savagely abused. Colonel Champion, one of them, says in a letter of June 1774, published in the Report alluded to below, “the inhumanity and dishonour with which the late proprietors of this country and their families have been used, is known all over these parts. A relation of them would swell this letter to an enormous size. I could not help compassionating such unparalleled misery, and my requests to the Vizir to shew lenity were frequent, but as fruitless as even those advices which I almost hourly gave him regarding the destruction of the villages; with respect to which he always promised fair, but did not observe one of his promises, nor cease to overspread the country with flames, till three days after the fate of Hafez Rhamet was decided.” The Nabob had frankly and repeatedly assured Hastings that his intention was to _exterminate_ the Rohillas, and every one who bore the name of Rohilla was either butchered, or found his safety in flight and in exile. Such were the diabolical deeds into which our government drove the native princes by their enormous exactions, or encouraged them in, only in the end to enslave them the more.

Before the connexion between the English and Oude, its revenue had exceeded three millions sterling, and was levied without being accused of deteriorating the country. In the year 1779, it did not exceed one half of that sum, and in the subsequent years it fell far below it, while the rate of taxation was increased, and the country exhibited every mark of oppressive exaction.[18] In this year the Nabob represented to the council the wretched condition to which he was reduced by their exactions: that the children of the deceased Nabob had subsisted in a very distressed manner for two years past; that the attendants, writers, and servants, had received no pay for that period; that his father’s private creditors were daily pressing him, and there was not a foot of country which could be appropriated to their payment; that the revenue was deficient fifteen lacs, (a million and a half sterling); that the country and cultivation were abandoned; the old chieftains and useful attendants of the court were forced to leave it; that the Company’s troops were not only useless, but caused great loss to the revenue and confusion in the country; and that the support of his household, on the meanest scale, was beyond his power.

This melancholy representation produced—what?—pity, and an endeavour to relieve the Nabob?—no, exasperation. Mr. Hastings declared that, both it and the crisis in which it was made were equally alarming. The only thing thought of was what was to be done if the money did not come in? But Mr. Hastings, on his visit to the Nabob at Lucknow, made a most lucky discovery. He found that the mother and widow of the late Nabob were living there, and possessed of immense wealth. His rapacious mind, bound by no human feeling or moral principle, and fertile in schemes of acquisition, immediately conceived the felicitous design of setting the Nabob to strip those ladies, well known to English readers since the famous trial of Mr. Hastings, as “the Begums.” It was agreed between the Nabob and Mr. Hastings, that his Highness should be relieved of the expense which he was unable to bear, of the English troops and gentlemen; and he, on his part, engaged to strip the Begums of both their treasure and their jaghires (revenues of certain lands), delivering to the Governor-general the proceeds. As a plea for this most abominable transaction, in which a prince was compelled by his cruel necessities and the grinding exactions and threats of the English to pillage forcibly his near relatives, a tale of treason was hatched against these poor women. When they refused to give up their money, the chief eunuchs were put to the torture till the ladies in compassion gave way: 550,000_l._ sterling were thus forced from them: the torture was still continued, in hope of extracting more; the women of the Zenana were deprived of food at various times till they were on the point of perishing for want; and every expedient was tried that the most devilish invention could suggest, till it was found that they had really drawn the last doit from them. But what more than all moves one’s indignation against this base English Inquisitor, was, that he received as his share of these spoils the sum of ten lacs, or 100,000_l._!—and that notwithstanding the law of the Company against the receipt of presents; its avowed distress for want of money; and the poverty of the kingdom of Oude, which was thus plundered and disgraced from the very inability to pay its debts, if debts such shameful exactions can be called. Hastings did not hesitate to apprise the council of what he had received, and requested their permission to retain it for himself.

Of the numerous transactions of a most wicked character connected with these affairs; of the repugnance of the Nabob to do the dirty work of Hastings on his relatives, the Begums; of the haughty insolence by which his tyrant compelled him to the compact; of the restoration of the jaghires, but not the moneys to the Begums; of the misery and desolation which forced itself even upon the horny eyes of Hastings as he made his second progress through the territories of Oude, the work of his own oppressions and exactions; of the twelve and a half millions which he added by his wars and political manœuvres to the Indian debt—we have not here room to note more than the existence of such facts, which are well known to all the readers of Indian history, or of the trial of Warren Hastings, where every artifice of the lawyers was employed to prevent the evidence of these things being brought forward; and where a House of Peers was found base or weak enough to be guided by such artifices, to refuse the most direct evidence against the most atrocious transactions in history; and thus to give sanction and security to the commission of the most dreadful crimes and cruelties in our distant colonies. Nothing could increase from this time the real power of the English over Oude, though circumstances might occasion a more open avowal of it. Even during the government of Lord Cornwallis and Sir John Shore, now Lord Teignmouth, two of the most worthy and honourable rulers that British India ever had, the miseries and exactions continued, and the well-intentioned financial measures of Lord Cornwallis even tended to increase them. In 1798, the governor, Sir John Shore, proceeded to depose the ruling Nabob as illegitimate (a plea on which the English set aside a number of Indian princes), and elevated another in his place, and that upon evidence, says the historian, “upon which an English court of law would not have decided against him a question of a few pounds.”

It was not, however, till 1799, under the government of the Marquis Wellesley, that the hand of British power was stretched to the utmost over this devoted district. That honest and avowed usurper, who disdained the petty acts of his predecessors, but declared that the British dominion over the peninsula of India must be frankly avowed and fearlessly asserted—certainly a much better doctrine than the cowardly and hypocritical one hitherto acted upon;—that every Englishman who did not belong to the Company must and should be expelled from that country; and that the English power and the Corporate monopoly should be so strenuously and unflinchingly exerted, that foreign aggression or domestic complaint should be alike dispersed;—this straightforward Governor-general soon drove the Nabob of Oude to such desperation, by the severity of his measures and exactions, that he declared his wish to abdicate. Nothing could equal the joy of the Governor-general at the prospect of this easy acquisition of this entire territory: but that joy was damped by discovering that the Nabob only wished to resign in favour of—his own son! The chagrin of the Governor-general on this discovery is not to be expressed; and the series of operations then commenced to force the Nabob to abdicate in favour of the Company; when that could not be effected, to compel him to sacrifice one half of his territories to save the rest; when that sacrifice was made, to inform him that he was to have no independent power in his remaining half—is one of the most instructive lessons in the art of diplomatic fleecing, of forcing a man out of his own by the forms of treaty but with the iron-hand of irresistible power, which any despot who wishes to do a desperate deed handsomely, and in the most approved style, can desire. It was in vain that the Nabob declared his payment of exactions; his hereditary right; his readiness shewn on all occasions to aid and oblige; the force of treaties in his favour. It was in vain that he asked to what purpose should he give up one half of his dominions if he were not to have power over the other, when it was to secure this independent power that he gave up that half? What are all the arguments of right, justice, reason, or humanity, when Ahab wants the vineyard of Naboth, and the Jezebel of political and martial power tells him that she will give it him? The fate of Oude was predetermined, along with that of various other states, by the Governor-general, and it was decided as he determined it should be.

Before we close this chapter, we will give one instance of the manner in which the territories of those who held aloof, and did not covet the fatal friendship of the English were obtained, and the most striking of these are the dominions of Hyder Ali—the kingdom of Mysore.

Hyder was a soldier of fortune. He had risen by an active and enterprising disposition from the condition of a common soldier to the head of the state. The English considered him as an ambitious, able, and therefore very dangerous person in India. There can be no doubt that he considered them the same. He was an adventurer; so were they. He had acquired a great territory by means that would not bear the strictest scrutiny; so had they;—but there was this difference between them, Hyder acted according to the customs and maxims in which he had been educated, and which he saw universally practised by all the princes around him. He neither had the advantage of Christian knowledge and principle, nor pretended to them. The English, on the contrary, came there as merchants; they were continually instructed by their masters at home not to commit military aggressions. They were bound by the laws of their country not to do it. They professed to be in possession of a far higher system of religion and morals than Hyder and his people had. They pretended to be the disciples of the Prince of Peace. Their magnanimous creed they declared to be, “To do to others as they would wish to be done by.” But neither Hyder nor any other Indian ever saw the least evidence of any such superiority of morals, or of faith, in their conduct. They were as ambitious, and far more greedy of money than the heathen that they pretended to despise for their heathenism. They ought to have set a better example—but they did not. There never was a people that grasped more convulsively at dominion, or were less scrupulous in the means of obtaining it. They declared Hyder cruel and perfidious. He knew them to be both. This was the ground on which they stood. There were reasons why the English should avoid interfering with Hyder. There were none why he should avoid encroaching on them, for he did not profess any such grand principles of action as they did. If they were what they pretended to be, they ought to preach peace and union amongst the Indian princes: but union was of all things in the world the very one which they most dreaded; for they _were not_ what they pretended to be; but sought on the divisions of the natives to establish their own power. Had Hyder attacked them in their own trading districts, there could have been no reason why they should not chastise him for it. But it does not appear that he ever did attack them at all till they fell upon him, and that with the avowed intention to annihilate his power as dangerous. No, say they, but he attacked the territories of our ally the Subahdar of Deccan, which we were bound to defend. And here it is that we touch again upon that subtle policy by which it became impossible, when they had once got a footing in the country that, having the will and the power, they should not eventually have the dominion. While professing to avoid conquest, we have seen that they went on continually making conquests. But it was always on the plea of aiding their allies. They entered knowingly into alliances on condition of defending with arms their allies, and then, when they committed aggressions, it was _for_ these allies. In the end the allies were themselves swallowed up, with all the additional territories thus gained. It was a system of fattening allies as we fatten oxen, till they were more worthy of being devoured. They cast their subtle threads of policy like the radiating filaments of the spider’s web, till the remotest extremity of India could not be touched without startling them from their concealed centre into open day, ready to run upon the unlucky offender. It was utterly impossible, on such a system, but that offences should come, and wo to them by whom they did come.

The English were unquestionably the aggressors in the hostilities with Hyder. They entered into a treaty with Nizam Ali, the Subahdar of Deccan, offensive and defensive; and the very first deed which they were to do, was to seize the fort of Bangalore, which belonged to Hyder. They had actually marched in 1767 into his territories, when Hyder found means to draw the Nizam from his alliance, and in conjunction with him fell upon them, and compelled them to fly to Trincomalee. By this unprovoked and voluntary act they found themselves involved at once in a war with a fierce and active enemy, who pursued them to the very walls of Madras; scoured their country with his cavalry; and compelled them to a dishonourable peace in 1769, by which they bound themselves to assist _him_ too in his defensive wars! To enter voluntarily into such conditions with such a man, betrayed no great delicacy of moral feeling as to what wars they engaged in, or no great honesty in their intentions as regarded the treaty itself. They must soon either fight with some of Hyder’s numerous enemies, or break faith with him. Accordingly the very next year the Mahrattas invaded his territories; he called earnestly on his English allies for aid, and aid they did not give. Hyder had now the justest reason to term them perfidious, and to hold them in distrust. Yet, though deeply exasperated by this treachery, he would in 1778 most willingly have renewed his alliance with them; and the presidency of Madras acknowledged their belief that, had not the treaty of 1769 been evaded, Hyder would never have sought other allies than themselves.[19] There were the strongest reasons why they should have cultivated an amicable union with him, both to withdraw him from the French, and on account of his own great power and revenues. But they totally neglected him, or insulted him with words of mere cold courtesy; and a new aggression upon the fortress of Mahé, a place tributary to Hyder, which they attacked in order to expel the French, and which Hyder resented on the same principle as they would resent an attack upon any tributary of their own, well warranted the declaration of Hyder, that they “were the most faithless and usurping of mankind.” They were these arbitrary and impolitic deeds which brought down Hyder speedily upon them, with an army 100,000 strong; and soon showed them Madras menaced, the Carnatic overrun, Arcot taken, and a war of such a desperate and bloody character raging around them, as they had never yet seen in India, and which might probably have expelled them thence, had not death released them in 1782 from so formidable a foe, who had been so wantonly provoked.

Tippoo Sultaun, with all his activity and cunning, had not the masterly military genius of his father,—but he possessed all the fire of his resentment, and it was not to be expected that, after what had passed, there could be much interval of irritation between him and the English. They had roused Hyder as a lion is roused from his den, and he had made them feel his power. They would naturally look on his son with suspicion, and Tippoo had been taught to regard them as “the most faithless and usurping of mankind.” Whatever, therefore, may be said for or against him, on the breaking out of the second war with him, the original growth of hostility between the British and the Mysorean monarchs, must be charged to the former, and in the case of the last war, there appears to have been no real breach of treaty on the part of Tippoo. He had been severely punished for any act of irritation which he might have committed against any of the British allies, by the reduction of his capital, the surrender of his sons as hostages, and the stripping away of one half of his territories to be divided amongst his enemies, each of whom had enriched himself with half a million sterling of annual revenue at his expense. Tippoo must have been nothing less than a madman in his shattered condition, and with his past experience, to have lightly ventured on hostilities with the English. But it was charged on him that he was seeking an alliance with the French. What then? He had the clearest right so to do. So long as he maintained the terms of his treaty, the English had no just right to violate theirs towards him. The French were his ancient and hereditary friends. Tippoo persisted to the last that he had done nothing to warrant an attack upon him; but Lord Mornington had adopted his notions about consolidating the British power in India, and every possible circumstance, or suspicion of a circumstance, was to be seized upon as a plea for carrying his plans into effect. It was enough that a fear _might_ be entertained of Tippoo’s designs. It became good policy to get the start; and when once that forestalling system in hostilities, that outstripping in the race of mischief, is adopted, there is no possible violence nor enormity which may not be undertaken, or defended upon it. Tippoo was assailed by the British, and their ally the Nizam; and though he again and again protested his innocence, again and again asked for peace, he was pursued to his capital, and killed bravely defending it. His territories were divided amongst those who had divided the former half of them in like manner, the English, the Nizam, and the Mahrattas, with a little state appropriated to a puppet-rajah. Thus did the English shew what they would do to those who dared to decline their protection. Thus did they pursue, beat down, and destroy with all their mighty resources an independent prince, whose whole revenue, after their first partition of his realm, did not much exceed a million sterling. We have heard a vast deal in Europe of the partition of Poland, but how much better was the forcible dismemberment of Mysore? The injury of this dismemberment of his kingdom is, however, not the least heaped upon Tippoo. On his name have been heaped all the odious crimes that make us hate the worst of tyrants. Cruelty, perfidy, low cunning, and all kinds of baseness, make up the idea of Tippoo which we have derived from those who profited by his destruction. But what say the most candid historians? “That the accounts which we have received from our countrymen, who dreaded and feared him, are marked with exaggeration, is proved by this circumstance, that his servants adhered to him with a fidelity which those of few princes in any age or country have displayed. Of his cruelty we have heard the more, because our own countrymen were amongst the victims of it. But it is to be observed, that unless in certain instances, the proof of which cannot be regarded as better than doubtful, their sufferings, however intense, were only the sufferings of a very rigorous imprisonment, of which, considering the manner in which it is lavished upon them by their own laws, Englishmen ought not to be very forward to complain. At that very time, in the dungeons of Madras or Calcutta, it is probable that unhappy sufferers were enduring calamities for debts of 100_l._, not less atrocious than those which Tippoo, a prince born and educated in a barbarous country, and ruling over a barbarous people, inflicted upon imprisoned enemies, part of a nation, who, by the evils they had brought upon him, exasperated him almost to frenzy, and whom he regarded as the enemies both of God and man. Besides, there is among the papers relating to the intercourse of Tippoo with the French, a remarkable proof of his humanity, which, when these papers are ransacked for matters to criminate him, ought not to be suppressed. In a draught of conditions on which he desired to form a treaty with them, these are the words of a distinct article:—‘demand that male and female prisoners, as well English as Portuguese, who shall be taken by the republican troops, or by mine, shall be treated with humanity; and, with regard to their persons, that they shall (their property becoming the right of the allies) be transported, at our joint expense, out of India, to places far distant from the territories of the allies.’

“Another feature in the character of Tippoo was his religion, with a sense of which his mind was most deeply impressed. He spent a considerable part of every day in prayer. He gave to his kingdom a particular religious title, _Cudadad_, or God-given; and he lived under a peculiarly strong and operative conviction of the superintendence of a Divine Providence. To one of his French advisers, who urged him zealously to obtain the support of the Mahrattas, he replied, ‘I rely solely on Providence, expecting that I shall be alone and unsupported; but God and my courage will accomplish everything.’... He had the discernment to perceive, what is so generally hid from the eyes of rulers in a more enlightened state of society, that it is the prosperity of those who labour with their hands which constitutes the principle and cause of the prosperity of states. He therefore made it his business to protect them against the intermediate orders of the community, by whom it is so difficult to prevent them from being oppressed. His country was, accordingly, at least during the first and better part of his reign, the best cultivated, and his population the most flourishing, in India: while under the English and their pageants, the population of Carnatic and Oude, hastening to the state of deserts, was the most wretched upon the face of the earth; and even Bengal itself, under the operations of laws ill adapted to their circumstances, was suffering almost all the evils which the worst of governments could inflict.... For an eastern prince he was full of knowledge. His mind was active, acute, and ingenious. But in the value which he set upon objects, whether as means, or as an end, he was almost perpetually deceived. Besides, a conviction appears to have been rooted in his mind that the English had now formed a resolution to deprive him of his kingdom, and that it was useless to negotiate, because no submission to which he could reconcile his mind, would restrain them in the gratification of their ambitious designs.”—_Mills._

Tippoo was right. The great design of the English, from their first secure footing in India, was to establish their control over the whole Peninsula. The French created them the most serious alarm in the progress of their career towards this object; and any native state which shewed more than ordinary energy, excited a similar feeling. For this purpose all the might of British power and policy was exerted to expel these European rivals, and to crush such more active states. The administration of the Marquis Wellesley was the exhibition of this system full blown. For this, all the campaigns against Holkar and Scindia; the wars from north to south, and from east to west of India, were undertaken; and blood was made to flow, and debts to accumulate to a degree most monstrous. Yet the admiration of this system of policy in England has shewn how little human life and human welfare, even to this day, weigh in the scale against dominion and avarice. We hear nothing of the horrors and violence we have perpetrated, from the first invasion of Bengal, to those of Nepaul and Burmah; we have only eulogies on the empire achieved:—“See what a splendid empire we have won!” True,—there is no objection to the empire, if we could only forget the means by which it has been created. But amid all this subtle and crooked policy—this creeping into power under the colour of allies—this extortion and plunder of princes, under the name of protection—this forcible subjection and expatriation of others, we look in vain for the generous policy of the Christian merchant, and the Christian statesman.[20]

The moderation of a Teignmouth, a Cornwallis, or a Bentinck, is deemed mere pusillanimity. Those divine maxims of peace and union which Christianity would disseminate amongst the natives of the countries that we visit, are condemned as the very obstacles to the growth of our power. When we exclaim, “what might not Englishmen have done in India had they endeavoured to pacify and enlighten, instead of to exact and destroy?” we are answered by a smile, which informs us that these are but romantic notions,—that the only wisdom is to get rich!