by Edmund Burke
So early as the 6th of the following January the appointment of these gentlemen was communicated in a letter to the Court of Directors, without any sort of color, apology, or explanation. That court found a servant removed from his station without complaint, contrary to the tenor of one of their standing injunctions. They allow, however, and with reason, that, “if it were possible to suppose that a saving, &c., had been his motive, they would have approved his proceeding. But that when immediately afterwards two persons, with two salaries, had been appointed to execute the office which had been filled with reputation by Mr. Fowke alone, and that Mr. Graham enjoys all the emoluments annexed to the office of Mr. Fowke,” — they properly conclude that Mr. Fowke was removed without just cause, to make way for Mr. Graham, and strictly enjoin that the former be reinstated in his office of Resident as Post-master of Benares. In the same letter they assert their rights in a tone of becoming firmness, and declare, that “on no account we can permit our orders to be disobeyed or our authority disregarded.”
It was now to be seen which of the parties was to give way. The orders were clear and precise, and enforced by a strong declaration of the resolution of the Court to make itself obeyed. Mr. Hastings fairly joined issue upon this point with his masters, and, having disobeyed the general instructions of the Company, determined to pay no obedience to their special order.
On the 21st July, 1778, he moved, and succeeded in his proposition, that the execution of these orders should be suspended. The reason he assigned for this suspension lets in great light upon the true character of all these proceedings: “That his consent to the recall of Mr. Graham would be adequate to his own resignation of the service, as it would inflict such a wound on his authority and influence that he could not maintain it.”
If that had been his opinion, he ought to have resigned, and not disobeyed: because it was not necessary that he should hold his office; but it was necessary, that, whilst he hold it, he should obey his superiors, and submit to the law. Much more truly was his conduct a virtual resignation of his lawful office, and at the same time an usurpation of a situation which did not belong to him, to hold a subordinate office, and to refuse to act according to its duties. Had his authority been self-originated, it would have been wounded by his submission; but in this case the true nature of his authority was affirmed, not injured, by his obedience, because it was a power derived from others, and, by its essence, to be executed according to their directions.
In this determined disobedience he was supported by Mr. Barwell, who on that occasion delivered the dangerous doctrine to which your Committee have lately adverted. Mr. Fowke, who had a most material interest in this determination, applied by letter to be informed concerning it. An answer was sent, acquainting him coldly, and without any reason assigned, of what had been resolved relative to his office. This communication was soon followed by another letter from Mr. Fowke, with great submission and remarkable decency asserting his right to his office under the authority of the Court of Directors, and for solid reasons, grounded on the Company’s express orders, praying to be informed of the charge against him. This letter appears to have been received by Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell very loftily. Mr. Hastings said, “that such applications were irregular; that they are not accountable to Mr. Fowke for their resolution respecting him. The reasons for suspending the execution of the orders of the Court of Directors contain no charge, nor the slightest imputation of a charge, against Mr. Fowke; but I see no reason why the board should condescend to tell him so.” Accordingly, the proposition of Mr. Francis and Mr. Wheler, to inform Mr. Fowke “that they had no reason to be dissatisfied with his conduct,” on the previous question was rejected.
By this resolution Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell discovered another principle, and no less dangerous than the first: namely, that persons deriving a valuable interest under the Company’s orders, so far from being heard in favor of their right, are not so much as to be informed of the grounds on which they are deprived of it.
The arrival soon after of Sir Eyre Coote giving another opportunity of trial, the question for obedience to the Company’s orders was again brought on by Mr. Francis, and again received a negative. Sir Eyre Coote, though present, and declaring, that, had he been at the original consultation, he should have voted for the immediate execution of the Company’s orders, yet he was resolved to avoid what he called any kind of retrospect. His neutrality gained the question in favor of this, the third resolution for disobedience to orders.
The resolution in Bengal being thus decisively taken, it came to the turn of the Court of Directors to act their part. They did act their part exactly in their old manner: they had recourse to their old remedy of repeating orders which had been disobeyed. The Directors declare to Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell, though without any apparent reason, that “they have read with astonishment their formal resolution to suspend the execution of their orders; that they shall take such measures as appear necessary for preserving the authority of the Court of Directors, and for preventing such instances of direct and wilful disobedience in their servants in time to come.” They then renew their directions concerning Mr. Fowke. The event of this sole measure taken to preserve their authority, and to prevent instances of direct and wilful disobedience, your Committee will state in its proper place, — taking into consideration, for the present, the proceedings relative to Mr. Bristow, and to Mahomed Reza Khân, which were altogether in the same spirit; but as they were diversified in the circumstances of disobedience, as well from the case of Mr. Fowke as from one another, and as these circumstances tend to discover other dangerous principles of abuse, and the general prostrate condition of the authority of Parliament in Bengal, your Committee proceed first to make some observations upon them.
The province of Oude, enlarged by the accession of several extensive and once flourishing territories, that is, by the country of the Rohillas, the district of Corah and Allahabad, and other provinces betwixt the Ganges and Jumna, is under the nominal dominion of one of the princes of the country, called Asoph ul Dowlah. But a body of English troops is kept up in his country; and the greatest part of his revenues are, by one description or another, substantially under the administration of English subjects. He is to all purposes a dependent prince. The person to be employed in his dominions to act for the Committee [Company?] was therefore of little consequence in his capacity of negotiator; but he was vested with a trust, great and critical, in all pecuniary affairs. These provinces of dependence lie out of the system of the Company’s ordinary administration, and transactions there cannot be so readily brought under the cognizance of the Court of Directors. This renders it the more necessary that the Residents in such places should be persons not disapproved of by the Court of Directors. They are to manage a permanent interest, which is not, like a matter of political negotiation, variable, and which, from circumstances, might possibly excuse some degree of discretionary latitude in construing their orders. During the lifetime of General Clavering and Colonel Monson, Mr. Bristow was appointed to this Presidency, and that appointment, being approved and confirmed by the Court of Directors, became in effect their own. Mr. Bristow appears to have shown himself a man of talents and activity. He had been principally concerned in the negotiations by which the Company’s interest in the higher provinces had been established; and those services were considered by the Presidency of Calcutta as so meritorious, that they voted him ten thousand pounds as a reward, with many expressions of esteem and honor.
Mr. Bristow, however, was recalled by Mr. Hastings and Mr. Barwell, who had then acquired the majority, without any complaint having been assigned as the cause of his removal, and Mr. Middleton was sent in his stead to reside at the capital of Oude. The Court of Directors, as soon as they could be apprised of this extraordinary step, in their letter of the 4th of July, 1777, express their strongest disapprobation of it: they order Mr. Middleton to be recalled, and Mr. Bristow to be reinstated in his office. In December, 1778, they repeat
their order. Of these repeated orders no notice was taken. Mr. Bristow, fatigued with unsuccessful private applications, which met with a constant refusal, did at length, on the 1st of May, 1780, address a letter to the board, making his claim of right, entitling himself to his offices [office?] under the authority of the Court of Directors, and complaining of the hardships which he suffered by the delay in admitting him to the exercise of it. This letter your Committee have inserted at large in the Fifth Report, having found nothing whatsoever exceptionable in it, although it seems to have excited the warmest resentment in Mr. Hastings.
This claim of the party gave no new force to the order of the Directors, which remained without any attention from the board from Mr. Bristow’s arrival until the 1st of May, and with as little from the 1st of May to the 2nd of October following. On that day, Mr. Francis, after having caused the repeated orders of the Court of Directors to be first read, moved that Mr. Bristow should be reinstated in his office. This motion, in itself just and proper in the highest degree, and in which no fault could be found, but that it was not made more early, was received by Mr. Hastings with the greatest marks of resentment and indignation. He declares in his minute, that, “were the most determined adversary of the British nation to possess, by whatever means, a share in the administration, he could not devise a measure in itself so pernicious, or time it so effectually for the ruin of the British interests in India.” Then turning to the object of the motion, he says, “I will ask, Who is Mr. Bristow, that a member of the administration should, at such a time, hold him forth, as an instrument for the degradation of the first executive member of this government? What are the professed objects of his appointment? What are the merits and services, or what the qualifications, which entitle him to such uncommon distinction? Is it for his superior integrity, or from his eminent abilities, that he is to be dignified at such hazard of every consideration that ought to influence the members of this administration? Of the former (his integrity) I know no proofs; I am sure it is not an evidence of it, that he has been enabled to make himself the principal in such a competition: and for the test of his abilities I appeal to the letter which he has dared to write to this board, and which I am ashamed to say we have suffered. I desire that a copy of it may be inserted in this day’s proceedings, that it may stand before the eyes of every member of the board, when he shall give his vote upon a question for giving their confidence to a man, their servant, who has publicly insulted them, his masters, and the members of the government to whom he owes his obedience, — who, assuming an association with the Court of Directors, and erecting himself into a tribunal, has arraigned them for disobedience of orders, passed judgment upon them, and condemned or acquitted them, as their magistrate or superior. Let the board consider, whether a man possessed of so independent a spirit, who has already shown a contempt of their authority, who has shown himself so wretched an advocate for his own cause and negotiator for his own interest, is fit to be trusted with the guardianship of their honor, the execution of their measures, and as their confidential manager and negotiator with the princes of India. As the motion has been unaccompanied by any reasons which should induce the board to pass their acquiescence in it, I presume the motion which preceded it, for reading the orders of the Court of Directors, was intended to serve as an argument for it, as well as an introduction to it. The last of those was dictated the 23rd December, 1778, almost two years past. They were dictated at a time when, I am sorry to say, the Court of Directors were in the habit of casting reproach upon my conduct and heaping indignities upon my station.”
Had the language and opinions which prevail throughout this part of the minute, as well as in all the others to which your Committee refer, been uttered suddenly and in a passion, however unprovoked, some sort of apology might be made for the Governor-General. But when it was produced five months after the supposed offence, and then delivered in writing, which always implies the power of a greater degree of recollection and self-command, it shows how deeply the principles of disobedience had taken root in his mind, and of an assumption to himself of exorbitant powers, which he chooses to distinguish by the title of “his prerogative.” In this also will be found an obscure hint of the cause of his disobedience, which your Committee conceive to allude to the main cause of the disorders in the government of India, — namely, an underhand communication with Europe.
Mr. Hastings, by his confidence in the support derived from this source, or from the habits of independent power, is carried to such a length as to consider a motion to obey the Court of Directors as a degradation of the executive government in his person. He looks upon a claim under that authority, and a complaint that it has produced no effect, as a piece of daring insolence which he is ashamed that the board has suffered. The behavior which your Committee consider as so intemperate and despotic he regards as a culpable degree of patience and forbearance. Major Scott, his agent, enters so much into the principles of Mr. Hastings’s conduct as to tell your Committee that in his opinion Lord Clive would have sent home Mr. Bristow a prisoner upon such an occasion. It is worthy of remark, that, in the very same breath that Mr. Hastings so heavily condemns a junior officer in the Company’s service (not a servant of the Council, as he hazards to call him, but their fellow-servant) for merely complaining of a supposed injury and requiring redress, he so far forgets his own subordination as to reject the orders of the Court of Directors even as an argument in favor of appointing a person to an office, to presume to censure his undoubted masters, and to accuse them of having been “in a habit of casting reproaches upon him, and heaping indignities on his station.” And it is to be observed, that this censure was not for the purpose of seeking or obtaining redress for any injury, but appeared rather as a reason for refusing to obey their lawful commands. It is plainly implied in that minute, that no servant of the Company, in Mr. Bristow’s rank, would dare to act in such a manner, if he had not by indirect means obtained a premature fortune. This alone is sufficient to show the situation of the Company’s servants in the subordinate situations, when the mere claim of a right, derived from the sovereign legal power, becomes fatal not only to the objects which they pursue, but deeply wounds that reputation both for ability and integrity by which alone they are to be qualified for any other.
If anything could add to the disagreeable situation of those who are submitted to an authority conducted on such principles, it is this: The Company has ordered that no complaint shall be made in Europe against any of the Council without being previously communicated to them: a regulation formed upon grave reasons; and it was certainly made in favor of that board. But if a person, having ground of complaint against the Council, by making use of the mode prescribed in favor of that very Council, and by complaining to themselves, commits an offence for which he may be justly punished, the Directors have not regulated the mode of complaint, they have actually forbidden it; they have, on that supposition, renounced their authority; and the whole system of their officers is delivered over to the arbitrary will of a few of their chief servants.
During the whole day of that deliberation things wore a decided face. Mr. Hastings stood to his principles in their full extent, and seemed resolved upon unqualified disobedience. But as the debate was adjourned to the day following, time was given for expedients; and such an expedient was hit upon by Mr. Hastings as will, no doubt, be unexpected by the House; but it serves to throw new lights upon the motives of all his struggles with the authority of the legislature.
The next day the Council met upon the adjournment. Then Mr. Hastings proposed, as a compromise, a division of the object in question. One half was to be surrendered to the authority of the Court of Directors, the other was reserved for his dignity. But the choice he made of his own share in this partition is very worthy of notice. He had taken his sole ground of objection against Mr. Bristow on the supposed ill effect that such an appointment would have on the minds of the Indian powers. He said, “that these powers could have no dependence on h
is fulfilling his engagements, or maintaining the faith of treaties which he might offer for their acceptance, if they saw him treated with such contempt.” Mr. Bristow’s appearing in a political character was the whole of his complaint; yet, when he comes to a voluntary distribution of the duties of the office, he gives Mr. Bristow those very political negotiations of which but the day before he had in such strong terms declared him personally incapable, whose appointment he considered to be fatal to those negotiations, and which he then spoke of as a measure in itself such as the bitterest adversary to Great Britain would have proposed. But having thus yielded his whole ground of ostensible objection, he reserved to his own appointment the entire management of the pecuniary trust. Accordingly he named Mr. Bristow for the former, and Mr. Middleton for the latter. On his own principles he ought to have done the very reverse. On every justifiable principle he ought to have done so; for a servant who for a long time resists the orders of his masters, and when he reluctantly gives way obeys them by halves, ought to be remarkably careful to make his actions correspond with his words, and to put himself out of all suspicion with regard to the purity of his motives. It was possible that the political reasons, which were solely assigned against Mr. Bristow’s appointment, might have been the real motives of Mr. Hastings’s opposition. But these he totally abandons, and holds fast to the pecuniary department. Now, as it is notorious that most of the abuses of India grow out of money-dealing, it was peculiarly unfit for a servant, delicate with regard to his reputation, to require a personal and confidential agent in a situation merely official, in which secrecy and personal connections could be of no possible use, and could only serve to excite distrust. Matters of account cannot be made too public; and it is not the most confidential agent, but the most responsible, who is the fittest for the management of pecuniary trusts. That man was the fittest at once to do the duty, and to remove all suspicions from the Governor-General’s character, whom, by not being of his appointment, he could not be supposed to favor for private purposes, who must naturally stand in awe of his inspection, and whose misconduct could not possibly be imputable to him. Such an agency in a pecuniary trust was the very last on which Mr. Hastings ought to have risked his disobedience to the orders of the Direction, — or, what is even worse for his motives, a direct contradiction to all the principles upon which he had attempted to justify that bold measure.
