THE ANSWER OF PHILIP FRANCIS, ESQ. TO THE CHARGES EXHIBITED AGAINST HIM, GENERAL CLAVERING, AND COLONEL MONSON. BY SIR ELIJAH IMPEY, KNIGHT, WHEN AT THE BAR OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, ON HIS DEFENCE TO THE NUNDUCOMAR CHARGE.
LONDON: Printed for JOHN ABRAHAM, No. 3, St. Swithin's Lane, Lombard-Street; and to be had of all other Booksellers, in Town and Country.
HOUSE OF COMMOMS.
February
27, 1788.
THE Order of the Day being read, on the motion of Sir Gilbert Elliot, and the House having resolved itself into a Committee of the whole House, to consider further of the Charges against Sir Elijah Impey, Mr. Wyndham in the Chair.—
Mr. Francis
rose and said: I lament that there is not a fuller attendance, and especially am I concerned that some gentlemen are not present who heard Sir Elijah Impey deliver his speech at the bar; in which he thought fit to pass a censure on the conduct of General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and myself. I will, however, if the Committee will grant me that indulgence, now proceed, according to my notice on a former day, to answer the imputation.
The consent of the Committee being signified to Mr. Francis, he again rose and said—
MR. WYNDHAM,
I Flattered myself, Sir, that, when the House thought proper to exclude me from the Committee of Managers, whether that Resolution was meant to be a discharge from a service, or a relief from a duty, it would have had this effect, at all events, that from thenceforward I should be suffered to remain in a state of neutrality; and that, as I was deprived of the honour, I should also be exempted from the cares and censures to which the managers of an impeachment must unavoidably submit. But much more had I reason to expect that, after the public declaration, which I made in Parliament almost two years ago,
that I would never sit in judgment upon him, and that I would never give a judicial vote in any cause, in which Sir Elijah Impey might be a party, unless I could safely give it for him;
and having avowed that declaration in print, as the most public mode of avowal of it, and having also since repeatedly declared to my friends, and particularly to the Hon. Baronet near me, (Sir Gilbert Elliot) that I would never directly or indirectly, take a part of any kind in the prosecution of Sir Elijah Impey, and having strictly adhered to the spirit of those declarations, I should not have been implicated in any shape in the impeachment of that gentleman: Least of all did I expect that I should be accused by him of having borne testimony to his good conduct, and be compelled by him to answer, as a criminal, for declarations, which he tells you I have heretofore made in his favour. I do not mean to deny his right of mixing accusation with defence, if to criminate others be in any degree material, or even useful to his own exculpation. In some cases undoubtedly the weapons of attack are the best, perhaps the only instruments of defence. With some men such is the only defence that can be made. Whether the use he has made of this weapon, and the manner in which he has availed himself of his undisputed right, on this occasion, be perfectly prudent or not, can only be determined by the event. All I assert and contend for, is, that
I,
in my turn, may be allowed the same latitude which
he
has taken, and which I allow him. It is not my direct object this day to criminate him or any man. But it
may
be necessary to my Defence. It may be unavoidable. Defence and accusation, in this particular case, may be inseparable. If that should happen, I desire it may be remembered, that, besides the general right which, for myself, I admit, I stand upon the specifick use he himself has made of it, and follow the precedent which he has himself specifically set me.
Sir, the situation in which I have lately stood in this House, has been very painful to me indeed. I have been repeatedly the personal object of debate; the middle passive subject between the action and re-action of the powers of the House: between the hammer and the anvio. How irksome such a situation must have been, I leave to the sensations of those who have stood in the same situation themselves. Much has been said of my character, much of my temper. I have, by one learned gentleman not now present, (the Master of the Rolls) been accused of comparing myself with him, and and with others of his profession. Such a comparison I never presumed to make. Arrogance is one thing, passion is another; passion I have ever conceived to be an honest, open, and manly emotion of the mind; arrogance on the contrary, I take to be a cold, settled, and determined rule of conduct, resulting from illiberal and unwarrantable ideas. I may have made use of warm or passionate language perhaps, but I was never guilty of the presumption and arrogance which has been imputed to me. I stand up now as the
Defendant
in the present case: as such, I hope to be heard patiently, and with a fair and liberal construction—that is all I desire.
The charge brought against Sir J. Clavering, Col. Monson, and myself, by Sir Elijah Impey, as I understand it, amounts to this: (It is his own fault if I do not state it correctly. I mean to do it fairly.)
"That whereas we had by sundry declarations and minutes, both before and after the event, expressed or strongly intimated our opinion that the prosecution, trial, and execution of Nunducomar were sounded on political motives, and pursued for the sole purpose of saving Mr. Hastings from the effect of that man's evidence, no credit ought to be given to the same, because we had, in a few days after the execution, ordered a paper, purporting to be a Petition from Nunducomar against the Judges, to be burnt, the entries of it to be expunged, and the translations to be destroyed; and, because he had on that occasion declared, that we considered the informations contained in it as wholly insupported, and of a libellous nature, and that to send a copy of it to the Judges would be giving it much more weight than it deserved."
If this be the Charge, I admit all the facts, and deny the conclusion. If I have omitted any part of the Charge: If I have not stated it in as strong terms against myself as it is possible to be stated, I beg any gentleman who hears me, to correct me. I request the Committee to divide the Charge into two parts, and to consider it: First, as it regards us collectively: Secondly, as it personally regards General Clavering in particular.
But I entreat the Committee to consider preliminary, First, how this paper came into Sir Elijah Impey's hands, and in what state, and with what proof of its authenticity it is now brought before the House.
[Here Mr. Francis read an Extract from the Bengal Appendix, p. 585, dated the 16th of August, 1775.]
On that day we resolved upon a motion, made by me, that the original should be burnt, and burnt by the hands of the common hangman; to which Mr. Hastings repeatedly said he had no objection; but observed, that this would not be enough, as the paper stood on our records, and would that way become public. To remove that objection, I proposed that the entry should be expunged, and it was agreed that it should be expunged accordingly, and that the translations should be destroyed. The resolution was unanimous. Mr. Hastings approved of it, and was party to it. On the 28th of August the Judges wrote to us in the following words:
"A Paper containing a false, scandalous, and malicious charge against the Judges of the Supreme Court, produced at your Board, having been by you declared a Libel, and ordered to be burnt by the hands of the common hangman, we return you our thanks for having shewn so due a sense of this outrage to public justice; but, as we must be interested as well in the Minutes introducing and condemning the Paper, as in the Paper itself, we find ourselves obliged to desire that you will furnish us with a copy of the Libel, and of such Minutes, which relate to it, as stand on your consultations, and must therefore be conveyed to England, that we may judge whether they contain any matters necessary for us to take notice of."
The following was our Reply, dated
Sept.
11, 1775.
"We shall be much obliged to you, if you will be pleased to acquaint us, from whom you received the imperfect information, which appears to have been conveyed to you, on this and other occasions, of the proceedings of this Board in our secret department; such communications cannot regularly be made to you but by the authority of the Board, nor can they be obtained without a breach of trust in some of our, officers, which we are persuaded you would not encourage."
And this letter is signed by Mr. Hastings, who knew that he alone had given the information.
It is true he disapproved of the draft, but not for the reason, which he ought to have assigned, and which would have prevented our writing that paragraph; neither can he pretend, that he held himself bound by the sense of the majority to sign the letter, because, upon another occasion, viz. on the 16th of June, 1775, he positively refused to sign a letter to the Judges, of which he disapproved.
Sir Elijah Impey tells you, on another occasion, that he knew nothing of the contents of the Charges of Nunducomar against Mr. Hastings.
How should he? They were produced before a Secret Council; they were examined by a Secret Committee, of
which all the Members, their Clerks and Secretaries were sworn to secrecy.
Mr. Hastings nevertheless communicates this paper to him, and through his channel to the other Judges. I shall presently shew, that he imparted many other parts of our proceedings to him.
Sir Elijah Impey affirms, that although the paper was imparted to him, he never saw the minutes till very lately, when he procured a copy of them from the India House. This is very extraordinary, and, indeed, it is incredible, that Mr. Hastings should shew him one and not the other; especially as it appears, that in the month of January following, he communicated to him several other minutes signed by us, in which charges against him were certainly expressed, and especially as these very minutes were printed by the Directors, and in possession of many people in Bengal, in the course of 1776 or 1777, and, I believe, read by every body in Calcutta. I know they were by many. Mr. Hastings takes upon him not only to communicate the paper, after he had
agreed
that the entry should be expunged, and the translations destroyed, but even alters the translations in many parts with his own hand. Who will say that, a paper, so communicated, so altered, and so produced, deserves any credit? What is a Secret Commitee? The name sufficiently speaks its character; and in respect to the Secret Committee of Council in Calcutta, not only Mr. Hastings, and every member was bound by an oath of secrecy, but the secretaries and clerks, and every one of their officers. Even if there had been no oath, Mr. Hastings was bound in truth and honour by his own agreement; in my own breast, I hold such an agreement to be equally binding with an oath.
The original paper, I have no doubt, contained insinuations against the Judges, and that those insinuations being wholly unsupported, deserved no weight. That the description I gave of it was exact, and that it was a libel upon the whole Court of Justice, in the strict and proper sense of that word. The question is, whether by these declarations I contradict many others in which I have charged the prosecution and execution of Nunducomar against Sir Elijah Impey, as a political measure of the most atrocious kind. At first sight, it is not very likely that we (or any men who were not absolute ideots) should enter such contradictions, on the same records, and place ourselves before the Directors in a pointof view which must utterly annihilate their confidence in us.
Let the Committee judge of the following declarations made by us before, and after the execution of Nunducomar.
Minute of Mr.
FRANCIS.
April,
24, 1775.
"I beg leave to observe, that a prosecution for a conspiracy is now instituted, or is intended to be instituted, against Maha Rajah Nunducomar, and others; the tendency of which seems to me to be to prevent, or deter him from proceeding in making good those discoveries which he has laid before the Board; I cannot but think that the East-India Company, and consequently this Board, have a very great concern in every step taken in that prosecution, whether it be actually begun, or intended."
Extract of a Minute of
CLAVERING, MONSON,
and
FRANCIS,
Sept.
15, 1775.
"After the death of Nunducomar, the Governor, we believe, is well assured that no man, who regards his safety, will venture to stand forth as his accuser.
"On a subject of this delicate nature it becomes us to leave every honest man to his own reflection. It ought to be made known, however, to the English nation, that the forgery, of which the Rajah was accused, must have been committed several years; that in the interim he had been protected and employed by Mr. Hastings; that his son was appointed to one of the first offices in the Nabob's houshold, with a salary of one lack of rupees; that the accusation, which ended in his destruction, was not produced till he came forward, and brought a specifick Charge against the Governor-General, of corruption in his office.
Ditto,
dated Nov.
21, 1775.
"It seems propable, such embezzlements may have been universally practised. In the present circumstance, it will be difficult, if not impracticable, to obtain direct proofs of the facts. The terror impressed on the minds of the natives, by the execution of Mahah Rajah Nunducomar, is not to be effaced, for though he suffered for the crime of forgery, yet the natives conceive he was executed for having dared to prefer complaints against the Governor General.
"This idea, however destitute of foundation, is prevalent amongst the natives, and will naturally deter them from making discoveries, which may be attended with the same fatal consequences to themselves.
"Punishment is usually intended as an example, to prevent the commission of crimes; in this instance, we fear, it has served to prevent the discovery of them.
Ditto, March
21. 1776.
"Some of the facts, with which he (Mr. Hastings) has been personally charged, have been proved. The presumptive evidence, in support of the rest, will, we apprehend, lose none of its force, by the precipitate removal of Maha Raja Nunducomar."
The petition was brought before us after the man's death. It charged the Judges with having murdered him, for having accused Mr. Hastings, or to that effect. It came before us without a responsible accuser, without a witness to prove, or evidence to support it; the fabrication of a man, publickly executed for a crime, and consequently no longer capable of proving his allegation. This being the case, it was what I called it, a libel, and nothing else, I called it so then, I call it so still; though I was not then, nor am I now, convinced, that the substance of it was untrue. But it included
all
the Judges; concerning two of whom (Justice Hyde and Sir Robert Chambers) we never had a suspicion of corrupt motives: and concerning another of whom (Mr. Justice Le Maistre) we had then no ground of suspicion; excepting his intimacy with Sir Elijah Impey, his acting on all occasions as his instrument, and the notorious violence of his deportment. We therefore treated it as a libel against a whole Court of Justice ought to be treated.
This is no new distinction by me; no after-thought, no
ex post facto
vindication. When Mr. Hastings accused me personally, about three months before, of presenting a libel to the Board, what was my answer on that occasion.
Extract of a Minute of Mr.
FRANCIS.
March 21, 1775.
"The Governor General, who had long expected the appearance of such a letter, and was apprised of the contents of it, made no objection, however, to its being received and read at the Board. When the man, who advances a specific charge, declares himself ready to come forward and support it, and to hazard the consequences of failing in his proofs, it may still be presumed that the charge is false; but it does not partake of the nature of a libel. A libeller advances charges, which he does not in the end, or is unable to make good:—When called upon to appear and produce his evidence, he shelters himself, sometimes in the obscurity, sometimes in the superiority of his situation, and leaves the accusation without an accuser, to operate as far as it can, in the opinions of men, against the honour and reputation of the party accused. Rajah Nunducomar is not an obscure person in the country, nor does he in this instance act the part of a libeller. He is himself of very high rank; he publickly accuses the Governor-General of misconduct in his office, and desires to be heard in person in support of his Charge."
This is my defence against the Charge, as it affects us collectively on the face of our proceedings, but we had other motives for our conduct, which do not appear upon the records, and which I shall now lay before the House.
This concerns General Clavering, and not myself. In this part he is properly the Defendant, and not
I.
If favour, protection, and indulgence are due to a man who is here to defend himself, (and they have been shewn in an eminent degree to Sir Elijah Impey) how much more are they due to a man of great character, who is not here, who is not only absent, but dead, and who died in the service of his country; not in an honourable, but a most odious service: not in the field of battle, where his gallant mind would have led him, but in an odious, unprofitable contest, with men of whom he had the worst opinion possible. I cannot undertake to answer for all the motives of his conduct in this transaction, but I think I can for some of them.
Let gentlemen recollect the general temper of the settlement. The union between the Governor General, Mr. Barwell, and the Judges, or some of them, and the general combination amongst them against us. That we were considered in the settlement as the common enemy, and Mr. Hastings looked up to as their common protector. That Sir Elijah Impey, in one of his letters to us, had already declared, that reports were publickly circulated in Calcutta, that if the Judges could not be prevailed upon to release Nunducomar, he would be delivered by force,
manu forti,
by the Commander in Chief.
Extract of a letter from Sir
ELIJAH IMPEY,
to the Board,
May
15, 1785.
"The particular reason which called upon me in this case to make that requisition, was the reports publickly circulated in this town; that if the Judges could not be prevailed upon to release the Maha Rajah, he would be delivered by force."
Against this imputation, Gen. Clavering thought it necessary for his safety to exculpate himself by oath. I say
safety,
because I am firmly of opinion, that he would have been in as great danger as Nunducomar, if the Judges could have found any thing to lay to his charge. The General says, in his Minute of the 14th of August, 1775,
that he was resolved not to make any application whatever in favour of Nunducomar.
He knew, by experience, that all such applications would be needless; that they would be much more likely to injure than to serve Nunducomar, and that our intercessions would rather hasten than delay his execution. In support of this assertion, I beg leave to read to you some passages from our Records. The House will observe, that we had often applied to Sir Elijah Impey for some indulgence to this unfortunate man in the mode of his imprisonment, particularly that he would not suffer him to perish for want of sustenance. Sir Elijah says, in reply, in his letter of the 9th of May, 1775.
"I must make it my request, that the Maha Rajah may be acquainted by the Board, that if he has any further application to make for relief, that he must address himself immediately to the Judges, who will give all due attention to his representations; for should he continue to address himself to the Board, that which will, and can only be obtained from principles of justice, may have the appearance of being obtained by the means of influence and authority, the peculiar turn of mind of the natives being to expect every thing from power, and little from justice,"
In another letter, dated
May
15, 1775, he says.
"I did not, nor do not question the authority of the Board in receiving Petitions; I carefully restricted what I said to this individual prisoner; I did not desire his Petitions should not be received, but when received, if they were to require any thing from the Judges of the Court, that the answers given to those Petitions should be, that he must apply himself directly to the Judges; and this I did to avoid the imputation I then alluded to, and which would be equally derogatory to the character of the Council, as that of the Judges."
On the 27th of June we sent to the Judges an application from the Nabob of Bengal, in favour of Nunducomar; to which the following is the answer of the Judges sent by message, June 25, 1775.
"That the Court is of opinion, that all claims of individuals ought to be made directly to the Court by the individuals, and not by the authority of the Governor General and Council."
"That it is contrary to the principles of the English constitution, for any person or persons to address a Court of Justice by letter missive, concerning any matter pending before such Court, and that the higher the station of the person or persons so addressing, the act is the more unconstitutional."
To another application made at the same time, by the Nabob, through us, in favour of his own Vaqueel, or Minister, at Calcutta, Sir Elijah wrote as follows.
Extract of a letter from Sir
ELIJAH IMPEY.
June,
19, 1775.
As to communicating Petitions to the Judges, I apprehend that no Board, even of the highest authority in England, can refer any matter, either to a Court of Justice, or any Judge thereof, otherwise than by suit legally instituted.
In a subsequent resolution upon the same subject, the Judges say,
"It is with the deepest concern we find the Council still persist to address the Court by letter, on subjects pending in Court, or on which the Court have given their opinion, and that, notwithstanding the frequent declarations, and unanimous opinion of the Court, upon the impropriety of that mode of address."
And Sir Elijah declared from the Bench, that the Governor General and Council, whom he considered as nothing more than as agents of the East-India Company, could only apply to the Court by humble petition, and that the Court could not receive in future any letters or messages but in that form.
Extract of a Declaration from the Bench, made by Sir
ELIJAH IMPEY
on
the 23d of June,
1775.
"The Company, as well as all other appellants, must not claim it, but prefer a humble Petition. This being thus explained, to prevent any further altercations of this nature, the Court must inform the Board that they cannot (respect being had to the dignity of his Majesty's Courts, and to the welfare of the country) receive in future any letter or messages but in that form."
After all this passed, it is not much to be wondered at that General Clavering should resolve not to make any more applications in favour of Nunducomar. Gen. Clavering was a strict, rigid man, not as some thought cruel, but rigid over much even to prudery, as I sometimes told him, in consequence of his refusing even a dish of fruit, and civilities that certainly did not come within the legal prohibition of presents; very tender of public reputation, and particularly fearful of the imputation of supporting and encouraging the accuser of Mr. Hastings, an imputation, which, he was sure he should incur and equally sure of doing Nunducomer no service. What he did, was, in truth, a most rash and inconsiderate action, namely, the bringing the Petition at all before the Board. The man was dead, and Gen. Clavering made himself the publisher of the libel. He put himself in the power of his enemies who infallibly would have ruined him. This, let it operate as it may, I declare, upon my honour, and I shall, if necessary, upon my oath, was a strong concurrent motive with Col. Monson and me, for getting the paper destroyed. As Mr. Hastings entirely agreed with us in every thing we did relative to the paper, I never had a doubt that all the translations of it were destroyed, until Sir Elijah Impey produced a copy of it at the Bar of this House. Of the authenticity of which you have no evidence, and which, admitting it to be authentic, must have been obtained by means the most unjustifiable, by means which prove, what we always suspected, that we were betrayed by one of our own Board to Sir Elijah Impey, and by means, which prove to demonstration the collusion and confederacy that subsisted from the first, between Sir Elijah Impey and Mr. Hastings.
I beg the Committee to consider whether such facts were not convincing proofs of a confederacy and collusion existing between the Governor-General and Sir Elijah Impey; to me they appeared such, and so I conceive they must to every candid man. I hesitate not to declare, in the most explicit, and in the most solemn manner, that the private motive of my standing so forward as I did for the destruction of the copy and translations of the petition sent by Nunducomar, previous to his execution, to General Clavering, was not the public one I assigned, viz. that it was a libel; but my fear for the safety of General Clavering: Colonel Monson and myself observing, that the Judges had gone all length; that they had already dipped their hands in blood for a political purpose; and that they might again proceed on the same principle. With respect to what passed relative to Nunducomar's application to be removed from the common gaol of Calcutta, to some place where he could take sustenance, and perform his ablutions, and other ceremonies, in a manner conformable to his religion, I beg to declare to the Committee, that however absurd to many, such opinions as Nunducomar entertained on that subject may be considered, yet I believe, and always did believe, Nunducomar to be serious in those scruples: he gave a strong proof that he was so, by continuing to refuse any kind of nourishment for
siuty
or
seventy
hours together. The manner in which General Clavering's daughters have been treated by Sir Elijah Impey, at the bar of this House, was in the most unbecoming, in the most unwarrantable manner. The conduct of these ladies had been most grosly misrepresented—not their sex, their virtue, their youth, their beauty, nor their many accomplishments, could rescue them from the most illiberal misrepresentation; a misrepresentation, hazarded merely for the purpose of making them, by a false and forced construction of their conduct, to appear as the accusers of their father. The act they did, was an act of humanity, an act of charity, which, had they been ugly, deformed, loathsome, or even prostituted, would have cast a veil over their vilest vices; but that act had been, by Sir Elijah Impey, perverted, and falsely urged as a proof against their parent. Those ladies visited Nunducomar in his confinement, and endeavoured to make his situation as light as possible. If such conduct was a crime in the ladies. I am equally criminal; I visited Nunducomar frequently, and should have considered myself devoid of humanity had I done otherwise. The sufferings of Nunducomar were great, confined in the common gaol of Calcutta, so miserable, so horrid a place, that the bare commitment to it was equal to death. Many confined in that prison had died in consequence of such confinement, and particularly a Mr. Maynard. Many who hear me know what I assert to be a fact; let gentlemen then consider what the unfortunate Nunducomar must have felt in such a confinement; a man esteemed of higher rank in his own country than any of the Council, a man who had been the Prime Minister of the country, and was of the highest cast of his religion!! It was undoubtedly true that the Supreme Court sent pundits to Nunducomar to examine into his scruples, and that they declared that he might take sustenance without incurring more than a very slight and trivial penance; but it should be considered what the pundits were; they were men of small income, and of a lower cast of religion than Nunducomar, and could not consequently judge of his scruples. Nunducomar himself told me, that the pundits not being of so high a cast as himself, were wholly incapable of advising him, or feeling the same scruples that he did. Nunducomar was of the highest order of the Bramins, and it was therefore most probable that what he had asserted was true, especially as he continued, though upwards of seventy years of age, to refuse all sustenance, till the Judges themselves were alarmed at the idea of a
legal murder,
and caused Nunducomar to be removed to a place of confinement more adapted to his being able to perform what his conscience told him his religion required.
I conceive, Sir, the best evidence that can be brought against any man, to be that man's own evidence, such evidence generally makes the deepest impression: I will undertake to satisfy the Committee, that Sir Elijah Impey, when in Bengal, never looked on the transaction, on which he now pretends to place so much reliance, in the same sense in which he represented it at the bar of this House. I will prove that Sir Elijah Impey never did, before his defence at the bar, give that construction to the act of General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and myself, of burning the petition of Nunducomar, as he has lately endeavoured to fix upon it, namely, that it amounted not only to a flat contradiction of any opinions we had, or might deliver to the disadvantage of the Judges, in that business, but did express and convey a direct and explicit justification of their conduct. To prove that this was not the opinion of Sir Elijah Impey, in the year 1775, I beg leave to read several passages from a letter sent by Sir Elijah Impey to the Secretary of State, dated the 20th of January, 1776, written on purpose to vindicate his character from the aspersions uniformly thrown upon it by General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and myself, for his conduct in the business of Nunducomar, and to charge us with having constantly imputed to the Court the most atrocious motives for their conduct, by strong insinuation, malignant sarcasm, and severe censure; and to accuse us also of attempting, on sundry occasions, to over-awe, and reduce the authority of the Court.
Extract of a Letter from Sir
ELIJAH IMPEY,
to the Secretary of State.
Dated Calcutta,
Jan.
20, 1776.
1. The Governor General has, within these few days, communicated to me several Minutes, signed by General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis. They are severally fraught with direct Charges, or plain insinuations against the characters of the Judges, and the conduct of the Court of Judicature. Some seem more particularly levelled at
me.
2. The crimes either directly charged upon the Judges, or indirectly insinuated, (which, I think we have more reason to complain of, as being less liberal) are of so horrid and detestable a nature, that if they are well grounded, ought to subject each of them to the highest punishment a Parliamentary Impeachment can inflict, and brand their names with infamy to the latest posterity.
3. I do sincerely attribute the offensive parts of the paragraphs to immaginations, heated by party disputes; and entertain so high a sense of the honour of the gentlemen, that at a period some distance from the events, which shall have given time for their judgments to cool,
they will
themselves be shocked at what they have wrote, and be willing to retract the charges.
4. A publick notification is professedly made to the English nation, by which it is attempted to persuade them, that the Court of Judicature, established by his Majesty for protecting the natives of this country, and the East India Company, from the violence and oppression of the Company's servants, has been by the Judges converted into an execrable instrument in the hands of Mr. Hastings, of destroying the innocent native, for the sake of protecting the guilty servants of the Company.
5. It should be known, that the conduct of the Council to the Judges, and to the prisoner during his confinement, had raised an almost universal belief in the natives, and even among the Europeans, that the prisoner would be
protected
from Justice, in defiance of the Court.
6. Rajah Gourdass (son of Nunducomar) has caused it to be intimated to me, that he was very desirous to pay his respects to me, but is possitively enjoined (he must mean
forbidden)
entering my house by members of the Council.
N. B. The majority of the Council in one of their minutes had said,
we are ignorant of any attempts to overthrow or reduce the outhority of the Supereme Court.
7. In answer to this, I must refer to the letters sent me by the Council in May last, concerning Nunducomar; the letter addressed to Mr. Justice Hyde and Justice Lemaistre; the
universal
tenor of the Minutes of the Council,
whenever
the conduct of the Judges made part of their consultations.
Had Sir Elijah Impey, at the time he wrote that letter, considered our declaraion that Nunducomar's petition was a Libel, and the burning it in consequence thereof, as any proof of our opinion in his favor, can it be imagined by any reasonable man that he would not have stated, and urged it for that purpose in his letter to the Secretary of State, which consisted of several sheets, and was, from beginning to end, a professed defence of himself against our charges, and a laboured effort to recriminate upon us! Instead of doing so, the fact was not mentioned, or even alluded to, in this voluminous letter—That was the time, if ever for him to have availed himself of our evidence against ourselves, and to have invalidated any declarations we might have made against him on other occasions—His not availing himself of that opportunity, warranted a conclusion the most irresistible; it proves beyond a doubt that while he was in Bengal, or at least, however, when he wrote the letter, that he had not the most remote Idea, that our act, on which he now insists, could bear the Construction he now gives it.
But why, Sir, did Sir Elijah Impey declare that he never saw the minutes of the Secret Committee till lately? the reason is obvious—because, had he admitted that he had seen the minutes in Calcutta, as in fact he must have done, his letter to the Secretary of State, dated Jan. 23, 1775, would have been a manifest falshood as a charge, and palpably defective as a defence. It would have been false upon the face of it, and his answer to the charge, criminating him on account of the execution of the Nunducomar, would have been most unaccountably defective by the omission of that, which, if true, and agreeable to his construction of it, would have been the best answer of all, viz. our own acquittal of him by the minutes in question.
I appeal, Sir, to the judgement of the Committee, and to common sense, whether, by the facts I have stated, I have not fully answered the accusation, and censure, by Sir Elijah Impev, on Gen. Clavering, Colonel Monson, and myself—I think I have done so, in a manner that must be satisfactory to the feelings of every gentleman present, and to every honest man who hears me.
I have been under much difficulty on account of Sir Elijah Impey's having made his imputation oath; I will act a more fair part, I challenge Sir Elijah Impey to put upon paper his charge against us; if he does so, I pledge myself to the house, and to the world, that I will deliver the defence of Gen. Clavering, Col. Monson, and myself, in writing likewise.
Sir, I wish to make one further observation to the Committee, and that is, to remind them of the extraordinary mode adopted by Mr. Hastings, and Sir Elijah Impey, when defending themselves at the bar of this house, against charges stated in express terms, and in a specific form—The very first thing those men thought necessary to do, in that situation, was to mark me as their enemy, they seemed to conceive it essential to their safety to single me out as a person proper to attack, to calumniate, to discredit, to disqualify, and to remove.—I know not how other gentlemen may feel, but I own myself proud of the distinction—I consider it an honour. I am not the personal enemy of those men, but I hope as long as my name shall exist, it may be known in opposition to theirs, and that my character, my conduct, and my name, may everlasting remain contrasted, and considered as in everlasting hostility with the names, conduct, characters, and hearts, of Mr. Hastings, and Sir Elijah Impey.
FINIS.
Just Published, (Price Two Shillings.)
BY JOHN ABRAHAM, A TRIP TO PARNASSUS; OR, THE JUDGMENT OF APOLLO ON DAMATIC AUTHORS AND PERFORMERS. A POEM.