The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IX | Page 9

suffer Nundcomar to appear before the board at his accuser_; that he attempted to indict his said accuser for a conspiracy, in which he failed; and that the said Rajah Nundcomar was soon after, and while his charge against the said Warren Hastings was depending before the Council, indicted upon an English penal statute, which does not extend even to Scotland,[1] before the Supreme Court of Judicature, for an offence said to have been committed several years before, and not capital by the laws of India, and was condemned and executed. That the evidence of this man, not having been encountered at the time when it might and ought to have been by the said Warren Hastings, remains justly in force against him, and is not abated by the capital punishment of the said Nundcomar, but rather confirmed by the time and circumstances in which the accuser of the said Warren Hastings suffered death. That one of the offices for which a part of the money above mentioned is stated to have been paid to the said Warren Hastings was given by him to Munny Begum, the widow of the late Mir Jaffier, Nabob of Bengal, whose son, by another woman, holds that title at present. That the said Warren Hastings had been instructed by the Court of Directors of the East India Company to appoint "a minister to transact the political affairs of the government, and to select for that purpose some person well qualified for the affairs of government, to be the minister and guardian of the Nabob's minority." That for these offices, and for the execution of the several duties belonging to them, the said Warren Hastings selected and appointed the said Munny Begum, a woman evidently unqualified for and incapable of such offices, and restrained from acting in such capacities by her necessary seclusion from the world and retirement in a seraglio. That, a considerable deficiency or embezzlement appearing in this woman's account of the young Nabob's stipend, she voluntarily declared, by a writing under her seal, that she had given fifteen thousand pounds to the said Warren Hastings for an entertainment,--which declaration corresponds with and confirms that part of the charge produced by Rajah Nundcomar to which it relates. That neither this nor any other part of the said charge has been at any time directly denied or disputed by the said Warren Hastings, though made to his face, and though he was repeatedly accused by his colleagues, who were appointed by Parliament at the same time with himself, of peculation of every sort. That, instead of promoting a strict inquiry into his conduct for the clearance of his innocence and honor, he did repeatedly endeavor to elude and stifle all inquiry by attempting to dissolve the meetings of the Council at which such charges were produced, and by other means, and has not since taken any steps to disprove or refute the same. That the said Warren Hastings, so long ago as September, 1775, assured the Court of Directors, "that it was his fixed determination most fully and liberally to explain every circumstance of his conduct on the points on which he had been injuriously arraigned, and to afford them the clearest conviction of his own integrity, and of the propriety of his motives for declining a present defence of it"; and having never since given to the Court of Directors any explanation whatever, much less the full and liberal explanation he had promised so repeatedly, has thereby abandoned even that late and protracted defence which he himself must have thought necessary to be made at some time or other, and which he would be thought to have deferred to a period more suitable and convenient than that in which the facts were recent, and the impression of these and other charges of the same nature against him was fresh and unimpaired in the minds of men.
That on the 30th of March, 1775, a member of the Council produced and laid before the board a petition from Mir Zein Abul Deen, (formerly farmer of a district, and who had been in creditable stations,) setting forth, that Khan Jehan Khan, then Phousdar of Hoogly, had obtained that office from the said Warren Hastings, with a salary of seventy-two thousand sicca rupees a year, and that the said _Phousdar had given a receipt of bribe to the patron of the city_, meaning Warren Hastings, to pay him annually thirty-six thousand rupees a year, and also to his banian, Cantoo Baboo, four thousand rupees a year, out of the salary above mentioned. That by the thirty-fifth article of the instructions given to the Governor-General and Council, they are directed "immediately to cause the strictest inquiry to be made into all oppressions which might have been committed either