XI.  That the said Warren Hastings, still pursuing his said evil designs, did apply to the Council for discretionary powers relative to the intrigues and factions in the Mogul’s court, giving assurances of his resolution not to proceed against their sense; but the said Council, being fully aware of his disposition, and having Major Browne’s letter, recorded by himself, the said Warren Hastings, before them, did refuse to grant the said discretionary powers, but, on the contrary, did exhort him “most sedulously and cautiously to avoid, in his correspondence with the different princes in India, whatever may commit, or be strained into an interpretation of committing the Company, either as to their army or treasure,”—­observing, “that the Company’s orders are positive against their interference in the objects of dispute between the country powers.”

XII.  That, in order to subvert the plain and natural interpretation given by the Council to the orders of the Court of Directors, and to justify his dangerous intrigues, the said Warren Hastings, in his letter of the 16th June, 1784, to the said Court, did, in a most insolent and contemptuous manner, endeavor to persuade them of their ignorance of the true sense of their own orders, and to limit their prohibition of interference with the disputes of the country powers to such country powers as are permanent,—­expressing himself as follows:  “The faction which now surrounds the throne [the Mogul’s throne] is widely different from the idea which your commands are intended to convey by the expressions to which you have generally applied them, of country powers, to which that of permanency is a necessary adjunct, and which may be more properly compared to a splendid bubble, which the slightest breath of opposition may dissipate with every trace of its existence.”  By which construction the said Hastings did endeavor to persuade the Court of Directors that they meant to confine their prohibition of sinister intrigues to those powers only who could not be easily hurt by them, and whose strength was such that their resentment of such clandestine interference was to be dreaded; but that, where the powers were weak and fragile, such intrigues might be allowed.

XIII.  That the said Hastings, further to persuade the Court of Directors to involve themselves in the affairs of the Mogul, and to reconcile this measure with his former conduct and declared opinions, did write to them to the following effect:  That “at that former period to which the ancient policy with regard to the Mogul applied, the king’s authority was sufficiently respected” (which he knew not to be true,—­having himself declared, in his minute of the 25th of October, 1774, “that he remained at Delhi, the ancient capital of the empire, a mere cipher in the administration of it”) to maintain itself against common vicissitudes; that he would not have advised interference, if the king himself retained the exercise of it, however feeble,