XIX.  That the castle aforesaid being surrendered upon terms of safety, and on express condition of not attempting to search their persons, the woman of rank aforesaid, her female relations and female dependants, to the number of three hundred, besides children, evacuated the said castle; but the spirit of rapacity being excited by the letters and other proceedings of the said Hastings, the capitulation was shamefully and outrageously broken, and, in despite of the endeavors of the commanding officer, the said woman of high condition, and her female dependants, friends, and servants, were plundered of the effects they carried with them, and which were reserved to them in the capitulation of their fortress, and in their persons were otherwise rudely and inhumanly dealt with by the licentious followers of the camp:  for which outrages, represented to the said Hastings with great concern by the commanding officer, Major Popham, he, the said Hastings, did afterwards recommend a late and fruitless redress.

XX.  That the Governor-General, Warren Hastings, in exciting the hopes of the military by declaring them well entitled to the plunder of the fortress aforesaid, the residence of the mother and other women of the Rajah of Benares, and by wishing the troops to secure the same for their own benefit, did advise and act in direct contradiction to the orders of the Court of Directors, and to his own opinion of his public duty, as well as to the truth and reality thereof,—­he having some years before entered in writing the declaration which follows.

“The very idea of prize-money suggests to my remembrance the former disorders which arose in our army from this source, and had almost proved fatal to it.  Of this circumstance you must be sufficiently apprised, and of the necessity for discouraging every expectation of this kind amongst the troops. It is to be avoided like poison. The bad effects of a similar measure were but too plainly felt in a former period, and our honorable masters did not fail on that occasion to reprobate with their censure, in the most severe terms, a practice which they regarded as the source of infinite evils, and which, if established, would in their judgment necessarily bring corruption and ruin on their army.”

XXI.  That the said Hastings, after he had given the license aforesaid, and that in consequence thereof the booty found in the castle, to the amount of 23,27,813 current rupees, was distributed among the soldiers employed in its reduction, the said Hastings did retract his declaration of right, and his permission to the soldiers to appropriate to themselves the plunder, and endeavored, by various devices and artifices, to explain the same away, and to recover the spoil aforesaid for the use of the Company; and wholly failing in his attempts to resume by a breach of faith with the soldiers what he had unlawfully disposed of by a breach of duty to his constituents, he attempted