XVI.  That it does not appear that the said Hastings did write any letter in answer to the proposal of the said Middleton, but he, the said Hastings, did communicate his pleasure thereon, to Sir Elijah Impey, being then at Lucknow, for his, the said Middleton’s, information; and it does appear that the seizing of the treasures of the mother of the Nabob, said to have been proposed as an alternative by the said Nabob to prevent the resumption of the jaghires, was determined upon and ordered by the said Hastings,—­and that the resumption of the said jaghires, for the ransom of which the seizing of the treasures was proposed, was also directed:  not one only, but both sides of the alternative, being enforced upon the female parents of the Nabob aforesaid, although both the one and the other had been secured to them by a treaty with the East India Company.

XVIII.[60] That Sir Elijah Impey, Knight, his Majesty’s chief-justice at Port William, did undertake a journey of nine hundred miles, from Calcutta to Lucknow, on pretence of health and pleasure, but was in reality in the secret of these and other irregular transactions, and employed as a channel of confidential communication therein.  And the said Warren Hastings, by presuming to employ the said chief-justice, a person particularly unfit for an agent, in the transaction of affairs prima facie at least unjust, violent, and oppressive, contrary to public faith, and to the sentiments and law of Nature, and which he, the said Hastings, was sensible “could not fail to draw obloquy on himself by his participation,” did disgrace the king’s commission, and render odious to the natives of Hindostan the justice of the crown of Great Britain.

XIX.  That, although the said Warren Hastings was from the beginning duly informed of the violence offered to the personal inclinations of the Nabob, and the “apparent assumption of the reins of his government,” for the purposes aforesaid, yet more than two years after he did write to his private agent, Major Palmer, that is to say, in his letter of the 6th of May, 1783, “that it has been a matter of equal surprise and concern to him to learn from the letters of the Resident that the Nabob Vizier was with difficulty and almost unconquerable reluctance induced to give his consent to the attachment of the treasure deposited by his father under the charge of the Begum, his mother, and to the resumption of her jaghire, and the other jaghires of the individuals of his family”:  which pretence of ignorance of the Nabob’s inclinations is fictitious and groundless.  But whatever deception he might pretend to be in concerning the original intention of the Nabob, he was not, nor did he pretend to be, ignorant of his, the Nabob’s, reluctance to proceed in the said measures; but did admit his knowledge of the Nabob’s reluctance to their full execution, and yet did justify the same as follows.