The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 08 (of 12) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 475 pages of information about The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 08 (of 12).

The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 08 (of 12) eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 475 pages of information about The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 08 (of 12).
much odium on account of their participation in his measures, and that they were not only considered by the party of the dispossessed jaghiredars, and the mother and uncle of the Nabob, but by the Nabob himself, as the dependants of the English government, which they certainly are, and it is by its declared and most obvious support alone that they can maintain the authority and influence which is indispensably necessary.”  And the said Middleton did therefore recommend “that they should be honored with some testimony of his [the said Hastings’s] approbation and favor.”  And he, the said Warren Hastings, did send kellauts, or robes of honor, (the most public and distinguished mode of acknowledging merit known in India,) to the said ministers, in testimony of his approbation of their late services.

LII.  That the said Hastings did not only give the aforesaid public encouragement to the ministers of the Nabob to betray and insult their master and his family in the manner aforesaid, but, when the said Nabob did write several letters to him, the said Hastings, expressive of his dislike of being used as an instrument in the dishonorable acts aforesaid, and refusing to be further concerned therein, he, the said Warren Hastings, did not only suppress and hide the said letters from the view of the Court of Directors, but in his instructions to the Resident, Bristow, did attribute them to Hyder Beg Khan, minister to the Nabob, (whom in other respects he did before and ever since support against his master,) and did express himself with great scorn and contempt of the said Nabob, and with much asperity against the said minister:  affirming, in proud and insolent terms, that he had, “by an abuse of his influence over the Nabob,—­he, the Nabob himself, being (as he ever must be in the hands of some person) a mere cipher in his [the said minister’s],—­dared to make him [the Nabob] assume a very unbecoming tone of refusal, reproach, and resentment, in opposition to measures recommended by ME, and even to acts done by MY authority”:  the said Hastings, in the instruction aforesaid, particularizing the resumption of the jaghires, and the confiscation of the treasures that had been so long suffered to remain in the hands of his, the Nabob’s, mother.  But the letters of the Nabob, which in the said instructions he refers to as containing an opposition to the measures recommended by him, and which he asserts was conveyed in a very unbecoming tone of refusal, reproach, and resentment, he, the said Hastings, hath criminally withheld from the Company, contrary to their orders, and to his duty,—­and the more, as the said letters must tend to show in what manner the said Nabob did feel the indignities offered to his mother, and the manner in which the said ministers, notwithstanding their known dependence on the English government, did express their sense of the part which their sovereign was compelled to act in the said disgraceful measures. 

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The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 08 (of 12) from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.