without the whole matter being fairly stated, I do hope and trust it will be sufficient for them to reject now these vague and unsupported charges, in like manner as they were before rejected by the Court of Directors and his Majesty’s ministers, when they were first made by General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis.—­I must here interrupt the course of my defence to explain on what grounds I employed or had any connection with a man of so flagitious a character as Nundcomar.”

My Lords, I hope this was a good and reasonable ground for me to anticipate the defence which Mr. Hastings would make in this House,—­namely, on the known, recognized, infamous character of Nundcomar, with regard to certain proceedings there charged at large, with regard to one forgery for which he suffered and two other forgeries with which Mr. Hastings charged him.  I, who found that the Commons of Great Britain had received that very identical charge of Nundcomar, and given it to me in trust to make it good, did naturally, I hope excusably, (for that is the only ground upon which I stand,) endeavor to support that credit upon which the House acted.  I hope I did so; and I hope that the goodness of that intention may excuse me, if I went a little too far on that occasion.  I would have endeavored to support that credit, which it was much Mr. Hastings’s interest to shake, and which he had before attempted to shake.

Your Lordships will have the goodness to suppose me now making my apology, and by no manner of means intending to persist either in this, or in anything which the House of Commons shall desire me not to declare in their name.  But the House of Commons has not denied me the liberty to make you this just apology:  God forbid they should! for they would be guilty of great injustice, if they did.  The House of Commons, whom I represent, will likewise excuse me, their representative, whilst I have been endeavoring to support their characters in the face of the world, and to make an apology, and only an humble apology, for my conduct, for having considered that act in the light that I represented it,—­and which I did merely from my private opinion, without any formal instruction from the House.  For there is no doubt that the House is perfectly right, inasmuch as the House did neither formally instruct me nor at all forbid my making use of such an argument; and therefore I have given your Lordships the reason why it was fit to make use of such argument,—­if it was right to make use of it.  I am in the memory of your Lordships that I did conceive it to be relevant, and it was by the poverty of the language I was led to express my private feelings under the name of a murder.  For, if the language had furnished me, under the impression of those feelings, with a word sufficient to convey the complicated atrocity of that act, as I felt it in my mind, I would not have made use of the word murder.  It was on account of the language furnishing me with no other