which he carried on with Mr. Hastings, unknown to the Council, after Durbege Sing had been appointed Naib, after the new government had been established, after Mr. Hastings had quitted that province, and had apparently wholly abandoned it, and when there was no reason whatever why the correspondence should not be public.  This private correspondence of Mr. Markham’s, now produced for the first time, is full of the bitterest complaints against Durbege Sing.  These clandestine complaints, these underhand means of accomplishing the ruin of a man, without the knowledge of his true and proper judges, we produce to your Lordships as a heavy aggravation of our charge, and as a proof of a wicked conspiracy to destroy the man.  For if there was any danger of his falling into arrears when the heavy accumulated kists came upon him, the Council ought to have known that danger; they ought to have known every particular of these complaints:  for Mr. Hastings had then carried into effect his own plans.

I ought to have particularly marked for your Lordships’ attention this second era of clandestine correspondence between Mr. Hastings and Mr. Markham.  It commenced after Mr. Hastings had quitted Benares, and had nothing to do with it but as Governor-General:  even after his extraordinary, and, as we contend, illegal, power had completely expired, the same clandestine correspondence was carried on.  He apparently considered Benares as his private property; and just as a man acts with his private steward about his private estate, so he acted with the Resident at Benares.  He receives from him and answers letters containing a series of complaints against Durbege Sing, which began in April and continued to the month of November, without making any public communication of them.  He never laid one word of this correspondence before the Council until the 29th of November, and he had then completely settled the fate of this Durbege Sing.

This clandestine correspondence we charge against him as an act of rebellion; for he was bound to lay before the Council the whole of his correspondence relative to the revenue and all the other affairs of the country.  We charge it not only as rebellion against the orders of the Company and the laws of the land, but as a wicked plot to destroy this man, by depriving him of any opportunity of defending himself before the Council, his lawful judges.  I wish to impress it strongly on your Lordships’ minds, that neither the complaints of Mr. Markham nor the exculpations of Durbege Sing were ever made known till Mr. Markham was examined in this hall.

The first intimation afforded the Council of what had been going on at Benares from April, 1782, at which time, Mr. Markham says, the complaints against Durbege Sing had risen to serious importance, was in a letter dated the 27th of November following.  This letter was sent to the Council from Nia Serai, in the Ganges, where Mr. Hastings had retired for the benefit of the air.  During the whole time he was in Calcutta, it does not appear upon the records that he had ever held any communication with the Council upon the subject.  The letter is in the printed Minutes, page 298, and is as follows.