That your Lordships may learn something of one of these ladies, called the Munny Begum, I will refer you to Major Browne’s evidence,—­a man who was at Delhi, the fountain-head of all the nobility of India, and must have known who this lady was that has been treated with such indignity by the prisoner at your bar.  Major Browne was asked, “What was the opinion at Delhi respecting the rank, quality, and character of the Princesses of Oude, or of either of them?”—­“The elder, or Munny Begum, was,” says he, “a woman of high rank:  she was, I believe, the daughter of Saadut Ali Khan, a person of high rank in the time of Mahommed Shah.”—­“Do you know whether any woman in all Hindostan was considered of superior rank or birth?”—­He answers, “I believe not, except those of the royal family.  She was a near relation to Mirza Shaffee Khan, who was a noble of nobles, the first person at that day in the empire.”  In answer to another question put by a noble Lord, in the same examination, respecting the conversation which he had with Mirza Shaffee Khan, and of which he had given an account, he says, “He [Mirza Shaffee Khan] spoke of the attempt to seize the treasures of the Begums, which was then suspected, in terms of resentment, and as a disgrace in which he participated, as being related by blood to the house of Sufdar Jung, who was the husband of the old Begum.”  He says afterwards, in the same examination, that he, the Begum’s husband, was the second man, and that her father was the first man, in the Mogul empire.  Now the Mogul empire, when this woman came into the world, was an empire of that dignity that kings were its subjects; and this very Mirza Shaffee Khan, that we speak of, her near relation, was then a prince with a million a year revenue, and a man of the first rank, after the Great Mogul, in the whole empire.

My Lords, these were people that ought to have been treated with a little decorum.  When we consider the high rank of their husbands, their fathers, and their children, a rank so high that we have nothing in Great Britain to compare with theirs, we cannot be surprised that they were left in possession of great revenues, great landed estates, and great moneyed property.  All the female parts of these families, whose alliance was, doubtless, much courted, could not be proffered in marriage, and endowed in a manner agreeably to the dignity of such persons, but with great sums of money; and your Lordships must also consider the multitude of children of which these families frequently consisted.  The consequences of this robbery were such as might naturally be expected.  It is said that not one of the females of this family has since been given in marriage.