legitimate son, and to depose him for the sake of a bastard son of her husband’s,—­to exalt him at the expense of the former, and to exalt, of course, the mother of that bastard at her own expense, and to her own wrong.  But I say, that this, though possible, is grossly improbable.  The reason why the Begum is implicated in this charge with Saadut Ali by the affidavits cannot escape your notice.  Their own acquittal might be the only object of the deponents in their crimination of the latter; but the treasures of the former were the objects of their employers, and these treasures could not be come at but by the destruction of the Begums.

But, my Lords, there are other affidavits, or whatever your Lordships may call them, that go much further.  In order to give a color to the accusation, and make it less improbable, they say that the Nabob himself was at the bottom of it, and that he joined with his brother and his mother to extirpate out of his dominions that horrible grievance, the English brigade officers,—­those English officers who were the farmers-general, and who, as we have proved by Mr. Hastings’s own evidence, had ruined the country.  Nothing is more natural than that a man, sensible of his duty to himself and his subjects, should form a scheme to get rid of a band of robbers that were destroying his country and degrading and ruining his family.  Thus you see a family compact naturally accounted for:  the Nabob at the head of it, his mother joining her own son, and a natural brother joining in the general interests of the family.  This is a possible case.  But is this the case pressed by them?  No:  they pass lightly over the legitimate son; they scarcely touch upon Saadut Ali Khan; they sink the only two persons that could give probability or possibility to this business, and endeavor to throw the whole design upon these two unfortunate women.

Your Lordships see the wickedness and baseness of the contrivance.  They first, in order to keep the whole family in terror, accuse the whole family; then, having possessed themselves of the treasures of the Begums upon another pretence, they endeavor to fix upon them that improbable guilt which they had with some degree of probability charged upon the whole family, as a farther justification of that spoliation.  Your Lordships will see what an insult is offered to the Peers of Great Britain, in producing before you, by way of defence, such gross, scandalous, and fraudulent proceedings.

Who the first set of witnesses were which they produced before their knight-errant chief-justice, Sir Elijah Impey, who wandered in search of a law adventure, I have laid open to your Lordships.  You have now had an account of the scandalous manufacture of that batch of affidavits which was in the budget of Sir Elijah Impey,—­that Pandora’s box which I have opened, and out of which has issued every kind of evil.  This chief-justice went up there with the death-warrant of the Begums’ treasures,