My Lords, the cause between this man and these unfortunate women is at last come into Westminster Hall; the cause is come to a solemn trial; and we demand other witnesses and other kinds of proof than what these affidavits furnish.  My Lords, the persons who have been examined here are almost all of them the same persons who made these affidavits; but there is this material difference in their evidence:  at your Lordships’ bar they sunk all those parts of their former evidence which criminated the Nabob and Saadut Ali, and confined their testimony wholly to what related to the Begums.  We were obliged, by a cross-examination, to squeeze out of them the disavowal of what they had deposed on the former occasion.  The whole of their evidence we leave to the judgment of your Lordships, with these summary remarks:  first, that they are the persons who were to profit by their own wrong; they are the persons who had seven months’ arrears paid to them out of the money of these unfortunate ladies; they are the persons who, to justify the revolt which they had caused in the country by their robbery, charge their own guilt upon others.  The credibility of their evidence is therefore gone.  But if it were not affected by these circumstances, Mr. Hastings has put an end to it by telling you that there is not one of them who is to be credited upon his oath,—­no, not in a court-martial; and can it, therefore, be expected that in a case of peculation they will do otherwise than acquit the party accused?  He has himself laid before you the horrible state of the whole service; your Lordships have it fresh in your memories, and ringing in your ears.  You have also heard from witnesses brought by Mr. Hastings himself, that these soldiers committed misdemeanors of the very same kind with those which we have stated.  They ought not, therefore, to be listened to for a moment; and we aver that it is an aggravation of the prisoner’s crimes, that he has brought the instruments of his guilt, the persons of whom he has complained as having ruined and destroyed that country, and whom he had engaged, at the Nabob’s desire, in the treaty of Chunar, to send out of the country, as being a nuisance in it,—­to bring, I say, these people here, to criminate, at a distance of nine thousand miles, these unfortunate women, where they have neither attorney or agent who can from local knowledge cross-examine them.  He has the audacity to bring these people here; and in what manner they comport themselves, when they come here, your Lordships have seen.

There is one of them whom we cannot pass by:  that is, Captain Gordon.  The other witnesses, who appeared here as evidences to criminate the Begums, did it by rumors and hearsays.  They had heard some person say that the Begums had encouraged rebellion, always coupling them with Saadut Ali Khan, and sometimes with the Nabob, because there might have been some probability for their charge in the transactions with Saadut Ali Khan, which, though impossible with regard to the Begums, they thought would implicate him [them?] in his designs.  But Captain Gordon is to give a different account of the proceedings.