While Asaph-ul-Dowlah was at Chunar, he was completely subjugated by the clear and commanding intellect of the English statesman.  But, when they had separated, the Vizier began to reflect with uneasiness on the engagements into which he had entered.  His mother and grandmother protested and implored.  His heart, deeply corrupted by absolute power and licentious pleasures, yet not naturally unfeeling, failed him in this crisis.  Even the English resident at Lucknow, though hitherto devoted to Hastings, shrank from extreme measures.  But the Governor-General was inexorable.  He wrote to the resident in terms of the greatest severity, and declared that, if the spoliation which had been agreed upon were not instantly carried into effect, he would himself go to Lucknow, and do that from which feebler minds recoil with dismay.  The resident, thus menaced, waited on his Highness, and insisted that the treaty of Chunar should be carried into full and immediate effect.  Asaph-ul-Dowlah yielded making at the same time a solemn protestation that he yielded to compulsion.  The lands were resumed; but the treasure was not so easily obtained.  It was necessary to use violence.  A body of the Company’s troops marched to Fyzabad, and forced the gates of the palace.  The Princesses were confined to their own apartments.  But still they refused to submit.  Some more stringent mode of coercion was to be found.  A mode was found of which, even at this distance of time, we cannot speak without shame and sorrow.

There were at Fyzabad two ancient men, belonging to that unhappy class which a practice, of immemorial antiquity in the East, has excluded from the pleasures of love and from the hope of posterity.  It has always been held in Asiatic courts that beings thus estranged from sympathy with their kind are those whom princes may most safely trust.  Sujah Dowlah had been of this opinion.  He had given his entire confidence to the two eunuchs; and after his death they remained at the head of the household of his widow.

These men were, by the orders of the British Government, seized, imprisoned, ironed, starved almost to death, in order to extort money from the Princesses.  After they had been two months in confinement, their health gave way.  They implored permission to take a little exercise in the garden of their prison.  The officer who was in charge of them stated that, if they were allowed this indulgence, there was not the smallest chance of their escaping, and that their irons really added nothing to the security of the custody in which they were kept.  He did not understand the plan of his superiors.  Their object in these inflictions was not security but torture; and all mitigation was refused.  Yet this was not the worst.  It was resolved by an English government that these two infirm old men should be delivered to the tormentors.  For that purpose they were removed to Lucknow.  What horrors their dungeon there witnessed can only be guessed.  But there remains on the records of Parliament, this letter, written by a British resident to a British soldier: