“Sir, the Nabob having determined to inflict corporal punishment upon the prisoners under your guard, this is to desire that his officers, when they shall come, may have free access to the prisoners, and be permitted to do with them as they shall see proper.”

While these barbarities were perpetrated at Lucknow, the Princesses were still under duress at Fyzabad.  Food was allowed to enter their apartments only in such scanty quantities that their female attendants were in danger of perishing with hunger.  Month after month this cruelty continued, till at length, after twelve hundred thousand pounds had been wrung out of the Princesses, Hastings began to think that he had really got to the bottom of their coffers, arid that no rigour could extort more.  Then at length the wretched men who were detained at Lucknow regained their liberty.  When their irons were knocked off, and the doors of their prison opened, their quivering lips, the tears which ran down their cheeks, and the thanksgivings which they poured forth to the common Father of Mussulmans and Christians, melted even the stout hearts of the English warriors who stood by.

But we must not forget to do justice to Sir Elijah Impey’s conduct on this occasion.  It was not indeed easy for him to intrude himself into a business so entirely alien from all his official duties.  But there was something inexpressibly alluring, we must suppose, in the peculiar rankness of the infamy which was then to be got at Lucknow.  He hurried thither as fast as relays of palanquin-bearers could carry him.  A crowd of people came before him with affidavits against the Begums, ready drawn in their hands.  Those affidavits he did not read.  Some of them, indeed, he could not read; for they were in the dialects of Northern India, and no interpreter was employed.  He administered the oath to the deponents with all possible expedition, and asked not a single question, not even whether they had perused the statements to which they swore.  This work performed, he got again into his palanquin, and posted back to Calcutta, to be in time for the opening of term.  The cause was one which, by his own confession, lay altogether out of his jurisdiction.  Under the charter of justice, he had no more right to inquire into crimes committed by Asiatics in Oude than the Lord President of the Court of Session of Scotland to hold an assize at Exeter.  He had no right to try the Begums, nor did he pretend to try them.  With what object, then, did he undertake so long a journey?  Evidently in order that he might give, in an irregular manner, that sanction which in a regular manner he could not give, to the crimes of those who had recently hired him; and in order that a confused mass of testimony which he did not sift, which he did not even read, might acquire an authority not properly belonging to it, from the signature of the highest judicial functionary in India.