Read Ebook: Angelica by Holding Elisabeth Sanxay

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Under this head you will have produced to you full proof of his sale of a judicial office to a person called Kh?n Jehan Kh?n, and the modes he took to frustrate all inquiry on that subject, upon a wicked and false pretence, that, according to his religious scruples, he could not be sworn.

The great end and object I have in view is to show the criminal tendency, the mischievous nature of these crimes, and the means taken to elude their discovery. I am now giving your Lordships that general view which may serve to characterize Mr. Hastings's administration in all the other parts of it.

It was not true in fact, as Mr. Hastings gives out, that there was nothing now against him, and that, when he had got rid of Nundcomar and his charge, he got rid of the whole. No such thing. An immense load of charges of bribery remained. They were coming afterwards from every part of the province; and there was no office in the execution of justice which he was not accused of having sold in the most flagitious manner.

After all this thundering the sky grew calm and clear, and Mr. Hastings sat with recorded peculation, with peculation proved upon oath on the minutes of that very Council,--he sat at the head of that Council and that board where his peculations were proved against him. These were afterwards transmitted and recorded in the registers of his masters, as an eternal monument of his corruption, and of his high disobedience, and flagitious attempts to prevent a discovery of the various peculations of which he had been guilty, to the disgrace and ruin of the country committed to his care.

Is it fit for a governor to say, will Mr. Hastings say before this august assembly, "I may be accused in a court of justice,--I am upon my defence,--let all charges remain against me,--I will not give you an account"? Is it fit that a governor should sit with recorded bribery upon him at the head of a public board and the government of a great kingdom, when it is in his power by inquiry to do it away? No: the chastity of character of a man in that situation ought to be as dear to him as his innocence. Nay, more depended upon it. His innocence regarded himself; his character regarded the public justice, regarded his authority, and the respect due to the English in that country. I charge it upon him, that not only did he suppress the inquiry to the best of his power, but he did not in any one instance endeavor to clear off that imputation and reproach from the English government. He went further; he never denied hardly any of those charges at the time. They are so numerous that I cannot be positive; some of them he might meet with some sort of denial, but the most part he did not.

The first thing a man under such an accusation owes to the world is to deny the charge; next, to put it to the proof; and lastly, to let inquiry freely go on. He did not permit this, but stopped it all in his power. I am to mention some exceptions, perhaps, hereafter, which will tend to fortify the principle tenfold.

He promised, indeed, the Court of Directors a full and liberal explanation of these transactions; which full and liberal explanation he never gave. Many years passed; even Parliament took notice of it; and he never gave them a liberal explanation, or any explanation at all of them. A man may say, "I am threatened with a suit in a court, and it may be very disadvantageous to me, if I disclose my defence." That is a proper answer for a man in common life, who has no particular character to sustain; but is that a proper answer for a governor accused of bribery, that accusation transmitted to his masters, and his masters giving credit to it? Good God! is that a state in which a man is to say, "I am upon the defensive--I am on my guard,--I will give you no satisfaction,--I have promised it, but I have already deferred it for seven or eight years"? Is not this tantamount to a denial?

Mr. Hastings, with this great body of bribery against him, was providentially freed from Nundcomar, one of his accusers, and, as good events do not come alone, it did so happen that all the rest, or a great many of them, ran away. But, however, the recorded evidence of the former charges continued; no new evidence came in; and Mr. Hastings enjoyed that happy repose which branded peculation, fixed and eternized upon the records of the Company, must leave upon a mind conscious of its own integrity.

My Lords, I will venture to say, there is no man but owes something to his character. It is the grace, undoubtedly, of a virtuous, firm mind often to despise common, vulgar calumny; but if ever there is an occasion in which it does become such a mind to disprove it, it is the case of being charged in high office with pecuniary malversation, pecuniary corruption. There is no case in which it becomes an honest man, much less a great man, to leave upon record specific charges against him of corruption in his government, without taking any one step whatever to refute them.

Though Mr. Hastings took no step to refute the charges, he took many steps to punish the authors of them; and those miserable people who had the folly to make complaints against Mr. Hastings, to make them under the authority of an act of Parliament, under every sanction of public faith, yet, in consequence of those charges, every person concerned in them has been, as your Lordships will see, since his restoration to power, absolutely undone, brought from the highest situation to the lowest misery, so that they may have good reason to repent they ever trusted an English Council, that they ever trusted a Court of Directors, that they ever trusted an English act of Parliament, that they ever dared to make their complaints.

And here I charge upon Mr. Hastings, that, by never taking a single step to defeat or detect the falsehood of any of those charges against him, and by punishing the authors of them, he has been guilty of such a subversion of all the principles of British government as will deserve, and will I dare say meet, your Lordships' most severe animadversion.

In the course of this inquiry we find a sort of pause in his peculations, a sort of gap in the history, as if pages were torn out. No longer we meet with the same activity in taking money that was before found; not even a trace of complimentary presents is to be found in the records during the time whilst General Clavering, Colonel Monson, and Mr. Francis formed the majority of the Council. There seems to have been a kind of truce with that sort of conduct for a while, and Mr. Hastings rested upon his arms. However, the very moment Mr. Hastings returned to power, peculation began again just at the same instant; the moment we find him free from the compulsion and terror of a majority of persons otherwise disposed than himself, we find him at his peculation again.

My Lords, at this time very serious inquiries had begun in the House of Commons concerning peculation. They did not go directly to Bengal, but they began upon the coast of Coromandel, and with the principal governors there. There was, however, an universal opinion that these inquiries would go to far greater lengths. Mr. Hastings was resolved, then, to change the whole course and order of his proceeding. Nothing could persuade him, upon any account, to lay aside his system of bribery: that he was resolved to persevere in. The point was now to reconcile it with his safety. The first thing he did was to attempt to conceal it; and accordingly we find him depositing very great sums of money in the public treasury through the means of the two persons I have already mentioned, namely, the deputy-treasurer and the accountant,--paying them in and taking bonds for them as money of his own, and bearing legal interest. This was his method of endeavoring to conceal some at least of his bribes: for I would not suggest, nor have your Lordships to think, that I believe that these were his only bribes,--for there is reason to think there was an infinite number besides; but it did so happen that they were those bribes which he thought might be discovered, some of which he knew were discovered, and all of which he knew might become the subject of a Parliamentary inquiry.

He accordingly formed, or pretended to form, a private bribe exchequer, collateral with and independent of the Company's public exchequer, though in some cases administered by those whom for his purposes he had placed in the regular official department. It is no wonder that he has taken to himself an extraordinary degree of merit. For surely such an invention of finance, I believe, never was heard of,--an exchequer wherein extortion was the assessor, fraud the cashier, confusion the accountant, concealment the reporter, and oblivion the remembrancer: in short, such as I believe no man, but one driven by guilt into frenzy, could ever have dreamed of.

He treats the official and regular Directors with just contempt, as a parcel of mean, mechanical book-keepers. He is an eccentric book-keeper, a Pindaric accountant. I have heard of "the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling." Here was a revenue exacted from whom he pleased, at what times he pleased, in what proportions he pleased, through what persons he pleased, by what means he pleased, to be accounted for or not, at his discretion, and to be applied to what service he thought proper. I do believe your Lordships stand astonished at this scheme; and indeed I should be very loath to venture to state such a scheme at all, however I might have credited it myself, to any sober ears, if, in his defence before the House of Commons, and before the Lords, he had not directly admitted the fact of taking the bribes or forbidden presents, and had not in those defences, and much more fully in his correspondence with the Directors, admitted the fact, and justified it upon these very principles.

As this is a thing so unheard-of and unexampled in the world, I shall first endeavor to account as well as I can for his motives to it, which your Lordships will receive or reject, just as you shall find them tally with the evidence before you: I say, his motives to it; because I contend that public valid reasons for it he could have none; and the idea of making the corruption of the Governor-General a resource to the Company never did or could for a moment enter into his thoughts. I shall then take notice of the juridical constructions upon which he justifies his acting in this extraordinary manner; and lastly, show you the concealments, prevarications, and falsehoods with which he endeavors to cover it. Because wherever you find a concealment you make a discovery. Accounts of money received and paid ought to be regular and official.

Now here is a new system of bribery, contrary to law, very ingenious in the contrivance, but, I believe, as unlikely to produce its intended effect upon the mind of man as any pretence that was ever used. Here Mr. Hastings changes his ground. Before, he was accused as a peculator; he did not deny the fact; he did not refund the money; he fought it off; he stood upon the defensive, and used all the means in his power to prevent the inquiry. That was the first era of his corruption,--a bold, ferocious, plain, downright use of power. In the second, he is grown a little more careful and guarded,--the effect of subtilty. He appears no longer as a defendant; he holds himself up with a firm, dignified, and erect countenance, and says, "I am not here any longer as a delinquent, a receiver of bribes, to be punished for what I have done wrong, or at least to suffer in my character for it. No: I am a great inventive genius, who have gone out of all the ordinary roads of finance, have made great discoveries in the unknown regions of that science, and have for the first time established the corruption of the supreme magistrate as a principle of resource for government."

If you sanction this practice, if, after all you have exacted from the people by your taxes and public imposts, you are to let loose your servants upon them, to extort by bribery and peculation what they can from them, for the purpose of applying it to the public service only whenever they please, this shocking consequence will follow from it. If your Governor is discovered in taking a bribe, he will say, "What is that to you? mind your business; I intend it for the public service." The man who dares to accuse him loses the favor of the Governor-General and the India Company. They will say, "The Governor has been doing a meritorious action, extorting bribes for our benefit, and you have the impudence to think of prosecuting him." So that the moment the bribe is detected, it is instantly turned into a merit: and we shall prove that this is the case with Mr. Hastings, whenever a bribe has been discovered.

I am now to inform your Lordships, that, when he made these great discoveries to the Court of Directors, he never tells them who gave him the money, upon what occasion he received it, by what hands, or to what purposes he applied it.

His conduct upon these occasions may be thought irrational. But, thank God, guilt was never a rational thing: it distorts all the faculties of the mind; it perverts them; it leaves a man no longer in the free use of his reason; it puts him into confusion. He has recourse to such miserable and absurd expedients for covering his guilt as all those who are used to sit in the seat of judgment know have been the cause of detection of half the villanies in the world. To argue that these could not be his reasons, because they were not wise, sound, and substantial, would be to suppose, what is not true, that bad men were always discreet and able. But I can very well from the circumstances discover motives which may affect a giddy, superficial, shattered, guilty, anxious, restless mind, full of the weak resources of fraud, craft, and intrigue, that might induce him to make these discoveries, and to make them in the manner he has done. Not rational, and well-fitted for their purposes, I am very ready to admit. For God forbid that guilt should ever leave a man the free, undisturbed use of his faculties! For as guilt never rose from a true use of our rational faculties, so it is very frequently subversive of them. God forbid that prudence, the first of all the virtues, as well as the supreme director of them all, should ever be employed in the service of any of the vices! No: it takes the lead, and is never found where justice does not accompany it; and if ever it is attempted to bring it into the service of the vices, it immediately subverts their cause. It tends to their discovery, and, I hope and trust, finally to their utter ruin and destruction.

In the first place, I am to remark to your Lordships, that the accounts he has given of one of these sums of money are totally false and contradictory. Now there is not a stronger presumption, nor can one want more reason to judge a transaction fraudulent, than that the accounts given of it are contradictory; and he has given three accounts utterly irreconcilable with each other. He is asked, "How came you to take bonds for this money, if it was not your own? How came you to vitiate and corrupt the state of the Company's records, and to state yourself a lender to the Company, when in reality you were their debtor?" His answer was, "I really cannot tell; I have forgot my reasons; the distance of time is so great," "I cannot give an account of the matter; perhaps I had this motive, perhaps I had another," "perhaps I had none at all which I can now recollect." You shall hear the account which Mr. Hastings himself gives, his own fraudulent representation, of these corrupt transactions. "For my motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge of the Council, or of the Court of Directors, and for taking bonds for part of these sums and paying others into the treasury as deposits on my own account, I have generally accounted in my letter to the Honorable the Court of Directors of the 22d of May, 1782,--namely, that I either chose to conceal the first receipts from public curiosity by receiving bonds for the amount, or possibly acted without any studied design which my memory at that distance of time could verify, and that I did not think it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest. It will not be expected that I should be able to give a more correct explanation of my intentions after a lapse of three years, having declared at the time that many particulars had escaped my remembrance; neither shall I attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied in that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily, or with a strong probability, follow them."

"Light the lamp!" he cried sharply. "You're an idiot, Polly, to sit here in the dark like this! You--Miss What's-Your-Name--you mustn't let her. It's very bad for her. Try to keep her cheerful."

He had turned a switch as he spoke, and five electric lights had flashed on, making the room as brilliant as a stage. He looked anxiously at Polly.

"Eating better?" he asked. "I've brought you some oysters--something rather special. Are you coming down?"

"Not to-night, Eddie, thank you; but I'll enjoy the oysters. Is your mother home yet?"

"No. I shan't wait for her. I told Annie an early dinner. Half-past six sharp, miss! I've brought home a lot of work to do."

He went out again, with a curt nod at Angelica.

"You'd better get ready," said Polly. "He's not very patient. He doesn't like to be kept waiting."

"I am ready," said Angelica. "I haven't any better clothes to put on."

She had risen, and was standing near the door. She knew that Polly wished her to go, but still she lingered, miserable but resolute.

"Did I do all right to-day?" she blurted out.

Polly opened her eyes.

"Why, certainly, my dear," she said. "Would you mind putting out all the lights but one?"

"But doesn't he want it cheerful?"

"I think it 'll be more cheerful that way," Polly answered, with a faint smile. "Now, then--thank you! I think I'll rest until dinner-time."

"But were you satisfied with me?" insisted Angelica.

"Of course I was."

"Well, do you want me to stay? Because he's coming to talk it over with you. Will you tell him that you want me?"

"Yes," said Polly. "I do want you--very much!"

Angelica was very nervous about having dinner with Mr. Eddie. He was obviously fastidious and hard to please, and she hadn't the vaguest idea what his standards might be. She did what she could with her appearance; she washed her hands and face and brushed her hair, and then, having no watch or clock to advise her, went down-stairs.

She hadn't been in the dining-room before, and she stopped, profoundly impressed, in the doorway. It was so exactly the dining-room she had expected--the grand, stately dining-room of the cinema drama, with paneled walls and sideboard loaded with plate, the opulently set table, the high-backed chairs, the flowers all about, the very air of dignity and richness.

There was the essential butler, too. She felt sure that the man bending over the sideboard was a butler; busy, no doubt, with work about which she was quite ignorant. She drew near to ask him the time, and was surprised to see him stuffing cigars into his pocket from three or four boxes that lay in a drawer. She didn't know whether this was proper, whether it was part of a butler's proper functions; but when she saw the man's face, and observed his stealthy and hurried manner, she grew certain that he was stealing. One of those society thieves of whom she had read!

He was in evening dress, and he had some sort of perfume about him. He was a slender little man with neat, snow-white hair and a dapper white mustache. His face was bland, with a long upper lip that gave it a humorous look, and intelligent blue eyes.

He turned suddenly and saw her.

"That's my business," said Angelica.

This was her idea of a non-committal answer. She could not decide whether he was a servant, a member of the family, or merely an outside thief who had dropped in, and she was anxious to make no avoidable mistakes.

"Of course it is!" he replied, cheerfully. "No doubt I'll learn in the course of time. But perhaps you'll enlighten me as to your status?"

She didn't understand him, and she scowled.

"Perhaps you'll tell me what you're doing here?" he inquired.

"Waiting," he answered imperturbably. "Waiting for dinner and Mr. Eddie."

"Oh, him! Well, he's in. I saw him up-stairs."

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