The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 09 (of 12)Burke, Edmund
History
The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 09 (of 12)
Burke, Edmund
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1760-1820; Political science -- Early works to 1800
That the Nabob of Arcot, with whom the said Hastings did keep up an
unwarrantable clandestine correspondence, without any communication with
the Presidency of Madras, wrote a letter of complaint, dated the 27th of
March, 1784, against the Presidency of that place, without any
communication thereof to the said Presidency, the said complaint being
addressed to the said Warren Hastings, the substance of which complaint
was, that he, the Nabob, had not been made a party to the late treaty;
and although his interest had been sufficiently provided for in the said
treaty, the said Warren Hastings did sign a declaration, on the 23d of
May, at Lucknow, forming the basis of a new article, and making a new
party to the treaty, after it had been by all parties (the Supreme
Council of Calcutta included) completed and ratified, and did transmit
the said new stipulation to the Presidency at Calcutta, solely for the
purposes and at the instigation of the Nabob of Arcot; and the said
declaration was made without any previous communication with the
Presidency aforesaid, and in consequence thereof orders were sent by the
Council at Calcutta to the Presidency of Fort St. George, _under the
severest threats in case of disobedience_: which orders, whatever were
their purport, would, as an undue assumption of and participation in the
government, from which he was absent, become a high misdemeanor; but,
being to the purport of opening the said treaty after its solemn
ratification, and proposing a new clause and a new party to the same,
was also an aggravation of such misdemeanor, as it tended to convey to
the Indian powers an idea of the unsteadiness of the councils and
determinations of the British government, and to take away all reliance
on its engagements, and as, above all, it exposed the affairs of the
nation and the Company to the hazard of seeing renewed all the
calamities of war, from whence by the conclusion of the treaty they had
emerged, and upon a pretence so weak as that of proposing the Nabob of
Arcot to be a party to the same,--though he had not been made a party by
the said Warren Hastings in the Mahratta treaty, which professed to be
for the relief of the Carnatic,--though he was not a party to the former
treaty with Hyder, also relative to the Carnatic,--though it was not
certain, if the treaty were once opened, and that even Tippoo should
then consent to that Nabob's being a party, whether he, the said Nabob,
would agree to the clauses of the same, and consequently whether the
said treaty, once opened, could afterwards be concluded: an uncertainty
of which he, the said Hastings, should have learned to be aware, having
already once been disappointed by the said Nabob's refusing to accede to
a treaty which he, the said Warren Hastings, made for him with the
Dutch, about a year before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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