"adjacent villages to partake in the entertainment."* With surprise indeed they must have gazed. None of their own most barbaric rites-neither the zealot who rushes forward to be crushed by the car of Juggernaut, nor the widow compelled to share the funeral pile of her dead lord, nor the worshipper of Siva, deeming that he gains the favour of the idol if he sheds the blood of an innocent wayfarer-none of these, when first beheld, could have more greatly amazed the island-strangers than were the Hindoos to see two members of that Council, sent over for their governance, engage in single combat, according to certain fancied rules: each seeking, as he would explain it, not to destroy the other, but only to clear himself; each taking a careful aim at his antagonist, yet each ready, should he see that antagonist fall, to express a generous sympathy, and to staunch, to the utmost of his power, the wound which he had made. Hastings and Francis fired at nearly the same instant; Hastings was unharmed, but Francis was shot through the side. He was conveyed to an adjacent house, where the surgeons found, that although his wound was severe, his life was not in danger. In the course of the same day Hastings sent his secretary with a message to the sick man, expressing his concern, and offering to call upon him when his health should be sufficiently restored. Francis coldly acknowledged the civility, but said, that after what had passed, the Governor-General and himself could meet only at the Council-Board. There accord ingly they did meet for some weeks more; but early in the next December Francis gave up his office and returned to England. In taking that step, he did no more than fulfil an intention which, finding his influence wholly declined, he had formed even in the preceding year. At that time his position and his purpose were delineated, as follows, by his chief: "Francis is mi"serable; and is weak enough to declare it, in a manner "much resembling a passionate woman whose hands are "held to prevent her from doing mischief. He vows he "will go home in November, but I do not believe that "his resolution is so fixed as he pretends."† * To L. Sulivan, Esq., August 30. 1780 INDIA.] 66 66 THE COSSIJURAH CASE. 281 Dissension with Francis, however fierce, was no novelty to Hastings. But during the same period he had to wage a painful warfare with a former friend - Sir Elijah Impey. In the Regulating Act of 1773 the limits. between the judicial and political powers which it instituted had not been duly defined. Thus it happened, that on several points in practice the Supreme Court came to clash with the Supreme Council. Moreover, the new Judges had gone out with overstrained ideas of their rights and privileges. They would scarcely acknowledge any co-ordinate authority for which they could find no precedent in Westminster Hall. "Who"thus on one occasion spoke Mr. Justice Le Maistre"who are the Provincial Chief and Council of Dacca? They are no Corporation in the eye of the law. A "man might as well say that he was commanded by the "King of the Fairies as by the Council of Dacca; because the law knows no such body."* On these principles it happened that the most cherished customs and feelings, both of the Hindoos and of the Mussulmans, were often set at nought. It was impossible for the Governor-General to view their resentment with indifference or without an effort at redress. The consequent dissension between the Supreme Court and the Supreme Council for a long time only smouldered. At last, in the beginning of 1780, it burst into open flame. The immediate cause was the progress of a suit which had been brought against a wealthy landholder, the Rajah of Cossijurah, by Cossinaut Baboo his agent at Calcutta, when the Judge issued a writ to sequester his lands and goods. For this object an armed band, consisting of sixty men and commanded by a Serjeant of the Court, was despatched to Cossijurah. The Rajah, with a just apprehension of the terrors of the law, had already fled from his house. Nevertheless it was forcibly entered by the gang of bailiffs; nor did they even shrink from breaking open the ZENANA, or the women's chambers, ever held sacred in the East amidst the worst barbarities of war. The servants of the Rajah stood at the threshold * Appendix No. 9. to the Report of the Committee of 1781; and note to Mill's History of India, vol. iv. p. 317. ready to resist, so far as they could resist, what they deemed the dishonour of their master, but some of them were wounded and the rest beaten back and overborne. Nor was this all. It was alleged by the Rajah, that not only had his Zenana been forced and his property plundered, but his place of worship also had been stripped of its ornaments, and his collection of revenue been prevented. When these tidings reached Calcutta, the GovernorGeneral, supported on this one occasion by his Council's unanimous assent, took, as was his duty, effectual measures of redress. A circular was issued to the landholders of Bengal explaining that, unless in certain specified cases, they owed no obedience to the mandates of the Supreme Court. Upon this, all patience and all prudence departed from Sir Elijah Impey and his brother Judges. Even the most violent steps did not seem to them too strong. They cast into prison Mr. North Naylor, the Company's attorney, merely because, as he was bound to do, he had obeyed the orders of the Council. They caused a summons to be served on every member of the Council requiring him to appear at their bar, and to answer for his public acts. Hastings and the other members refused to obey the call. The Judges pronounced the refusal to be "a clear contempt of His Ma"jesty's law and of his Courts.” It is difficult to say to what extremities-scarcely short of civil war - this collision might have grown, had not Cossinaut, no doubt on some secret inducements held out to him by the Governor-General, suddenly dropped his actions at law; thus depriving the Judges of all present materials upon which their wrath could build. The immediate case might thus be dealt with, but a more permanent remedy was needed. With this view, the fertile brain of Hastings devised another scheme. Under the Act of 1773 there were certain judicial powers which belonged to the Supreme Council as a tribunal of appeal from some of the provincial Courts, but which the Supreme Council had neither sufficient time, nor yet sufficient knowledge, to exert. Hastings proposed that these powers should be henceforth vested in a Judge appointed by the Governor and Council, and removable at INDIA.] SIR ELIJAH IMPEY. 283 their pleasure, and that this newly appointed Judge should be no other than the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Such was the scheme which, in September 1780, Hastings laid before his colleagues in the Government, and which, in spite of strenuous opposition from Francis and from Wheler, was carried through. To Francis, who almost immediately afterwards returned to England, there only remained the spiteful satisfaction of spreading far and wide among his friends and the public at home the charge, that the Chief Justice had been bribed from a course of opposition by a new salary of 8,000l. a year. It must be owned, that whenever there has been strife between two persons, and whenever that strife is ended by the one accepting from the other a post of honour and of profit, we shall seldom err in casting heavy censure on the character of one or both. In this case, however, there are several circumstances of alleviation or defence which were not known to, or not weighed by, the public at the time, but which demand the careful consideration of a later age. In the first place, there appears no inconsistency in the course pursued on this occasion by Sir Elijah Impey. His proceedings on the suit of Cossinaut were already closed. On the general question, he had struggled and protested against that portion of judicial power claimed by the members of the Supreme Council; he was bound therefore to be satisfied, when those members, of their own accord, divested themselves of that judicial power, and transferred it to judicial hands. No complaint, however slight, of his reconciliation could surely have been raised had any other judge but himself been named to the new post. Impey would have done far better to decline it, yet it does not follow, that in accepting it his motives were all of a sordid kind. In his secret letters to his nearest kindred some weeks afterwards, while, adverting to the great additional labour which he had consented to discharge, he declares that he did so "in the hope that I may be able to convert "these courts which, from ignorance or corruption, have "hitherto been a curse, into a blessing. No pecuniary "satisfaction has been offered or even mentioned to me.' *Sir Elijah Impey to his brother in England, November 12. Thus he had taken the duty without any promise of reward, although in the same private letter we find him frankly acknowledge-" but I do not imagine it is in"tended that my trouble is to go unrecompensed." Some weeks afterwards the Council did accordingly determine that a salary, not, as was said, of eight thousand, but of five thousand pounds a year, should be attached to the new office. * Then, however, Sir Elijah stated, that he should refuse to accept any part of this money until the opinion of the Lord Chancellor had been asked and obtained from England. There are still extant the regular vouchers of the sums paid to the Chief Justice in pursuance of the Council's order, and paid back by him to the Company's account. And in point of fact, neither then nor at any time afterwards was a single rupee of this new salary received for his own use by Sir Elijah Impey. † The Mahratta campaign, and the altercations with Francis and with Impey, however burthensome to Hastings, were not, at this time, his only, nor yet his greatest, care. Another and more pressing danger rose in view. Hyder Ali, the mighty sovereign of Mysore, had observed with much displeasure, the British expedition to Mahé. On several lesser points also he had been most imprudently thwarted and chafed by Sir Thomas Rumbold at Madras. With his usual energy of character, he made few complaints, but actively matured his plans. He saw that the opportunity was favourable; that the English were now entangled in a difficult war with the Mahrattas, and that a French armament was soon expected on the coast of Coromandel. He drew together an army which amounted, or at least which popular terror magnified, to 90,000 men. These forces, though wild and savage, were not wholly wanting in European discipline; they had been trained, in part, by good officers from France, and * Minutes of the Revenue Council, December 22. 1780. See the facts of the case, and the documents to prove it, set forth at full length in the Memoirs of Impey, by his son, pp. 209-229. And again, pp. 256-263. The reader should be, of course, on his guard against the writer's bias, and should judge only from the documents themselves. |