Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [42]
One of the men appointed to serve on the Council concocted by the British government to advise Hastings had been Philip Francis. The two men came to loathe each other. After serving six years in India, during which time he made a small fortune at the card table, was dragged through the courts for seducing another man’s wife and fought a duel with Hastings (which both men survived), Francis returned to England in 1781, where he bought himself a seat in parliament and began doing his utmost to destroy Hastings. His accusations – of venality, unnecessary violence and wholesale corruption – did not get far at first, for Francis was widely considered an India bore. But when he fed his information to the great parliamentary orator Edmund Burke he acquired the most powerful of allies. Burke’s often contradictory opinions cannot be reduced to coherence other than by seeing them through the prism of his unique high-mindedness. In contrast to the chancers of the Company, whose interest was mere pillage, what was being done in his country’s name and by his country’s citizens mattered intensely to Burke. It was not that he felt there was anything uniquely evil about the young men who took ship to India: they were no ‘worse than the boys whom we are whipping at school, or that we see trailing a pike, or bending over a desk at home’. The problem was that they rolled into India in wave after wave ‘with appetites continually renewing for a food that is continually wasting’. The British relationship with India was thus entirely one of serial plundering and the visitors brought neither art nor education nor even kindness to the people. ‘Were we to be driven out of India this day,’ he wrote, ‘nothing would remain, to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the orangutan or the tiger.’ Francis’s evidence seemed to offer Burke the chance to confront the Company. Parliament and the nation were already in one of Britain’s periodic fits of morality when, in February 1788, he rose to impeach Warren Hastings.
The ancient Westminster Hall, where Charles I had faced his accusers and been sentenced to death, was packed. The doors opened at 9.00 a.m., but crowds had been gathering since six o’clock, some of the would-be spectators having slept in coffeehouses to be sure of getting a seat. As the imperial historian Macaulay described it (although he had not been born at the time), ‘there were gathered together, from all parts of a great, free, enlightened, and prosperous Empire, grace and female loveliness, wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of every art.’ The queen sat in the royal box, in a light-brown satin dress, surrounded by a retinue of children and nobles. One hundred and seventy lords in gold and ermine processed into the chamber, followed by the Prince of Wales. Two hundred MPs had crammed inside, and in the gallery sat the president of the Royal Academy and society portraitist, Sir Joshua Reynolds, for whom Hastings had once posed as the high-minded orientalist, wearing an embroidered silk waistcoat and clutching a handful of documents in Persian. Near by in the gallery the theatrical superstar Sarah Siddons gazed down, as did Edward Gibbon, who had recently completed his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. What resonances would he hear today?
It was worth waiting for. Burke’s opening speech was spread over four days, was packed with horrific detail and steamed with moral disdain. He was a man possessed, claiming to have ‘brought before you the head, the chief, the captain-general in iniquity; one in whom all the frauds, all the peculations, all the violence, all