the crimes of which they were accused; and I may now ask the Prisoner at your bar, how he dares to produce Captain Gordon here;-how he dares thus to insult the Peers-how he dares thus to insult the publick justice of his country; after not having dared to inquire upon the spot, of this man to whom he was referred by the Begums, for an account of this very transaction?

I hope your Lordships have got enough of this kind of evidence. All the rest is of the same batch, and of the same description; made up of nothing but hearsays, except in one particular only. This I shall now mention to your Lordships; Colonel Popham and another gentleman have told you, that in a battle with Cheit Sing's forces, they took prisoners two wounded nudjeeves or swordmen, and that these men told them, that they were sent there by the Begums that they had got two rupees and two wounds, but that they thought two rupees a bad compensation for two wounds. These two men, with their two wounds and two rupees, had however been dismissed. It does not appear that this accident was considered by these officers to be of consequence enough to make them ever tell one word of it to Mr. Hastings, though they knew he was collecting evidence of the disaffection of the Begums, of all kinds, good, bad, and indifferent, from all sorts of persons.

My Lords, I must beg leave to say a few words upon this matter; because I consider it as one of the most outrageous violations of your Lordships' dignity, and the greatest insult that was ever offered to a court of justice. A nudjeeve is a soldier armed with a sword. It appears in evidence that the Nabob had several corps of nudjeeves in his service; that the Begums had some nudjeeves; and that Colonel Hannay had a corps of nudjeeves. It is well known that every prince in Hindostan has soldiers of that description, in like manner probably as the princes of Europe have their guards. The whole then amounts to this; that a story told by two men who were wounded in an action far from the place from which they were supposed to come; who were not regularly examined; not cross-examined; not even kept for examination, and whose evidence was never reported, is to be a reason why you are to believe that these Begums were concerned in a rebellion against their son, and deserved to forfeit all their lands and goods, and to suffer the indignities that we have stated.

My Lords, I am really ashamed to mention so scandalous a thing; but let us put a case, let us suppose, that we had accused Mr. Hastings of instigating the Rajah of Berar to fall upon some of the country powers; and that

the

the evidence we produced at your bar to prove it, was that an officer had taken two nudjeeves, who declared they were instigated by Mr. Hastings to go into the service of that Rajah; Could you bear such a thing? would you suffer such evidence to be produced? or do you think that we should have so little regard for our own reputation, as to venture to produce such evidence before you? Again, we have charged Mr. Hastings with committing several acts of violence against the Begums. Let us suppose our proof to be, that two persons who never appeared before nor since; that two grenadiers in English uniforms, (which would be a great deal stronger than the case of the nudjeeves, because they have no particular uniform belonging to them ;) that two English grenadiers, I say, had been taken prisoners in some action and let go again, who said that Mr. Hastings had instigated them to make war upon the Begums, would your Lordships suffer such evidence to be produced before you? No; and and yet two of the first women in India are to be stripped of all they have in the world upon no better evidence, than that which you would utterly reject.

You would not disgrace the British peerage; you would not disgrace this court of justice; you would not disgrace human reason itself, by confiscating

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confiscating on such evidence the meanest property of the meanest wretch. You would not subject to the smallest fine for the smallest delinquency, upon such evidence. I will venture to say that in an action of assault and battery, or in an action for the smallest sum, such evidence would be scouted as odious and contemptible, even supposing that a perfect reliance might be placed upon its truth. And yet this is the sort of evidence upon which the property, the dignity, and the rank of some of the first persons in Asia, are to be destroyed; by which a British guarantee and the honour and dignity of the Crown of Great Britain, and of the Parliament itself, which sent out this man, are to be forfeited.

Observe, besides, my Lords, that the two swordsmen said they were sent by the Begums. Now they could not be sent by the Begums, in their own person. This was a thing in India impossible. They might indeed have been sent by Jewar and Behar Ali Khan: and then we ask again, how came these ministers not to be called to an account at the time? why were they not called upon for their muster rolls of these nudjeeves? No, these men and women suffer the penalty, but they never hear the accusation nor the evidence.

But to proceed with the evidence of this

pretended rebellion. Captain Williams has told your Lordships, that he once had a great number of letters and papers to prove this rebellion of the Begums. But he declares that he has lost all these letters. A search was ordered to be made in Mr. Hastings's record-office, called a trunk; and accordingly in the trunk is found a paper worthy of such a place and such a cause. This letter, which has been made use of to criminate the Begums, has not their names mentioned, nor is there any possibility of their being included in it. By this paper which is preserved, you may judge of the whole of the papers that are lost. Such a letter, I believe, was never before brought as evidence in a court of justice. It is a letter said to have been intercepted, and is as follows:

"To the most noble

whose pros

perity be everlasting. It is represented that "the august Purwanah (command) having completed his honourable arrival on the 16th "of the month in the evening, highly exalted 66 me; it is ordered that I should charge Medeporee and the other enrolled sepoys belong"ing to my district, and take bouds from them "that none of them go for service to the Ra

jah; and that when 400 or 500 men, nudjeeves and others, are collected, I should