*INDIAN STATESMEN AND SOLDIERS: LAWRENCE AND THE HEROES OF THE MUTINY*
The Indian Mutiny, which produced "such a breed of warlike men," the equals of whom have rarely, if ever, been found awaiting their country's need of them, is especially commemorated in the Abbey, which holds the graves of Lord Lawrence; Colin Campbell, Lord Clyde; and Sir James Outram. Only a monument does honour to Warren Hastings, whose name is so indissolubly linked with Westminster and with India, for it was at Westminster School that he was educated, the favourite pupil of the head-master Dr. Nichols, who found him "a hard student, bold, full of fire, ambitious in no ordinary degree;" and it was to India that he went, when eighteen, into the service of the East India Company. To the building up of the British Empire in India he gave his life, working with unfaltering courage under a thousand difficulties, sometimes no doubt making errors of judgment, more often the victim of other men's intrigues and treachery, but always the dauntless, enthusiastic servant of the State. And his reward was disgrace, confiscation, and impeachment. He was used by Ministers at home as a cat's-paw in the game of politics. Burke and Fox charged him in Parliament with cruelty, extortion, and corruption, while Sheridan's brilliant eloquence so dazzled the Commons as to obscure all their calm judgment, and they impeached Warren Hastings at the bar of the House of Lords for "high crimes and misdemeanours." In the February of 1788 this most famous of trials commenced in Westminster Hall, and it took Burke two days to get through his list of charges. All the force of his great powers as an orator was brought to bear against the accused, who "stood there small, spare, and upright, his bearing a mixture of deference and dignity, his soft sad eyes flashing defiance on his accusers; the lines of his mouth and chin firm, his face very pale but calm."
The trial lingered on and on; it was seven years before the verdict was given, a verdict which practically cleared Hastings, and proved that, if on occasions he had been unnecessarily ruthless or hard in his rule, he had not so acted from any selfish or unworthy motive, but because he believed that thereby he was best serving the interests both of England and of India. Though he was acquitted, he was practically a ruined man. The trial had cost him more than £70,000, and he was not rich, neither could he hope for any employment under Fox or Pitt. The East India Company voted him a pension for twenty-eight years, but refused him when he asked that it might be continued during the lifetime of his wife, "the dearest object of all his concerns." And so he died a bitterly disappointed man.