Mr. Sulivan rose in his own vindication, and acknowledged the circumstance to be true; but said, that as Lord Clive had taken occasion in the House, last session, to impute the distresses of the Company to the Directors, he thought he, as a Director, was justified in endeavouring to turn the tables, and lay the blame upon his Lordship, which he had been in hopes of doing fairly, with the assistance of Mr. Hoole. He then expatiated upon the enmity which had long been maintained against him by Lord Clive; and to show that it had not been reciprocal, he would now, he said, divulge a circumstance highly injurious to the noble Lord's honour, and which he had industriously concealed from the Secret Committee: this was the suppression of sixteen months' correspondence which had passed during his first government of Bengal, and which, though repeatedly called for by the Directors, had never been produced: that it was believed that the letters so suppressed might set the business of the jaghire in a different light from any in which it had yet appeared. Lord Clive, immediately rising, stated the facts. The correspondence with Indian Princes is always carried on by the Governor only; and translations are kept in books transmitted to the Directors from time to time. Some portion of it, written in the year 1759, by some accident had been neglected to be sent home. In 1763, when Lord Clive filed a bill against the Company for recovering his jaghire, the Directors (suspecting that the missing letters might contain something of importance, and had therefore been withheld) called on him to produce them, as it was presumed that he had retained copies for himself of his correspondence. In answer, he acquainted the Court that he had delivered the sections in question to Mr. Campbell, a Scotch author, in the year 1760, in order to prepare a memorial concerning the Dutch affairs to be laid before Mr. Pitt, then Secretary of State: that since then he had not seen them, though he had in vain made every inquiry after them; but that, from his own knowledge, he could affirm they did not contain any thing that could affect the matter in dispute between him and the Company.
To this statement Mr. Sulivan, of course, might give only such credit as he was disposed; but, as it happened, some account of the debate having appeared in the public newspapers, Dr. Campbell wrote to inform Lord Clive that he had found the sections mentioned by Mr. Sulivan, and was ready to deliver them to his Lordship's order. They were accordingly recovered next day, and immediately sent to the Court of Directors, and were found not to have the smallest reference to the jaghire.