The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. 12 (of 12). Edmund Burke
affidavits. "Oh! but," they say, "a judge may take an affidavit in his chamber privately; and he may take an affidavit, though not exactly in the place of his jurisdiction, to authenticate a bond, or the like."—We are not to be cheated by words. It is not dirty shreds of worn-out parchments, the sweepings of Westminster Hall, that shall serve us in place of that justice upon, which the world stands. Affidavits! We know that in the language of our courts affidavits do not signify a body of evidence to sustain a criminal charge, but are generally relative to matter [matters?] in process collateral to the charge, which, not coming before the jury, are made known to the judge by way of affidavit.
But was it ever heard, or will it be borne, that a person exercising a judicial office under his Majesty should walk beyond the sphere of his jurisdiction,—that he should desert the station in which he was placed for the protection of the natives, and should march to such a place as Lucknow in order to take depositions for criminating persons in that country, without so much as letting these poor victims know one article in the depositions so taken? These depositions, my Lords, were made to criminate, they were meant to justify a forfeiture, and are not in the nature of those voluntary affidavits which, whether made within jurisdiction or without, whether made publicly or privately, signify comparatively nothing to the cause. I do not mean, to say that any process of any court has not its weight, when the matter is within it in the ordinary course of proceedings: it is the extraordinary course, the extrajudicial conduct, which divests it of that just weight it otherwise would have.
This chief-justice goes to Lucknow, where he holds his court, such as it was. He is ready to authenticate any process by the signature of the English chief-justice, in a court which he holds by night, in a court which he holds in darkness and secrecy. He holds his court in Fyzabad; he holds it, unknown to the Nabob of Oude, in his own capital, and without giving him the least knowledge of or any notice of what he was proceeding to do. He holds it at the lodgings of Colonel Morgan, a pensioner of the Nabob; and the person assisting him is Mr. Middleton, who is likewise, as we have proved to you, one of the Nabob's pensioners, a monopolizer of trade in the country, and a person who received much the major part of his emoluments from the Nabob's hands.
In that clandestine manner, in the Nabob's own house, in his own capital city, in the lodging of his dependant and pensioner, Colonel Morgan, with no other witness that we know of than Mr. Middleton, was this iniquitous, dark procedure held, to criminate the mother of the Nabob. We here see a scene of dark, mysterious contrivance: let us now see what is brought out in the face of open day. The attestations themselves, which you have seen on the record before you. They were brought out—where? there? No: they were brought out in another place; they were brought out at Calcutta,—but were never communicated to the Nabob. He never knew anything of the matter. Let us now see what those attestations were. Your Lordships will bear in mind that I do not advert to this thing, which they bring as evidence, in the way of imputation of its being weak, improper, and insufficient evidence, but as an incontrovertible proof of crimes, and of a systematic design to ruin the accused party, by force there and by chicane here: these are the principles upon which I am going to talk to you upon this abominable subject,—of which, I am sorry to say, I have no words sufficient to express my horror. No words can express it; nor can anything but the severity of your Lordships' judgments find an adequate expression of it. It is not to be expressed in words, but in punishment.
Having stated before whom the evidence collected in this body of affidavits was taken, I shall now state who the persons were that gave it. They were those very persons who were guilty of robbing and ruining the whole country: yes, my Lords, the very persons who had been accused of this in the mass by Mr. Hastings himself. They were nothing less than the whole body of those English officers who were usurping the office of farmers-general, and other lucrative offices in the Nabob's government, and whose pillage and peculations had raised a revolt of the whole kingdom against themselves. These persons are here brought in a mass to clear themselves of this charge by criminating other persons, and clandestinely imputing to them the effect of their own iniquity.
But supposing these witnesses to be good for anything, supposing it fit that the least attention should be paid them, the matter of their testimony may very possibly be true without criminating the Begum. It criminates Saadut Ali Khân, the brother of the Nabob; the word Begum is never mentioned in the crimination but in conjunction with his; and much the greater part of it criminates the Nabob himself. Now, my Lords, I will say, that the matter of these affidavits, forgetting who the deponents were, may possibly be true, as far as respects Saadut Ali Khân, but that it is utterly as improbable, which is the main point and the stress of the thing, with respect to the Begums, as it is impossible with respect to the Nabob. That Saadut Ali, being a military man, a man ambitious and aspiring to greatness, should take advantage of the abuses of the English government and of the discontent of the country, that he should, I say, raise a revolt against his brother is very possible; but it is scarcely within possibility that the mother of the Nabob should have joined with the illegitimate son against her legitimate son. I can only say that in human affairs there is the possibility of truth in this. It is possible she might wish to depose her legitimate son, her only legitimate son, and to depose him for the sake of a bastard son of her husband's,—to exalt him at the expense of the former, and to exalt, of course, the mother of that bastard at her own expense, and to her own wrong. But I say, that this, though possible, is grossly improbable. The reason why the Begum is implicated in this charge with Saadut Ali by the affidavits cannot escape your notice. Their own acquittal might be the only object of the deponents in their crimination of the latter; but the treasures of the former were the objects of their employers, and these treasures could not be come at but by the destruction of the Begums.
But, my Lords, there are other affidavits, or whatever your Lordships may call them, that go much further. In order to give a color to the accusation, and make it less improbable, they say that the Nabob himself was at the bottom of it, and that he joined with his brother and his mother to extirpate out of his dominions that horrible grievance, the English brigade officers,—those English officers who were the farmers-general, and who, as we have proved by Mr. Hastings's own evidence, had ruined the country. Nothing is more natural than that a man, sensible of his duty to himself and his subjects, should form a scheme to get rid of a band of robbers that were destroying his country and degrading and ruining his family. Thus you see a family compact naturally accounted for: the Nabob at the head of it, his mother joining her own son, and a natural brother joining in the general interests of the family. This is a possible case. But is this the case pressed by them? No: they pass lightly over the legitimate son; they scarcely touch upon Saadut Ali Khân; they sink the only two persons that could give probability or possibility to this business, and endeavor to throw the whole design upon these two unfortunate women.
Your Lordships see the wickedness and baseness of the contrivance. They first, in order to keep the whole family in terror, accuse the whole family; then, having possessed themselves of the treasures of the Begums upon another pretence, they endeavor to fix upon them that improbable guilt which they had with some degree of probability charged upon the whole family, as a farther justification of that spoliation. Your Lordships will see what an insult is offered to the Peers of Great Britain, in producing before you, by way of defence, such gross, scandalous, and fraudulent proceedings.
Who the first set of witnesses were which they produced before their knight-errant chief-justice, Sir Elijah Impey, who wandered in search of a law adventure, I have laid open to your Lordships. You have now had an account of the scandalous manufacture of that batch of affidavits which was in the budget of Sir Elijah Impey,—that Pandora's box which I have opened, and out of which has issued every kind of evil. This chief-justice went up there with the death-warrant of the Begums' treasures, and, for aught he knew, the death-warrant of their persons. At the same time that he took these affidavits he became himself a witness in this business; he appears as a witness. How? Did he know any one circumstance of the rebellion? No, he does not even pretend to do so. "But," says he, "in my travels I was obliged to avoid Fyzabad, upon account of the suspected rebellion there." Another chief-justice would have gone fifty miles about to avoid Lucknow, for everybody knows that Lucknow was the focus and centre of extortion, corruption, and peculation, and that a worse air for the lungs of a chief-justice could not be found in the world. If his lungs wanted the benefit of pure air, he would even have put himself in the focus of a rebellion, to have kept at a distance from