The Trial of Warren Hastings: Classical Oratory and Reception in Eighteenth-Century England by Chiara Rolli (review)

We live in an age of impeachment, or might soon. Impeachment is contemplated, hoped for, or resisted, its chances denied. It is not clear it would answer the purpose anyhow, even if that purpose were clear. Yet the idea of impeachment remains potent, threatening, and beguiling. There is grandeur in its prospect, a form of theatre that fulfils an ache for catharsis, and for cleansing. But the ambition is abject; impeachment, though it should enact an avowed pushing away, will yet entail a keeping close, under a devoted, horrified, and never-solely judicial gaze. The impeachment will be televised. The idea of impeachment, more accurately, its imagined spectacle, coincides dreadfully with our fascination with celebrity. It is the worst of times: but equally the best of times to write about the impeachments of the past. There were many grand trials in the seventeenth– and eighteenth–century British history, and none more celebrated, more raked over, and more misunderstood than the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Governor–General of Bengal from 1773 until 1785. Hastings was indicted, after lengthy parliamentary debates, on four principal charges: with having provoked Rajah Chait Singh of Benares into rebellion; with having appropriated the income and treasure of the Begams of Oudh; with awarding contracts corruptly and extravagantly; and with receiving presents from Indian rulers and clients, which he kept for his own enrichment. His subsequent trial, before the House of Lords, generated legal argument, literary endeavor, and scurrilous satire. Held over 145 days from 1788 until its termination in 1795, the trial was a great show. Folks went for the day. Well–to–do attendees used their connections to get tickets, tucked into sandwiches that they bought while they were there, and wrote voluminous letters about what they saw and heard. As the trial dragged on, and Hastings's acquittal looked certain, it became less clear what was at stake in the proceeding. That Hastings had acted aggressively seemed obvious; that he had sought to maximize revenues for himself and the East India Company was evident (if never quite evidenced). But what was the role of the Governor–General of Bengal, and the EIC, if it was not to grasp these things? To complain that revenues had been collected with excessive violence, amounting to deliberate cruelty, was not necessarily to deny that the revenues ought not to have been sought. Perhaps Hastings's crime was his failure to clothe rapacity as governance; and even of that he was acquitted.

Hastings's trial is the subject of a compelling and careful study by Chiara Rolli. It is to her work that I am indebted for knowledge of the sandwiches on offer to those lucky enough to cadge tickets. They were rather meaty: ham and fowl, tongue and veal, Dutch beef and butter. No one seemed prepared to dilute their enjoyment of dead flesh with anything as sappy as lettuce or tomato. To this fare, and providing their own plentiful servings of tongue and ham, came the Managers of the prosecution, the A–listers of opposition: Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Charles Grey, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Burke and Sheridan are most often remembered as the speakers at the trial. Both gave speeches great in length and sumptuous in rhetoric: Burke, opening the trial and outlining the Benares charge, and Sheridan, excoriating on the treatment of the Begams. As Rolli explains, the Hastings trial seems to sit all too comfortably alongside other cultural-cum-political events of the decade, mostly notably the Handel commemoration concerts of 1785, but also the service of Thanksgiving, held in 1789, to mark the end of George III's "madness." In common with these spectacles, the Hastings trial produced its own memorabilia, alongside the paraphernalia of hospitality. Much of this material was collected by Sarah Sophia Banks, whose collection is generously illustrated in opening sections of The Trial of Warren Hastings, revealing...