And it does not appear that the said Hastings has ever
produced any witness, letter, or other document, tending to prove that
the said Rajah ever did carry on any hostile negotiation whatever with
any of those powers with whom he was charged with a conspiracy against
the Company, previous to the period of the said Hastings's having
arrested him in his palace, although he, the said Hastings, had various
agents at the courts of all those princes,--and that a late principal
agent and near relation of a minister of one them, the Rajah of Berar,
called Benaram Pundit, was, at the time of the tumult at Benares,
actually with the said Hastings, and the said Benaram Pundit was by him
highly applauded for his zeal and fidelity, and was therefore by him
rewarded with a large pension on those very revenues which he had taken
from the Rajah Cheyt Sing, and if such a conspiracy had previously
existed, the Mahratta minister aforesaid must have known, and would have
attested it.
XXVII. That it appears that the said Warren Hastings, at the time that
he formed his design of seizing upon the treasures of the Rajah of
Benares, and of deposing him, did not believe him guilty of that
premeditated project for driving the English out of India with which he
afterwards thought fit to charge him, or that he was really guilty of
any other great offence: because he has caused it to be deposed, that,
if the said Rajah should pay the sum of money by him exacted, "he would
settle his zemindary upon him on the most eligible footing"; whereas, if
he had conceived him to have entertained traitorous designs against the
Company, from whom he held his tributary estate, or had been otherwise
guilty of such enormous offences as to make it necessary to take
extraordinary methods for coercing him, it would not have been proper
for him to settle upon such a traitor and criminal the zemindary of
Benares, or any other territory, upon the most eligible, or upon any
other footing whatever: whereby the said Hastings has by his own stating
demonstrated that the money intended to have been exacted was not as a
punishment for crimes, but that the crimes were pretended for the
purpose of exacting money.
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