ar you see a desire,
obliquely expressed, to get the landed estates of all these great
families. But even while he was meeting with such reluctance in the
Nabob upon this point, and though he also met with some resistance upon
the part even of Mr. Middleton, Mr. Hastings appears to have given him
in charge some other still more obnoxious and dreadful acts. "While I
was meditating," says Mr. Middleton, in one of his letters, "upon this
[the resumption of the jaghires], your orders came to me through Sir
Elijah Impey." What these orders were is left obscure in the letter: it
is yet but as in a mist or cloud. But it is evident that Sir Elijah
Impey did convey to him some project for getting at more wealth by some
other service, which was not to supersede the first, but to be
concurrent with that upon which Mr. Hastings had before given him such
dreadful charges and had loaded him with such horrible responsibility.
It could not have been anything but the seizure of the Begum's
treasures. He thus goaded on two reluctant victims,--first the reluctant
Nabob, then the reluctant Mr. Middleton,--forcing them with the bayonet
behind them, and urging on the former, as at last appears, to violate
the sanctity of his mother's house.

Your Lordships have been already told by one of my able fellow Managers,
that Sir Elijah Impey is the person who carried up the message alluded
to in Mr. Middleton's letter. We have charged it, as an aggravation of
the offences of the prisoner at your bar, that the Chief-Justice, who,
by the sacred nature of his office, and by the express provisions of the
act of Parliament under which he was sent out to India to redress the
wrongs of the natives, should be made an instrument for destroying the
property, real and personal, of this people. When it first came to our
knowledge that all this private intrigue for the destruction of these
high women was carried on through the intrigue of a Chief-Justice, we
felt such shame and such horror, both for the instrument and the
principal, as I think it impossible to describe, or for anything but
complete and perfect silence to express.

But by Sir Elijah Impey was that order carried up to seize and
confiscate the treasures of the Begums. We know that neither the Company
nor the Nabob had any claim whatever upon these treasures. On the
contrary, we know that two treaties had been made for the protection of
them. We know that the Nabob, while he was contesting about s