e
Court of Directors, to the true policy of this kingdom, and to the
safety of the British possessions in the East.

VII. That the said letter from Major Browne was by the said Warren
Hastings transmitted to the Court of Directors, without being
accompanied by any part of the previous correspondence; by which wilful
concealment the said Warren Hastings is guilty of an high and criminal
disrespect to the Court of Directors, and of a most flagrant breach and
violation of their orders, which he was bound by an act of Parliament to
obey.

VIII. That the said Hastings having early in the year 1784 procured to
himself a deputation to act in the upper provinces, the Council, being
well aware of his disposition to engage in unwarrantable designs against
the neighboring states, did expressly confine his powers to the
circumstance of his actual residence within the Company's provinces. But
it appears that ways were found out by which he hoped to defeat the
precautions of the board: for the said Warren Hastings did write from
Lucknow, the capital of the country of Oude, to the Court of Directors,
a certain postscript of a letter, dated the 4th of May, 1784, in which
he informs the Court that the son and heir-apparent of the Great Mogul
had taken refuge with him and the Nabob of Oude; that he had a
conference with that prince on the 10th of the same month of May, "no
person being either present or within hearing" during the same; and that
in the said conference the prince had informed him of the distresses of
his father, and his wish for the relief of the king and the restoration
of the dominions of his house, as well as to rescue him from the power
of certain persons not named, who degraded him into a mere instrument of
their interested and sordid designs, and that, on a failure of his
application to him, he would either return to his father, or proceed to
Calcutta, and thence to England; and that the said Warren Hastings did
give him an answer to the following effect: "That our [the British]
government had just obtained relief from a state of universal warfare,
and required a term of repose; that our whole nation was weary of war,
and dreaded the renewal of it, _and would he equally alarmed at any
movement of which it could not see the issue or progress, but which
might eventually tend to create new hostilities_; that he came hither
[to Lucknow] with a limited authority, and could not, if he chose it,
engage in a business of th